classes more widely divorced, not only from the many popular dialects spoken in the province, but from that of ordinary conversation.  Literary Bengalee is not even an altogether indigenous growth.  It owes its birth mainly to the labours of English missionaries, like Carey, in the first half of the last century, assisted by the Pundits of Calcutta.  Yet it is upon this community of language that the Bengalees mainly found their claim to recognition as a “nation”; or, to put it in another form, their claim rests upon education as they understand it—­i.e., upon the high proportion of literacy that exists in Bengal as compared with most parts of India.  Education is unquestionably a power in Bengal.  It has not superseded caste, which in all essentials is still unbroken, but it has to some extent overshadowed it.

The Brahmans of Bengal have never within historical times been a politically dominant force.  They did not condescend to take office even in the remote days when there were Hindu Kings in Bengal, and still less under Mahomedan rule.  They were content to be learned in Sanscrit and in the Hindu Scriptures, and they left secular knowledge to the Kayasthas, or writer caste, with whom they preserved, notwithstanding certain rigid barriers, much more intimate relations than usually exist between different Hindu castes.  There is a tradition that the highest Brahman septs of Bengal are the descendants of five priests of special sanctity whom King Adisur of Eastern Bengal in the ninth century attracted to his Court from the holiest centres of Hinduism, and that the servants who accompanied them founded the septs to which precedence is still accorded amongst the Kayasthas of Bengal, and both have been at pains to preserve the purity of their descent by a most exclusive and complicated, and often unsavoury, system of matrimonial alliances known as Kulinism.  Hence in Bengal the Brahmans share their social primacy to an extent unknown in other parts of India with the Kayasthas, and also with another high caste, the Vaidhyas, who formerly monopolized the practice of Hindu medicine.  The nexus is education, and that nexus has been strengthened since the advent of British rule and of Western education.  When the educational enterprise of the early British missionaries was followed up, under the impulse of Dr. Duff, the greatest figure in the missionary annals of India, and of Ram Mohun Roy, the most learned and earnest of all reforming Brahmans, by the famous Government Minute of March 7, 1835, many distinguished members of all these three castes responded to the call and began to qualify for employment under Government and for the liberal professions that were opening out in the new India we were making.  They were first in the field, and, though other castes have followed suit, it is they who have practically monopolized the public offices, the Bar, the Press, and the teaching profession.  It was they who were the moving spirits