Practical education is, however, as urgently needed for Indian agriculture as for any other form of Indian industry.  The selection of land and of seeds, the use of suitable manures, an intelligent rotation of crops, the adoption of better methods and less antiquated implements can only be brought about by practical education, and the demand for it is one that Government will hear put forward with growing insistency by the new Councils on which Indian landowners have been wisely granted the special representation that the agricultural interests of India so abundantly deserve.

It was the “sun-dried bureaucrat” again who in regard to Indian industries as well as to Indian agriculture preached and practised sound Swadeshi before the word had ever been brought into vogue by the Indian politician.  The veteran Sir George Birdwood, Sir George Watt, Sir Edward Buck, and many others have stood forth for years as the champions of Indian art and Indian home industries.  As far back as 1883, a Resolution was passed by Government expressing its desire “to give the utmost encouragement to every effort to substitute for articles now obtained from Europe articles of bona fide local manufacture or indigenous origin.”  In 1886, a special Economic Department was created to keep up the elaborate survey of the economic products of India which Sir George Watt had just completed under State direction.  But the most important administrative measure was the creation under Lord Curzon of a separate portfolio of Commerce and Industry in the Government of India, to which a civilian, Sir John Hewett, was appointed with very conspicuous success.  It was also under Lord Curzon that the most vigorous impulse was given to technical education of which the claims had already been advocated by many distinguished Anglo-Indian officials, such as Sir Antony MacDonnell and Sir Auckland Colvin.  The results of an exhaustive inquiry conducted throughout India by a Committee of carefully selected officers were embodied in the Educational Resolution of 1904.  Particular stress was laid upon the importance of industrial, commercial, and art and craft schools as the preparatory stages of technical education, for which, in its higher forms, provision had already been made in such institutions as the engineering colleges at Sibpur, Rurki, Jubbulpore, and Madras, the College of Science at Poona, and the Technical Institute of Bombay.  Until then the record of technical schools had too often resembled the description which Mr. Butler, the new Minister of Education, tersely gave of that of the Lucknow Industrial School—­“a record of inconstant purpose with breaks of unconcern.”  Not only did the question of technical education receive more systematic treatment, but a special assignment of Rs.244,000 a year was made in 1905 by the Government of India in aid of the provincial revenues for its improvement and extension.  It was not, however, until the liberality of the late Mr. J.N.  Tata and his sons, one of the best known Parsee families of Bombay, recently placed a considerable income for the purpose at the disposal of Government that steps have been taken to establish an “Indian Institute of Science” worthy of the name, to which the Mysore Government, who have given a site for it in Bangalore, as well as the Government of India, have promised handsome financial assistance.