of the better classes
offending with a Pariah woman.[32] Some aversion of race there might, no
doubt, have been, but the police of caste and its penalties were so strong
that he would be a bold man indeed who would venture to run any risk of
detection. To give an idea of how the punishment for an offence of this
kind would operate, it may be added that, if one of the farming classes in
this country, on a case of seducing one of the lower, was fined by his
neighbours L500, and cut by society till he paid the money, he would be in
exactly the same position as a Manjarabad farmer would be who had violated
the important caste law under consideration. Here, therefore, we have a
moral police of tremendous power, and the very best proof we have of the
regularity with which it has been enforced lies in the fact that the
Pariahs and the farmers are distinguished by a form and physiognomy almost
as distinct as those existing between an Englishman and a negro. Caste,
then, as we have seen, protects the poor from the passions of the rich,
and it equally protects the upper classes themselves, and enforcedly makes
them more moral than, judging from our experience in other quarters of the
globe, they would otherwise be.

Having thus briefly glanced at caste law, as controlling the connection of
the sexes, let us now look at it from another point of view, which I
venture to think is, as regards its ultimate consequences, of even still
more importance. If there is one vice more than another which is
productive of serious crime, it is the abuse of alcohol; and there is no
doubt that, to use the words of an eminent statesman, "if we could
subtract from the ignorance, the poverty, the suffering, the sickness, and
the crime now witnessed among us, the ignorance, the poverty, the
sickness, and the crime caused by the single vice of drinking, this
country would be so changed for the better that we should hardly know it
again." Regarding it, then, in all its consequences, whether physical or
mental (and how many madmen and idiots are there not bred by
drinking?[33]), it is difficult to estimate too highly the value of caste
laws that utterly prohibit the use of those strong drinks that are
injurious in any country, but are a thousand times more so under the rays
of a tropical sun. And when we come to consider that a large proportion of
the population of India are absolutely compelled to abstain from the use
of alcohol, and that these being the