I asked, and I knew by the sudden gleam in his eye that I had hit the nail on the head. I loaded the rifle and held it to his shoulder, and the vanity of the old man for once overcame his Sultan's dignity, for he shot a swift glance backwards to make sure that every one was watching him. Then, with a satisfied smile, he laid his cheek to the stock. Pointing the rifle at a great ant heap about thirty yards away, I steadied it whilst he pulled the trigger. There is but little recoil to a wellbalanced rifle of this calibre, yet even so it proved rather heavy on the old man's shoulder, though he recovered himself immediately. His eyes grew large with wonder as he exclaimed

"Let be," I said. "It shall stay with you while you sleep,' and with a pleased smile he turned and called, "Chewolopi!

Chewolopi promptly ran up from the house and knelt by the Sultan's chair. The headman stepped forward and, picking up the Sultan, placed him pick-a-back upon the girl. He then picked up the rifle, but the Sultan apparently had every objection to that, and curtly ordered him to lay it across the girl's shoulders. Carrying the double weight the girl rose to her feet easily, the Sultan steadying the rifle as it lay between them, and with a regal glance in my direction, he bade me "Good morning." As I watched them move away I had to exercise every scrap

Thereafter he settled into a rapturous silence while the retinue, now considerably swelled by the discharge of the rifle, chattered away unchecked as they stood round the ant heap gazing into the hole the bullet had made. After some time, seeing the old man was disinclined for further conversation, I rose to take my leave. I stretched out my hand for the rifle which was leaning against the Sultan's chair, but the old man instinctively closed his fingers round the barrel. Quickly seeing the enormity of his offence, he tried to atone for it by handing me the rifle himself, but of course it was too heavy for him to lift.

myself laughing out aloud. It was too grotesque; and yet, even so, there was something very affecting in the simple dignity of it all.

The next morning I bade him good-bye and set off for my own camp, but before leaving I promised I would come back and see him again. In the months that followed I redeemed my promise, and before I left those parts we had become firm friends. Much he told me of the old days and their customs, drawing invidious comparisons between them and the world of to-day-as he knew it. On one point only did he hold me at arm's-length, and that was when I asked him how they sent news through

us.

On my safaris I have repeatedly noticed that my arrival in a village synchronised exactly with the beating of the "long distance" drums. They have been beaten with a distinct note, too, but whenever I have suggested that they are telegraphing my arrival to another village, the natives have laughed delightedly. I always noticed, however, that the drummer stood by his drum until faintly from the distance came an answering tattoo. My partner R. once covered three hundred and five miles in eleven days, and the friend in Fort Johnson with whom he was to stay heard from the natives three days before he arrived that he was on the way down. The drums were the only possible solution to this, though the informer strenuously denied it, and persisted that a special runner had come through. As this special runner would have had to cover rather over thirty-eight miles per day

lie was too obvious! I had hoped that the Sultan would tell me how the drums were used, as in the darkness of his hut he did tell me so many of the more or less secret rites pertaining to initiation and marriage-but on this one point he was adamant.

Going to say good-bye to the old gentleman before I left for England, I found him much more feeble than when I saw him first, and I think he had not much farther to go. I had hoped to see him outside in the sunlight, but it was in the darkness of the hut that I was to hear his voice for the last time.

"Kwaheli, Bwana wangu!" 1 he faltered, as I shook his thin hand, using the friendly form of address to which we had latterly become accustomed when alone. Then, raising himself, he called his headman, who was waiting outside.

THE politician is ever a careless empiric. He plays with empires as a child plays with a box of bricks. And no politician of our time has shown a more disastrous carelessness than did the late Mr E. S. Montagu, when, some six years ago, he determined that he would arouse India from what he called her pathetic contentment. The problem which he attempted to solve was indeed insoluble. In pure recklessness he and his advisers attempted to thrust upon India the political institutions which were in the act of breaking down even among the English, who had been trained for centuries to manage them. Because the ballot-box was the fetish of our Liberal politicians, it should be introduced, they thought, into a country of diverse races and religions, which was united only in illiteracy and in a complete, if wise, ignorance of the thing called democracy. The number of men who could be admitted to share the vast privilege of the vote belonged to a tiny outer fringe of halfeducated Indians, who had learned in the process of education how to become revolutionaries. A little thought might have convinced Mr Montagu that his childish experi

ment could have but one end. There is nothing inherently noble and virtuous about democracy. It is not a system that many men should desire; it is a system which the illiterate millions of India, used for centuries to an honourable obedience, could not attempt to understand. All that Mr Montagu achieved by his attempt to make India a partner in the British Empire was to stir up a band of agitators, sworn to separate themselves and their country from all share in the glittering partnership which was offered them.

