to a mere skeleton by the oppression of alien rulers during hundreds of years, still preserves her vitality, it is because the Brahmans have never relaxed in their devotion to her.  She has witnessed political and social revolutions.  Famines and pestilence have shorn her of her splendour.  But the Brahmans have stood by her through all the vicissitudes of fortune.  It is they who raised her to the highest pinnacle of glory, and it is they whose ministrations still keep up the drooping spirits of her children.”

The Brahmans are the sacerdotal caste of India.  They are at the same time the proudest and the closest aristocracy that the world has ever seen, for they form not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of divine origin.  Of the Brahman it may be said as of no other privileged mortal except perhaps the Levite of the Old Testament:  Nascitur non fit.  No king, however powerful, can make or unmake a Brahman, no genius, however transcendent, no services, however conspicuous, no virtues, however pre-eminent, can avail to raise a Hindu from a lower caste to the Brahman’s estate.  In early times the caste laws must have been less rigid, for otherwise there would only be Aryan Brahmans, whereas in the South of India there are many Brahmans of obviously Dravidian stock.  But to-day not even the Brahmans themselves can raise to their own equal one who is not born of their caste, though by the exercise of the castely authority they can in specific cases outcaste a fellow-Brahman who has offended against the immutable laws of caste, and, except for minor transgressions which allow of atonement and reinstatement, when once outcasted he and his descendants cease for ever to be Brahmans.  The Brahmans might be at a loss to make good their claim that they date back to the remote ages of the Vedas.  But a good deal more than two thousand years have passed since they constituted themselves the only authorized intermediaries between mankind and the gods.  In them became vested the monopoly of the ancient language in which all religious rites are performed, and with a monopoly of the knowledge of Sanskrit they retained a monopoly of learning long after Sanskrit itself had become a dead language.  Like the priests who wielded a Latin pen in the Middle Ages in Europe, they sat as advisers and conscience-keepers in the councils of every Hindu ruler.  To the present day they alone can expound the Hindu scriptures, they alone can approach the gods in their temples, they alone can minister to the spiritual needs of such of the lower castes as are credited with sufficient human dignity to be in any way worthy of their ministrations.