hist. But
inside these general religious denominations are very many
distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus
who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajputs are
races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their
racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels
and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and
religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than
perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate
subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are
governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the
western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed
meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire
which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of
light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion
of Imperial Rome.[57] There is the same miscellany of tribes and races
in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the
frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture
in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote
interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much
slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among
the educated classes, because the English language, like the Latin,
has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest
ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.
There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress,
resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote
province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from
Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising Britons that
they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting
the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly
affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these
distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and
so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.

In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost
universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score,
since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by
their government, provided that public order and decency were
observed; and this is the p