established or
administered in any state in India, by any Government to which we
have succeeded; and the people always consider the existing
Government free to adopt that which may seem best calculated to
effect the one great object, which criminal law has everywhere in
view--_the security of life, property, and character, and the
enjoyment of all their advantages_. The actions by which these are
affected and endangered, the evidence by which such actions require
to be proved, and the penalties with which they require to be
visited, in order to prevent their recurrence, are, or ought to be,
so much the same in every society, that the people never think us
bound to search for what Muhammad and his companions thought in the
wilds of Arabia, or the Sanskrit poets sang about them in courts and
cloisters. They would be just as well pleased everywhere to find us
searching for these things in the writings of Confucius and
Zoroaster, as in those of Muhammad and Manu: and much more so, to see
us consulting our own common-sense, and forming a penal code of our
own, suitable to the wants of such a mixed community.[11]

The fiscal laws which define the rights and duties of the landed
interests and the agricultural classes in relation to each other and
to the ruling powers were also everywhere exceedingly simple and well
understood by the people. What in England is now a mere fiction of
law is still in India an essential principle. All lands are held
directly or indirectly of the sovereign: to this rule there is no
exception.[12] The reigning sovereign is essentially the proprietor
of the whole of the lands in every part of India, where he has not
voluntarily alienated them; and he holds these lands for the payment
of those public establishments which are maintained for the public
good, and are supported by the rents of the lands either directly
under assignment, or indirectly through the sovereign proprietor.
When a Muhammadan or Hindoo sovereign assigned lands rent-free in
_perpetuity_, it was always understood, both by the donor and
receiver, to be with the _small reservation_ of a right in his
successor to resume them for the public good, if he should think
fit.[13] Hindoo sovereigns, or their priests for them, often tried to
bar this right by _invoking curses_ on the head of that successor who
should exercise it.[14] It is a proverb among the people of these
territories, and, I believe, among the people of India generally,
t