It can hardly be denied that, except where
official relations brought them into contact--and not always
there--Europeans and Indians have lived too much in separate water-tight
compartments until each has ceased to see anything but the beam in the
other's eye. In Calcutta they have been far more rarely drawn together
in commercial and industrial co-operation, and they have rubbed up less
frequently against each other in healthy competition than, for instance,
in Bombay. It is one of the most promising features of the new reforms
that the Europeans, who have hitherto taken very little interest in
anything that was not directly connected with their own business or
their own amusements, have been at last roused to play the part which it
is their duty as well as their right to play in the political life of
the country, and the men who have been returned to sit in the new
Councils as the representatives of the European community seem to
realise fully, the importance of the task that is before them in giving
a practical example of what the helpful co-operation of Europeans with
Indians can do to promote the healthy political life of the country.

In social service there is an equally large field of co-operation of
which Calcutta has also provided an interesting illustration. In no
other city in India are University students, of whom there are nearly as
many--some 26,000--at the one university of Calcutta as in all the
universities of Great Britain put together, thrown so much on their own
resources without any guidance or control. The bulk of them may never
come in contact even with European professors, let alone with the
European community in general. What opportunities have they of forming
any opinion for themselves of what our civilisation stands for, except
possibly through the medium of cheap cinemas in which its worst and most
vulgar features are thrust before them? Bengalee youths are
extraordinarily quick to respond to the best European influence when it
has once established contact with them. Some teachers do secure a
strong personal hold upon them, most of all in the missionary and other
hostels where they live under the same roof with them, take part in
their games as well as in their studies, and encourage them to express
their own opinions freely and fearlessly. There relations of mutual
friendship and confidence grow up and endure. In this respect the
Y.M.C.A., in which Indian Christians act in close co-operation