And yet all this is not a tithe of all that, in the endless Indian world, is calculated to resist our progress. To so many of those peoples the past, in which we have no part, is so much more than the present or the future. The Islamite, remembering the centuries of his ascendency since Mahmud of Ghazni, and the Hindu, thinking of centuries in the older night of time, wish them back. It is aristocracy to live in the past, and they are all aristocrats. They revere ancestry more deeply than we can understand. Still more, they worship power, which to them is of God. Hence if, on the one hand, they obey a Maharana of Udaipur, the reputed descendant of Vishnu, or a Maharaja of Travancore, sprung, they say, from the old emperors of Malabar; on the other, they can yield allegiance no less, when a body-servant founds the dynasty of Scindia, or the brigand, Sivaji, becomes a monarch, or when a corporal seizes the crown of Mysore. So they are irked by the hum of "progress," and prefer their native hills and valleys to the bare blank plain of equality, even with safe-conduct from Padgett, M.P.
Nevertheless, when all this has been said as to the difficulties in the way of our policy of prosperity, we know little if we do not take a deeper sounding yet. In Asia we operate in the presence of some of the greatest creeds that have sought to reconcile humanity to its lot. There is Hinduism, the faith meditative, and Islam, the faith militant. Farther off, rise the peaks of Buddhism, those Himalayas
