by which he collected his revenues, or in his measures for securing justice and social order. Wherever the monuments of Akbar's reign exist, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Muhammadan alike testify to the gladness and contentment which his benevolent despotism brought to the people. In this record of national art those who have eyes to see can see that Akbar achieved-what so far we have not succeeded in winning a sincere understanding between the rulers and the ruled, a sentiment deeper than respect or astonishment. It is just that note of gladness which we have failed to evoke. We bring with us into India the dull, grey northern skies, and in spite of all that we have done we are still looked upon by most Indians as stern and strict schoolmasters, rather than as friends and fellow-citizens of the Empire. This comes chiefly from our failure to grasp the fundamental fact that art is a far more important matter of State policy in India than it is in Europe-just because in India art is still the voice of the people. To be out of touch with a people's art is to be out of touch with the people.

The discipline which we have imposed upon India has been-at least for the time being-a great blessing, but the dulness is not an essential part of the discipline. Our Indian Empire is now held by a departmental machinery so immense and so complex that no administrator in modern times has been able to do what Akbar did. Lord Curzon attempted it and might have succeeded, were it not that by the peculiar system through which we govern our Indian Empire India is deprived of his services just when his work was beginning. His wonderful energy and intellectual powers have done much to improve the machinery, but that welding of the administrative system on to the national life, which Akbar achieved and which we must achieve before we can regard India as an integral part of the British Empire, has still to be done. Lord Curzon, moreover, is, unfortunately for India, an ardent archaeologist. I say this without disrespect and without the least intention of depreciating the splendid work which he has done in restoring Indian monuments. It was a work to which Lord Curzon devoted the best of his great intellect and artistic sympathy, and no artist can have other than the most sincere admiration for the results. But in seven years Lord Curzon had not time to realise what no Anglo-Indian administrator has yet learnt in a lifetime-that in India art is not archaeology. What Lord Curzon failed to do in seven years his successors can hardly hope to do in five; so, although the Taj, the palaces of the Moguls, and many other splendid monuments of India's past bear the mark of Lord Curzon's great personality, Indian art remains where it was on the road to ruin-unless 'Swadeshi' should come to the rescue.

It says much for the thoroughness and enthusiasm with which Lord Curzon did his work that at the end of his seven years' labours

he succeeded in digging through the surface layers on which most of our Indian administrative system is built, and struck against the bed-rock of what we may call Indian nationality, though that word fails to express exactly what Swadeshi is. It may be that he did so unconsciously, but, nevertheless, if through his action he has prepared the way for a more solid and enduring foundation on which the administrative fabric may be built, Lord Curzon deserves well of the Empire.

In discussing Swadeshi it is necessary to distinguish between the true Swadeshi and the false, and it may be said at once that Manchester can laugh at the false one, and need not fear the true, for a happy and prosperous India is Manchester's best friend. India has need of the method of Manchester as well as the artistic sense of Swadeshi. The false Swadeshi is just now the most conspicuous, for it is noisy and self-assertive. It preaches thinly-veiled sedition and talks largely of patriotism, though it is as absurd to speak of patriots of India as it would be to speak of patriots of Europe. It will help a decaying national industry when it can be used as a political lever, but will leave it to starve and die out when it does not serve that purpose. Its methods are generally hollow, unpractical and insincere; but though it justly deserves our contempt we should never forget that it is largely the product of our own educational system.

The true Swadeshi keeps aloof from the official administration, and neither joins in the scramble for official favours nor apes the noisy manner of the Western demagogue. It lives its own life apart from ours, and many Anglo-Indians spend a lifetime in India hardly conscious of its existence. You may see its various outward manifesta tions on the ghâts at Benares, and learn that though there are many formularies-Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and Muhammadan-it has one ideal. That ideal is so different from ours that few Europeans attempt to understand it, and few would succeed in less than a cycle of transmigrations. It is something more than nationality. It is the Eastern way of thinking. This Swadeshi is not disloyal, though it has its sinister aspect, which it revealed in 1857. It is not for us; but it is grateful for the pax Britannica, and realises its value. It bides its time; it has faith in the centuries-and, unless all Indian history lies, the centuries are on its side.

It is this Swadeshi which, from the time the Aryans entered into India, has absorbed one conquering race after another without materially altering its way of thinking. It is an immense political force, now passive on the whole, but getting more active every day, for its strength, which was dissipated by a long period of anarchy and misrule, is being slowly recruited under our firm and stable government. We, to a certain extent, like Akbar, found our Indian system of revenue, law and police upon it, but in many vital matters in which art is concerned, such as industrial development, public works, and

national education, we almost completely ignore it. It is in the matter of industrial development that Swadeshi has lately shown a remarkable activity and drawn European attention to the fact of its existence. How little our Anglo-Indian departmentalism has been aware of this side of Swadeshi is shown by the fact that until a few years ago official statistics referred to Anglo-Indian cotton mills, which give employment to only 350,000 people, as representing the most important industry in India after agriculture. Not long ago an official, considered a high authority on industrial matters, lectured to an Anglo-Indian audience in London and described the handweaving industry of India as almost driven out of the marketthe fact being that it still supports directly and indirectly, not thousands, but millions of Indian villagers. The hand industry is not only of far greater importance than the whole of the steam-power factories put together, but contributes largely towards their support by purchasing the greater part of the yarn which the Indian steam mills produce.

