“A war of Bengalis against Englishmen was like a war of sheep against wolves, of men against demons....  Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable....  All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the Dark Ages.  What the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the sting is to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song, is to woman, deceit is to the Bengali.”

And yet, impenetrable as Macaulay’s own ignorance of the Indian peoples remained, his Minute of 1835, “to promote English literature and science,” and to decree that “all funds appropriated for education should be employed in English education alone,” has marked in Indian history an era from which the present situation of the country dates.

It is true that the education has not gone far.  The Government spends less than twopence per head upon it; less than a tenth of what it spends on the army.  Only ten per cent. of the males in India can write or read; only seven per thousand of the females.  But, thanks chiefly to Macaulay’s conviction that if everyone were like himself the world would be happy and glorious, there are now about a million Indians (or one in three hundred) who can to some extent communicate with each other in English as a common tongue, and there are some thousands who have become acquainted with the history of English liberties, and the writings of a few political thinkers.  Together with railways, the new common language has increased the sense of unity; the study of our political thinkers has created the sense of freedom, and the knowledge of our history has shown how stern and prolonged a struggle may be required to win that possession which our thinkers have usually regarded as priceless.  “The one great contribution of the West to the Indian Nationalist movement,” writes Mr. Ramsay Macdonald with emphasis, “is its theory of political liberty.”

It is a contribution of which we may well be proud—­we of whom Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die.  Whatever the failures of unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay’s spirit could point to this contribution as sufficient counterbalance.  From the works of such teachers as Mill, Cobbett, Bagehot, and Morley, the mind of India has for the first time derived the principles of free government.  But of all its teachers, I suppose the greatest and most influential has been Burke.  Since we wished to encourage the love of freedom and the knowledge of constitutional government, no choice could have been happier than that which placed the writings and speeches of Burke upon the curriculum of the five Indian universities.  Fortunately for India, the value of Burke has been eloquently defined by Lord Morley, who has himself contributed more to the future constitutional freedom