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152 Legal History in the Making
be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India
were well governed and independent of us, than ill-governed and subject to us;
that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working
with our cutlery, than they were performing their salaams to English collectors and
English magistrates. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than
to govern savages.
Beyond frank materialistic calculation of this sort, there was the national
moral achievement to be won by 'civilizing', by endowing India with European
institutions and culture: 24
To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition,
to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges
of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own . . . there are triumphs which
are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of
decay. Those triumphs are the specific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that
empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and
our laws.
Though, presumably, Macaulay's reference to 'our laws' was not to be taken
as meaning anything more than a system of laws devised and imposed by the
British, for James Mill (and Bentham) transposing unreformed precedentencrusted
English law to India would be to invite chaos of a new variety; a
move from the frying pan to the fire. 25
In general political outlook Macaulay subscribed to Whig notions of steady
and cautious social progress; accepting a gradualist or evolutionary view of
social and political movement, whereby legislative intervention was a necessary
catching up or adjustment process by government carefully 'watching the
historical clock'. 26 Macaulay looked to a judicious compromise between
innovatory speculation and well-grounded practicality. Thus for him 'the
perfect law giver is a just temper between the mere man of theory, who
can see nothing but general principles, and the mere man of business, who
can see nothing but particular circumstances'. 27 But Macaulay's hostility
towards radical Utilitarian political philosophy was never carried through to
Benthamite jurisprudence. Indeed in the process of his noted dismembering of
James Mill's Utilitarian a priori science of government, 28 (where Macaulay
'came forth like a Whig David to slay the Utilitarian Goliath') he had
incidentally expressed admiration for Bentham's contribution to legal
24 Ibid., 583-86.
25 Mill, History, \, 425; Bentham, Works, i, 187-88.
26 Collini, et al., That Noble Science of Politics, 192.
27 History, Works, ii, 46? -64.
28 A science of government deducible from the immutable features of human nature; attacked in
Mill's 'Essay on Government' (1829), Works, vii, 365. Macaulay himself was later accused of the
same sin of 'a priori reasoning' by T.C. Robertson, a member of the Governor-General's Council,
Stokes, op. cit.,212.