In each and every Hindoo village or town which has retained its old form the children even to-day are able to read, write, and cipher. But wherever the village-system has been swept away by foreign and other influences there the village school has also disappeared with it. A trial by jury, called "punchayet," was also a part of the primitive system of self-government instituted by the early Brahmans: each party named two or more arbitrators, and the judge one; the jury could not in any case be composed of less than five persons, whence the name "punchayet"--five just ones. In difficult cases the influence of the heads and elders of the village was brought to bear upon the contending parties, and the administration of justice was so pure in those days that the saying "In the punchayet is God" became proverbial. Out of these marked mental and physical differences grew up the monstrous and extraordinary system of caste in India. Not that caste does not exist in some degree everywhere throughout the world. In the British Isles it is as fixed and absolute as a Medo-Persic law, and even among Americans a marked social inequality exists. Caste naturally sprang up with the first mingling of the conquering and conquered races on Indian soil. At first the distinctions of class and rank were no more marked than that of an English peasant and the lord of a domain, or that of the negro girl and her mistress in the United States to-day. But the proud, white-skinned Brahmans, in order to guard the purity of their own "blue blood," and to rivet their own ascendency, invented at length a distinct and most binding code of laws, and then claimed for them the divine authority of the Vèdas. Of the four great castes that we read so much about, three only were fixed--Brahmans, Kshatryas, and the Vaisyas. This last was the common Aryan people, and they were not separated from their superiors by any harsh distinctions. But the Sudras, "the threefold black men," among whom the Aryan population established themselves, all the non-Aryan races and tribes of the peninsula of Hindostan, were kept off by a wide gulf and the most galling marks of inferiority. The Sudra could not read the Vèdas nor join in their religious meetings. He could not cook their food, or even serve in their houses; he was unclean, gross, sensual, irreligious, and therefore an abomination to the noble white-faced Aryan.