l consciousness,
self-rule, and a glowing, triumphant patriotism can be built only upon
the ruins of the caste system.

And even as it is a foe to nationality, so is it the mortal enemy of
individualism. The caste system is really a glorification of the
multitude as against the individual. Individual initiative and
assertion, liberty of conscience, the right of man to life and the
pursuit of happiness,--all these are foibles of the West which it has
been the chief business of caste to crush; and upon their ruin it has
erected this mighty tower of Babel. In India, it has been the business
of men, from time immemorial, not to do what they think to be right,
nor to find out, every one for himself, what they consider to be the
best and to act according to the dictates of conscience; it has rather
been submission to caste dominance. And it is the unblushing teaching
of the _Shastras_ that obedience to caste is the fulfilment of duty
and the _summum bonum_ of life. So omnipotent and omniscient is the
arm and head of caste that men dare not defy it. Hence we are
compelled to look in India to-day upon the saddest spectacle of abject
manhood the world has known. To those who, like the writer, have spent
a lifetime in trying to raise the outcasts and the lower strata of
Indian society, the most difficult and discouraging obstacle is the
inertia and the abjectness of the people themselves. Through a bitter
experience of many centuries they have learned that it does not pay
for the individual to assert himself against the dictates of the
caste, or for the lower castes to rise in rebellion against their lot.
They discovered that they were merely butting their heads against an
adamantine rock. So they have lost every ambition and hope; and he who
would lift them up must first remove that leaden despair which rests
upon them like a mighty incubus.

Nor is it much better with the educated classes of India. There are
hundreds of thousands of these men of western university training who
annually assemble in Congress and in Convention, and who in spotless
English of Addisonian accent and in the sonorous phraseology of a
Macaulay, discourse upon human rights and who denounce the bondage of
caste tyranny. And yet they submit, in their own homes, to that same
accursed tyranny and are in life as abject as the meanest Pariah in
the face of caste edicts which they know to be unrighteous and
demeaning to the core.

It should also be remember