en Hindus and Mahomedans, our difficulties in the new
Frontier Province, as well as along the whole North-West frontier, are
of quite a different order, and though the turbulence of Pathan tribes
and the occasional outbreaks of Moslem fanaticism amongst them are a
cause of constantly recurring anxiety to the Government of India, it is
not amongst those hardy and only half-tamed hillsmen that the cry of
_Swadeshi_ and _Swaraj_ from Bengal or of "Arya for the Aryans" from the
Punjab is likely to elicit any response. Such echoes of far away
sedition as may reach their mountain fastnesses provoke only vague
wonder at the forbearance and leniency of British rulers, and if ever
the British _Raj_ were in jeopardy, Pathan and Baluch would be the first
to sharpen their swords and shoulder their rifles either in response to
our call or in order to descend on their own account, as their forbears
have done before, into the fair plains of Hindustan and carve out
kingdoms for themselves from the chaos that would follow the collapse of
British power. Along the North-East frontier British India marches with
semi-independent States that have little or nothing in common with the
rest of India. Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim are Himalayan highlands
inhabited chiefly by Mongolian Buddhists, who have far more affinity
with Tibetans and Chinese than with their Indian neighbours to the
south. Assam is little more than an administrative dependency of Eastern
Bengal, whilst Burma has been even more accurately described as a mere
appendage of India, attached for purposes of administrative convenience
to our Indian Empire, but otherwise as effectively divided from it by
race, religion, customs, and tradition as by the waters of the Bay of
Bengal and the dense jungles of the Patkai Mountains.

In none of these borderlands has Hinduism ever struck root, and in none
of them, therefore, is Indian Nationalism, which is so largely bound up
with Hinduism, likely to find a congenial soil. But that Southern India
where Hinduism is supreme should have remained hitherto so little
affected by the political agitation which has swept across India further
north from the Deccan to Bengal may at first sight cause some surprise.
Yet the explanation is not far to seek, if one bears in mind the
profound differences which nature itself has imposed upon this vast
sub-continent. Southern India, which may be defined as including the
whole of the Madras Presidency and the thre