When legislators began to give their sanction to this social system, their chief object seems to have been to guard against too great a confusion of the four orders--the two orders of nobility, the sacerdotal and the princely, and the two orders of the people, the citizens and the slaves, by either prohibiting intermarriage, or by degrading the offspring of alliances between members of different orders. If men of superior married women of inferior, but next adjoining, rank, the offspring of their marriage sank to the rank of their mothers, or obtained a position intermediate between the two. The children of such marriages were distinguished by separate titles. Thus, the son of a +Brâhmaṇa+ by a +Kshatriya+ woman was called +Mûrdhâbhishikta+, which implies royalty. They formed a distinct tribe of princes or military nobility, and were by some reckoned superior to the +Kshatriya+. The son of a +Brâhmaṇa+ by a +Vaiśya+ woman was a +Vaidya+ or +Ambashṭha+; the offspring of a +Kshatriya+ by a +Vaisya+ was a +Mahishya+, forming two tribes of respectable citizens. But if a greater disproportion of rank existed between the parents--if, for instance, a +Brâhmaṇa+ married a +Śûdra+, the offspring of their marriage, the +Nishâda+, suffered greater social penalties; he became impure, notwithstanding the nobility of his father. Marriages, again, between women of superior with men of inferior rank were considered more objectionable than marriages of men of superior with women of inferior rank, a sentiment which continues to the present day. What is peculiar to the social system, as sanctioned by Hindu legislators, and gives it its artificial character, is their attempt to provide by minute regulations for the rank to be assigned to new tribes, and to point out professions suitable to that rank. The tribes had each an internal government, and professions naturally formed themselves into companies. From this source, while the corporations imitated the regulations of tribes, a multitude of new and arbitrary tribes sprang up, the origin of which, as assigned by Manu and other legislators, was probably, as Colebrooke admits, more or less fanciful. In his “Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal,” the subject of caste in its bearing on the social improvement of the Indian nation was likewise treated by Colebrooke. In reply to the erroneous views then prevalent as to the supposed barriers which caste placed against the free development of the Hindus, he writes:--