1,400 boys are learning English. The effect of this education on the
Hindus is prodigious.... It is my firm belief that if our plans of
education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among
the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be
effected merely by the natural operation of knowledge and reflection."
Ah, gentlemen, the natural operation of knowledge and reflection
carries men of a different structure of mind, different beliefs,
different habits and customs of life--it carries them into strange and
unexpected paths. I am not going to embark you to-night upon these
vast controversies, but when we talk about education, are we not
getting very near the root of the case? Now to-night we are not in the
humour--I am sure you are not, I certainly am not--for philosophising.
Somebody is glad of it. I will tell you what I think of--as I have for
a good many months past--I think first of the burden of responsibility
weighing on the governing men at Calcutta and Simla and the other main
centres of power and of labour. We think of the anxieties of those in
India, and in England as well, who have relatives in remote places and
under conditions that are very familiar to you all. I have a great
admiration for the self-command, for the freedom from anything
like panic, which has hitherto marked the attitude of the European
population of Calcutta and some other places, and I confess I have
said to myself that if they had found here, in London, bombs in the
railway carriages, bombs under the Prime Minister's House, and so
forth, we should have had tremendous scare headlines and all the other
phenomena of excitement and panic. So far as I am informed, though
very serious in Calcutta--the feeling is serious, how could it be
anything else?--they have exercised the great and noble virtue, in all
ranks and classes, of self-command. Now the Government--if you will
allow me for a very few moments to say a word on behalf of the
Government, not here alone but at Simla--we and they, for after all we