lishment of Government headquarters at Delhi may mean a saving of many hours in the transmission of mails from Whitehall to the Indian capital. At any rate, Hindostan's Imperial centre considers herself of great strategic importance, next door, as she is, to many Native States, and sitting in the lap of the martial races of India. Since Bombay and Karachi will benefit by the changes, for the former city may be able to gratify her ambition to be the first city in India, and the latter to become a far more important seaport than she was or could otherwise have become, they pat Delhi on the back and salaam the Government for the favour that has been extended. Some say that the astute Administration has removed the capital from Calcutta to escape the Bengali agitator, and also to decrease his mischief-making capacity by reducing the prestige of his chief city. Meantime, the Bengalis-a sentimental race-as a rule do not mourn their fate over losing the capital, the repartition of Bengal being considered sufficient recompense. The worst comment they make about it is that the Indian Government can ill-afford to spend the vast sum of money needed for the transfer of the seat of Government, which, it is declared, may amount to £10,000,000. This argument is met by the rejoinder that since Delhi is only about twelve hours distant from the summer headquarters at Simla, whereas Calcutta is about forty-eight hours from it, by making the move the Government will save much recurring expense, and therefore can well afford the initial disbursement involved in shifting the capital. Those opposed to the transfer ask what will become of the splendid office buildings erected at Calcutta by the Supreme Government, and are answered that they will be utilised by the Local Administration. At any rate, Delhi says that if the Government of India can survive without enjoying the benefits of being in direct access to the sea during the eight or nine months it spends on the Himalayan heights, it will be able to exist during the remaining three or four months in mid-winter, without the good offices of Calcutta. The KingEmperor wisely introduced, in his Calcutta speeches, passages calculated to act as balm to the Bengalis' wounds. On the same principle, the Viceroy has thrown a sop to Calcutta by promising that he will spend a month there every winter.

The repartition of Bengal, too, has given rise to a controversy. Those against the measure say that this step was inadvisable when the agitation against Lord Curzon's great accomplishment had died down, and when the Liberal régime of Lord Morley had more than once pronounced the thing "a settled fact." They add that inasmuch as this change means giving in to the agitators, it will permanently hurt the prestige of the British-Indian

Administration, make the Indians clamour all the louder, and fire the hot-headed ones with additional zeal for propagating terrorism. In short, they say, in the future, whenever the natives of India want a concession of any nature, they will feel that all they need to do will be to throw a few bombs, discharge a few revolver shots, and butcher a few Britishers, in order to get anything they want. Those who oppose this view say that the agitation was not dead-only silenced by coercive measures, and that free speech and free writing were practically suspended in Bengal in order to accomplish this end. They say that only

as

his Majesty could have dared to undo the partition, as the Liberal
Government did not possess the requisite courage to carry out
this just and necessary reform in its own, instead of the Royal,
name. Moreover, they are jubilant over the fact that, coming
as it did through the King, the repartition has been given a
finality which party measures are said essentially to lack. In
the opinion of these people, the move has shown the Indians,
nothing else could have demonstrated to them, that their faith
in Great Britain's good intentions is well founded, and that all
their just aspirations in due time will be fulfilled. This, they
aver, will rivet India to England with hoops of steel.
A great
many declare that the partition of the area in question along the
lines of prevalent vernaculars is a master-stroke, and is just to
all parties concerned; and that it answers the purposes Lord
Curzon had in mind when he broke up Bengal, viz., to make a
cumbersome administrative division less burdensome to the head
of the Local Government, with the added advantage that there
is no feature connected with it calculated to rouse the animosity
of any section of people.

VII.

When the fire of contention has spent itself, and the people are able to take a more dispassionate view of the Emperor's Indian visit, probably the incident connected with it that will loom the largest will be the one which has received the smallest attention—the King's pronouncement on the expansion of India's educational system. Leaving aside the grant of £300,000, and the promise of further aid "in future years on a generous scale," the King's declaration of the educational policy which hereafter is to be pursued in Hindostan deserves especial attention. In his speech at Calcutta on January 6th, in reply to the address of the Calcutta University, he said :--

"It is my wish that there may be spread over the land a network of schools and colleges from which will go forth loyal and manly and useful VOL. XCI. N.S.

N N

citizens, able to hold their own in industries and agriculture, and all the vocations in life, and it is my wish, too, that the homes of my Indian subjects may be brightened and their labour sweetened by the spread of knowledge, with all that follows in its train-a higher level of thought, of comfort, and of health. It is through education that my wish will be fulfilled, and the cause of education in India will ever be very close to my heart."

There is only one other document in existence in the whole world to which this passage can be compared, and that is the Rescript on Education issued by his Imperial Majesty Mitsuhito, Emperor of Japan. In order to turn the faces of his subjects from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light of advancing civilisation, the Ruler of the Sunrise Kingdom declared his educational policy in the following words :--

All

The acquirement of knowledge is essential to a successful life. knowledge, from that necessary for daily life to that higher knowledge necessary to prepare officials, farmers, merchants, artisans, physicians, &c., for their respective vocations, is acquired by learning. A long time has elapsed since schools were first started in this country. But for the farmers, artisans, and merchants, and also for women, learning was regarded as beyond their sphere, owing to some misapprehension in the way of school administration. Even among the higher classes much time was spent in the useless occupation of writing poetry and composing maxims, instead of learning what would be for their benefit or that of the State. Now an educational system has been established, and the schedules of study re-modelled. It is designed that education shall be so diffused that there may not be a village with an ignorant family, or a family with an ignorant member."

