have observed the
extraordinary elasticity of practical Hinduism, the fictions and
anomalies which can be invented or tolerated at need. But the beliefs
and practices of popular Hinduism are obviously irreconcilable with the
principles of modern civilization; and the various indications of a
desire to reform and purify their ancient religion may be partly due to
the perception among educated Hindus that so contradictory a position is
ultimately untenable, that the incongruity between sacrifices to the
goddess Kali and high University degrees is too manifest.

The course and consequences of the measures taken by the British
Government to promote Western education in India has been attentively
studied by the author of this volume. It is a story of grave political
miscalculation, containing a lesson that has its significance for other
nations which have undertaken a similar enterprise. Ignorance is
unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the
last century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be
the certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay
should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for
political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case it was the clear
and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the
intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British
rule. We have since discovered, by experience, that, although education
is a sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable to healthy
progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this
potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame of
an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains,
stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the
disappointment is bitterly resented. That these effects are well known
even in Europe may be read in a remarkable French novel published not
long ago, "Les Deracines," 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