95. I have referred to legal matters in an earlier context (see paras. 39-42, 46) where I was concerned with some of the mechanisms of social control. There is another way of approaching law: through the description and analysis of its rules. In a stable society (which is a useful fiction) it is not unrealistic to think that one may systematically collect all the rules relating to important institutions and activities (family, inheritance, marriage, land tenure, hire of labour, apprenticeship, credit, burial, ritual, and so on), codify them, and use them in the settling of differences. Lockhart and his colleagues and the first generations of administrators to follow them could reasonably aim at formulating rules in this manner. The situation has changed. It is true that in a sense the Administration is committed to the laws and customs of the local Chinese as they were at the time of the treaty which made the New Territories British; but, quite apart from the difficulty in establishing what these laws and customs were, nobody can now realistically assert that the norms which do in fact or should in theory govern the behaviour of the New Territories Chinese are those which regulated the conduct of the people inhabiting the area two generations ago. More than two generations of 'normal' social change have passed. (Some of what Lockhart and his contemporaries described is now so remote from present-day Chinese that the early official documents may seem to them rather like a scriptural code — exotic and only 'ideally' authoritative. I once thought myself to be on the track of some historical material on the early New Territories only to realise that what I was being tempted by were simply the Lockhart reports which were being surreptitiously circulated to give local men a notion of what the Administration took to be their customs). From the point of view of the research worker two questions have to be kept carefully distinct: the description of how norms are variously formulated or implied in different relationships, and the description of how people would like to change these norms if they were able. The distinction is most clearly applicable to the discussion of possible reforms in the law of marriage. What that law is can, with some difficulty it is true, be stated; what it ought to be, in the light of modern conditions, is a question compounded again of certain facts (what people think it ought to be) and judgments made as to the wisdom of these opinions. The rules governing various spheres of New Territories life will emerge from the study of particular themes: land tenure, family, village organisation, etc. But the field
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