சாதி வேற்றுமையும் போலிச்சைவரும்
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treat henceforth the lecturers and other with equality and without minding any caste - distinctions. Of course, there were one or two dissenting elements but these were eliminated from our group. We then sat together, prayed to God for blessing us with that bond of unity, and partook of our meals with one joyous heart. On that third sitting day of the conference, the lectures had been very illuminating and the proceedings were brought to a successful close by my concluding speech which impressed on the minds of the audience the urgent necessity of cutting at the root the evils of caste - distinctions.
Nevertheless, a few mischievous elements with whom caste was everything, while virtue, learning, intelligence. piety, religiousness and such other great qualities count for nothing, could not be silenced either by reasoning or by any regard to social unity, but they bestirred themselves most actively and attacked me in a magazine - article which, with much abusive matter, asserted the superiority of their caste on false and most erroneous grounds. I might have treated it with indifference, for it contained no argument worth contending for, but for the harmful influence it was likely to have on the minds of the unenlightened. I had, therefore, to take up the cudgels on behalf of the down - trodden and in the interest also of the true Saiva community whose progress consisted not in its exclusiveness but in absorbing into it and assimilating with itself persons of higher qualities turned out from lower orders and having an eager expectation to be lifted up from above; and the result was the first edition of this treatise.
The first edition was merely a booklet of 22 pages, which dealt chiefly with the practical aspect of the caste question, while its theoretical part it touched but rather too briefly. How the barriers raised between one caste and another are mere fictitious ones existing only in the imagination of certain class of people in whom it was bred by their own arrogance and ignorance, how a mixture of castes results as a product of natural human needs and takes place both openly and covertly from the very beginning of the human family, and how easily a fusion of the good and cultured people picked up from every caste and community can be effected for the immense benefit of all, were clearly shown in it. That the tenets of Saiva religion do not stand against
