S Mr. Mayne on the Administration of Native Law 



was not only his Divinity, but his most powerful ally. To 

 us nothing can seem more absurd than the ancient system of 

 trial by ordeal. To those who practised it nothing could seem 

 more natural. When we read that there was a time, when 

 the guilt or innocence of a Hindu was made to depend upon 

 his power of remaining under water while a man ran and re- 

 turned the length of a bowshot ; or upon his succeeding in 

 taking a ring out of a vessel without being stung by a cobra 

 coiled within, we seem to be reading of lunatics. The essence 

 of the ordeal appears to have been the impossibility of escape, 

 and so it was. But the Hindu confidently expected the 

 Deity to interfere in favour of innocence, and if he did inter- 

 fere, the greater the impossibility, the more convincing was 

 the justification. And so in the days of chivalry, when two 

 knights met in combat to clear their aspersed honour, the 

 words " God defend the Right" were no empty sounds, but 

 the expression of a real belief that strength and skill would 

 prove unavailing against the lance which was held by a pure 

 hand. 



It certainly cannot be said of the Indian J udges, that they 

 showed any desire to ignore the religious or customary rights 

 of the Natives, or that they were too early tormented by 

 doubts as to their own capacity for adjudicating upon them. 

 No doubt it must at first have been startling to an English 

 gentleman to have to decide, whether a particular caste 

 should be allowed to wear white shoes ; whether pilgrims 

 to a particular shrine might take their purificatory bath with 

 any priest they liked, or only with certain special Brah- 

 mans ; whether it was good cause for excommunication, that 

 a man having a daughter to marry, and his choice of two 

 nephews as husbands, had intended to marry her to the 

 younger in defiance of the prescriptive claims of the elder. 

 Our Judges seem, however, to have behaved very much as 

 an ordinary man would, on finding himself in fairy-land. 



