though it advances in Central Africa, declines in the Mediterranean countries. It has hitherto declined not by the conversion of its members to other faiths, but by the diminution of the Muslim population; yet one must not assume that when the Turkish Sultanate or Khalifate has vanished, it may not lose much of its present hold upon the East. Possibly both Hinduism and Islam may, so potent are the new forces of change now at work in India, begin within a century or two to show signs of approaching dissolution. Polygamy may by that time have disappeared. Other peculiar features of the law of family and inheritance will tend to follow, though some may survive through the attachment to habit even when their original religious basis has been forgotten.

In the Arctic seas, a ship sometimes lies for weeks together firmly bound in a vast ice-field. The sailor who day after day surveys from the masthead the dazzling expanse sees on every side nothing but a solid surface, motionless and apparently immoveable. Yet all the while this ice-field is slowly drifting to the south, carrying with it the embedded ship. At last, when a warmer region has been reached and the south wind has begun to blow, that which overnight was a rigid and glittering plain is in the light of dawn a tossing mass of ice-blocks, each swiftly melting into the sea, through which the ship finds her homeward path. So may it be with these ancient religions. When their dissolution comes, it may come with unexpected suddenness, for the causes which will produce it will have been acting simultaneously and silently over a wide area. If the English are then still the lords of India, there will be nothing to prevent their law from

becoming (with some local variations) the law of all India. Once established and familiar to the people, it will be likely to remain, whatever political changes may befall, for nothing clings to the soil more closely than a body of civilized law once well planted. So the law of England may become the permanent heritage, not only of the hundreds of millions who will before the time we are imagining be living beyond the Atlantic, but of those hundreds of millions who fill the fertile land between the Straits of Manaar and the long rampart of Himalayan snows.

We embarked on this inquiry for the sake of ascer taining what light the experience of the English in India throws upon the general question of the relation of the European nations to those less advanced races over whom they are assuming dominion, and all of whom will before long own some European master1.

These races fall into two classes, those which do and those which do not possess a tolerably complete system of law. Turks, Persians, Egyptians, Moors, and Siamese belong to the former class; all other non-European races to the latter.

As to the latter there is no difficulty. So soon as Kafirs or Mongols or Hausas have advanced sufficiently to need a regular set of legal rules, they will (if their European masters think it worth while) become subject to the law of those masters, of course more or less differentiated according to local customs or local needs.

1 Among the 'less advanced races' one must not now include the Japanese, but one may include the Turks and the Persians. The fate of China still hangs in the balance. It is not to be assumed that she will be ruled, though she must come to be influenced, and probably more and more influenced, by Europeans.

It may be assumed that French law will prevail in Madagascar, and English law in Uganda, and Russian law in the valley of the Amur.

Where, however, as is the case in the Musulman and perhaps also in the Buddhist countries belonging to the former class, a legal system which, though imperfect, especially on the commercial side, has been carefully worked out in some directions, holds the field and rests upon religion, the question is less simple. The experience of the English in India suggests that European law will occupy the non-religious parts of the native systems, and will tend by degrees to encroach upon and permeate even the religious parts, though so long as Islam (or Brahmanism) maintains its sway the legal customs and rules embedded in religion will survive. No wise ruler would seek to efface them so far as they are neither cruel nor immoral. It is only these ancient religions-Hinduism, Buddhism, and especially Islamthat can or will resist, though perhaps only for a time, and certainly only partially, the rising tide of European law.

X. PRESENT POSITION OF ROMAN AND ENGLISH

LAW IN THE WORLD.

European law means, as we have seen, either Roman law or English law, so the last question is: Will either, and if so which, of these great rival systems prevail over the other?

They are not unequally matched. The Roman jurists, if we include Russian as a sort of modified Roman law, influence at present a larger part of the world's population, but Bracton and Coke and Mansfield might rejoice to perceive that the doctrines which they expounded

are being diffused even more swiftly, with the swift diffusion of the English tongue, over the globe. It is an interesting question, this competitive advance of legal systems, and one which would have engaged the attention of historians and geographers, were not law a subject which lies so much outside the thoughts of the lay world that few care to study its historical bearings. It furnishes a remarkable instance of the tendency of strong types to supplant and extinguish weak ones in the domain of social development. The world is, or will shortly be, practically divided between two sets of legal conceptions of rules, and two only. The elder had its birth in a small Italian city, and though it has undergone endless changes and now appears in a variety of forms, it retains its distinctive character, and all these forms still show an underlying unity. The younger has sprung from the union of the rude customs of a group of Low German tribes with rules worked out by the subtle, acute and eminently disputatious intellect of the Gallicized Norsemen who came to England in the eleventh century. It has been much affected by the elder system, yet it has retained its distinctive features and spirit, a spirit specially contrasted with that of the imperial law in everything that pertains to the rights of the individual and the means of asserting them. And it has communicated something of this spirit to the more advanced forms of the Roman law in constitutional countries.

At this moment the law whose foundations were laid in the Roman Forum commands a wider area of the earth's surface, and determines the relations of a larger mass of mankind. But that which looks back to West

minster Hall sees its subjects increase more rapidly, through the growth of the United States and the British Colonies, and has a prospect of ultimately overspreading India also. Neither is likely to overpower or absorb the other. But it is possible that they may draw nearer, and that out of them there may be developed, in the course of ages, a system of rules of private law which shall be practically identical as regards contracts and property and civil wrongs, possibly as regards offences also. Already the commercial law of all civilized countries is in substance the same everywhere, that is to say, it guarantees rights and provides remedies which afford equivalent securities to men in their dealings with one another and bring them to the same goal by slightly different paths.

The more any department of law lies within the domain of economic interest, the more do the rules that belong to it tend to become the same in all countries, for in the domain of economic interest Reason and Science have full play. But the more the element of human emotion enters any department of law, as for instance that which deals with the relations of husband and wife, or of parent and child, or that which defines the freedom of the individual as against the State, the greater becomes the probability that existing divergences between the laws of different countries may in that department continue, or even that new divergences may appear.

Still, on the whole, the progress of the world is towards uniformity in law, and towards a more evident uniformity than is discoverable either in the sphere of religious beliefs or in that of political institutions.