The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

In A Study of History, Professor A. J. Toynbee quotes the Latin hexameters which Claudian of Alexandria wrote in praise of Rome almost five hundred years after Caesar set foot on Egyptian soil, and he adds ruefully: “It would be easy to prove that the British Raj had been in many respects a more benevolent and also perhaps a more beneficent institution than the Roman Empire, but it would be hard to find a Claudian in any of the Alexandrias of Hindustan.”13 Now it is not altogether farfetched to assume that, had the British in India instead of cultivating the Nizams, Maharajas, Nawabs, Gekawars and so on made an effort to win the Indian intellectual; had they treated him as an equal, encouraged him in his work and allowed him a share of the fleshpots, they could perhaps have maintained their rule there indefinitely.