of Indian history which modern
research has only recently rescued from the legendary obscurity of still
earlier ages?

We are witnessing to-day a new phase of this great struggle, the clash
of conflicting elements in two great civilisations. A constitution has
been inaugurated at Delhi to bring India into permanent and equal
partnership with a commonwealth of free nations which is the greatest
political achievement of Western civilisation, and the latest prophet of
Hinduism, applying to it the language of the West, has banned it
forthwith as a thing of Satan, the offspring of a Satanic government and
of a Satanic civilisation. His appeal to India is intended to strike
many and various chords, but it is essentially an appeal to the ancient
forces of Hinduism which gave India a great civilisation long before
Europe, and least of all Britain, had emerged from the savagery of
primitive man. Englishmen find it difficult to understand the strength
of that appeal, perhaps because they do not realise how deep and vital
are the roots of the civilisation to which it appeals.

CHAPTER II

THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM

India's civilisation, intimately bound up from its birth with the great
social and religious system which we call Hinduism, is as unique as it
is ancient. Its growth and its tenacity are largely due to the
geographical position of a great and populous sub-continent, on its land
side exposed only to incursions from the north through mountainous and
desolate regions, everywhere difficult of access and in some parts
impenetrable, and shut in on the other two sides of a roughly isosceles
triangle by broad expanses of sea which cut it off from all direct
intercourse with the West until, towards the close of the Middle Ages,
European navigators opened up new ocean highways to the East. India owes
her own peculiar civilisation to the gradual fusion of Aryan races of a
higher type that began to flow down from Central Asia before the dawn of
history upon the more primitive indigenous populations already in
possession. Its early history has only now begun to emerge from the
twilight of myths and legends, and cannot even now be traced with any
assurance of accuracy nearly as far back as that of other parts of the
world which preceded or gave birth to our own much more recent
civilisation. The pyramids of Ghizeh and Sakkara and the monumental
temples of Thebes bore ample witness to the greatness of Egyptian
civili