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 is other than the difference of races, except in the case of the Brahmans, who still form the less mixed portion of the population.

Among the causes which have perpetuated the system of castes, the law of heredity has furthermore continued to play a fundamental part.  Aptness is inevitably hereditary among the Hindus, and, also inevitably, the son follows the profession of the father.  The principle of heredity of the professions being universally admitted, there has resulted the formation of castes as numerous as the professions themselves, and to-day in India castes are numbered by the thousand.  Each new profession has for an immediate consequence the formation of a new caste.

The European who comes to India to live soon perceives to what an extent the castes have multiplied in observing the number of different persons whom he is obliged to hire to wait on him.  To the two preceding causes of the formations of castes, the ethnological cause, now very weak, and the professional, which is still very strong, are added political office, and the heterogeneity of religious beliefs.