firms to admit Indians as
apprentices to their works, and that in consequence they are compelled
to go to other countries where they are treated with less suspicion.
This reluctance is perhaps in reality more often due to the fear lest
young Indians should afterwards turn their knowledge to too good an
account, as the Japanese have often done, in the promotion of competing
industries in their own country. However that may be, the results are
certainly regrettable. For, if there is one thing that has impressed
itself on me during my last visit to India, it is that, if we want to
retain our hold, not only upon the country, but upon the people, we must
neglect no opportunity of arresting the estrangement which is growing up
between us and the younger generation of Indians. It is upon this
estrangement that the revolutionary organizations outside of India
chiefly rely for the success of their propaganda, and nothing helps them
more than the bitterness with which young Indians who come abroad often
return to India ready for any desperate adventure[14].

CHAPTER XII.

THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS.

It is impossible to acquit the Congress of having contributed to the
growth of active and violent unrest, though the result may have lain far
both from the purpose of its chief originators and from the desire of
the majority of its members. Western education has largely failed in
India because the Indian, not unnaturally, fails to bring an education
based upon conceptions entirely alien to the world in which he moves
into any sort of practical relation with his own life. So with the
Indian politician, who, even with the best intentions, fails to bring
the political education which he has borrowed from the West into any
sort of practical relation with the political conditions of India.

The Indian National Congress assumed unto itself almost from the
beginning the functions of a Parliament. There was and is no room for a
Parliament in India, because, so long as British rule remains a reality,
the Government of India, as Lord Morley has plainly stated, must be an
autocracy--benevolent and full of sympathy with Indian ideas, but still
an autocracy. Nor would the Congress have been in any way qualified to
discharge the functions of a Parliament had there been room for one. For
it represents only one class, or rather a section of one class--the
Western educated middle, and mainly professional, class, consisting
chiefly of l