from the professed aspirations of the Indian National Congress.  Just as the Ruling Chiefs rightly complained of the effect upon their own people of the seditious literature imported into their States from British India before we were at last induced to check the output of the “extremist” Press, so they would be justified in resenting any grave political changes in British India which would react dangerously upon their own position and their relations with their own subjects.  When we talk of governing India in accordance with Indian ideas, we cannot exclude the ideas of the very representative and influential class of Indians to which none are better qualified to give expression than the Ruling Chiefs.  One further suggestion.  The policy of annexation has long since been abandoned, and the question to-day is whether we might not go further and give ruling powers to a few great chiefs of approved loyalty and high character, who possess in British India estates more populous and important than those of many whom we have always recognized as Ruling Chiefs.  The objections to so novel a departure are, I know, serious, and may be overwhelming—­foremost among them being the reluctance hitherto shown by the people themselves whenever, for purposes of administrative convenience, any slight readjustment of boundaries has been proposed that involved the transfer to a native State of even a few villages until then under British Administration.

The political reforms with which Lord Minto’s Viceroyalty will remain identified are only just on their trial.  All that can safely be said at present is that they are full of promise, and it would be rash to predict whether and when it may be safe to proceed further in the direction to which, they point.  It is difficult even to say yet awhile what share they have had, independently of the “repressive” measures that accompanied them, in stemming at least temporarily the tide of active sedition.  Time is required to mature their fruits whether for good or for evil.  One may hope that, though they address themselves only to the political elements of the present unrest, they will tend to facilitate the treatment of the economic and social factors of the Indian problem.  It is these that now chiefly and most urgently claim the attention of the British rulers of India.  To rescue education from its present unhealthy surroundings and to raise it on to a higher plane whilst making it more practical, to promote the industrial and commercial expansion of India so as to open up new fields for the intellectual activity of educated Indians, to strengthen the old ties and to create new ones that shall bind the ancient conservative as well as the modern progressive forces of Indian society to the British Raj by an enlightened sense of self-interest are slower and more arduous tasks and demand more patient and sustained statesmanship than any adventures in constitutional changes.  But it is only by the successful achievement of such tasks that we can expect to retain the loyal acquiescence of the Princes and peoples of India in the maintenance of British rule.