the training of the Indian people to govern themselves, and for the first time an attempt was made to appraise generously but fairly the position of the Western-educated classes and the part they have come to play in the Indian polity.  The passage is worth quoting in full, as the constitutional changes effected on the lines recommended by the Report were to give them the opportunity to prove the stuff they were made of as the political leaders of their country.

In estimating the politically-minded portion of the people of India we should not go either to census reports on the one hand, or to political literature on the other.  It is one of the most difficult portions of our task to see them in their right relation to the rest of the country.  Our obligations to them are plain, for they are intellectually our children.  They have imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their credit.  The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no reproach but rather a tribute to our work.  The Raj would have been a mechanical and iron thing if the spirit of India had not responded to it.  We must remember, too, that the educated Indian has come to the front by hard work; he has seized the education which we offered him because he first saw its advantages; and it is he who has advocated and worked for political progress.  All this stands to his credit.  For thirty years he has developed in his Congress, and latterly in the Moslem League, free popular convocations which express his ideals.  We owe him sympathy because he has conceived and pursued the idea of managing his own affairs, an aim which no Englishman can fail to respect.  He has made a skilful, and on the whole a moderate, use of the opportunities which we have given him in the legislative councils of influencing Government and affecting the course of public business, and of recent years he has by speeches and in the press done much to spread the idea of a united and self-respecting India among thousands who had no such conception in their minds.  Helped by the inability of the other classes in India to play a prominent part he has assumed the place of leader; but his authority is by no means universally acknowledged and may in an emergency prove weak.

The prospects of advance very greatly depend upon how far the educated Indian is in sympathy with and capable of fairly representing the illiterate masses.  The old assumption that the interests of the ryot must be confided to official hands is strenuously denied by modern educated Indians.  They claim that the European official must by his lack of imagination and comparative lack of skill in tongues be gravely handicapped in interpreting the thoughts and desires of an Asiatic people.  On the other hand, it is argued that in the limited spread of education, the endurance of caste exclusiveness and of usages sanctioned by caste, and in the records of some local bodies