464
THE GREEN BAG
in the antiquity of India an odium was attached to the color yellow. "Let him not wash his feet in a pan of mixed yellow metal; nor let him eat from a broken dish; nor where his mind is disturbed with anxious apprehension." Mr. Halhed, in his preface to his transla tion, summarizes his opinion of the Gentoo laws in scholarly, almost eloquent style: "They will deserve the consideration of the politician, the judge, the divine, and the philosopher, as they contain the genuine sentiments of a great and flourishing people . . . upon subjects in which all mankind have a common interest; as they abound with maxims of general policy and justice, which no particularity of manners or diversity of religious opinions can alter." I have closed these two quaint volumes and to-morrow will put them back in their cells of loneliness on the shelves. They may not be disturbed again for years. Some day, time, the implacable foe of all of us, will conquer them. The principles they contain,
however, time can never conquer. Cycles are behind them and cycles before them. They declare the laws of a race which seems to have vitality immortal and customs well-nigh immutable. While that race has lived silently on, many a great empire has driven its chariots over western Europe, but one no longer sees Grecian or Roman or Spanish drivers. Many peoples have marched successively through the papyrus leaves and calf-bound volumes, yet the antiquity of their records, compared to India, is as a day to a decade. We are highly civilized; the rich legacy of English legal experience is ours and we may well say our customs are the fittest survivors of the trial of time. We smile at the oddities in the customs of India. Well and good, that is only natural. But there is a possibility, a few thousand years hence, of some Hindu author writing an essay on the absurdities of the laws and customs of a nation once called America. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., August. 1908.
