Before closing this branch of the subject, I may allude briefly to what has been so often attacked by the opponents of caste:  I mean the prohibition of the marriage of widows.  This rule exists in Manjarabad, but I am not aware that any great moral evil arises from it, as a widow can always contract to live with a man, the difference being that the ceremonies performed are of an inferior kind.  This is not allowed to be a marriage, but, in fact, it is a marriage, though of a kind held in rather low estimation.  On customs like these, which in a great measure neutralize the evils arising from the restrictions on re-marriage, it seems to me that our information is very scanty, and I am not aware how far the practice alluded to prevails in other parts of India.

Having taken into consideration the advantages of caste in acting as a moral restraint amongst the Indians themselves, I now purpose to inquire how far caste has acted advantageously, or the reverse, in segregating the people socially from the conquerors who have overrun their country.

If the advantages of caste are striking and plainly apparent as regards the moral points I have alluded to, they seem to me to be infinitely more so when we come to consider the happy influence this institution has had in segregating the Indians from the white races.  And here I cannot help indulging in a vain regret that the blessings of caste have not been universally diffused amongst all inferior races.  How many of these has our boasted civilization improved off the face of the earth?  How much has that tide of civilization which the first conquerors invariably bring with them effected?  How much, in other words, have their vice, rum, and gunpowder helped to exterminate those unhappy races which, unprotected by caste, have come in contact with the white man?  Nor in India itself are we altogether without a well-marked instance of the value, for a time at least, of an entire social separation between the dark and white races; and the Todas, the lords of the soil on the Nilgiri Hills, furnish us with a lamentable example of what the absence of caste feeling is capable of producing.  We found them a simple pastoral race, and the early visitors to the hills were struck with their inoffensive manners, and what was falsely considered to be their greatest advantage—­freedom from caste associations.  But what is their condition now?  One of drunkenness, debauchery, and disease of the most fatal description.  Had the much-reviled caste law been theirs, what a different result would have ensued from their contact with Europeans!  Caste would have saved them from alcohol, and their women from contamination:  they would thus have maintained their self-respect; and if, at first, separation brought no progress nor shadow of change, it would have at least induced no evil, and education and enlightenment would in time have modified these caste institutions, which, to a superficial observer, seem to be productive of nothing but evil.