This system, strange though it appears to those who are familiar only with Jewish and Teutonic customs, has been particularly successful in securing the ends of every marriage--comfort, free development, and the worthy upbringing of healthy children. In no class in India is education better appreciated and more widely shared by the sexes. Every Nair girl is sent to the village school, her education as much a matter of course as her brothers’; while there are many who have matriculated at the Madras University. At the same time, by the universal admission of those who know them, there are few women in India who have greater charm or exercise as valuable an influence on the manners and morals of society. Marriage in Hindu India is, therefore, very various both in practice and in theory according to the locality and the race or caste. But regarded as a whole it presents, one may say, some common characteristics. It is invariably a religious rite, sanctioned by magical ceremony, really sacramental. Only in castes which allow a widow to remarry is the second union divested of most of this supernatural sanction, to become almost a free contract. Again marriages are in general arranged by the parents or relations--with the advice of priests and astrologers--while the husband and wife are still children, either in real childhood or shortly after their puberty. Further, in all the higher castes, and in lower castes as they assume or usurp a higher position, widows are forbidden a further marriage. Normally the idea of marriage in the classes in which Brahman influence is most firm is accompanied by a certain ascetic thought, which holds sensuousness and enjoyment to be something debasing and earth-bound. The world of action being illusory and unreal, and each action entailing its answering reaction, deliverance from illusive appearances and absorption into the one final reality can be gained only by passive withdrawal from activity. But all action springs from desire: and the strongest and most attractive of desires is love. Hence in marriage there should be no overpowering desires, none of those impulses of emotion which keep the man bound during thousands of incarnations to the idly-turning wheel of illusion. Only as a deliverance from conflicting desire and as the means of continuing family life is marriage in itself to be valued. Its happiness and fruition are to be sought not in the tumults of passion but in the calm and ordered affection of a disciplined and worshipful pair. From the husband protection and self-restraint are due; from the wife to the lord, whom heaven has given her, unflinching devotion, constant respect and obedience, unwavering chastity.