CHAPTER I 9
so to say, and its absence was supplied by a number of poetical works, composed during the previous two or three centuries, many of which, however, were highly demoralising in their teachings. The inner life of society was still more deplorable. With the decay of national life, frightful social evils, that pressed hard on the life of almost all classes, had sprung up ; the rules of caste, though partly slackened by the influence of Mahomedan education and also by the altered circumstances of social life, consequent upon the establishment of British rule, were still very stringent. Almost all the agencies that in subsequent times have so largely contributed to partially break down the barriers of ages, such agencies, for instance, as a common western education, which has opened up a new channel of communication, the uniformity of circumstances of political life that is drawing closer the bonds of sympathy between different parts of the country, cheap postage, which carries with wonderful rapidity and regularity the thoughts of one province to another, a net-work of railways, that takes no account of caste, but rather helps in breaking it down by promoting the intercourse of the races, were not then in existence. Men were exclusive, unsympathetic and jealous of their class privileges, so much so that it was seriously argued by the orthodox
