PREFACE. V

the fact remains that we in India hold the price of any such
Advantages to be too high. In- the words of Thoreau, the
-c'ost of a thing is the whole, amount of wha-t may be called
life, which has to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in
the long run. The advantages, such as they may be, are
outweighed by the paralysis of the live moral forces of the
nation, resulting from the removal of responsibility.

It is a paradox to speak of preparing a people for self-
government. Alien government, by removing responsi-
bility and the natural motives for public spirit, tends only
to unfit a subject people for independent action. The
•chief lessons in self-government which England has given
to India, have been given in the last few yea,rs; given,
however, not in the officially controlled municipalities and
universities, but in the necessity which the present situa-
tion has revealed to the Indian people,—the necessity for
unity and combination in the national interest. In the
woi'ds of one of our leaders, India is c learning through
her own struggles all her lessons of a free and self-regulated
.and self-sustained national life.7 Those lessons, there is
but too much reason to say, are being learnt in spite of,
not with the help of, England.

The gift of a seat on the Executive Council, or of a
few official posts, more or less, no more fulfils or tends to
fulfil the objective of the national movement, than a seat
in the Cabinet for an Ulster Unionist would meet the Irish
•demand for Home Rule, or the elevation of Mr. Burns to
the Presidency of the Board of Trade, the Socialist demand
for the nationalisation of natural monopolies. The objec-
tive of the true nationalist is control of government—not
a share in the administration of his country.

None can be truly qualified to educate or govern, who
cannot, in the words of the great Sinhalese chronicle,