The fearless response made by the ruling Chiefs to Lord Minto’s appeal for advice and support in the repression of sedition conveys at the same time another lesson which we may well take to heart.  The Government of India consulted them after the danger had arisen and become manifest.  Is it not possible that, had we maintained closer touch with them in the past, had we appreciated more fully the value of their knowledge and experience, the danger might never have arisen or would never have attained such threatening proportions?  At any rate, now that the consciousness of a common danger has drawn Princes and Government closer together, no time should be lost in establishing some machinery which would secure for the future a more sustained and intimate co-operation between them.

CHAPTER XVI

CROSS CURRENTS

The political aspects of Indian unrest have compelled me to dwell chiefly upon the evil forces which it has generated.  But contact with the West has acted as a powerful ferment for good as well as for evil upon every class of Indian society that has come more or less directly under its influence.  Were it otherwise we should indeed have to admit the moral bankruptcy of our civilization.  The forces of unrest are made up of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, and even in their most mischievous manifestations there are sometimes germs of good which it should be our business to preserve and to develop.  Largely as the classes touched, however superficially, by Western education have of late years been invaded by a spirit of reaction and of revolt against all for which that education stands, they have not yet by any means been wholly conquered by it.  It is the breath of the West that has stirred the spiritual and intellectual activity of which Hindu revivalism and political disaffection, glorified under the name of Nationalism, are unfortunately the most prominent and the most recent but not the only outcome.  Another and much healthier outcome is the sense of social duty and social service which has grown up amongst many educated Indians of all races and creeds, and amongst none more markedly than amongst the Hindus.  Traditions of mutual helpfulness are indeed deep-rooted in India as in all Oriental communities.  Mutual helpfulness is the best feature of the caste system, of the Hindu family system, of the old Indian village system, and it explains the absence in a country where there is so much poverty of those abject forms of pauperism with which we are compelled at home to deal through the painful medium of our Poor Laws.  But until the leaven of Western ideas had been imported into India mutual helpfulness was generally confined within the narrow limits of distinct and separate social units.  It is now slowly expanding out of watertight compartments into a more spacious conception of the social inter-dependence of the different classes of