temper. But
it was not merely in obedience to that temper that they shrank from any
changes that would weaken the administration; the best of them at least
had a strong sense of their responsibilities as guardians and protectors
of the simple and ignorant masses committed to their care. They might be
inclined to judge the Western-educated class of Indians too harshly, and
to identify them too closely with the type that was beginning to
dominate the Indian National Congress, but the form in which the
question of yielding to Indians any substantial part of their authority
presented itself to their minds was by no means an entirely selfish one.
"Are we justified," they asked, "in transferring our responsibilities
for the welfare and good government of such a large section of the human
race to a small minority which has hitherto shown so little disposition
to approach any of the difficult problems with the solution of which the
happiness and progress of the overwhelming majority of their own race
are bound up, though, because themselves belonging to the same stock and
the same social system, it would have been much easier for them to deal
with those problems than it is for alien rulers like ourselves? Those
problems arise out of the social system which is known as Hinduism--for
Hinduism is much more a social than a religious system. Western-educated
Indians will not openly deny its evils--the iron-bound principle of
caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern
exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials
and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social
outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated
as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of
widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to
a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile
mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the
economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of
lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so
forth. How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown
themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British
bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own
fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of
them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, ha