It is now over twenty-five years since he entered upon his power, after a few years of tutelage under the British Government, which had deposed his predecessor for overstepping the latitude granted to native rulers in everything but politics. In that quarter-century, by the help of carefully chosen Ministers, such as Mr. Romesh Chandra Dutt, he has realized reforms in government and daily life that are continually called impossible by ourselves. Throughout his whole State he has absolutely separated the judicial from the executive functions—a reform that we have acknowledged for years to be essential for India, but are boggling over still. He has restored the ancient village Panchayat, or parish council, by the men whom villagers can trust, whereas, in our passion for rigid and centralized power, we have almost destroyed the last vestige of this national training in self-government. After a careful experiment for fourteen years in one district, he has now made primary education compulsory and universal throughout his State. Whereas in British India the Government expenditure upon primary education still stood in 1906-7 at about £200,000, or considerably less than £1 per thousand of the population, in Baroda the proportion was about £1 to every fifty-five, and the State counts more educated girls, for its size, than any other part of India. The latest step in constitutional reform has been the admission of genuinely elected members into the Legislative Council, which was to meet that year (1908) for the first time in its more democratic form. Such reforms as the Indian Government had at that time proposed for its Legislative Council, were only intended to frustrate what shadow of democratic principle then existed in them. [Illustration: MAKING YARN.] [Illustration: A VILLAGE PANCHAYAT.] But it is much harder to change a social custom than to legislate, and the Maharajah’s greatest triumphs lay in the prevention of child-marriages, the emancipation of ladies from the “purdah,” or curtained life, and the breaking-down of caste barriers. In all this he had been aided by the encouragement and example of his Maharani, who had stood by his side like one of the heroic queens of Mahratta history. In all India I suppose there was not another man and woman who had done more for the happiness and advancement of their people, or done more to disprove the common Anglo-Indian charge that Indians are incapable of carrying out even their own reforms. For their very success they were suspected and maligned by officials, who had not the courage to imitate their methods. But when official torpor and private malignity had said their worst, the Maharajah and his queen remained among the royal souls of India. They had once more established the old Roman paradox that it is possible to follow virtue even in a palace, and there was something almost Aurelian in their proud service to the Commonwealth.[71] FOOTNOTES: