chnical knowledge have brought in their train. Nor can it be denied
that the growing pressure of office work as well as the increased
facilities of home leave and frequent transfers from one post to another
have inevitably to some extent lessened the contact between the
Anglo-Indian official and the native population. Of more remote
influences which have indirectly reacted upon the Indian mind it may
suffice for the present to mention the South African War, which lowered
the prestige of our arms, and the Russo-Japanese War, which was regarded
as the first blow dealt to the ascendency of Europe over Asia, though it
may be worth noting that in his novel, "The Prince of Destiny," Mr. Surat
Kumar Ghosh lays repeated emphasis on the impression produced in India
some years earlier by the defeat of the Italian forces in Abyssinia.
Each of the above points has its own importance and deserves to be
closely studied, for upon the way in which we shall in the future handle
some of the delicate questions which they raise will largely depend our
failure or our success in coping with Indian unrest--that is, in
preventing its invasion of other classes than those to which it has been
hitherto confined. But the clue to the real spirit which informs Indian
unrest must be sought elsewhere.

Two misconceptions appear to prevail very widely at home with regard to
the nature of the unrest. The first is that disaffection of a virulent
and articulate character is a new phenomenon in India; the second is
that the existing: disaffection represents a genuine, if precocious and
misdirected, response on the part of the Western educated classes to the
democratic ideals of the modern Western world which our system of
education has imported into India. It is easy to account for the
prevalence of both these misconceptions. We are a people of notoriously
short memory, and, when a series of sensational dastardly crimes,
following on a tumultuous agitation in Bengal and a campaign of
incredible violence in the native Press, at last aroused and alarmed the
British public, the vast majority of Englishmen were under the
impression that since the black days of the Mutiny law and order had
never been seriously assailed in India, and they therefore rushed to the
conclusion that, if the _pax Britannica_ had been so rudely and suddenly
shaken, the only possible explanation lay in some novel wave of
sentiment or some grievous administrative blunder which had abruptl