voluntarily assume such a condition for self-righteous and self-glorifying ends. Such men can and will do, for such reasons, what other men have not nerve enough to adventure merely in obedience to the theoretic rules of their order.
The Brahmins would fain be regarded as the learned class of India. Of course there was a time when, in the earlier ages of the world, they were so, as compared to men in other nations. No scholar can doubt this for a moment. But the world and education are no longer what they once were; both have advanced amazingly, while the Brahmin has not only stood still, but he has retrograded. The ruins of India's colleges, observatories, and scientific instruments, especially in Benares, (once “the eye of Hindustan,”) convince the traveler too painfully of this fact. Even there, in that renowned city, there is not a single public building devoted to, or containing, the treasures of India's arts, sciences, or literature; no paintings, sculptures, or libraries; no colleges of learning, no museums of her curiosities; no monuments of her great men; only beastly idolatry, filthy fakirs, shrines of vileness without number, and festivals of saturnalian license, all sustained and illustrated by a selfish and ignorant Brahminhood.
Their learning is in the past, and little remains save their great Epics and the magnificent dead Language in which they were written. Their chronology is a wild and exaggerated falsehood, their geography and astronomy are subjects of ridicule to every schoolboy, their astrology (to which they are specially devoted) a humbug for deluding their countrymen; they had no true history till foreigners wrote it for them, and could not even read the Pali on their own public monuments till such Englishmen as Princeps and Tytler deciphered it. Native education to-day owes more to Macaulay, Dr. Duff, and Trevelyan, than to all the Brahmins of India for the past five hundred years. Every improvement introduced, and every mitigation of the miseries in the lot of woman, and of the lower and suffering classes, has been introduced against their will and without their aid as a class. They feel, they know, that their system is more or less effete; that they are being left
