LAW 359
a quarter of a century before its annexation to the British Indian empire. After passing through every conceivable phase of anarchy and dormant anarchy, it fell under the tolerably consolidated dominion of a half military half religious oligarchy known as the Sikhs. The Sikhs themselves were afterwards reduced to subjection by a single chieftain belonging to their order, Runjeet Singh. At first sight there could be no more perfect embodiment than Runjeet Singh of sovereignty as conceived by Austin. He was absolutely despotic. Except occasionally on his wild frontier he kept the most perfect order. He could have commanded anything; the smallest disobedience to his commands would have been followed by death or mutilation; and this was perfectly well known to the enormous majority of his subjects. Yet I doubt whether once in all his life he issued a command which Austin would call a law. He took as his revenue a prodigious share of the produce of the soil. He harried villages which recalcitrated at his exactions, and he executed great numbers of men. He levied great armies; he had all material of power, and he exercised it in various ways. But he never made a law. The rules which regulated the lives of his subjects were derived from their immemorial usages, and those rules were administered by domestic tribunals in families or village communities – that is, in groups no larger or little larger than those to which the application of Austin's principles cannot be effected on his own admission without absurdity."
So far as the mere size of the community is concerned, there is no difficulty in applying the Austinian theory. In postulating a considerably numerous community Austin was thinking evidently of small isolated groups which could not without provoking a sense of the ridiculous be termed nations. Two or three families, let us suppose, occupying a small island, totally disconnected with any great power, would not claim to be and would not be treated as an independent political community. But it does not follow that Austin would have regarded the village communities spoken of by Maine in the same light. Here we have a great community, consisting of a vast number of small communities, each independent of the other, and disconnected with all the others, so far as the administration of anything like law is concerned. Suppose in each case that the headman or council takes his orders from Runjeet Singh, and enforces them, each in his own sphere, relying as the last resort on the force at the disposal of the suzerain. The mere size of the separate communities would make no sort of difference to Austin's theory. He would probably regard the empire of Runjeet Singh as divided into small districts, – an assumption which inverts no doubt the true historical order, the smaller group being generally more ancient than the larger. But provided that the other conditions prevail, the mere fact that the law is administered by local tribunals for minute areas should make no difference to the theory. The case described by Sir Henry Maine is that of the undoubted possession of supreme power by a sovereign, coupled with the total absence of any attempt on his part to originate a law. That no doubt is, as we are told by the same authority, "the type of all Oriental communities in their native state during their rare intervals of peace and order." The empire was in the main in each case a tax-gathering empire. The unalterable law of the Medes and Persians was not a law at all but an occasional command. So again Maine puts his position clearly in the following sentences: – "The Athenian assembly made true laws for residents on Attic territory, but the dominion of Athens over her subject cities and islands was clearly a tax-taking as distinguished from a legislating empire." Sir Henry Maine, it will be observed, does not say that the sovereign assembly did not command the laws in the subject islands – only that it did not legislate.
In the same category may be placed without much substantial difference all the societies that have ever existed on the face of the earth previous to the point at which legislation becomes active. Sir Henry Maine is undoubtedly right in connecting the theories of Bentham and Austin with the overwhelming activity of legislatures in modern times. And formal legislation, as he has elsewhere shown, comes late in the history of most legal systems. Law is generated in other ways, which seem irreconcilable with anything like legislation. Not only the tax-gathering emperors of the East, indifferent to the condition of their subjects, but even actively benevolent Governments have up to a certain point left the law to grow by other means than formal enactments. What is ex facie more opposed to the idea of a sovereign's commands than the conception of schools of law? Does it not "sting us with a sense of the ridiculous" to hear principles which are the outcome of long debates between Proculians and Sabinians described as commands of the emperor? How is sectarianism in law possible if the sovereign's command is really all that is meant by a law? No mental attitude is more common than that which regards law as a natural product – discoverable by a diligent investigator, much in the same way as the facts of science or the principles of mathematics. The introductory portions of Justinian's Institutes are certainly written from this point of view, which may also be described without much unfairness as the point of view of German jurisprudence. And yet the English jurist who accepts Austin's postulate as true for the English system of our own day would have no difficulty in applying it to German or Roman law generated under the influence of such ideas as these.
Again, referring to the instance of Runjeet Singh, Sir H. Maine says no doubt rightly that "he never did or could have dreamed of changing the civil rules under which his subjects lived. Probably he was as strong a believer in the independent obligatory force of such rules as the elders themselves who applied them." That too might be said with truth of states to which the application of Austin's system would be far from difficult. The sovereign body or person enforcing the rules by all the ordinary methods of justice might conceivably believe that the rules which he enforced had an obligatory authority of their own, just as most lawyers at one time, and possibly some lawyers now, believe in the natural obligatoriness, independently of courts or parliaments, of portions of the law of England. But nevertheless, whatever ideas the sovereign or his delegates might entertain as to "the independent obligatory force" of the rules which they enforce, the fact that they do enforce them distinguishes them from all other rules. Austin seizes upon this peculiarity and fixes it as the determining characteristic of positive law. When the rule is enforced by a sovereign authority as he defines it, it is his command, even if he should never so regard it himself, or should suppose himself to be unable to alter it in a single particular.
It may be instructive to add to these examples of dubious cases one taken from what is called ecclesiastical law. In so far as this has not been adopted and enforced by the state, it would, on Austin's theory, be, not positive law, but either positive morality or possibly a portion of the Divine law. No jurist would deny that there is an essential difference between so much of ecclesiastical law as is adopted by the state and all the rest of it, and that for scientific purposes this distinction ought to be recognized. How near this kind of law approaches to the positive or political law may be seen from the sanctions on which it depended. "The theory of penitential discipline was this: that the church was an organized body with an outward and visible form of government; that all who were outside her boundaries were outside the means of divine grace; that she had a command laid upon her, and authority given to her, to gather men into her fellowship by the ceremony of baptism, but, as some of those who were admitted proved unworthy of their calling, she also had the right by the power of the keys to deprive them temporarily or absolutely of the privilege of communion with her, and on their amendment to restore them once more to church membership. On this power of exclusion and restoration was founded the system of ecclesiastical discipline. It was a purely spiritual jurisdiction. It obtained its hold over the minds of men from the belief, universal in the catholic church of the early ages, that he who was expelled from her pale was expelled also from the way of salvation, and that the sentence which was pronounced by God's church on earth was ratified by Him in heaven" (Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art. "Penitence," p. 1587).
