even to the lowest.  And I may also mention here that I have slept in the veranda of a farmer’s house, in which members of the family slept close to some of my people, who were of the toddy-drawer caste above alluded to, and who, I am sure, were quite as welcome as members of their own caste would have been.  But as regards all these matters concerning the inner life of the people, we know nothing, unless we actually live amongst them, and sleep in their houses, and, in fact, see the people at home; and as it is extremely difficult to find anyone who has done anything of the kind, it naturally follows that it is almost impossible to find anything like reliable sources of information regarding native habits throughout India.  You may, it is true, stuff your very soul with information of some sort or other, if you go about asking questions, but if you do you will find yourself much in the same predicament that Johnson found himself in his tour to the Hebrides; and the reader may recollect that the worthy doctor very soon found that nothing could be more vague, unsatisfactory, and uncertain than the answers of an unsophisticated simple people, who were not much in the habit of being asked questions of any sort.  However, the reader may, in the meantime, reasonably infer that the conduct of the people in the rural districts of India, and situated under similar circumstances, would not materially differ, as regards matters of caste, from the practice as existing in Manjarabad.  And should that turn out to be the case, it is plain that those notions, as regards the practice of caste, which have been so industriously circulated in England, are almost entirely false.

I have said that I proposed inquiring, further, whether there are not some compensating advantages in this division of the people into castes which tend, in a great measure, to neutralize the prejudicial effects that arise from people’s sympathies and feelings being more or less confined to members of their own caste, instead of being distributed over the human race considered as a whole.  Now, it is perfectly true that the tendency of caste is to weaken the claim that humanity in general has on an individual; but though the claim of society in general is weakened, it must be remembered that the claims of each caste on the members of it are strengthened.  And though this fact may militate against an enlarged and Christian philanthropy, the aggregate force of claims will be found to amount to a much larger sum than if one part of a society had no more claim on a man than another.  A man of one caste would not, for instance, perhaps feel that a man of another caste had much claim on him; but he would distinctly and strongly feel that a member of his own caste had.  And every caste acting on the same principle of supporting and helping its members, I am convinced that the aggregate force of assistance rendered must be greater than in a country where there is little or no caste principle.