en now, among the educated, especially in Bengal, caste restrictions
upon dining are being increasingly ignored. A Bengalee gentleman
enjoys ordinary hotel fare with apparently none to interfere with his
liberties. In Madras, the writer has more than once rubbed shoulders
with Brahman lawyers and others eating together the common fare of a
well-known restaurant of the city. And he has known Brahman patients,
high in society, who did not object even to buy and use nourishment in
the form of "Liebig's Beef-extract," so long as they could cover its
offensiveness to the women of their household by the euphemistic name
"meat-extract."

And to this they are being rapidly carried by a conjunction of many
forces which are increasingly dominating the land.

In the first place, they have the potent example of a host of western
lives among them. This body of white people, from the far-off lands,
is distributed all over India. They are the rulers of the land. A
Brahman may deem their touch pollution. But that same Brahman is often
glad to undergo that ceremonial taint if thereby he can only enjoy the
white man's cultured society. He beholds in these people from the West
a freedom from irksome caste restraints. He notices conjugal relations
among them, such as furnish richest home blessings. Their social
relations are untrammelled and abound in convivial privileges such as
are denied to Hindu society. All this creates in him an uneasiness. If
he is a man of culture and resides in some city of importance, he will
wish to meet English friends upon lines of social equality; but this
he will find to be impossible apart from his defiance of caste rules;
for, to the man of the West, the common cup and the festal board are
the essential conditions of true friendship and intimacy. Thus the
life of the ruling race in India is a constant rebuke to the
narrowness of caste and a source of discontent to the caste-ridden
people, because it reveals to them a different and a better way of
living.

Nor is it merely this new type of non-caste western life that appeals
to them. The modern civilization of the West, with its humanizing
laws, its exaltation of the individual, its religious freedom, its new
and broadening education and culture, its equal rights to every man,
its many institutions through every one of which there breathes the
Anglo-Saxon's blessed love of liberty, the home with its sanctified
affection and its glorified womanhood, phila