time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India capable of self-government--not yet, of course, on the lines now contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is to be their final result on the character of the people?" The following passage in that remarkable document may be commended to our faint-hearted doubters of to-day: Liberal treatment has always been found the most effectual way of elevating the character of any people, and we may be sure that it will produce a similar effect on that of the people of India. The change will no doubt be slow, but that is the very reason why no time should be lost in commencing the work. We should not be discouraged by difficulties, nor, because little progress may be made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has been among the nations of Europe and through what a long course of barbarous ages they had to pass before they attained their present state. When we compare other countries with England, we usually speak of England as she now is. We scarcely ever think of going back beyond the Reformation, and we are apt to regard every foreign nation as ignorant and uncivilised, whose state of government does not in some degree approximate to our own, even should it be higher than our own was at no distant date.