1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 595 and the fundamental cleavages in human thought, he frankly indicates his own position. He is unreservedly in favour of the constitutional reform party in India and the ideal of Indian self-government. He can criticize severely many aspects of British policy, the ' sacrifice ' of Indian fiscal interests to the Manchester school, the methods by which the civil service, while nominally thrown open to Indians, remained long a pre- served area for men of British birth, and the practice of charging Indian revenues with the cost of imperial wars. Though the present reviewer cannot accept many of Mr. Thakore's conclusions, he willingly concedes the reasonableness of his position and the fairness of his advocacy. The purely historical portion of the volume is vigorously written, based on wide reading, and inspired as a rule with shrewdness, insight, and sympathy, though there are a few lapses into bitterness, almost as though the author felt it incumbent upon him'to pay a perfunctory homage to the conventional nationalist attitude. Of Pitt's India Act, 1784, he says with truth that historians have not taken sufficient account of the secrecy, the unky, and the efficiency of the small, central, supreme body that Pitt created for the guidance and control of the East India Company. His judgement here reinforces that of Professor Holland Rose, who in his biography of Pitt gave that statesman far more credit for this famous act than is generally allotted to him. ranking it ' amongst the greatest of legislative achievements ', and declaring that by it Pitt ' harmonized the claims of viceregal autocracy in the Orient with those of popular government at home, and thereby saved the British empire from the fate which befell that of Rome '. The chapter on ' The Supreme Government ' is an admirable statement of the constitutional development since 1858. There is a fine appreciation of ' the dedicated lives ' lived by the first generation of civil servants : ' If the roots of British rule have gone deep into the soil of India, if mediaevalism be really going to be uprooted hence and to make room for the upgrowth of modernity to a long and vigorous prime, it is they who have created the miracle, their husbandry, their faith, and their devotion.' The newer generation drifted away from sympathy with those they ruled. They found a more frequent and quicker intercourse with the outside world, ' life was fuller and more civilized than had till then been possible in India. But their discontent with it was the more poignant.' The rapid change that has passed over the spirit of modern India is forcibly summarized : ' Education followed ; foreign not merely in outward look and form, but foreign through and through to the spirit of Indian culture ; preaching the supremacy of the individual conscience, the right as well as the duty of individual action and individual judgement, the dignity of the individual soul ; an education mundane, political, democratic, recognizing nothing higher than the reason of man and the experience of mankind.' So came the thirst for self-government, ' as for the mystical waters of the fabled spring of eternal life '. Dis illusionment was bound to follow such radiant expectations, and we in the Western world, who have hoped and suffered so much from self-government, should regard these aspirations at once with sympathy and compassion. The author believes that the Indian spirit of admiration and veneration for British ideals and politics was finally changed by the failure of the Qq2
