Page:India — Wonderland of the East.djvu/10

 viii Task of the Educational Reformer

which the hand of Nature and the hand of man have both contributed in no niggardly fashion. It must surely, then, be due to want of information that the seeker after pathos, beauty, and grandeur so seldom finds his way to the cradle of our Aryan civilization. We have rushed ahead of those laggards on the road of time, but not always because we were their superiors, and they demand, and should receive, our sympathy and our help. When that sympathy and that help are given in a whole-hearted manner, there will no longer be an Indian problem.

The educational reformer must sooner or later be convinced of the necessity for such work as this series attempts to do; it is needed as a corrective to the elaborate and exegetic treatises of which our age of scholastic specialism is so prolific. The student wants, not one, but dozens of books which attempt the sifting and generalization of what the specialist accumulates; he can then compare different views and choose his own. In the hope that it may soon be only one among a number, I offer him my sketch of the struggle of East and West during a millennium of World-Empire.

C. W. W. ASCOT, May, 1907.