40 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Manu does not leave the matter of acting upto the ideal to the Shudra. He goes a step further and provides that the Shudra does not escape or avoid his destined task. For one of the duties enjoined by Manu upon the King is to see that all castes including the Shudra to discharge their appointed tasks.
VIII. 410. “The king should order each man of the mercantile class to practice trade, or money lending, or agriculture and attendance on cattle; and each man of the servile class to act in the service of the twice born.”
VIII. 418. “With vigilant care should the king exert himself in compelling merchants and mechanics to perform their respective duties; for, when such men swerve from their duty, they throw this world into confusion.”
Failure to maintain was made an offence in the King punishable at Law.
VIII. 335. “Neither a father, nor a preceptor, nor a friend, nor a mother, nor a wife, nor a son, nor a domestic priest must be left unpunished by the King, if they adhere not with firmness to their duty.”
VIII. 336. “Where another man of lower birth would be fined one pana, the king shall be fined a thousand, and he shall give the fine to the priests, or cast it into the river, this is a sacred rule.”
These rules have a two-fold significance, spiritual as well as economic. In the spiritual sense they constitute the gospel of slavery. This may not be quite apparent to those who know slavery only by its legal outward form and not by reference to its inner meaning. With reference to its inner meaning a slave as defined by Plato means a person who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. In this sense a slave is not an end in himself. He is only a means for filling the ends desired by others. Thus understood the Shudra is a slave. In their economic significance the Rules put an interdict on the economic independence of the Shudra. A Shudra, says Manu, must serve. There may not be much in that to complain of. The wrong however consists in that the. rules require him to serve others. He is not to serve himself, which means that he must not strive after economic independence. He must forever remain economically dependent on others.
For as Manu says:—
I. 91. One occupation only the lord prescribed to the Shudra to serve meekly even these other three castes.
In the third place Hinduism leaves no scope for the Shudra to accumulate wealth. Menu’s rules regarding the wages to be paid to the