the West, she would find again that peace which
was hers before alien domination divided and exploited her people. As to
the form of government and administration which would then obtain in
India, he would not go beyond a vague assurance that it would be based
on the free will of the people expressed by manhood suffrage for which
Indians were already ripe, if called upon to exercise it upon truly
Indian lines. When I objected that caste, which was the bed-rock of
Hindu social and religious life, was surely a tremendous obstacle to any
real democracy, he admitted that the system would have to be restored to
its pristine purity and redeemed from some of the abuses that had crept
into it. But he upheld the four original castes as laid down in the
Vedas, and even their hereditary character, though in practice some born
in a lower caste might well rise by their own merits and secure the
deference and respect of the highest castes, "such as, for instance, if
I may in all modesty quote my own unworthy case, the highest Brahmans
spontaneously accord to me to-day, though by birth I am only of a lowly
caste." I tried to get on to more solid ground by pointing out that,
whatever views one might hold as to his ultimate goal, the methods he
was employing in trying to break up the existing schools and colleges
and law-courts and to paralyse the machinery of administration was
destructive rather than constructive, and that, confident as he might
feel of substituting better things ultimately for those that he had
destroyed, construction must always be a much slower process than
destruction; and in the meantime infinite and perhaps irreparable harm
would be done. "No," he rejoined--and I think I can convey his words
pretty accurately, but not his curious smile as of boundless compassion
for the incurable scepticism of one in outer darkness--"no, I destroy
nothing that I cannot at once replace. Let your law-courts with their
cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her
old _Panchayats_, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with
her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of
rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of
ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the
educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we
will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the
learning of our forefathers that will make