Chapter 5

The palanquin had stopped in a large garden, or rather grove, which was brilliantly illuminated with coloured lamps; even the lofty cocoa-nut trees were not without a crown of rainbow tinted light. As I was assisted in my exit from the palanquin, two young Parsee boys, in flowing white robes, girt with a scarlet shawl round the waist, advanced and presented me, the one with a large bouquet of roses, tied, after their usual fashion, round a slender stick, and dripping with rose-water; the other, with a thin long chip of sandal-wood, having at the end a small piece of white cotton, steeped in delicious attar of roses. After receiving their gifts, I was conducted by them to the house, where the owner, a Parsee merchant, met and welcomed me with the ordinary salutation, pressing his hand to his head and heart, and then offering it to me. My palanquin had arrived last, and I found all the rest of the party seated round a table covered with a splendid repast--a regular hot supper, intermingled with fruit and flowers in profusion. The chief ornament of the table was a handsome silver vase, presented to our host by the East India Company, of which he appeared very proud, lifting it from the table, to shew the inscription on it to each of the party individually. At the end of the banquet, the quiet attendants moved round with a very elegant silver flagon of rose-water, the neck of which was very long, and as thin as the tube of a china pipe; from it they poured a few drops on the head of each of the guests. The sensation produced by this sudden trickling of cold rose-water is very pleasant, though a little startling to strangers. We had so recently had refreshment, that we were not inclined to do justice to the hospitality proffered, and the supper was scarcely tasted; but on rising to go, our host explained to the 'Governor Sahib,' 'that the feast was his: it had been prepared for him; he had looked on it! it was his!' These polite assertions were a little mystifying, till one of the staff-officers, well versed in the manners of the natives, explained that the governor was expected to carry off what remained of the entertainment. It was really difficult to help laughing at the whimsical notion of carrying away the roast turkeys, kid, fruit, &c., which was before us; but all was actually the perquisite of the train of attendant servants, and I suppose they took possession of it. The gifts offered to the governor when travelling are also theirs, when not too valuable; that is to say, when they only consist--as they generally do in mere villages--of fruit, eggs, nuts, and sweetmeats. If the present be, as it occasionally is, a camel, with its head painted green or red, it is usual to accept it, re-paint it blue or yellow, and make a return present of it, to the original donor, who, of course, feigns to be totally unacquainted with the animal thus 'translated.' Gifts made to the governor become the property of the East India Company, as no servant of the Company is permitted to receive a private present; and it would be the height of discourtesy to refuse the wonted and time-honoured 'offering' made on the occasion of a visit to the Burra Sahib.

After many courteous salaams and farewells on the part of our host, we resumed our journey, gratified at this glimpse of the interior of a native home. The Parsees are generally rich, and their houses or _bungalows_ are large and handsome. Their adoration of light tends greatly to the embellishment of their dwellings, as to every upper panel of the wainscoting they attach a branch for wax-candles, which are lighted every night, and give to the building the appearance of being illuminated. These 'children of the light' are a fine race, very handsome and intelligent. The upper servants at Parell were all Parsees; one, named Argiesia was an especial favourite with us all, having always a shrewd and amusing answer for every question put to him. We remember on the occasion of a total eclipse of the sun, which took place during our stay in Bombay, asking him why the people of the village near the house made such a noise with their tom-toms. His reply was:

'Because ignorant people, Ma'am Sahib, think great serpent is swallowing the sun, and they try to frighten him away with big noise.'

'And what do you think the shadow is, Argiesia?' we asked. He looked grave for a minute--one never sees an Oriental look puzzled!--and then answered:

'Sun angry men are so wicked. In anger, him hide his face.' This ready-witted and poetical Ghebir met his death, not long after, in one of his own sacred elements, being drowned in the Mahr River, 'where ford there is none.' He once expressed great surprise to me that a nation possessing Regent Street--a description of which he had received from his father--'should come to live in India.'

It was night when we reached Parell after our day's pleasuring; and we all agreed that the climate of India, during the winter months, is of all others the best adapted for picnics, which are so often marred in England by ill-timed showers or gloom; and yet, certain memories came back half reproachfully as we spoke, painting to our mental vision the pretty lanes and fresh green dells and dingles of England, the soft cool breeze, the varied and flitting shadows, the open-air enjoyment of many a past summer-day, when in our own merry island we

'Went a gipsying a long time ago,'

and we gave an involuntary sigh for the country of our birth.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Residence of the governor of the Bombay presidency.

THE LONDON PRISONS OF THE LAST CENTURY.

