almost entirely by ministering, at more or less extortionate rates, to the material and spiritual needs of pilgrims, averaging about a thousand a day in ordinary times and scores of thousands at the special festival seasons, on their way to and from the sacred hill-top.  There are whole streets of lodgings for their use, consisting chiefly of small bare cubicles, and rows of shops at which they can purchase their simple vegetarian food and innumerable religious trifles as mementoes of their pilgrimage.  When I approached Tirupati, early in the morning, a few groups of pilgrims were already on their way to the hill-sanctuaries and peasants were starting work on the temple lands outside the town.  Sacred monkeys gambolled about the trees and still more sacred cows had begun to exercise their daily privilege of browsing for food wherever their fancy leads them, even amongst the vegetables exposed for sale in the public market-places.  The Brahmans themselves were still engaged in performing their elaborate morning devotions and ablutions, but the members of their household had already swept the approach to their low, one-storied, flat-roofed houses and stencilled on the threshold with white liquid chalk the geomantic patterns, finished off with scattered marigolds, which keep away the evil spirits.  The Brahman quarters surround the temples, of which of course only the outer courtyards are accessible to other than high-caste Hindus.  The low-caste “untouchables,” who do the menial work of the town, live strictly segregated in their own quarter, which consists only of mud huts and even flimsier shelters of platted palm-leaves and bamboos.  The whole town wore an air of leisured superiority as if conscious that there can be no need for special effort when the gods bring pilgrims to provide for the wants of its “twice-born” inhabitants.

There are scores of other Tirupatis in which the Brahman still reigns supreme by virtue of his quasi-sacerdotal caste.  But in the public life of Southern India, as British rule has moulded it, he has owed a pre-eminence only recently disputed to a monopoly of Western education in modern times almost as complete as the monopoly which he enjoyed of Hindu learning and culture before the advent of the British.  As soon as he saw that the British Raj threatened no curtailment of his hereditary supremacy in the religious and social world of Hinduism, he was quick to profit by all the material advantages which the country as a whole derived from a new era of public security and peace.  He realised at once that Western education might open up for him opportunities of making himself almost as indispensable, if on a somewhat humbler scale, to the alien rulers of India as he had formerly made himself to the indigenous rulers in the land.  Thus the Brahmans acquired from the first a virtual monopoly of all the subordinate public services in the Madras Presidency and, as time went on, of all the higher posts gradually thrown open to Indians.