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 and recognised ascendancy. However hard the laws that governed the Hindu family might press on individual members, the family itself remained a living organism, united by sacred ties--indeed more than a mere living organism, for the actually living organism was one with that part of it which had already passed away and that which was still awaiting rebirth. It is undoubtedly in the often dignified and beautiful relations which bind the Hindu family together that Hinduism is seen at its best, and Hindu literature delights in describing and exalting them. Traditional usages, or Smriti, were ultimately embodied in codes of law, of which the most famous is that of Manu; and though disfigured by many social servitudes repugnant to the Western mind, they represent a lofty standard of morality based upon a conception of duty, or Dharma, narrowly circumscribed, but solid and practical. Though these codes of law, and notably that of Manu in the form in which we possess them, are of uncertain but probably much later date, they afford us, in conjunction with the vast body of earlier religious and philosophic literature, and with a certain amount of scientific literature dealing with astronomy and astrology, with mathematics and specially with geometry, and with grammar and prosody, sufficient materials for appraising, with a fair measure of accuracy, the stage of progress which the Aryan Hindus had reached in the sixth century B.C. When the world was young, and they revelled in their recent conquest of a fair portion in it, they delighted to worship the bright gods who had helped them to possess it, and worship and war were the ties that kept their loose tribal organisation together. Out of the primitive conditions of nomadic and pastoral life, under the leadership of tribal elders who were both priests and warriors, they gradually passed, after many vicissitudes of peace and war, into more settled forms of agricultural life and developed into distinct and separate polities of varying vitality, but