And I will say this, gentlemen.  Do not think there is a single responsible leader of the reform party in India, who does not deplore the outbreak of disorder that we have had to do our best to put down; who does not agree that disorder, whatever your ultimate policy may be—­must be with a firm hand put down.  If India to-morrow became a self-governing Colony—­disorder would still have to be put down with an iron hand; I do not know and I do not care, to whom these gentlemen propose to hand over the charge of governing India.  Whoever they might be, depend upon it that the maintenance of order is the foundation of anything like future progress.  If any of you hear unfavourable language applied to me as your representative, do me the justice to remember considerations of that kind.  To nobody in this world, by habit, by education, by experience, by views expressed in political affairs for a great many years past, to nobody is exceptional repression, more distasteful than it is to me.  After all, gentlemen, you would not have me see men try to set the prairie on fire without arresting the hand.  You would not blame me when I saw men smoking their pipes near powder magazines, you would not blame me, you would not call me an arch coercionist, if I said, “Away with the men and away with the pipes.”  We have not allowed ourselves—­I speak of the Indian Government—­to be hurried into the policy of repression.  I say this to what I would call the idealist party.  Then I would say something to those who talk nonsense about apathy and supineness.  We will not be hurried into repression, any more than we will be hurried into the other direction.  This party, which is very vocal in this country, say:—­Oh! we are astonished, and India is astonished, and amazed at the licence that you extend to newspapers and to speakers; why don’t you stop it?  Orientals, they say, do not understand it.  Yes, but just let us look at that.  We are not Orientals; that is the root of the matter.  We are in India.  We English, Scotch, and Irish, are in India because we are not Orientals.  We are representatives, not of Oriental civilisation, but of Western civilisation, of its methods, its principles, its practices; and I for one will not be hurried into an excessive haste for repression, by the argument that Orientals do not understand patience or toleration.

You will want to know how the situation is viewed at this moment in India itself, by those who are responsible for the Government of India.  This view is not a new view at all.  It is that the situation is not gravely dangerous, but it requires serious and urgent attention.  That seems for the moment to be the verdict.  Extremists are few, but they are active; their field is wide, their nets are far spread.  Anybody who has read history knows that the Extremist often beats the Moderate by his fire, his heated energy, his concentration, by his very narrowness.  So be it; we remember it; we watch it all, with that lesson of historic experience full