Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/625

 18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 611 affected the law of England at home. It seems to have been fancied thirty or forty years ago, when law reform in gen- eral and codification in particular occupied the public mind more than they do now, that the enactment of codes of law for India, and the success which was sure to attend them there, must react upon England and strengthen the demand for the reduction of her law into a concise and systematic form. No such result has followed. The desire for codifica- tion in England has not been perceptibly strengthened by the experience of India. Nor can it indeed be said that the experience of India has taught jurists or statesmen much which they did not know before. That a good code is a very good thing, and that a bad code is, in a country which pos- sesses competent judges, worse than no code at all — these are propositions which needed no Indian experience to verify them. The imperfect success of the Evidence and Contract Acts has done little more than add another illustration to those furnished by the Civil Code of California and the Code of Procedure in New York of the difficulty which attends these undertakings. Long before Indian codification was talked of, Savigny had shown how hard it Is to express the law in a set of definite propositions without reducing its elasticity and impeding Its further development. His argu- ments scarcely touch penal law, still less the law of procedure, for these are not topics In which much development need be looked for. But the future career of the Contract Act and of the projected Code of Torts, when enacted, may supply some useful data for testing the soundness of his doctrine. One reason why these Indian experiments have so little affected English opinion may be found In the fact that few Englishmen have either known or cared anything about them. The British public has not realized how small Is the number of persons by whom questions of legal policy in India have during the last seventy years been determined. Two or three officials In Downing Street and as many in Calcutta have practically controlled the course of events, with little Interposition from outside. Even when Commis- sions have been sitting, the total number of those whose hand is felt has never exceeded a dozen. It was doubtless much