out of history in the tempest of the Mutiny.  It was on the plain of Delhi that the assumption by Queen Victoria of the imperial title was solemnly proclaimed in 1878, and, with still greater pomp, King Edward’s accession in 1903.  There again in 1911 King George, the first of his line to visit his Indian Empire as King-Emperor, received in person the fealty of princes and peoples and restored Delhi to her former pride of place as its imperial capital.

Where else in the world can such a procession of the ages pass before one’s eyes, from the great “Horse Sacrifice” of the Pandavas at the dawn of history to the inauguration by a British prince in the King-Emperor’s name of modern political institutions conceived in the democratic spirit of British freedom?

Yet at the very time when an Indian-elected assembly, representing as far as possible all creeds and classes and communities, and above all the Western-educated classes who are the intellectual offspring of British rule, were gathered together to hear delivered to them in English—­the one language in which, as a result of British rule, and by no means the least valuable, Indians from all parts of a vast polyglot country are able to hold converse—­the Royal message throwing open to the people of India the road to Swaraj within the British Empire, the imperial city of Delhi went into mourning as a sign of angry protest, and the vast majority of its citizens, mostly, it must be remembered, Mahomedans, very strictly observed a complete boycott of the Royal visit in accordance with Mr. Gandhi’s “Non-co-operation” campaign, and went out in immense crowds to greet the strange Hindu saint and leader who had come to preach to them his own very different message—­a message of revolt, not indeed by violence but by “soul force,” against the soulless civilisation of the West.

In no other city in India would such an alliance between Hindus and Mahomedans have seemed only a few years ago more unthinkable.  For nowhere else have we such a vision as in Delhi of the ruthlessness as well as of the splendour of Mahomedan domination in India.  Nowhere can one measure as in Delhi the greatness of its fall, and its fall had begun before it ever came into conflict with the rising British power.  It had been shaken to its foundations by the far more ancient power of Hinduism, which Islam had subdued but never destroyed.  In the seventeenth century Shivaji, the hero still to-day of the Hindu revival of which Mr. Gandhi is the latest apostle, led out for the first time his Mahrattas in open rebellion against Delhi and started the continuous process of disintegration from which the Moghul Emperors were driven to purchase their only possible respite under British protection.  Since India finally passed not under Mahratta, but under British rule, Hinduism has never again been subjected to the oppression which the fierce monotheism of Islam itself taught all her Mahomedan rulers, with the one noble exception of