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fellow feel
With all my recollections of valued friends le behind me in India, whose features live in memory and whose portraits in some cases decorate my walls it is amazing to me to hear on my return to England that this good, easy going people, amiable and igno rant, tolerant and docile, accomodating and affec tionate, is, in the opinion of wise and good men, "enslaved by a custom which annihilates ing and eats out human sympathy, and makes one portion of the community slaves to the other." I could multiply quotations of this kind, but it is not my object to aggravate this difficulty, but rather to compose it. I cannot see, that caste is an evil of the kind and degree, which it is imagined by many good men to be. In an exaggerated and selfasserting from it would certainly be at evil
under a Hindu system of government of the stiff and intolerant forms of modern religious creeds, but tolerance has ever been of the essence of the Hindu system, and in British India the claws of caste have been cut by a strong and impartial government, and the social pressure of a population, made up of various elements which would not submit to oppression. I remark that in Europe classes lie in strata horizontally, and that in India the separation is by verticle fissures. I have known men of good caste and social position as gentlemen, who were not ashamed to have in their families near relations
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