There are plenty of difficulties in this immense task in England, and I am not sure that I will exclude Scotland, but I said England in order to save your feelings.  One of the obstacles is the difficulty of finding out for certain what actually happens.  Scare headlines in the bills of important journals are misleading.  I am sure many of you must know the kind of mirror that distorts features, elongates lines, makes round what is lineal, and so forth.  I assure you that a mirror of that kind does not give you a more grotesque reproduction of the human physiognomy, than some of these tremendous telegrams give you as to what is happening in India.  Another point is that the Press is very often flooded with letters from Indians or ex-Indians—­from Indicus olim, and others—­too oftened coloured with personal partisanship and deep-dyed prepossessions.  There is a spirit of caste outside the Hindu sphere.  There is a great deal of writing on the Indian Government by men who have acquired the habit while they were in the Government, and then unluckily retain the habit after they come home and live, or ought to live, in peace and quietness among their friends here.  That is another of our difficulties.  Still, when all such difficulties are measured and taken account of, it is impossible to overrate the courage, the patience and fidelity, with which the present House of Commons faces what is not at all an easy moment in Indian Government.  You talk of democracy.  People cry, “Oh!  Democracy cannot govern remote dependencies.”  I do not know; it is a hard question.  So far, after one Session of the most Liberal Parliament that has ever sat in Great Britain, this most democratic Parliament so far at all events, has safely rounded an extremely difficult angle.  It is quite true that in reference to a certain Indian a Conservative member rashly called out one night in the House of Commons “Why don’t you shoot him?” The whole House, Tories, Radicals, and Labour men, they all revolted against any such doctrine as that; and I augur from the proceedings of the last Session—­with courage, patience, good sense, and willingness to learn, that democracy, in this case at all events, has shown, and I think is going to show, its capacity for facing all our problems.

Now, I sometimes say to friends of mine in the House, and I venture respectfully to say it to you—­there is one tremendous fallacy which it is indispensable for you to banish from your minds, taking the point of view of a British Liberal, when you think of India.  It was said the other day—­no, I beg your pardon, it was alleged to have been said—­by a British Member of Parliament now travelling in India—­That whatever is good in the way of self-government for Canada, must be good for India.  In my view that is the most concise statement that I can imagine, of the grossest fallacy in all politics.  It is a thoroughly dangerous fallacy.  I think it is the hollowest and, I am sorry to say, the commonest,