by doing any kind of work, ate of the temple,
or lived by royal bounty or private charity, and by the free breakfasts
without which a marriage, "thread ceremony" or funeral in a gentleman's
house could not be respectably celebrated. Idleness and sanctity are a
powerful combination, and it is written in the _shastras_ that every day
in which a holy man does no work for his bread, but lives by begging, is
equal in the eyes of the gods to a day spent in fasting; so, though the
prospect of power and wealth might tempt a few restless and wayward
spirits, the great mass of the Brahmin caste clung to the sacred
calling.

All this time the Purbhoo was in the land, but insignificant. He had no
sacred calling. Tradition assigned him a hybrid origin. He could not
presume to be a warrior, because his mother was a _shoodra_, nor could
he condescend to be a farmer, for his father was a _kshutriya_. So the
gods had given him the pen, and he was a writer--not a secretary, but a
humble quill-driver. But when the Portuguese and then the British came
upon the scene, not ruling by word of mouth, like the native rajahs, but
inditing their orders and keeping records, the Purbhoo saw an open door
and went in.

Then the Brahmin woke up, for he saw that he was in evil case. The
spirit of the British _raj_ was falling like a blight and a pestilence
upon the means by which he had lived, drying up the fountains of
religious revenue and slowly but surely blighting the luxuriance of that
pious liberality which always took the form of feeding holy men. He
found that he must work for his bread whether he liked it or not, and
the only implement of secular work that would not soil his priestly hand
was the pen. And this was already taken up by the Purbhoo, who carried
himself haughtily under the new _regime_ and showed no mind to make way
for the holier man. Hence sprang those bitter enmities and jealousies
which have done so much to lighten the difficulties of our position.

The British Government has often been accused of acting on the maxim,
_Divide et impera_. It is a libel. We do not divide, for there is no
need. Division is already there. We have only to rejoice and rule. How
well and justly we rule all the world knows, but only the initiated know
how much we owe to the fact that the talents and energies which would
otherwise be employed in thwarting our just intentions and
phlebotomising the ryot are largely preoccupied with the more useful
wo