Maine, SIR HENRY JAMES SUMNER

Maine, SIR HENRY JAMES SUMNER, was born in 1822, and had his education at Christ's Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where his career was unusually brilliant. He carried off the Craven scholarship and other university prizes, and graduated in 1844 as senior classic and Chancellor's classical medallist, as well as a senior optime in mathematics. Soon after he was elected fellow and tutor of Trinity Hall, and in 1847, at the age of twenty-five, was appointed regius professor of Civil Law, which office he vacated in 1854 to become Reader on Jurisprudence at the Middle Temple. He was called to the bar in 1850, and went to India in 1862 as Law Member of the Council in India—an office held by Macaulay, and in which he himself was succeeded in December 1869 by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. In 1870 he was appointed to fill the new chair of Comparative Jurisprudence at Oxford, and next year to a seat in the Council of the Secretary of State for India, on which occasion he was created K.C.S.I. At the close of 1877 he was elected Master of Trinity Hall at Cambridge, and in 1887 also Whewell professor of International Law. But his health was already broken, and on February 3, 1888, he died of apoplexy at Cannes. Maine gave some wise reforms to Indian law, but it is by his work on the origin and growth of legal and social institutions that his name will be best remembered. His books were Ancient Law (1861), one of the most important and influential works of its time; Village Communities in the East and West (1871); The Early History of Institutions (1875); Early Law and Custom (1883); and Popular Government (1885). One fundamental idea of Sir Henry Maine's was to make paternal or patriarchal power the germ from which society developed. This view was strongly controverted by McLennan, Morgan, and Spencer; but Maine's answer was marked by equal learning and far greater lucidity and grace of exposition. See the Memoir by Sir M. E. Grant Duff (1892).