as perhaps formed by the invaders anterior to the Aryans, whom we have
just mentioned.

These divisions corresponded, as is evident, to our three ancient
castes, the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate. Beneath these
classes was the aboriginal population, the Sudras, forming three
quarters of the whole population.

Experience soon revealed the inconveniences which might rise from the
mixture of the superior race with the inferior ones, and all the
proscriptions of religion tended thereafter to prevent it. "Every
country which gives birth to men of mixed races," said the ancient
law-giver of the Hindus, the sage Manu, "is soon destroyed together with
those who inhabit it." The decree is harsh, but it is impossible not to
recognize its truth. Every superior race which has mingled with another
too inferior has speedily been degraded or absorbed by it.

The Spaniards in America, the Portuguese in India, are proofs of the
sad results produced by such mixtures. The descendants of the brave
Portuguese adventurers, who in other days conquered part of India, fill
to-day the employments of servants, and the name of their race has
become a term of contempt.

Imbued with the importance of this anthropological truth, the Code of
Manu, which has been the law of India for so many centuries, and which,
like all codes, is the result of long anterior experiences, neglects
nothing to preserve the purity of blood.

It pronounces severe penalties against all intermingling of the superior
castes between themselves, and especially with the caste of the Sudras.
There are no frightful threats which it does not employ to keep the
latter apart.

But in the course of the centuries nature triumphed over these
formidable prohibitions. Woman always has her charms, no matter how
inferior she may be in caste. In spite of Manu, crossings of caste were
numerous, and one need not travel India throughout to perceive that,
to-day, the populations of all the races are mixed to a large extent.
The number of individuals white enough to prove that their blood is
quite pure is very restricted. The word caste, taken in its primitive
sense, is no longer a synonym of color, as it used to be in Sanscrit,
and, if caste had had only formerly prevailing ethnological reasons to
invoke, it would have had no reason for continuing. In fact, the
primitive divisions of caste have long since disappeared. They were
replaced by new divisions, the origin of which i