[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.
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