Note 165 — Chapter VIII

Caste is one of the most enlightened inventions of the civilized East. It supplies an admirable system of police, acts as practical conservatism, and leads to high excellence in the crafts, arts, and sciences, by breeding generation after generation, till an instinctive superiority is acquired. The Englishman exclaims, ‘What a shame it is, because my father is a tinker, that I am forbidden by the laws of the land to be prime minister;’ and he objects to caste because it ‘keeps the people down.’ He forgets, however, that he is talking, not of petty European kingdoms of twenty or thirty millions, but of some two hundred millions of human beings, and that each caste is quite numerous enough to form by itself a first-class nation.