10 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

to earn the perpetual love of her adopted people by her-
fiery death, the death which every Rajput woman would
have preferred above dishonour. To this day her name
is remembered by the peoples of northern India, as that of
one who was the flower and crown of beauty and heroism.-
And just in such wise are all the different parts of India
bound together by a common historical tradition and ties
of spiritual kinship ; none can be spared, nor can any live
independent of the others.

The diverse peoples of India, are like the parts of some
magic puzzle, seemingly impossible to fit together, but
falling easily into place when once the key is known ; and
the key is that realization of the fact that the parts do fit
together, which we call national self-consciousness. I am
often reminded of the Cairene girl's lute, in 'the tale of
Miriam and Ali Nur-al-Din. It was kept in a " green
satin bag with slings of gold." She took the bag, " and
opening it, shook it, whereupon there fell thereout two-and-
thirty pieces of wood, which she fitted one into other?
male into female and female into male, till they became
a polished lute of Indian workmanship. Then she un-
covered her wrists and laying the lute in her lap, bent
over it with the bending of mother over babe, and swept
the strings with her finger-tips ; whereupon it moaned
and resounded and after its olden home yearned ; and it
remembered the waters that gave it drink and the earth
whence it sprang and wherein it grew and it minded the
carpenters who cut it and the polishers who polished it and
the merchants who made it their merchandise and the ships
tha,t shipped it; and it cried and called aloud and moaned
and groaned; and it was as if she asked it of all these
things and it answered her with the tongue of the case."
Just such an instrument is India., composed of many parts