Letter from Colonel Sir Lewis Pelly, Baroda to His Lordship Lord Northbrook, Viceroy of India [‎6r] (1/14)

From
y COLONEL SIR LEWIS PELLY, k. c. s. i.
BAUODA,
December 28^, 1874.
[ Private. ]
My Lord,
I have to-niglit received yours of 24tli. In the meantime your
Lordship will have received my telegram reporting the confession of the
Jemadar after being solemnly warned by myself that I would not pardon him,
also my telegram reporting his having thrown himself into a well. I now
enclose a memorandum drawn up by my Assistant, Mr. Richey, giving a
resumd of much of the direct and corroborative evidence that has come out.
To-morrow morning the Commissioner of Police will proceed to Bombay,
where he will take the evidence of Colonel Phayre's butler, will cause the
evidence already taken, as well as his report thereon, to be immediately put in
print, and will, at my requisition, cause the opinion of Mr. Scoble, the Advocate-
General, to be obtained on the evidence generally, and more particularly as to
the probability or even possibility of the evidence being the result of a
conspiracy.
Mr. Souter will then return to Baroda, and all the papers will be submitted
to your Lordship without any delay whatever.
As regards the general situation of affairs, matters become clearer and
easier to me; and, had it not been for this question of attempted poisoning,
I should not have considered the case of Baroda more difficult or complicated
than other duties which I have had to discharge. And even as matters stand,
I think I see my way quite clearly towards the reformation of the adminis
tration of the State, and I am confident that three years' proper management
would not only restore the finances and general prosperity of the Baroda State,
but would put it on the road to a surplus, and tend to make it quite an ordi
narily thriving Native protected State, and this principally owing to an
extraordinarily fertile soil and to the possibility of easily increasing the land
revenue by again bringing under the plough large areas which high assessment
and general mismanagement have heretofore thrown out of cultivation.