Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/87

 ence fossilised every profession into a caste, that encyclopaedic organisation—the Hindu Society, with its round-robin of castes—could accommodate professional lewdness with a plea and a place, just as it furnished the professional thief with a guide-book and a presiding-genius. What comes by birth-right need not be earned by accomplishments; and "the general notion," as the Census Commissioner observes, "of their employment (at present) is that expressed in one of the schedules from a town in the north as singing and enjoying sensual pleasures!" Such have been the high origin and the low fall of a most unfortunate section of mother India's daughters; who (in the words of Prof. Sir W. Monier Williams) were once "patterns of piety and propriety," but are now "slaves to the licentious passions of the profligate." Is not society bound to help them up to a pure course of life? "How is it," asks that eminent temperance-preacher and noble friend of India, the Rev. T. Evans, "that the temple