Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/492

 and producers of exchangeable articles, to devote yourselves in short to careers, by which men and countries grow rich.

The economic problems of India with its rapidly increasing population and the absolute certainty, that although, here and there, savings might be made by the use of less costly agencies, and so forth, there is very little after all to be done in that way, are of the very gravest kind. They can only be solved by largely increased receipts, and whence are the largely increased receipts to come, if the most educated men of the country do not put their shoulder to the wheel, and add greatly to the wealth out of which the people are to be supported. Tinker and fidget as much as you will over forms of administration, the elementary truth remains that you can't get blood out of a stone. If India, or any other country under heaven, is to be really well-governed, it must be rich.

But to proceed on our quest of occupation for graduates—Politics, in their journalistic form, may give occupation to a few of you, but you are too far removed from the great centres of the world, to treat with much advantage of general politics. To one who has lived in the midst of them, it is indeed astounding to see the sort of heroism, with which some people charge into the middle of the most difficult and complicated subjects, on the authority of a telegram, which does not even pretend to do more than reflect the morning's gossip of this, or that, European capital, thousands and thousands of miles away. "Oh!" but some will observe, "there are Indian politics." The answer to that observation is, that there is in India but scant material for any politics, worthy of the name.

What has given its great importance to political life in England and some other countries, is that they have been the pioneers of the world's progress in a great many matters of vast importance, connected with men's daily lives. They have had by endless debate, sometimes in the Council chamber, sometimes in Parliaments, often in the field, to work out the solution of a thousand puzzles, one more difficult than the other.

You might easily have had to do the same, if no Europeans had ever landed upon these shores. In that case you would probably have had a long period of ever-increasing turbulence, then a slow process of re-construction, which would have gone on, say, a thousand years, and brought you at last very possibly to about