ride. You frequently see them
upon children also; and on holidays and religious anniversaries,
when the people come out for pleasure, or during special ceremonials
at their temples, nearly everybody wears a "god mark," just as he
would wear a badge denoting his regiment and corps at a Grand
Army reunion.

The more you study the question of caste the more confusing it
becomes, but it is interesting and important because it is the
peculiar institution of India and is not found in any other country
in the world. The number of castes is almost infinite. The
200,000,000 or more Hindus in this empire are divided into a vast
number of independent, well-organized and unchangeable groups,
which are separated by wide differences, who cannot eat together or
drink from the same vessel or sit at the same table or intermarry.
There have been, and still are, eminent and learned philosophers
and social scientists who admire caste as one of the highest
agencies of social perfection, and they argue that it alone has
prevented the people of India from relapsing into barbarism, but
foreigners in general and Christian missionaries in particular
take a very different view, and many thoughtful and patriotic
Hindus publicly declare that it is the real and only cause of
the wretched condition of their people and the greatest obstacle
to their progress. Mr. Shoshee Chunder Dutt, a very learned Hindu
and author of a standard book entitled "India, Past and Present,"
declares that "civilization has been brought to a standstill by
its mischievous restrictions, and there is no hope of its being
remedied until those restrictions are removed."

It is curious to learn that the word "caste" is not Hindu at
all, but Portuguese, and that instead of being an ancient feature
of the Hindu religion, it is comparatively a modern idea.

The first form of religion in India was the worship of nature,
and the chief gods of the people were the sun, fire, water and
other natural phenomena, which were interpreted to the ignorant
masses by priests, who gradually developed what is now called
Brahminism, and, in the course of time, for social reasons, divided
the people into four classes: First, the Brahmins, which include the
priestly, the literary and the ruling portions of the population;
second, the Kshatryas, or warriors, who were like the knighthoods
of Europe in the middle ages; then the Vaisyas, or landowners,
the farming population, and those engaged in mer