Akbar, like all men, great or petty, lived with the limitations of his period and its circles of ideas. And a Turkoman, ruling in India, was necessarily ignorant of much that Europe had been painfully learning for a thousand years. He knew nothing of the growth of a popular consciousness in Europe, and little or nothing of the wide educational possibilities that the church had been working out in the West. Something more than an occasional dispute with a Christian missionary was needed for that. His upbringing in Islam and his native genius made it plain to him that a great nation in India could only be cemented by common ideas upon a religious basis, but the knowledge of how such a solidarity could be created and sustained by universal schools, cheap books, and a university system at once organized and free to think, to which the modern state is still feeling its way, was as impossible to him as a knowledge of steamboats or aeroplanes. The form of Islam he knew best was the narrow and fiercely intolerant form of the Turkish Sunnites. The Moslems were only a minority of the population. The problem he faced was, indeed, very parallel to the problem of Constantine the Great. But it had peculiar difficulties of its own. He never got beyond an attempt to adapt Islam to a wider appeal by substituting for "There is one God, and Muhammad is his prophet," the declaration, "There is one God, and the Emperor is his regent." This he thought might form a common platform for every variety of faith in India, that kaleidoscope of religions. With this faith he associated a simple ritual borrowed from the Persian Zoroastrians (the Parsees), who still survived, and survive to-day, in India. This new state religion, however, died with him, because it had no roots in the minds of the people about him.
The essential factor in the organization of a living state, the world is coming to realize, is the organization of an education. This Akbar never understood. And he had no class of men available who would suggest such an idea to him or help him to carry it out. The Moslem teachers in India were not so much teachers as conservators of an intense bigotry; they did not want a common mind in India, but only a common intolerance in Islam. The Brahmins, who had the monopoly of teaching among the Hindus, had all the conceit and slackness of hereditary privilege. Yet, though Akbar made no general educational scheme for India, he set up a number of Moslem and Hindu schools.

H. G. Wells. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY. Volume II. Garden City, New York, GARDEN CITY BOOKS, 1961, p. 579

The judgments in this fragment slightly differ from the judgments published in those pieces of information, which I quoted in my previous message, hence the title of this message.

Seweryn