do this, and
why won't they do that? Caste--and caste is the common refuge; and with
most of our countrymen who have tried to introduce new customs or a new
religion, caste has ever been a handy and convenient peg on which to hang
any difficulties they may meet with, or any problem they cannot readily
solve. In short, it is hard to say what difficulty has not been disposed
of in this fashion. Let us glance at two instances to illustrate my
meaning.

For the first instance, I cannot select, perhaps, a better example than
that afforded by the Rev. G. U. Pope, in the notes he has made when
editing a second edition of the valuable work of the Abbe Dubois. And, in
alluding to these footnotes, it is impossible to repress some feeling of
annoyance that the valuable work of the Abbe should, in an evil hour, have
fallen into the hands of a writer who has thought fit often, in a few
brief and contemptuous words, summarily to dismiss and overrule those
conclusions which were the result of a life spent on more intimate terms
with natives than any I have ever been able to hear of. And Mr. Pope's
statements are the more calculated to impose on the general reader, as he
speaks of having had "more than twenty years of a somewhat intimate
intercourse with the Hindoos;" the fact being that he spent the greater
part (in fact, all but a few years, as far as I have been able to
ascertain) as head of the Grammar School on the Nilgiri Hills, where he
had no more opportunity of having any intercourse with natives than a
Hindoo would have of gaining experience of the natives of England, were he
to take up his residence on the Grampians, and interchange a few words
occasionally with the shepherds of those mountains. But as to what caste
has done. "Caste," says Mr. Pope, "has prevented the Hindoos from availing
themselves of the opportunities afforded them of acquiring the sciences,
arts, and civilization of nations with whom they have come in contact."
Caste, "the great petrifier," we are again told, is the real cause of the
stagnation that everywhere abounds. Caste, again, "upholds immutable
distinctions by arbitrary and absurd laws, which are enforced by
irresponsible authority, and maintains a standard of right and wrong
entirely independent of the essential principles of moral science;" and,
in order that everything may be included at one blow, we are finally told,
in a note appended to the remarks of the Abbe on the moral and social
advant