The phases through which the State’s educational policy in India have passed during the last fifty years are explained at length in this volume.  The Government was misled in the wrong direction by the reports of two Commissions between 1880 and 1890, whose mistakes were discerned at the time by those who had some tincture of political prudence.  The problem is now to reconstruct on a better plan, to try different lines of advance.  But some of us have heard of an enterprising pioneer in a difficult country, who confidently urged travellers to take a new route by assuring them that it avoided the hills on the old road.  Whether the hills were equally steep on his other road he did not say.  And in the present instance it may not be easy to strike out a fresh path which may be clear from the complications that have been suffered to grow up round our system of Indian education; while no one proposes to turn back.  The truth is that in India the English have been throughout obliged to lay out their own roads, and to feel their way, without any precedents to guide them.  No other Government, European or Asiatic, has yet essayed to administer a great Oriental population, alien in race and religion, by institutions of a representative type, reckoning upon free discussion and an unrestricted Press for reasonable consideration of its measures and fair play, relying upon secular education and absolute religious neutrality to control the unruly affections of sinful men.  It is now seen that our Western ideas and inventions, moral and material, are being turned against us by some of those to whom we have imparted an elementary aptitude for using them.  And thus we have the strange spectacle, in certain parts of India, of a party capable of resorting to methods that are both reactionary and revolutionary, of men who offer prayers and sacrifices to ferocious divinities and denounce the Government by seditious journalism, preaching primitive superstition in the very modern form of leading articles.  The mixture of religion with politics has always produced a highly explosive compound, especially in Asia.

These agitations are in fact the symptoms of what are said by Shakespeare to be the “cankers of a calm world”; they are the natural outcome of artificial culture in an educational hothouse, among classes who have had for generations no real training in rough or hazardous politics.  The outline of the present situation in India is that we have been disseminating ideas of abstract political right, and the germs of representative institutions, among a people that had for centuries been governed autocratically, and in a country where local liberties and habits of self-government had been long obliterated or had never existed.  At the same time we have been spreading modern education broadcast throughout the land, where, before English rule, learning had not advanced beyond the stage of Europe in the middle ages.  These may be taken to be the primary causes of the