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analysed, could not say whether it was fermented or distilled, and was not prepared with chemical proofs to rebut the suggestion that it might have been coloured water. It is all of a part with this hopeless worship of technicalities that within the last year the courts in thirty-two cases have ordered the apparatus taken in gambling raids to be restored to its proprietors, and that it is the easiest thing for law-breakers, in the name of 'liberty,' to bring suits for oppression against individual policemen, and to secure from their friends on the bench injunctions against molestation by the police. I have already mentioned that there are some two hundred ex-convicts in New York who are acting as chauffeurs; after that, it seems almost like an anticlimax to add that the police have no effective powers of any kind. over the pawnbrokers, who form the second line of defence in the operations of thieves and burglars.

New York not only attracts to itself every crook and hooligan in the United States but is fed by an unceasing stream of European criminals. Equally with the home-bred gangs, these foreign associations are controlled by the politicians. Crime in New York, indeed, is not so much an individual aberration as a business, massed, brigaded, and organised at every point, politically, financially, and legally; and whenever he comes to close quarters with it the honest policeman finds himself ham-strung by the politicians. The whole complex and many-sided problem needs, therefore, for its solution, as I have said, something far more effective than mere 'publicity' and a periodic hurricane of ' revelations.' It needs a recasting of some of the average American's most cherished theories in regard to the structure and practice of local government. So long as New York is largely ruled from Albany, so long will laws be passed that are out of all harmony with the wishes and needs of the metropolis; and so long as such laws are passed the temptation to buy and sell exemption from their operations and to use them as instruments of blackmail will prove, as it is to-day, irresistible. So long as the Commissioner of Police is a political nominee, with no official stability and unable to dismiss a single policeman without an appeal to the civil courts, so long will the internal discipline and administration of the force remains a chaos. So long as police magistrates are appointed by the politicians, and are susceptible to political influences, so long will justice be betrayed. So long as the police are permitted to be used as adjuncts to and agents of the dominant political machine, for the purpose of making house-to-house visitations at election time, tracking removals, and drawing up lists of voters, so long will the power of the politicians be automatically perpetuated, and so long will the policeman look up to and take orders from the Tammany district leader.

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long as judicial procedure and the laws of evidence combine to shield the malefactor and to defeat the honest officer, crime will continue, as now, to be one of the safest and most lucrative professions open to the ambitious New Yorker. The problem of the New York police, in short, is part of the problem that now more than ever confronts the whole American people-how to restore, how to reassume, how to make workable and effective, selfgovernment.

SYDNEY BROOKS.

CHRISTIANITY IN HINDUISM

In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say;
For it's not likely we should higher soar,
In search of heaven, than all the church before.

DRYDEN.

THE proposal for the foundation of Moslem and Hindu Universities has once more brought the question of Christian civilisation in India to the front, and therefore the present time, when with the approval of the Government of India a Hindu University for my co-religionists is shortly to be established in India, seems a most favourable opportunity to inquire how far this new centre of Hindu education is likely to co-operate with Christian ideas as taught through the medium of English literature in educational institutions throughout that vast dependency. The many points of resemblance between the Christian and Hindu religious codes would lead one to think that if stress were laid upon this phase it should not be difficult in the new Hindu University to encourage a spirit of better comprehension between the Hindus and their Christian rulers which would augur well for the future of the two peoples. Every attempt should be made to utilise the Hindu University to remove the spirit of segregation which unquestionably exists between the Christian Government in India and its Hindu subjects, and thus pave the way to harmonious co-operation between the Aryan rulers and the ruled in India. As a Hindu myself, I shall confine my observations here solely to Hindu ethics as compared with Christian teaching, and shall leave it to a qualified Moslem to discuss the matter as it affects his faith.

The importance of the question may be gathered from the fact that whereas the subjects of the King of England include representatives of the four great world-faiths which count their followers by the hundred million-viz. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Mahomedans-of these, 220 millions, or more than half the total population of the British Empire, are my co-religionists, Hindus. A comparison between Christianity and Hinduism has, therefore, for citizens of the British Empire an Imperial aspect which raises it above a mere academic discussion.

