PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference :-
TLC.O. 882
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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
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by the prompt attendance of the General and the military.
The General and the military on this occasion took the arrangements on themselves, and ordered out the forces which appeared at Bonelle.
Mr. Anstruther, under the idea that it was done by Lord Torrington, says such a precaution was ludicrous. (See General's Despatch, page 29. Mr. Anstruther's Evidence, 7679.)
Three days later (on the 28th July), the Pre- tender entered Matelle, and as he came in at one end of the town, the police magistrate and the police, (the civil powers, and their force) made a precipi- tate flight at the other.
Two days later the civil power at Kornegalle was overpowered by the rebels, and were only protected from actual massacre by the providential arrival of the military at the precise moment of emergency.
In every instance, therefore, in which the civil power attempted to cope with the emergency un- aided by the military, it was signally defeated, and only saved from destruction by the prompt inter- vention of the soldiery.
The whole of the police force throughout the Kandyan province consists of but seventy-three men, ten serjeants, two inspectors, and a sub- inspector.
Of these, forty-six individuals are stationed in the town of Kandy itself, and the rest are dispersed in twos and threes over the country as a "rural police."
The entire of the civil power at Matelle con- sisted of a police magistrate, Mr. Waring, so infirm from age and the loss of eye-sight, that he begged to resign his office ten days after the insurrection broke out. His forces consisted of four or five messengers of his court, a serjeant and two police- men; and on the occasion of the rebellion there happened to be present ten or twelve policemen from Kandy, sent down to arrest the rioters reported to be in the highway between Matelle and Dambool.
At Kornegalle the civil power consisted of two civil officers-one of them the district judge and police magistrate, the other the revenue officer- and they had a night patrol of fifteen superannu
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ated Malays, with two muskets among the whole fifteen.
This was the çivil force with which Mr. Wode. house imagines that an irruption of 6000 armed Kandyans was to be effectually resisted, and an insurrection suppressed in that district.
But most of the districts are even more scantily
provided with civil power than Matelle and Korne- galle. Mr. Sims, the police magistrate at Made- welle-tenne, in the centre of the disturbed dis- tricts, on returning to his own station after witness- ing the conflict between the rebels and the military
at Kornegalle, found every human being-clerks, peons, and messengers, all fled! and, as he says himself in his report to the Governor, “civil power was reduced to his single self."
The fact is, the so-called police the only force
at the disposal of the civil power—was never cal- culated for such emergencies; they are a mere patrol, and scarcely serviceable as a detective force; and, in reality, the country is only kept in peace by the well-known fact of the constant presence of an available military power.
There is a fallacy in confounding the idea of civil power as it exista in civilized and friendly countries with that form in which it exists in Ceylon, or rather in the Kandyan country; which we may be said virtually to hold in a kind of military occupation.
The strength of the civil power in England is the sustaining force of public sympathy and public confidence, the love of order, and the pervading interest on behalf of property and the protection
of life.
But where would be the strength or influence of the civil power, in time of unusual treason, and almost universal insurrection against the instituted order of things—when its efforts would be opposed by the mames, on whom, in peaceful times, it would be reliant for support ↑
Besides this, it must be borne in mind that all the subordinate officers, without exception, are In the native, or the descendants of natives. Kandyan province, the majority of the minor officers, judicial, revenue, and civil, are Kandyans or Binghalese, whose apprehensions, if not their sympathies, wonkl array them `against us in any