in the modern political sense; never, indeed, could there be until
modern inventions brought distant places near each other. Two great
Indian empires there certainly were in the third century B.C. and the
fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and the paternal benevolence of Asoka,
the great Buddhist emperor of the third century B.C., deserves record
and all honour. Let Indians know definitely who deserves to be called an
ancient Indian emperor, when they wish to lament a lost past; and
descending to historical fact and detail, let them compare that period
with the present. The later empire referred to was an empire only in the
old sense of a collection of vassal states. Turning back to the hoary
past, in which many Indians, even of education, imagine there was a
golden Indian empire, we can trace underneath the ancient epic, the
Ramayan, a conquering progress southward to Ceylon itself of a great
Aryan hero, Ram. But of any Indian empire founded by him, we know
nothing. "One who has carefully studied the Ramayan will be impressed
with the idea that the Aryan conquest had spread over parts of Northern
India only, at the time of the great events which form its
subjects."[37] Coming down to the period of the greatest extent of the
Moghul empire in India in the end of the seventeenth century, we find
the Emperor Aurangzeb with as extensive a military empire as that of
Asoka, but with the Mahrattas rising behind him even while he was
extending his empire southwards. That decadent military despotism cannot
be thought of as a union of India. In truth, the old Aryan conquest of
India was not a political conquest, and never has been; it was a
conquest, very complete in the greater part of India, of new social
usages and certain new religious ideas. The first complete political
conquest of India by Aryans was the British conquest, and the ideas
which have come in or been awakened thereby, we are now engaged in
tracing. As regards the new idea of nationality, we have noted that the
new national name _Indian_ now heard upon political platforms, is not a