The same principles which impel us to ask for political Justice for ourselves should actuate us to show social justice to each other....  By the sincerity of our efforts to uplift the depressed classes we shall be judged fit to achieve the objects of our national desire....  The system which divides us into innumerable castes claiming to rise by minutely graduated steps from the pariah to the Brahman is a whole tissue of injustice, splitting men equal by nature into divisions high and low, based not on the natural standard of personal qualities but on accidents of birth.  The eternal struggle between caste and caste for social superiority has become a constant source of ill-feeling....  Want of education is practically universal amongst the depressed classes, but this cannot have been the cause of their fall, for many of the so-called higher classes in India share in the general ignorance.  Unlike them, however, they are unable to attend the ordinary schools owing to the idea that it is pollution to touch them.  To do so is to commit a sin offensive alike to religion and to conventional morality.  Of professions as a means of livelihood these depressed classes have a very small choice.  Here, too, the supposed pollution of their touch comes in their way.  On every hand we find that the peculiar difficulty from which they suffer, in addition to others that they share with other classes, is their “untouchableness.”

After a powerful argument against the theory of “untouchableness” and against priestly intolerance, the Gaekwar urges not only upon Hindus, but upon Government the duty of attacking in all earnestness this formidable problem.

A Government within easy reach of the latest thought, with unlimited moral and material resources, such as there is in India, should not remain content with simply asserting the equality of men under the common law and maintaining order, but must sympathetically see from time to time that the different sections of its subjects are provided with ample means of progress.  Many of the Indian States where they are at all alive to the true functions of government, owing to less elevating surroundings or out of nervousness, fear to strike out a new path and find it less troublesome to follow the policy of laisser faire and to walk in the footsteps of the highest Government in India, whose declared policy is to let the social and religious matters of the people alone except where questions of grave importance are involved.  When one-sixth of the people are in a chronically depressed and ignorant condition, no Government can afford to ignore the urgent necessity of doing what it can for their elevation.

Can the Government of India afford to disregard so remarkable an appeal?  The question is not merely a social and moral question, but also a political one.  Whilst some high-caste Hindus are beginning to recognize its urgency, the more prosperous of the