Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/18

 viii AUTHOR'S PREFACE be no " fresh start "; and each new period carries on much of what preceded it. In India, as ever in the East, change is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. Ancient India was too deeply rooted in its traditions to wither even under the storm of Moslem conquest. The old Indian life survived the shock of the new ideas, which it modified at least as much as it was modified; it outlived the Moslem Period, and still endures, but little altered, in the modern age of English domination. It never really assimilated the foreigners or their ideas. Despite the efforts of a few wide-seeing men like Akbar, no true or permanent union, except occasionally among the official and ruling classes, ever took place between the Moslems and the Hindus; and the ascendent races, whether Turks, Persians, Afghans, or Moghuls, re- mained essentially an army of occupation among a hostile or at least repellent population. The history of the Mohammedan Period is, there- fore, necessarily more a chronicle of kings and courts and conquests than of organic or national growth. The vast mass of the people enjoy the doubtful happiness of having no history, since they show no development; apparently they are the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nor was there any such marked change even in the principles and methods of government as might be expected from the diversity of successive rulers of various races. English Collector-Magistrates follow much the same system, in essential outline, as that which Akbar adopted from his Hindu Chancellor, and many executive details and most of the principles of