Yet the "energetic" officer will be expected to work this Act à pied de la lettre.
I saw a good deal of the actual working of this Act at one time, when I was a subordinate officer. Every time a beast was lost it had to be tracked, and the village where the tracks were lost had to pay. It made no difference if there was any reasonable presumption against the village, there the law was. The tracks might be lost two miles from the actual village, simply crossing its boundary; the law was there.
I remember one village had a bad time because it was near a frequented road, and when the tracks got on this road they were always lost, as the surface was hard. So the village had to pay. Yet what evidence was there against the village? None. I had the curiosity for some time, whenever a case wherein a village was fined was subsequently detected, to find out what village had been fined, and see if that village had been in any way cognisant of the theft. It never had. The fine was purely gratuitous, was worse than useless, for it was wrong.
Yet it is a Government rule—not, I think, actually laid down, but understood—that whenever an offence occurs, unless the culprit is arrested a village must be held responsible.
I always disliked the Track Law and its subsidiary sections, not because I have any objection to holding a village, in certain cases, responsible for its members—I think it is a sound principle—but because it always hit innocent people, as far as I could see. I used it as little as I could, yet there were difficulties. I will mention a case in point.
There was a broker who lived not in my district but near its boundary, and one day he rode to a village in my district to collect some debts. He didn't collect them, and left the village in a rage, saying he would complain to the police-station six or seven miles away that he had been cheated. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when he left, and he rode off across the plain in the direction of the police-station.
He was sighted at dusk near the river, going along a road which half a mile farther on passed through a village, and no more was seen of him. He never arrived at the police-station, and next morning his pony was found roaming the plain about the village near which he had last been seen.
There was no sign of him or his body.
He was a well-known man, reputed to be wealthy, and a great fuss was made. His wife declared he must have been murdered. The magistrate of the broker's district was indignant that "his" broker should have been murdered in my district and I do nothing. My police could get no clue at all, nor could I. A subordinate magistrate held a proceeding under the Track Law against the village where the broker disappeared, and recommended it be fined. I, however, held my hand.
Then a body was found floating in the river some miles lower down, and identified as the broker's body, and his wife gave it a funeral. Still I held my hand.