Page:A Collection of Statutes Relating to India (Second Edition) Vol 1.djvu/12

 PREFACE.

Collection of the Statutes relating to India was published in two volumes by Mr Whitley Stokes eighteen years ago, and the supplemental volume, which appeared after a short interval, ends with the Fugitive Offenders Act, 1881 (44 & 45 Vict., c. Since then some seventy new Statutes affecting India have been passed by Parliament; a number of those extant in 1881 have been repealed, while many have been substantially amended; and nearly all have been affected by the various Statute Law Revision Acts recently passed. A cursory examination of the first volume shows clearly how completely the publication is out of date. It contains seventy five Statutes passed between 1726 and 1855. Of this number, twenty-two have been wholly repealed, and of the remaining fifty-three only two appear to be intact, all the others having been altered by partial repeals or amendments. The necessity for a new edition is, therefore, obvious. The volume now published contains the Statutes down to the end of 1870, and the contents are based on the latest issue of the Statutes Revised. It has to some extent been prepared on the same lines as the edition of 1881, but a certain number of alterations have been made, and these are explained in the following paragraphs.

3. The short titles given to the older Statutes by the Short Titles Act, 1896 (59 & 60 Vict., c. 14), have been inserted.

4. The edition of 1881 includes 35 Statutes which were passed before 1726 and are of possible application to the Presidency-towns and Rangoon, where European British subjects, at any rate, are to a certain (or uncertain) extent governed by English law so far as applicable to a British settlement. Several of them, however, have been repealed by either imperial or local legislation: two or three have been judicially held to be inapplicable to India: some relate to the succession to the Crown and seem out of place in an Indian collection, for India is an integral part of the British Empire and must follow the fortunes of the