Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/627

 18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 613 has been due to purely historical causes, and of late years (as we shall see presently) the streams that flow in these channels have tended to come nearer to one another. During the period of more than four centuries (b. c. 241 to A. D. 211-7), when these three methods of development and assimilation were in progress, the original law of the City was being remoulded and amended in the midst of and under the influence of a non-Roman population of aliens (peregrini) at Rome and in the provinces, and that semi- Roman law which was administered in the provinces was being created by magistrates and judges who lived in the provinces and who were, after the time of Tiberius, mostly themselves of provincial origin. Thus the intelligence, re- flection, and experience of the whole community played upon and contributed to the development of the law. Judges, advocates, juridical writers and teachers as well as legis- lators, joined in the work. The completed law was the out- come of a truly national effort. Indeed it was largely through making a law which should be fit for both Italians and provincials that the Romans of the Empire became al- most a nation. In India the march of events has been different, because the conditions were different. India is ten thousand miles from England. The English residents are a mere handful. The Indian races are in a different stage of civilization from the English. They are separated by religion ; they are separated by colour. There has therefore been no fusion of English and native law. Neither has there been any movement of the law of England to adapt itself to become the law of her Indian sub- jects. English law has not, like Roman, come halfway to meet the provinces. It is true that no such approximation was needed, because English law had already reached, a cen- tury ago, a point of development more advanced than Roman law had reached when the conquest of the provinces began, and the process of divesting English law of its archaic tech- nicalities went on so rapidly during the nineteenth century under purely home influences, that neither the needs of India nor the Influences of India came Into the matter at all.