Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/32

 open to all, independent of all external authority, and professing to administer to all alike one known and uniform body of law. Whenever the British Government succeeded to the sovereignty, this defect was one of the first which it strove to remedy. From the very nature of things it was often impossible to do more than to provide the most just and upright men the Government could obtain, who knew something of the language and people, and leave them to administer justice as best they could, with no other guide than the light of their own conscience and reason. Even this was a considerable step; because, however imperfect the machinery, the men employed belonged to a race which has an almost superstitious veneration for law, and had been trained to guide their conduct by habitual reference either to written find authoritative rule and regulation or to well-known and undoubted usage. But the British Government was never content with this ; no considerable province was ever annexed to the British Empire without some attempt being made to introduce some sort of written and systematic code of law and practice within a few years after the province became an integral portion of British India. In many cases, as in the Elphinstone Code of 1827, which for so many years was the Mofussil law of the Presidency, the system, administered as it generally was by upright and conscientious men, was proved in practice to be well adapted to the transition state of a country where written authoritative law had been long unknown. But neither did the British Government rest content with this. Many years ago under the administration of Lord William Bentinck, to whom India owes so much, a commencement was made of the gigantic work of drawing up codes of law and procedure for all India. The best intellects which England and India could furnish were engaged for many years on the task. Some of the most important portions of the Criminal Code and the Procedure Codes have only within the last few years become law. I can speak from personal observation of the labour of those employed. Sir Barnes, Peacock and Mr. Harrington, the one in some respects the greatest English lawyer who ever sat on an Indian Bench, the other vindicating an hereditary title to the fullest knowledge of Indian Law, are at this moment on their way homeward, worn with labours of which the preparation of these codes has been the greatest and the longest continued, and they will, I hope, long be spared to aid still further in the completion of the great work of so many of the best years of their lives. It has been sometimes supposed that these codes were intended, or at least destined, to deprive you of the advantages which you, in all the Presidency cities of India, so justly prize, of an administration of English law by