chiefly rely for the success of their propaganda, and nothing helps them more than the bitterness with which young Indians who come abroad often return to India ready for any desperate adventure[14]. CHAPTER XII. THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS. It is impossible to acquit the Congress of having contributed to the growth of active and violent unrest, though the result may have lain far both from the purpose of its chief originators and from the desire of the majority of its members. Western education has largely failed in India because the Indian, not unnaturally, fails to bring an education based upon conceptions entirely alien to the world in which he moves into any sort of practical relation with his own life. So with the Indian politician, who, even with the best intentions, fails to bring the political education which he has borrowed from the West into any sort of practical relation with the political conditions of India. The Indian National Congress assumed unto itself almost from the beginning the functions of a Parliament. There was and is no room for a Parliament in India, because, so long as British rule remains a reality, the Government of India, as Lord Morley has plainly stated, must be an autocracy--benevolent and full of sympathy with Indian ideas, but still an autocracy. Nor would the Congress have been in any way qualified to discharge the functions of a Parliament had there been room for one. For it represents only one class, or rather a section of one class--the Western educated middle, and mainly professional, class, consisting chiefly of lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, newspaper men; an important and influential class, no doubt, but one which itself only represents an infinitesimal fraction--barely, perhaps, one-hundredth part--of the whole population. To what extent it is really representative even of that small section it is impossible to say, as the members are not returned by any clearly defined body of constituents or by any formal process of election. Originally it attracted the support of not a few non-Hindus, though the Hindu element always largely preponderated, and a small group of distinguished Parsees, headed by Mr. Dadhabai Naoroji, together with a sprinkling of Mahomedans, helped to justify its claim to be called National, in so far as that appellation connoted the representation of the different creeds and races of India. But gradually most of the Mahomedans dropped out, as it became more and more an exponent of purely Hindu opinion, and the Parsees retained little more than the semblance of the authority they had at one time enjoyed.