n-political conventions and conferences and congresses held
annually all over the country. Within the last 12 months there have been
philanthropic and religious conferences like the All India Temperance
Conference, the Christian Endeavour Convention, the Theosophical
Convention, social conferences like the Indian National Social
Conference, the Moslem Educational Congress, and the Sikh Educational
Conference, economic conferences like the Industrial Conference held at
Lahore in connexion with the Punjab Industrial and Agricultural
Exhibition, not to speak of many others, such as the Rajput Conference,
the Hindu Punjab Conference, the Kshatrya Conference, the Parsee
Conference, &c., which dealt with the narrower interests of particular
castes or communities, but nevertheless gathered together
representatives of those interests from all parts of India, or any rate
from a whole province. Some of these meetings may be made to subserve
political purposes. Others, like the Parsee Conference, betray
reactionary tendencies in the most unexpected places, for the Parsee
community, which has thriven more than any other on Western education
and has prided itself upon being the most progressive and enlightened of
all Indian communities, is the last one in which one would have looked
for the triumph, however temporary, of a strangely benighted orthodoxy.
But the majority of these gatherings represent an honest and earnest
attempt to apply, as far as possible, the teachings of Western
experience to the solution of Indian problems, and to subject Indian
customs and beliefs to the test of modern criticism. They apply
themselves, moreover, chiefly to questions in which no alien Government
like that of India can take the initiative without serious risk of being
altogether ahead of native opinion and arousing dangerous antagonism. As
Mr. Lala Dev Raj, the chairman of the last Social Conference at Lahore,
for instance, put it:--

The reforms advocated here strike at those harmful and
undesirable customs which are purely of our own creation and
which must be bidden farewell to, as our eyes are being opened
to them. If we cannot do that, we can hardly call ourselves
a living community.

The results of all this activity may not so far have been very marked,
but the mere fact that the supreme sanction of tradition, which was
formerly almost undisputed, is now subjected to discussion is bound to
make some impression, even upon t