egislators
are far less anxious to get business done than to get the doing of
business. Everyone who is crotchety, or enthusiastic, or anxious for
notoriety, or desirous to serve a party or please a constituency, may
set a hand to the work. A man, from the best of motives, may carry some
impulsive suggestion. The measure may be tortured and worried out of
shape by any number of alterations, moved without clear apprehension of
the effect upon the whole. Trifling details will receive an excessive
amount of elaboration, and the most important proposals be passed over
with precipitation, because the controversy becomes too heated and too
complicated with personal interests to be decided upon reasonable
grounds. The two evils of procrastination and haste may thus be
ingeniously combined, and the result may be a labyrinth of legislative
enactments through which only prolonged technical experience can find
its way. I need not inquire what compensations there may be in the
English system, or how far its evils might be avoided by judicious
arrangements. But it is sufficiently clear what impression will be made
upon anyone who tests a piece of legislative machinery by its power of
turning out finished and coherent work which will satisfy legal experts
rather than reflect the wishes of ignorant masses.

I must now try to indicate more precisely the nature of the task in
which Fitzjames had to take a share. He gives a preliminary sketch in
one of his first speeches.[108] The law of British India was composed of
different elements, corresponding to the process by which the trading
company had developed into a sovereign power and extended its sway over
an empire. There were, in the first place, the 'regulations' made in the
three presidencies, Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, before the formation of
the Legislative Council in 1834. Then there were the acts of the
Legislative Council which had since 1834 legislated for the whole of
British India; and the acts of the subordinate legislatures which had
been formed in the two presidencies in 1861. Besides these there were
executive orders passed by the Governor-General in Council for the
'non-regulation' provinces (the North-western Provinces, the Punjab,
Oudh, the Central Provinces, and Burmah). These had more or less
introduced the same laws into the regions successively annexed, or such
an approximation to those laws as was practicable, and dictated
according to an accustomed formula by 'j