Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 26 DEVELOPMENT OF HINDU LAW. Lecture is to be sought in the fact that we have to trust to ii. —- texts which, although sometimes placed side by side, are of various antiquity,—a fact which must be carefully borne in mind by the student of Hindu law. Whatever truth there may be in the reproach that the Hindus are an unprogressive race, even the most careless student of our law must admit that the charge must be received with considerable reservation. Hindu law is, no doubt, archaic, but there are portions of it which furnish unmistakeable evidence of maturity. A not very friendly critic has said: " There is in truth but little doubt that, until education began to cause the natives of India to absorb Western ideas for themselves, the influence of the English rather retarded than hastened the mental development of the race. There are several departments of thought in which a slow modification of primitive notions and consequent alteration of practice may be seen to have been proceeding before we entered the country; but the signs of such change are exceptionally clear in jurisprudence, so far, that is to say, as Hindu jurisprudence has been codified. Hindu law is, theoretically, contained in Manu, but it is practically collected from the writings of the jurists who have commented on him, and on one another." (Maine's Village Communities, page 46.) In examining Hindu law, we must, I repeat, carefully distinguish the rudimentary stages of COMPARATIVE JURISPRUDENCE. 27 legnl thought from its maturity; and it is because Lecture this has not always been done, that Hindu law has —- attracted to itself a cloud of undeserved prejudice. It may be said that it is not always possible to obtain direct evidence of the relative antiquity of the texts of Hindu law; but in this, as in...