stence on spiritual forces alone we
deeply respect and desire to emulate, but we cannot understand your
combining into it with a close alliance with those who, as you frankly
say, would draw the sword as soon as they could.

Your desire for an education truly national commands our whole-hearted
approval. But instead of Indianizing the present system, as you could
begin to do from the beginning of next year, or instead of creating a
hundred institutions such as that at Bolpur and turning into them the
stream of India's young intellectual life, you appear to be turning that
stream out of its present channel into open sands where it may dry up.
In other words, you seem to us to be risking the complete cessation, for
a period possibly, of years, of all education, for a large number of
boys and young men. Is it best, for those young men or for India that
the present imperfect education should cease before a better education
is ready to take its place?

Your desire to unite Mohammedan and Hindu and to share with your
Mohammedan brethren in seeking the satisfaction of Mohammedan
aspirations, we can understand and sympathize with. But is there no
danger, in the course which some of your party have urged upon the
Government, that certain races in the former Ottoman Empire might be
fixed under a foreign yoke, for worse than that which you hold the
English yoke to be? You could not wish to purchase freedom in India at
the price of enslavement in the middle East.

To sum up, we thank you for the spirit of your letter, to which we have
tried to respond in the same spirit. We are with you in the desire for
an India genuinely free to develop the best that is in her and in the
belief that best is something wonderful of which the world to-day
stands in need.

We are ready to co-operate with you and with every other man of any race
or nationality who will help India to realize her best. Are you going to
insist that you can have nothing to do with us if we receive a
government grant (i.e., Indian money), for an Indian School. Surely some
more inspiring battle cry than non-co-operation can be discovered. We
have ventured quite frankly to point out three items in your present
programme, which seem to us likely to hinder the attainment of your true
ideals for Indian greatness. But those ideals themselves command our
warm sympathy, and we desire to work, so far as we have opportunity, for
their attainment. In fact, it is only thus that we