and the whole turned into a hospital for sick soldiers! Has the world ever witnessed a ruin more prompt, more complete, more amazing than this?
For seven hundred years the Mohammedan dynasties—of whom this wretched old man was the last representative—had tried to hold the reins of power over India, alien alike in race, language, and religion from the people whom they ruled. Mahmoud of Ghuznee—a contemporary for five years of William the Conqueror—was the founder of this line of monarchs; and yet such was their character, that when these long centuries of selfish and bigoted misrule were ending, and this old man was in circumstances that might well have evoked compassion and sympathy from those around him, he was allowed to sink out of sight, not only without regret or condolence, but amid the expressed sense of relief of the race over whom he and his ancestors had dominated—a people with whom they had ever refused to amalgamate, whom they had never tried to conciliate, and from whom his race never realized either loyalty or affection.
It may be doubted if any royal line on earth has had such a sad record to present to the historian. Of the sixty-five monarchs who thus conquered and ruled India, only twenty-seven of the number died a natural death; all the rest were either exiled, killed in battle, or assassinated, while the average length of each reign was only eleven years. Truly has it been said, “Delhi has been the stage of greatness—men the actors, ambition the prompter, and centuries the audience.” It was my opportunity to come in at the close, and behold destruction drawing the curtain over the scene, and writing upon it the realized sentence, and the warning to the nations: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.”
This was all the more significant, because the men by whose instrumentality God wrought out his purposes were the very race
