as in all educational and philanthropic developments, have always been in the van.  With the growth of Western education the Indian woman of the higher classes cannot indefinitely lag behind, and, if only to make their daughters more eligible for marriage, the most conservative Indian parents will be compelled to educate them, as some have already done, so that they shall not be separated from their male partners by an unfathomable gulf of intellectual inferiority.  In Calcutta, in Bombay, in Madras, and indeed in all the principal cities of India, one may already meet native ladies, both Hindu and Mahomedan, of education and refinement, who, however few their numbers, are shining examples of what Indian womanhood can rise to when once it is emancipated from the trammels of antiquated custom.

CHAPTER XXII.

SWADESHI AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS.

Was it not Talleyrand who said that speech had been given to man in order to enable him to disguise his thoughts?  Indian politicians are no Talleyrands, but they sometimes seem to have framed their vocabulary on purpose to disguise political conceptions which most of them for various reasons shrink from defining at present with decision.  We have already seen how elastic is the word Swaraj, self-government, or rather self-rule.  In the mouth of the “moderates” of the Indian National Congress it means, we are assured, only a pious aspiration towards the same position which our self-governing Colonies enjoy within the Empire.  For the “advanced” politician Swaraj means a transition stage which he hopes and believes must infallibly lead to a complete severance of the ties that unite India to the Empire.  For the “extremists” it means the immediate and violent emancipation of India from British rule, and absolute independence.  So it is with the term Swadeshi, which means anything from the perfectly legitimate and commendable encouragement of Indian trade and industry to the complete exclusion of foreign, and especially of British, goods by a “national” and often forcible “boycott” as part of a political campaign against British rule.

Political Swadeshi bases itself upon a Nationalist legend that a “golden age” prevailed in India before we appeared on the scene, and that British rule has deliberately drained India of her wealth.  Even if we have to, admit that Indian home industries have suffered heavily from the old commercial policy of the East India Company and from the formidable competition of the organized and scientific processes of British industry, this legend hardly deserves to be treated seriously.  The reductio ad absurdum of the argument has certainly been reached when Mr. Keir Hardie alleges that Indian loans raised in England constitute “a regular soaking drain upon India because the interest is paid to bondholders in this country [England], and is not therefore benefiting the people from whom it is taken.”  I can