Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/18

 x FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE and tributary kingdoms under its command, obscures the most characteristic achievement of our nation in Asia. That achievement was no sudden triumph, but an indomitable endurance during a century and a half of frustration and defeat. As the English were to wield a power in the East greater than that of any other European people, so was their training for the task to be harder and more prolonged. We have been too much accustomed to regard our Indian Empire as an isolated fact in the world's history. This view does injustice to the Continental nations, and in some degree explains the slight esteem in which they hold our narratives of Anglo- Asiatic rule. In one sense, indeed, England is the residuary legatee of an inheritance painfully amassed by Europe in Asia during the past four centuries. In that long labour, now one Christian nation, then another, came to the front. But their progress as a whole was continuous. It formed the sequel to the immemorial conflict between the East and the West, which dyed red the waves of Salamis and brought Zenobia a captive to Rome. During each successive period, the struggle reflected the spirit of the times: military and territorial in the ancient world; military and religious in the Middle Ages; military and mer- cantile in the new Europe which then awoke; devel- oping into the military, commercial, and political com- binations of the complex modern world. This preliminary volume attempts a survey, rapid, yet so far as may be from primary sources, of the