Brahman Officials. Brahman official is ignorance, an ignorance of everything that goes on in the world, of the doings and sayings and thoughts of men other than Brahmans; of the modes in which people are governed, clothed, and fed; of the natures and uses of the various products of the earth; in short, of everything that is not to be seen in a Brahman village. Owing partly to his contempt for every per son and thing not Brahman, and partly to his lazy and sedentary habits, the ordinary Brah man official learns nothing after he leaves school but the routine of his particular office and the niceties of native intrigue. So much for the native magistracy. The native judges, called District Munsifs, who do the great bulk of the civil and judicial work of the country, closely resemble the native magistrates in respect to education, general information, and morality, but must be al lowed tu be somewhat superior to them as regards law and procedure. They are re quired to pass more difficult examinations, and, as a rule, they have seen something of the practice of courts before being appointed judges. They do judicial work alone, sitting daily in more or less convenient court-houses, and they are assisted by regularly appointed pleaders, who are presumed to have qualified themselves for advocacy by passing an ele mentary examination in English and Indian law. If these functionaries were entrusted with the duty of receiving, hearing, and deter mining only the very simplest suits, and were directed to decide matters according to their own ideas of what is right and proper rather than according to the rules of a highly refined and complex procedure, it is possible that they might do fairly well. But, unfortunately, they are vested with a very large jurisdiction, and are called upon from time to time to settle disputes of the most complicated character, and their decisions must be grounded, in every case on supposed principles of the English, Hindoo, or Mahomedan law, or the lex loci, according to the religion and status or custom of the parties and the nature of the subject-
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matter of dispute; and in any case they must guide themselves as to the whole conduct of the suit or proceeding by the provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure. Besides the Code of Civil Procedure the Indian Legislature has made many laws in tended to simplify matters that never can be made simple. I have already mentioned the Evidence Act. Then there are the Con tract, Succession, Specific Performance, Lim itation, and many other acts, all quite beyond the comprehension of ordinary unskilled per sons, but which nevertheless are supposed to be studied and turned to proper use by the na tive judge and his uneducated bar. Happily, however, with the exception of the Limita tion law, which is constantly undergoing alterations and repairs, these acts are quietly "shelved " by most of the courts, as supply ing no need and being unnecessary for the conduct of business; and by this simple proc ess no doubt an immense amount of trouble and of damage to rude litigants is avoided. One would expect that the difficulty neces sarily felt by native judges and pleaders in dealing with purely English enactments would vanish when they come to the settlement of questions of Indian law and custom. But this is far from being the case. Under the existing system of administering justice the Brahman judge is actually precluded from ascertaining by patient investigation the existing customary law of the persons who contend before him, and in lieu thereof is obliged to administer what are inanely styled "The Mahomedan Law " and " The Hindoo Law." The former of these is the supposed law of the orthodox believers of Bokhara and Bagdad, and perhaps as well suited to the wants of the professing Mahomedans of Madras as the written laws of Greece to the inhabitants of New York. The latter, being buried in a highly artificial language that never could have been used for the purposes of ordinary conversation, is even less adapted to the wants of the savage tribes, castes, and families of South India. And, in effect,
