ating a love of liberty. The Asiatics cannot understand what value
there is in it. They have balanced Freedom against Security; they have
deliberately preferred the latter, and left the former for Europe to
sigh for. Liberty is alone appreciated in a life of action; but the life
of Asia is essentially passive, its desire is for tranquillity. Some
have affirmed that this imbecility is due to the fact that that
continent has no true temperate zone, and that thus, for ages, the weak
nations have been in contact with the strong, and therefore the hopeless
aspirations for personal freedom have become extinct. But nations that
are cut off from the sea, or that have accepted the dogma that to
travel upon it is unholy, can never comprehend liberty. From the general
tenor of the Vedas, it would appear that the condition of women was not
so much restrained as it became in later times, and that monogamy was
the ordinary state. From the great extent of these works, their various
dates and authorship, it is not easy to deduce from them consistent
principles, and their parts being without any connexion, complete copies
are very scarce. They have undergone mutilation and restoration, so that
great discordances have arisen.

[Sidenote: The Institutes of Menu.]

In the Institutes of Menu, a code of civil and religious law, written
about the ninth century before Christ, though, like the Vedas, betraying
a gradual origin, the doctrine of the Divine unity becomes more
distinctly mixed up with Pantheistic ideas. They present a description
of creation, of the nature of God, and contain prescribed rules for the
duty of man in every station of life from the moment of birth to death.
Their imperious regulations in all these minute details are a sufficient
proof of the great development and paramount power to which the
priesthood had now attained, but their morality is discreditable. They
indicate a high civilization and demoralization, deal with crimes and a
policy such as are incident to an advanced social condition. Their
arbitrary and all-reaching spirit reminds one of the papal system; their
recommendations to sovereigns, their authorization of immoralities,
recall the state of Italian society as reflected in the works of
Machiavelli. They hold learning in the most signal esteem, but concede
to the prejudices of the illiterate in a worship of the gods with
burnt-offerings of clarified butter and libations of the juices of
plants. As respec