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