PREFACE.

f r\HESE Essays represent an endeavour towards an ex-
^ planation of the true significance of the national
movement in Iiadia. This movement can only be
rightly understood, and has ultimate importance only, as
an idealistic movement. Its outward manifestations have
attracted abundant notice ; the deeper meaning of the
struggle is sometimes forgotten, alike in England and in
India. Were this meaning understood, I believe that not
only the world at large, but a large part even of the
English people, would extend to India a true sympathy iu
her life-and-death struggle with foreign bureaucracy and
•their parasitic dependents. ^JEV^lJiM^^

It is a struggle for spiritual and

mental freedom from the domination of an alien ideal. In
Buch a conflict, political and economic victory are but half
the battle ; for an India, " free in name, but subdued by
Eitrope in her inmost soul," would ill justify the price of
freedom. It is not so much tKe "material, as the moral
and spiritual, subjection of Indian civilisation that in the
•end impoverishes humanity.

"William Morris wrote some twenty-seven years ago
concerning Socialism, — and few have worked more whole-
heartedly for a cause than he did for the ideal that he
understood by Socialism, — 4* Meantime I can see no (usa izk
people having political freedom unless they use it as an
instrument for leading reasonable and manlike lives ; Tip
good even in education if, when ttey are educated, people
have only slavish work to do, and have to live lives