What wonder then if the result is a miserable and ludicrous failure? Not only has none of these judges seen,' as Hindus would say, the living camel of Hindu law, for if it ever lived, which is exceedingly improbable, it died centuries ago: the existing translations of the 'recollections' of it are so few and scanty that no one who is ignorant of Sanskrit can hope to form a just idea of its size, proportions, and shape. And, at the present moment, strange and incredible as it may appear, the Hindū law of the Madras School' practically is but little more than a crude mass of contradictory and dubious aphorisms, based on an inadequate translation of a non-professional commentary on but thirty-six verses of a sectarian Smrti. And this in the presence of the fact that a truly immense body of Sanskrit legal literature is known to exist, and to be (at all events in part) available for use.

Is this scandalous state of things to be permitted to go on? Surely not. I hope to be able to show in due course that during the last ten years or so a radically false system has been producing its necessary results in great abundance, and things have been fast going from bad to worse, so much so that the end cannot now be far off.

Two courses, and (in my humble opinion) two courses only, are open to us, if we would loyally carry into effect, in spirit as well as in letter, the terms of the royal proclamation quoted above, and, without imposing our English convictions on our Indian fellowsubjects, pay due regard, in administering Hindu

law, to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India.

The first, and to my mind by far the preferable, course is to appoint a commission, such as I have before recommended, to ascertain and report on the existing usages and customs of the various tribes and castes, Brahman and non-Brahman, of the Madras Province; and upon the report so obtained base a set of simple provisional rules for the guidance of the courts, which rules might gradually be modified, added to, and improved, as experience suggested, until at length codification of them might hopefully be attempted.

The smiles and sneers of hostile critics notwithstanding, I still fail to see any special difficulty in the way of effecting this series of operations.' That something of the sort might be done is shown, to some extent, by the recent publication of Mr. Tupper's three volumes of 'Punjab Customary Law.' The first of these volumes, according to the preface, is designed to illustrate the history of the treatment of Customary Law in the Punjab;' the second' contains abstracts of a considerable number of the Tribal Records of various districts and notes from the Settlement Reports; whilst the third is intended to assist Settlement Officers in the compilation of Tribal Records, and was also meant to suggest the outline of a General Code of Tribal Customs, in case it had been resolved to prepare one.' It is true that we have not the sort of Tribal and Settlement Reports that Mr. Tupper has See Sir Thomas Munro's opinion, on the title-page,

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turned to use, but we could very soon get them. And District Officers, both Revenue and Judicial, would very rapidly collect thousands of answers to intelligent questions set by the commission. The difficulties to be encountered in this respect seem to me to be very trifling; whilst the cost of the whole proceeding would be nothing, or next to nothing. And the errors and defects of the original inquiry could be satisfactorily remedied by careful systematic judicial observation during a space of, say, ten or twenty years before attempting codification.

in making the inquiry the gratuitous services of intelligent natives belonging to all the castes, particularly of heads of villages and castes, retired Government officials, managers of temples, and the like, would be largely availed of, and, I make no doubt, gladly rendered. It would be impossible for class prejudices and vested interests to interfere to any great extent with the formation of their various reports, and, if treated with due consideration, they could hardly fail to interest themselves in the performance of their honourable duty, and to furnish correct and valuable information.

At all events, why not make the experiment, which, if unsuccessful, could not possibly do any harm?

At the worst, if the questions set were unintelligent, and the answers defective, and the inquiry generally scientifically worthless, we should still have a framework of real living usage, upon which we might hopefully work and build, instead of the shape

less inorganic structure that now does duty for Hindu law.

The other, and less profitable, course would be to appoint a commission of native Pandits, from Tanjore, Madura, Combaconum, and other centres of Hindu life, to report on the books (or parts of books) that to their knowledge, or in their opinion, contain the law customarily followed by the several castes at the present day; get the selected books (or parts of books) translated, and at once proceed to codification.

The conceivable objections to this course are numerous and weighty, and the difficulties to be encountered in pursuing it by no means contemptible. But I believe it to be feasible. And most certainly the code of Hindu law that would be achieved would be immensely superior to what we have now, the reported decisions of the Madras High Court. Whatever its defects, from a scientific point of view, it would be Hindu in letter and in spirit, and, as such, satisfactory for the most part to the native mind. It would not be a sickly hybrid clothed in a foreign garb.

In preparing this code it would, of course, be essentially necessary to leave untranslated all terms of art, such as dharma, dāyāda, vibhakta, and the like, and to abstain altogether from indulgence in 'apt equivalents.' Still more necessary would it be to abstain from 'pitchforking English doctrine into Sanskrit texts.' Probably, therefore, it would be advisable to entrust the work to an eminent foreigner, say Professor Max Müller, or Professor Jolly. If

due attention were paid to essentials of this sort, and to brevity-I would not have the code contain more than 500 sections at most-a very passable work might be produced.

But, for obvious reasons, I would vastly prefer a collection of usages and customs to a code of Sanskrit law. The latter might do something for the Brahmans, but (I fear) it would do little or nothing for the nonBrahmans, that is to say, for the great bulk of the people. Many of these non-Brahmans undoubtedly have customs, e.g. polyandry, that are not only op posed to, but actually irreconcilable with, the recognised Brahmanic system of the Sanskrit çastras ; and it would be simply impossible to decide questions of partition and the like, arising amongst such persons, in accordance with any rules deducible from such çastras. So that, if a code of the kind were to be drawn up, probably it would soon be found to be unworkable, for the benefit of any but Brahmans, and a few tribes that more or less closely imitate the Brahman mode of life; and it would be necessary after all to ascertain and commit to writing the usages and customs of the great body of non-Brahmans. In other words, it would soon be found necessary to keep the code for the Brahmans, and appoint a commission (as suggested by me) for the others.

I do not purpose going farther for the present into this very important question. The main object of this book is to bring to public notice the uncertainty that has been caused during the last ten years or so by conflicting decisions on a few questions of para