Hindu temple in the same city, listen to the Autobiography of another earlier Moghul emperor, Jahangir.  “It was the belief of these people of hell [the Hindus] that a dead Hindu laid before the idol would be restored to life, if in his life he had been a worshipper there....  I employed a confidential person to ascertain the truth, and as I justly supposed, the whole was detected to be an impudent imposture....  Throwing down the temple which was the scene of this imposture, with the very same materials I erected on the spot the great mosque, because the very name of Islam was proscribed at Benares, and with God’s blessing it is my desire ... to fill it full of true believers.”  These things I write, not to hold up to condemnation these Moghul rulers, but to point out by contrast the voluntary character of the influence during the British and Christian period.  For there is in India a grander interest still than that of the British political organisation, namely, the peaceful gradual transformation of the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and fears, of each individual of the millions of India.

[Sidenote:  The nineteenth century in India—­a conflict of ideas]

The real history of the past century in India has been the conflict and commingling of ideas, a Homeric struggle, renewed in the nineteenth century, between the gods of Asia and Europe.  Sometimes the shock of collision has been heard, as when by Act of Legislature, in 1829, Suttee or widow-burning was put down, and, in 1891, the marriage of girls under twelve; or when by order of the Executive, the sacred privacy of Indian houses was violated in well-meant endeavours to stay the plague [1895-], great riots ensuing; or when an Indian of social standing has joined the Christian Church.  At other times, like the tumbling in, unnoticed, of slice upon slice of the bank of a great Indian river flowing through an alluvial plain, opinion has silently altered, and only later observers discover that the old idea has changed.  Not a hundred years ago, students of Kayasth (clerk) caste were excluded from the Sanscrit College in Calcutta.  Now, without any new ordinance, they are admitted, as among the privileged castes, and the idea of the brotherhood of man has thus made way.  The silent invasion is strikingly illustrated in the official Report on Female Education in India, 1892 to 1897.  On a map of India within the Report, the places where female education was most advanced were coloured greener according to the degree of advance—­surely most inappropriate colouring, though that is not our business.  The map showed a strip of the greenest green all round the sea-coast.  There the unobserved new influence came in.  The Census Report for 1901 showed the same silently obtruding influence from over the sea in the case of the education of males.  Many such silent changes might be noted.  And yet again, the most diverse ideas may be observed side by side in a strange chequer.  In the closing