“Know thyself” is the Heaven-descended injunction which ancient piety inscribed in letters of gold in the temple at Delphi.[117] The famous oracle is mute, but the divine injunction survives; nor is it alone. Saint Augustine impresses it in his own eloquent way, when he says, “Men go to admire the heights of mountains, and the great waves of the sea, and the widest flow of rivers, and the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, _and leave themselves behind_.”[118] Following the early mandate, thus seconded by the most persuasive of the Christian Fathers, man will consider his place in the universe and his relations to his brother man. Looking into his soul, he will there find the great irreversible Law of Right, universal for the nation as for himself, commanding to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and under the safeguard of this universal law I now place the rights of all mankind. It is little that I can do; but, taking counsel of my desires, I am not without hope of contributing something to that just judgment which shall blast the effrontery of Caste as doubly offensive, not only to the idea of a Republic, but to Human Nature itself. * * * * * Already you are prepared to condemn Caste, when you understand its real character. To this end, let me carry you to that ancient India, with its population of more than a hundred and eighty millions, where this artificial discrimination, born of impossible fable, was for ages the dominating institution of society,--being, in fact, what Slavery was in our Rebellion, the corner-stone of the whole structure. The Portuguese were the first of European nations to form establishments in India, and therefore through them was the civilized world first acquainted with its peculiar institutions. But I know no monument of their presence there, and no contribution from them to our knowledge of the country, so enduring as the word Caste, or, in the Portuguese language, _Casta_, by which they designated those rigid orders or ranks into which the people of India were divided. The term originally applied by them has been adopted in the other languages of Europe, where it signifies primarily the orders or ranks of India, but by natural extension any separate and fixed order of society. In the latter sense Caste is now constantly employed. The word is too modern, however, for our classical English literature, or for that most authentic record of our language, the Dictionary of Dr. Johnson, when it first saw the light in 1755.