as "scandalous in Bengal and Eastern Bengal, and unsatisfactory in every province."
In a word, our educational policy in India has been that rare thing—a policy of which nobody can approve. Nay more, it has been so misguided on the whole, up to 1904 at any rate, that on its reform the justification of our rule must depend. For we only hold India on the tenure of continuous amelioration.
So far, then, it has seemed that, as regards the third phase of our policy, we are still no more than half-way in it. But, to go a step further, is it not, conceivably, impossible that we should succeed here? All question of our own official policy apart, do not the very facts of Indian life forbid prosperity to be anything but a languid exotic?
Forexample, the Hindu population of 220,000,000 is divided against itself more profoundly than any other in recorded time. Out of that total, no less than 53,000,000 at the present date are reckoned so unclean by the others that their very touch or presence is pollution, and they are doomed to a shameful ostracism. An Englishman may be entitled to agree with what an Indian prince, the Gaekwar of Baroda, says of this system that, "claiming to rise by minutely graduated steps from the pariah to the Brahman, it is a whole tissue of injustice, splitting men equal by nature into divisions high and low"; and he adds that, therefore, reckoning the Mohammedans into his
