Page:An Essay On Hinduism.pdf/165

as become hereditary in the population, being a relic of the old tribal culture.

2. Linguistic distinctions also keep the people apart, and become factors of disintegration.

3. Distinctions in manners and fashions, distinctions in the articles of consumption, and also other cultural distinctions are injurious to society, when they are due to the old tribal lines and therefore hereditary.

Some people appear to believe that the present multiplicity of castes and complexity of the system are a result of original good and simple conditions becoming worse. In fact, such a view has been held both by learned and ignorant. This is the view which pervades the writings of European scholars as well as those of Hindus. Christian missionaries have turned this belief to account by ascribing the growth of evils to Brahmanism, and have tried to make that wrong supposition an argument in favour of the propaganda of their own religion. To a person endowed with better knowledge of facts, and with ability to formulate some laws connecting and explaining those facts, the history of the past has an entirely different meaning. He would plainly see that the present conditions should not be looked upon as a degeneration of the good conditions of the former times, but only as a result of insufficient integration or insufficient unity of the groups that were brought into contact. Hindu society, that is, all people of India (excepting those who have joined foreign creeds and thus have become members of foreign society), disunited and divided into castes as they may seem, are far better united to-day than ever before. There have been a number of divisions of later growth, and some more divisions are taking place even to-day, but all these can be interpreted as by-products, and