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The oldest and highest members of other castes implore the blessing of the youngest and poorest of theirs; they are the chosen recipients of all charities, and are allowed a license in their private relations which would be resented as a deadly injury in any but themselves." This reverence is largely due to superstitions which the Brahmins do their best to cultivate and encourage.
India has suffered enough already from the distinction of castes, and from the deeply rooted prejudices which that distinction has engendered. God forbid that we should inflict on her the curse of a new caste, that we should send her a new breed of Brahmins, authorised to treat all the native population as Parias!
It is supposed by some to have been founded upon conquest, the first three castes being composed of a foreign race, who subdued the natives of the country and reduced them to an inferior caste. Others trace it to the fondness of perpetuating, by descent from father to son, certain offices or occupations. The Hindu tradition gives the following account of the origin of the various castes.
Next to the Brahman, but far beneath him, is the Kshatrya and beneath him again the Vaishya. The Shudras are the fourth caste that exists chiefly to serve the three twice-born castes, and above all the Brahman.
In the subcontinent of India recent political developments of a momentous character have plunged its divers castes, races and denominations into grave turmoil, brought in their wake riots, bloodshed, misery and confusion, fanned into flame religious animosities, and well-nigh disrupted its economic life.
Particular occupations in India are restricted to particular castes. All trades are hereditary. For example, a tatmah, or weaver, is always a weaver. He cannot become a blacksmith or carpenter. He has no choice. He must follow the hereditary trade.
In every civilization individuals, groups, classes and sometimes castes have exploited or used up fellow humans and fellow creatures to suit their own purposes and advance their own interests. Abraham Lincoln gave a classical definition of human exploitation in a simple sentence: "It is the principal that says you work and toil and earn bread and I will eat it."
The same causes which tended to produce the hereditary king and hereditary priest would tend to produce the hereditary artisan and laborer, and to separate society into castes. The power which association sets free for progress would thus be wasted, and barriers to further progress be gradually raised.
And a time must surely come when, by the common consent of the Muslim world the reference to Muḥammad in the brief creed of the Muslim will be removed. The 'one true Church' corresponds of course with the one true God. Hinduism, which would willingly accept the one, would as naturally accept the other also, as a great far-spreading caste. There are in fact already monotheistic castes in Hinduism.
The first form of religion in India was the worship of nature, and the chief gods of the people were the sun, fire, water and other natural phenomena, which were interpreted to the ignorant masses by priests, who gradually developed what is now called Brahminism, and, in the course of time, for social reasons, divided the people into four classes: First, the Brahmins, which include the priestly, the literary and the ruling portions of the population; second, the Kshatryas, or warriors, who were like the knighthoods of Europe in the middle ages; then the Vaisyas, or landowners, the farming population, and those engaged in mercantile and manufacturing industries; and finally the Sudras, or servants who attended the other castes, toiled in the fields and did the heavy labor of the community.
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