Indian Industry
THIS is the first volume of what promises to be an economic study of high value. Dr. Soni is yet another Indian scholar with -the detached and disinterested mind, -that examines without bias -matters exciting controversy., He goes into the question of Britain's culpability for. the destruction of village industries, and shows -how inevitable that result was, even if England had never become a political- force in India. He follows this up with an analysis -of India's sources of wealth—actual, in minerals and forests ; potential, in sources of heat and power. He has the courage to write devastatingly about the educational mess, criticizing it not in the usual unjust outsider's fashion, as producing " babu English " (against which- we should remember the thousands of Indians who have learnt to speak our difficult tongue with easy mastery and grace), but as corrupting the mutual relations of people and Government. Indian higher education " is inefficient because it is cheap ; and it -is cheap, almost dirt- cheap, because the publie opinion in the - country demands that it should be within everybody's reach " (page 31). The next Viceroy has got to be a- Lincoln for courage and ability to forge a lonely .way : to stand up to officialdom as no Governor-General has done since Lord Cornwallis's time, and to brush aside mischieVoui expectations fostered by funk and evasion in Indians themselves. If one knew who be was going to be, this is one of the books that an anonymous well-wisher might send him !
• EDWARD THOMPSON.
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