authors of the Report do not propose to concede to it even such beginnings of responsible government as they are prepared to grant to the other provinces of India. The fact is that mere literacy does not play an important part in the awakening of political consciousness in a people. It is a useful ingredient of character required for the exercise of political power but by no means essential. POVERTY The argument based on poverty is of still less force. On the other hand, it is the best reason why the people of India should have the power to determine and carry out their fiscal policy. We hope the admissions made in Paragraph 135 of the Report which we bodily reproduce[2] will once for all dispose of the silly statement, so often repeated even by men who ought to know better, that materially India has been highly prosperous under British rule. If so, how is it that in the language of the Secretary of State for India and the Viceroy "enormous masses of the population have little to spare for more than the necessaries of life"? What about the prosperity of a province, one of the biggest in India (the United Provinces), in which the number of landlords (not tenants and farmers) whose income derived from their proprietary holdings exceeds £20 ($100 a year, which comes to 30 cents a day for the whole family), is about 126,000 out of a population of 48 millions! Acceptance of the argument of poverty as sufficient to deprive people of political right is putting a premium on it which is hardly creditable to the political ethics of the twentieth century. It is the poorest and the most ignorant in the community who most egregiously suffer at the hands of autocracy. It is they who require protection from it. The wealthy and the educated know how to placate the bureaucrat and get what they want. It is the poor who pay the penalty of political helplessness, yet, curiously, it is for them and in their interest that the English Government in India proposes to withhold the power of the purse from the proposed Indian Councils and insists on denying the Indian people even the elements of responsible government. While we admit the general justice and accuracy of the observations made under the head of "extent of interest in political questions," "political capacity of the rural population," we fail to see anything in them which justifies the conclusion that the interests of the classes not politically minded will be safer in the hands of the British officer, and on the whole better protected by him than by his educated countrymen who are likely to get the power in case of responsible government being conceded now. In our judgment no greater argument for the immediate grant of a substantial step in the direction of complete responsible government throughout India and in all spheres of government, could be advanced than what is involved in the following observation of the authors of the joint Report: