Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter.  He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands.  There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed—­the blood of Timur flowed in his veins—­and men of other races and of other creeds.  They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces.  What was the reason?  Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and perished?  Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge in the family.  He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force, but he never used force alone.  He subdued the Rajput states, but he won the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among their daughters.  With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East.  He created a homogeneous system of civil administration which our own still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively slight modifications to the present day.

Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area of India.  A great stride had been made towards real unity and social fusion.  Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could be no security for the future against the revival of the old and deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds.  He was himself learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred books to be translated into Persian—­the cultured language of his court—­so that he could study them for himself; and he invited Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his presence the relative merits of their religious systems.  The deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with exceptional vividness the life of the splendid