India is governed by a Christian Power, and it may perhaps strike the deep student of politics that, since so many Christian ideas are included in the Hindu conception of right and wrong, this may have been instrumental in greatly reducing friction in the Anglo-Indian Legislature when the Christian rulers of India were framing laws and regulations for the hundreds of millions of Hindus there, and thus may have helped to give stability to the British Raj in Hindustan. Doubtless there is no religion without some points of resemblance to the rest, but the bed-rocks of thought on which the great structures of Christianity and Hinduism are based have so much in common when one gets down to essentials that it seems to me this ought to furnish a great bond of sympathy between the two peoples, and that a general enunciation of the moral codes of Christianity and Hinduism might do much to foster a still clearer understanding between England and her mighty dependency in the East. To show that there is a vast groundwork of faith which Englishman and Hindu can hold in common must surely help to further that mutual comprehension between East and West which all friends of peace and progress must desire.

That is one aspect of the comparative study of Christianity and Hinduism, but there is another aspect in which it may be approached. As a knowledge of one language aids the acquisition of another, it seems to me that it might be well for Biblical students to take more friendly account of the religious thought of the Hindus, since it is probable that comparison of the two religions would serve not to shake faith but to increase confidence in the essential portions, the vital essence, of which Christianity and Hinduism possess so much in common. Science is not weakened but fortified when she perceives her laws working in similar fashion throughout the universe, neither is there anything but comfort to the right-thinking mind in the fact that religion also has her general laws. The pity is that men, led astray by adventitious differences, miss the essential resemblances.

Christianity and Hinduism have often been compared by Western scholars, but in most cases such comparisons have either been based largely on the Rig Veda, the bed-rock of Hinduism, or the Bhagavad Gita, immortalised by Sir Edwin Arnold as The Song Celestial. I do not know of any instance where a parallel has been drawn between those two great religions of the world without direct recourse to the famous Hindu religious classics, the Rig Veda and the Bhagavad Gita. For special reasons, however, I have entirely omitted such comparison here. In the first place I have excluded the Rig Veda because I wish to emphasise the kind of precept that is taught in Hindu India directly to the mass of the people, and the contents of the Rig Veda, though

known, of course, to the Hindu scholar, are not familiar to both high and low as are the stories and religious lessons of the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata tales are matters of common knowledge to all Hindus, learned or unlearned; they are familiar both to the illiterate Hindu grocer or sepoy and to their womenfolk in every part of India, and perhaps even better known than is the Bible nowadays to the average Englishman. In the second place, although the Bhagavad Gita is embedded in the Mahabharata, I have made no use of it, because so much controversy has raged about the date of its composition. I have, in short, confined myself to giving a slight idea of some points of comparison between the ethics of other portions of the Mahabharata and the Christian teaching contained in the two chief epitomes of Western moral law, the Beatitudes and the Commandments, and have endeavoured to show the wonderful accord between these famous summaries of Christian right conduct and the Hinduism of the greatest Indian epic. Whether the Hindus live up to their lofty precepts is another matter. How many would say that the conduct of the average Englishman to-day follows out the religion taught by Christ? But the rules are there all the same, and if the harmony between these two powerful religious systems were better understood I think the world would hear less of the irreconcilable differences between England and India. I particularly wish to emphasise the fact that the passages I quote are not solitary instances of agreement with Christian doctrine, but the same ideas are found repeated constantly throughout the great epic, as if to impress them solemnly on the very heart of the people.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Taking the Beatitudes in order, we find that the first deals with aloofness from the world. Attachment to nothing external, other-worldliness-on this principle Christ undoubtedly based His kingdom, and it is a precept which the Hindu sages of the Mahabharata never wearied of preaching. Inwardly unattached, though attached in outer seeming, standing aside from the world, with all his fetters riven, looking with equal eye on friend and foe, that man, O King, is held to be emancipate.' '1 How was the Hindu to attain this spiritual freedom? By knowledge. Knowledge, they said, is the great cure for human pride. 'Covetousness in all creatures ariseth out of ignorance. Seeing the mutability of all enjoyment, it dieth." How may covetousness be subdued? To Yudhishthira, Hindu Emperor of India and King George's predecessor on the Delhi throne in the fifteenth century B.C., came the explanation: When we feel pity for every living creature and perceive the

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1 Santi Parva xviii. 31.

Ibid. clxiii. 20.

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