m the Courts of the Madras Presidency. 11 



lesson upon the Native mind. If an English Rector were 

 to sue the members of his congregation for not touching 

 their hats to him, or for attending Little Bethel instead of 

 the Parish Church, an English Court would meet him, not by 

 denying its own jurisdiction, but by denying his right of 

 action. It is evident that most of the cases mentioned 

 before rested upon the assumption, that every thing which 

 was old was right, and every thing which was new was a 

 wrong. The grandchildren of dead priests, who had ex- 

 tracted fees from the grandfathers of living pilgrims, claimed 

 'the right in their own persons to extort similar fees from 

 the existing generation. New pagodas and unusual proces- 

 sions were forbidden, on grounds which would have equally 

 warranted an injunction against railways and gaslamps. A 

 bold assertion of the principle of individual liberty, and a 

 clear exposition of the doctrine, that damnum sine in- 

 juria will not support a civil action, would have gone far to 

 release the Native from his thraldom to custom, and to ter- 

 minate that state of arrested progress which is his greatest 

 bane. 



It might have been expected that Courts which were so 

 willing to comply with Hindu usage, however opposed to 

 common sense, in matters of religion, would have fallen into 

 at least equal absurdities in matters of contract and inheri- 

 tance. Such absurdities might naturally be expected in the 

 Hindu and Muhammadan laws, from that tendency to con- 

 found the immoral and the illegal — that which can be enforced 

 by man, and that which can only be enforced by God — which, 

 as I have already said, always marks a Code framed on the 

 theory of a divine inspiration. For instance, the Hindu law 

 laid it down, that all those brothers who are addicted to any 

 vice should lose their title to the inheritance ; and that, al- 

 though in general sons should share alike, this was only 

 where they were equal in good qualities ; but that he who 



