Page:The empire and the century.djvu/655

 Governor of Madras, and eleven on the Council of the Governor of Bombay. Nearly every year three or four Indians pass into the Civil Service, and on two occasions Indians have been elected by English constituencies as Members of Parliament. Municipalities and local boards, manned almost entirely by Indians, have been established for the administration of local affairs, and now in our local affairs Indians have obtained, at the hands of the British Government, almost the same privileges as are enjoyed by the people of this country in the management of their local concerns.

When viewed over a long period, a vast amount has then been done towards admitting the natives of India to a share in the government of their own country. But the main service we can do them may, after all, prove to lie, not so much in training them for Government offices, and fitting them to take a part in political life, nor yet in carrying out material improvements in the country, intersecting it with irrigation canals, threading it with roads and railways, tying it together with telegraph lines, fostering its industrial development, and yearly increasing the volume of its trade; nor yet, again, in educating the people, in opening to their minds the gateways leading to all the wealth of Western science and Western culture—not so much in these directions may lie the chief service we may do the people of India as in affording them, by the peace and order we preserve, the opportunity for developing along those spiritual lines to which by nature they are best adapted.

Religion is the backbone of their national life. 'If there is any land on this earth,' says the religious reformer, Swami Vivekenanda, 'that can lay claim to be the land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards generosity, towards purity, towards calmness, the land above all of introspection and spirituality, it is India. Hence have started the founders of religion from the most ancient times, deluging the earth again and again with the pure and perennial waters of spiritual truth. And here, again, must start the wave