In the year 1728, an opinion was entertained that much cruelty and rapacity were exercised by the keepers of the great prisons in London. It was known that they had almost unlimited power in their hands, that they were not subject to regular inspection, and that it was scarcely possible to bring them to justice for their treatment of those committed to their charge. It was argued, that it is impossible to depend upon the lenity of men who have such powers over their fellow-creatures, and that these officers must be supposed more than human if they did not occasionally abuse their authority. Of their having actually done so, many rumours had from time to time reached parliament. But in making out a case for inquiry, its strongest supporters had but a very slight forecast of the horrors it was to divulge. It may here be remarked, that before the proper arrangements for official responsibility and regular systematic management in such matters as prison discipline or the custody of the insane were devised, our free parliament did incalculable service by its inquiries and exposures. In that august assembly, every tale of formidable injustice or oppression was sure to receive a ready auditory; and its power was so transcendent, that every door flew open at its command, and no influence could protect the wrong-doer from its sweeping vengeance. With such a body in existence, even the worst governments which Britain has known could not keep up those mysterious agents of tyranny, secret state-prisons, which continue to be the curse of every despotic country. Yet it will be seen, that for want of some more immediate and direct responsibility, the abuses in the prisons even of this country had risen to a very dreadful height.

The member who headed the inquiry was Colonel Oglethorpe. He was a man of literary talent--a dashing and intrepid soldier, but still more renowned for his wide and active benevolence. It is to him that Pope alludes in the lines:

One driven by strong benevolence of soul, Shall fly like Oglethorpe from pole to pole.

A committee obtained by his influence, did not conduct its inquiry in easy state in St Stephen's, but appalled the guilty parties by immediately repairing to the prisons, and diving to the furthest recesses of their dungeons. In the Marshalsea, it found that even those who paid excessive fees for their lodgings, were laid in lairs above each other on boards set on tressels, where they were packed so close together, that many were believed to have died from mere deficiency of air. There was no doubt that many others, debtors, had come to a miserable end by starvation. Some were found in the last stage of attenuation. Those who could not provide for themselves, had nothing to feed on but a scanty charity-allowance from the benevolence of individuals, which, when distributed among the whole, furnished each with sometimes only a few peas in the day; and at intervals of several days, an ounce and a half of meat. 'When the miserable wretch,' say the committee in their report, 'hath worn out the charity of his friends, and consumed the money which he hath raised upon his clothes and bedding, and hath ate his last allowance of provisions, he usually in a few days grows weak for want of food, with the symptoms of a hectic fever; and when he is no longer able to stand, if he can raise 3d. a day to pay the fee of the common nurse of the prison, he obtains the liberty of being carried into the sick-ward, and lingers on for about a month or two, by the assistance of the above-mentioned prison portion of provision, and then dies.' The committee made more lifelike this horrible description of the state of the prison by describing the results of their efforts to relieve the sufferers. They said: 'On the giving food to these poor wretches--though it was done with the utmost caution, they being only allowed the smallest quantities, and that of liquid nourishment--one died; the vessels of his stomach were so disordered and contracted for want of use, that they were totally incapable of performing their office, and the unhappy creature perished about the time of digestion.' These prisoners were debtors, not criminals. We make our extracts from the reports, just after having heard in a scientific society an examination of the dietary of a large district of prisons. The difficulty appeared to be, to find the medium that would preserve health without making the criminal's living in some measure luxurious; and it appeared that, by almost every dietary in actual use in the district, the prisoners fattened; in fact, they profited so much in constitution by sobriety, good air, and regular food, however simple, that it was found a difficult matter to give them what might be considered a bare sufficiency, without raising their physical condition, and sending them out of prison with improved constitutions. So different is imprisonment for crime in the present age, from imprisonment for debt a hundred and twenty years ago.

