In looking at the conditions of the problem, there is another fallacy which underlies the oft-exaggerated estimates of the blessings of British rule in India by British statesmen and British publicists. They compare the India of today with the India of 1757 and at once jump to the conclusion that "the moral and material civilisation of the Indian people has made more progress in the last fifty years than during all the preceding centuries of their history." The proper comparison is of the Great Britain, the France, the United States, the Germany, the Italy and the Japan of 1757, with the India of that year and of India's progress within the last century and a half, or even within the last 50 years, with the progress of these countries in the same period. We have no desire to withhold credit for what Great Britain has done in India, but what she has misdone or could have done but failed to do, by virtue of her rule in India being absolute and thus necessarily conditioned by limitations inevitable in a system of absolute rule, should not be forgotten. The Indian critics of British rule in India have repeatedly pointed out that what they condemned and criticised was the _system_ and not the personnel of the Government, and the distinguished authors of the Report "very frankly recognise that the character of political institutions reacts upon the character of the people" and that the exercise of responsibilities calls forth capacity for it (Paragraph 130), which mainly accounts for the conditions that serve as reasons for withholding responsible government from the Indian people. In discussing "the basis of responsibility" Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford very properly point out that the qualities necessary for it are only developed by exercise and that though "they are greatly affected by education, occupation and social organisation" "they ultimately rest on the traditions and habits of the people." "We cannot go simply to statistics for the measure of these things." Yet, unfortunately, it is exactly these statistics that seem to have influenced them largely in the framing of their half-hearted measures. The two dominating conditions which obsess them are (1) that the immense masses of the people are poor, ignorant and helpless far beyond the standards of Europe; and (2) that there runs through Indian society a series of cleavages--of religion, race and caste--which constantly threaten its solidarity. We admit the existence of these conditions, but we do not admit that they are an effective bar to the beginnings of responsible government even on that scale on which European countries had it when the conditions of life in those countries were no better than they are now in India.