ated than our present
policy of _laisser faire_ to refine and purify Indian religious
conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western
ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the
present revolt against Western ascendency?

Here is surely a question bound up with all the main-springs of Indian
life in which we may be rightly asked "to govern according to Indian
ideas." Can we expect that the youth of India will grow up to be
law-abiding citizens if we deprive them of what their parents hold to be
"the keystone to the formation of character"? Can we close our eyes to
what so many responsible Indians regard as one of the chief causes of
the demoralization which has crept into our schools and colleges? The
State can, doubtless, exact in many ways more loyal co-operation from
Indian teachers in safeguarding their pupils from the virus of
disaffection. It can, for instance, intimate that it will cease to
recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be
rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians
themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have
helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly
take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be
charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the
fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long as
we take no steps to refute a charge which, in view of recent evidence,
can no longer be dismissed as wholly unfounded, can we expect education
to fulfil the purpose rightly assigned to it by Dr. Mookerjee--"the
raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the
State?"

CHAPTER XXI.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

It is too late in the day now to discuss whether it was wise to begin
our educational policy as we did from the top and to devote so much of
our energies and resources to secondary at the expense of primary
education. The result has certainly been to widen the gulf which divides
the different classes of Indian society and to give to those who have
acquired some veneer, however superficial, of Western education the only
articulate voice, often quite out of proportion to their importance, as
the interpreters of Indian interests and desires. One million is a
liberal estimate of the number of Indians who have acquired and retained
some knowledge of English; whilst at the last censu