CHAPTER I

THE NEW ERA--SOME LEADING WITNESSES

"The epoch ends, the world is still,
The age has talked and worked its fill;

The famous men of war have fought,
The famous speculators thought.

See on the cumbered plain,
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the New Age.
Bards make new poems;
Thinkers, new schools;
Statesmen, new systems;
Critics, new rules."

MATTHEW ARNOLD.


India is a land of manifold interest. 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