t by the arbitrary fancies
of the rulers. Society was 'worn to the bone.' It had become an
aggregate of villages, each forming a kind of isolated units. In some
districts even the villages had been broken up and no political
organisation remained except that between landholders and individual
husbandmen, which was really a relation between oppressors and
oppressed. Elsewhere, there was a chaos of village communities,
dominated by the most inorganic and ill-defined of aristocracies and
monarchies. The village communities are decaying, and, in spite of
regrets prompted by various reasons, they decay because they represent a
crude form of socialism, paralysing to individual energy and
inconsistent with the fundamental principles of our rule. The cardinal
duty which we have to discharge in India is to keep the peace. The
villages formed self-contained communities, each regulating its own
affairs, and bound by loose customs, leading to quarrels which could
only be settled by blood-feuds and the strong hand. Strict laws and a
rigid administration of justice are incompatible with such modes of
determining disputes between man and man and village and village. The
communities, therefore, break up when the law admits of no coercive
action except its own. If we will not allow a man to gather his friends,
arm them with bludgeons, and march out to settle a boundary dispute with
a neighbouring village, we must settle the boundary ourselves, and we
must settle it by distinct rules--that is, we must enforce laws. Peace
and law go together, as violence and elastic custom go together. Now we
must keep the peace, and, therefore, we must rule by law.

Rule by law, however, though necessary, is not a necessary evil but an
invaluable benefit. Laws are necessary to vigorous administration. When
Lawrence and his colleagues undertook to rule the Punjab, it was a
popular notion that they ruled by mere personal discretion. The fact, as
already noticed, was the very reverse. Their first step was to establish
far better, simpler, and more scientific systems of law than were in
force in the older provinces. Moreover, and this is one of Fitzjames's
most characteristic theories, 'the establishment of a system of law
which regulates the most important part of the daily life of a people
constitutes in itself a moral conquest, more striking, more durable, and
far more solid than the physical conquest which renders it possible. It
exercises an influence o