essentially political, they can be met by compromise on purely political
lines. This assumption ignores, I fear, certain factors of very great
importance, social, religious, and economic, which profoundly affect, if
they do not altogether overshadow, the political problem. The question
to which I propose to address myself is whether Indian unrest represents
merely, as we are prone to imagine, the human and not unnatural
impatience of subject races fretting under an alien rule which, however
well intentioned, must often be irksome and must sometimes appear to be
harsh and arbitrary; or whether to-day, in its more extreme forms at any
rate, it does not represent an irreconcilable reaction against all that
not only British rule but Western civilization stands for.

I will not stop at present to discuss how far the lamentable
deficiencies of the system of education which we have ourselves
introduced into India have contributed to the Indian unrest. That that
system has been productive of much good few will deny, but few also can
be so blind as to ignore the fact that it tends on the one hand to
create a semi-educated proletariate, unemployed and largely
unemployable, and on the other hand, even where failure is less
complete, to produce dangerous hybrids, more or less superficially
imbued with Western ideas, and at the same time more or less completely
divorced from the realities of Indian life. Many other circumstances
also which have helped the promoters of disaffection I must reserve for
subsequent discussion. Some of them are economic, such as the remarkable
rise in prices during the last decade. This has seriously enhanced the
cost of living in India and has specially affected the very classes
amongst whom disaffection is most widespread. The clerk, the teacher,
the petty Government official, whose exiguous salaries have remained the
same, find themselves to-day relatively, and in many cases actually,
worse off than the artisan or even the labourer, whose wages have in