elasticity of practical Hinduism, the fictions and anomalies which can be invented or tolerated at need.  But the beliefs and practices of popular Hinduism are obviously irreconcilable with the principles of modern civilization; and the various indications of a desire to reform and purify their ancient religion may be partly due to the perception among educated Hindus that so contradictory a position is ultimately untenable, that the incongruity between sacrifices to the goddess Kali and high University degrees is too manifest.

The course and consequences of the measures taken by the British Government to promote Western education in India has been attentively studied by the author of this volume.  It is a story of grave political miscalculation, containing a lesson that has its significance for other nations which have undertaken a similar enterprise.  Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the last century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be the certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking.  In any case it was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British rule.  We have since discovered, by experience, that, although education is a sovereign remedy for many ills—­is indeed indispensable to healthy progress—­yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this potent medicine may engender other disorders.  It acts upon the frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the disappointment is bitterly resented.  That these effects are well known even in Europe may be read in a remarkable French novel published not long ago, “Les Deracines,” which, describes the road to ruin taken by poor collegians who had been uprooted from the soil of their humble village.  And in Asia the disease is necessarily much more virulent, because the transition has been more sudden, and the contrast between old ideas of life and new aspirations is far sharper.  From the report of an able French official upon the Indo-Chinese Colonies we may learn that the existing system of educating the natives has proved to be mischievous, needing radical reform.  Of the Levantine youths in the Syrian towns, the product of European schools, a French traveller writes (1909), “C’est une tourbe de declasses”; while in China some leaders of agitation for democratic changes in the oldest of all Empires are said to be those who have qualified by competitive examination for public employ, and have failed to obtain it.  In every country the crowd of expectants far outnumbers the places available.  If, indeed, the Government which introduced Western education into Bengal had been native instead of foreign, it would have found itself entangled in difficulties no less grave than those which now confront the British rulers; and there can be little doubt that it would probably have broken down under them.