Benthamite aspirations. This code, says Fitzjames,
'seems to me to be the most remarkable, and bids fair to be the most
lasting monument of its principal author. Literary fashions may change,
but the penal code has triumphantly stood the ordeal of twenty-one
years' experience; and, though composed by a man who had scarcely held a
brief, has been more successful than any other statute of comparable
dimensions.'[105] The code, however, slept for many years in a
pigeon-hole--a fact which Fitzjames considers[106] to be a most striking
proof of the reluctance of the English Government to interfere in any
way with native institutions. We rubbed on, it seems, with a sort of
compromise between English and Mahommedan criminal law until 1860, when
the code, after a careful revision by Sir Barnes Peacock, was finally
passed into law. That, says Fitzjames, was a singular piece of good
fortune. 'An ideal code ought to be drawn by a Bacon and settled by a
Coke'; it should combine the highest qualities of literary skill and
technical knowledge. Thus drawn, the code became the first specimen of
an 'entirely new and original method of legislative expression.' It
served as a model for all the later Indian codes. Its method is first to
state the 'leading idea' in the most pointed and explicit form; then to
give a definite explanation of any terms which admit of a possible
doubt; then to give equally definite exceptions; and, finally, to
illustrate the whole by applying it to a number of concrete cases.[107]
In Macaulay's hands the legal document, freed from the endless verbiage,
circumlocution and technicality of English statutes, became a model of
logical precision, and was even entertaining as a piece of literature.

The passage of this code was part of a systematic process of
codification. An Indian Law Commission, sitting in England, had been
appointed in 1853 to carry on the work of consolidating the law. The
suppression of the mutiny and the dissolution of the Company were
naturally followed by various administrative and legislative reforms. A
code of civil procedure was passed in 1859, and a code of criminal
procedure, as a necessary supplement to the penal code, in 1861. In 1862
Maine went out as legislative member of the Indian Council, and carried
on the work of codification in combination with a new Law Commission,
appointed in 1861. The Commission ultimately fell out with the Indian
Government, and finally resigned in 1870. The