The historian of India would have principally to speak of the successes of a long series of foreign conquerors, who, from Alexander the Great to Nadir Shah, have invaded this country by the North-west side from Persia. The Greeks were indeed told that, before Alexander the Great, no foreign conqueror had ever invaded India; and even after this invasion, and on the death of Sandracottus, when the Indians were liberated from the transient dominion of the Greeks, they were for a long lapse of ages governed by native princes; and their country was parcelled out into a number of great and petty kingdoms, such as those of Magadha, Ayodha, &c. It is a striking incident in the moral, and intellectual history of the Hindoos that amid all the revolutions under their ancient and native rulers, and amid all the later vicissitudes of foreign conquest, their peculiar modes of life and their institution of castes should have been preserved, and, in despite of all the changes of time and of empire, should have stood unchanged, like the one surviving monument of the primitive world. In the administration and government of this country, the absolute monarchical sway which exists in China, and the unlimited despotism of other oriental countries, could never be realized; for that hereditary division of classes, and those hereditary rights belonging to each, which, as they form a part of the Indian constitution, have taken such deep root in the soil; and which, as they rest on the immoveable basis of ancient faith, have become, as it were, the second nature of this people--all these present an unassailable rampart, which not even a foreign conqueror could ever succeed in overthrowing. We can hence understand what led the Greeks to believe and assert that there were Republican states in India. If from prepossessions, which were natural to that people, they asserted too much, or thought they saw more than a nearer investigation proves to be actually the case; still their assertion is not totally without foundation, for the Indian system of castes is in many respects more favourable to institutions of a Republican nature, or at least Republican tendency, than the constitution of any other Asiatic state. When those modern writers therefore, who were the declared enemies of all hereditary rank and hereditary rights, spoke with contempt and abhorence of the Indian constitution of castes, represented it as the peculiar basis of despotism, and even applied the name of caste as a party-word to the social relations of Europe; their assertions were false and utterly opposed to history. The invectives of these writers may be easily accounted for, from their very democratic views, or rather from their doctrine of absolute equality, as this equality itself is ever the attendant of despotism, produces it, or proceeds from it, and is one of its most distinctive characteristics. In confirmation of what we have