What, then, has the establishment of British power meant in India? Until the British power was established, India had in all her long history never known political unity. She had seen nothing but an almost uninterrupted succession of wars, an endless series of conquests and evanescent dominions. Always Might had been Right; Law had represented only the will of the master, and the law courts only the instruments of his arbitrary authority, so that the lover of righteousness could only pursue it by cutting himself off from all the ties of society and living the life of the ascetic. India was the most deeply divided land in the world--divided not only by differences of race and tongue (there are 38 distinct languages in India to-day, and some of them differ more widely than Russian and Spanish), but divided still more deeply by bitter conflicts of creed and, most sharply of all, by the unchanging, impermeable barriers of caste, which had arisen in the first instance from the determination of conquering peoples to keep themselves free from any intermixture with their subjects. Nowhere in the world are there to be seen, cheek by jowl, such profound contrasts between distinct grades of civilisation as are represented by the difference between (say) the almost savage Bhils or the out-caste sweepers, and the high-bred Brahmin, Rajput or Mahomedan chiefs. One result of these time-worn distinctions is that through all the ages the ruling castes and races have been accustomed to expect, and the mass of humble men to offer, the most abject submission; so that British administrators have often had to complain that the chief difficulty was, not to make laws for the protection of the humble, but rather to persuade those for whose benefit they were made to take advantage of them.