The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c7.s1.26

c7.s1.26

³ Smith's *Early Hist.*, pp. 356—357. The same fallacy is to be noticed in Banerji, Vol. I, pp. 225—228, 307, 308, in Banerjea's *Public*, pp. 235—239, and even in the poet Yogindranath Basu, whose recent epics in Bengali, *Prithvî-râj* (1915) and *Shivaji* (1918), are intended to be history in verse. All of them have an extraordinary conception of the importance of political unity in national life. It is evidently forgotten that the *élan de la vie* of mankind is not unity so much as freedom (*sva-râj*), be it the freedom of five thousand or of five million.