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needs; but Mr. Montagu was chosen chiefly for reasons which had nothing to do with India. At the same time it must be remembered that the ultimate framing of policy is the task of the Cabinet and not of Mr. Montagu, and that Parliament must have the last word.

Mr. Montagu goes on his journey at a time when the political atmosphere of India is charged with electricity. It is significant of the leaderless condition of the Indian political Parties that much of the present factitious excitement centres upon the entirely unimportant personality of Mrs. Annie Besant, who is almost as much an accident as Mr. Montagu. I do not feel disposed to support the protests against Mrs. Besant's recent release from internment, because I hold the opinion that owing to the weakness and inaction of the Government of India Mrs. Besant was treated in the wrong way; and if this opinion be correct, the only possible course was to release her. It was originally alleged that Mrs. Besant's political activities were detrimental to the public interest. One or two Provincial Governments, therefore, barred her from access to their particular provinces. This was the first mistake. Anybody who knows anything about India knows perfectly well that before issuing their orders these Provincial Governments must have told the Government of India what they were going to do. If Mrs. Besant deserved to be barred from one or two Indian provinces, she ought to have been barred from all India; in other words, deported. The duty of deportation would have devolved upon the Government of India, but Simla shirked a decision. Mrs. Besant went to Madras, where she usually dwells, and where she publishes a newspaper. The Madras Government found occasion to warn her afresh regarding her political activities, and eventually Lord Pentland, the Governor-who is no Tory, but a rather advanced Liberal-took further action. He offered Mrs. Besant the choice between internment in a Madras hill-station, and what has been called "a kind of voluntary deportation.' After refusing to give a suggested undertaking, Mrs. Besant elected to be interned at the pleasant hot-weather resort of Ootacamund. Again I say that the Government of India must have known what Lord Pentland proposed to do, and that their feebleness in thrusting upon him the odium of a half-measure was craven. The true alternatives were the same as beforefreedom or compulsory deportation.

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The result of the middle course might have been foreseen. Mrs. Besant was at once acclaimed as a martyr, and got right into the middle of the limelight, where she has stayed ever since. · She has had the time of her life, and must be thoroughly delighted. On September 16 she and two equally unimportant male companions were released by the Government of India. A great

many Englishmen have since been saying, at public meetings and in the Press, that the order of release strikes a blow at provincial authorities, because it appears to flout Lord Pentland. The allegation is to some extent true, but I cannot associate myself with it because I feel that Mrs. Besant's case was so unwisely handled that her release was imperative. The real culprits are the Viceroy and the Government of India, who are supposed to govern, but in this respect did not do so. The upshot of the whole business was the long statement by Mr. Montagu in the House of Commons on September 16, followed by a quite unnecessary debate, which invested Mrs. Besant with further importance, when the sensible course would have been to take no notice of her.

To crown all this exceedingly silly story about a misguided old lady who is now seventy years of age, the Indian National Congress has elected Mrs. Besant as its President at the annual meeting next December. In the whole history of a movement which teems with examples of political ineptitude, the Indian politicians have never done anything more stupid and more suicidal. They want, as they tell us, to manage their own affairs. The gift of greater political freedom can only be given them by the British people. They have first to convince the people of these islands that they have some qualifications for handling their domestic affairs, for they may depend upon it that Englishmen have not the smallest intention of allowing India to lapse into the chaos and anarchy which marked its history for hundreds of years. A door was opening before them. Their claims were being listened to as never before. Even in the midst of the greatest war ever known, the British Cabinet was paying renewed heed to Indian aspirations. And then the Indian politicians suddenly make themselves supremely ridiculous by choosing as their head, and as worthy to sit in the place of Gokhale and Ranade, a notoriety-hunting person who is not even of their own race. There are three hundred and fifteen millions of people in India. At this crisis of their fate they cannot produce a single man or woman of their own nationality to lead them. What do they suppose the British electorate will think of their folly? They are clamouring for They are clamouring for "self-government and are unable even to find an Indian to preside over the beargarden which calls itself the National Congress. Such is India, and the whole Besant episode throws very grave doubts on the expediency of further political reforms in India at this juncture.

It should be added, however, that Mrs. Besant's election seems to have been to some extent due to political manipulation of a very peculiar kind. The President of the National Congress is chosen by a number of Provincial Committees. Each province names its candidate, and, as I understand it, the Reception

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Committee formed in the city where the Congress is to be held makes the final choice. As a rule the final election is a formality. On this occasion the nomination of Mrs. Besant by the Extremists symbolized a split between the Extremists and the Moderates. Many of the Moderates are sensible men, who sympathized with Mrs. Besant, but had no wish to make themselves a laughingstock for all England by choosing her as their President. The trouble came to a head at the meeting of the Bengal Provincial Committee at Calcutta on August 29. Mr. Surendra Nath Banerjee presided at the meeting, which recommended the choice of the Raja of Mahumadabad as President. There were thirty-four votes for the Raja, and thirty for Mrs. Besant. It must be mentioned here that the seven other provinces had already chosen Mrs. Besant. Next day the Calcutta Reception Committee met for the final election, and it seems fairly clear that the majority of the Committee meant to choose the Raja of Mahumadabad. The Extremists thereupon took an extraordinary step. Before the meeting assembled, about two hundred people suddenly joined the Reception Committee by the simple process of paying 33s. apiece. They were not elected in accordance with precedent, and it is claimed that their "membership was therefore not valid. Be that as it may, the meeting was packed. The proceedings began in uproar. Mr. Surendra Nath Banerjee protested against the "automatic" creation of committeemen, and walked out, followed by most of the old guard." The chairman declared the meeting dissolved, and accompanied him. The Extremists then contended that the Committee was still sitting, and Mrs. Besant was proposed as President. Mr. J. N. Roy very sensibly pointed out that at this political juncture it was extremely desirable that an Indian should preside over the Congress." Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, egregious as of old, and sloppy to the last, retorted that "Mrs. Besant was no longer a foreigner, no longer an individual. She was a grand principle and the incarnation of Home Rule." The meeting carried Mrs. Besant's election by 218 votes to 1, and the Calcutta correspondent of the Times of India makes the significant remark that "the great majority of the 218 who voted for Mrs. Besant are members of the Junior Bar." The Statesman observes that " many of the Provincial Committees have signified their wish that Mrs. Besant should be elected President of the Congress this year, but what happened in Calcutta throws grave suspicion on the proceedings of these Committees."

