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IKTRODtJCTION.
XX 111
landlord from driving them off his estate by excessive extortion, and they are usually to be found in what is, for their position and unambitious wants, a state of comparative affluence. Though war is not their trade, they are not destitute of spirit, and are capable of being converted into good soldiers. The other numerous subdivisions, of which the remaining three millions of pure Hindus are made up, it is unnecessary to deal with in detail. If the Supreme Being made the Kahar with the distinct purpose of catching fish and carrying his betters on his shoulders ; the Gareria to tend sheep ; the Barhai, the Lobar, the Kumhar to work in wood, iron, and clay the Teli for oil, and the Luniya for salt ; the Halwai to make sweetmeats for the Hindu, and the Nao to shave his beard, those purposes have been very largely lost sight of, for, though each caste retains the monopoly of the labour which was its proper destiny, it also very largely supplements that means of subsistence by tilling the soil. Of the lowest stratum of the whole society many of the divisions are certainly, and all probably, derived from the old aboriginal stocks who lived in the country before the Aryan colonization. Some of them, such as the Pasis, who number nearly 700,000, command a certain amount of consideration, were valued formerly as soldiers, and still furnish the greater Others, and particularly the Bhars and part of the rural police. the Tharus, cling in small self-sufficing groups to the skirts of the jungle and the hills, and hold aloof from the rest of the community. Nats and Kanjars live in the same state of isolation, and wander over the face of the country with their small movable villages of matting and leaf-screens and those are most happy who escaped being assigned any distinct functions The lowest depth of misery and in the Hindu caste system. and Chamars, the weavers Koris the degradation is reached by Many of these in the northern rest. and leather-cutters, to the having hardly ever the spirit slaves, districts are actually bond offered by our courts, and to avail themselves of the remedy generation to generation as the descend with their children from plough the for the Brahhold value of an old purchase. They pride of caste forbids him to man or Chhattri master, whose unclean than themselves, less in touch it, and live with the pigs, village. of the rest Always on separate quarters apart from the the verge of starvation, their lean, black, and ill-formed figures, their stupid faces, and their repulsively filthy habits reflect the wretched destiny which condemns them to be lower than the beast among their fellow-men, and yet that they are far from incapable of improvement is proved hy the active and useful
