The question for India's teeming millions is not "how to live well" but how to live at all. There is no question of comforts for them. What they want, and do not get, is sufficient and nourishing food and a knowledge of the three R's. Your Government is unable to give them the first, and persists in refusing to give them the second; yet when an Indian publicist loses patience and says "slavery has deprived Indians of wealth, honors and freedom, and has reduced them to destitution and starvation," your Viceroy in India cites it as an instance of depraved journalism and a justification for the gagging of the press. He complains that "there are papers in India which magnify the ills from which she suffers" and "which harp upon plague, famine, malaria and poverty" and "ascribe them all to the curse of an alien government." May I ask, sir, if it is not a fact that millions in India die of famine, plague, and malaria? Is it not a fact that the curses and the appalling effects of them, are directly or indirectly traceable to poverty? Many countries on the face of the earth do not grow food sufficient for themselves while India does. Why then should India alone suffer from famines when her food supply, once in a while, falls short of the ordinary year of agricultural "prosperity?" If even during famine years India can supply food to other nations by exports of wheat and other grains, why can't she keep that food at home and feed her own hungry children? Why should plague have stayed in India so long? Why should malaria exact such a heavy annual toll there? The reason is obvious. Because of the ignorance and poverty of the people. Let us assume that India has not grown poorer under British rule, though there is abundant evidence to the contrary, that the masses have become poorer and are becoming poorer every day; let us also assume that in the matter of education India was worse off under native rule--_i. e._, before the introduction of the British rule--a period of history when no other part of the world was any the better. Is it not a matter of shame, that after 150 years of British rule, when most of the other national governments in other parts of the world have reduced their illiteracy almost to zero point, India should still have more than 90% of its population illiterate. Is it not a matter of shame, that of all the grain producing countries of the world India alone should be so miserably situated as to be unable to supply sufficient and nourishing food to her sons and daughters. Don't you think, sir, that the Indians have reason to feel sore when they see that the food grown by them is denied to them; that it is almost snatched from their mouths; that others should eat the food which is grown by them, that even in the best of years millions of them must be contented with only one meal a day, and that of the coarsest grain.