And always one great warning went out to those ancient Kings, as spoken by Bhīṣhma, the Master of Ḍharma, when the blameless King Yuḍhiṣhthira went to him to ask as to the duties of the Elder Brother of the Nation. He bade him remember that behind the King was the Law, the Divine Law, which none might break with impunity. And then those famous words were spoken that every King should daily remember: "Take care, O King, of the weak, not of the strong; take care of the weak, for the tears of the weak undermine the throne of Kings." That is the great lesson for modern rulers. You may have enemies, you can fight them and conquer them; you may have difficulties, you can surmount them and turn them into steps upwards; but take care of the poor, take care of the miserable, take care of the starving of your realm. For of these, said Bhīṣhma, to whose cry no man listens, the cry enters into the ears of God, who calls on His representative to give account for the miseries of the poor, and who avenges their wrongs by the destruction of the careless King. Now there lies the old ideal. But many of the States of the past were built on the denial of this great Law of Brotherhood. Look at Babylonia; look at the later Egypt; look at the so-called Republics of Greece; look at the masses of the people under the Roman Empire; what do you find? You find that every great Empire of the later past has been built on a foundation of the misery of the lowest of the people. You find that the vast majority in these Empires were slaves--slaves in name, as well as in reality. Brotherhood was denied; the weak were trampled on; strength was used to plunder and not to cherish; with the result that every such Empire has faded from the pages of history. When we want to know their stories we have to burrow in their sepulchres, for they built against the Law of Brotherhood, and the Law has broken them into pieces, and they are dead. Now of all the ancient Empires, Babylonia, Assyria, Nineveh, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all these have passed away; only one Nation remains of that splendid circle of civilisations in the past; only one people, contemporary with those mighty Empires, is still a living Nation; they are dead, nay, they are buried, and only the fragments of their bones remain; but one of their contemporaries lives in our modern days, for the India, that traded with Babylonia in the might of her prosperity, is a living Nation in the twentieth century. And why? because in her teaching, because in her religion, because in her literature, she taught the Law of Brotherhood, though later she ceased to live it out in practice, and then began her long downward course. The old theory of the castes was a law of Brotherhood; the Shūḍra who serves, said Manu, he is to be the younger child in your family. There is no humiliation in being a younger child in a family; there is no shame in being one of the juniors of the circle