No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is born; but
he may fall to a lower one.

There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move is
backward. Don't kick against the pricks therefore. You were born a
Brahmin with wealth and power because you won the favor of the gods in
some previous existence; or you were born a Sudra, predestined to a
life of suffering and semi-starvation, because in your previous
existence you failed to merit better treatment from the gods. If you
are only a sweeper, be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra.
Kismet, Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life;
and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things which must
happen to you throughout your whole existence.

The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority and then said
to all the other classes: Rebel not at the inequalities of life. They
are ordained of the gods. The good that the higher castes enjoy is the
reward of their having conducted themselves properly in previous
existences. Submit yourself to your lot in the hope that with
obedience to what the Brahmins tell you, you may possibly likewise win
birth into a higher caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so much
as with a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty and
one lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape again.

Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised a
cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never has
there been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadening
to all initiative. "_Jo hota so hota_,"--"What is happening was to
happen"--so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospital
to have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. "It is
written on my forehead," a man will often say with stoical
indifference when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to the
belief that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on every
man's forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act {228} of
his can change them. "I was impelled of the gods to do the deed," a
criminal will say in the courts. "And I am impelled of the gods to
punish you for it," the judge will sometimes answer. If plague comes,
the natives can only be brought by force to observe precautions
against it. "If we are to die, we shall die; why offend the gods by
attempting interference with their plans?" The fatalism of the East as
ex