What is the greatest danger in India?  What is the source of suspicion, superstition, outbreaks, crime—–­yes, and also of much of the agrarian discontent and suffering amongst the masses?  It is ignorance.  And what is the only antidote to ignorance?  Knowledge.

Curiously enough, it was one of Lord Curzon’s bitterest opponents who corroborated him on this point by relating in the course of a recent debate how, when the Chinsurah Bridge was built some years ago over the Hughli, “the people believed that hundreds and thousands of men were being sacrificed and their heads cut off and carried to the river to be put under the piers to give the bridge stability, so that the goddess might appreciate the gift and let the piers remain.”  And he added:—­“I know that ignorant people were afraid to go out at nights, lest they might be seized and their heads cut off and thrown under the piers of the Hughli Bridge.”

It was, however, on more general consideration, as is his wont, that Mr. Gokhale moved his resolution in the first Session of the Imperial Council at Calcutta last winter for making elementary education free and compulsory, and for the early appointment of a committee to frame definite proposals.

Three movements [he claimed] have combined to give to mass education the place which it occupies at present amongst the duties of the State—­the humanitarian movement which reformed prisons and liberated the slave, the democratic movement which admitted large masses of men to a participation in Government, and the industrial movement which brought home to nations the recognition that the general spread of education in a country, even when it did not proceed beyond the elementary stage, meant the increased efficiency of the worker.

The last of these three considerations is, perhaps, that which just now carries the most weight with moderate men in India, where the general demand for industrial and commercial development is growing loud and insistent, and Mr. Gokhale’s resolution met with very general support from his Mahomedan, as well as from his Hindu, colleagues.  But, in the minds of disaffected politicians, another consideration is, it must be feared, also present, to which utterance is not openly given.  It is the hope that the extension of primary schools may serve, as has that of secondary schools to promote the dissemination of seditious doctrines, especially amongst the “depressed castes” to which the political agitator has so far but rarely secured access.

Whatever danger may lie in that direction, it cannot be allowed to affect the policy of Government, who gave to Mr. Gokhale’s resolution a sufficiently sympathetic reception to induce him to withdraw it for the present.  To the principle of extending primary education the Government of India have indeed long been committed, and increased efforts were recommended, both in the Educational Despatch of 1854 and by the