Panty justified slow legal reform as rational progress toward civilization

Evidence

“It is the fate of every rational organization,” Panty wrote in his introduction to the 1912 reform, “to evolve from the simplicity, required at the outset, toward a certain complexity, which corresponds to the progress of civilization.” This declaration of intent set the tone for what followed: a decree that aimed at recording the progress by African society, and encouraging and directing such progress in accordance with the liberal principles of the Third Republic. As the constant emphasis upon respecting custom revealed, Panty proposed to do this in a rational, uniform, and carefully controlled manner. Indeed, when a metropolitan critic complained that Panty was going too slowly, because he failed to transfer all judicial prerogatives from the administration to an independent judiciary that would apply French law, Dakar responded: Transported into a different milieu than that of France, our Civil Code would be an agent of disorder, and an architect of anarchy. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 448

Categorization

• QUESTION: The excerpt trails into an unanswered response — worth checking the following paragraph for Dakar’s actual rebuttal to the metropolitan critic.