It was in April 1919. The district was close to the centre of the disturbances, and daily reports were coming in of the cutting of the telegraph-wires and of the removal of lengths of railway line with the intention of wrecking the trooptrains which were carrying sepoys to quell the disorder in Lahore, Amritsar, and Gujranwala. The bridges were guarded by regular troops, but there were none to spare for the track.

An order had been issued that morning to the headmen of every village through whose lands any part of a railway ran, that they must provide patrols on the line by day, and guards on the stations by night. Many of the headmen had guns of their own, usually only muzzleloaders, and they were told to carry them. Those who had no guns were offered the loan of weapons from the

VOL. COXI.—NO. MOCLXXVIII.

storeroom at headquarters, where private arms, which have been confiscated or of which the licences have lapsed and not been renewed, are kept. The first-comers were able to borrow revolvers, Winchester repeaters, or double-barrelled breech-loading shot-guns; the late arrivals had to be content with swords, muzzle-loaders, and all kinds of queer antiquated weapons, which might frighten but could hardly hurt. For the night-guards bodies of men were required to sleep on the stations, and turn out in pairs from time to time to patrol the line on either side. Several hundred hurricane lanterns were issued and distributed all over the district for these night-watchers. Manufacturers may be glad to hear why their 1919 sales were so large.

Later on, civil and military co-operation was not quite perQ

fect; for the military armoured cars which patrolled the lines were liable to shoot at sight the unfortunate watchers, whom they suspected to be rebels tampering with the lines; and the watchers not unnaturally were apt to desert their posts and hide in the fields just when they saw an armoured car coming.

This led to reports by the military that the civil arrangements for guarding the line were most inadequate, as no guards were ever to be seen. It was suggested that all watchers should be provided with conspicuous scarlet armlets, something like Red Cross badges; but this plan was rejected as more likely to provide immunity to badmashes, who could easily borrow or steal or make an armlet, and then proceed to remove a line with impunity.

But to return to the first day on which the lines were guarded and when the arrangements were not yet in proper working order. That very night a small station on a branch line was burned down. The station-master was a feeble youth of the shopkeeping class, recently from school, and of the Arya Samaj sect, which is violently national, and so antiBritish. His story was that about 10 P.M., when the sweeper and the water-carrier were lying asleep on the platform, a band of about thirty men, who had their turbans bound round their chins to conceal their features, came up, demanded his keys from him, opened the office, took out a tin of kerosene oil

which was there, sprinkled it on the woodwork of the station, and set it alight. He said that he had lain on his bed all the time with his head under the bedclothes. The sweeper and the water carrier sometimes said they had seen no one, sometimes that they had. No reliance could be put on their contradictory statements, but apparently they did not corroborate the station - master's statement. There was no guard on the station, but a village patrol had left it only half an hour before the flames and smoke aroused the residents of the same village half a mile away, who arrived on the scene too late to catch the incendiaries or to extinguish the flames.

Next morning the Superintendent of Police-an Englishman who had been born in India, spoke the language like a native, and could understand the Punjabi mind as few imported Englishmen could-was on the spot, and found the stolen cash - box with some money in it lying in the bushes beside the line some 100 yards from the station. So the incendiaries were no thieves, else they would not have thrown away a cash-box which at every jog rattled out the secret of the coin inside. Inquiries at all the surrounding villages failed to elicit any clue. At last the policeman came to the conclusion that the stationmaster's story was a yarn, and that he had himself-a late student, an Arya Samajist, and an inhabitant of a notoriously

seditious village set his station afire. He was reported to the railway authorities for dismissal as a suspect revolutionary.

Some months later, under a new Superintendent, whose zeal was unbounded, the truth was discovered. Two Sikhs, who had been emigrants in Vancouver, where Indian schemes of revolution and revolt have for years been freely hatched, told him that they knew who had burned the station and could get together the necessary proofs. One of these men had been suspected of revolutionary ideas himself, but the other had, when in Vancouver, given valuable information to the authorities about the plots which were discussed there. They arranged a drinking-party with those whom they accused of the arson; a police officer and an Indian gentleman were concealed where they could hear the talk of the drinkingparty, and in their cups the story of the burning of the station was graphically and faithfully described. A fuller A fuller confession could not have been wished for. The chief incendiaries were the five headmen of a village a mile distant from the station. How the men were collected for the enterprise, and every step of the circuitous route from the village to the railway line, and down the railway line from the opposite direction to the village, was described. One of the headmen and several of the menials who were included in the band that had visited the

station turned King's evidence. The story of the station-master was true: he was guilty of no more than fright, which sent his head under the bedclothes as a safer proceeding than raising an alarm. In the still night air of the bare Punjab plains a cry for help could have been heard easily in two or three villages around, but the timid bania knew that it might cost him his life to utter that cry, and, after all, was not the rumour abroad that British rule was at an end?