The concentration of labour and machinery rendered necessary by the use of steam power, the struggle of the agricultural labourer for bettering' himself, and of the capitalist to add to his capital, have given Lancashire its steam mills in which, according to a competent authority, the weaving industry is carried on under conditions unhealthy and dangerous, bad for mind and body, making women unfit for motherhood, cursing the children and causing the people to deteriorate. The remarkable development of hand-loom weaving in the last twenty years does not support the popular belief that the power loom will drive out the hand loom altogether even in Europe. In India, after 150 years of fighting with obsolete weapons against all the resources of European mechanical science, the almost forgotten hand-loom industry is still a highly organised and very formidable industrial army. This is because in the first place heredity makes the Indian caste weaver a highly skilled artisan, and secondly, because his Swadeshi way of thinking does not give the Indian labourer that passion for mere money-making which the West calls laudable ambition. The Indian people, the true Swadeshi, are at heart philo. sophical and deeply religious. Every peasant believes that if he is faithful to his dharma (his duty to God and the State) in this life, his karma (his place in the cosmos) may make him a king in the next re-birth. Why then should he struggle for mere wealth in this? So the high wages of modern industrialism-which in Europe draw the life-blood of nations to the great cities-in India attract only the scum of the population. Only when starvation drives him to the famine-camp or to the cities will the peasant leave his plough and the skilled weaver his loom.

The agitation against the partition of Bengal has brought to the aid of the Indian hand-loom weaver all the forces of Swadeshi,

both the real and the sham, and bids fair to solve in a twelvemonth a problem which has puzzled departmentalism for fifty yearstechnical education for India. The despised occupation of weaving has become one which attracts the intelligence of the highest castes. The best appliances of modern Europe are being brought to replace the primitive apparatus of the village hand-loom weaver, who suddenly finds himself in great demand as a teacher for Brahmins and Vaishyas and for 'failed B.A.s' of the Calcutta University. One of Lord Curzon's last acts as Viceroy was to sanction for Bengal an important scheme for a school of hand-loom weaving on the best modern lines-a stroke of policy worthy of the best traditions of Anglo-Indian statesmen, which will help to turn many disaffected agitators into loyal and industrious citizens. The Indian weaving industry will thus be able to face the competition of nineteenthcentury factories on more equal terms. The latest improvements in the application of mechanical power all tend to make the concentration of labour in these social pest-houses less and less a necessity for modern industrial methods. It is more than probable that before many decades have passed modern science will place at the disposal of the Indian village weaver, in a simple and effective form, as much power as he may want to use. Thus the centuries even now are helping Swadeshi.

Let us now discuss Swadeshi in relation to public works. For the last fifty years departmentalism has entrusted the whole construction of public works and with it the whole art interests of India to a body of engineers who have had no artistic training. I say 'whole art interests' advisedly, for if all the schools of art in India were closed to-morrow Indian art would be hardly a whit the worseor better. Art museums as they have been always conducted may give a spasmodic impulse to a passing caprice of fashion in Europe and America, by advertising so-called Indian art ware. But, unfortunately, most of the art collected in Indian museums and exhibitions is made solely for the European market. It is an art which from its falseness can never have a permanent commercial value, and it is not in any sense the art of the people. A permanent revival of Indian art, either in a commercial or artistic sense, can never be produced by such

methods as these.

The monopoly of architectural art which the Indian Public Works Department has assumed, and the curse of a false classicism which it has brought with it from Europe, are the principal causes of the decay of the real art of the country. The complacency with which Arglo-Indian administrators have regarded the ineptitude of this policy is partly, no doubt, a recognition of the splendid and devoted services of Public Works officers in the construction of railways and irrigation works, but it is mainly due to the ineradicable superstition that European architecture is better adapted

to modern requirements, and that though Indian architects may have excelled in the aesthetic side of their profession, they are far behind the times in all that relates to constructional science. We form our ideas of Indian art from the precious inlay of the Taj or from the exuberant carving of Jain and Hindu temples. But do we generally take the mosaic of St. Mark's at Venice as the criterion of the cost of a post-office, or form the estimates of a hospital on the carving of a Gothic cathedral? Indian architects, like those of medieval Europe, know how to be economical when economy is wanted, though they disregard economy when it is neither becoming nor necessary. In other words they are trained in all the requirements of their profession.

It is doubtless true that Indian builders of the present day know little of the use of iron for building purposes, but it is important to remember that brick, stone, and wood have not yet been entirely superseded as building materials in India, either by iron, glass, papiermaché, sawdust or any other of the up-to-date resources of Western architects. In the purely constructional use of these old-fashioned materials all that European builders have achieved, whether in classic, medieval, or modern times, has been equalled or excelled by Indian architects; and it is highly probable that if Anglo-Indian engineers had attempted to study and make use of the traditional craftsmanship of centuries which the descendants of these men keep alive, they would have learnt something of the artistic possibilities of iron girders, for the native builders, instinctively, will use even corrugated iron and kerosene tins more artistically than we do.

We pride ourselves on being a practical nation, and the popular excuse for any act of vandalism, or any peculiarly stupid artistic abomination, is that art must give way to considerations of utility. Yet when art becomes a question of public policy, we are probably the most unpractical and irrational of all civilised nations. We have certainly exhibited ourselves in that light in India, both before and since Great Britain assumed imperial responsibility for the government of the country. Some time ago I met in Calcutta a Prussian State engineer, sent out officially to India by his Government to study the constructive principles of Indian architecture. Our Teutonic friends are more practical than ourselves. It was an English chemist who discovered aniline dyes. The Germans forthwith appropriated the discovery, and built up a gigantic German industry upon it. Now they are rapidly taking from us the Indian indigo trade. Englishmen opened the door to Sanscrit literature, but German scholars placed the study of it on a scientific basis, and when we want Principals for the few Indian colleges where Oriental literature is a special study, we must generally send to Germany for them. A Scotchman, James Fergusson, spent forty years of his life in exploring the marvellous field of architectural research, scientific and artistic, which our Indian