a problem of infinite difficulty—­have certainly not been improved by the large influx of a lower class of Europeans which the development of railways and telegraphs and other industries requiring technical knowledge have brought in their train.  Nor can it be denied that the growing pressure of office work as well as the increased facilities of home leave and frequent transfers from one post to another have inevitably to some extent lessened the contact between the Anglo-Indian official and the native population.  Of more remote influences which have indirectly reacted upon the Indian mind it may suffice for the present to mention the South African War, which lowered the prestige of our arms, and the Russo-Japanese War, which was regarded as the first blow dealt to the ascendency of Europe over Asia, though it may be worth noting that in his novel, “The Prince of Destiny,” Mr. Surat Kumar Ghosh lays repeated emphasis on the impression produced in India some years earlier by the defeat of the Italian forces in Abyssinia.  Each of the above points has its own importance and deserves to be closely studied, for upon the way in which we shall in the future handle some of the delicate questions which they raise will largely depend our failure or our success in coping with Indian unrest—­that is, in preventing its invasion of other classes than those to which it has been hitherto confined.  But the clue to the real spirit which informs Indian unrest must be sought elsewhere.

Two misconceptions appear to prevail very widely at home with regard to the nature of the unrest.  The first is that disaffection of a virulent and articulate character is a new phenomenon in India; the second is that the existing:  disaffection represents a genuine, if precocious and misdirected, response on the part of the Western educated classes to the democratic ideals of the modern Western world which our system of education has imported into India.  It is easy to account for the prevalence of both these misconceptions.  We are a people of notoriously short memory, and, when a series of sensational dastardly crimes, following on a tumultuous agitation in Bengal and a campaign of incredible violence in the native Press, at last aroused and alarmed the British public, the vast majority of Englishmen were under the impression that since the black days of the Mutiny law and order had never been seriously assailed in India, and they therefore rushed to the conclusion that, if the pax Britannica had been so rudely and suddenly shaken, the only possible explanation lay in some novel wave of sentiment or some grievous administrative blunder which had abruptly disturbed the harmonious relations between the rulers and the ruled.  People had forgotten that disaffection in varying forms and degrees of intensity has existed at all times amongst certain sections of the population, and under the conditions of our rule can hardly be expected to disappear altogether.  Whether British statesmanship has always sufficiently