I came out of these dark corners presently into the sunblaze of India. I was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment and engaged in preparing matter for my first book, "Enterprise and India," and therein you may read how I went first to Assam and then down to Ceylon following up this perplexing and complicated business of human enslavement to , exercised by this great spectacle of human , and at once attracted by and by and dissatisfied with those that would make all this vast harsh spectacle of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and upon humanity. And behind and about the things I was looking for were other things for which I was not looking, that slowly came into and the problem. It dawned upon me by degrees that India is not so much one country as a vast spectacle of human development at every stage, in infinite variety. One ranges between naked and the most sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries about great modern enterprises, about railway labor, canal labor, tea-planting, across vast stretches of country where men still lived, , agricultural, unprogressive and simple, as men lived before the first stirrings of recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those mud-built villages groups of women with who are identical in pose and figure and quality with the women modelled in Tanagra figures, and the droning wall-wheel is the same that the fields of ancient Greece, and the crops and beasts and all the life is as it was in Greece and Italy, Phœnicia and Judea before the very dawn of history.  
By imperceptible degrees I came to realize that this matter of expropriation and enslavement and control, which bulks so vastly upon the modern consciousness, which the treat as though it was the comprehensive present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect of an overlife that struggles out of a massive ancient and traditional common way of living, struggles out again and again—blindly and always so far with a disorderly insuccess....
 
I began to see in their proper proportion the vast enduring normal human existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, and unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those excrescences of multitudinous city , those stormy excesses of productive energy that up out of that life, establish for a time great strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads, empires, literatures, and then and fall back again into ruin. In India even more than about the all this is spectacular. There the peasant goes about his work according to the usage of fifty thousand years. He has a version of religion, a moral tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by years of trial and survival to his needs, and the whole land is littered with the and abandoned material of those newer, bolder, more experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.
 
It was when I was going through the panther-haunted palaces of Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri that I first felt how tremendously the ruins of the past may face towards the future; the thing there is like a frozen wave that rose and never broke; and once I had caught that light upon things, I found the same quality in all the ruins I saw, in and Vijayanagar and Chitor, and in all that I have seen or heard of, in ancient Rome and ancient Verona, in Pæstum and Cnossus and ancient Athens. None of these places was ever really finished and done with; the Basilicas of Cæsar and Constantine just as much as the baths and galleries and halls of audience at Fatehpur Sikri express not ends achieved but intentions of permanence. They and . They are trials, abandoned trials, towards ends , ends felt rather than known. Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of Pekin, in the vast of its Forbidden City, which are like a cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a . I saw the place in 1905 in that slack after the European looting and before the great that followed the Russo-Japanese war. Pekin in a century or so may be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors. Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it seemed to me I felt the first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable and cessation at the very of things, that voice which opposes to all the hasty ambitions and eagerness of men: "It is not here, it is not yet."
 
Only the other day as I came back from Pa............