If we look at the signs of moral and spiritual progress during the last 40 years, the results of the mission work have been most encouraging.  It is quite true that naturally the Panchamas are poor, dirty, ignorant, and, as a consequence of many centuries of oppression, peculiarly addicted to the more mean and servile vices.  But the most hopeful element in their case is that they are conscious of their degradation and eager to escape from it.  As a consequence, when formed into congregations under the care of earnest and capable teachers, they make marked progress materially, intellectually, and morally.  Their gross ignorance disappears; they become cleaner and more decent in their persons and homes; they give up cattle poisoning and grain stealing, two crimes particularly associated with their class; they abstain from the practice of infant marriage and concubinage, to which almost all classes of Hindu society are addicted; they lose much of the old servile spirit which led them to grovel at the feet of their social superiors, and they acquire more sense of the rights and dignity which belong to them as men.  Where they are able to escape their surroundings they prove themselves in no way inferior, either in mental or in moral character, to the best of their fellow-countrymen.  Especially is this the case in the Mission Boarding Schools, where the change wrought is a moral miracle.  In many schools and colleges Christian lads of Panchama origin are holding their own with, and in not a few cases are actually outstripping, their Brahman competitors.
 ...  In one district the Hindus themselves
bore striking testimony to the effect of Christian teaching on the pariahs, “Before they became Christians,” one of them said, “we had always to lock up our storehouses, and were always having things stolen.  But now all that is changed, We can leave our houses open and never lose anything.”

In the heyday of the Hindu Social Reform Movement, before it was checked by the inrush of political agitation, the question of the elevation of the depressed castes was often and earnestly discussed by progressive Hindus themselves, but it is only recently that it has again been taken up seriously by some of the Hindu leaders, and notably by Mr. Gokhale.  One of the utterances that has produced the greatest impression in Hindu circles is a speech made last year by the Gaekwar of Baroda, a Hindu Prince who not only professes advanced Liberal views, but whose heart naturally goes out to the depressed castes, as the fortunes of his own house were made in the turmoil of the eighteenth century by a Mahratta of humble extraction, if not actually of low-caste origin.  His Highness does not attempt to minimize the evils of the system.