Sir H. Maine added—“The difference between the stationary and progressive societies is, however, one of the great secrets which inquiry has yet to penetrate.” His own contribution, which he regarded as a partial solution only, was that the difference depends in part upon the period at which the customs of a people become codified in written law. If, as the tribes of a people become settled and enter upon a national existence, there is no written code of law and custom, customs, he urged, which at their origin were socially advantageous tend to become extended by analogy to other fields of practice and to assume an excessive and senseless rigour; for example, the custom of cleanliness becomes the exceedingly elaborate ritual of purification, which among the Hindus limits and restrains social life at every point. Or a useful distinction of classes becomes a rigid caste system, than which nothing is more prejudicial to progress, intellectual or moral. The continuation of the process of extension by analogy through long ages has resulted in nearly all the uncivilised and less civilised peoples of the modern world being bound down on every hand by a system of rigid and worse than useless customs, which, restricting both thought and action, render progress impossible. On the other hand, early codification of custom in a system of written laws secures that thereafter custom shall not develop in this blind unintelligent and socially prejudicial manner, but shall be developed only by deliberate intention and the reasoned fore-thought of the ruling powers of society; it will then develop in the main, in spite of many mistakes, in a way which promotes the efficiency of social life and the welfare of society. Maine’s suggestion is in harmony with the fact that the progressive peoples have not been those who invented or learnt the art of writing at an early period. Writing and the written codification of customary law could not be invented by any people until they had attained to a settled life and a considerable degree of social organisation; and then, when the invention was worked out sufficiently, the damage had been done, socially advantageous customs had already degenerated into useless rites and ceremonial observances; and writing served only to establish these more firmly, to fix their yoke upon the necks of the people, as in the case of the Hindus. On the other hand, the progressive peoples have been those who remained in a savage or barbarous condition until a relatively late period, and who then acquired by imitation the arts of writing and of reducing custom to written law, acquired them in a fully developed condition from the peoples who had invented and developed these arts. They have, therefore, enjoyed the advantages of written laws from the beginning of their civilisation.