mercifully to death.' The reply, if it was ever given, combines the two views which barbarous men appear to have taken at different times of the aged. At first they are useless, burdensome, and importunate, and they fare accordingly. But at a later period a new sense of the value of wisdom and counsel raises them to the highest honour. Their long life comes to be recognised as one way of preserving experience. The faculty of speech, which separates man from the brute, and the art of writing, by which the society capable of civilisation is distinguished from the society condemned to permanent barbarism, are simply methods by which experience is enlarged, compared, and transmitted, and by which mankind is enabled to have more of it than is contained in single separate lives. Yet the individual life is always the original source of experience, and at some time or other it must have been perceived that the more the individual life was prolonged, the larger was its contribution to the general stock. This seems the best explanation of the vast authority which, in the infancy of civilisation, was assigned to assemblies of aged men, independently of their physical power or military prowess. It probably sprang up among communities which had no writings to learn from, and who were conscious that the importance of the arts which were necessary for their very existence was out of all proportion to the average shortness of

life. Almost everywhere in the advancing portions of the ancient world we find that the old, generally organised in assemblies, had a large share of the public powers, and there is a survival of these ideas in the minimum limit of age which has been made the condition of a seat in the artificial Second Chambers which have been constructed over most of the civilised West as supposed counterparts of the English House of Lords. But these modern Second Chambers reverse to a great extent the functions of the ancient assemblies, known, from their names and otherwise, to have originally consisted of old men. The Second Chamber is nowadays assumed to have a veto in the legislation of the Chamber which has the initiative; but the ancient Senates, in their primitive condition at all events, decided beforehand what measures should be submitted to the Popular Assembly, and if they legislated themselves, their enactments had reference to special departments of State, such as religion and finance. On the whole, they were rather administrative than legislative bodies. The nearest analogy to the very important control over the lawmaking power which they once possessed, must be sought in the indefinite but most real and effective authority which an English Cabinet enjoys through its virtual monopoly of the initiative in legislation.

CHAPTER II.

RELIGION AND LAW.

THE most ancient of the books containing the sacred laws of the Hindus appear to me to throw little light on the absolute origin of law Some system of actual observance, some system of custom or usage, must lie behind them; and it is a very plausible conjecture that it was not unlike the existing very imperfectly sacerdotalised customary law of the Hindus in the Punjab. But what they do show is, if not the beginning of law, the beginning of lawyers. They enable us to see how law was first regarded, as a definite subject of thought, by a special learned class; and this class consisted of lawyers who were first of all priests. There are signs of the ancient identity of the two professions in the earliest recorded usages of several races, Celts, Romans, and Greeks. Nobody, for example, will understand the ancient Roman lawyer, with that obstinate adherence of his to texts which has characterised his profession during so many centuries, and that method of stating his facts in

·

inflexible formulas which has only just died out in this country, unless it is realised that the jurisconsult sprang from the pontiff or priest. All through the Middle Ages the lawyer who was

avowedly a priest held his own against the lawyer who professed to be a layman; and ours is the only country in which, owing to the peculiar turn of our legal history, it is difficult to see that, on the whole, the canonist exercised as much influence on the course of legal development as the legist or civilian. If the Roman Empire had merely transmitted its administrative system to Western Europe, and if it had not bequeathed to it a coherent body of codified secular law making considerable approach to completeness, it is very doubtful whether the general law of the West would not even now reflect a particular set of religious ideas as distinctly as the Hindu law reflects the sacerdotal conceptions of the Brahmans.

It is necessary, first of all, to observe how the priestly character of the Brahmanical authors of the law-books affected their view of conduct, a word which must be used at the outset in preference to 'law.' Shortly, this view is intimately affected throughout by their belief as to the lot which awaits human beings after death. This lot will be made up of various experiences, some of which correspond to direct reward or punishment in Heaven or Hell, as conceived by the Western religions. But the Hindu

belief concerning the posthumous state of man, and the Buddhist belief which has mainly sprung from it, differ from the most widely diffused Western beliefs in that the Transmigration of Souls fills as large a space as direct reward and punishment, and in that rewards and punishments in all their forms are regarded, not as eternal, but as essentially transitory. It is beside my purpose, I should observe, to consider what may have been the most ancient faith or faiths of the Hindus, and still more how far the religious ideas reflected in the books before us represent their existing religious doctrine. In the works of which I have been speaking, the early manuals of law, belief has reached a definite stage, which may be examined by itself and which seems to me extremely instructive. Hindu theology, from very remote times, appears to have regarded the universe as having been destroyed and again created, and as destined to be destroyed and again created; but during the enormous intervals between these destructions and creations the aggregate of existence is conceived as indestructible and as incapable of increase or diminution. The sum of life, in particular, is always constant. This essence, life or soul, is regarded as running in a continuous stream through all animate, perhaps we might say through all organic, nature; but it is always returning on itself-never ending, still beginning. This stream of life is divided into portions or parcels,