ncial
and the Imperial Governments. The people are being trained for the
wisest exercise of political rights. But many who have carefully
observed the political corruption which they reveal in the exercise of
already acquired rights, think that no greater evil could befall India
than that of a sudden bestowal, by the State, of a great extension of
these privileges.

The root of India's present incapacity for self-government is not
intellectual, but social and moral. No one doubts that there is
ability enough; but many believe that India must develop much upon the
lower ranges of domestic sanity and social ethics before it is
prepared for enhanced political privileges. The ignorance and the
disabilities of women in India are a crying injustice, whose influence
penetrates every department of Indian life, and for the removal of
which educated Indians will hardly raise a finger.

The caste system, with its numberless stereotyped divisions, its
myriad insurmountable barriers between class and class, and its
countless petty jealousies and mutual antagonisms, is well known to
all. And so long as Hindus continue to worship this demon, caste, it
is impossible for them to become a united body to which, with any
courtesy, the name Nation can be applied. Nor can they blend into such
action as can in any sense be called National or patriotic. India is
wofully lacking in the first essential of self-government--public
spirit.

In other words, the most urgent need of India at present is social
reform, which depends entirely upon the people, and not political
reform, which must come from the State. And yet the social reform
movement in India is less rapid to-day than at any time during the
last quarter of a century. And those who cry loudest for political
rights are the ones who cast a sinister eye upon the social reform
movement.

And it must be remembered that the people who cry most loudly for
national independence to-day are the very ones whose antecedents and
whose fundamental conceptions of life and of society would forbid
them to grant even the most elementary social, not to say political,
rights to one-half of the population of the land. The way the Brahman
and the higher Sudras, who are clamouring for what they regard
God-given rights from the British government, deny in principle and
practice, to their fellow-citizens, the so-called outcasts and other
members of the community, the most elementary principles of liberty
a