give some little trouble, as we have seen very recently from a newspaper account of an attack made by a new sect upon the Jugunâth temple. In India the matter was simply one for the police; and the Courts will have kept carefully clear of any opinion as to the spiritual status or antecedents of the sect's leader; whereas in China the authorities would probably have pronounced the embodiment not false or counterfeit, but simply contraband, and they would have ordered him out of the world back into antenatal gloom, as if he had been a convict returned from beyond seas without proper permission.

Whether the Chinese nation is naturally, or by reason of the teachings of Confucius and the higher Buddhism, more inclined to connect religion with morals than elsewhere in Eastern Asia, or whether the Chinese Government, which has undoubtedly realised the enormous value of outward morality to an administration, has really succeeded, by persistent supervision, in maintaining in all external worships a general show of morality and propriety, it is hardly safe to conjecture. But all observers appear to agree that in China the public practices and the acknowledged principles of religion are decent and ethically tolerable, which is more than can be said for all rites and doctrines in adjacent countries. And it is not difficult to see how the Buddhistic dogma of promotion by merit through various stages of existence must have worked in with the system of open competition for official employ, which in China binds up all classes of the people so closely with the State's administration. So also the systems of re-embodiment and deification serve to keep up the prestige and dignity of the Great Pure dynasty, for the Emperors of previous dynasties are not only worshipped as gods, but they may reappear and reign again, occasionally, in the person of later sovereigns, thus attesting the divine right and the true succession of the present family. On the other hand, all these devices for identifying the Government with the prevailing religion have one weak side: a religion may fall, and by its fall may drag down the dynasty. How dangerous to the Empire may be a religious uprising founded on a principle that escapes from or rejects the traditional State control, has been proved to the present generation by the

Taiping insurrection, which is stated by all accounts to have derived its religious character and fervour from the misunderstood teachings of Christian missionaries. The enthusiasm of the new sect at once took a political form, and the leader, as usual, credited himself with a divine mission to seize temporal dominion, according to the invariable law of such movements in Asia, whereby the conqueror always claims religious authority, and the religious enthusiast declares himself ordained for political conquest. The whole atmosphere became rapidly charged with fanatic energy of a type more characteristic of Western than of Eastern Asia. Tai Ping,

the leader, denounced idolatry, condemned the Taouist and Buddhist superstitions, and proclaimed fire and sword not only against the creeds, but against the dynasties that encouraged them. Probably nothing is more perilous to a Government that has incorporated the elder and milder religions into its system, and has soothed them and lulled them into tame and subordinate officialism, than an assault upon those very religions by a wild and ardent faith suddenly blazing up in the midst of them. The fabric of conservative government is threatened at its base; the more it has leant upon the old creeds the greater its risk of falling; and this is evidently the vulnerable point of the whole principle of using religion as bulwarks to the State. A great ruler, like Constantine, may have the address and foresight to save his government by going over to the winning side in time, but this has been rare in all ages and countries; while in Asia strong religious upheavals still shatter dynasties and subvert empires.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE FORMATION OF SOME CLANS AND CASTES IN INDIA.

Early history of nations runs back to a tribal period-Reference to this period in European history-The Native States of Central India, which have been left outside the great empires of India, are still in the state of tribal formationDescription of this state of society, no nationalities, the people are classed in clans and sects, by kinship or worship-Examples of grouping by consanguinity and by religion-Description of the structure and development of a consanguineous group-Circles of affinity-Connection between lowest and highest groups, non-Aryan tribes, predatory tribes, half blood and pure blood clans-Influence on a clan of the original founder or leader-Effect upon social formations of religious ideas, rise of sects, and their transition into castes— Narrowing of circle of affinity-Possible connection of these early phases of society with latest European forms.

