Conscience. 39 



judge them by their standards and not by our own. Take 

 for instance the wild tribes on the northern frontier of India, 

 who believe in the principle of a tribal vendetta, and who 

 think that they are not alone justified, but are fulfilling a 

 sacred duty, in slaying an absolutely innocent man who has 

 never done them the slightest harm, on the sole plea that he 

 happens to belong to a tribe of which some other member 

 had killed one of their clan. We, from our standpoint, 

 sententiously assert that conscience is an infallible guide; 

 but here we have thousands of men who are ready at any 

 moment to conscientiously commit murder. The conscience 

 of the Hindus is quite as susceptible to the influence of 

 training as is that of the Kybarees. They are governed to a 

 great extent by the principle of swadharm, which signifies 

 in Sanskrit that each one has his own particular work to do, 

 the performance of which is a virtue in him, although it 

 might be a vice in others. Thus the man who replied, ' I am 

 a thief,' to the rajah who, in one of the stories of the Baital 

 Pucheesee, asked him who he was, simply stated, without either 

 shame or bravado, the nature of his vocation. The women 

 of certain tribes regard the exercise of professional ' gaiety,' 

 as the work for which Providence brought them into being ; 

 in the same manner as their brothers look upon themselves, 

 with a clear conscience, as robbers and poisoners. This 

 belief in swadliarm saves Hindus, and all who acknowledge 

 Hindu authority, from the snobbishness of wishing to pose 

 as belonging to a caste superior to their own. The Dom, 

 Dhobi, or Mehter, the mere touch of whom would be pollu- 

 tion to a Brahmin, is as contented in his sphere of life as a 

 ' twice born.' Hence, among Hindus we find castes, to the 

 men of whom death has no terror ; and others, like the 

 Bengalees, who are not ashamed to admit that they belong 

 to a nation of cowards. It is unfortunate that the chief 

 leaders of native thought in India, should be recruited from 

 this pusillanimous race. The Parsees, also, know all about 

 trade ; but nothing about fighting. Our system of selection, 



