Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE HERITAGE OF THE SUN.

[The Rajputs (literally Sons of Kings) are an immigrant race into India from the plains of Central Asia, and are considered to be of Scythic origin. They adopted the Hindu religion, became the rulers of most of Northern India, and continued so until the Muhammadan invasion. According to their traditions their three main clans are descended from the Sun, the Moon, and the Sacred Pit of Fire. The Solar race are considered to be the eldest line, and the Sesodias are the eldest branch of that line. Of the Sesodias the head is the Maharana of Udaipur. His ancestors put up a stout fight against the Muhammadans, and their former capital, Chitor, was sacked "24 times" as they reckon. On each occasion the heir to the throne was sent away with a small party. The women were burnt on funeral pyres, and the men, putting on their saffron robes in token of their devotion to death, marched out of the city into the midst of their foes and were all slain.

One of the customs of the Princes of Udaipur and other Rajput states is the evening feeding of the wild animals in the jungles adjoining their Palaces.]

WHERE enchantment's marble isles,

With airy domes on pillars light,
Seek deep within the limpid lake
The image of their radiance white:
Where, like rain-fretted pinnacles

Of bergs that drift to tropie seas,
The fairy palace cupolas

Sway gently in the scented breeze:
Where, green beneath the autumn rains,
The shaggy hills stretch out their arms
To clasp the closer to their breast

The Naiad of a thousand charms:
Where sambhur, boar, and shy gazelle,
At bugle-call steal slowly down
To feast upon the rich largesse

Of monarchs of the solar crown:
High on a jutting battlement,

The eldest of the Sun's own breed
Watches, like his great ancestor,
The lowest of his subjects feed:
The inbred fineness of his blood
Imprinted on his musing face,
He sits and dreams of all the past,
Of all the future of his race:
How they reach through the mist of years

To the great God, who lights the world:
How from high Asia's wind-scoured steppes
Smoke of their camps to heaven upourled:

How, through the passes of the North,

With sword and spear they thrust their way, And over India's fabled plains

Stretched far and wide their royal sway:
How they built up a commonwealth,

Each caste in its due order placed,
Each man content to tread the path
His father had before him traced:
How, when the bigot Moslem hordes
Closed on their hill-set capital,
They donned their saffron robes, and fell,
With solemn joy, as heroes fall,

To save from sacrilegious hands
Of alien foes, with fury blind,
The secrets of their ancient faith,
The honour of their womenkind:
How warriors from strange Western isles
Imposed on all their iron will,
And quelled a seething continent

With their imperious "Peace, be still":
How India's first great Empress-Queen,
In mother-love made solemn pact
To cherish and protect her sons

And guard her Princes' rights intact:
Yet, how the wisdom of the West,
Transplanting an exotio shoot,
Bewildered, saw the sapling bend

Beneath sedition's baleful fruit:
How, though war's fiery test assayed
Ind's soldier sons as tempered steel,
Now, they must 'bate their pride and crouch
Beneath a slippered clerkly heel,

And immemorial Kings must bow

To subtle scribes of days gone by: "Never!" outflamed the Sun-god's sword, "My children still know how to die."

RAJPUT.

MUSINGS WITHOUT METHOD.

THE INDEPENDENCE OF EGYPT-SHIRKING OUR RESPONSIBILITIES
-WHAT NAPOLEON AND THE GERMANS THOUGHT THE OPINION
OF MR ALFRED MILNER AND LORD CROMER-THE LORD MAYOR OF
CORK-THE HUMOUR OF MR and MRS WEBB-A NEW CONSTITUTION
-THE KING AND TWO HOUSES OF COMMONS-THE FAILURE OF
PEDANTRY-WHAT BRITONS WILL NOT ENDURE.

IT is not easy to detect a harmonious plan in the confused policy of our present governors. At the very moment at which they are assuming fresh responsibilities in Palestine and Mesopotamia, against the will of the Arabs, they are discarding elsewhere the burdens which it is their imperative duty duty to carry. They have stripped from Ireland the last semblance of government. Light-heartedly and at the command of Mr Gandhi, the proclaimed friend of Mr E. S. Montagu, they have inaugurated what is ominously called "a new era in India. And now after India comes Egypt. Egypt also is on the verge of a "new era." She is to be given complete independence, and without tradition and without training she will come forth a full-blown democracy; and Germany may be once more congratulated on having won in defeat what she hardly dared to hope might be the fruit of victory.

[ocr errors]

Egypt an attack upon India. Not even Nelson's triumph in Aboukir Bay distracted his glance wholly from the Orient. In his love of romance he delighted to picture himself as the Emperor of the East, as a modern Alexander the Great. He mourned bitterly, in the seolusion of St Helena, over his lost opportunity. He regretted again and again that he ever left Egypt, and he was sure that had he made himself Emperor of the East he would have still been upon the throne. His imagination worked easily when in memory he contemplated the Orient. "Arabia awaits a man," said he; "with the French in reserve and the Arabs as auxiliaries I should have seized Judea, I should have been master of the East." Above all, he knew full well whither the domination of Egypt would have led him. He saw clearly that if France were mistress of Egypt she would be mistress of India. "If once Egypt were in possession of the French," said he, "farewell India to the British. This was one of the great projeots which I aimed at."

