Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/612

 598 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY First, a large and elaborate system of Inheritance and Family Law, the Musulman pretty uniform throughout India, though in some regions modified by Hindu custom, the Hindu less uniform. Each was utterly unlike English law and incapable of being fused with it. Each was closely bound up with the rehgion and social habits of the people. Each was contained in treatises of more or less antiquity and authority, some of the Hindu treatises very ancient and credited with almost divine sanction, the Musulman treatises of course posterior to the Koran, and consisting of com- mentaries upon that Book and upon the traditions that had grown up round it. Secondly, a large mass of customs relating to the occupa- tion and use of land and of various rights connected with tillage and pasturage, including water-rights, rights of soil- accretion on the banks of rivers, and forest-rights. The agricultural system and the revenue system of the country rested upon these land customs, which were of course mostly unwritten and which varied widely in different districts. Thirdly, a body of customs, according to our ideas com- paratively scanty and undeveloped, but still important, re- lating to the transfer and pledging of property, and to con- tracts, especially commercial contracts. Fourthly, certain penal rules drawn from Musulman law and more or less enforced by Musulman princes. Thus there were considerable branches of law practically non-existent. There was hardly any law of civil and crim- inal procedure, because the methods of justice were primitive, and would have been cheap, but for the prevalence of corrup- tion among judges as well as witnesses. There was very little of the law of Torts or Civil Wrongs, and in the law of property of contracts and of crimes, some departments were wanting or in a rudimentary condition. Of a law relating to public and constitutional rights there could of course be no question, since no such rights existed. In this state of facts the British officials took the line which practical men, having their hands full of other work, would naturally take, viz. the line of least resistance. They accepted and carried on what they found. Where there was