ness,--respectively
represented by the Brahmana, Kshattriya, and Vaisya casts.

When the Hindus dwelt in the country of the five rivers, and were
worshippers of the powers and phenomena of material Nature, as of
Indra, Vayu, Agni &c., cast was necessarily unknown, for the notion of
Brahma was undeveloped.

The divisions or classes among them were conventional; there were
princes, priests, and peasants or cultivators.

But class distinction had not then crystallized into cast, into
immiscible, uncongenial yet co-ordinate elements of a so called
revealed constitution.

So soon however as the idea of Brahma had attained fixity in the Hindu
mind, and simultaneously with it, cast was developed, as we find it
(but imperfectly) in the earliest records of Hindu philosophy, the
Upanishads.

Thus, cast governs and is antecedent to law, which must bend and adapt
itself to cast, as the overruling, intrinsic, unalterable condition of
Hinduism, of Hindu life. There is one law, one phase of obligation for
the twice-born, another for the Sudra. In Manu, cast is not so
fully and severely developed: Manu permits to the Brahmana four
wives, of whom one may be a Sudra, necessarily permitting,
therefore, a transition or quasi-amalgamation between the highest and
the lowest in the scale. Yajnavalkya permits this Brahmanical
communion with the Kshattriya and Vaisya, but not with the Sudra.
Later promulgators of law,[9] restrict the Brahmana to his own
class.

But although cast, once developed, admitted not of change, juridical
rules, subservient to cast, might and did progress: civil laws and
procedure became more comprehensive and exact, the criminal code more
regulated, lenient, and enlightened. And as universally, (for such is
human,) breaches and occasional disregard of rules have, silently
though surely, worked a change, or caused exceptional accessions to
the rules themselves.

The rule of the Sastras, that kingly power should belong to the
Kshattriya alone, was, even in the halcyon days of Hindu polity,
repeatedly set aside. Chandragupta, a Sudra, and his dynasty, held
sway over India from 315 to 173 B. C.: afterwards came Brahmanical
kings, the Kanwas, from 66 to 21 B. C.: whilst the mighty Gupta kings,
from 150 to 280 A. C., were Vaisyas.

The code of Manu presents a disarranged mass of regulations, in so
much that some have supposed the disorder to have been designed.

That conclusion, however, is repelled by the compar