196 FOOTFAIXS OF INDIAN HISTORY
into the political consciousness of the Gupta period. It shows us Northern India, then as now, dominated by two governing forces—one seated near Delhi, and one within the region to-day known as Bengal; and it shows unity to be a question mainly of a coalition between these two. Two hundred and fifty years later than Vikramaditya, India is again ruled by a strong hand, that of Harishchandra, But his capital is at Thaneswar, near Kurukshetra. Thus the shifting and re-shifting goes on, and the great problem of modern times, that of finding a common sentiment of nationality, is seen to be but a new inclusion of an age-old oscillation of centres, whose original cause may perhaps be deep-hidden in the geographical and ethnological conditions that gave birth to India.
Why, again, is the scene of the telling of the Mahabharata laid, theoretically, at Taxila? This place, situated to the north-west of Rawal Pindi, would appear, from the age of Buddha onwards till the coming of the Huns more than a thousand years later, to have occupied much the same place in Indian parlance as the University of Cordova in mediaeval Europe, and for much the same reason. The city was a university in the time of Buddha, as witness the youth who went there from Rajgir to learn medicine. It lay on the highway of nations. Past its very doors streamed the nomadic hordes of invading Scythian and Tartar, both before and after the birth of the Christian era. Long before that it had given hostelry and sub-
