Nevertheless, it had its noble features, and did good work for a time. The high advancement to which the Indo-European art, literature, painting, music, and architecture attained was due to the leadership of the Brahman civilization. It was an aristocracy to rule and educate the masses, which everywhere exhibited a uniform inferiority. But even with all the help of caste and the inflexible code of Manu to preserve them on every side, the proud white-faced Aryans did not long escape the deteriorating influences both of the climate in which they had settled and the debasing usages of the non-Aryan populations around them. The most degrading practice that sprang up in time on Indian soil was asceticism. The amount and the terrible nature of this self-imposed penance practised by the Hindoos exceed anything known in the world, and are almost inconceivable to any ordinary European, whose first instinct is self-preservation. Ablutions and commands of personal cleanliness, which formed a part of the code of Manu, have increased in number, and also the penalties attached to their violation to such a degree that now-a-days a Brahman or Hindoo is defiled by the most trifling accident of place or touch. To eat with the left hand, to sneeze when he is praying, to gape in the presence of the sacrificial fire, to touch one of a low caste, are all pollutions. In fact, the very shadow of an Englishman or a Sudra falling on his cooking-pot renders it obligatory on him to bury his meal in the earth and to throw away his pot if earthen; if not, it must undergo seven purifications before it is in a sufficiently holy condition to boil the rice sacred to the Brahman. The simple contact with pig's fat in the cartridges made the sepoys, who believed they were thus lost to caste and to heaven, willing and terrible tools in the hands of the arch-enemy of British power in the East. Nana Sahib, or, more properly speaking, Dundoo Punt, who, in order to revenge a private wrong--the lapse to the East Indian Company, on the death of his uncle and royal father by adoption, of a large territory bequeathed to him--worked upon the caste-prejudices of the sepoys until he maddened them into committing the most fiendish acts ever recorded in Indian history. But the original code does not so regard the eating of pork. If a Brahman purposely eat pork he shall be degraded, but if he has partaken of it involuntarily or through another's connivance, a penance and purification are sufficient for full atonement.