the new departure he was advocating.  Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our efforts should be directed.  “It may be,” he declared, “that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge they may, in some future age, demand European institutions.  Whether such a day will ever come, I know not.  But never will I attempt to avert or retard it.  Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.”

Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was to be the diffusion of Western education.  “The great object of the British Government,” he declared, “ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone.”

India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to the new call.  Not only were the new Government schools as well as the older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning, but the rapid assimilation of Western ideas amongst the upper classes, especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit of the West.  Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the barbarous custom of Sati, i.e. the self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands.  Government, however, rightly felt that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and beliefs into harmony with Western standards.  Nor was there any lack of Indians to give their countrymen that lead—­amongst them several high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost.  They were resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superstitious and idolatrous impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure kernel of Hindu philosophy.  The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any personal God.  British administrators watched and fostered the moral and intellectual progress of India with