The Sun.
London, England, 1863-02-06 00:00:00

The Law of Contracts in India.

Contracts in India are, of course, precisely what contracts
are in England, with two very important exceptions. Every
native workman is always under contract, ane not one
workman in 60 can read the contract he signs. The sys-
tem works in this way. Suppose an employer wants a
dozen chairs, or a few thousands of bricks, or a few hun-
dredweight of rice, he calls up the carpenter, or brickmaker,
or peasant, and offers him a set price, to produce at a future
time the article required., haggling foi a few hours
the
wor
riedto_mst liathe former
case, asks an " advance" in cash from his would-be em-
ployer. He has no capital, or says he has none, to buy
wood or find firing, or live while his crop is growing; and
if he had it would be contrary to his principles to trust any-
body's promise to pay. The employer agrees, pays the spe-
cified sum, usually half value, an agreement is written, but
not read, and the peasant departs to spend the money re-
ceived on a quasi-religious, quasi-domestic festival. Ha-
ving spent it, he, if inclined to work, borrows some more
from the native money •lender, pledging his " job" as se-
curity, and saves the interest by using inferior wood, or
half -burning his bricks, or putting a little sand into the
weight of rice delivered to his employer. Very often, how•
ever, particularly if the contract covers a little period, he
is disinclined to perform it, wearies of working a dead
horse, and puts his employer off with stories which, if ad-
dressed to a native, display a wonderful fertility in lying,
or, if addressed to a European, are always intensely pa-
thetic. The employer, whose trade depends upon punc-
tuality, scolds or threatens, or, if a wonderfully reasonable
man, asks for his money back. The workman never dreams
of refusing or resisting, or even demurring, and promises
the money with delicious unction, but never pays or intends
to make an effort to pay. Pincers would not squeeze the
money out of him ; he had rather, if he must, perform the
work, but till he must, he will placidly decline doing any-
thing, and call all his gods to witness that his house was
burnt down last week, and his wife gave him twins yester-
day. The remedy for conduct like that in England would
be very speedily applied. The County Court would amerce
the defaulter in the amount of his debt, plus damages plus
msts, and there would be an end of the matter. But in
India there are in the interior no County Courts, the
Judge's Court is usually 40 miles off, and the system of pro-
cedure is the old Equity system in England—a judgment on
written pleadings (all written on stamped paper), the Indian
Government selling justice as dear as it dare), and an easy
case takes about six months to decide. During that period
witnesses have to be conveyed over the distance perhaps
ten times, lawyers to be fed, and the police to be conci-
liated, or they will worry the witnesses into absconding;
then a second suit must be instituted for the execution of
the judge's decree, and then—the workman has assigned
all his property to his brother-in-law and disappeared for a
year. Imagine a cotton-grower with 6,000 suits like that !
The Anglo-Indians, official and otherwise, resolve to remedy
this state of affairs, but not precisely after the English
fashion. Englishmen would have made County Courts cheap
and common, and coerced defaulters into honesty by fear of
a mild but inevitable application of law. There was not the
faintest objection to this course, as the six or eight county
courts already established work admirably and already pay
their expenses ; but this did not suit either the colonial
habit of violent thought or the Home Government's dread
of expense. It was resolved, for the sake of at once display-
ing energy and maintaining thrift, to cure a boil by actual
cautery. A bill was introduced giving the magistrates sum-
mary jurisdiction over every workman who broke his con-
tract, with power to imprison for six months, and then make
him work the agreement out. Very satisfactory that,
thought the employer, and so it might be in England, where
courts are always honest, and workmen can usually read.
But in India no one workman in a thousand can read; he
is wholly in the hands of his employer's writer, invariably
a rascal ; he has no power of resisting advances any more
than a parrot has of resisting sugar, and he is subject to the
very worst gang of scoundrels known to exist upon earth
as an organised body—the Indian native police. There
is :ao language we can employ to describe this body which
will exceed in severity the language used by their own Go-
vernment, Sir F. Halliday, for instance, affirming in an
official report that they committed more than half the crime
of the country. To make breach of contract penal is there-
fore to place a workman, for violation of an agreement
which he cannot read, binding him to pay sums with which
he was tempted, in the hands of men armed with the whole
strength of the Government, corrupt beyond all experience
of European corruption, and cruel as they were described to
be in the official " Torture Report" of Madras. It is serfage
and nothing less which such a law would produce, and Sir
Charles Wood in angrily prohibiting it did his duty as
completely as he neglected it when he failed to authorise
adequate County courts. The Indian Government obeyed,
of course, but proposed a new bill. We cannot find the
draught of this measure, but, from the language employed
in debate, it appears to have provided a civil procedure, but
levied the resulting damages by criminal process. In other
words, it abolished the swift certainty of the first law, but
still handed over the people to the tender mercies of the
polio and Sir Charles Wood prohibited that also. He was
right.
We say deliberately, writing
lem
swetitthfuelnl
t in India,belieinth it
is
better necessityth for
that
rt such
Indian e
encouragingle Europeanment should end, our Indian trade
decay, or ou
sett
Empire perish, than that any such law
should remain five years upon the statute book. At the end
of that time a hundred millions of labourers now free would
be simply slaves, and a war of vengeance, to which the mu-
hwaorulleds NbVeooodrghaansisdinisgplayed the instinct
in every district.
tlinn irejecting
ai
it
j so
ikrec,
which belongs to the statesman of a free
people, as well as
the humanity which ought to be the first principle of a Go-
vernment so terribly resistless as that of Inclia.-speetakr •