‘Asiaticus’ has again frankly gone back upon his short-lived liberalism, and Sir Valentine Chirol is no better. Convenience suggests the postponement of discussion of the Indian Budget, and the statute allows it. Out here in India the doctrine of unconditional loyalty is held up to us. We are told that it is a folly, if not a crime, to talk of what may come to India when the time for readjustment comes. Meanwhile Indian speculation, so natural to a nation of speculators, is roaming free. Hopes spring up only to give place to fears.... “There are not wanting men among us also who have only one counsel to give, and that is, wait and see. No doubt the virtues of patience are great, but we think that so far as patience alone is concerned India may easily throw out a challenge to any nation in the world. If India will not help herself she will have little reason to grumble if others will not help her. Let us distinctly tell England that the time for half measures and gingerly reform has gone and that for bold and courageous steps has come.” V The Indian National Congress, the official organisation of the constitutional party, held its annual session at Madras in December, 1914. In the course of his speech, the President remarked: “If English rule in India meant the canonisation of a bureaucracy, if it meant perpetual domination and perpetual tutelage, and increasing dead-weight on the soul of India, it would be a curse to civilisation and a blot on humanity.” Again he asks complainingly: “The right to carry arms, the right to bear commissions in the Army and lead our men in the cause of the Empire, the right to form volunteer corps in the defence of hearth and home, how long will these be denied to the Indian people? How long will India toddle on her feet, tied to the apron-strings of England? It is time she stood on her own legs. If England were obliged, as was Imperial Rome in her day, to abandon India in the hour of some great danger, what could be more humiliating to England and to India alike, than for India to be left unarmed and untrained in the use of arms, as her civil population now is, a prey to internal anarchy and external aggression? What a commentary would it be, on 150 years of British rule in India, that England found the people strong though disunited and left them helpless and emasculated?”