every one of bad reputation and character.[290] In this way the clans under the guidance of the Brahman assessors possessed the most complete censorship over the lives of the members, and a power of punishment from which there was no escape. The families could impose expiations and fines on any member who transgressed or failed to fulfil his religious, moral, or caste duties; if he refused to submit to these they could at a certain time expel him for ever out of the community, by excluding him from the funeral feast. The latter resolution of the family deprived the person on whom it fell of his entire social position; in fact, of his economical existence. It implied exclusion from the caste. No one could have any dealings with a person so expelled, otherwise he became infected by communion with him. He could not get his children married; after his decease no sacrifice for the dead assuaged the punishments which awaited him in the other world. Now as ever, the clans perform the ceremony of adopting the young Dvija into the caste and family by investiture with the sacred girdle; they still exercise this jurisdiction, and as a penalty for breach of the arrangement of castes, neglect of religious duties, drunkenness, slander, and other moral errors, they impose exclusion from the family and caste by overturning the water-jar and exclusion from the funeral feast. A sentence of social extinction is thus pronounced upon the expelled person. He is civically dead and despised. No one associates with him in any one relation; no one holds any communion with him. The members of his own family will not give him a draught of water after his expulsion; no member even of the lowest order shelters him, for by doing so he would break the law of caste. It is only by this self-government, this censorship of the clans, that the system of caste has been able to strike such deep roots, to resist every new doctrine, and the severest attacks of foreign tyranny; that the religion, character, and civilisation of the Indians continue to exist after centuries of oppression.