in the Courts of the Madras Presidency. 19 



who so operated upon the English law were Englishmen. 

 They experienced in their own persons, and in the persons of 

 their friends, the inconveniences which they sought to 

 remedy, and they were not bound by any express statute to 

 administer an entire system of rules, whether those rules 

 were just or unjust, sensible or absurd. 



Now all such judicial modifications are effectually preclud- 

 ed in India by the fact that Native law is administered, not 

 by Natives, but by Englishmen.. No doubt the great ma- 

 jority of Judges are Natives. But practically the law is 

 administered by those who occupy the appellate benches, 

 and especially by those who sit in the Court of final resort. 

 Now these are exclusively Englishmen, and therefore, if they 

 are on the watch, the law can never assume any shape which 

 they are unwilling to sanction. And in general they will be 

 unwilling to sanction a change. If the nation comes to out- 

 grow some time-honoured principle of Manu or Muhammad, 

 a Native Judge would be willing silently to relax the rule. 

 Not so the Englishman. He neither feels the pressure, nor 

 acknowledges the propriety of yielding to it. If it is 

 pointed out to him, that clothes which fitted the boy will 

 cramp the man, he will either deny that the boy has 

 grown, or else reply, that he regrets the circumstance, but 

 that he is strictly sworn neither to increase the quantity of 

 the material, nor to permit any alteration in the cut. The 

 result is that those who are anxious to amend the law have 

 not the power, and those who have the power have not the 

 inclination. From a liberal desire to give the Natives the 

 benefit of their own law, we have put out of their reach the 

 most effectual means of amending it. 



No doubt legislation might accomplish those changes, 

 which judicial interpretation is forbidden to effect. But in 

 India this remedy is peculiarly slow and imperfect. Till 



