long ago, "Les Déracinés," 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 déclassés"; 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.

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