[Sidenote:  The new national consciousness.]

[Sidenote:  English rule, a chief cause.]

[Sidenote:  The very name Indian is English.]

Other new political ideas follow the lines of social change.  We have seen how in the modern school, the idea of caste gives way before the idea of rank in the school, to be followed in College by the idea of intellectual distinction, and still later in life by the idea of success in some modern career.  In the political sphere, modern life is also busy dissolving the older and narrower conceptions of life.  Atop of the sectarian consciousness of being a Hindu or the provincial consciousness of belonging to Bengal or Bombay, is coming the consciousness of being an Indian.  This consciousness of a national unity is one of the outstanding features of the time in India, all the more striking because hitherto India has been so unwieldily large, and her people incoherent, like dry sand.  “The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality,” says Max Mueller.  “The very name of India is a synonym for caste, as opposed to nationality,” says Sister Nivedita, the pro-Hindu lady already referred to, who likewise notes the emergence of the national idea.[35] “Public spirit or patriotism, as we understand it, never existed among the Hindus,” writes Mr. Bose, himself an Indian, author of a recent work on Hindu Civilisation under British Rule.[36] And Raja Rammohan Roy, the famous Bengali reformer of the beginning of the nineteenth century, we have already heard denouncing the caste system as “destructive of national union.”  From what then, during the nineteenth century, has the national consciousness come forth?  Many causes may be cited.  The actual unification effected by the postal, the telegraph, and the railway organisation, has done much.  The omnipresence of the foreign government, all-controlling, has also done much.  The current coins and the postage stamps with King Edward’s head upon them—­the same all over India, a few native states excepted—­bring home the union of India to the most ignorant.  The constant criticism of the Government in the native press, the meetings of the All-India political association called the Congress, and the fact that modern interests, stimulated by daily telegrams from all over the world, are international, not provincial or sectarian—­all these things combine to give to the modern educated Indian a new Indian national consciousness in place of the old provincial and sectarian one.  In short, the British rule has united India, and the awakened mind of India is rejoicing in the consciousness of the larger existence, and is identifying the ancient glories of certain centres in North India with this new India created by Britain.  Never before was there a united India in the modern political sense; never, indeed, could there be until modern inventions brought distant places near each other.  Two great Indian empires there certainly were in the third century