१३२ महात्मा फुले : समग्र वाङ्मय which their selfishness and cunning had forged. The severity of the laws as affecting then Sudras, and the intense hatred with which they were regarded by the Brahmins can be explainded on no other supposition but that there was, originally between the two, a deadly feud, arising as we have shown above, from the advent of the latter into this land. It is surprising to think what a mass of specious fiction these interlopers invented with a view to hold the original occupiers of the soil fast in their clutches, and working on their credulity, rule securely for ages yet to come. Anyone who will consider well the whole history of Brahmin domination in India, and the tharldom under which it has retained the people even upto the present day, will agree with us in thinking that no language could be too harsh by which to characterise the selfish heartlessness and the consummate cunning of the Brahmin tyranny by which India has been so long governed. How far the Brahmins have succeeded in their endeavours to enslave the minds of the Surdras and Atisudras, those of them who have come to know the true state of matters know well to their cost. For generations past they have borne these chains of slavery and bondage. Innumerable Bhut writers, with the selfsame objects as those of Manu and others of his class, added from timeto time to the existing mass of legends, the idle phantasies of their own brains and palmed them off upon the ignorant masses as Divine inspiration, or as the acts of the Deity himself. The most immoral, inhuman, unjust actions and deeds have been attributed to that Being who is our Creator, Governor and Protector, and whois all Holiness himself. These blasphemous writings, the products of the distempered brains of these interlopers were received as gospel truths, for to doubts them was considered as the most unpardonable of sins. This system of slavery, to which the Brahmins reduced the lower classes is in no respects inferior to that which obtained a few years ago in America. In the days of rigid Brahmin dominancy, so lately as that of the time of the Peshwa, my Sudra bretheren had even greater hardships and oppression practised upon them than what even the siaves in America had to suffer. To this system of selfish superstition and bigotry, we areto attributethestagnation and all the evils under which India has been groaning for many centuries past. It will, indeed, be difficult to name a single advantage which aecrued to the aborigines from the advent of
