Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/515

Rh passing away. In this manner the vague and elastic ordinances of primitive societies were naturally falling into disuse, with a tendency toward dissolution. But the operation of the British courts of justice, which had been established in the older provinces, was to arrest this spontaneous decomposition. To these tribunals every question of right, every dispute over matters of inheritance, property, and customary law generally, was necessarily referred, and the result was commonly to fix by the judicial decisions, and thus to stereotype an order of things that was by its nature elastic, that had taken its shape from the rude exigencies of lawless times, and was becoming inconsistent with the new social and economical environment, with peace, with the growth of wealth, security of property, and the spread of education. The effect was to give inflexible precision and rigidity to loose undefined usages, for, while a self-regulating community can amend or abandon an inconvenient precept of caste or creed, in the hands of an English judge the rule becomes immutable, and the bonds are tightened. But the conditions of life, for all classes of the population, had been so profoundly affected by the advent of British dominion, that nothing but our own positive and inflexible law could have prevented a corresponding modification of archaic ideas and institutions.

It had thus come to pass that while the general civil law of India was to a great extent intricate and uncertain, varying from province to province, with multifarious distinctions and exceptions created by religious