was eightfold, and that of the emerald fourfold, that of their radiant sister, and the "whirligig of time" may once more revenge them for their present eclipse. But while taste is fickle, nature is immutable; and her productions maintain their qualities unchanged, although we see them with different eyes. Even should the diamond cease to be esteemed the most beautiful of natural substances, it will nevertheless continue to be the most impene trable, and discarded from the tiara of the princess and the neck. lace of the ball-room belle, it will maintain its place in the workshop of the engineer and the atelier of the gem-engraver.

AGNES M. CLERKE, in Fraser's Magazine.

THE BACKWOODS OF CEYLON.

THE island of Ceylon has been at all times part and parcel of India, and if the term body politic can be fitly employed with respect to that strange medley of races, castes, and creeds, it is a constituent part of that body politic. By an accident of nature it is separated from the continent by a narrow streak of sea, but its people are more closely allied to the thoroughly Indian races than are some of the great tribes who now inhabit the Indian peninsula. The Sinhalese, who form about two thirds of the population, are the descendants of Aryan emigrants who left their homes in the Ganges valley more than five centuries before the Christian era. Down to the time of Christ their intercourse with Bengal seems to have been intimate and constant, those being the days of missionary Buddhism; but after that period the course of Bengal and Ceylon history, as expressed in language, religion, and in the chronicles themselves, rapidly parted, and now little remains to indicate the common origin save the similarity of physical conformation and temperament of the peoples and the present outgrowth of the primitive language. The Tamils, who nearly compose the remaining one third, are the cousins and brothers of the great race of the Presidency of Madras. The streak of sea, however, and her distant position, saved Ceylon from many waves of conquest which passed over India; and its people were permitted to retain the simple and humanizing doctrines of Buddhism, while their kin beyond the sea fell under the debasing influences of the Brahminist reaction. And in more recent times her insular position induced her English conquerors to diminish the too vast responsibility of the governor general by placing Ceylon under the colonial instead of the Indian administration. Though a crown colony, and under the Colonial Office, Ceylon has nothing to do with other crown colonies, such as Mauritius or Jamaica, and is to all intents a separate government. And it is for this reason that Ceylon is at all times a subject

worthy of the consideration of those interested in Indian matters. She has indeed no foreign policy, nor any native states within her borders; but in agriculture, the management of natives, administration of justice, and in Mofussil life generally, the difficulties to be encountered are practically the same. Indian problems have to be solved by a non-Indian government. And it is especially interesting to note how this part of India has been governed by a modest and inexpensive local administration, without, indeed, the prestige and lustre of the Indian service, and with perhaps fewer individuals in proportion of marked ability, but untrammelled in the execution of their duty by the red tape exigencies which beset the subordinates of that great bureaucracy. It may, without exaggeration, be said that in Ceylon the people are quieter and more contented than in any part of India, taxation is considerably lighter, labor is more amply rewarded; while alongside of “bankrupt: India" we find the Ceylon revenue providing without any strain for large railway, irrigation, and other public works.

The island has not, however, been always prosperous in English hands. From the acquisition of the whole of it in 1815 down to 1850, at the close of the last Kandyan rebellion, the Government had considerable difficulty in paying its way. About that time an era of prosperity began with the revival of the coffee enterprise, and the abundant revenue was employed in public works and education under the direction of several able governors, among whom may be specially named Sir Henry Ward and Sir Hercules Robinson, the present Governor of New Zealand. The two great works with which the name of Sir Henry Ward will always be connected are the Colombo and Kandy Railway and the great irrigation works of the Eastern Province, by means of which thousands of acres of jungle have been converted into waving fields of paddy. Both these enterprises remained to be completed by Sir Hercules Robinson, who in his turn struck out a new line of fame by the passing of what is known as the Village Communities Ordinance. It had long been known, although the general attention was emphasized by the appearance of Sir Henry Maine's wellknown work, that in the interior of Ceylon the affairs of village life, comprising the conduct of agriculture, petty civil justice, and to some extent criminal justice and police, were directed and administered by a council of elders of the village, whose authority was held in respect due to its vast antiquity, although for ages it had received but little sanction or support from the supreme governing powers of the land. Sir Hercules Robinson's law was passed with a view to saving this time-honored institution from the decadence with which it was threatened by the extension of the police-courts, and to relieving the police courts of a mass of frivolous lawsuits of which they had become

the scene. The Sinhalese people, though not wanting in wit and humor, have no national drama and few games or other amusements, and it is not surprising to find that the English courts have become to them all that the theatre is to the French. The pieces performed might be tragic or comic, highway robberies with thrilling details, or cattle stealing with a pitched battle betweent& resening party and the thieves, or the acquisition of a coveted piece of field with elaborate testimony to lengthy pedigrees, deeds of gift and disinheritings. In the course of all such dramas the various actors in the witness-box would perform their parts as a rule with conspicuous ability, while the knowledge possessed by some part of the audience of the falsehoods uttered, making them watch with keen interest the course of the magistrates thought, imported a sort of Sophoclean irony into the whole proceeding. The greater the distance at which the English court was from the litigants, and the greater the ignorance of the magistrate of the country language and life, the more zest had they in the sport. The Government, on the other hand, hoped that by intrusting the trial of petty causes to the more intelligent of the natives themselves, with the right of appeal to competent European officers, not only would pressure be taken off the police-courts, but the natives would gain a valuable schooling in self-government. And this hope has been fairly fulfilled. Native gentlemen have proved themselves competent presidents of these village tribunals, and have in some cases been appointed police magistrates of the same grade with junior civilians. An account of the establishment of these village coun cils and tribunals has already been given in the Fortnightly Review, and it is only necessary, in alluding to them here, t remark that the village council and tribunal created by Sir Henry Robinson is not exactly a revival of the old institution. A native gentleman of the highest position is appointed president of a large district, and holds circuit courts in the smaller divisions of that district, where he is assisted by assessors drawn from a list similar to that of our special jurymen. There is a right of appeal from the village tribunal to the Government agent or collector of the province, and from him to the governor in council. The small number of appeals even to the Government agent testifies to the quality of the justice administered. The system was not introduced into all dis tricts, but only into such as were from time to time deemed fitted for the experiment. And it has been found that the districts wherein the councils have answered best have been those in which the old village system was still alive, viz., in the districts occupied by the Kandyan Sinhalese.

