dustries which they practiced were hereditary on
the male side of the parentage. These hereditary classes were and are
simply the concrete embodiments of those successive stages of culture
which have marked the industrial development of mankind in every part of
the world. Everywhere (except at least in those countries where he is
still a savage), man has advanced from the stage of hunting and fishing
to that of nomadism and cattle-grazing, and from nomadism to agriculture
proper. Everywhere has the age of metallurgy and of the arts and
industries which are coeval with it been preceded by a ruder age, when
only those arts were known or practiced which sufficed for the hunting,
fishing, and nomad states. Everywhere has the class of ritualistic
priests and lettered theosophists been preceded by a class of
less-cultivated worshipers, who paid simple offerings of flesh and wine
to the personified powers of the visible universe without the aid of a
hereditary professional priesthood. Everywhere has the class of nobles
and territorial chieftains been preceded by a humbler class of small
peasant proprietors, who placed themselves under their protection and
paid tribute or rent in return. Everywhere has this class of nobles and
chieftains sought to ally itself with that of the priests or sacerdotal
order; and everywhere has the priestly order sought to bring under its
control those chiefs and rulers under whose protection it lives.

All these classes had been in existence for centuries before any such
thing as caste was known on Indian soil; and the only thing that was
needed to convert them into castes, such as they now are, was that the
Brahman, who possessed the highest of all functions--the
priestly--should set the example. This he did by establishing for the
first time the rule that no child, either male or female, could inherit
the name and status of Brahman, unless he or she was of Brahman
parentage on _both_ sides. By the establishment of this rule the
principle of marriage unionship was superadded to that of functional
unionship; and it was only by the combination of these two principles
that a caste in the strict sense of the term could or can be formed. The
Brahman, therefore, as the Hindu books inform us, was "the first-born
of castes." When the example had thus been set by an arrogant and
overbearing priesthood, whose pretensions it was impossible to put down,
the other hereditary classes followed in regular order do