to ashes. This is an animus, radical, utter, and final, ever vitalised by inextinguishable memories, and fed daily by the clash of warring beliefs. The wisest and most liberal Mohammedan of the nineteenth century, Syad Ahmad Khan, has said that on the day on which England left India there would be war, and that, if the Mohammedans were hard pressed, "then our Musalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys—like a swarm of locusts would they come." A gruesome prospect for Bengali journalists, and able editors! A prospect more than ever certain to-day, when Hinduism and Islam are both busy with revivalism, with delimitations of doctrinal frontiers, and the fortification of theological stockades.
Yet all these are merely some of the difficulties which check the movement of a decomposed society towards integration and cohesion. For example, there is the status of women in Hinduism. We may credit the eulogies so often devoted to the domestic influence and character of the women of India. In India, Sister Nivedita with pardonable exaggeration tells us, "the sanctity and sweetness of family life have been raised to the rank of a great culture," and she adds that there is "a half-magical element in this attitude of Hindus towards women." But all this must not conceal from us the tremendous practical disadvantages under which the women labour, disadvantages so burdensome as to react with severity upon the race. We
