Your Lordships are born to hereditary honors in the chief of your houses; the rest mix with the people. With the Gentoos, they who are born noble can never fall into any second rank. They are divided into four orders,--the Brahmins, the Chittery, the Bice, and the Soodur, with many subdivisions in each. An eternal barrier is placed between them. The higher cannot pass into the lower; the lower cannot rise into the higher. They have all their appropriated rank, place, and situation, and their appropriated religion too, which is essentially different in its rites and ceremonies, sometimes in its object, in each of those castes. A man who is born in the highest caste, which at once unites what would be tantamount in this country to the dignity of the peerage and the ennobled sanctity of the episcopal character,--the Brahmin, who sustains these characters, if he loses his caste, does not fall into an inferior order, the Chittery, the Bice, or the Soodur, but he is thrown at once out of all ranks of society. He is precipitated from the proudest elevation of respect and honor to a bottomless abyss of contempt,--from glory to infamy,--from purity to pollution,--from sanctity to profanation. No honest occupation is open to him; his children are no longer his children; their parent loses that name; the conjugal bond is dissolved. Few survive this most terrible of all calamities. To speak to an Indian of his caste is to speak to him of his all. But the rule of caste has, with them, given one power more to fortune than the manners of any other nation were ever known to do. For it is singular, the caste may be lost, not only by certain voluntary crimes, but by certain involuntary sufferings, disgraces, and pollutions, that are utterly out of their power to prevent. Those who have patiently submitted to imprisonment,--those who have not flinched from the scourge,--those who have been as unmoved as marble under torture,--those who have laughed at the menaces of death itself,--have instantly given way, when it has been attempted to subject them to any of those pollutions by which they lose caste. To this caste they are bound by all laws of all descriptions, human and divine; and inveterate usage has radicated it in them to a depth and with an adhesion with which no other known prejudice has been known to exist. Tyranny is therefore armed against them with a greater variety of weapons than are found in its ordinary stores.