only say this to my idealist friends, whether Indian or European, that for every passage that they can find in Mill, or Burke, or Macaulay, or, any other of our lofty sages with their noble hearts and potent brains, I will find them a dozen passages in which history is shown to admonish us, in the language of Burke—­“How weary a step do those take who endeavour to make out of a great mass a true political personality!” They are words much to be commended to those zealots in India—­how many a weary step has to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass that has a true political personality!  My warning may be wasted, but anybody who has a chance ought to try to appeal to the better, the riper, mind of educated India.  Time has gone on with me, experience has widened.  I have never lost my invincible faith that there is a better mind in all civilised communities—­and that this better mind, if you can reach it, if statesmen in time to come can reach that better mind, can awaken it, can evoke it, can induce it to apply itself to practical purposes for the improvement of the conditions of such a community, they will earn the crown of beneficent fame indeed.  Nothing strikes me much more than this, when I talk of the better mind of India—­there are subtle elements, religious, spiritual, mystical, traditional, historical in what we may call for the moment the Indian mind, which are very hard for the most candid and patient to grasp or to realise in their full force.  But our duty, and it is a splendid duty, is to try.  I always remember a little passage in the life of a great Anglo-Indian, Sir Henry Lawrence, a very simple passage, and it is this, “No one ever ate at Sir Henry Lawrence’s table without learning to think more kindly of the natives.”  I wish I could know that at every Anglo-Indian table to-day, nobody has sat down without leaving it having learned to think a little more kindly of the natives.  One more word on this point.  Bad manners, overbearing manners are disagreeable in all countries:  India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime.

The Government have been obliged to take measures of repression; they may be obliged to take more.  But we have not contented ourselves with measures of repression.  Those of you who have followed Indian matters at all during the last two or three months are aware there is a reform scheme, a scheme to give the Indians chances of coming more closely and responsibly into a share of the Government of their country.  The Government of India issued certain proposals expressly marked as provisional and tentative.  There was no secret hatching of a new Constitution.  Their circular was sent about to obtain an expression of Indian opinion, official and non-official.  Plenty of time has been given, and is to be given, for an examination and discussion of these proposals.  We shall not be called upon to give an official decision until spring next year, and I shall not personally