Another of the principal complaints brought against caste is the fact that it has a tendency to keep one caste fixed below another; but even here we shall find some compensating considerations which are of great value.  For, if caste in this respect has a keeping-down tendency, it has also a levelling one.  It may keep one order above another, but within the limits of that caste order it has a levelling tendency, and in one respect the poorest of each class feel themselves on a level with the richest.  Nor is a poor man of good caste made to experience the bitter sense of degradation which falls to the lot of a gentleman who, from poverty and misfortune, has fallen out of his original class into another far below him.  The Indian may descend into the most humble spheres, but if he attends to the regulations of his caste he is always a member of it, and his feelings of self-respect are maintained by the fact that, however poor, it is quite possible that his daughter may be married by a man of wealth and position.  But in this country, where a man has gone a long way down the hill, when he has descended—­as many gentlemen especially do in our colonies—­into the lower ranks of life, he loses all connection with people who are of his own rank by birth.  I do not, of course, mean to allege that this want of caste feeling is to be lamented with us, but I am merely stating facts which seem to me to show the number of ways in which this much-reviled caste system can be proved to have compensating advantages which tend to counterbalance the drawbacks of the situation.

Before concluding this chapter, it may be useful to make a few remarks as to the way in which caste laws act as regards the social condition of people who have by wealth raised themselves above the general average of their order; and I shall at the same time notice a few instances that have fallen within my observation as to the way in which caste laws of the most stringent nature are occasionally set aside by universal consent.

The old idea we entertained of caste was that, to use the words of Tennent, “each class is stationed between certain walls of separation, which are impassable by the purest virtue or the most conspicuous merit;” or that, to come to more recent times, and to use the words of the late Mr. Wilson, in his speech before leaving for India, “in India you see people tied down by caste, and, whatever their talents or exertions may be, they cannot rise.”  Now the history of many families that have risen to eminence entirely belies this assertion, and the evidences are so numerous that I need not weary the reader by quoting them.  But one instance I may perhaps mention, as the circumstances seem to me somewhat extraordinary, and a reference to them here may induce some one to make more particular inquiries in the locality alluded to.  Buchanan notices that “in Bhagulpore there were certain families who, from having adopted a pure life, had within the memory of man risen from