ombination of malignant forces. It is too early
yet to speak with absolute assurance of its enduring success. For
success must depend upon many factors outside India as well as within.
All that can be said with confidence is that it has made a far more
promising start than might have been looked for even in less
unfavourable circumstances, and many Englishmen, and Indians also, who
disliked and distrusted the reforms and would have preferred to stand in
the old ways, are coming round to the belief that in their success lies
the best and possibly the one real hope for the future. Faith is
naturally strongest in those who see in the experiment the natural and
logical corollary of that even bolder experiment initiated nearly a
hundred years ago when we introduced Western education in India. That
was the great turning-point in the history of British rule. We had gone
to India with no purpose of seeking dominion, but circumstances had
forced dominion upon us. With dominion had come the recognition of the
great responsibilities which it involved, and having imposed upon India
our own rule of law we imposed it also upon the agencies through which
we then exercised dominion--a self-denying ordinance for ourselves, for
Indians a pledge of justice. Dominion pure and simple made room for
dominion regarded as a great trust. But when we introduced Western
education, we placed upon our trusteeship a new and wider construction.
We invited Indians to enter into intellectual partnership with our own
civilisation, and for the purpose, admitted at the time but afterwards
sometimes forgotten, of training them to a share in the responsibilities
of Indian government and administration. Many Englishmen from that
moment contemplated intellectual partnership as the means to political
partnership as the end. That was indeed--nearly a century before Mr.
Asquith coined the phrase--"the new angle of vision." The Mutiny
distorted it, and it remained obscured when the great experiment was
found to result, like all human experiments, in the production of some
evil as well as of much good. If the tares may have been sometimes more
conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack
of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth
of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations,
and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that
intellectual partnership however imperfe