order, the obligation to protect wife and children as the weakest party, the right of men and women to domestic felicity, all are more or less ignored and this violation of the Divine law carries with it its own punishment, in the promotion of family dissension and of sensuality in various forms.
As to the evils and inconveniences of nepotism—
(1) Polygamy, with its accompanying demoralisation and cares, is prescribed to the eldest son of Malayalam Brahmans in order to offspring, in place of the happy marriage of the sons to one wife each.
(2) The revolting system of polyandry is not rare among Sudras, Carpenters, Ilavars, and other Marumakkal castes, and has been thought by some to have been the origin of these laws. But they rather appear to be traceable to the Brahman prohibition of marriage to all but eldest sons.
Rarely is there ever felt such strong and elevated affection in these cases that the brothers quarrel, or are jealous about possession of the common partner; on the contrary, we have known an elder brother offended because the younger, on becoming a Christian, very properly took a wife to himself.
(3) The natural relationship and reciprocal love of parents and children are interfered with, and perverted by this pernicious law. It is somewhat odd that notwithstanding the introduction and spread of enlightenment among the higher classes in Travancore, so far as to lead to the preparation and publication of interesting native works, some are yet found who are not ashamed to defend this distortion of the law of nature and of God, and to represent the love and relationship of the father as something merely conventional and legal, rather than natural: just as some tribes ludicrously go to the opposite extreme of obliging the mother to rise, and the father to go to bed with the new-born babe.
"The reckoning of blood relationship," says G. K. Varmman, "through the mother is more natural than through the male parent: the latter is rather by a legal rule. Among animals the mother alone cares for the progeny. Amongst men we find by experience that commonly the mother has more affection for the children, the father a little less. But as mankind are rational beings, besides that the father has some parental affection (by nature), he cherishes it also by obligation to law, and on account of the children performing funeral ceremonies for him and inheriting his property. And we see amongst Nepotists greater affection, arising from reason, towards sisters' sons, who are not their own children, and merely by law their heirs and mourners."
Here the love and care and discipline of the father are systematically absent. And if children do not know, or scarcely
