than forty years ago New Zealand, for instance, repealed the Statute of Uses, which is the corner-stone of English conveyancing; and the Australian legislatures have altered (among other things) the English marriage law. But even if the changes made by statute had been far greater than they have been, and even if there were not, as there still is, a right of appeal from the highest Courts of these colonies to the Crown in Council, their law would still remain, in all its essential features, a genuine and equally legitimate offspring of the ancient Common Law.

We come now to the territories conquered by England, and to which she has given her law whether in whole or in part. Among these it is only of India that I shall speak, as India presents the phenomena of contact between the law of the conqueror and that of the conquered on the largest scale and in the most instructive form. What the English have done in India is being done or will have to be done, though nowhere else on so vast a scale, by the other great nations which have undertaken the task of ruling and of bestowing what are called the blessings of civilization upon the backward races. Russia, France, Germany, and now the United States also, all see this task before them. To them therefore, as well as to England, the experience of the British Government in India may be profitable.

VI. ENGLISH LAW IN INDIA.

When the English began to conquer India they found two great systems of customary law in existence there, the Musulman and the Hindu. There were other

minor bodies of custom, prevailing among particular sects, but these may for the present be disregarded. Musulman law regulated the life and relations of all Musulmans; and parts of it, especially its penal provisions, were also applied by the Musulman potentates to their subjects generally, Hindus included. The Musulman law had been most fully worked out in the departments of family relations and inheritance, in some few branches of the law of contract, such as money loans and mortgages and matters relating to sale, and in the doctrine of charitable or pious foundations called Wakuf.

In the Hindu principalities, Hindu law was dominant, and even where the sovereign was a Musulman, the Hindu law of family relations and of inheritance was recognized as that by which Hindus lived. There were also of course many land customs, varying from district to district, which both Hindus and Musulmans observed, as they were not in general directly connected with religion. In some regions, such as Oudh and what are now the North-West provinces, these customs had been much affected by the land revenue system of the Mogul Emperors. It need hardly be said that where Courts of law existed, they administered an exceedingly rough and ready kind of justice, or perhaps injustice, for bribery and favouritism were everywhere rampant.

There were also mercantile customs, which were generally understood and observed by traders, and which, with certain specially Musulman rules recog nized in Musulman States, made up what there was of a law of contracts.

Thus one may say that the law (other than purely religious law) which the English administrators in the days of Clive and Warren Hastings found consisted of—

First, a large and elaborate system of Inheritance and Family Law, the Musulman pretty uniform throughout India, though in some regions modified by Hindu custom, the Hindu less uniform. Each was utterly unlike English law and incapable of being fused with it. Each was closely bound up with the religion and social habits of the people. Each was contained in treatises of more or less antiquity and authority, some of the Hindu treatises very ancient and credited with almost divine sanction, the Musulman treatises of course posterior to the Koran, and consisting of commentaries upon that Book and upon the traditions that had grown up round it.

Secondly, a large mass of customs relating to the occupation and use of land and of various rights connected with tillage and pasturage, including water-rights, rights of soil-accretion on the banks of rivers, and forest-rights. The agricultural system and the revenue system of the country rested upon these land customs, which were of course mostly unwritten and which varied widely in different districts.

Thirdly, a body of customs, according to our ideas comparatively scanty and undeveloped, but still important, relating to the transfer and pledging of property, and to contracts, especially commercial contracts.

Fourthly, certain penal rules drawn from Musulman law and more or less enforced by Musulman princes.

Thus there were considerable branches of law practically non-existent. There was hardly any law of civil and criminal procedure, because the methods of justice were primitive, and would have been cheap,

but for the prevalence of corruption among judges as well as witnesses. There was very little of the law of Torts or Civil Wrongs, and in the law of property of contracts and of crimes, some departments were wanting or in a rudimentary condition. Of a law relating to public and constitutional rights there could of course be no question, since no such rights existed.

In this state of facts the British officials took the line which practical men, having their hands full of other work, would naturally take, viz. the line of least resistance. They accepted and carried on what they found. Where there was a native law, they applied it, Musulman law to Musulmans, Hindu law to Hindus, and in the few places where they were to be found, Parsi law to Parsis, Jain law to Jains. Thus men of every creed-for it was creed, not race nor allegiance by which men were divided and classified in Indialived each according to his own law, as Burgundians and Franks and Romanized Gauls had done in the sixth century in Europe. The social fabric was not disturbed, for the land customs and the rules of inheritance were respected, and of course the minor officers, with whom chiefly the peasantry came in contact, continued to be natives. Thus the villager scarcely felt that he was passing under the dominion of an alien power, professing an alien faith. His life flowed on in the same equable course beside the little white mosque, or at the edge of the sacred grove. A transfer of power from a Hindu to a Musulman sovereign would have made more difference to him than did the establishment of British rule; and life was more placid than it would have been under either a rajah or a sultan, for the marauding bands which

had been the peasants' terror were soon checked by European officers.

So things remained for more than a generation. So indeed things remain still as respects those parts of law which are inwoven with religion, marriage, adoption (among Hindus) and other family relations, and with the succession to property. In all these matters native law continues to be administered by the Courts the English have set up; and when cases are appealed from the highest of those Courts to the Privy Council in England, that respectable body determines the true construction to be put on the Koran and the Islamic Traditions, or on passages from the mythical Manu, in the same business-like way as it would the meaning of an Australian statute1. Except in some few points to be presently noted, the Sacred Law of Islam and that of Brahmanism remain unpolluted by European ideas. Yet they have not stood unchanged, for the effect of the more careful and thorough examination which the contents of these two systems have received from advocates, judges, and text-writers, both native and English, imbued with the scientific spirit of Europe, has been to clarify and define them, and to develop out of the half-fluid material more positive and rigid doctrines than had been known before. Something like this may probably have been done by the Romans for the local or tribal law of their provinces.

In those departments in which the pre-existing 1 It is related that a hill tribe of Kols, in Central India, had a dispute with the Government of India over some question of forest rights. The case having gone in their favour, the Government appealed to the Judicial Committee. Shortly afterwards a passing traveller found the elders of the tribe assembled at the sacrifice of a kid. He inquired what deity was being propitiated, and was told that it was a deity powerful but remote, whose name was Privy Council.