Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/39

Rh together with all his troops, elephants, horses, and chariots. In his wrath he could frame new worlds, with new gods and new mortals. A man who barely assaulted a Brahmin, with the intention of hurting him, would be whirled about for a century in the hell termed Tamasa. He who smote a Brahmin with only a blade of grass, would be born an inferior quadruped during twenty-one transmigrations. But he who should shed the blood of a Brahmin, save in battle, would be mangled by animals in his next birth for as many years as there were particles of dust rolled up by the blood shed. If a Sudra (a low-caste man) sat upon the same seat with a Brahmin, he was to be gashed in the part offending.”—Institutes of Menu, I, 94, etc.

Thus a body of men, supposed to number not more than a few hundred thousand, have held the two hundred millions of their fellow-countrymen for thirty centuries in the terrors of this sacerdotal legislation, enforcing its claims to the last limit of endurance, though at the fearful price of the utter ignorance, degradation, and slavery of their nation. The reader can well appreciate the indignant feelings with which this greedy, proud, and supercilious order of men contemplated the incoming of a Christian Government, which would make all men “equal before the law,” and the advent of a Religion whose great glory it is to vindicate the oppressed and “preach the Gospel to the poor.”

The Kshatriya caste (derived from Kshetra, land) and the Vaisyas (traders) had the privilege of the investiture with the sacred string; but to the Sudras there was to be no investiture, no sacrifice, and no Scriptures. They were condemned by this law to perpetual servitude. Yet this class, with the Outcasts, were necessarily the great majority of the nation, and those who might have been their instructors and guides, heartlessly took away the key of knowledge, made it a legal crime to “teach them how sin might be expiated,” and deliberately degraded them for time and eternity. The Vedas expressly state that the benefits of the Hindoo religion are open only to three of the four castes! The fourth-caste man could have no share in religion and hold no property. He was a