If the law is compelled to make these large concessions, so contradictory to the system, it seeks in the opposite direction to maintain the distinctions of the castes as strongly as possible; the higher castes may descend to the lower, but no lower caste can ever engage in the occupation of the higher. Such interference is punished with confiscation of property and banishment. Still, even here, the law allows an exception, and that in favour of the lowest caste, the Çudras, whom the law rigidly keeps in the servitude imposed upon them by force of arms. The Çudra is meant for a servant; he who is not born a slave is to serve voluntarily for hire; he must first seek service with a Brahman, then with Kshatriyas, then with Vaiçyas. Blind submission to the command of his master is the duty of the Çudra. Yet if he cannot find service anywhere, he may support himself by handicraft; but the law adds, "it is not good for a Çudra to acquire wealth, for he will use it in order to raise himself to an equality with the other orders." The impure castes among the Çudras are not, for this very reason, to be employed among the Dvijas for labour in the house and field. In the law the four castes are races divided from each other by creation. As in all distinctions of orders, so in India, the separation first applied to the men. The final point was not reached, the rigidity of the order was not complete, the caste did not exist, till the women also were included in the division, till the marriages between the orders ceased and were forbidden, till the free circulation of blood among the people was thus checked, and the classes stood towards each other as distinct races and tribes of alien blood. In the book of Manu we find two views on the connubium of the orders existing side by side, one more strict than the other. From the nature of the case, and the position which it occupies in the book of the law, the milder view is the older, the more strict the later. According to the older view caste is determined by descent from the father; a man belonging to the three upper castes, _i.e._ a Dvija, may take a wife from the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, or Vaiçyas, as he pleases; Çudra women only are excluded. In this sense the law lays down that Çudra wives are not suitable for men of the three upper classes, and wives of the three upper castes are not suitable for Çudra husbands. In order to transform this, the current custom, into a more severe practice, the law does not indeed forbid marriage with women from any other of the three higher castes, but it recommends that a maid of a man's own caste should be taken as his first wife; and after this he may proceed according to the rank of the castes. This recommendation met with more favour, it would seem, because a Çudra woman could be taken as a second wife. It is obvious that only a wife of equal birth could perform the sacrifices of the house with the lord.[301] A Çudra woman could not be the first, _i.e._ the legitimate