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we may complain of them, they do not strike us with the horror and
dismay which would be produced by a new grievance of smaller severity.
In India the case is widely different. English law, transplanted to that
country, has all the vices from which we suffer here; it has them all in
a far higher degree; and it has other vices, compared with which the
worst vices from which we suffer are trifles. Dilatory here, it is far
more dilatory in a land where the help of an interpreter is needed by
every judge and by every advocate. Costly here, it is far more costly in
a land into which the legal practitioners must be imported from an
immense distance. All English labor in India, from the labor of the
Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief, down to that of a groom or
a watchmaker, must be paid for at a higher rate than at home. No man
will be banished, and banished to the torrid zone, for nothing. The rule
holds good with respect to the legal profession. No English barrister
will work, fifteen thousand miles from all his friends, with the
thermometer at ninety-six in the shade, for the emoluments which will
content him in chambers that overlook the Thames. Accordingly, the fees
at Calcutta are about three times as great as the fees of Westminster
Hall; and this, though the people of India are, beyond all comparison,
poorer than the people of England. Yet the delay and the expense,
grievous as they are, form the smallest part of the evil which English
law, imported without modifications into India, could not fail to
produce. The strongest feelings of our nature, honor, religion, female
modesty, rose up against the innovation. Arrest on mesne process was the
first step in most civil proceedings; and to a native of rank arrest was
not merely a restraint, but a foul personal indignity. Oaths were
required in every stage of every suit; and the feeling of a Quaker
about an oath is hardly stronger than that of a respectable native. That
the apartments of a woman of quality should be entered by strange men,
or that her face should be seen by them, are, in the East, intolerable
outrages,--outrages which are more dreaded than death, and which can be
expiated only by the shedding of blood. To these outrages the most
distinguished families of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, were now exposed.
Imagine what the state of our own country would be, if a jurisprudence
were on a sudden introduced among us, which should be to us what our
jurispru