608 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY and experience than those of the five High Courts at Cal- cutta, Madras, Bombay, Allahabad and Lahore. The Penal Code was universally approved ; and it deserves the praise bestowed on it, for it is one of the noblest monu- ments of Macaulay's genius. To appreciate its merits, one must remember how much, when prepared in 1834, it was above the level of the English criminal law of that time. The subject is eminently fit to be stated in a series of positive propositions, and so far as India was concerned, it had rested mainly upon statutes and not upon common law. It has been dealt with in a scientific, but also a practical com- mon-sense way: and the result is a body of rules which are comprehensible and concise. To have these on their desks has been an immense advantage for magistrates in the coun- try districts, many of whom have had but a scanty legal training. It has also been claimed for this Code that under it crime has enormously diminished: but how much of the diminution is due to the application of a clear and just sys- tem of rules, how much to the more efficient police adminis- tration, is a question on which I cannot venture to pro- nounce.^ No similar commendation was bestowed on the Evidence Code. Much of it was condemned as being too metaphysical, yet deficient in subtlety. Much was deemed superfluous, and because superfluous, possibly perplexing. Yet even those who criticized its drafting admitted that it might pos- sibly be serviceable to untrained magistrates and practi- tioners, and I have myself heard some of these untrained men declare that they did find it helpful. They are a class relatively larger in India than in England. It was with regard to the merits of the Contract Code that the widest difference of opinion existed. Any one who reads it can see that its workmanship is defective. It is neither exact nor subtle, and its language is often far from lucid. Every one agreed that Sir J. F. Stephen (afterwards Mr. Justice Stephen), who put it into the shape in which it was ' The merits of this Code are discussed in an interesting and sugeest- ive manner by Mr. H. Spever in an article entitled Le Droit PSnal Anplo-indien, which appeared in the Bevue de I'UniversiU de Bruxelles in April, 1900.
