ible pinnacle, and keep the
Pariah grovelling in the dust. "What," continues the speaker, "keeps the
Brahmin at the top and the Pariah at the bottom?" Why, let me ask in turn,
is a cow's tail long, and a fox's tail bushy? Is it in this nineteenth
century that we are to try and din into people's ears that the upper
classes in India were at the top of the social scale, and the Pariah at
the bottom, centuries before caste, in its present shape, ever existed,
and that the relative position of the two races would continue with little
change if caste was to be abolished to-morrow morning? "What," gravely
asks another, "has prevented the peoples of India uniting into one grand
nation, and destroyed all hopes of political fusion?" Nor, to many, would
the absurdity of the question be apparent till you asked them what has
prevented all Europe becoming one nation; or, to take things on a smaller
scale, till you asked what prevented the Highland clans forming themselves
into a nation. In short, whenever a man is in difficulty, and at a loss to
account for anything connected with the state of the people of India, he
takes refuge in caste, combined, perhaps, with what is called native
prejudice, though what that last means I do not pretend to explain. Now,
it is not improbable that some of my readers may have heard of Holloway's
pills, and we know, in fact, that thousands believe that medicine to be an
efficacious remedy for every constitutional ailment. Only swallow
Holloway, and you are a cured man. Well, the abolition of caste, with an
incredible number of people, is, in like manner, confidently pronounced to
be a universal remedy for all the political and social complaints of
India. Remove that, and you will at one stroke secure social liberty,
national unity, the removal of idolatry, and, some even are rash enough to
affirm, the universal adoption of Christianity. Such, then, are a few
examples of the nonsense you will hear commonly talked about caste, and I
think I need not waste time in pointing out that the opponents of caste
must take very different ground if they wish to obtain a hearing from the
peoples of India.

In the second point to which I have called the attention of the reader I
alluded to the general law of opposition, and used a common saying which
exactly illustrates the probable result of violent and ill-judged attacks
on caste. In fact, so apparent is this, that the reader must have already
anticipated the line