Page:Elements of Hindu Law.djvu/40

2, not by his own, but by our law. This observation excludes from our view farther, in a treatise like the present, professedly limited, the wide field of all that belongs to persons standing in a public relation; comprised, in part, with reference to the Hindus, in the seventh chapter of the Institutes of Menu. Upon a distinct ground, we have nothing to do with their penal enactments; which, it is probable, have been thought to be capricious, or cruel, in too many instances, to be fit to be adopted, as the measure of retributive justice, in the King's Courts, even as against the Hindu himself, those ordinances they are. They are minutely detailed by Menu; who sums up all, by exalting to "the mansion of Sacra, that king, in whose realm lives no thief, no adulterer, no defamer, no man guilty of atrocious violence, and no committer of assaults." 

Neu quis fur esset, neu latro, neu quis adulter.

In the Company's Courts, as dispersed over the interior, (those dependant on the government of Bombay excepted,) the Mahomedan penal law, modified in particulars, has been substituted for that of the, Hindus;—with what propriety this is not the place to inquire. Under the Presidency of Bombay, Hindus and Mahomedans are tried according to their respective codes. accommodated in a certain degree to British ideas; while