y altered. The
politician's theme is that the Government is more expensive and less
sympathetic than it might be, because of the employment of alien
Europeans where natives might be employed.

[Sidenote: The new national consciousness.]

[Sidenote: English rule, a chief cause.]

[Sidenote: The very name _Indian_ is English.]

Other new political ideas follow the lines of social change. We have
seen how in the modern school, the idea of caste gives way before the
idea of rank in the school, to be followed in College by the idea of
intellectual distinction, and still later in life by the idea of success
in some modern career. In the political sphere, modern life is also busy
dissolving the older and narrower conceptions of life. Atop of the
sectarian consciousness of being a Hindu or the provincial consciousness
of belonging to Bengal or Bombay, is coming the consciousness of being
an Indian. This consciousness of a national unity is one of the
outstanding features of the time in India, all the more striking because
hitherto India has been so unwieldily large, and her people incoherent,
like dry sand. "The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality," says
Max Mueller. "The very name of India is a synonym for caste, as opposed
to nationality," says Sister Nivedita, the pro-Hindu lady already
referred to, who likewise notes the emergence of the national idea.[35]
"Public spirit or patriotism, as we understand it, never existed among
the Hindus," writes Mr. Bose, himself an Indian, author of a recent work
on _Hindu Civilisation under British Rule_.[36] And Raja Rammohan Roy,
the famous Bengali reformer of the beginning of the nineteenth century,
we have already heard denouncing the caste system as "destructive of
national union." From what then, during the nineteenth century, has the
national consciousness come forth? Many causes may be cited. The actual
unification effected by the postal, the telegraph, and the railway
organisation, has done much. The omnipresence of the foreign government,
all-controlling, has also done much. The current coins and the postage
stamps with King Edward's head upon them--the same all over India, a few
native states excepted--bring home the union of India to the most
ignorant. The constant criticism of the Government in the native press,
the meetings of the All-India political association called the Congress,
and the fact that modern interests, stimulated by daily telegrams from
all over