Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/167

Rh learning to which they are devoted, live only in past ages, and are engaged in a perpetual struggle to maintain the connection between the barbarism of antiquity and the manners and opinions of the present time. Their oracular responses are too often the result of ignorance, pedantry, or corruption; but as they are few in number, and have a monopoly of this kind of learning, it is almost impossible to convict them. The judges and barristers, being excluded by the anomalous state of the legal system from the mysteries of their own profession, can exercise no control over them. The people, who know no law except what happens from time to time to fall from the lips of the muftis and pundits, are still more helpless. The injurious influence of such a state of things as this, both on the administration of justice and on the general advancement of the people in knowledge and civilisation, can be better conceived than described.

This fabric has been overthrown by the decision of the British Parliament, that a Commission should be appointed to ascertain and digest the laws of India. The alliance between bad law and false religion has been dissolved; and as the natives will now be able to consider the civil and criminal codes only as they affect their temporal welfare, the way will be opened for the introduction of those fun-