part of British firms to admit Indians as apprentices to their works, and that in consequence they are compelled to go to other countries where they are treated with less suspicion.  This reluctance is perhaps in reality more often due to the fear lest young Indians should afterwards turn their knowledge to too good an account, as the Japanese have often done, in the promotion of competing industries in their own country.  However that may be, the results are certainly regrettable.  For, if there is one thing that has impressed itself on me during my last visit to India, it is that, if we want to retain our hold, not only upon the country, but upon the people, we must neglect no opportunity of arresting the estrangement which is growing up between us and the younger generation of Indians.  It is upon this estrangement that the revolutionary organizations outside of India chiefly rely for the success of their propaganda, and nothing helps them more than the bitterness with which young Indians who come abroad often return to India ready for any desperate adventure[14].

CHAPTER XII.

THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS.

It is impossible to acquit the Congress of having contributed to the growth of active and violent unrest, though the result may have lain far both from the purpose of its chief originators and from the desire of the majority of its members.  Western education has largely failed in India because the Indian, not unnaturally, fails to bring an education based upon conceptions entirely alien to the world in which he moves into any sort of practical relation with his own life.  So with the Indian politician, who, even with the best intentions, fails to bring the political education which he has borrowed from the West into any sort of practical relation with the political conditions of India.

The Indian National Congress assumed unto itself almost from the beginning the functions of a Parliament.  There was and is no room for a Parliament in India, because, so long as British rule remains a reality, the Government of India, as Lord Morley has plainly stated, must be an autocracy—­benevolent and full of sympathy with Indian ideas, but still an autocracy.  Nor would the Congress have been in any way qualified to discharge the functions of a Parliament had there been room for one.  For it represents only one class, or rather a section of one class—­the Western educated middle, and mainly professional, class, consisting chiefly of lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, newspaper men; an important and influential class, no doubt, but one which itself only represents an infinitesimal fraction—­barely, perhaps, one-hundredth part—­of the whole population.  To what extent it is really representative even of that small section it is impossible to say, as the members are not returned by any clearly defined body of constituents or by any formal process of election.  Originally