caste for social superiority has
become a constant source of ill-feeling.... Want of
education is practically universal amongst the depressed
classes, but this cannot have been the cause of their fall, for
many of the so-called higher classes in India share in the
general ignorance. Unlike them, however, they are unable
to attend the ordinary schools owing to the idea that it is
pollution to touch them. To do so is to commit a sin offensive
alike to religion and to conventional morality. Of
professions as a means of livelihood these depressed classes
have a very small choice. Here, too, the supposed pollution
of their touch comes in their way. On every hand we find
that the peculiar difficulty from which they suffer, in addition to
others that they share with other classes, is their "untouchableness."

After a powerful argument against the theory of "untouchableness" and
against priestly intolerance, the Gaekwar urges not only upon Hindus,
but upon Government the duty of attacking in all earnestness this
formidable problem.

A Government within easy reach of the latest thought,
with unlimited moral and material resources, such as there
is in India, should not remain content with simply asserting
the equality of men under the common law and maintaining
order, but must sympathetically see from time to time that
the different sections of its subjects are provided with ample
means of progress. Many of the Indian States where they
are at all alive to the true functions of government, owing
to less elevating surroundings or out of nervousness, fear to
strike out a new path and find it less troublesome to follow
the policy of _laisser faire_ and to walk in the footsteps of the
highest Government in India, whose declared policy is to let
the social and religious matters of the people alone except
where questions of grave importance are involved. When
one-sixth of the people are in a chronically depressed and
ignorant condition, no Government can afford to ignore
the urgent necessity of doing what it can for their elevation.

Can the Government of India afford to disregard so remarkable an appeal?
The question is not merely a social and moral question, but also a
political one. Whilst some high-caste Hindus are beginning to recognize
its urgency, the more prosperous of the socially depressed castes
themselves are showing signs of restl