8 THE GOSPEL AND THE PLOW 



language, while having certain obvious disadvantages, 

 has been a great blessing to India. From the English 

 classics the Indian student has mastered some great 

 world ideas that were dimly stated, or not stated at all, 

 in oriental literature. These ideas are now bearing fruit. 

 The great fact of the growth of a feeling of nationalism 

 in India; the idea of democracy, the idea of human lib- 

 erty, learned from Milton and the other English writers, 

 are necessary antecedents of the idea of responsible gov- 

 ernment in India which will be a government in which 

 the majority elected will be Indians. English has been a 

 hard schoolmaster, but it has been a thorough one, and 

 its teachings are now part of the warp and woof of 

 the thinking of educated India. Nothing else could so 

 surely and so quickly have made it possible for India 

 to consider itself one people. When these students found 

 that they were to be instructed by a teacher who knew 

 so little about his subject, they were afraid that they 

 would fail in their Government examinations. Up to 

 this time the Indian University has been an examining 

 body, not a teaching university, and no separate college 

 can examine its own students or grant degrees. It was 

 difficult to find Indian illustrations that the students 

 could understand, for the various economic principles 

 laid down in the text books. Granted the soundness of 

 the principles, it was essential to obtain illustrations 

 and concrete examples out of the Indian conditions which 

 they knew. With this end in view we began to take 

 advantage of the Indian holiday system, which perhaps 

 needs a word of explanation. India possesses the larg- 

 est Mohammedan population of any country in the 

 world. It is greater than that of Egypt, Turkey, Persia, 

 and Arabia put together and amounts to over seventy 



