on of alien rulers during hundreds of years, still preserves her
vitality, it is because the Brahmans have never relaxed in their
devotion to her. She has witnessed political and social revolutions.
Famines and pestilence have shorn her of her splendour. But the Brahmans
have stood by her through all the vicissitudes of fortune. It is they
who raised her to the highest pinnacle of glory, and it is they whose
ministrations still keep up the drooping spirits of her children."

The Brahmans are the sacerdotal caste of India. They are at the same
time the proudest and the closest aristocracy that the world has ever
seen, for they form not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest
sense of the term, but one of divine origin. Of the Brahman it may be
said as of no other privileged mortal except perhaps the Levite of the
Old Testament: _Nascitur non fit_. No king, however powerful, can make
or unmake a Brahman, no genius, however transcendent, no services,
however conspicuous, no virtues, however pre-eminent, can avail to raise
a Hindu from a lower caste to the Brahman's estate. In early times the
caste laws must have been less rigid, for otherwise there would only be
Aryan Brahmans, whereas in the South of India there are many Brahmans
of obviously Dravidian stock. But to-day not even the Brahmans
themselves can raise to their own equal one who is not born of their
caste, though by the exercise of the castely authority they can in
specific cases outcaste a fellow-Brahman who has offended against the
immutable laws of caste, and, except for minor transgressions which
allow of atonement and reinstatement, when once outcasted he and his
descendants cease for ever to be Brahmans. The Brahmans might be at a
loss to make good their claim that they date back to the remote ages of
the Vedas. But a good deal more than two thousand years have passed
since they constituted themselves the only authorized intermediaries
between mankind and the gods. In them became vested the monopoly of the
ancient language in which all religious rites are performed, and with a
monopoly of the knowledge of Sanskrit they retained a monopoly of
learning long after Sanskrit itself had become a dead language. Like the
priests who wielded a Latin pen in the Middle Ages in Europe, they sat
as advisers and conscience-keepers in the councils of every Hindu ruler.
To the present day they alone can expound the Hindu scriptures, they
alone can approach the gods