race to a small minority which has hitherto shown so little disposition to approach any of the difficult problems with the solution of which the happiness and progress of the overwhelming majority of their own race are bound up, though, because themselves belonging to the same stock and the same social system, it would have been much easier for them to deal with those problems than it is for alien rulers like ourselves? Those problems arise out of the social system which is known as Hinduism--for Hinduism is much more a social than a religious system. Western-educated Indians will not openly deny its evils--the iron-bound principle of caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so forth. How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, have the courage to act up to their opinions? At one time--before the Congress gave precedence to political reforms--social reform did find many enthusiastic supporters amongst the best class of Western-educated Indians, but the gradual disappearance of men of that type may be said almost to coincide with the growth of political agitation. There have been, and there still are, some notable and admirable exceptions, but they are seldom to be found amongst the men who claim to be the tribunes of the Indian people. It is on these grounds--moral rather than political--that we claim to be still the best judges of our duties as trustees for the people of India."