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India's Message to America
as progenitors of the civilization which you now enjoy. It is a commemoration of the completion, so to speak, of one cycle of life, a picture of the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, because the first representative of race is invited to commune with the last and best in opportunities of races. That this new American nation, the youngest child in the history of nations has wisely and hospitably invited the aged and wellpreserved nation from the farthest country to the entertainment is without precedent in the history of the world.
It is a pleasing thought to my country that she finds parallels of epochs or stages in the development of human lives and races. While you Americans tell of your Washington, who was "first in peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," so we, also, have our Washington, who many centuries ago embalmed himself in the institutions of my country. No greater man than King Ashoka has ever reigned in India and no succeeding monarch has equalled his glory. He was inspired by a liberal and catholic spirit in his internal administration and in his foreign policy, and the profound love of truth and the desire to spread the truth, have made his name a household word from Siberia to Ceylon.
You have had your Abraham Lincoln, who was the regenerator of your country, a second Washington. We had also our Abraham Lincoln; the victor of a great and patriotic war, the patron of reviving Hinduism, the center of all that is best and most beautiful in modern Sanskrit literature, and the subject of a hundred legends. Vikrama the Great, is to the Hindu what Charlemagne is to the French, what Alfred is to the English, and what Harun-Er-Rashid is to the Mohammedan – to the learned as to the illiterate, to the poet as to the story teller, to the old man as to the school-boy, his name is as familiar in India as the name of any prince or potentate or mighty leader in any country. Tender
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