It is said that 226 of 244 millions of people in British India live a rural life: "agriculture is the one great occupation of the people" and "the proportion of these who even give a thought to matters beyond the horizon of their villages is very small." We ask did not similar conditions exist in Great Britain, France and Germany before the inauguration of the Industrial Revolution, and if they did, did they stand in the way of their people getting responsible government or parliamentary institutions? Everyone knows what the conditions in France were in years immediately preceding the Revolution. Italy was no better off in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is not much better even today. The masses of the people in these and other countries of Europe, including Great Britain, were far more ignorant, poor and helpless when these countries obtained parliamentary government than they are in India today. And the authors of the report are not unaware that similar concerns are perhaps the main interests of the population of some country districts in the United Kingdom even today. In several of the Balkan States, Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria--in Italy and in the component parts of Russia--the conditions are no better, yet their right to autonomous government, nay, even to absolute independence, is hardly questioned. Moreover, as has been pointed out by Mr. Sidney Webb, "It is a mistake to assume that a land of villages necessarily means what is usually implied by the phrase, a people of villagers. In truth, India, for all its villages, has been also, at all known periods, and to-day still is, perhaps, to a greater extent than ever before, what Anglo-Saxon England, for instance was _not_ or the South African Republic in the days before gold had been discovered, and what the Balkan peninsula even at the present time may perhaps not be, namely a land of flourishing cities, of a distinctly urban civilization, exhibiting not only splendid architecture, and the high development of the manufacturing arts made possible by the concentration of population and wealth, but likewise--what is much more important--a secretion of thought, an accumulation of knowledge, and a development of literature and philosophy which are not in the least like the characteristic products of villages as we know them in Europe or America. And to-day, although the teeming crowds who throng the narrow lanes of Calcutta or Benares, Bombay or Poona, Madras or Hyderabad, or even the millions who temporarily swarm at Hardwar or Allahabad or Puri may include only a small percentage of the whole population, yet the Indian social order does not seem to be, in the European understanding of the phrase, either on its good or on its bad side, essentially one of the villagers. The distinction may be of importance, because the Local