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THE POWER OF KARMA me; how my heart almost failed me, and how more than once I was on the point of giving up the battle. Wealth, ease, luxury, and the thousand and one delusive pleasures which hold the Bhayla (cattle) in bondage, I had abandoned, and had almost completely subdued and mastered the evil propensities--the curse of a thousand ages of animality-with which our race is afflicted. Yet such is the demon of perversity, all-powerful through the inherited blindness of a benighted and besotted past, that it required all the fierce determination of which I am capable to persist in the upward path. ‘Through night to light'-let this be your motto in the course of ascent. The greater the obstacles the greater the triumph; and though seclusion is to be recommended under all circumstances, yet if you are of the right calibre, you will succeed wherever you are. ... We Hindoos are a race immeasurably older in mental culture than the one from which you have sprung: your so-called civilization is but of yesterday, and you are merely engaged in an eternal process of multiplying your wants. You have abnormally developed and stimulated the accumulative instinct, so that you have actually come to look upon life as a mere opportunity of piling up rubbish, in the shape of so-called
