[Footnote 2:  Outline of History, H.G.  Wells.  Vol.  I, pp. 146-8.]

[Footnote 3:  Outline of History, H.G.  Wells, Vol.  I, pp. 196-199.]

[Footnote 4:  Outline of History, H.G.  Wells, Vol.  I, pp. 189-190.]

[Footnote 5:  Ancient Times, Breasted, pp. 658-9.]

[Footnote 6:  Code of Manu, Book 9, quoted Lux Christi, Mason, p. 14.]

[Footnote 7:  India through the Ages, Florence Annie Steele, Routledge, pp. 95-104, 116-18.]

[Footnote 8:  India through the Ages, pp. 190-200]

CHAPTER TWO

AT SCHOOL

Hindu or Christian.

In the last chapter we have spoken of the Hindu girl as yet untouched by Christianity, save as such influence may have filtered through into the general life of the nation.  We have had vague glimpses of her social inheritance, with its traditions of an ancient and honorable estate of womanhood; of the limitations of her life to-day; of her half-formed aspirations for the future.

Of education as such nothing has been said.  As we turn now from home to school life, we shall turn also from the Hindu community to the Christian.  This does not mean that none but Christian girls go to school.  In all the larger and more advanced cities and in some towns you will find Government schools for Hindu girls as well as those carried on by private enterprise, some of them of great efficiency.  Yet this deliberate turning to the school life of the Christian community is not so arbitrary as it seems.

In the first place, the proportion of literacy among Christian women is far higher than among the Hindu and Muhammadan communities.  Again, because a large proportion of Christians have come from the depressed classes, the “submerged tenth,” ground for uncounted centuries under the heel of the caste system, their education is also a study in social uplift, one of the biggest sociological laboratory experiments to be found anywhere on earth.  And, lastly, it is through Christian schools that the girls and women of America have reached out hands across the sea and gripped their sisters of the East.

The School under the Palm Trees.

“And the dawn comes up like thunder Outer China ’cross the Bay.”  Far from China and far inland from the Bay is this South Indian village, but the dawn flashes up with the same amazing swiftness.  Life’s daily resurrection proceeds rapidly in the Village of the Seven Palms.  Flocks of crows are swarming in from their roosting place in the palmyra jungle beside the dry sand river; the cattle are strolling out from behind various enclosures where they share the family shelter; all around is the whirr of bird and insect as the teeming life of the tropics wakes to greet “my lord Sun.”

Under the thatch of each mud-walled hovel of the outcaste village there is the same stir of the returning day.  Sheeted corpses stretched on the floor suddenly come to life and the babel of village gossip begins.