The Village Communities Ordinance, although it provides for rules to be passed in accordance with native customs for irrigation and cultivation of fields, was in the main a judicial reform. It

was reserved to Sir William Gregory to extend its provisions to the execution of works of practical and lasting benefit. In the days of native government all public works had been performed by the people themselves, at the command of the king and under the direction of his officers. This "king's business," called rajakāriya, differed from other service regularly performed for the holding of land in so far as it was limited by no fixed rules as to time, place, or extent. Like the oppressions of the Turks it fell upon the people anomalously, and often at considerable intervals, and caused little disaffection in the nation at large. But when the same system came to be applied by the English to the making of soundlyengineered roads and other such works, it was found to interfere too much with the liberty of the subject, and forced labor was abolished by the "Magna Charta" of 1833. The finances of the colony were not then in a very flourishing state, and, as may be supposed, public works did not get performed. Laws were afterward passed by which every male adult, between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five, was rendered liable to perform six days' labor a year on the public roads, or to pay the commuted value in money. The unskilled labor of the villagers could only be employed in the easier work of digging and gravelling, and the difficulties involved in calling together and superintending heterogeneous gangs have led to the general adoption of commutation, and the mass of the people regularly pay their 3s. a year as road tax. The aim of their rulers to get the country Sinhalese to do manual labor for their own benefit was thus found to be impracticable so far as the public roads were concerned. There remained the possibility of getting them to work with effect at the restoration of the mag nificent irrigation tanks which had been the glory of the ancient kings, and which still in their dilapidated condition held small supplies of water for the cultivation of insignificant fields. An experiment in this direction has been made during the last six years, and I now desire to record an account of its progress and results.

The region in which the most of these tanks are situate is the in terior country of the northern half of the island. The mountains of the southern and broader half are the sources of all the constant rivers of Ceylon. The valleys in the hills and the slopes lying between them and the sea toward the west, south, and east, are fairly supplied with perennial streams. But toward the north the two great rivers, the Maha Velliganga and the Kalãoya, emerging from the hill country, have their respective courses turned to the sea in an easterly and westerly direction, leaving the vast plains of the north fed only by an intermittent and precarious rainfall. Travel. lers from Kandy by the great north road making the usual halt at Dambulla, forty-five miles distant, and climbing the steep rock to view the cavernous temples with their numberless images and

curious paintings for which the place is famous, are invariably at tracted by the sight of the ocean plain of jungle spread out before their eyes. Only a few pale green patches of field are seen close beneath the rock on which they stand. All fields and villages beyond are as much hidden from view as weeds that grow beneath the standing corn. A few single rocks-the fortified Sigiri with its winding galleries and inaccessible crown out toward the east, the haunted steeps of Ritigala, and the sacred heights of Mihintale, to the north-are the only breaks between the spectator and the hori zon of darkest green. These are the backwoods of Ceylon.

Yet this great jungle was once covered with villages and fields, and alive with an agricultural population. Those days-the great period of the Sinhalese monarchy-were the ten centuries between the 3d before and the 8th after Christ. The grand descriptions given by poetry and tradition of the size and population of Anurad hapura, of the wealth and largesses of its kings, may well be treated with scepticism by reasonable men. But no one can dis pute the evidences of a wealthy and populous city and of a highly cultivated country afforded by the monuments of that city which remain, by the historical muniments of title engraven on rocks and pillars, and chiefly by the embankments of thousands of tanks which at all available points in the undulations of the plain dam up the precious rains. This interesting district, inhabited by Kandyan Sinhalese, was for a few years after the annexation in 1815 administered from Kandy, or more truly was left unadministered. In 1834 it was annexed to the northern, a thoroughly Tamil province, the capital of which, Jaffna, is situate at the extreme north of the island; an assistant officer was stationed at Anuradhapura, and for the following forty years the prospects of the district were so far bettered in that it had a representative of Government in its midst, through whom its cries might go up to headquarters. But the Government agent at Jaffna was always an officer interested in the Tamils, and generally ignorant of the Sinhalese and their language. The district was on all sides far removed from the sea. No money was spent either in the construction of roads or in the repair of tanks, and the decadence of a thousand years was permitted to run toward absolute decay.

It may be well to describe the district in brief detail, as its condition and characteristics differ considerably from those of all the other parts of the island. Although it may be considered a great plain, it is, in fact, composed of gentle undulations, across the little valleys of which are thrown the embankments, or bunds, forming the tanks. These embankments vary greatly in size, but the majority are from two hundred yards to half a mile in length; while the greatest, such as Padawiya, Kalawawa, and Minneriya, are many miles in length, having, while perfect, held up waters