This Rescript to-day is worshipped by the Japanese people-for the achievements of Modern Nippon, and its future prosperity, are based upon it.

In the humble opinion of the writer, when all else is forgotten, the King's words about the educational policy that the Indian Government should pursue, if his suggestions are loyally and generously carried out, will be remembered. Posterity, proud of Hindostan's intellectual, spiritual, and economic stability and progress, will point to the first trip undertaken by the "White Maharaja," in 1911 and 1912, during the course of which the first definite pronouncement was made to accelerate the speed and multiply the power of the machinery which is removing the stigma of ignorance and superstition from twentieth-century India. If his Majesty had done naught else but this, the money, time, and trouble involved in the visit would wisely and well have been spent.

THE RUSSIAN CONSUL-GENERAL AND THE RUSSIAN
JEWS.

IN the January number of this Review there appeared, from the pen of the Russian Consul-General in London (Baron A. Heyking), under the guise of a disquisition on Anglo-Russian progress, a violent attack upon the Jewish subjects of the Tsar, and an apologia for the attitude of the Russian Government towards them. It is significant that the eve of the visit of the British Deputation to St. Petersburg should have been chosen for this outburst-as though the Consul-General had concluded that the hour had come when the Russian entente could be crowned by a formal British endorsement of the Jewish persecution. I propose, in this article, to examine the statements of Baron Heyking-so far as the limitations of space will allow, premising only that as he has imprudently raised the diplomatic safety curtain behind which the Russian Authorities have worked their will with six million Jews, the friends of liberty will take care to keep it raised until the facts concerning the frightful Russo-Jewish tragedy are burnt in upon the conscience of Christian Europe.

Baron Heyking's article appears to resolve itself into a two-fold plea-viz.: (1) that the Jewish persecution either does not exist, or is grossly exaggerated; and (2) that so far as it is real, it is deserved and necessary.

The Consul-General does not seem to be able to decide on which of two wooden legs he will elect to stand. At one moment he speaks of the "alleged persecution" of the Jews in Russia, while at another we get the admission that the activity of the Jews is restrained in Russia by the law and by administrative measures, though he argues that the restrictions are just. As to the 'alleged persecution," the entente is surely not so old that Englishmen have forgotten Kishineff. The red annals of the Russian persecution-its loot and rapine and savage atrocities --are written in the files of every English newspaper, and in the solemn protest, in the name of humanity, which on one great occasion went out from the London Guildhall. The persecution of the Russian Jew is no more to be denied than the succession of the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun. It takes two forms. In the first place, and in the main, it consists of a multiplicity of oppressive and mutually contradictory laws and circulars, designed to stamp upon the Jewish features the brand of helotry,

and to render the Jewish existence precarious, if not impossible. When this process of legal ruin lags, it is speeded up by wholesale massacres, such as those of the year 1905. As to this latter assertion, let public recollection speak. As to the former, let me quote the testimony of one who certainly held no brief for the Russian Jews-Major (now Sir William) Evans Gordon. Sir William (who had previously gone on a special mission of study to Russia in connection with his agitation for an Alien Immigration Act) told the Immigration Commission that: "The Jews, who for several centuries have been Russian subjects, among whom are to be found some of the most cultivated and intelligent people of the country, and who have contributed largely to its wealth and prosperity, are classed with people of the lowest standard of civilisation. . . . In all legislation which affects the Jews there is an obvious intention on the part of the Russian Government to suppress them and prevent them from taking their natural place in the social and official life of the country.

It was the late Procurator of the Holy Synod (M. Pobiedonostzeff) who is reported to have declared that one-third of the Jews in Russia would be forced to emigrate, another third would be compelled to accept Baptism, and the remainder would be brought to the verge of starvation!

Baron Heyking argues that if the persecution is not a myth, it is at any rate only a trivial affair. He admits that the majority of the Jews in Russia are kept within certain territorial limits, and are not allowed free movement over the Empire. But he contends that this entails little hardship, seeing that these limits -the Pale of Settlement, as they are usually called-comprise twenty-six provinces, forming an area double the size of both France and Germany, and two and a half times the size of Great Britain. "It can, therefore, hardly be said," remarks Baron Heyking, "that the Jews in Russia are crowded together." Can it really be believed that the Consul-General has never heard of the famous May Laws, by which Jews (with certain exceptions) are confined in fifteen of the twenty-six (or is it twenty-five?) provinces, to the cities and townlets? Surely, it is one thing to confine a population to a large territory, and quite another to restrict it to the towns in that territory. Surely, too, Baron Heyking must be aware of the fact that when the May Laws were enacted, Jews from the villages were driven back, pell-mell, on to the masses in the towns, intensifying the congestion in those places and adding to the desperation of the struggle for a livelihood. Yet it is this very restriction to the towns-ignored by the Consul-General--which Major Evans Gordon told the Aliens Commission is the causa causans of a great deal of the misery and