THE ENGLISH POLICY OF ISOLATION 369

population under two different and entirely incompat- ible political systems. For although the Indian people are broken up into diversities of race and language, they are, as a whole, not less distinctly marked off from the rest of Asia by certain material and moral char- acteristics than is their country by the mountains and the sea. The component parts of that great country hang together, physically and politically; there is no RUINS OF TYRE, THE ANCIENT PHOENICIAN CITY ON THE MEDITERRANEAN. more room for two irreconcilable systems of govern- ment than in Persia, China, or Asiatic Turkey. The attitude of insulation might not have been in- consistent in the infancy of the English dominion, when the forces of the native states were better divided and more equally balanced, and when we might have con- fined our enterprise to the establishment of a great maritime and commercial power on the shores of the Indian and Arabian seas, like the Phoenicians or the Venetians in the Mediterranean. But it has been seen that, during the second half of the eighteenth century, England penetrated inland, striking in among the local