For some days we have
seen and heard a good many religions mendicants, both Mahommedans and
Hindoos, but still very few lame, blind, and otherwise helpless
persons, asking charity. The most numerous and distressing class of
beggars that importune me, are those who beg redress for their
wrongs, and a remedy for their grievances,--"their name, indeed, is
_Legion_," and their wrongs and grievances are altogether without
remedy, under the present government and inveterately vicious system
of administration. It is painful to listen to all these complaints,
and to have to refer the sufferers for redress to authorities who
want both the power and the will to afford it; especially when one
knows that a remedy for almost every evil is hoped for from a visit
such as the poor people are now receiving from the Resident. He is
expected "to wipe the tears from off all faces;" and feels that he
can wipe them from hardly any. The reckless disregard shown by the
depredators of all classes and degrees to the sufferings of their
victims, whatever be the cause of discontent or object of pursuit, is
lamentable. I have every day scores of petitions delivered to me
"with quivering lip and tearful eye," by persons who have been
plundered of all they possessed, had their dearest relatives murdered
or tortured to death, and their habitations burnt to the ground, by
gangs of ruffians, under landlords of high birth and pretensions,
whom they had never wronged or offended; some, merely because they
happened to have property, which the ruffians wished to take--others,
because they presumed to live and labour upon lands which they
coveted, or deserted, and wished to have left waste.
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