enabled to perform their legitimate functions with independence. Theirs is the position of the mediastine between the rulers on the one side and the masses of their own countrymen on the other, as also between the masses and the diverse classes of their countrymen themselves. They are a median organism in this way between various other sets of complicate and contradictory organisms, each of which is sufficiently charged with its own latent but powerful and impatient energies. These energies are by no means an evanescent factor in the case, but have in each case been stored up by the long and persistent action of civilizations which are bound to make the severest struggle for self-preservation. It has fallen to the lot of the educated classes to serve as organic sheaths and conductors between the multiform sets of organisms forming the repositories of these energies. The many-sided strain now put upon these classes and likely to grow in quality and quantity while performing those functions, requires that they should find proportionate strength and support from all those who contribute to the strain and will benefit by the capacity of this class to meet it.
The method of developing and maturing,in this mediastine class, a right and beneficent capacity, not only for meeting this strain, but also for performing their difficult functions, is a problem in whose solution all India - including its English population - is deeply and directly interested. The extent to which those at the helm of the State will be equal to the task of pursuing this method with foresight, sympathy and even sacrifice, will also be the measure of their own reward in the long run. But any such method, if method itself be not altogether abjured by them, must in any case involve a concession of the necessary and sufficient amount of free scope for independent action to the median organism, and must thereby afford a valid ground for the hope that some of the fictions, here offered, of what in part are only our hero's visions to-day, may
