And the vanquished king was not dispossessed, Saint Helenaed, or beheaded.  Simply, he acknowledged his conqueror as his overlord, paid him tribute; perhaps put his own Kshatriya army at his disposal; and went on reigning as before.  So Porus met Alexander without the least sense of fear, distrust, or humiliation at his defeat.  “How shall I treat you?” said the Macedonian.  Porus was surprised.—­“I suppose,” said he in effect, “as one king would treat another”; or, “like a gentleman.”  And Alexander rose to it; in the atmosphere of a civilization higher than anything he knew, he had the grace to conform to usage.  Manu imposed his will on him.  Porus acknowledged him for overlord, and received accretions of territory.—­This explains why all the changes of dynasty, and the many conquests and invasions have made so little difference as hardly to be worth recording.  They effected no change in the life of the people.  Even the British Raj has been, to a great degree, molded to the will of Manu.  Each strong native state is ruled by its own Maharaja, who acknowledges the Kaiser-i-Hind at London for his overlord, and lends him at need his Moslem or Kshatriya army.—­All of which proves, I think, the extreme antiquity of the svstem:  which is so firmly engraved in the prototypal world—­the astral molds are so strong—­that no outside force coming in has been able materially to change it.  The Greek invasion goes wholy unnoticed in Indian literature.

Which brings us back to Alexander.  If he got as far as to the Indus;—­he got no farther.  There were kingdoms up there in the northwest—­perhaps no further east than Afghanistan and Baluchistan—­which had formed part of the empire of Darius Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece; and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus’s successor.  But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very different from those in Persia:  there was no “unquestionable superiority of the European to the Asiatic,” nor nothing like.  Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to witness again as to the “unquestionable superiority of the Asiatic to the European.”  But thither the Macedonians refused to follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of terrene limits.  For he knew well that there was plenty more world to conquer, could one conquer it:  rich and mighty kingdoms beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to cross.  He knew, because there were many to tell him:  exiled princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a catspaw.  Among them one in particular:  as masterful a man as Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself.  He was (probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the