six centuries of Mahomedan domination.  Could it be expected to yield without a struggle to the new forces, however superior we may consider them and however overwhelming they may ultimately prove, which British rule has imported into India during a period of transition more momentous than any other through which she has ever passed, but still very brief when compared with all those other periods of Indian history which modern research has only recently rescued from the legendary obscurity of still earlier ages?

We are witnessing to-day a new phase of this great struggle, the clash of conflicting elements in two great civilisations.  A constitution has been inaugurated at Delhi to bring India into permanent and equal partnership with a commonwealth of free nations which is the greatest political achievement of Western civilisation, and the latest prophet of Hinduism, applying to it the language of the West, has banned it forthwith as a thing of Satan, the offspring of a Satanic government and of a Satanic civilisation.  His appeal to India is intended to strike many and various chords, but it is essentially an appeal to the ancient forces of Hinduism which gave India a great civilisation long before Europe, and least of all Britain, had emerged from the savagery of primitive man.  Englishmen find it difficult to understand the strength of that appeal, perhaps because they do not realise how deep and vital are the roots of the civilisation to which it appeals.

CHAPTER II

THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM

India’s civilisation, intimately bound up from its birth with the great social and religious system which we call Hinduism, is as unique as it is ancient.  Its growth and its tenacity are largely due to the geographical position of a great and populous sub-continent, on its land side exposed only to incursions from the north through mountainous and desolate regions, everywhere difficult of access and in some parts impenetrable, and shut in on the other two sides of a roughly isosceles triangle by broad expanses of sea which cut it off from all direct intercourse with the West until, towards the close of the Middle Ages, European navigators opened up new ocean highways to the East.  India owes her own peculiar civilisation to the gradual fusion of Aryan races of a higher type that began to flow down from Central Asia before the dawn of history upon the more primitive indigenous populations already in possession.  Its early history has only now begun to emerge from the twilight of myths and legends, and cannot even now be traced with any assurance of accuracy nearly as far back as that of other parts of the world which preceded or gave birth to our own much more recent civilisation.  The pyramids of Ghizeh and Sakkara and the monumental temples of Thebes bore ample witness to the greatness of Egyptian civilisation long before the interpretation of her hieroglyphics enabled us to determine its antiquity,