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The result, however, is clear enough. The Extremists have even seized the "office records" of the Calcutta Reception Committee, and they have now again captured the entire Congress organization, as they tried to do by violence at Surat in 1907, and as they actually did at Lucknow last Christmas. Mrs.

Besant is only a foolish pawn. It may be objected that instead of describing these remarkable intrigues I ought to be defining magniloquent principles for the future polity of India. I take a different view. These are the men who will soon be addressing claims to the people of England, and while many are making high-sounding speeches about India, it is highly desirable that some one should explain to the British public how Indian politics are being run. This Calcutta episode shows the Indian position in a nutshell. The great bulk of the Indian intelligentsia are not Extremists at all, but the Moderates have no backbone, and the Extremists bully them into submission. The Moderates are like a netful of jellyfish. They appear now to be accepting the very questionable election of Mrs. Besant, and to be drifting with the Extremists. They should have disowned the Extremists, and held a Congress of their own, as was done after the Surat smash in 1907; but the old leaders are nearly all dead, Mr. Banerjee is honest enough, but lacks force, and the Extremists rule the roast. The "calm atmosphere" which Mr. Montagu wishes to create in India for his visit seems likely to resemble the calmness of the tiger after he had swallowed the young lady of Riga.

The salient portion of the Cabinet's declaration of policy regarding India, as stated by Mr. Montagu in the House of Commons on August 20, is as follows:

The policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of increasing the association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India, as an integral part of the British Empire. They have decided that substantial steps in this direction should be taken as soon as possible and that it is of the highest importance, as a preliminary to considering what these steps should be, that there should be a free and informal exchange of opinion between those in authority at Home and in India. . . . I would add that progress in this policy can only be achieved by successive stages. The British Government and the Government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian peoples, must be judges of the time and measure of cach advance and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those upon whom now opportunities of service will thus be conferred and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility.

The principles thus defined, together with the issues raised by Mr. Gokhale's political testament, published in the Times of August 15; Lord Islington's proposals, expounded in his excellent speech at Oxford on August 8; the various resolutions passed by Indian political associations, and other cognate matters, may be discussed here on a future occasion. They are not urgent. What is urgent is to understand clearly the stultifying action imposed on the Indian National Congress ten days after Mr. Montagu's announcement, and the regrettable collapse of the Indian Moderates as an organized political force; and these are the points which I have endeavoured to explain. ASIATICUS

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SIR,-The article on "The Finance of an Assistant Schoolmaster" in the October number of the National Review will strike a responsive chord in the hearts of a good many. It is simply deplorable that the men who are daily moulding the destinies of a future generation should be paid wages which, in these spacious days, a skilled plumber would turn up his nose at. I am not, for the moment, concerned with our Elementary Schools, or with the big Public Schools, but with our numerous smaller Secondary Schools; for it is there that we find the greatest anomalies. But it is only just to say that, in a majority of cases, neither head masters nor governing bodies are wholly to blame; the root of the difficulty lies in the whole Secondary School system which, financially, is unsatisfactory from top to bottom.

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I happen to have been the head master of no less than three secondary schools, and have (or may be presumed to have) a fair working knowledge of the " system" under which these schools are worked. Let me, then, take a typical case. An advertisement is inserted in the papers, some fine day, announcing that a head-mastership of some secondary school is vacant, and inviting applications. Possibly there are about fifty candidates; of these five or six will be put on the short list," and interviewed by the governors. The successful candidate will learn that he has a fixed income of £150 a year, and a house big enough to accommodate twenty to thirty boarders; he will also-probably-be allowed a capitation fee of £3 or £4 a boy per year. The total fees payable by each boy will not, as a rule, exceed £50 a year, and out of this he will probably (indeed almost certainly) be required to hand over to the governors £8 to £10 This will leave him with £40 a year for each boy-not, surely, an extravagant sum at any time, and in these days something the reverse of extravagant, as the head master must not only feed the boys, but light them, coal them, laundry them, and pay wages to servants (four or five maids and a man); and he will also have to board and lodge his resident masters. If the school is fairly well endowed (say to the tune of £300 a year), this endowment will be needed-every penny of it, and something more-to pay assistant masters. Then there is the cost of upkeep and management to consider; and this will absorb no small proportion of the fees paid in to the governors, who generally disburse such items.

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My own experience is that, with the boarding fees, capitation fees, and fixed salary, a head master, after paying all charges, will be able to count on very little more than £200 a year; this in normal times. If he has forty day-boys in addition to his boarders, it must not be supposed that the accruing capitation fees represent much of a profit; most (and in some

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