339 



What lias been accomplished has been effected chiefly by pro- 

 viding the country with the material appliances of civiliza- 

 tion, by clearing the ground of all obstructions to progress 

 and by making it possible for people to take interest in public 

 affairs outside the narrow limits of castes and creeds into 

 which they are divided. What requires to be done is 

 gradually to widen the foundations of local government and 

 make it strike deeper roots into society, so as to enable it to 

 adjust its institutions to its needs as they arise, without 

 weakening in any way the power of the central Government 

 for maintaining the due balance between rival interests and 

 creeds and for interfering effectually when there is danger of 

 such balance being disturbed. And this work will need even 

 greater foresight and statemanship for its successful accom- 

 plishment than in the past. There is, however, no reason 

 whatever to suppose that either the Government or the 

 people will fall short of requirements in this respect. As 

 regards the Government, the work already accomplished 

 lyider enormous difficulties, as narrated in the foregoing pages 

 is a standing testimony in its favour. The quickness with 

 which the people have adapted themselves to the new regime 

 affords also every ground for hope that they might be trusted 

 to assimilate the elements of progress even more rapidly 

 in the future. I remember that twenty years ago, com- 

 plaints were very general that laws were being passed with 

 bewildering rapidity, that society was being shaken to its 

 foundations and that social relations were being loosened to 

 an undesirable degree. Now the feeling among the educated 

 classes, daily growing in importance and numbers, is that 

 progress does not proceed fast enough, just in the same way 

 as persons who were content to travel two miles an hour by 

 country carts thirty or forty years ago consider it a hardship 

 now to travel by slow railway trains moving at the rate of 15 

 miles an hour. 



Whatever might be the feeling of persons who forgetting 

 the evil side of the old type of society and its injustice to the 

 lowest classes, shutting out all prospect of improvement from 

 them, are fascinated by its stationary civilization, ordered re- 

 lations, and freedom from worry, those who beUeve in the 

 modern principle of progress and in the necessity for giving 

 free play to individual energy have no reason to look on the 

 future in a spirit other than that of thankfulness and hope. 

 To those again who are inclined to under-value the progress 

 made und^r the mistaken idea that thereby they would be 

 calling attention pointedly to the evils that now exist in order 



