ut in India we have a
tree with a double system of roots. The banyan tree drops roots from its
boughs. These bough roots in time run as deep underground as the
original root. And the tap root and its runners, and the branch roots
and theirs, get knotted and knit into each other, till the whole forms
one solid mass of roots, thousands of yards of a tangle of roots,
sinuous and strong. Conceive the uprooting of such a tree, like the
famous one of North India, for instance, which sheltered an army of
seven thousand men. You cannot conceive it; it could not be done, the
earthward hold is so strong.

The old in India are like these trees; they are doubly, inextricably
rooted. There is the usual great tap root common to all human trees in
all lands--faith in the creed of the race; there are the usual running
roots too--devotion to family and home. All these hold the soul down.

But in India we have more--we have the branch-rooted system of Caste;
Caste so intricate, so precise, that no Western lives who has traced it
through its ramifications back to the bough from which it dropped in the
olden days.

This Caste, then, these holding laws, which most would rather die than
break, are like the branch roots of the banyan tree with their infinite
strength of grip. But the strangest thing to us is this: the people love
to have it so; they do not regard themselves as held, these roots are
their pride and joy. Take a child of four or five, ask it a question
concerning its Caste, and you will see how that baby tree has begun to
drop branch rootlets down. Sixty years afterwards look again, and every
rootlet has grown a tree, each again sending rootlets down; and so the
system spreads.

But we look up from the banyan tree. God! what are these roots to Thee?
These Caste-root systems are nothing to Thee! India is not too hard for
Thee! O God, come!

CHAPTER IX

The Classes and the Masses

"We speak of work done against the force of
gravitation. If the magnitude of a force can be
estimated in any sense by the resistance which it
has to overcome, then verily there is no land
under the sun more calculated than India to
display the Grand Forces of God's Omnipotent
Grace. For here it has to face and overcome the
_combined resistances_ of the Caste system,
entrenched heathenism, and deeply subtle
philosophies. Praise God! it can