e Hindoos. Yet, after all their struggles, we now find
them on a lower level than they were thousands of years ago. What a
picture! All these millions of civilized, peaceful, diligent, sensible
people bend their knees before thirty-three millions of disgusting
images and pictures, and among all this people, in all their thirty
thousand cities there was not a hospital for the sick, not an asylum for
the blind or deaf, not a home for lepers or insane, not one voice saying
to the lowly and the poor: "Thou art my brother."

Then came Buddha, the great reformer, preaching the religion of self
denial and human love. The old petrified social fabric and religion were
shaken to their foundation, and the system of caste was on the verge of
dissolution. Under the first wave of enthusiasm caused by the teachings
of Buddha, hospitals for the sick and asylums for the poor were
established. Every fifth year the Buddhistic kings gave away their
riches, not only to the monks but also to the poor, to the orphans and
outcasts, and even asylums for sick animals were established. But
Brahminism soon avenged itself by bloody wars, Buddhism was to a large
extent driven out of India, and gradually its noble principles were
forgotten. Nearly the same condition as that which prevailed before the
Buddhistic reformation again prevailed, until the Christian civilization
quite recently began to make itself felt through the practical measures
introduced by the English government. Woman without liberty, without
human worth, and almost without virtue; the countless many oppressed and
despised by the privileged few, and not even allowed to read a religious
book at the risk of eternal damnation; one of the greatest and mightiest
nations on earth, discordant within itself, divided into different
hostile classes; the one suspicious, envious, and full of hate toward
the other, all of them humiliated, conquered, and ruled by a few
strangers,--the English,--whose forefathers were savages a thousand
years after the period when the Hindoos possessed the highest
civilization of antiquity.

The cause of this deplorable condition is clear enough to those who have
grown up under the influence of Christian civilization. With all its
studies, all its wisdom, all its genius, and all its religious
contemplation, this people have neglected or spurned the simple truths
on which the Christian civilization is founded,--love and charity: "Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as th