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 declasses"; 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
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