Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/615

 18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 601 India, or indeed to give it any regular and systematic form. Such alterations as it underwent were the natural result of its being dispensed by Europeans, But to this general rule there were two exceptions, the law of Procedure and the law of Crimes. Courts had been established in the Presidency towns even before the era of conquest began. As their busi- ness increased and subordinate Courts were placed in the chief towns of the annexed provinces, the need for some regular procedure was felt. An Act of the British Parlia- ment of A. D. 1781 empowered the Indian Government to make regulations for the conduct of the provincial Courts, as the Court at Fort William (Calcutta) had already been authorized to do for itself by an Act of 1T73. Thus a regular system of procedure, modelled after that of Eng- land, was established ; and the Act of 1781 provided that the rules and forms for the execution of process were to be accommodated to the religion and manners of the natives. As respects penal law, the English began by adopting that which the Musulman potentates had been accustomed to apply. But they soon found that many of its provisions were such as a civilized and nominally Christian government could not enforce. Mutilation as a punishment for theft, for instance, and stoning for sexual offences, were penalties not suited to European notions ; and still less could the prin- ciple be admitted that the evidence of a non-Musulman is not receivable against one of the Faithful. Accordingly a great variety of regulations were passed amending the Musulman law of crimes from an English point of view. In Calcutta the Supreme Court did not hesitate to apply Eng- lish penal law to natives ; and applied it to some purpose at a famous crisis in the fortunes of Warren Hastings when (in 1775) it hanged Nuncomar for forgery under an Eng- lish statute of 1728, which in the opinion of many high authorities of a later time had never come into force at all in India. It was inevitable that the English should take criminal jurisdiction into their own hands — the Romans had done the same in their provinces — and inevitable also that they should alter the penal law in conformity with their own ideas. But they did so in a very haphazard fashion.