Indian Unrest | Page 4

which have undertaken a similar enterprise. Ignorance is
unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the last
century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be the
certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay
should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for
political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case it was the clear
and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the
intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British rule.
We have since discovered, by experience, that, although education is a
sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable to healthy
progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this
potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame
of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains,
stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the
disappointment is bitterly resented. That these effects are well known

even in Europe may be read in a remarkable French novel published
not long ago, "Les Déracinés," which, describes the road to ruin taken
by poor collegians who had been uprooted from the soil of their humble
village. And in Asia the disease is necessarily much more virulent,
because the transition has been more sudden, and the contrast between
old ideas of life and new aspirations is far sharper. From the report of
an able French official upon the Indo-Chinese Colonies we may learn
that the existing system of educating the natives has proved to be
mischievous, needing radical reform. Of the Levantine youths in the
Syrian towns, the product of European schools, a French traveller
writes (1909), "C'est une tourbe de déclassés"; while in China some
leaders of agitation for democratic changes in the oldest of all Empires
are said to be those who have qualified by competitive examination for
public employ, and have failed to obtain it. In every country the crowd
of expectants far outnumbers the places available. If, indeed, the
Government which introduced Western education into Bengal had been
native instead of foreign, it would have found itself entangled in
difficulties no less grave than those which now confront the British
rulers; and there can be little doubt that it would probably have broken
down under them.
The phases through which the State's educational policy in India have
passed during the last fifty years are explained at length in this volume.
The Government was misled in the wrong direction by the reports of
two Commissions between 1880 and 1890, whose mistakes were
discerned at the time by those who had some tincture of political
prudence. The problem is now to reconstruct on a better plan, to try
different lines of advance. But some of us have heard of an enterprising
pioneer in a difficult country, who confidently urged travellers to take a
new route by assuring them that it avoided the hills on the old road.
Whether the hills were equally steep on his other road he did not say.
And in the present instance it may not be easy to strike out a fresh path
which may be clear from the complications that have been suffered to
grow up round our system of Indian education; while no one proposes
to turn back. The truth is that in India the English have been throughout
obliged to lay out their own roads, and to feel their way, without any
precedents to guide them. No other Government, European or Asiatic,

has yet essayed to administer a great Oriental population, alien in race
and religion, by institutions of a representative type, reckoning upon
free discussion and an unrestricted Press for reasonable consideration
of its measures and fair play, relying upon secular education and
absolute religious neutrality to control the unruly affections of sinful
men. It is now seen that our Western ideas and inventions, moral and
material, are being turned against us by some of those to whom we
have imparted an elementary aptitude for using them. And thus we
have the strange spectacle, in certain parts of India, of a party capable
of resorting to methods that are both reactionary and revolutionary, of
men who offer prayers and sacrifices to ferocious divinities and
denounce the Government by seditious journalism, preaching primitive
superstition in the very modern form of leading articles. The mixture of
religion with politics has always produced a highly explosive
compound, especially in Asia.
These agitations are in fact the symptoms of what are said by
Shakespeare to be the "cankers of a calm world"; they are the natural
outcome of artificial culture in an educational hothouse, among classes
who have had for generations no real training in rough or hazardous
politics. The outline of the present situation in India is that we have
been disseminating ideas of abstract political right, and