120 ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
model, is a pure delusion. The country over which the breath of the West, heavily charged with scientific thought, has once passed, and has, in passing, left an enduring mark, can never be the same as it was before. The new foundations must be of the Western, not of the Eastern, type. As Sir Henry Maine very truly remarks,1 the British nation in dealing with India " cannot evade the duty of rebuilding upon its own principles that which it unwittingly destroys." The most salient and generally accepted of those principles is unquestionably
1 Maine, " Village Communities of the East and West/' p. 28. I take this opportunity of mentioning that some remarks I made in my work on (f Modern Egypt/' vol. ii., c. xxxvii., as to the difficulty of reforming Islam, have been a good deal misunderstood, owing, I have no doubt, to the fact that I failed to express them clearly. Without going at length into the subject, I may say that I did not wish it to be inferred that in my opinion the social system adopted in Moslem countries would not be changed, and, still less, that the reform of political institutions in those countries was impossible. On the contrary, I do not in the least doubt that both social changes and political reforms will take place. What I meant was that these changes would almost inevitably produce this result—that the Islamism of the future would probably be something quite different to what we imply when we speak of the Islamism of to-day. To this view I adhere, but what the Islamism of the future will be is a point on which I do not venture to prophesy.