ve the courage
to act up to their opinions? At one time--before the Congress gave
precedence to political reforms--social reform did find many
enthusiastic supporters amongst the best class of Western-educated
Indians, but the gradual disappearance of men of that type may be said
almost to coincide with the growth of political agitation. There have
been, and there still are, some notable and admirable exceptions, but
they are seldom to be found amongst the men who claim to be the tribunes
of the Indian people. It is on these grounds--moral rather than
political--that we claim to be still the best judges of our duties as
trustees for the people of India."

This was perhaps the most forcible of the British administrator's
arguments, and it was an honest one. Another was that the
Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a
narrow circle of professional classes in the towns, who could not
therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a
vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests
they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and
from whom the very education which constituted their main title to
consideration had tended to separate and estrange them. The land-owning
gentry and the peasantry had so far scarcely been touched by this
political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its
existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the
most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively
from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering
competitions as they had already been drawn into for municipal and local
government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a
struggle that threatened their traditional prestige and authority as
well as their material interests. What they dreaded most of all was the
ascendancy of the lawyer class in this new political movement--the
_Vakil-Raj_, as they called it--for they had in many instances already
been made to feel how heavy the hand of the lawyer could be upon them
in a country so prone to litigation as India, and endowed with so costly
and complicated a system of jurisprudence and procedure, if they
ventured to place themselves in opposition to the political aspirations
of ambitious lawyers. Above all, the British administrator, who rightly
held the maintenance of a strict balance between the different creeds
a