Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/613

 18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 599 a native law, they applied it, Musulman law to Musulmans, Hindu law to Hindus, and in the few places where they were to be found, Parsi law to Parsis, Jain law to Jains. Thus men of every creed — for it was creed, not race nor allegiance by which men were divided and classified in India — lived each according to his own law, as Burgundians and Franks and Romanized Gauls had done in the sixth century in Eu- rope. The social fabric was not disturbed, for the land cus- toms and the rules of inheritance were respected, and of course the minor officers, with whom chiefly the peasantry came in contact, continued to be natives. Thus the villager scarcely felt that he was passing under the dominion of an alien power, professing an alien faith. His life flowed on in the same equable course beside the little white mosque, or at the edge of the sacred grove. A transfer of power from a Hindu to a Musulman sovereign would have made more difference to him than did the establishment of British rule; and life was more placid than it would have been under either a rajah or a sultan, for the marauding bands which had been the peasants' terror were soon checked by European officers. __ So things remained for more than a generation. So indeed things remain still as respects those parts of law which are inwoven with religion, marriage, adoption (among Hindus) and other family relations, and with the succession to property. In all these matters native law continues to be administered by the Courts the English have set up ; and when cases are appealed from the highest of those Courts to the Privy Council in England, that respectable body deter- mines the true construction to be put on the Koran and the Islamic Traditions, or on passages from the mythical Manu, in the same business-like way as It would the meaning of an Australian statute.^ Except in some few points to be presently noted, the Sacred Law of Islam and that of Brah- pute with the Government of India over some question of forest-rights. The case having gone in their favour, the Government appealed to the Judicial Committee. Shortly afterwards a passing traveller found the elders of the tribe assembled at the sacrifice of a kid. He inquired what deity was being propitiated, and was told that it was a deity powerful but remote, whose name was Privy Council. '
 * It is related that a hill tribe of Kols, in Central India, had a dis-