ession and social injustice. At the present time no
blood or social difference separates the great majority of castes from
the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and so high
an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that even in the
beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of the same race and
blood.

If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the
intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accomplished,
as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, without restricting
the right of the individual to engage in any line of work for which he
is fitted or to go as high in that work as his ability warrants.
Booker Washington, born in the South's lowest ranks, becomes a
world-figure; had he been born in India's lowest caste, he would have
remained a burner of dead bodies. To compare the South's effort to
preserve race integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd.

Bombay, India.

{236}

XXIV

THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN

In India marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert Compton
remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. Children in their
cradles are not infrequently given in marriage by their parents; they
are sometimes promised in marriage (contingent upon sex) before they
are born.

"You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask when an
American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in the
negative, "Why not? Couldn't they get anybody to have you?"

"Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow," is an
Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot of woman is
hard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder if she be a widow.
Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men within its reach; of the women
within its reach it enslaves all.

I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of a
civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept this
standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom.
In the great temple at Madura are statues of "The Jealous Husband" who
always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and
the attitude of the man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a
system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that
woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dharma
Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: "It is the nature
of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A femal