The value of Egypt, especially to the British Empire, cannot be over-rated. "Egypt," said Napoleon, "is the most important country in the Napoleon, of course, was in world." It was his constant the right of it. The power ambition to make make through whieh masters Egypt masters

India also and much else bebesides. Nor were the Germans slow to learn the lessons which Napoleon taught them. For many years they have kept their eyes fixed upon the key of our Eastern Empire. Long before the war they were busy in Egypt. Their system of peaceful penetration was complete. They had established schools, where were taught and learned the true lessons of Kultur. Their spies covered the land with their accustomed industry, and would doubtless have been a far greater danger had they not been German spies. But their failure was not intentional, and when the war broke out the Germans hoped that they had broken down with what subtlety they might the moral defences of Egypt. They had been trained by Bismarck in the proper school of thought; for though "the maker of modern Germany" W88 ever a bad prophet in the East, though be believed in 1882 that Arabi could not be defeated, and hoped three years later that "Wolseley's head would soon arrive in Cairo, nicely pickled and packed," he did not underrate the importance of Egypt. "Egypt," he once said, "is as necessary to England as her daily bread." And again: "Egypt is of the utmost importance to England on aecount of the Suez Canal, the shortest line of communiestion between the eastern and western halves of the Empire." Such were the lessons which Bismarck taught; and his unworthy successors, though, hap

VOL. CCVIII.—NO. MCCLX.

[blocks in formation]

set there should be the German flag fluttering in the breeze. The only question which divided these amateurs, was precisely how much of the world they should lay their hands upon. Some were satisfied with the French coast as far as the Somme. Others thought it prudent to include Bordeaux or even Toulon in the new map of Germany. But all were agreed that to deprive England of Egypt would be a fitting end to a victorious war. The loss of England should surely be Germany's gain. "The day on which England sees herself face to face with ruin in Egypt and in the world, will be the birthday of the new trans-oceanic Germany." Thus said Dr Rohrbach, and he had good reason for the faith which was in him. And Herr Jäokh posed the argument at another angle. "If you asked an English statesman," said he, "which would be more easily supportable-an anti-English Calais or a non-English Suez, he would renounce Calais without a moment's hesitation, and would insist upon keeping Suez. From Calais England might be pestered, wounded; at Suez she would be beaten,

2 N

[ocr errors]

66

[ocr errors]

killed. Calais does not affect solence and cynicism has the great world-wide British never been, never will be, Empire. Suez cuts the only surpassed. After having exdirect line of communication pressed their amiable inbetween European England tention keep Belgium, and her African, Asiatic, and to correct their whole Australian Empire; it affects frontier from Belfort to the her vital nerve. What, then, sea, to lay hands upon some asked Herr Jäckh, was to be of the Channel ports, they done? He had no difficulty in turned their thoughts to answering the question him- Egypt. "As to Egypt,' self. "The world war," said he, "has now for its object to win for us the regions which lie between the Dardanelles and Suez. We must organise thoroughly a Turkey rioh and strong, thanks to German toil, and guard our ever increasing Germany against English hostility by ensuring a perpetual menace to the centre of the English world in front of, or even at, Suez itself."

It is well to recall what were the amiable intentions and the joyous hopes of the Germans, not only because we may shape our policy by them, but because, having dreamed the wildest dreams of universal dominion, they now protest bitterly against the smallest attempt to bring their headstrong folly to account. We can best judge our own olemeney by comparing the world as it is to-day with what it would have been had the Germans won the war. And the opinions set forth by Dr Rohrbach and Herr Jäckh were not theirs alone. They were shared eagerly by Germans of all kinds and all classes. We remember, for instance, the famous manifesto of Professor Onoken and his colleaguesa document which for in

wrote the professorial fireeaters, "which unites English Africa with English Asia, and which with far-distant Australia makes an English sea of

Indian Ocean, Egypt, which forms a link between the Mother Country and all her eastern colonies, it is, as Bismarck said, "the nape of England's world empire, it is the crampon by which England subdues the Eastern and the Western world to its arbitrary power." The professors would no longer permit this subjugation, and they knew how to put an end to it. "It is there, in Egypt, that the vital nerve of England can be struck! If that succeeds the world route of the Suez Canal will be liberated from the dominion of one power, and the ancient rights of Turkey will be re-established 88 much as possible."

The last sentence is, of course, pure hypocrisy. The Germans did not care a fig for Turkey, and their sole purpose was to substitute the German for the English power. But the passages which we have quoted show us with what clearness our enemies envisaged the question of Egypt, and it will doubtless be

« PreviousContinue »