Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/419

Rh population under two different and entirely incompatible political systems. For although the Indian people are broken up into diversities of race and language, they are, as a whole, not less distinctly marked off from the rest of Asia by certain material and moral characteristics than is their country by the mountains and the sea. The component parts of that great country hang together, physically and politically; there is no more room for two irreconcilable systems of government than in Persia, China, or Asiatic Turkey.

RUINS OF TYRE, THE ANCIENT PHŒNICIAN CITY ON THE MEDITERRANEAN.

The attitude of insulation might not have been inconsistent in the infancy of the English dominion, when the forces of the native states were better divided and more equally balanced, and when we might have confined our enterprise to the establishment of a great maritime and commercial power on the shores of the Indian and Arabian seas, like the Phœnicians or the Venetians in the Mediterranean. But it has been seen that, during the second half of the eighteenth century, England penetrated inland, striking in among the local