anscrit and the Sacred Scriptures, _i.e._ higher education as formerly
understood, is the exclusive privilege of certain castes. The very
expression "higher education" has come to mean a modern English
education, not as formerly an education in Sanscrit lore. Had the
British Government allowed things to take their course, the still
surviving institutions of the old kind for Oriental learning would have
been transformed, one and all, into modern schools and colleges. Even in
1824, when Government, then under "Orientalist" influence, founded the
Sanscrit College in Calcutta for the encouragement of Sanscrit learning,
a numerous body of native gentlemen, with the famous Raja Rammohan Roy
at their head, petitioned that a college for the study of Western
learning might be established instead. For a number of years now, the
Sanscrit College, then founded, has actually had fewer pupils on its
rolls than it is permitted to admit at a greatly reduced fee.[6]

Again, the idea of _public questions_, the idea of the common welfare,
has come into being with the nineteenth century, and is quietly
repudiating caste and giving to the community a solidarity and a feeling
of solidarity unknown hitherto. Upon one platform now meet, as a matter
of course, the native gentlemen of all the castes, when any general
grievance is felt or any great occasion falls to be celebrated. The
Western custom of public meetings for the discussion of public questions
is now an established Indian institution, and daily gives the lie to the
idea that there is pollution in bodily contact with a person of lower
caste. That a special seat should be reserved for a man because he is a
brahman would be scouted. The convenience of travelling by rail or in
tram-cars has been even more widely effective in dissolving the idea.
And if the advantage or convenience of the new ways can overcome the
force of custom, so can the unprofitableness of the old. For
illustrations, I pass from the gentlemen who attend public meetings
where the speeches are in English, to the less educated and more
superstitious and more blindly conservative people. In the Mahratta
districts of the Central Provinces, says the _Census Report_ for 1901,
in recent years an unavoidable scepticism as to his efficiency has
tended to reduce the earnings of the Garpagari or averter of hail from
the crops. In Calcutta the same influence has extinguished the trade of
supplier of Ganges water. The water taps in