Various

“ There is no reason for abandoning in India the ordinary view, that sonship depends on marital cohabitation between the father and mother. There are undoubtedly in certain special and exceptional cases methods of acquiring sons otherwise than by marital cohabitation. But these contrivances can only be resorted to when there is no son by marriage, and the fiction which, as we shall see, is resorted to to conceal the true nature of these contrivances, would be entirely meaningless, as would most of the rules which regulate them, if sonship in general was based entirely on ownership. ”

“ Divorce, in the sense of a rupture of the marriage tie, is not known to the true Hindu law. But unchastity deprives a wife of all her rights except to a bare maintenance, and this without any legal proof. She cannot succeed her husband as his heir, and of course she cannot remarry. A little confusion has been caused by the fact that a Hindu husband sometimes goes through a private ceremony which is erroneously called a divorce. But this is only done in order more effectually to bar an unchaste wife from succeeding to his property. ”

“ INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM, the title of the official list of those books which on doctrinal or moral grounds the Roman Catholic Church authoritatively forbids the members of her communion to read or to possess, irrespective of works forbidden by the general rules on the subject. Most governments, whether civil or ecclesiastical, have at all times in one way or another acted on the general principle that some control may and ought to be exercised over the literature circulated among those under their jurisdiction. ”

“ No one is dependent upon his own contribution to the family fund. No one member can say to another, “You have consumed more than your share, and you must make it good.” On the other hand, whatever is earned goes into the common stock. Though separate acquisition is possible, it is exceptional, and there is always a presumption that the earnings of all the members belong to the common fund, so that if any member claims property as self-acquired he must establish his assertion by evidence as to how he acquired it, and that he did so “without using the patrimony.” ”

“ Legal rights are everywhere taking the place of unwritten customs. Land, which was before merely a source of livelihood to the cultivator and of revenue to the state, has now become the subject of commercial speculation. The fixing of the revenue demand has conferred upon the owner a credit which he never before possessed, by allowing him a certain share of the unearned increment. This credit he may use improvidently, but none the less has the land system of India been raised from a lower to a higher stage of civilization. ”

“ It seems never to have been asked why it was that up to this time no Hindu had ever made a will, or to question the radically false assumption that the power of alienation inter vivos and the power of testamentary alienation necessarily go together. A long series of decisions confirmed by the legislature has, however, established that a Hindu in modern times can dispose of any property of which he is the sole owner. In other words, a Hindu can dispose by will of his self-acquired property, and under the Dayabhaga a Hindu can dispose by will of his share in family property. ”

“ On the other hand, in dealing with offences against property the authors of the Penal Code have cleared away entirely the difficulties which have long beset the English law as to how to deal with a man who, having become possessed of property, dishonestly misappropriates it. English lawyers have tried to squeeze as many of these cases as they can into the crime of larceny. The Penal Code simply makes dishonest misappropriation a crime in itself. ”

“ At the head of the Bay of Bengal in Chittagong district, side by side with coffee on the Nilgiri hills, on the forest-clad slopes of Kumaon and Kangra, amid the low-lying jungle of the Bhutan Dwars, and even in Arakan, the energetic pioneers of tea-planting have established their industry. Different degrees of success may have rewarded them, but in no case have they abandoned the struggle. The area under tea, of which nine-tenths lies in the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, expanded by 85% during the sixteen years from 1885 to 1901, while the production increased by 167%. ”

“ India. The Eastern Ghats stretch in fragmentary spurs and ranges down the Madras presidency, here and there receding inland and leaving broad level tracts between their base and the coast. The Western Ghats form the great sea-wall of the Bombay presidency, with only a narrow strip between them and the shore. In many parts they rise in magnificent precipices and headlands out of the ocean, and truly look like colossal “passes or landing-stairs” (gháts) from the sea. The Eastern Ghats have an average elevation of 1500 ft. ”

“ In languages such as Panjabi which have little or no literature, and in the speech of the peasantry all over India, they are few in number. In the modern literary Bengali a false standard of literary taste has led to their employment in overwhelming numbers, and the homely vigorous home-speech, which is itself capable of expressing every idea that the mind of man can conceive, flounders about awkwardly enough under the weight of its borrowed plumes. The native vocabulary of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars is thus made up of tadbhavas, dēśyas and tatsamas. ”

“ Canning in Calcutta, John Lawrence in the Punjab, were men indeed equal to any burden; and the stress of the Mutiny, ending once and forever the bad old system of seniority, brought to the front so many subordinates of dauntless gallantry and soldierly insight that a ring of steel was rapidly drawn round the vast territory affected. Lawrence saw that the surest way to prevent the Mutiny from spreading from the sepoy army of Bengal to the recently conquered fighting races of the Punjab was to hurl the Sikh at the Hindu ”

“ The malarious tarái fringing the Himalayas, the uninhabitable swamps of the Gangetic delta, and the wide jungles of the central plateau are at present the chief home of the tiger. His favourite food appears to be deer, antelope and wild hog. When these abound he will disregard domestic cattle. Indeed, the natives are disposed to consider him as in some sort their protector, as he saves their crops from destruction by the wild animals on which he feeds. But when once he develops a taste for human blood, then the slaughter he works becomes truly formidable. ”

