when it appears to the Government that the court are misconstruing its laws; and the legislative government should be authorized to issue authoritative interpretations of the law. Position of the courts. Provision for lawyers. I would make the position of the Government in the civil courts very much that of her MaGovernment in jesty in this country. A suit against the Government should only be tried on production of the warrant of a great executive officer. A man who has a claim against the Government should first bring it forward by petition in the revenue courts, and, if there defeated, should apply for a warrant for the trial of certain issues in the civil court, which, if there is reasonable ground, should be granted. The best of laws, ill administered, will become bad, and law in its best form is too great a obtaining good science to be properly administered by other than professional jurists. I have proposed to separate from the proper judicial department the judicial duties connected with revenue and criminal law. But the civil law will afford scope to great lawyers, and will be an amply sufficient field for a judicial service. I shall explain, in connection with the civil service, the mode in which I propose to secure due qualifications in the European judges. It is still more important to make the natives good lawyers, and Proposed Col- they are eminently capable of becoming so. lege of Justice. My plan is to establish a great central college of justice in connection with the Supreme Court and the judicial department of Government; and I may here remark that I should look to this establishment for much of the assistance necessary to the committee of justice in carrying out the required codes. I would give the natives a thorough juridical education, and shall afterwards propose to bring the European judicial ser vants into connection with the college for a time. I would here collect the best expounders of the different native laws; and would give the college a very high status, not only as a place of education, but as a sort of public and privileged association of jurists and great juridical university. The details and farther uses of this plan I cannot here enter upon. Separation of executive and ju dicial functions. I would draw a broad and permanent line between the executive and judicial departments. The criminal administration of an absolute government is the performance, by the executive, of a corrective duty for the protection of the public; but Government is not directly concerned in a private suit between man and man; and it is no doubt quite necessary in an advanced state of society that it should delegate the duty of deciding the civil rights of individuals to professional judges other than the ordinary executive officers. Bad systems of procedure and bad laws have brought law and lawyers into disrepute, not good laws well administered. Laws as they ought to be are but for rendering natural justice and equity more certain, clear, and attainable, and for determining, arbitrarily but certainly, those things where equity may be wanting; and it is certain that an artificial state of society and the accumulation of property engender questions of civil right which can only be solved by lawyers. Lawyers, then, we must have; but the great object is, that they should be professional and good lawyers. It is here that the Indian service is chiefly wanting. Yet the members of the service are not to blame, but the system, which makes no man a lawyer by profession, and yet comparatively late in life calls upon him to perform the duties of a full-blown lawyer. All this must be changed. Let us have a service of professional lawyers; let men of talent be set apart to that profession from their youth, and duly trained up to it. I doubt not that Indian servants will then become as remarkable for judicial as for executive efficiency. At present a civil servant has no legal training whatever till he is made a Zillah judge, a situation in which he is called on alone to perform more difficult legal duties than fall to any single judge in Westminster Hall. To qualify himself for such duties he must devote himself solely and exclusively to them; and it is on this ground that I especially insist on finally and permanently dividing, by an absolute line of demarcation, the judicial from the executive service of Government. The bar. An indispensable requisite to a good judicial system is a good bar. The greatest of judges could hardly, with confidence, decide difficult legal questions without the assistance of an able and honourable bar; and that is one of the most important of the many difficulties under which Indian judges have laboured. It will be a good beginning of a bar of a higher character if the European judicial servants acquire their first experience as advocates of Government; and we must strive to obtain a respectable native bar. Talent is not wanting; but we must try to add legal education, and the character and honour of gentlemen. In the moral and material improvement of the country and people an immense field on which we have yet but little entered lies before us and demands all the efforts of the Government, but such efforts must depend on the possession of funds, and I must therefore leave these subjects till I have separately noticed our military and financial position, which I have also excluded from this chapter. We must now look to the machinery subordinate to the executive government. ments. The system by which, in each presidency, heads of departments-boards and superintendents Heads of exe-are intrusted with the management of cutive departthe details of their respective charges, is good and necessary. While the Government directs, the departmental heads secure a sufficiently minute supervision and a uniform management throughout the territories of each local government. It is by a similar arrangement in connexion with the Central Government that all India may be united and efficiently administered. Connected with this subject is the question of the relative advantages of a plural board and of a single superintendent. In unity and energy of action the latter has great advantages; but where a very great mass of detailed business is to be transacted, and where uniformity is urgently required, a plural board is necessary. It is to secure uniformity and due consideration that the chief courts of justice are, and must be, plural. I think that the quantity of minute business in the revenue department of the local governments is also so great, it is so necessary to maintain a uniform system, and so much of the business is of a quasijudicial character, that the boards of revenue must be continued. Under this system the continuity of action. and usage is not broken on each change of an individual officer. The two revenue commissioners at Bombay might be with advantage united in a board; and, when the Indus territories are put under a governor, part of the present Punjab board may form a board of revenue. I have proposed to unite in one department the whole criminal administration the prevention, detection, trial, and punishment of crime. The police stands much in need of a more general superintendence; so do our criminal courts and the discipline of our jails. All these duties I would intrust to Revenue. Criminal. Education. the criminal boards (one under each local government) which I have already suggested. The members of the board may well arrange among themselves to divide the duties, while they unite in conclave on important subjects. I fear that the great variety of opinion on educational subjects entertained by amateur members of the councils of education has done much to paralyse the educational efforts of Government, and it seems to me that they will only be effectual when the supervision of the whole educational system of each presidency is intrusted either to a paid professional board of limited numbers, or to one executive superintendent, with no other duties, and under the immediate orders of the governor, who will again receive instructions from the central ministry of the interior. Under the general superintendent we should have local superintendents of divisions. Public works. In the department of public works great change is also necessary. If considerable works for the improvement of the country are to be carried on, it is absurd, and in the ordinary construction and repair of public buildings it is inconvenient in the last degree, to intrust the supervision of every brick and every broken pane of glass in the civil department to the military board far away and already overburdened with duties of their own, which, as they are situated, they cannot possibly perform. If a pane of glass is broken in the cutcherry of the collector of Delhi, the bill for replacing it, after passing through various official grades, must be referred to the military board at Calcutta, who, if upon consideration they approve of the expense of a new pane, are, I believe, actually allowed to sanction so small an item without troubling the Government. But if the expense exceed a certain very limited sum the matter is much more serious, and |