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CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
thoughts of Greeks and Romans and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life alone, but a transfigured and eternal life, again I should point to India."
Before India became the hunting-ground of foreign marauders, she had produced poets and philosophers at whose feet Homer or Plato, Shakespear or Bacon would have done well to sit and learn. But when these barbarians overran Aryāvarta and made it into Hindoostan, when Mahomed Ghazni, the great iconoclast, made it his business to trample everything that was dear and sacred to the Aryan mind, when Zenghiskhan and his successors with the exception of one or two spread their tyranny over the country and lastly when the European commerce and Western civilization began to suck the very blood of India, would you wonder that India is not in the same condition as it was in days gone by.
The wonder is that notwithstanding these foreign attacks, India and her people have survived; that notwithstanding the demoralizing influences of foreigners, India still leads in spirituality and morality. Sir T. Munro says, “If a good system of agriculture, unrivalled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing and arithimatic, the general practice of hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above all, a treatment of the famale sex full of confidence, respect and delicacy, are among the signs which denote a civilized people, then Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilisation is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo.", Life, its Object and Laws according to Hindus
When I was a small boy, about eight years old, I used to 1. India- u hat can it teach us?, E.Max Muller, 1899, p. 6 2. Ibid, p. 62
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