“ In order, therefore, to find what share each member takes on partition under the Dayabhaga, we must inquire into the history of the family and ascertain what share has become vested in each member of the family by the ordinary rules of inheritance. The rules of inheritance, as laid down in the Dayabhaga, are not very dissimilar to those which we find in other parts of the world. Everywhere we find that a man’s property is taken by his nearest relatives, but there are differences in the way in which proximity is reckoned. ”

“ Until the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, the club of Mahmud and the wood gates of Somnath were preserved at the tomb of the great conqueror near Ghazni. The club has now disappeared, and the gates brought back to India by Lord Ellenborough are recognized to be a clumsy forgery. To Mahommedans Mahmud is known, not only as a champion of the faith, but as a munificent patron of literature. The dynasty that he founded was not long-lived. Fourteen of his descendants occupied his throne within little more than a century, but none of them achieved greatness. ”

“ In the great Canadian north-west, and to a large extent also in the tier of American states to the south, the blood of the Indian, through the mingling of French, Scottish and English traders, trappers, employees of the great fur companies, pioneer settlers, &c., has entered largely and significantly into the life of the nation, the half-breed element playing a most important rôle in social, commercial and industrial development. ”

“ Of course there is nothing to prevent the husband and the wife from agreeing to a divorce, and to the terms on which it is to take place, and such an arrangement is very common. The treatment of the wife by the husband is not a ground upon which the marriage can be dissolved, but the impotence of the husband is a ground of dissolution. The courts in India consider that they have the power under Mahommedan law to grant a decree for the restitution of conjugal rights. ”

“ Probably it never entered into the head of any Hindu before British rule was set up in India that any human agency could be entrusted with the power of making or changing the law; and although both the Indian legislatures and the British parliament have full power to legislate for Hindus upon all matters without any exception, they have, in fact, hardly ever exercised this power as regards the Hindu law. Custom is a less direct instrument of change than legislation, and operates more slowly and secretly, but its influence is very great. ”

“ Not all the men who rendered the greatest services to independence were in Congress in July 1776; not all who voted for the Declaration ever signed it; not all who signed it were members when it was adopted. ”

“ The Mahratta chiefs never again united heartily for a common purpose, though they still continued to be the most formidable military power in India. In especial, they dominated over the British settlement of Bombay on the western coast, which was the last of the three presidencies to feel the lust of territorial ambition. For more than a hundred years, from its acquisition in 1661 to the outbreak of the first Mahratta war in 1775, the British on the west coast possessed no territory outside the island of Bombay and their fortified factory at Surat. ”

“ How far the suffixes which can be traced back to Indo-European times (i.e. to a time before the separation of the languages) had existence as separate entities it is impossible to say. From what we see of the later history of the languages it is much more probable that both forms and signification were very largely the result of analogy. For in the making of new words analogy plays a much larger part than any reference to general principles of formation or composition. New words are to a large extent, even in modern times, the invention of persons unskilled in the history of language. ”

“ Each of the two leading commentaries on Hindu law, the Mitacshara and the Dayabhaga, opens with a very long discussion as to when and how a son becomes entitled to be called an owner of the family property. Two conflicting theories are propounded. One is that the sons are joined with the father in the ownership in his lifetime; the other is that they only become owners when he dies, or relinquishes worldly affairs, which, according to Hindu ideas, like taking monastic vows, produces civil death. ”

“ In Sanskrit, it would be called “Bharata-varsha,” from Bharata, a legendary monarch of the Lunar line; but Sanskrit is no more the vernacular of India than Latin is of Europe. The name “Hindustan,” which was at one time adopted by European geographers, is of Persian origin, meaning “the land of the Hindus,” as Afghanistan means “the land of the Afghans.” According to native usage, however, “Hindustan” is limited either to that portion of the peninsula lying north of the Vindhya mountains, or yet more strictly to the upper basin of the Ganges where Hindi is the spoken language. ”

“ Iron.—In purity of ore, and in antiquity of working, the iron deposits of India probably rank first in the world. They are to be found in every part of the country, from the northern mountains of Assam and Kumaun to the extreme south of the Madras Presidency. Wherever there are hills, iron is found and worked to a greater or less extent. The indigenous methods of smelting the ore, which are everywhere the same, and have been handed down unchanged through countless generations, yield a metal of the finest quality in a form well suited to native wants. ”

“ Even at the present day domestication means different things in the case of different animals. A pig is not domesticated as a dog is; in areas like the Hebrides or western Ireland, where cattle and human beings share the two ends of the same building, domestication means something very different from the treatment of large herds on a farm extending to many hundreds of acres. In other respects the height of the civilization was vastly exaggerated. That the Indo-European people were agricultural as well as pastoral seems highly probable. ”

“ Unlike many other large geographical areas, India is remarkable for having no distinctive botanical features peculiar to itself. It differs conspicuously in this respect from such countries as Australia or South Africa. Its vegetation is in point of fact of a composite character, and is constituted by the meeting and more or less blending of adjoining floras,—those of Persia and the south-eastern Mediterranean area to the north-west, of Siberia to the north, of China to the east, and of Malaya to the south-east. ”

“ The girls are generally married in infancy, and after marriage they have no claim to maintenance from their own family. The most frequent claim is by the widow; and it is a very important one, because she can sometimes, through the assertion of this claim, put herself almost in the position of an heir. If a Hindu under the Dayabhaga dies leaving sons and a widow, the widow is entitled to maintenance, and whilst the family remains joint she can claim to be suitably maintained, in the family if she remains in her husband’s house, or out of it if she goes elsewhere. ”