India

“ Reader! let the millions of India have a place within your heart! Remember their darkness and their degradation! Remember that they have immortal souls! Remember them at the mercy-seat; and when you thank God that you were not born in a heathen land, cry to him to send the gospel to them, and ask him what you can do to hasten the day when the kingdoms of this world shall have become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. ”

“ Are we to treat the monotonous singing voice which even now echoes out over the length and breadth of India, as in the sunsetting some Brahman recites the ancient hymns--are we to treat this as the first trace of Ancient India? Or, as we sit listening, are we to watch the distant horizon, so purple against the gold of the sky, and wonder if it is only our own unseeing eyes which prevent our tracing the low curve that may mark the site of a town, ancient when the Aryans swept it into nothingness? ”

“ And in that study of the history of the human mind, in that study of ourselves, of our true selves, India occupies a place second to no other country. Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only. ”

“ India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or, at the very utmost, a curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe, it has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own history, and in what is the very life of history, the history of the human mind. ”

“ This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations—the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will. ”

“ I was quite satisfied with that ideal India which I had built up for myself, whether from their books or from those who had come to see me at Oxford. If my India, as I am often told, is an ideal India, is it more so than Greece as seen through the poems of Homer, or Italy as seen through the verses of Virgil? What is ideal is not necessarily unreal, it is only like a landscape seen in sunshine. Look at a landscape on a brilliant summer’s day bathed in light and verdure, and again on a bleak day of March with its bitter winds and cloudy sky. ”

“ How shouldst thou see, strange-bred as thou art from the uttermost guile of India--this old, old India that was guileful long ages before thy island came into being? What canst thou or thy kind know of the bottomless deceits, the dregs of many years, the sediment of many men which must underlay the smooth levels of India? ”

“ Thus India itself is the sufficient argument for missions in India. Let any one visit this country, and study its religion, and see how it enters into the very life of the people; how all social intercourse is regulated by caste; how one feels at every instant the pressure of an ancient and unchangeable religion, and ask how its iron rule is ever to be broken? ”

“ He who has seen India only in its crowded and corrupt cities, in its seaports and its courts, knows little of the masses scattered through the country. The visitor of the villages, though he finds much, very much, to make his heart sad and his soul faint for the sins of the people, yet finds a light as well as a shade to the picture. ”

“ The country is an infinite green and brown chess-board of young corn and fallow, dead flat on every side, ugly with the complacent plainness of all rich country. Beyond the sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north, south, east, and west, you can see only land, and land, and land—a million acres with nothing on them to see except the wealth of India and the secret of the greatness of India. ”

“ To India, indeed, men did not scruple to say they were going, simply and purely to make their fortunes; but then India was a long way off, and the fortunes men had made there, the undying names they had left behind, the pages their deeds filled in history, read like the enchanted story of some eastern romance. ”

“ Those who plead that Indians are too hopelessly divided into religions, communities, sects, castes, and languages, to be able to form a government of their own, forget that the English have been in India only for the last century and a half and that before that India governed herself. The India of to-day is in no way happier than it was before preBritish days. The India of Akbar was happier than the England of Elizabeth and even more prosperous. The India of Asoka was infinitely happier and more prosperous than the England of Alfred the Great. ”

“ But India is an ancient land with established traditions, honoured throughout recorded history for her spiritual civilisation, for her dignity of soul, for her intense piety, for her valour and chivalry, tolerance and hospitality, and love and peace. ”

“ For three thousand years before England's arrival in the Orient, Indian Kingdoms and Empires had held leading places in Asia, and that means in the world. Some of the ablest rulers, statesmen, generals and financiers known to history, as well as many of the greatest thinkers and writers of mankind, have been of India’s production. How is it, then, that she suddenly becomes imbecile and unable to stand on her own feet or conduct her own affairs as soon as England appears on the scene? ”

“ In truth, in this particular argument, India, so present to every mind in every other argument, India, the choicest flower of the Empire, the brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown—any other figure of speech that may spring of the oriental richness of an imperial fancy—seems suddenly to be forgotten. But another land seems also to be forgotten, a land which should surely be more to us than all the wonders of the East, a land whose kindred and friendship should surely be more precious to Englishmen than all the glories and all the treasures of a hundred thousand Great Moguls. ”

“ The sun of India's destiny would rise and fill all India with its light and overflow India and overflow Asia and overflow the world. Every hour, every moment could only bring them nearer to the brightness of the day that God had decreed. ”

“ Such things have been, nay, are, in India, seeming in truth more fantastic when set down in pen and ink than they do when seen in the warm clasp of that Indian sunlight which shines down indifferently on so many a strange anomaly of caste, and creed, and custom. ”