The condition of many of the prisoners for debt in England, though few knew the actual extent of its horrors, was well known to be wretched, and several humane persons had made charitable bequests for their support. Colonel Oglethorpe's Committee made inquiry as to the employment of these charities, and disclosed incidents of singular villainy. It appeared, for instance, that in the Marshalsea there were several charities; and that the prisoners might be sure of benefiting by them, it was arranged that they should elect six constables, and that these constables should choose a steward, who was to receive and disburse the charities. Like a corporation, the steward had a seal which he appended to the receipts for the money received for the charities. The officers of the prison had carried on a systematic perversion of these charities, either through connivance of the steward elected by the constables, or by imposing on him. In the year 1722, however, it happened that a man named Matthew Pugh, an active, clever exponent of abuses, was chosen steward. He discovered several charities, the knowledge of which had been entirely suppressed, the proceeds being drawn by the officers of the prison. He found, that to facilitate their fraud, they had got a counterpart of the common seal, with which they certified the receipts. Pugh got a new seal made; and to prevent a new system of fraud being carried out, he got a safety-chest fixed to the prison wall, with six locks, requiring for opening it six separate keys, which were put into the hands of the six constables. The committee, in describing how audaciously these precautions were defeated, shew distinctly how slight were the checks on the conduct of prison-officers in the reign of George II. They say: 'But this public and just manner of receiving and disbursing the charities was disliked by the keeper and his servants; and they complained to the judge of the Palace Court, and gave information that the said Pugh was a very turbulent fellow, and procured a rule by which it was ordered, that Matthew Pugh should no longer be permitted to have access to the said prison or court; and the prisoners are allowed to choose another steward; and accordingly, John Grace, then clerk to the keeper, was chosen steward by those in the keeper's interest; but the constables, in behalf of the prisoners, refused to deliver up the keys of the chest, where their seal was, insisting that all receipts should be sealed as usual in a public manner, that they might know what money was received; and thereupon the said chest was broke down, and carried away by the said William Acton (the keeper) and John Grace.'--_Parliamentary History_, viii. 736. Hence the deaths from starvation reported by Colonel Oglethorpe's Committee.

The reports of the committee were varied by statements of atrocious cruelties committed on the prisoners, by their committal, whenever the prison-officers thought fit, to damp and loathsome dungeons full of filth, by heavy irons being forced on them, and even by the application of the thumbkins, and other such tortures as were applied in the previous century to the Covenanters. Thus, after narrating an attempt made to escape, and the severities used on those who had participated in it, the committee say: 'One of them was seen to go in (to the keeper's lodge) perfectly well, and when he came out again, he was in the greatest disorder; his thumbs were much swollen, and very sore; and he declared that the occasion of his being in that condition was, that the keeper, in order to extort from him a confession of the names of those who had assisted him and others in their attempt to escape, had screwed certain instruments of iron upon his thumbs, so close, that they had forced the blood out of them with exquisite pain. After this, he was carried into the strong room, where, besides the other irons which he had on, they fixed on his neck and hands an iron instrument called a collar, like a pair of tongs; and he being a large lusty man, when they screwed the said instrument close, his eyes were ready to start out of his head, the blood gushed out of his ears and nose, he foamed at the mouth, and he made several motions to speak, but could not: after these tortures, he was confined in the strong room for many days with a heavy pair of irons called sheers on his legs.'

It is not to be denied that some of the charges made by the committee were not ultimately confirmed. It is natural for humane men, becoming for the first time acquainted with extensive cruelties, to tinge their narrative with the indignation they feel, and thus give it a prejudiced and exaggerated tone. Even committees of the House of Commons are not entirely exempt from such failings. But for our purpose, which is that of noticing the progress of civilisation and humanity in the period that has elapsed since the inquiry, it is sufficient to know, that there must have been an extensive foundation in facts for the horrors detailed by the committee. If it could not be distinctly proved that an individual officer had murdered any prisoner by the use of a particular torture, yet the instruments of torture described in the above extract were in the prisons--they were seen and handled by the committee, who were not to suppose that they were kept for no use. They state, that it had become the practice for the keepers 'unlawfully to assume to themselves a pretended authority as magistrates, and not only to judge and decree punishments arbitrarily, but also to execute the same unmercifully.'

In the exercise of this authority, the keepers seem to have imitated the cruelties of the classical tyrant Mezentius, commemorated by Virgil as chaining the living to the dead, for the committee say: 'The various tortures and cruelties before mentioned not contenting these wicked keepers in their said pretended magistracy over the prisoners, they found a way of making within the prison a confinement more dreadful than the strong room itself, by coupling the living with the dead; and have made a practice of locking up debtors who displeased them in the yard with human carcasses. One particular instance of this sort of inhumanity, was of a person whom the keepers confined in that part of the lower yard which was then separated from the rest, whilst two dead bodies had lain there four days; yet was he kept there with them six days longer; in which time the vermin devoured the flesh from the faces, ate the eyes out of the heads of the carcasses, which were bloated, putrid, and turned green during the poor debtor's dismal confinement with them.'

