presented, tacitly inviting him to compare and to modify. We can put
ourselves in the place of many a youth of sixteen or seventeen, hope of
the village school, going up to enter a college in one of the larger
towns of India. He is entering the new world. Should he be of brahman
caste, it may profit him a little, for he will still meet with many
non-brahman householders ready to find him in food and lodging simply
because he is a poor brahman student. Of course he is looking forward to
one of the new professions, Law, or Medicine, or Engineering, or
Teaching, or Government Service. In _these_ it is patent to him that
caste is of no account. High caste or low, he and all his
fellow-students are aware they must prove themselves and fight their way
up. The leading place at the bar is no more a high-caste man's privilege
than it is his privilege to be exempted from standing in the dock or
suffering the extreme penalty of the law. We have already referred to
the effect of the assertion of the equality of men before the law in
1775 in the hanging of the brahman, Nandakumar, for forgery. Now,
looking back at the dissolving of the old ideas of artificial rank and
privileges, we may reckon also the equality of men in the great modern
professions, foremost in India being Law, as among the chief dissolving
agencies.

[Sidenote: Extent of English education.]

[Sidenote: English words naturalised.]

It is easy to give _figures_ at least for the vast agency now at work in
the spread of English education in India. Higher English education for
natives began with the founding of the Hindu College in Calcutta in
1817; in the year 1902 there were in India five Universities, the
examinations of which are conducted in English; and affiliated to these