Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/75

 INTRODUCTION.

IxV

pared to stifle all the elements of national order, and byputting nothing in their place to condemn the people to the worst of all fates, political annihilation we must keep them familiarized with the habits and thoughts of Government. It is ttbsolutely necessary that we should associate them with ourselves in all departments of the administration, and inform their minds and raise their characters by the privileges and responsibilities of office. Similar, and hardly less important in its effect, is the introduction of English courts and English forms of legal thought. The old despotism practically never interfered in the civil disputes of its subjects and rarely stepped in to punish crime. Offences against social order were repressed by the summary vengeance of the raja when they exceeded, as in the instance of notorious dacoits> the limits of endurance, or they were, in the cases to which it applied, visited with the penalty of exclusion from caste civil disputes were arranged when between men of the same class by easte arbitration boards, otherwise by the order of the The confusion between political and religious local chieftain. ordinances, which is one of the principal defects of their faith, prevented Muhammadans from applying any but the elaborate provisions of their own law when called on to act as judges, and their action in that capacity among a people to whom their law was either unintelligible or abominable was impossible. That a Hindu, for instance, should allow their rules to guide a dispute as to the devolution of property or the proprietary status of women It resulted that there was nothing to is simply inconceivable. obscure in the eyes of the people the administration of their owti law by the instruments consecrated to that purpose from among themselves by their own immemorial custom. All that is now altered. One of these instruments, the chieftain, has been entirely superseded, and if men of. different castes disagree they are compelled to resort to the arbitrament of our tribunals. The decisions of caste panchayats are weakened by the existence of a co-ordinate and sometimes superseding jurisdiction. The law itself, however much we attempt to enforce it in its completeness, is essentially modified by having to work through the forms of a foreign procedure and in the mind of a judge tinged with It need not be pointed out how powerforeign lines of thought. reacts as change a solvent of the old social system of fully this

—



the country. Of the economical tendency of our rule it is ex-ceedingly It has been seen that this is an excludi£Bx;ult to judge clearly. 9