Now, the history of India before 1000 A. D. has not yet been completely constructed, and who knows but that by future researches some other Samundra Guptas may be discovered? But in any case, the point is not so very important. In that sense even now, India may not be called a complete political unity. It was not so in 1830 A. D. Up till 1849 the Punjab was independent and so were the other provinces annexed by Lord Dalhousie. So Vincent Smith’s claim, that it has been so since 1818 A. D.[7] is not well founded. What is more important for our purpose is the present and the future. It is claimed that under the British, India is a political unity though Nepal is still independent. The critics of Indian aspirations are very unfair, when they compare the India of the seventeenth or the eighteenth or even of the nineteenth century with Great Britain, Germany, France and United States of the twentieth. They forget that the political nations known by these names are only the growth of yesterday. India is as big as the whole of Europe excluding Russia. Yet what was Europe before the nineteenth century? It was a big camp of warring nations and warring religions, engaged in exterminating and persecuting each other alternately. India was more or less a political unity when Great Britain was smarting under the heels of the Romans. It took the British over 1600 years to establish their present political unity. Compare the following account of “England under foreign rule” (1013-1204), given by Green in his “Short History of the English People,” with the condition of things in India from the time of Samundra Gupta onwards. “Britain had become England in the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest, and its conquest had ended in the settlement of its conquerors.... But whatever titles kings might assume, or however imposing their rule might appear, Northumbrian remained apart from West Saxon, Dane from Englishman. “Through the two hundred years that lie between the flight of Aethelred from England to Normandy and that of John from Normandy to England our story is a story of foreign rule. Kings from Denmark were succeeded by kings from Normandy, and these by kings from Anjou. Under Dane, Norman, or Angevin, Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by foreign masters; and yet it was in these years of subjection that England first became really England.... The English Lords themselves sank into a middle class as they were pushed from their place by a foreign baronage who settled on English soil.”