SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
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love of the people for the Ideal which he represented. He was now all the more convinced that religion represented the very heart of Indian national life, and all along the way he broadcasted his ideas about the regeneration of India in a series of brilliant speeches.
MESSAGE TO HIS COUNTRYMEN Enthusiasm reached its height at Madras. The city erected for him seventeen triumphal arches, presented him with twenty-four addresses in various languages, and suspended her whole public life at his arrival. Here he gave an eloquent utterance to his message to India in a series of magnificent lectures comprising ‘My Plan of Campaign’, ‘The Mission of Vedanta’, and ‘The Future of India’. ‘Each nation, like each individual’, he said, ‘has one theme in this life, which is its centre, the principal note with which every other note mingles to form the harmony. If any nation attempts to throw off its national vitality, the direction which has become its own through the transmission of centuries, that nation dies. In India religious life forms the centre, the keynote of the