Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/616

 602 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The criminal law became a patchwork of enactments so con- fused that it was the first subject which invited coditicatioji in that second epoch of English rule which we are now approaching. Before entering on this remarkable epoch, one must re- member that the English in India, still a very small though important class, were governed entirely by English law. So far as common law and equity went, this law was exactly the same as the contemporaneous law of England. But it was complicated by the fact that a number of Regulations, as they were called, had been enacted for India by the local government, that many British statutes were not intended to apply and probably did not apply to India (though whether they did or not was sometimes doubtful), and that a certain number of statutes had been enacted by Parliament expressly for India. Thus though the law under which the English lived had not been perceptibly affected by Indian customs, it was very confused and troublesome to work. That the learning of the judges sent from home to sit in the Indian Courts was seldom equal to that of the judges in England was not necessarily a disadvantage, for in travers- ing the jungle of Indian law the burden of English case lore would have too much impeded the march of justice. The first period of English rule, the period of rapid ter- ritorial extension and of improvised government, may be said to have ended with the third Maratha war of 1817-8. The rule of Lord Amherst and Lord WiUiam Bentinck (1823-35) was a comparatively tranquil period, when in- ternal reforms had their chance, as they had in the Roman Empire under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. This was also the period when a spirit of legal reform was on foot in Eng- land. It was the time when the ideas of Bentham had begun to bear fruit, and when the work begun by Romilly was being carried on by Brougham and others. Both the law applied to Englishmen, and such parts of native law as had been cut across, filled up, and half re-shaped by English legal notions and rules, called loudly for simplification and reconstruction. The era of reconstruction opened with the enactment, in