Consider what this means. I am the mortgagee of a piece of land. If I improve it so that its value is increased the owner can come back, borrow money to redeem it, and re-mortgage it for double the amount next day to someone else. Therefore I certainly won't improve it. I can't sell it. I can work it of course. I have also to defend my title every now and then from attack. It may be that the original mortgagor did not own the land at all. He may have simply been the member of the family in whom the occupation was vested. The other members can challenge my right. They do. And this sort of thing can go on for sixty years. That is not the sort of law to encourage progress. It encourages litigation, but that is all. The whole country groans under it naturally. But before any relief could be given there would have to be some consensus of opinion among the people as to the change. Government could not do it themselves. Even if their amendment were good it would raise a hornets' nest about their ears. Thus here again is an _impasse_, and a dangerous one, typical of many. By our system of Civil Law and Civil Courts, of precedent and case law we have petrified the bonds in which India lay when we arrived and made them far more rigid than before. While by our introduction of new ideas and of greater material progress we have rendered the old laws more and more obsolete, we have at the same time stopped all evolution of these laws, and killed any capacity they had for accommodating themselves to change. Some lawyers even, enthusiastic as they are about their own profession, have seen this danger. Here is what Sir Henry Sumner Maine, who was Legal Member to the Government of India, says: "What that law and usage"--Indian law and usage--"was, the Sudder Court used to ascertain with what some would call most conscientious accuracy and others the most technical narrowness. Under the hand of the Judges of the Sudder Courts the native rules hardened and contracted a rigidity which they never had in real native practice. Among the older records of their proceedings may be found injunctions couched in the technical language of English Chancery proceedings which forbid the priests of a particular temple to injure a rival fane by painting the face of their idol red instead of yellow, and decrees allowing the complaint of other priests that they were injured in property and repute because their neighbours rang a bell at a particular moment of their services. There is in truth but little doubt that until education began to cause the natives of India to absorb Western ideas for themselves the influence of the English rather retarded than hastened the mental development of the race." And it does so more and more, because however much they may absorb Western ideas theoretically, they cannot express them practically owing to our petrifaction of their law and custom.