Page:A History of the Brahmo Samaj.djvu/33

io HISTORY OF THE BRAHMO SAMAJ adversaries of Ram Mohun Roy that it was an unpardonable breach of social decorum on the part of the most virtuous of Sudras to sit on the same bench or carpet with a Brahmin. The conventional usages of society paid an external homage, almost bordering on worship, to the repre- sentatives of the priestly class who were ignorant and unspiritual to a degree. There was living in Calcutta in those days a Sudra spice-seller who had collected the dust from the feet of a hundred thousand Brahmins to wear it as a remedy for an attack of leprosy, and he was a type of his people. The rules of caste made it sinful for the different castes to inter-marry or dine with one another. The weight of social opinion pressed heavily on the lower classes, who aspired to nothing higher or nobler than common menial service or brutalis- ing labour unredeemed by a single ray of intellec- tual light. The poverty and degradation of the masses were frightful. Centuries of ignorance and political slavery had reduced them to the condition of children, and, like children, they revelled in childish things. Even in religion, they believed in and practised puerile things that were unworthy of rational beings.

But no class were greater sufferers from the social evils of the time than the women of Bengal. A few centuries ago a certain Hindu ruler of