Annie Besant and Miss Noble [Sister Nivedita], and the American, Colonel Olcott.  Which side of that glaring incongruity is to give way—­brahman and caste ideas, or the buttressing of caste ideas by outcastes, Feringees, like Mrs. Besant?  It would be interesting to hear an orthodox brahman upon Mrs. Besant’s claim to have had a previous Hindu existence as a Sanscrit pandit.  What sin did the pandit commit, would be his natural reflection, that he was born again a Feringee, and a woman?

[Sidenote:  Unpardonable offences.]

But the offence of the fifth sin, marrying below one’s caste, or the marriage of widows, seems as rank as ever.  Upon these points, rather, the force of caste seems concentrating.  The marriage of widows will be considered when we come to discuss the social inferiority of woman in India.  To marry within one’s caste promises to be the most persistent of all the caste ideas.  The official observation is that “whatever may have been the origin and the earlier developments of caste, this prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth now as its essential and most prominent characteristic.  The feeling against such unions is deeply engrained.”  And again, a second pronouncement on caste:  “The regulations regarding food and drink are comparatively fluid and transitory, while those relating to marriage are remarkably stable and absolute."[16] The pro-Hindu lady, already referred to, also agrees.  “Of hereditary caste,” she says, “the essential characteristic is the refusal of intermarriage."[17] Even Indian Christians are reluctant to marry below their old caste, and value a matrimonial alliance with a higher.  To that residuum of caste, when it becomes the residuum, one could not object.  The Aryan purity of the stock may be a fiction, as authorities declare it to be in the great majority of castes and in by far the greater part of India; but given the belief in the purity of blood, the desire to preserve it is a natural desire.  If one may prophesy, then, regarding the fate of the caste system under the prevailing modern influences, castes will survive longest simply as a number of in-marrying social groups.  To that hard core the caste idea is being visibly worn down.

[Sidenote:  Support of caste by British authorities.]

With strange obliviousness surely, the British officials are lending support to caste ideas in various ways, while many of the best minds in India are groaning under the tyranny.  The compilers of the Report of the Census of India for 1901, gentlemen to whom every student of India is deeply indebted, in their enumeration of castes, give the imprimatur of government to such Cimmerian notions as that the touch of certain low castes is defiling to the higher.  The writer and condoner of the following paragraph surely need a lengthy furlough to Britain or the States.  We read that “the table of social precedence attached to the Cochin Report shows that while a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher caste only by