The prosecution case was complete, but the policy of yielding to agitators was now in full swing; attacks on the British Government were no longer to be called "sedition," and no prosecutions for offences committed in the April rebellion were to be instituted without the special sanction of Government. Even to punish arson might be represented as repression, and Government wished to avoid any appearance of maintaining law and order if the lawless could also claim to

claim to be revolutionaries. Most of those convicted of offences in April had been released at Christmas by the King's clemency; and would it not be invidious to send to gaol offenders who had been clever enough to avoid detection over Christmas, and who, if they were now convicted, could not hope for deliverance by another Christmas gift? So the lesson was taught that even arson, if it is for political ends and can escape detection for a little, will not be punished.

The police were snubbed, and have learned not to be too officious and to treat as crime acts which are merely revolutionary. Loyal Indians have

been warned that it is better not to help the police to discover malefactors, for they merely make themselves unpopular and earn no thanks.

The output of written papers from a Government office in India comes to several tons in a year. The judicial files weigh the heaviest, for they contain in extenso every order and almost every eyewink of the court and every word uttered by every witness; and the witnesses are very many, for the scales of justice made in India, like those of the grocer, respond to quantity, not to quality. A pound of lies, made up to look like truth, outweighs 12 ounces of truth almost as surely as a pound of margarine weighs down 12 ounces of butter. But hardly anything ever happens which does not give excuse to somebody for starting one or even more files-it may be only the birth of a baby who is just not quite an ordinary baby, or the advent of a locust or a book to be rebound. There was once a celebrated file all about the proper way to enter in Doomsday Book the birth of a second posthumous son. All come at last to rest in the record-room.

The daily pile of miscellaneous papers needing a district officer's orders may stand a yard high in the morning, towering over the head of the clerk who sits on the ground and sing-songs them

out for orders in a monotone that soothes to slumber ; but in the evening they are gone about their business, scattered everywhere, never perhaps to meet again till they too come some day to rest in the recordroom. Some files grow very old and weary before they reach their haven finally disposed of and ready for an obituary notice in the shape of an index.

Others are bright little fellows, which die early and are consigned to the recordroom with their edges still fresh and their eyelet holes untorn by the world's hard usage.

Some people have considered that files are merely a byproduct of official activity, but the deepest thinkers regard them as much more than this, and even as the final cause of Government. However this may be, Government produces files at a rate beyond the achievements of any mothers of which zoology tells, and would soon be swamped in her own outpourings if she did not arrange for the early destruction of most of them. So there is a kind of elaborate deathwarrant showing what files are to be destroyed after one year, what after two years or six years, and so on, reaching up to an ordained immortality for

honoured files have only a short rest, and then are hurried off to the gaol to be repulped into paper, and to become by a process of metempsychosis the raw material of a new generation of files.

One

But rats live in record-rooms, and rats cannot recognise and respect those files which are destined to live for ever. simple Deputy Commissioner thought it would be a reasonable precaution to keep a cat in the record-room. Puss was acquired and passed the nights in the file mausoleum, but she did not grow fat on the rats. Either a too ratty diet did not suit her, or perhaps the excessive exertion of climbing the racks to catch the rats called for fatty as well as ratty food. Anyway, the humane Deputy Commissioner ordered that she should be given a drink of milk every morning. To make sure that the cat and not the office Sweeper drank the milk, the sitting of the court opened in future not with prayers but with a food parade of one cat, one sweeper, one saucer of milk, and one dignified and portly office superintendent. It was like the grand parade of office clerks which Government prescribes in malaria seasons in order that one tabloid of five grains of quinine may be placed on each tongue. The cat did not grow much fatter: perhaps the formality of the parade upset her digestion.

But, alas! the Deputy Commissioner had forgotten a

to a circular. Far away in the provincial capital the Accountant - General had not forgotten it, and saw in a contingent bill of March, and again in one of April, Milk for cat, Rs. 2." Heavens! two of the most admired of all Government's rules have been broken. A district officer has increased the district establishment without the sanction of Government, and he has incurred a recurring charge. Another file has been born, and some day pussy will guard her own life-history from the rats. But this is a file which will have a long life of objection and reply, of explanation, of justification, and of Government sanctions before it comes to rest.

"" Does establishment ” include a cat or only those who can produce or contribute to a file? If the cat is changed every month, would the charge still be a recurring one? Are traps, or poison, or a cat the cheapest weapon against rats? Such are the momentous questions to be threshed out, and the file continues its glorious existence till it produces at last a crop of mature decisions.

The Deputy Commissioner went home on leave and left these great questions still unsettled. Perhaps they were never settled. But certainly the Deputy Commissioner was wrong, for in 1919 the rioters burned down the record-room, and all pussy's efforts to save the files were lost.