When we enter upon the government of any new territorial acquisition in India, we do not require or pretend to change the civil laws of the people; because their civil laws and their religion are in reality one and the same, and are contained in one and the same code, as certainly among the Hindoos, the Muhammadans, and the Parsees, as they were among the Israelites.  By these codes, and the established usages everywhere well understood by the people, are their rights and duties in marriage, inheritance, succession, caste, contract, and all the other civil relations of life, ascertained; and when we displace another Government we do not pretend to alter such rights and duties in relation to each other, we merely change the machinery and mode of procedure by which these rights are secured and these duties enforced.[10]

Of criminal law no system was ever either regularly 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