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IX
OUR ORIENTAL FUTURE
197

as well as any man, has stated that: "I never heard of a great measure of improvement that was popular in India, even among the classes that have received the largest share of education"; and he adds that the masses of the people "dislike everything new, they dislike almost everything that we look upon as progress." And the main cause of all this is that even to-day, as Sir Alfred Lyall has told us, "it is in the religious life that Asiatic communities still find the reason of their existence and the repose of it."

Thus it is that England, surveying her own work in India, in that third phase of her policy which would make men prosperous, has to apply to herself the words of Napoleon, "I am the Revolution." We shall discover, too, that the more eagerly we push that revolutionary programme of utilitarianism, and the more hastily India puts on the West, to the detriment of her old order, the more she will resent our disruption of the "reason of her existence and the repose of it."

Meditating on these deep issues, a thinker may have a dream. Resisting all present appearances, he may remember that the truer Hinduism never fails. The Greeks came, and made nothing of the Brahmans. Against that bulwark all -subduing Islam itself was checked. Buddha, who founded the most widely spread religion, was a Hindu, yet, because Buddhism was not orthodox, it was finally evicted from Hindustan, and had to conquer its world elsewhere. England herself,