What is evidently much wanted is greater elasticity.  In a country like India, which is an aggregation of many widely different countries, the needs and the wishes of the people must differ very widely and cannot be met by cast-iron regulations, however admirable in theory.  It is earnestly to be hoped that the creation of a separate portfolio in the Government of India will not involve the strengthening of the centralizing tendencies which have been the bane of Indian education since the days of Macaulay, himself one of the greatest theorists that ever lived.  We cannot afford to relax the very little control we exercise over education, but education is just one of the matters in which Provincial Governments should be trusted to ascertain, and to give effect to, the local requirements of the people.  In another direction, however, the creation of a Ministry for Education should be all to the good.  If any real and comprehensive improvements are to be carried out they will cost a great deal of money, and in the ordinary sense of the term it will not be reproductive expenditure, though no expenditure, if wisely applied, can yield more valuable results.  As a member of Council—­i.e., as a member of the Government of India—­Mr. Butler must carry much greater weight in recommending the necessary expenditure than a Director-General of Public Education or than a Provincial Governor, especially as the expenditure will probably have to be defrayed largely out of Imperial and not merely out of Provincial funds.  If the educational problem is the most vital and the most urgent one of all at the present hour in India, it stands to reason that no more disastrous blunder could be made than to stint the new department created for its solution.

CHAPTER XX.

THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

There remains one vital aspect of the educational problem which was left untouched by the Educational Resolution of 1904, and has been left untouched ever since we entered three-quarters of a century ago on an educational experiment unparalleled in the world’s history—­a more arduous experiment even than that of governing the 300 millions of India with a handful of Englishmen.  Many nations have conquered remote dependencies inhabited by alien races, imposed their laws upon them, and held them in peaceful subjection, though even this has never been done on the same scale of magnitude as by the British rulers of India.  We alone have attempted to educate them in our own literature and science and to make them by education the intellectual partners of the civilization that subdued them.  Of the two tasks, that of government and that of education, the latter is not by any means the easier.  For good government involves as little interference as possible with the beliefs and customs and traditions of the people, whereas good education means the substitution for them of the intellectual and moral conceptions of what we regard as our higher