friends, no treasures, be they ever so great, are able to hold him back who is about to dive into the tremendous darkness of Hell. Thy ancestors are in suspense when thou art come to give evidence, and ponder in their mind, "Wilt thou deliver us from Hell or precipitate us into it?" Truth is the soul of man; everything depends upon truth. Strive to acquire a better self by speaking the truth. Thy whole lifetime, from the night in which thou wert born up to the night in which thou wilt die, has been spent in vain if thou givest false evidence. There is no higher virtue than veracity; nor is there a greater crime than falsehood. One must speak the truth, therefore, especially when asked to bear testimony' (Narada, pp. 42, 43, Jolly). The somewhat analogous passage in Manu (VIII. 112) is defaced by the often reprobated qualification, 'In case of a promise made for the preservation of a Brahman, it is no deadly sin to take a light oath.'

The difficulties under which the student of the socalled Sacred Laws of the Hindus has so long laboured have been almost entirely caused by the transitional character of the book which was first introduced to European scholarship as the original source of Hindu Law. If the sample of this branch of Hindu literature first translated into a Western language had been Narada, it would have been regarded as a law-book of a familiar type, and the traces of sacerdotal influence

which are to be found in it would probably have been neglected. If, on the other hand, the book first made accessible had been Gautama, or Baudhâyana, or Apastamba, it would probably have been set down at once as a manual of practical religious conduct, the Whole Duty of a Hindu; the law contained in it would probably have been considered adventitious or accidental. But Manu, which Sir William Jones made famous in Europe, neither falls wholly under the one description nor wholly under the other. And so long as it stood by itself there was the greatest difficulty in determining its place in the general history of law. A good many years ago ('Ancient Law,' pp. 17, 18, 19), I showed the hesitation I felt in making use of it for archæological purposes; but I can now see that I underrated the sacerdotal element in the structure of Manu. The whole of the literature to which it belongs sprang, it would now appear, from a double origin; in part from some body of usage, not now easy to determine (though the recent investigation of local bodies of Indian custom has thrown some light upon it), but chiefly from the Hindu scriptural literature. The last exercised by far the most important influence. Its creators, far back in antiquity, did not start with any idea of making or stating law. Beginning with religious hymnology, devotional exercises, religious ritual, and theological speculation, some of their schools were

brought to Conduct, and to stating in detail what a devout man should do, what would happen to him if he did it not, and by what acts, if he lapsed, he could restore himself to uprightness. Gradually there arose in these schools the conviction that, for the purpose of regulating Conduct by uniform rules, it was a simpler course to act upon the rulers of men than on men themselves, and thus the King was called in to help the Brahman and to be consecrated by him. The beginning of this alliance with the King was the beginning of true civil law.

Nothing which thus happened seems to me to be very unlike what would have happened in the legal history of Western Europe, if the Canonists had gained a complete ascendency over Common Lawyers and Civilians. The system which they would have established might be expected to give great importance to the purgation of crime by penances. This in fact occurred; the preference of the ecclesiastical system with its penances over the secular system with its cruel punishments, had much to do, as may be seen from the legendary stories, with the popularity of St. Thomas (Becket). Then it would be probable that, in the case of graver sin, the ecclesiastical lawyer would invoke the aid of the secular ruler to secure the proper expiation; and this again occurred in the form of entrusting the severer punishments to the secular arm. Finally, if the sole advisers and instru

ments of the European King in the administration of civil and criminal justice had been ecclesiastics, they would have been driven in the long run to construct a system of civil and criminal law with proper sanctions enforced by the Courts. But the system would have been deeply tinged in all its parts with ecclesiastical ideas, and though it would possibly have borrowed some or many of its rules from older usage, it would have been very hard to detect their sources and their precise original form.

Here we have one of the chief drawbacks on the historical usefulness of the sacred Hindu laws. In the course of their growth they have probably absorbed much customary law from without; but even in the earliest of them it probably has been changed in transmission, while in the latest it may have been borrowed from several different bodies of usage, irreconcilable in the principles from which they start. On the whole, the most valuable portions of the literature are those which throw light on the derivation of certain branches of law from a set of entirely religious beliefs. One example of this derivation will be discussed in the next chapter.

I said that this ancient literature threw less light on the beginning of law than on the beginning of lawyers. But it is of course to be understood that the men who conceived and framed it were much more than lawyers. All the world knows that they

were also in some sense priests; but they were much more than priests. What we have to bring home to ourselves is the existence in ancient Indian society of a sole instructed class, of a class which had an absolute monopoly of all learning. It included the only lawyers, the only priests, the only professors, the sole authorities on taste, morality, and feeling, the sole depositaries of whatever stood in the place of a science. These books are one long assertion that the Brahmans hold the keys of Hell and Death, but they also show that the Brahmans aimed at commanding a great deal more than the forces of the intellect, and that all their efforts came to be directed towards bringing under their influence the mighty of the earth of another sort, the conquering soldier and the hereditary king. They were to become partners with princes in their authority, their advisers and assessors. 'A King and a Brahman deeply versed in the Vedas, these two uphold the moral order of the world'; thus it is written in one of the oldest of the books. Doubtless, the alliance between Brahman and King was often sealed, and produced great effects; for, amid the obscurities of early Indian history, the fact does seem to emerge that, although religions doubtless at first extended themselves by conversion, they were established over wide areas and again overthrown much less by propagandism than by the civil power. On the whole, the impression left on the mind by the