Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/630

 616 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IX. The Future of English Law in India Here, however, it is fit to remember that we are not, as in the case of the Romans, studying a process which has been completed. For them it was completed before the fifth cen- tury saw the dissolution of the western half of the Empire. For India it is still in progress. Little more than a century has elapsed since English rule was firmly established ; only half a century since the Punjab and (shortly afterwards) Oudh were annexed. Although the Indian Government has prosecuted the work of codification much less actively during the last twenty years than in the twenty years preceding, and seems to conceive that as much has now been done as can safely be done at present, still in the long future that seems to lie before British rule in India the equalization and development of law may go much further than we can fore- see to-day. The power of Britain is at this moment stable, and may remain so if she continues to hold the sea and does not provoke discontent by excessive taxation. Two courses which legal development may follow are con- ceivable. One is that all those departments of law whose contents are not determined by conditions peculiar to India will be covered by further codifying acts, applicable to Eu- ropeans and natives alike, and that therewith the process of equalization and assimilation will stop because its natural limits will have been reached. The other is that the process will continue until the law of the stronger and more advanced race has absorbed that of the natives and become applicable to the whole Empire. Which of these two things will happen depends upon the future of the native religions, and especially of Hinduism and of Islam, for it is in religion that the lesral customs of the natives have their roots. Upon this vast and dark prob- lem it may seem idle to speculate; nor can it be wholly dis- severed from a consideration of the possible future of the religious beliefs which now hold sway among Europeans. Both Islam and Hinduism are professed by masses of human beings so huge, so tenacious of their traditions, so appai*- ently inaccessible to European influences, that no consider-