day.  With that curious inconsequence which frequently characterises Hindu thought, even when it professes to be ruled by the sternest logic, the belief that every rebirth is irrevocably determined by the law of Karma, i.e. in accordance with the sum total of man’s deeds, good and bad, in earlier existences, is held to be compatible with the belief that the felicity of the dead can only be assured by elaborate rites of worship and sacrifice, which a son alone, or a son’s son, can take over from his father and properly perform.  The ancient patria potestas of tribal institutions has been thus prolonged beyond the funeral pyre, and the ancient reverence for the dead which originally found expression in an instinctive worship of the ancestors has been translated into a ceremonial cult of the ancestral manes, which constitutes the primary duty and function of every new head of the family.  Hence the Hindu joint family system which keeps the whole property of the family as well as the governance of all its members under the sole control of the head of the family.  Hence also the necessity of early marriage, lest death should overtake the Hindu before he has begotten the son upon whose survival the performance of the rites essential, not only to his own future felicity, but to that of all his ancestors depends, and, as an alternative, to mitigate the awful consequences of the default of heirs male of his own body, the introduction of adoption under conditions that secure to the adopted son precisely the same position as a real son would have enjoyed.  Hence again the inferiority of woman, whom early marriage tended to place in complete subjection to man.  Her chief value was that of a potential breeder of sons.  In any case, moreover, she passed on her marriage entirely out of her own family into that of her husband, and terribly hard was her lot if she were left a widow before having presented her husband with a son.  Even if she were left an infant widow of an infant husband and their marriage could not possibly have been consummated, she was doomed to an austere and humiliating life of perpetual widowhood, whilst, on the other hand, if she died, her widowed husband was enjoined to marry again at once unless she had left him a son.  To explain away this cruel injustice, her fate was supposed to be due to her own Karma, and to be merely the retribution that had overtaken her for sins committed in a former existence, which condemned her to be born a woman and to die a childless wife, or worse still, to survive as a childless widow.  The misfortune of the widowed husband who was left without a son should logically have been imputed in the same way to his own Karma, but it was not.  All through life, and in death itself, man was exalted and woman occupied a much lower plane, though in practice this hardship was mitigated for the women who bore sons by the reverence paid to them in their homes, where their force of character and their virtues often gave them a great