s are recruited. This caste was
formerly so exalted that the rank of royalty was not sufficient to
enable one to aspire to the hand of a Brahman's daughter.

The Hindu would rather die than violate the laws of his caste. Nothing
is more terrible than for him to lose it. Such loss may be compared to
excommunication in the middle ages, or to a condemnation for an infamous
crime in modern Europe. To lose his caste is to lose everything at one
blow, parents, relations, and fortune. Every one turns his back upon
the culprit and refuses to have any dealings with him. He must enter the
casteless category, which is employed only for the most abject
functions.

As to the social and political consequences of such a system, the only
social bond among the Hindus is caste. Outside of caste the world does
not exist for him. He is separated from persons of another caste by an
abyss much deeper than that which separates Europeans of the most
different nationalities. The latter may intermarry, but persons of
different castes cannot. The result is that every village possesses as
many groups as there are castes represented.

With such a system union against a master is impossible. This system of
caste explains the phenomenon of two hundred and fifty millions of men
obeying, without a murmur, sixty or seventy thousand strangers[24] whom
they detest. The only fatherland of the Hindu is his caste. He has never
had another. His country is not a fatherland to him, and he has never
dreamed of its unity.

[Footnote 24: English.]

W.W. HUNTER

At a very early period we catch sight of a nobler race from the
northwest, forcing its way in among the primitive peoples of India. This
race belonged to the splendid Aryan or Indo-Germanic stock from which
the Brahman, the Rajput, and the Englishman alike descend. Its earliest
home seems to have been in Western Asia. From that common camping-ground
certain branches of the race started for the east, others for the
farther west. One of the western offshoots built Athens and Sparta, and
became the Greek nation; another went on to Italy, and reared the city
on the Seven Hills, which grew into Imperial Rome. A distant colony of
the same race excavated the silver ores of prehistoric Spain; and when
we first catch a sight of ancient England, we see an Aryan settlement
fishing in wattle canoes, and working the tin mines of Cornwall.
Meanwhile other branches of the Aryan stock had gone forth from the
prim