[39] “The name ‘Laws of Manu,’ somewhat resembles a pious fraud, for the ‘laws’ are merely the laws or customs of a school or association of Hindoos, called the Manavas, who lived in the country rendered holy by the divine river Saraswati.  In this district the Hindoos first felt themselves a settled people, and in this neighbourhood they established colleges and hermitages, or asramas, from some of which we may suppose Brahmanas, Upanishads, and other religious compositions may have issued; and under such influences we may imagine the Code of Manu to have been composed.

“The Manavas were undoubtedly an active, energetic people, who governed themselves, paid taxes to the kins, established internal and external trade, and drew up an extensive system of laws and customs, to which they appended real and imaginary awards.  This system appears to have worked so well, that it was adopted by other communities, and then the organizers announced it as laws given to them by their divine progenitor, the great Mana.  They added passages, moreover, which assert the divine claims of Brahmans and the inferiority of the rest of mankind.  Such assertions are little more than rhetorical flourishes, for Brahmans never were either so omnipotent or so unamiable as the Code would represent them; nor were the Sudras ever so degraded.  In Sanskrit plays and poems, weak and indigent Brahmans are by no means unfrequent; and, on the other hand, we meet with Sudras who had political rights, and even in the Code find the pedigrees of great men traced up to Sudra ancestors.”—­MRS. MANNING’S Ancient and Mediaeval India, v. i., p. 276.

[40] As an instance that a man can abandon all religious rites whatever, and retain his caste unimpaired and unaltered, I may mention that my native clerk told me that he had done nothing in the way of religion at all for years; but that, of course, made no difference to him in the eyes of his neighbours, who didn’t care what he did, as long as he did not depart from the social customs of his caste.  I once said to a native shopkeeper in Bangalore, “What religion are you of?” “Oh!” he answered with a smile, “no religion at all, sir.”  But I need not trouble the reader with further evidence to show that a man may drop his religion altogether without dropping his caste, and that therefore religion and caste have no necessary connection with one another whatever.

[41] “Caste, though distinctly denounced by their sacred hooks, and ostensibly disavowed by the Singhalese themselves, still exists in their veneration for rank, whether hereditary or adventitious.  Thus every district and every village has its little leader, a preeminence accorded to birth rather than property; and, by a descending scale, certain members of the community, in right of relationship or connection, assume an undefined superiority, and are tacitly admitted to the exercise of what is technically called an ‘influence.’  In the hamlets, so universal is this feeling amongst