The word which comes nearest to caste in Sanskrit is “Varna” (colour), and in the early days of the Aryan invasion of India there were only two classes: the white conquerors and the “Dasyu,” or enemies, who were black, and, as the conquered people, looked down upon. What we call caste, then, which was originally a question of skin, had already in the Buddha’s time, five centuries before our era, become far more complicated than that. Ethnologically, the division between the white man and the black, the Arya and the Dasyu, the conqueror and the conquered, was as sharp as ever. But whereas the dark man remained as he was—the lowest of the castes—political reasons and the lust of power had subdivided the conquering race into three distinct classes, and, as I have said above, it was upon that subdivision that the Brahmans laid the “precious corner-stone” of their priestly tyranny. When the glorious young prince, a Kshatriya and the heir to the throne, the incomparable scholar and athlete, the man whom men envied and women loved, cast aside his royal rank and went forth into the wilderness, taking upon himself all the burthens and privations of the poorest and meanest, in order that for them he might work, striving for the good of all mankind without distinction of colour or race, the Brahmans were forced to see in him a hostile champion, armed to attack their stronghold. He went further than this: he denied the divine authority of the Veda, without which the whole structure of Brahmanism crumbles to dust, and so he finally was branded as a heretic.