In the first place, they have the potent example of a host of western lives among them. This body of white people, from the far-off lands, is distributed all over India. They are the rulers of the land. A Brahman may deem their touch pollution. But that same Brahman is often glad to undergo that ceremonial taint if thereby he can only enjoy the white man's cultured society. He beholds in these people from the West a freedom from irksome caste restraints. He notices conjugal relations among them, such as furnish richest home blessings. Their social relations are untrammelled and abound in convivial privileges such as are denied to Hindu society. All this creates in him an uneasiness. If he is a man of culture and resides in some city of importance, he will wish to meet English friends upon lines of social equality; but this he will find to be impossible apart from his defiance of caste rules; for, to the man of the West, the common cup and the festal board are the essential conditions of true friendship and intimacy. Thus the life of the ruling race in India is a constant rebuke to the narrowness of caste and a source of discontent to the caste-ridden people, because it reveals to them a different and a better way of living. Nor is it merely this new type of non-caste western life that appeals to them. The modern civilization of the West, with its humanizing laws, its exaltation of the individual, its religious freedom, its new and broadening education and culture, its equal rights to every man, its many institutions through every one of which there breathes the Anglo-Saxon's blessed love of liberty, the home with its sanctified affection and its glorified womanhood, philanthropy which carries with an even hand its sweet services to the high and the low--to Pariah as to the Brahman,--all these institutions and influences are at work like a mighty leaven in the mind and heart of India. And the people cannot be blind to this influence; and it is gradually transforming their ideals and ambition. Connected with these more subtle western civilizing agencies are found the material agencies which are the dread foes of caste exclusion. The chief among these is the railroad, the thirty thousand miles of which are so many tongues to proclaim the doom of past narrowness. The Brahman, with all his mean pride, cannot forego the wonderful conveniences of the "iron road and the fire-carriage"; but in order to avail himself of them, he must sit an hour at a time cheek by jowl with a low-caste--it may be a Pariah--fellow-passenger. The railroad gnaws at the vitals of caste life and convictions.