or the performance of certain sacrifices. Again, caste implies breeding, only relatively. Indeed, even the lowest person in the scale of life will talk of his caste. “I am of the caste of the sweeper,” he will say quite proudly; and he has further been known to say: “I am of the caste of—the Outcast”; because he knows of some one who will do what is tabooed even to him. Caste—that is—denotes a man’s place on the ladder of life, but not of necessity his place on any one rung rather than another. In this sense, it is a mere label.
Further, we must remember that with Caste as a rule—nascitur non fit. There have been known people who used a semblance of tribal name to climb into a caste above their own; or again, take the “Eaters-in-relief-kitchens,” a caste in Orissa made, we are told, of those who lost their original caste by accepting relief in famine time; and there are at our doors others, who by persistent self-restraint and imitation of the customs of a higher caste pass by courtesy, for such; but these do not deceive the elect into intermarriage. A man may buy himself salvation, a higher place in the world to come by his spiritual re-genesis. There is
