“Look at England--fat and fifty, overfed, short of breath, thickening in girth, deepening in brain. England building her ships to fatten in peace; talking much of war to keep the peace, but far beyond the zest and stir of trumpets. England, entered upon her inevitable period of physical decadence, boasting of conquests, like a middle-aged man with rheum in his eye, the clog of senility under his waist-coat, stiffness in his joints, and the red lights of apoplexy bright upon his throat--who throws out his chest among his sons and pants that he is ‘better than ever, e’gad!’ England, sensuous in the home, crowding her houses like a squirrel’s nest in the frosts; an animated stomach, already cultivating and condimenting her fitful but necessary appetites; wise and crafty in the world, but purblind to her own perversions and lying in the rot of them.... England, who will not put away boyish things and look to God!... She is draining India as Rome drained Gaul, as Spain drained Mexico, and accelerating the bestiality which spells _ruin_--with the spoils.... What a sweet and perfect retaliation if Gaul could only have seen the monstrous offspring of the Cæsars; if the Aztecs had only endured to see what befell Spain after the _Noche Triste_; if India--but did not India point out in her philosophy the wages of national, vampirism--before Cortez and before the Cæsars? “Then, if I am not wearying you, we might look at Russia, sundering in the pangs of wretched age. Mad, lesioned, its body a parliament of pains, its brain vaporing of past glories in its present ghastliness of disintegration. “And India, I see a difference here. All men as all nations must suffer. Europe and America are learning to suffer through their excesses; India through her privations, a cleaner, holier way.... I think of India as an old widow who has given away her possessions to a litter of Gonerils and Absaloms--put away all the vanities of conquest and material possessions--a poor old widow with gaunt breasts and palsied hands, who asks only a seat in the chimney-corner, and crumbs from the table of the world!... She has still kept a smile of kindliness for the world, as she sits in the gloom, her soul lifting to the stars....