could read and write; and in the whole of India only about half a
million girls, or four out of every 100 of a school-going age,--even on
the basis of a four years' course, are receiving any kind of education.
Of such as do go to school nine out of ten only go to primary schools.
Mr. Gokhale himself has abandoned the idea of making primary education
compulsory for girls as well as for boys. Female education is just one
of the questions upon which Indian opinion must be left to ripen,
Government giving, in proportion as it ripens, such assistance as can be
legitimately expected. It has long engaged the attention of enlightened
Indians, and in some communities, especially amongst the Aryas of the
Punjab, some headway is being made. The Parsees, of course, as in all
educational and philanthropic developments, have always been in the
van. With the growth of Western education the Indian woman of the higher
classes cannot indefinitely lag behind, and, if only to make their
daughters more eligible for marriage, the most conservative Indian
parents will be compelled to educate them, as some have already done, so
that they shall not be separated from their male partners by an
unfathomable gulf of intellectual inferiority. In Calcutta, in Bombay,
in Madras, and indeed in all the principal cities of India, one may
already meet native ladies, both Hindu and Mahomedan, of education and
refinement, who, however few their numbers, are shining examples of what
Indian womanhood can rise to when once it is emancipated from the
trammels of antiquated custom.

CHAPTER XXII.

SWADESHI AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS.

Was it not Talleyrand who said that speech had been given to man in
order to enable him to disguise his thoughts? Indian politicians are no
Talleyrands, but they sometimes seem to have framed their vocabulary on
purpose to disguise political conceptions which most of them for various
reasons shrink from defining at present with decision. We have already
seen how elastic is the word _Swaraj_, self-government, or rather
self-rule. In the mouth of the "moderates" of the Indian National
Congress it means, we are assured, only a pious aspiration towards the
same position which our self-governing Colonies enjoy within the Empire.
For the "advanced" politician _Swaraj_ means a transition stage which he
hopes and believes must infallibly lead to a complete severance of the
ties that unite India to the Empire. For the "extremists" it