their speech is English; but English spoken, not as we speak the tongues of India, but with a refinement, an accuracy, and a force of which millions of Englishmen are altogether incapable.

The avowed object of that Congress, to create and foster a national spirit, will be considered later. Here its import is that the very existence of such congresses, and thus their dreams of giving to polyphonetic India a national entity, could have been made possible by no other means than the intermediary we have pressed upon them, the gift of English. It is proof of the superior alacrity of the Eastern mind that, while it has perceived for years and done its best to further the developments to be wrought by the spread of English, only here and there does one find an official alive to its significance. That the things that have been are the things that shall be, and that there is no new thing under the sun, seems to express pretty accurately the attitude of its administrators towards India. The attitude is less surprising than it seems. The British official is, with rare exceptions, overworked; his mental world has often to be bounded by his office walls; he turns for relaxation to a society which shuts India out. He has probably neither inclination nor opportunity to keep in touch with native thought, and the making of opportunity might alienate him from his own people. He thus early learns to leave India as much as

possible alone outside his own professional account with her; accepts the official formulary for her present and future; isolates himself wherever he goes within a miniature hard-edged bit of England; does, for the most part with a wonderful kindness, conscientiousness, and capacity, the work set him, but closes the door, an impenetrable door, upon it the first moment he can. And, in another way, the spread of English is operating subtly to increase his isolation from the destinies he controls. Of old, for lack of interpreters, he had to make the people's speech his own, and so came into intimate relations with their life and thought. Now he is increasingly inclined to study it less completely, to make his need rather than theirs the standard of his accomplishment, and all the while the extending English tongue every year helps his defective knowledge further than before and offers a fresh encouragement to its deficiencies.

But there is another and accessory cause for this growing alienation, ironical also, and one which could hardly have been foreseen. Steam and electricity have brought England and the East within a few days' journey, within a few hours' speech. But the very coming nearer physically to one another has set them spiritually still further apart. The old-time official made

India his home; it had to be. He could not hope for consolations elsewhere, he looked for no

career beyond it. He took hold of it with both hands; not infrequently he took a wife from its daughters; he spoke its tongue as well as now the Bengali speaks ours. He was a real link with the country because he understood. His successor's ambition is to spend in India not a day more than he need, and to escape from it on every possible opportunity. His home is in England, where often, permanently or occasionally, are his wife and family. He hears daily, or even twice a day, what happens there; he lives exclusively in an English atmosphere, and outside of his calling he neither knows nor desires to know of the native races what to his predecessor were the cominonplaces of existence. A very little of the country's language serves his needs, and if he study it further it is rather for an intellectual than a professional purpose; and thus, from the other side, the spread of English, while seeming to propose a closer tie, is really erecting an impalpable barrier.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE BENGALIS' CHARACTER

INDIA is like a big nursery of children who, with very different tastes and aptitudes, have been all brought up by a common system. The result is that, at the point where to-day we find them, the children are in varying stages of development: some have learnt all or even more than it seems good while they are still children to teach them; others are no further advanced than when the teaching was begun. Thus one of the problems that waits for decision in India to-day is the extent to which the development of the forward children must be delayed for the sake of the backward, and hence whether we can any longer treat this Empire of varied races and spirits and faiths as a children's nursery without inducing more serious difficulties than would be the outcome of a new and more discriminating method. It is a problem that looks only superficially difficult, and seems to admit of only one solution till you make acquaintance with the peculiar differences in the types with which you have to deal.

Here in Bengal, here in Calcutta at the