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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.

But throughout the war India not only remained calm and restrained, but
her actual contribution to the war, in men and material, was colossal
and was ungrudgingly given. She had a right to expect in return generous
treatment; but what did she get? She got the Rowlatt Bill. Now, of
course, there was a great deal of wicked, lying nonsense talked by
agitators about the provisions of the Rowlatt Bill,