concilable politicians if greater trouble were taken to explain the
questions at issue.

What is evidently much wanted is greater elasticity. In a country like
India, which is an aggregation of many widely different countries, the
needs and the wishes of the people must differ very widely and cannot be
met by cast-iron regulations, however admirable in theory. It is
earnestly to be hoped that the creation of a separate portfolio in the
Government of India will not involve the strengthening of the
centralizing tendencies which have been the bane of Indian education
since the days of Macaulay, himself one of the greatest theorists that
ever lived. We cannot afford to relax the very little control we
exercise over education, but education is just one of the matters in
which Provincial Governments should be trusted to ascertain, and to give
effect to, the local requirements of the people. In another direction,
however, the creation of a Ministry for Education should be all to the
good. If any real and comprehensive improvements are to be carried out
they will cost a great deal of money, and in the ordinary sense of the
term it will not be reproductive expenditure, though no expenditure, if
wisely applied, can yield more valuable results. As a member of
Council--i.e., as a member of the Government of India--Mr. Butler must
carry much greater weight in recommending the necessary expenditure than
a Director-General of Public Education or than a Provincial Governor,
especially as the expenditure will probably have to be defrayed largely
out of Imperial and not merely out of Provincial funds. If the
educational problem is the most vital and the most urgent one of all at
the present hour in India, it stands to reason that no more disastrous
blunder could be made than to stint the new department created for its
solution.

CHAPTER XX.

THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

There remains one vital aspect of the educational problem which was left
untouched by the Educational Resolution of 1904, and has been left
untouched ever since we entered three-quarters of a century ago on an
educational experiment unparalleled in the world's history--a more
arduous experiment even than that of governing the 300 millions of India
with a handful of Englishmen. Many nations have conquered remote
dependencies inhabited by alien races, imposed their laws upon them, and
held them in peaceful subjection, though even this has never been don