There are scores of other Tirupatis in which the Brahman still reigns supreme by virtue of his _quasi_-sacerdotal caste. But in the public life of Southern India, as British rule has moulded it, he has owed a pre-eminence only recently disputed to a monopoly of Western education in modern times almost as complete as the monopoly which he enjoyed of Hindu learning and culture before the advent of the British. As soon as he saw that the British _Raj_ threatened no curtailment of his hereditary supremacy in the religious and social world of Hinduism, he was quick to profit by all the material advantages which the country as a whole derived from a new era of public security and peace. He realised at once that Western education might open up for him opportunities of making himself almost as indispensable, if on a somewhat humbler scale, to the alien rulers of India as he had formerly made himself to the indigenous rulers in the land. Thus the Brahmans acquired from the first a virtual monopoly of all the subordinate public services in the Madras Presidency and, as time went on, of all the higher posts gradually thrown open to Indians. They crowded also into all the new liberal professions fostered by Western education, and, above all, into the legal profession for which they showed, as most Indians do, a very special aptitude. But, like all monopolists, they were tempted to abuse their monopoly, the more so as they regarded it merely as a legitimate adaptation to the new conditions imported by British rule of the ancient privileges always vested in their caste. They resented any attempt on the part of Hindus belonging to inferior castes to follow in their footsteps along the new paths of Western learning and to qualify for a share of employment in the public services, for which under the British dispensation all Indians are entitled to compete on equal terms irrespective of all caste discriminations. The non-Brahmans were slow to start, and when they did start, they had to contend with the jealous opposition of the Brahmans, who combined, as Hindu castes know how to combine, against unwelcome intruders into a profitable field of which they had secured early possession. When the Public Services Commission was in Madras eight years ago, we heard many bitter complaints from non-Brahmans that, whenever one of them did succeed in getting an appointment under Government, the Brahmans with whom or under whom he had to work would at once unite to drive him out, either by making his life intolerable or by turning against him the European superior to whose ear they had easy access. For it is one of the weaknesses of an alien bureaucracy that, in regard to routine work at least, its weaker members are apt to be far too much in the hands of their native assistants. The Brahmans later on formed the bulk of the new Western-educated and "politically-minded" class, and the Madrasee Brahmans played a considerable part in the Indian National Congress