temple of Kali that only some fifteen years ago,
during the violent agitation provoked by the Partition of Bengal, vast
crowds used to assemble and take by the name of the Great Goddess the
vow of _Swadeshi_ as the first step to _Swaraj_, and Bengalee youths,
maddened by an inflammatory propaganda, learned to graft on to ancient
forms of worship the very modern cult of the bomb. To this same temple
resorted only the other day Mr. Gandhi's followers to seek the blessing
of the Great Goddess for the more harmless forms of protest by which he
exhorted the inhabitants of Calcutta to bring home to the Duke of
Connaught during his stay in Calcutta their indignant rejection of the
boon which he had been sent out by the King-Emperor to confer on the
people of India.

Must we then be driven to the conclusion that there is a gulf never to
be bridged between India's ancient civilisation and the modern
civilisation which we have brought to her out of the West? In that case
the great constitutional adventure on which we have just embarked would
be, unlike all our other great adventures in India, foredoomed to
failure, and those Englishmen would be right who shudder at its rashness
and reiterate with added conviction, since the school of Indian thought
for which Mr. Gandhi stands seems to bear them out, that "East is East
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The whole history of
the British connection with India surely excludes such a conclusion of
failure and despair. It teaches us, not, as such Englishmen contend,
that India was won and has been held and must be retained by the sword
alone, but that British rule was established and has been maintained
with and by the co-operation of Indians and British, and that in seeking
to-day to associate Indians more closely than ever before with the
government and administration of the country, we are merely persevering
in the same path which, though at times hesitatingly and reluctantly,
the British rulers of India have trodden for generations past, always
keeping step with the successive stages of our own national and
political evolution. The Indian extremists misread equally the whole
history of British rule who see in it nothing but a long nightmare of
hateful oppression to be finally overcome, according to Mr. Gandhi's
preaching, by "Non-co-operation" and the immortal "soul force" of India,
rescued at last from the paralysing snares of an alien civilisation. Not
for the fir