AND THE LORD SAID UNTO— 49
example, instead of, by overstrained constructions, and upon fanciful imaginations, to be outstepping the bounds set by their commission. Neither are we to presume that justice will not be done, though this court, sustaining the plea, should decline the office of rendering it.”
There are various passages to be found in different statutes which strongly show, not, perhaps, the entire exemption of the natives of India from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, but that the authority of the Supreme Court was never intended to embrace them; and that they were never comprehended within that extensive authority which was given to the Supreme Court with respect to British subjects.
Your Lordships will find in the 53rd of Geo. III., cap. 155, a long list of offences created in various clauses, all of which are introduced by words importing in clear terms the distinction between the local and personal jurisdiction of the court. At section 114, after reciting that it “was expedient that the stealing securities for the payment of money within the East Indies should be made felony,” and so on, it enacts, that if any person or persons within the “local limits of the criminal jurisdiction of any of his Majesty’s courts at Fort William. Fort Saint George, Bombay, or Prince of Wales’s Island, or if any person or persons, personally subject to the jurisdiction of any of the said courts at any place in the East Indies :” so that the distinction between the local jurisdiction the court, and the personal jurisdiction of the court, is very distinctly recognized, and that there may be persons within the local limits of the jurisdiction who are not personally subject, acknowledging a distinction between the local and the personal jurisdiction.
A question then arises whether a native who is an officer of a Provincial Court, a Gaoler, for instance, and who as such may be considered as a person in the service of the East India Company, is subject to have an habeas corpus directed to him in his character of Gaoler, for the purpose of bringing up a native prisoner in his custody before the Supreme Court at Bombay. If we are right in supposing that there never has been any intention of giving to the Supreme Court a control over the proceedings of the Provincial Courts, if a regular succession of appeals has been established from