Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/486

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CASTEL—CASTELAR Y RIPOLL
469

Egyptian tendency to accumulate, rather than to separate, employments. Occasionally families were set apart for the worship of a particular divinity. An interesting “section” of Egyptian society is afforded by a granite monument preserved in the museum at Naples. Nine figures in bas-relief represent the deceased, his father, three brothers, a paternal uncle, and the father and two brothers of his wife. Another side contains the mother, wife, wife’s mother and maternal aunts. The deceased is described as a military officer and superintendent of buildings; his elder brother as a priest and architect; his third brother as a provincial governor, and his father as a priest of Ammon. The family of the wife is exclusively sacerdotal. Egyptian caste, therefore, permitted two brothers to be of different castes, and one person to be of more castes than one, and of different castes from those to which his father or wife belonged. The lower employments, commerce, agriculture, even medicine, are never mentioned on the tombs. The absolute statements about caste in Egypt, circulated by such writers as Reynier and De Goguet, have, no doubt, been founded on passages in Herodotus (ii. 143, 164), who mentions seven classes, and makes war an hereditary profession; in Diodorus Siculus (i. 2-8), who mentions five classes and a hereditary priesthood; and in Plato, who, anxious to illustrate the principle of compulsory division of labour, on which his republic was based, speaks in the Timaeus of a total separation of the six classes—priests, soldiers, husbandmen, artisans, hunters and shepherds. Heeren (ii. 594) does not hesitate to ascribe the formation of Egyptian caste to the meeting of different races. According to the chronology constructed by Bunsen the division into castes began in the period 10,000–9000, and was completed along with the introduction of animal worship and the improvement of writing under the third dynasty in the 6th or 7th century of the Old Empire. The Scholiast of Apollonius Rhodius, on the authority of Dicaearchus, in the Second Book of Hellas, mentions a king, Sesonchosis, who, about 3712 B.C., “enacted that no one should abandon his father’s trade, for this he considered as leading to avarice.” Bunsen conjectures that this may refer to Sesostoris, the lawgiver of Manetho’s third or Memphite dynasty, the eighth from Menes, who introduced writing, building with hewn stone, and medicine; possibly, also, to Sesostris, who, Aristotle says (Polit. vii. 1), introduced caste to Crete. He further observes that in Egypt there was never a conquered indigenous race. There was one nation with one language and one religion; the public panegyrics embraced the whole people; every Egyptian was the child and friend of the gods. The kings were generally warriors, and latterly adopted into the sacerdotal caste. Intermarriage was the rule, except between the swineherds and all other classes. “Every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians” (Gen. xlvi. 34).

The comprehensive essay by Sir H. H. Risley in the introductory volume of the Indian Census Report for 1901 is the best recent account of caste in India. See also, besides the works mentioned in the text, Sir Denzil Ibbetson’s Report on the Punjab Census (1881); W. Crooke, Things Indian (1905) and other books by this author on Indian religion and caste; Senart, Les Castes dans l’Inde (1896); Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya, Hindu Castes and Sects (1896). There is an interesting chapter on the subject in Sidney Low’s Vision of India (1906). See also India, Indian Law, and Hinduism.

CASTEL, LOUIS BERTRAND (1688–1757), French mathematician, was born at Montpellier on the 11th of November 1688, and entered the order of the Jesuits in 1703. Having studied literature, he afterwards devoted himself entirely to mathematics and natural philosophy. He wrote several scientific works, that which attracted most attention at the time being his Optique des couleurs (1740), or treatise on the melody of colours. He endeavoured to illustrate the subject by a clavecin oculaire, or ocular harpsichord; but the treatise and the illustration were quickly forgotten. He also wrote Mathématique universelle (1728) and Traité de physique sur la pesanteur universelle des corps (1724). He also published a critical account of the system of Sir Isaac Newton in French in 1743.


CASTELAR Y RIPOLL, EMILIO (1832–1899), Spanish statesman, was born at Cadiz on the 8th of September 1832. At the age of seven he lost his father, who had taken an active part in the progressist agitations during the reign of Ferdinand VII., and had passed several years as an exile in England. He attended a grammar-school at Sax. In 1848 he began to study law in Madrid, but soon elected to compete for admittance at the school of philosophy and letters, where he took the degree of doctor in 1853. He was an obscure republican student when the Spanish revolutionary movement of 1854 took place, and the young liberals and democrats of that epoch decided to hold a meeting in the largest theatre of the capital. On that occasion Castelar delivered his maiden speech, which at once placed him in the van of the advanced politicians of the reign of Queen Isabella. From that moment he took an active part in politics, radical journalism, literary and historical pursuits. Castelar was compromised in the first rising of June 1866, which was concerted by Marshal Prim, and crushed, after much bloodshed, in the streets by Marshals O’Donnell and Serrano. A court-martial condemned him in contumaciam to death by “garote vil,” and he had to hide in the house of a friend until he escaped to France. There he lived two years until the successful revolution of 1868 allowed him to return and enter the Cortes for the first time—as deputy for Saragossa. At the same time he resumed the professorship of history at the Madrid university. Castelar soon became famous by his rhetorical speeches in the Constituent Cortes of 1869, where he led the republican minority in advocating a federal republic as the logical outcome of the recent revolution. He thus gave much trouble to men like Serrano, Topete and Prim, who had never harboured the idea of drifting into advanced democracy, and who had each his own scheme for re-establishing the monarchy with certain constitutional restrictions. Hence arose Castelar’s constant and vigorous criticisms of the successive plans mooted to place a Hohenzollern, a Portuguese, the duke of Montpensier, Espartero and finally Amadeus of Savoy on the throne. He attacked with relentless vigour the short-lived monarchy of Amadeus, and contributed to its downfall.

The abdication of Amadeus led to the proclamation of the federal republic. The senate and congress, very largely composed of monarchists, permitted themselves to be dragged along into democracy by the republican minority headed by Salmeron, Figueras, Pi y Margall and Castelar. The short-lived federal republic from the 11th of February 1873 to the 3rd of January 1874 was the culminating point of the career of Castelar, and his conduct during those eleven months was much praised by the wiser portion of his fellow-countrymen, though it alienated from him the sympathies of the majority of his quondam friends in the republican ranks.

Before the revolution of 1868, Castelar had begun to dissent from the doctrines of the more advanced republicans, and particularly as to the means to be employed for their success. He abhorred bloodshed, he disliked mob rule, he did not approve of military pronunciamientos. His idea would have been a parliamentary republic on the American lines, with some traits of the Swiss constitution to keep in touch with the regionalist and provincialist inclinations of many parts of the peninsula. He would have placed at the head of his commonwealth a president and Cortes freely elected by the people, ruling the country in a liberal spirit and with due respect for conservative principles, religious traditions and national unity. Such a statesman was sure to clash with the doctrinaires, like Salmeron, who wanted to imitate French methods; with Pi y Margall, who wanted a federal republic after purely Spanish ideas of decentralization; and above all with the intransigent and gloomy fanatics who became the leaders of the cantonal insurrections at Cadiz, Seville, Valencia, Malaga and Cartagena in 1873.

At first Castelar did his best to work with the other republican members of the first government of the federal republic. He accepted the post of minister for foreign affairs. He even went so far as to side with his colleagues, when serious difficulties arose between the new government and the president of the Cortes, Señor Martos, who was backed by a very imposing commission composed of the most influential conservative members of the last parliament of the Savoyard king, which had