on is very scanty, and I am not aware how far the
practice alluded to prevails in other parts of India.

Having taken into consideration the advantages of caste in acting as a
moral restraint amongst the Indians themselves, I now purpose to inquire
how far caste has acted advantageously, or the reverse, in segregating the
people socially from the conquerors who have overrun their country.

If the advantages of caste are striking and plainly apparent as regards
the moral points I have alluded to, they seem to me to be infinitely more
so when we come to consider the happy influence this institution has had
in segregating the Indians from the white races. And here I cannot help
indulging in a vain regret that the blessings of caste have not been
universally diffused amongst all inferior races. How many of these has our
boasted civilization improved off the face of the earth? How much has that
tide of civilization which the first conquerors invariably bring with them
effected? How much, in other words, have their vice, rum, and gunpowder
helped to exterminate those unhappy races which, unprotected by caste,
have come in contact with the white man? Nor in India itself are we
altogether without a well-marked instance of the value, for a time at
least, of an entire social separation between the dark and white races;
and the Todas, the lords of the soil on the Nilgiri Hills, furnish us with
a lamentable example of what the absence of caste feeling is capable of
producing. We found them a simple pastoral race, and the early visitors to
the hills were struck with their inoffensive manners, and what was falsely
considered to be their greatest advantage--freedom from caste
associations. But what is their condition now? One of drunkenness,
debauchery, and disease of the most fatal description. Had the
much-reviled caste law been theirs, what a different result would have
ensued from their contact with Europeans! Caste would have saved them
from alcohol, and their women from contamination: they would thus have
maintained their self-respect; and if, at first, separation brought no
progress nor shadow of change, it would have at least induced no evil, and
education and enlightenment would in time have modified these caste
institutions, which, to a superficial observer, seem to be productive of
nothing but evil.

We have now seen that social contact with whites, without any barrier
between them and the inferior races, is not, in a mora