,
_Things Indian_ (1905) and other books by this author on Indian
religion and caste; Senart, _Les Castes dans l'Inde_ (1896); Jogendra
Nath Bhattacharya, _Hindu Castes and Sects_ (1896). There is an
interesting chapter on the subject in Sidney Low's _Vision of India_
(1906). See also INDIA, INDIAN LAW, and HINDUISM.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _History of Rise and Progress of the English Constitution_, i.
332.

[2] Stubbs' _Constitutional History of England_, i. p. 162.

[3] _History of Peru_, i. 143.

[4] _Rapport sur les differentes classes de chefs dans la nouvelle
Espagne_ (1840), p. 223.

[5] Something like this is to be found in the Russian notion of
_chin_, or status according to official hierarchy of ranks, as
modified by the custom of _myestnichestvo_, by which no one entering
the public service could be placed beneath a person who had been
subject to his father's orders. Hereditary nobility at one time
belonged to every servant, military or civil, above a certain rank,
and a family remaining out of office for two generations lost its
rights of nobility; but in 1854 the privilege was confined to army
colonels and state councillors of the 4th class. At one time,
therefore, the _razryadniya knighi_, or special registers, superseded
by Peter the Great's _barkhatnaya kniga_, or Velvet Book, contained a
complete code of social privilege and precedence. Peter's "_tabel o
rangakh_" contained fourteen classes. The subject is treated of in
the 1600 articles of the ninth volume of the Russian Code _Svod
Zakonov_. The Russian Nobility, though deprived of their exemptions
from conscription, personal taxation and corporal punishment, still
retain many advantages in the public service.

[6] Juarros, _Hist. of Guatemala_, Tr. (London, 1823).

[7] _Life and Essays of H.T. Colebrooke_, i. p. 104.

[8] _History of India_.

[9] "The crudities and cruelties of the caste system need not blind
us to its other aspects. There is no doubt that it is the main cause
of the fundamental stability and contentment by which Indian society
has been braced up for centuries against the shocks of politics and
the cataclysms of Nature. It provides every man with his place, his
career, his occupation, his circle of friends. It makes him, at the
outset, a member of a corporate body: it protects him through life
from th