THE accounts of the origin of nations generally run back to a period, either of authentic history or accepted tradition, when the people of a country appear to have been grouped and ranked in tribes. The precise constitution of these tribes at the time when history opens has of course varied much in different countries; but almost everywhere the original source and explanation, if not always of the tribe, yet of the interior groups which make up the tribe, is assumed to have been kinship among all the members. The superstructure that is gradually built up on this foundation is shaped by political and social circumstances; the cement of the building is usually religion. Of the best-known tribal periods the general aspect is very similar in all ages and countries; the prevailing feature is a great diversity of forms and usages; and a piecemeal and patchwork distribution of mankind into political and social compartments. These pieces and patches gradually amalgamate and are fused into larger masses of people and betterdefined territories; very slowly when they are left to them

selves, often very rapidly under the violent compression and levelling forces of great conquests. Rome, itself formed out of a conflux of tribes, was of course the great consolidator of tribal atoms in Europe and Western Asia; and when Rome had declined and fallen, her Western provinces relapsed for a time into their primitive confusion. Their condition is described by Guizot in his Lectures on the Civilisation of France, where he sketches the period before Karl the Great attempted, and for his time accomplished, the task of restoring Imperial unity in the West. Nothing appears settled, nothing definite or uniform according to modern notions; territorial frontiers are constantly shifting and changing; distinct nations, in the proper sense of the word, exist nowhere; but instead there is a jumble of tribes, races, conquering bands, heaven-born chiefs -of languages, customs, and rites. Out of this confusion Guizot undertakes to extract and exhibit the elements which have been gradually fused into the two or three supreme political ideas and institutions which divide modern civilisation, and one important element is found in tribal manners and usages.

Now, when one passes from those parts of India which have long been under great centralizing governments, down into the midland countries which have never been fairly conquered by Moghals, Marathas, or Englishmen, the transition is probably very much the same as the change would have been from a well-ordered province of Imperial Rome into lands still under the occupation and dominion of powerful barbarian tribes. In these regions of India-so often invaded and thrown into disorder, but never subdued-the population has remained in a much more elementary and incoherent stage than in the great fertile plains and river-basins of Mahomedan India, where empires and kingdoms have been set up on a large scale, and powerful religious communities have been organised. In fact, the tribal period has here survived, and has preserved some of its very earliest social characteristics, while it still mainly influences the political formation. The surface of the country is marked off into a number of greater and lesser divisions, which we English call Native States, some of these very

ancient, others quite modern; most of them mixed up and interlaced in territorial patchwork and irregularity of frontiers, very much as they were left fifty years ago at the end of the stormy time which followed the dissolution of the Moghal Empire. Geographical boundaries, however, have no correspondence at all with distinctive institutions or grouping of the people, and have comparatively slight political significance. Little is gained toward knowing who and what a man is by ascertaining the State he obeys or the territory he dwells in, these being things which of themselves denote no difference of race, institutions, or manners. Even from the point of view of political allegiance, the government under which a man may be living is an accidental arrangement, which the British Viceroy or some other distant irresistible power decided upon yesterday and may alter to-morrow. Nor would such a change be grievous unless it divorced him from a ruler of his own tribe or his own faith; in other respects there is little to choose among governments in central India, which are simple organisms without the complicated functions of later development, being mainly adapted for absorbing revenue by suction. The European observer-accustomed to the massing of people in great territorial groups, and to the ideas (now immemorial in the West) contained in such expressions as fatherland, mother-country, patriotism, domicile, and the like-has here to realise the novelty of finding himself in a strange part of the world, where political citizenship is as yet quite unknown, and territorial sovereignty or even feudalism only just appearing. For a parallel in the history of Western Europe he must go back as far as the Merovingian period, when chiefs of barbaric tribes or bands were converting themselves into kings or counts; or, perhaps, he should carry his retrospect much further, and conceive himself to be looking at some country of Asia Minor lying within the influence of Rome at its zenith, but just outside its jurisdiction. He gradually discerns the population of central India to be distributed, not into great governments, or nationalities, or religious denominations, not even into widespread races such as those which are still contending for political supremacy in Eastern Europe; but into