And after the inhabitants of the City had ceased to be the heart of the Empire, this consciousness of greatness passed to the whole population of the Roman world when they compared themselves with the barbarians outside their frontiers. One finds it even in the pages of Procopius, a Syrian writing in Greek, after the western half of the Empire had been dismembered by barbarian invasions.

The English conquered India with forces much smaller than those of the Romans; and their success in subjugating a still vaster population in a shorter time may thus appear more brilliant. But the English had antagonists immeasurably inferior in valour, in discipline, in military science, and generally also in the material of war, to those whom the Romans overcame. Nor had they ever either a first-rate general or a monarch of persistent energy opposed to them. No Hannibal, nor even a Mithradates, appeared to bar their path. Hyder Ali had no nation behind him; and fortune spared them an encounter with the Afghan Ahmed Shah and the Sikh Ranjit Singh. Their most formidable opponents might rather be compared with the gallant but untrained Celtic Vercingetorix, or the showy but incompetent Antiochus the Great. It was only when Europeans like Dupleix came upon the scene that they had men of their own kind to grapple with ; and Dupleix had not the support from home which Clive could count on in case of dire necessity. Still the conquest of India was a splendid achievement, more striking and more difficult, if less romantic, than the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortez or the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro, though it must be admitted that the courage of these two adventurers in venturing

far into unknown regions with a handful of followers has never been surpassed. Among the English, as among the Romans, the sense of personal force, the conscious ascendency of a race so often already victorious, with centuries of fame behind them, and a contempt for the feebler folk against whom they were contending, were the main source of that dash and energy and readiness to face any odds which bore down all resistance. These qualities have lasted into our own time. No more brilliant examples were ever given of them than in the defence of the Fort at Lucknow and in the siege of Delhi at the time of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8. And it is worth noting that almost the only disasters that have ever befallen the British arms have occurred where the general in command was either incompetent, as must sometimes happen in every army, or was wanting in boldness. In the East, more than anywhere else, confidence makes for victory, and one victory leads on to another.

It is by these qualities that the English continue to hold India. In the higher grades of the civil administration which they fill there are only about one thousand persons and these one thousand control two hundred and eighty-seven millions, doing it with so little friction that they have ceased to be surprised at this extraordinary fact. The English have impressed the imagination of the people by their resistless energy and their almost uniform success. Their domination seems to have about it an element of the supernatural, for the masses of India are still in that mental condition which looks to the supernatural for an explanation of whatever astonishes it. The British Raj fills them with a sense of awe and mystery. That nearly three hundred millions

of men should be ruled by a few palefaced strangers from beyond the great and wide sea, strangers who all obey some distant power, and who never, like the lieutenants of Oriental sovereigns, try to revolt for their own benefit, this seems too wonderful to be anything but the doing of some unseen and irresistible divinity. I heard at Lahore an anecdote which, slight as it is, illustrates the way in which the native thinks of these things. A tiger had escaped from the Zoological Gardens, and its keeper, hoping to lure it back, followed it. When all other inducements had failed, he lifted up his voice and solemnly adjured it in the name of the British Government, to which it belonged, to come back to its cage. The tiger obeyed.

Now that we have rapidly surveyed the more salient points of resemblance or analogy between these two empires, it remains to note the capital differences between them, one or two of which have been already incidentally mentioned. On the most obvious of all I have already dwelt. It is the fact that, whereas the Romans conquered right out from their City in all directions-south, north, west, and east-so that the capital, during the five centuries from B. C. 200 (end of the Second Punic War) to A. D. 325 (foundation of Constantinople), stood not far from the centre of their dominions, England has conquered India across the ocean, and remains many thousands of miles from the nearest point of her Indian territory. Another not less obvious difference is perhaps less important than it seems. Rome was a city, and Britain is a country. Rome, when she stepped outside Italy to establish in Sicily her first province, had a free population of possibly only seventy or eighty thousand souls. Britain, when she began her

career of conquest at Plassy had (if we include Ireland, then still a distinct kingdom, but then less a source of weakness than she has sometimes since been), a population of at least eleven or twelve millions. But, apart from the fact that the distance from Britain to India round the Cape made her larger population less available for action in India than was the smaller population of Rome for action in the Mediterranean, the comparison must not really be made with Rome as a city, but with Rome as the centre of a large Italian population, upon which she drew for her armies, and the bulk of which had, before the end of the Republic, become her citizens. On this point of dissimilarity no more need be said, because its significance is apparent. I turn from it to another of greater consequence.

The relations of the conquering country to the conquered country, and of the conquering race to the conquered races, are totally different in the two cases compared. In the case of Rome there was a similarity of conditions which pointed to and ultimately effected a fusion of the peoples. In the case of England there is a dissimilarity which makes the fusion of her people with the peoples of India impossible.

Climate offers the first point of contrast. Rome, to be sure, ruled countries some of which were far hotter and others far colder than was the valley of the Tiber. Doubtless the officer who was stationed in Nubia complained of the torrid summer, much as an English officer complains of Quetta or Multan; nor were the winters of Ardoch or Hexham agreeable to a soldier from Apulia. But if the Roman married in Nubia, he could bring up his family there. An English officer cannot do this at Quetta or Multan. The English race

becomes so enfeebled in the second generation by living without respite under the Indian sun that it would probably die out, at least in the plains, in the third or fourth. Few Englishmen feel disposed to make India their home, if only because the physical conditions of life there are so different from those under which their earlier years were passed. But the Italian could make himself at home, so far as natural conditions went, almost anywhere from the Dnieper to the Guadalquivir.

The second contrast is in the colour of the races. All the races of India are dark, though individuals may be found among high-caste Brahmins and among the Parsis of Poona or Gujarat who are as light in hue as many Englishmen. Now to the Teutonic peoples, and especially to the English and Anglo-Americans, the difference of colour means a great deal. It creates a feeling of separation, perhaps even of a slight repulsion. Such a feeling may be deemed unreasonable or unchristian, but it seems too deeply rooted to be effaceable in any time we can foresee. It is, to be sure, not nearly so strong towards members of the more civilized races of India, with their faces often full of an intelligence and refinement which witnesses to many generations of mental culture, as it is in North America towards the negroes of the Gulf Coast, or in South Africa towards the Kafirs. Yet it is sufficient to be, as a rule, a bar to social intimacy, and a complete bar to intermarriage.

Among the highest castes of Hindus and among the most ancient princely families, such as those famous Rajput dynasties whose lineage runs back further than does that of any of the royal houses of Europe, there is