Let me now turn to our second question:  internal political unrest.  In clubs and other places where wise men in arm-chairs lay down the law about affairs of state, one constantly hears expressions of surprise and indignation that there should be any unrest in India at all.  “We have,” say the die-hard wiseacres, “governed India jolly well and jolly honestly, and the Indians ought to be jolly grateful instead of kicking up all this fuss.  If that meddlesome Montagu had not put these wicked democratic ideas into their heads, and stirred up all this mud, we should have gone on quite comfortable as before.”  But if we face the facts squarely, we shall see that the wonder is not that there has been so much, but that there has been so comparatively little unrest, and that India should, on the whole, have waited so patiently for a definite advance towards self-government.

What are the facts?  They are these.  Partly by commercial enterprise, partly by adroit diplomacy, partly by accident, largely by the valour of our arms, we have obtained dominion over the great continent of India.  We have ruled it for more than a century through the agency of a handful of Englishmen, alien in creed, colour, and custom from the people whom they rule—­men who do not even make their permanent homes in the land they administer.  Now, however efficient, however honest, however impartial, however disinterested such a rule may be, it cannot obviously be really agreeable to the peoples ruled.  This is the fundamental weakness of our position.  That our rule on these lines has lasted so long and has been so successful is due not to the fact alone that it has been backed by British bayonets, but rather to the fact that it has been remarkably efficient, honest, just, and disinterested—­and, above all, that we have in the past given and secured goodwill.

Superimposed on this underlying irritant, there have been of late years a number of other more direct causes of unrest.  Education, which we gave to India and were bound to give, had inevitably bred political aspiration, and an intelligensia had grown up hungry for political rights and powers.  Simultaneously the voracious demands of a centralised bureaucracy for reports and returns had left the district officer little leisure for that close touch with the people which in the past meant confidence and goodwill.  Political restlessness had already for some years begun to manifest itself in anarchical conspiracies and crimes of violence, when the Great War began.  In India, as elsewhere, the reflex action of the war was a disturbing element.  High prices, stifled trade, high taxation, nationalist longings and ideas of self-determination and self-government served to reinforce subterranean agitation.