What is the highest praise a Burman will give to an officer—that he is clever, painstaking, honest, energetic, kind? No; but that he has "auza." And what is "auza"? It is that influence and power that comes from personality. Who has "auza" nowadays? No one, not even Government. It has become, as Eversley expected, a Commission of Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER V
CRIMINAL LAW
Let us turn now from the personnel of government to its methods, from its men to its laws, from the motive power to the machine it works, or which more often now works government.
The first subject that comes naturally to our view is the prevention and suppression of crime, for in point of time that precedes all else. When you are conquering a country, after the soldiers have partly done their work and the civil power comes in, its first care is to create and maintain peace. It organises a police and appoints magistrates. Thus in point of time the Criminal Courts are the first to be organised and criminal law to be laid down, and they are the foundation-stone on which all else is built. And they remain always the most important of the functions of government. If they work well, then there is a good beginning made, but if ill, then the outlook is bad. If what should be Courts of Justice cease in the opinion of the people to be so, then is the very foundation-stone of your rule dissolving. The whole edifice is undermined; it is not founded on a rock, but on something that decays, which soon will give way and let down everything.
Let us go back therefore to the beginning, and see how things worked then. The laws were few, were crude, were often bad. It must be remembered that a hundred years ago the penal laws in England were the most savage, the most useless, the most wicked the world has ever seen. The law in India could not therefore be expected to be very good. But previous to our rule there was no law at all generally. And these bad laws of ours came to the people through the medium of personalities who were for the most part intelligent and sympathetic. Moreover, there was nothing like the number of cases then as now. The system now obliges all cognisable crime to be reported even if petty in its nature. In those days very little crime was reported, it was dealt with by the village communities and never known to the Courts. There were few pleaders; and a trial was really what it ought to be, an inquiry into facts by a magistrate desiring to know them. The question of personality came in a great deal, and whatever may be alleged of the ordinary district courts of those days, they were human, they really tried to be Courts of Justice, they tried to understand. The people respected them. If they did not respect the law, at all events they respected the magistrate who tried to do his best with it. They had an admiration for his personality which went a long way.
Now that is all changed.
The law has been greatly improved. It has been codified by trained legists; Lord Macaulay and Sir James Stephen were two of them, and it is up to the standard of European codes. But, on the other hand, it has been made absolute. There is a reign of law now, and there is no person in the world who does not hate law when he sees it. The personality that softened it in the old days has been ruled out. The High Courts supervise all work and reduce it to a dead level of uniformity. There is even a fixed scale of punishment sometimes. On revision, cases are rejudged on the written evidence alone. Of course, the case cannot be altered on revision, but the magistrate can be admonished—and he is. All humanity is eliminated.
Therefore the Courts are despised and hated by the people, who misuse them in every way they can.
Let us look into this matter.