petition for wealth and honour, with an education to match, will
inevitably cause a social revolution. By merely suppressing violence and
intestine war, you produce such a revolution in a country, which has for
centuries been the theatre of disorder and war, as surely as by damming
a river you produce a lake. You must look after the security of your
dams under penalty of fearful disasters.

Hence the great problem of the English in India is to see that this
inevitable revolution, at the head of which they have been placed, shall
run in the proper channels and produce good results. What will be the
ultimate result passes the wit of man to say. That India should
reproduce Europe in religious morals and law seems highly improbable;
but whatever changes take place will depend upon other causes than
legislation. The law can only provide a convenient social framework. The
utmost that we are entitled to say is that the maintenance of peace,
order, and the supremacy of a law, which leaves all religious inquiries
to find their own level, and is founded upon temporal expediency, is an
indisputable condition of the only kind of benefits which it is in our
power to confer upon India.

The conclusion, then, follows that so much legislation is not only
justifiable but necessary as will provide for the following
objects:--the firm establishment of our power; the recognition and
enforcement of the principles which it represents; and the vigorous
administration of the government. Such legislation should be earned out,
however much opposed either to European or to native principles. But all
legislation, not required for these purposes, is mischievous and
dangerous. The limits thus defined in general terms can only be
precisely marked out by experience. But 'no law should be made till it
is distinctly perceived and felt to be necessary. No one can admit more
fully or feel more strongly than I do the evils and dangers of mere
speculative legislation in India.'

Fitzjames proceeds to argue that these principles have in fact guided
our Indian legislation. No Government was 'ever less justly chargeable
with enacting laws merely for the sake of legislation.' The faults have
arisen from defects of style and from the peculiar conditions of Indian
administration. The unwritten law of India is mainly personal; and many
difficulties have arisen from the mixture of English law with the
Mohammedan and Hindoo laws and other native customs. All cases