ent which found eloquent advocates all
over India, and not least in Madras, and other agencies of a similar
character for purging Hindu life of its more barbarous and superstitious
associations, bore witness to the ascendancy which Western standards of
morality exercised over the Hindu mind. Keshub Chunder Sen was not
perhaps cast in so fine a mould as Ram Mohan Roy or the more
conservative Dr. Tagore, but his ideals were the same, and his
life-dream was to find a common denominator for Hinduism and
Christianity which should secure a thorough reform of Hindu society
without denationalizing it.

Nor were the milder forms of political activity promoted by the founders
of the Indian National Congress inconsistent with the acceptance of
British rule or with the recognition of the great benefits which it has
conferred upon India, and least of all with a genuine admiration for
Western civilization. For many of them at least the political boons
which they craved from their rulers were merely the logical corollaries
of the moral and intellectual as well as of the material boons which
they had already received. The fierce political agitation of later years
denies the benefits of British rule and even the superiority of the
civilization for which it stands. It has invented the legend of a golden
age, when all the virtues flourished and India was a land flowing with
milk and honey until British lust of conquest brought it to ruin. No
doubt even to-day there are many eminent Hindus who would still rely
upon the older methods, and who have sufficiently assimilated the
education they have received at the hands of Englishmen to share
wholeheartedly the faith and pride of the latter in British ideals of
liberty and self-government, and to be honestly convinced that those
ideals might be more fully realized in the government of their own
country if British administrators would only repose greater confidence
in the natives of India and give them a larger share in the conduct of
public affairs. But men of this type are now to be found chiefly amongst
the older generation.

No one who has studied, however scantily, the social and religious
system which for the sake of convenience we call Hinduism will deny the
loftiness of the philosophic conceptions which underlie even the
extravagances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the complex
fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many
of its aspects an almost