the house or on the street
are too convenient, and the quality of the water is too manifestly
superior for the desecration from the iron pipes to outweigh the
advantages. A few years ago, in Darjeeling, north of Bengal, the brahman
names upon the signs of the liquor shops were distinctly in the
majority. The sacerdotal caste, new style, had appreciated the chances
of big profits and shut their eyes to the regulations of caste, which
have relegated drink-sellers to a very low place in the scale. Brahmans
are even said to figure among the contractors who supply beef, flesh of
the sacred animal, to the British army in India. "A curious sign of the
changing time," says Mr. Lockwood Kipling (_Beast and Man in India_),
"is the fact that Hindus of good caste, seeing the profit that may be
made from leather, are quietly creeping into a business from which they
are levitically barred. Money prevails against caste more potently than
missionary preaching."

In this region, where convenience or comfort or personal advancement are
concerned, it may safely be asserted that the so-called Indian
conservatism has not much resisting power. There, at least, it is found
that where there is a will there is a way.[7]

[Sidenote: The Indian mind awakened.]

And there is a higher influence at work dissolving and reconstituting
the whole framework of ideas. Upon the Indian mind, long lain fallow,
modern civilisation and modern thought and the fellowship with the world
are acting as the quickening rain and sunshine upon the fertile Indian
soil. That these and similar obtruding influences have had a
transforming effect has already been alleged. But far beyond, in promise
at least, is the revived activity of the Indian mind itself. If the age
of Elizabeth be the outcome of the stirring of the minds of Englishmen
through the discovery of a new world, the multiplication of books, the
revival of learning, and the reformation of religion, how shall we
measure the effect upon the acute Indian mind of the far more
stimulating influences of this Indian Renaissance! What comparison, for
example, can be made between the stimulus of the new learning of the
sixteenth century and the stimulus of the first introduction to a modern
library? It would be an exaggeration to say that the Indian mind is now
showing all its power in response to the stimulus. But it is everywhere
active, and in some spheres, as in Religion and Philanthropy, in
History, in Archaeol