* சிந்தனைக் கட்டுரைகள்
11
is such that they are foremost in heartily lending their help and encouragement to a study of any language but that of Tamil and to an uplift of any people but the Tamils. Here, one can never hope to enlist the sympathy of a brahmin, unless he follows machine-like what is told and writ in the brahminical literature. No other cause than this domination of brahminism, can explain the existence of a multipublicity of the Sanscrit Puranas that came to be written and translated into Tamil in quick succession from the 12th century A.D. down to our own, and the adoption of Sanscrit for conducting services in the Tamil temples and performing rituals in Tamil homes. The Purity of Tamil, the simplicity of Tamil life, the height to which the Tamilians had risen in moral and intellectual culture, their ex- cellent aesthetic sense of beauty in nature and human character, their study of arts and sciences, their conception of God, soul and matter - in short, all that constituted their ancient civilisation were totally gone. Leaving them to dispute over trivial caste distinctions, to worship and offer bloody sacrifices to deified heroes and hero- ines, to perform ignorantly expensive and meaningless rites pre- scribed by brahmin priests and to earn their livelihood by means of trades and industries not intelligently carried on with improved knowledge and appliances but blindly followed from generation to generation without either any improvement, or higher motives and purposes. Such as the condition in which the Tamil people have continued to be for the last six centuries and even now when the physical, social and intellectual progress of other nations is so rapid and astounding, theirs has not advanced even a little but recedes farther and farther away into the shade.
No community that seeks its own benefit can hope to live long at the expense of others which supply its bare necessaries: food and clothing, by thier unremitting labour. The Hindu nation is composed of different classes of people who perform different kinds of work which go to render life easy and comfortable and produc- tive of high moral and spiritual good and who are, on that account, bound up one with the other so intimately, just as the different parts of a living body are united together one co-operating with the other for the common good of the whole. If any part of one's body claims
