This whole body of cases has been despatched by Jeremy Bentham in these words: “Exclusion put upon all persons of this or that particular description _includes a license to commit_, in the presence of any number of persons of that description, _all imaginable crimes_.”[75] The Psalmist exclaims: “I said in my haste all men are liars.” But the malediction of the Psalmist in his haste is gravely adopted in this proscription, which undertakes to blast “all men” of a specified description as “liars.” Assuming that all of a certain class or race or color cannot be believed on oath, it practically says, that, though present _in point of fact_ at any crime, they are absent _in point of law_. By the Mohammedan Law, no person could be convicted of adultery without the testimony of _four male witnesses_,--a requirement which was called by Gibbon “a law of domestic peace.”[76] The extravagance of this requirement rendered it practically a law to prevent conviction, not unlike the law excluding testimony. It is a disguised exclusion. But of the two, the Mohammedan Law is the least irrational. At all events, it does not assume the form of proscription. The rule of exclusion, when founded on race or color, is something more than a rule of evidence from which justice may suffer. It is a proscription, which finds prototypes in other countries and times, kindred in character to the persecution of the Moors in Spain, and to that cruelty which for ages pursued the Jews everywhere, while it reveals that insensibility to the claims of a common humanity which has so slowly yielded to the demands of a just civilization. In France, during the last century, even after politeness had begun to prevail, it is recorded of a most intellectual lady, the commentator upon Newton, Madame du Châtelet, that she did not hesitate to undress before her male domestics, as it did not seem clear that such persons were men.[77] But it is in the irreligious system of Caste, as established in India, that we find the most perfect parallel. Indeed, the late Alexander von Humboldt, in speaking of colored persons, has designated them as a Caste;[78] and a political and juridical writer of France has used the same term to denote not only the distinctions in India, but those in our own country, which he characterizes as “humiliating and brutal.”[79] But the Caste of India, by which the Brahmins and Sudras have been kept apart, is already repudiated by Christian civilization as “part and parcel of idolatry.” Bishop Heber, of Calcutta, says of this injustice, it is “a system which tends more than anything else the Devil has yet invented to destroy the feelings of general benevolence, and to make nine tenths of mankind the hopeless slaves of the remainder.”[80] But the language with which this accomplished bishop condemns the heathen Caste of India is not inapplicable to that other Caste in our own country, which, in one of its incidents, despoils the colored person of his right to testify.