Some of the accounts given by the committee are as grotesque, without being so horrible. A certain Captain John M'Phaedris had been a person of considerable fortune, and, like many of his contemporaries, had been a victim to the South-sea speculation, which appears to have made all the debtors' prisons more than usually full between the years 1720 and 1725. He refused to pay the exorbitant fees demanded by the keeper for accommodation, and maintained that they were illegal. To silence so troublesome a person, he was turned, unsheltered, into the yard, where he had to remain exposed to the weather day and night. 'He sat quietly,' said the committee, 'under his wrongs, and, getting some poor materials, built a little hut to protect himself as well as he could from the injuries of the weather.' The keeper, seeing this ingenious abode, exclaimed with an oath that the fellow made himself easy, and ordered the hut to be pulled down. 'The poor prisoner,' we are told, 'being in an ill state of health, and the night rainy, was put to great distress.'

In another instance, a prisoner had been committed to a cell so damp, as the witnesses described it, that they could sweep the water from the wall like dew from the grass. A feather-bed happened by some odd accident to be in the place, and the prisoner tore it up, and, for warmth, buried himself in the contents. Being covered with cutaneous sores, the feathers stuck to him, as if he had been subject to the operation of tarring and feathering. One Sunday, the door of the cell being left open, he rushed out, and entered the prison chapel during divine service--a horribly ludicrous figure. The committee, on the conclusion of the incident, say, 'he was immediately seized and carried back into the sad dungeon; where, through the cold, and the restraint, and for want of food, he lost his senses, languished, and perished.'

Such were the features of the system of mistreatment pursued in the London prisons, thirty years after the general liberties of the subject had been secured by the Revolution. We may in a subsequent paper advert to some of the particular cases which came under the attention of courts of justice.

LIFE-ASSURANCE OFFICES OF RECENT DATE.

The remarkable prosperity of life-assurance business in these realms--where alone it is a flourishing business--has naturally had the effect of causing 'offices' to multiply very fast. In the last eight years, 241 were projected, being at the rate of one for every twelve days nearly. Two or three bustling persons thereby obtain situations; there is a show of business for a time; but such concerns are often exceedingly weak, and the interests of the public are much imperiled by them. In consequence of an order of parliament, returns of the accounts of a large proportion of the recent offices have been made and published; so that the public may now form some opinion of the stability of these institutions. The general fact resulting is, that the greater number appear to have been started with small means, and are not now in hopeful circumstances. The business they have obtained is generally small in proportion to the expenses incurred; so that many of them are much behind the point at which they started.

Mr Robert Christie, of Edinburgh, has done the public the good service of publishing a small pamphlet in which the leading features of the accounts are presented in an intelligible form.[5] Here it appears that a life-assurance company will launch into business with an imposing name, a flourishing prospectus, and--L.3000! After three years, it will have received L.4000 of premiums. In that time, L.1300 will have been spent in salaries, L.600 in establishing agencies, L.700 in rent; in all, in expenses of management, upwards of L.5000, leaving little more than half the premium receipts to stand against the obligations towards the assured. There is one which has been in business upwards of four years, and which only possesses L.2869 of funds, out of which to pay policies represented by L.3094 of premiums, L.2379 of moneys received for investment, and L.1895 of deposits on shares. Another, which makes no small bustle in the world, received in two years and a half L.13,219 of premiums, spent in the same time L.6993, whereof L.1213 was for advertising, and L.539 for directors and auditors, and at the end of the period possessed, to make good its obligations, only L.7045, nearly one-half of which was composed of the original guarantee fund.

It is very likely that few or none of these establishments were commenced with a fraudulent design; but they were not required by the public, and their expenses have eaten them up. By most, if not all of them, loss and disappointment will be incurred. It is therefore highly desirable that the public should be warned against new offices generally. While there are so many old ones of perfectly established character both in England and Scotland--and we have some pride in remarking, that there is not one dangerous office known to us in the latter country--it is quite unnecessary to resort to any other.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] _Letter to the Right Hon. Joseph W. Henley, M.P., President of the Board of Trade, regarding Life-Assurance Institutions._ By Robert Christie, Esq. Edinburgh: Constable & Co.

ANECDOTE OF BURNS IN THE '93.

A public library had been established by subscription among the citizens of Dumfries in September 1792, and Burns, ever eager about books, had been from the first one of its supporters. Before it was a week old, he had presented to it a copy of his poems. He does not seem to have been a regularly admitted member till 5th March 1793, when 'the committee, by a great majority, resolved to offer to Mr Robert Burns a share in the library, free of any admission-money [10s. 6d.] and the quarterly contributions [2s. 6d.] to this date, out of respect and esteem for his abilities as a literary man; and they directed the secretary to make this known to Mr Burns as soon as possible, that the application which they understood he was about to make in the ordinary way might be anticipated.' This is a pleasing testimony to Burns as a poet, but still more so to Burns as a citizen and member of society. His name appears in September as a member of committee--an honour assigned by vote of the members.