of its wealth; it has impoverished the people, and brought about famine on a scale and with a frequency unknown before; its public works, roads, railways, and canals have generated malaria; it has introduced plague, by poisoning wells, in order to reduce the population that has to be held in subjection it has deprived the Indian peasant of his land; the Indian artisan of his industry, and the Indian merchant of his trade; it has destroyed religion by its godless system of education; it seeks to destroy caste by polluting maliciously and of set purpose, the salt and sugar that men eat and the cloth that they wear; it allows Indians to be ill-treated in British Colonies; it levies heavy taxes and spends them on the army; it pays high salaries to Englishmen, and employs Indians only in the worst paid posts—­in short, it has enslaved a whole people, who are now struggling to be free.

My enumeration may not be exhaustive but these are some of the statements that are now being implanted as axioms in the minds of rising generation of educated youths, the source from which we recruit the great body of civil officials who administer India.  If nothing more were said, if the Press were content to—­

“let the lie Have time on its own wings to fly” things would be bad enough.  But very much more is said.  Every day the Press proclaims, openly or by suggestion or allusion, that the only cure for the ills of India is independence from foreign rule, independence to be won by heroic deeds, self-sacrifice, martyrdom on the part of the young, in any case by some form of violence.  Hindu mythology, ancient and modern history, and more especially the European literature of revolution, are ransacked to furnish examples that justify revolt and proclaim its inevitable success.  The methods of guerilla warfare as practised in Circassia, Spain, and South Africa; Mazzini’s gospel of political assassination; Kossuth’s most violent doctrines; the doings of Russian Nihilists; the murder of the Marquis Ito; the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna in the “Gita,” a book that is to Hindus what the “Imitation of Christ” is to emotional Christians—­all these are pressed into the service of inflaming impressionable minds.  The last instance is perhaps the worst.  I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses of preaching political murder.

The consequences of this ever-flowing stream of slander and incitement to outrage are now upon us.  What was dimly foreseen a few years ago has actually come to pass.  We are at the present moment confronted with a murderous conspiracy, whose aim it is to subvert the Government of the country and to make British rule impossible by establishing general terrorism.  Their organization is effective and far-reaching; their