England has given India a good government.  It has accomplished wonders in the way of material improvements and we can say the same of the administration in the Philippine Islands, even for the short period of American occupation.  Mistakes have been made in both countries.  President Roosevelt, Secretary Taft, Governor General Wright and his associates would find great profit in studying the experience of the British.  The same questions and the same difficulties that confront the officials at Manila have occurred again and again in India during the last 200 years, and particularly since 1858, when the authority and rights of the East India Company were transferred to the crown.  And the most serious of all those questions is how far the native shall be admitted to share the responsibilities of the government.  The situations are similar.

The population of India, like that of the Philippines, consists of a vast mixed multitude in various stages of civilization, in which not one man in fifty and not one woman in 200 can read or write.

Ninety per cent of the people, and the same proportion of the people of the Philippines, do not care a rap about “representative government.”  They do not know anything about it.  They would not understand what the words meant if they ever heard them spoken.  The small minority who do care are the “educated natives,” who are just as human as the rest of us, and equally anxious to acquire money and power, wear a title, hold a government office and draw a salary from the public funds.  There are many most estimable Hindu gentlemen who do not come within this class, but I am speaking generally, and every person of experience in India has expressed the same opinion, when I say that a Hindu immediately becomes a politician as soon as he is educated.  It he does not succeed in obtaining an office he becomes an opponent of the government, and more or less of an agitator, according to his ability and ambitions.

The universities of India turn out about five thousand young men every year who have been stuffed with information for the purpose of passing the civil service examinations, and most of them have only one aim in life, which is to secure government employment.  As the supply of candidates is always much larger than the demand, the greater number fail, and, in their disappointment, finding no other profitable field nor the exercise of their talents, become demagogues, reformers and critics of the administration.  They inspire and maintain agitations for “home rule” and “representative government.”  They hold conventions, deliver lectures, write for the newspapers, and denounce Lord Curzon and his associates.  If they were in the Philippine Islands they would organize revolutions and paper governments from places of concealment in the forests and mountains.  They classify their emotions and desire for office under the name of patriotism, and some of them are undoubtedly sincere.  If