CHAPTER V.

ROYAL SUCCESSION AND THE SALIC LAW.

In the legal history of those Western societies which have passed through feudalism, Succession to Property and Succession to Thrones are intimately connected together. When Bruce and Baliol, with ten other competitors, conduct a litigation before Edward I. of England respecting the right to the Scottish Crown, the arguments are not distinguishable in principle from arguments on the inheritance of an ordinary fief, and in point of fact this famous dispute did settle some points in the law of succession to land all over the West. But the law systems of the East, which contain an elaborate law of succession to private property, contain little or nothing about succession to thrones. One reigning Mahommedan house, that of the Ottoman Sultans, has continued to our day a system of royal succession of the highest antiquity—that under which the eldest male relative is preferred in the succession to the son; but there is no clear connection between this rule and any part of the abundant private

law of inheritance declared by the Mahommedan doctors. At most we may trace a resemblance in the places respectively assigned to the son and to the paternal uncle in the Mahommedan scheme. Indeed, of all systems of succession to property, the Mahommedan system is the most difficult to adjust to royal successions. It is a system of minute fractional division between a number of relatives whose grouping1 nobody seems to me to have as yet successfully explained. I agree with Sir George Campbell, that it must have grown up among a race whose property was easily divided into units, and possibly consisted of flocks and herds; and, again, I think that Mr. Almaric Rumsey ('Mohammedan Law of Inheritance') has conclusively shown that its greatest apparent difficulties arise from the fact that, whatever was the algebraical knowledge of later Mahommedans, the earliest expositors of this law were ignorant of some simple principles in the manipulation of fractions. On the whole, we must at present be satisfied with the orthodox Mahommedan explanation of the rules, which is, that they rest upon separate utterances of authorities supposed to speak with Divine authority-of the Prophet, his companions, and those who talked with them; and that they are not therefore necessarily reducible to systematic order.

1 The difficulty is caused by the composition of the class of Mahommedan Inheritors known as the Sharers. The two remaining classes seem to exhibit the usual preference of Agnates to Cognates.

The Hindu law of succession has more authentic claims than that of the Mahommedans to a religious origin. Some of its principles can be applied without much difficulty to a royal succession; but nevertheless it is essentially a law of succession to private property. It is somewhat remarkable that we learn little from the ancient Hindu lawyers of the rules under which a King should succeed. For when they have once recognised the King as an important auxiliary of the Brahman, they are not chary of advice to him or of opinions on his duties. all, he is to execute justice and maintain truth. much more than this is inculcated on him.

First of

But

Even so

old an authority as Apastamba (II. x. 25. 1) tells him how to build a city and a palace.

The palace shall stand in the heart of the town. In front of it there shall be a hall. That is called the Hall of Invitation. At a little distance from the town to the south he shall cause to be built an assembly house, with doors on the south and on the north sides, so that one can see what passes inside and outside. In all these three places fires shall burn constantly, and oblations shall be offered in them daily, or at the daily sacrifice of a householder. In this hall he shall put up his guests, at least those who are learned in the Vedas. Rooms, a couch, meat and drink should be given to them according to their good qualities. But let not the king live better than his spiritual directors

or his ministers.' Elsewhere he is taught how to amuse himself with dice, 'in even numbers, made of vibhitaka wood;' how to appoint administrative deputies; how to reward successful generals. Gautama compendiously lays down that the king is master of all with the exception of Brahmans ;' and in the later treatises, Vishnu and Manu, there are very long discussions on regal duties, the teacher even giving an account of the art of strategy and of the methods of taxation. But there is nothing about the way in which princes succeed to thrones, unless a trace of a rule be sought in a direction to a victorious king, 'not to extirpate the royal race' when he conquers a country, but to invest a prince of this race with the royal dignities. The modern Hindu applies his religious law to royal succession only by analogy, and he generally applies the oldest part of that law. The family customs which have grown up in Indian royal houses reflect the ancient rules, barely mentioned by our oldest authorities, on the subject of primogeniture and indivisible patrimony, and it is to be observed that they show a marked preference for Adoption over Collateral Succession.

The truth is, that for Oriental systems of succession to Thrones, we have to go to to usages, older perhaps than the great religious movements which have swept from time to time over the East, and having, at all events, a history independent of the institutions

to which these movements give birth. The real or pretended doubts, the bitter disputes, and the sanguinary wars which the application of these customs occasioned were once among the chief scourges of mankind in the countries in which they prevailed, but the area of such troubles has been much contracted by the British Indian Empire. Yet the Empire itself was only the other day mixed up with one controversy of the kind which might be taken as a typical example of its class. One can never be very sure how long any Indian events survive in English memory, and yet some of us should recollect the perplexity caused by the names and claims of the various Chiefs or Princes who appeared during three or four years in the newspaper correspondence as pretenders to sovereign authority in Afghanistan. We heard of the unhappy Shere Ali Khan who, after the first British success, retired from Cabul, his capital, only to dieof Yakub Khan, now a State-prisoner in India, who ruled at Cabul as Shere Ali's successor at the time of Sir Louis Cavagnari's assassination-of Abdurrhaman Khan, long an exile in Russia, who now wears the most distinct badge of modern Afghan sovereignty by holding the three great cities of Cabul, Candahar, and Herat-of Ayub Khan, who, after inflicting on British Indian troops the first defeat in the open field which they had suffered for seventy-eight years, was utterly routed by the victorious General Roberts, and

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