was included in the British Empire under Queen Victoria. Again, the fact that Asoka’s Empire did not include the Southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula was more than compensated by the inclusion of almost the whole of Afghanistan and Beluchistan and Nepal in his dominions. The territories comprising the kingdom of Nepal are not included in the British Empire, although they constitute a necessary part of India. Yet even Vincent Smith does not doubt that India is a political unity to-day. Then again it is only very recently that he and other historians have found out the data for a history of the Gupta Empire from 320 to 455 A. D., about the extent of which he says: “The dominions under the direct government of Samundra Gupta in the middle of the fourth century thus comprised all the populous and fertile countries of Northern India.... Beyond those wide limits the frontier kingdoms of Assam and the Gangetic delta as well as those on the southern slopes of the Himalayas and the free tribes of Malwa and Rajputana were attached to the Empire by bonds of subordinate alliance; while almost all the kingdoms of the South had been overrun by the Emperor’s armies and compelled to acknowledge his irresistible might. “Whatever may have been the exact degree of skill attained by Samundra Gupta in the practice of the arts which graced his scanty leisure, it is clear that he was endowed with no ordinary powers; and that he was in fact a man of genius, who may fairly claim the title of the Indian Napoleon. “By a strange irony of fate this great king--warrior, poet, and musician--who conquered nearly all India, and whose alliances extended from the Oxus to Ceylon--was unknown even by name to the historians until the publication of this work.[6] His lost fame has been slowly recovered by the minute and laborious study of inscriptions and coins during the last eighty years.” It may be mentioned, in passing, that monarchs of the Samundra Gupta type, who may be compared easily with a Charlemagne, a Frederick or a Peter the Great, have flourished in India almost every second generation. Hindu folk-lore has known them as Vikramadityas (Suns of Power) and has invested their names with “the halo of Arthurian romance.” And this was a time in the history of the world when Egypt and Babylon had already passed away, when China was in a state of “anarchy,” when the Roman Empire was under the heels of the barbarians, and when the Saracenic Empire (Caliphate) had not yet come into existence. England, France and Germany were simply _non est_.