It is a religious body—a Universal Church—bent only on religious purification and the training of youth in accordance with Vedic rules. One can understand the opposition of orthodox Hindus, Mohammedans, and Christian missionaries, for in its religious propaganda the Samaj is distinctly militant and gathers in many converts. But the Indian Government is mistaken in regarding it as a centre of sedition. The leaders of both sections—such men as Hans Raj, Principal of the Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore, and Lala Munshi Rama, Governor of the Gurukula, near Hardwar—have steadily set their faces against political work of any sort, and they discourage political discussion among the students as strictly as the Risley Circular. It is useless, they say, to look for the political regeneration of India while the character and intellect of the people are unregenerate. I do not agree with them, believing, as I do, that political freedom is essential for any regeneration of the national spirit. But to accuse the Samaj of political aims, to grasp at any forgery or lie which seeks to implicate the Society in sedition, are only signs of ignorance fixed in its isolation among a subject race. In the summer of 1907, Lala Munshi Rama wrote a detailed defence of the Samaj on this point in the _Civil and Military Gazette_ of Lahore—a defence so just and reasonable that even the _Gazette_, conspicuous among Anglo-Indian papers for the virulence of its anti-Indian feeling, described the “dignity of this deeply pondered vindication” as commanding respect. In one passage he said:— “It is an awful responsibility which these people undertake who try to set the Government against the Arya Samaj, a Society which is trying its best to uproot some of the evils of intemperance, of impurity, of child-marriage, of polygamy, of gambling, and a host of other vices—why, it is the Arya Samajists whom you find in the foremost rank of workers in the field.” Six or seven years ago—in 1901 or early 1902—the writer of that protest cleared a large open space in a pleasant jungle where in a single day I have still seen many deer and monkeys, many wild boars and jackals, the bone-strewn home of a tigress with cubs, the spoor of a huge elephant, wild peacocks perching in the trees, and nearly all the other delights of Eden, except Eve. A few miles away the holy Ganges issues from the foot of the Himalayas into the great Indian plain, and there stands the holy town of Hardwar, goal of great pilgrimages and pitch of many religious beggars, who keep with them deformed cows and other holy monsters to move the hearts of worshippers to pity. On the open space in the jungle a quadrangle of tin-roofed buildings has been raised to be a Vedic school and future college. Over its gateway floats a red banner, inscribed with the sacred symbol of “Om,” and its Brahmacharya, or holy discipline, follows the lines laid down by primeval revelation.