“ India is curiously fruitful in them, and, so far as we have come in Indian history, their individualities stand forth all the stronger in contrast with the mists and shadows which surround them. Bhishma, Chandra-gûpta, Asôka, Kanîshka, Samûdra-gupta--we gauge our admiring interest by our desire to know what manner of men these were in feature and form. ”

“ For the visitors who crowd thither every cold season, and for the still larger number who will never see India, but have felt the glamour of the ancient land whose destiny is now so strangely linked to that of our far-off and latter-day islands, India has not one but many interests. There is the interest of the architectural glories of the Moghul emperors, in whose grand halls of audience, now deserted and merely places of show, a solitary British soldier stands sentry over a visitors' book. ”

“ What England has done for India; the incalculable debt all that continent of diverse peoples owes for the just, intelligent, humane rule of the Great White Queen and her son; for the treasure of noble lives poured into the peninsula for a century, for the burdens the white man has borne. ”

“ Many of these men have been rich and powerful members of the society in which they moved. Then a day came when they laid aside their robes of muslin and silk embroidered with gold; they left their great houses filled with troops of servants; without a word they slipped away from wife, from children, from friends, and the place they had filled knew them no more. They had gone to wander far and wide through the vast plains, the mighty hills of India—strange, naked, wild-looking figures, unwashed, unshorn, looking the veriest outcasts of the earth. ”

“ Sudden the Indian sky is overcast,
⁠And all the land is shrouded deep in gloom:
⁠A wail goes forth from many an Indian home,
And tears from old and young are streaming fast.
For where is he, our fearless champion bold,
⁠India's unflinching advocate and friend,
⁠Whose lofty purpose and whose cherish'd end,
Were Justice, Truth, and Righteousness to uphold? ”

“ India from the Himâlaya to Ceylon, do not suppose that it is my wish or intention to draw an ideal picture of India, leaving out all the dark shades, and giving you nothing but "sweetness and light." Having never been in India myself, I can only claim for myself the right and duty of every historian, namely, the right of collecting as much information as possible, and the duty to sift it according to the recognized rules of historical criticism. ”

“ But to the historian of the human race, to the student of the development of the human mind, those few solitary wanderers are after all the true representatives of India from age to age. Do not let us be deceived. ”

“ When we speak of the Vedic hymns as representing the religion, the thoughts and customs of India three thousand years ago, we cannot mean by India more than some unknown quantity of which the poets of the Veda are the only spokesmen left. When we now speak of India, we think of 250 millions, a sixth part of the whole human race, peopling the vast peninsula from the Himalayan mountains between the arms of the Indus and the Ganges, down to Cape Comorin and Ceylon, an extent of country nearly as large as Europe. ”

“ India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her. ”

“ India is no longer the distant island which it was, where each Crusoe had to make a home for himself as best he could. With the short and easy voyages from England to India and from India to England, with the frequent mails, and the telegrams, and the Anglo-Indian newspapers, official life in India has assumed the character of a temporary exile rather, which even English ladies are now more ready to share than fifty years ago. ”

“ Let the Persian, or the Greek, or the Roman, or the Arab, or the Englishman march his battalions and conquer the world, and link the different nations together, and the philosophy and spirituality of India is ready to flow along the new-made channels into the veins of the nations of the world. The calm Hindu's brain must pour its own quota to give to the sum total of human progress. ”

“ By this time India had become a resource, India that lay all about her, glowing, profuse, mysterious, fascinating, a place in which she felt that she had no part, could never have any part, but that of a spectator. ”

“ The loyalty that stimulates the feudatory Princes and brings them into closer union with the Empire of India, permeates their States, and is shared by their nobles and subjects—but it does more than that: it sets an example to the whole of India. It counteracts in a large measure the efforts of those who would seek to stir up discontent, and it emphasizes in the most unmistakable manner the advantages of an Empire founded on the confidence of the many tribes, castes, and religions of India as a whole. ”

“ It is a most remarkable fact, that while other countries have the whole face of society changed by conquest and subjection to rulers from foreign lands, India—though swept over by successive hordes of invaders, though plundered and divided among contending despots, though transferred from hand to hand, as each dynasty was crushed by one more powerful than itself—has, to a great extent, remained unchanged. India now is, in its habits, feelings, and pursuits, very much what it was three thousand years ago. ”

“ In short, the British rule has united India, and the awakened mind of India is rejoicing in the consciousness of the larger existence, and is identifying the ancient glories of certain centres in North India with this new India created by Britain. Never before was there a united India in the modern political sense; never, indeed, could there be until modern inventions brought distant places near each other. ”

“ It's just typical of what Western civilization has done so far for India. Like new cloth on an old garment, it has just patched itself on in an obvious, startling, ugly patch, absolutely ruining the charm of things Eastern and picturesque. So utterly unlike, it seems impossible they should ever merge gracefully the one into the other. ”