And here, before bringing this chapter to a close, I find it impossible to refrain from again alluding to the numerous instances where caste has been made the common scapegoat of every Indian difficulty. What is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of that? Why won't the natives do this, and why won't they do that? Caste--and caste is the common refuge; and with most of our countrymen who have tried to introduce new customs or a new religion, caste has ever been a handy and convenient peg on which to hang any difficulties they may meet with, or any problem they cannot readily solve. In short, it is hard to say what difficulty has not been disposed of in this fashion. Let us glance at two instances to illustrate my meaning. For the first instance, I cannot select, perhaps, a better example than that afforded by the Rev. G. U. Pope, in the notes he has made when editing a second edition of the valuable work of the Abbé Dubois. And, in alluding to these footnotes, it is impossible to repress some feeling of annoyance that the valuable work of the Abbé should, in an evil hour, have fallen into the hands of a writer who has thought fit often, in a few brief and contemptuous words, summarily to dismiss and overrule those conclusions which were the result of a life spent on more intimate terms with natives than any I have ever been able to hear of. And Mr. Pope's statements are the more calculated to impose on the general reader, as he speaks of having had "more than twenty years of a somewhat intimate intercourse with the Hindoos;" the fact being that he spent the greater part (in fact, all but a few years, as far as I have been able to ascertain) as head of the Grammar School on the Nilgiri Hills, where he had no more opportunity of having any intercourse with natives than a Hindoo would have of gaining experience of the natives of England, were he to take up his residence on the Grampians, and interchange a few words occasionally with the shepherds of those mountains. But as to what caste has done. "Caste," says Mr. Pope, "has prevented the Hindoos from availing themselves of the opportunities afforded them of acquiring the sciences, arts, and civilization of nations with whom they have come in contact." Caste, "the great petrifier," we are again told, is the real cause of the stagnation that everywhere abounds. Caste, again, "upholds immutable distinctions by arbitrary and absurd laws, which are enforced by irresponsible authority, and maintains a standard of right and wrong entirely independent of the essential principles of moral science;" and, in order that everything may be included at one blow, we are finally told, in a note appended to the remarks of the Abbé on the moral and social advantages of caste, that "caste, and its offspring custom, are among the hindrances to all good in India."