we with our enormous power and resolution should fail, I do not know.  But I do not believe anybody in this room representing so powerfully as you do dominant sentiments that are not always felt in England—­that in this room there is anybody who is for an era of pure repression.  Gentlemen, I would just digress for a moment if I am not tiring you. ("Go on,”) About the same time as the transfer, about fifty years ago, of the Government of India from the old East India Company to the Crown, another very important step was taken, a step which I have often thought since I have been concerned with the Government of India was far more momentous, one almost deeper than the transfer to the Crown.  And what do you think that was?  That was the first establishment—­I think I am right in my date—­of Universities.  We in this country are so accustomed to look upon political changes as the only important changes, that we very often forget such a change as the establishment of Universities.  And if any of you are inclined to prophesy, I should like to read to you something that was written by that great and famous man, Lord Macaulay, in the year 1836, long before the Universities were thought of.  What did he say?  What a warning it is, gentlemen.  He wrote, in the year 1836:—­“At the single town of Hooghly 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.