No sooner was the new constitution established, diarchy and all, than the rebels took the matter in hand, and the rebels have been busy ever since. The chief of them was Mr Gandhi, whom Mr Montagu called his friend, and whose panegyric he pronounced.

services which he has rendered both in India and outside of it; and yet a man whom his friends and I will count myself as one of them-would wish would exercise his great powers with a greater sense of responsibility, and would realise in time that there are forces beyond his control and outside his influence, who use the opportunities afforded by his name and reputation." Of this pronouncement no more need be said than that the modest reproach, hinted by Mr Montagu, might have been with greater justice retorted upon himself. He, too, had proved himself devoid of a a sense of responsibility in thrusting upon India a constitution in which none but the agitators took an interest, and that a baleful interest. He, too, failed to realise the forces which were beyond his control and outside his influence, or to understand that in calling Gandhi his friend he was giving direct encouragement to the worst kind of violence. "People who committed arson and assaulted women," confessed Mrs Besant, "did so with the name of Mr Gandhi upon their lips."

Mr Montagu and Mr Gandhi are no more. The evil they did lives after them. The result of Mr Montagu's action was inevitable and foreseen. The gift, generously bestowed upon the Indians, was rejected with scorn and violence. From the moment that the boon of partnership in an empire was

offered them, they broke out into open rebellion. What the British Government delighted to call beneficence, they construed as weakness. An elementary study of history might have convinced our rulers that the Indians, or the mere handful of them who even heard of this pretended democracy, would smile upon it the smile of contempt. They did what was expected of them. "Conquer the English monkeys," they shouted from their hoardings with bravery! Leave off dealings with the Englishmen. Close offices and workshops. Fight on. This is the command of Mahatma Gandhi. Get ready soon for the war, and God will grant victory to India very soon. Fight with enthusiasm, and enlist yourselves in the Gandhi army." No doubt the members of the Government which passed the Bill would have called that "legitimate political agitation.' It was the signal of a war which is only just beginning.

The Montagu-Chelmsford Act has been in force for six years, and has been a complete failure. Little, indeed, that was clear or positive had Lord Birkenhead to say about it when he discoursed in the House of Lords about the Government of India. He threw no light upon a vexed problem, and was eager rather to attenuate than to define the facts. Like other politicians, he gave with one hand and took away with the other. He left the impression on those who read his speech that

his own mind was not made up, and that, like the opportunist that he is, he would be glad to get out of the blind alley on any terms. He is ready to listen to anybody who has anything to say. "If our critics in India," he proclaimed, are of opinion that their greater knowledge of Indian conditions qualifies them to succeed where they tell us we have failed, let them produce a constitution which carries behind it a fair measure of general agreement among the great peoples of India." This is the language of despair. They who are in office and in power may not thus lightly shift their responsibility. And to pretend for a moment that "the great peoples" of India can confer together and invent a plan is to overlook the infinite variety of creeds and races which renders a homogeneous system of government in India impossible. As to this difficulty, Lord Birkenhead himself is in no doubt. "To talk of India as an entity," he says with perfect truth, "is as absurd as to talk of Europe as an entity. Yet the very nationalist spirit which has created most of our difficulties in the last few years is bound up in the aspirations and claims of a nationalist India. There never has been such a nation." On the same fallacy was based Mr Montagu's monstrous policy, and Lord Birkenhead, in inviting "the great peoples" to agree, is belying his own settled opinion.

If, indeed, he has any settled opinion at all. His speech is a tissue of contradictions. In one passage he could not say that the Montagu-Chelmsford reform had failed. "It had never been given a chance." Then, obviously, it has failed completely. "Mr Montagu looked, and surely he was entitled to do so, to those who cherished the most sanguine expectations of Indian political capacity to co-operate in his great task." If Mr Montagu looked to these sanguine persons, he should have known beforehand that his reform was based not upon the sand of doubt but upon the hard rock of certain failure. And most surely he was not entitled to do anything of the sort, which Lord Birkenhead claims for him. A politician must be judged by results, not by the vague hopes of the idealists. No man has a right to disturb "the pathetic contentment" of a of a vast group of nations if he has not measured correctly the amount of support which he is to receive. It is, we all know, and none better than Lord Birkenhead, the common practice of politicians to play blind hookey with the great interests entrusted to them. But that practice is never justified, and the politicians must be condemned, without appeal, if their expectations are not realised.

"The critics of Indian capacity for self-government," complains Lord Birkenhead, "would have been helpless had wiser counsels prevailed in India.”