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1824 that "caste divisions are as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment." The late Svāmī Vivekānanda, the brilliant representative of Hinduism at the "Parliament of Religions," held in Chicago in connection with the Universal Exposition in 1893, passed the last years of his too short life (he died in 1902) in a suburb of Calcutta, doing philanthropic work, denouncing caste and the outcasting of those who had crossed the ocean, and recommending the Hindus to take to the eating of meat. The voices of other reformers are lifting. Especially the two great native religious reform associations, the Brāhma Samāj, or Theistic Association of Bengal, and the Ārya Samāj, or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Panjab, different as are their aims in other respects, are marshalled on the side of opposition to caste, as an anachronism, anomaly, and bar to social and national progress.

The dreadful institution of Suttee, or widow-burning abolished in 1829, under the administration of Lord William Bentinck, by decree of government; the car of Juggernaut; the sect of the Thugs; and the practice of self-hypnosis to the point of prolonged trance or apparent death, are evidences of the frenzying quality of Hindu religion, and the way it has of overshadowing individual sanity and public interest. There has been, and there still is, too much