THE domestic moralist is apt to undervalue lost opportunities. They are not mere occasions of regret. We have known many men and women who got great pleasure out of the recollection of them. The successes they might have had had they not refused such-and-such a chance, the persons they might have married, the bargains they might have driven, the fine figures they might have cut, are to them favorite subjects of cogitation. We are not speaking of those who nurse a grievance against fate. We mean cheerful people who have made or are making a fairly satisfactory career for themselves, but who like to think that they might have done still better. People often say to some younger friend with whom they are intimate that they in their youth were offered such-and-such a post which so-and-so afterwards took and how this chance led him to fortune. Obviously the same chance might not have led a less capable man there; but that they do not think of. Or perhaps 、 we might more truly say that, though they put the thought aside, they like to regard the chance as everything. They watch the man who stands, as they feel, in their shoes without envy but with interest, and enter, as they think, into the pleasant experiences peculiar to his situation. There can be no doubt that many women reflect with real satisfaction upon the brilliant careers of men whom they might have married. A few, of course, lament the refusal, and consequent loss of worldly prestige, with considerable bitterness; but the majority, while satisfied with their own less successful partner or sufficiently contented with

no partner at all, keep and cherish the lost opportunity among their precious memories. In some way they seem to share a success which they forwent, and take credit for an abnegation which, indeed, was no abnegation at all but simple matter of choice and inclination. In much the same way men dwell upon their mistakes in speculation. 'Had I but had courage to buy then,' they say, 'had I but acted upon my own intuition, how different would my financial position have been at the present moment!' For one man who says this in bitterness of spirit ten seem to take a certain pleasure in the reflection.

Among smaller lost opportunities we may count opportunities of cheap purchase. 'I could have got that house, or those chairs, or that picture for a song twenty years ago,' we may hear an old man declare, and perhaps we get tired of the recitation of the missed chances, which seem to give the teller more pleasure each time that they are told. Some of us who feel our own insignificance are considerably consoled by the thought of missed opportunities of shining. It is a curious fact about these lost chances that those who hear about them never quite believe in them. Do we ever seriously think that our friend's career, or character, or even position, would have been quite different had he taken at the flood what he imagines to have been the tide in his affairs? We listen to what he tells us on the subject, we may even be greatly interested because of the light which his own belief in the matter throws upon his personality or his

ambition, but that is all. Proposals of marriage, for instance, are matters about which very great skepticism prevails. 'I wonder if he really did want to marry her?' is the comment which nine times out of ten the younger members of a family make upon any tradition of courtship which has for its subject the refusal by some woman of the family of any embryo celebrity or person of exalted rank. All these stories of lost opportunities tend to grow in the telling because their authors, perhaps unconsciously, gloat over them so much.

We suppose the explanation of these rather odd phenomena is to be found in the fact that we all resent our limitations, of whatever sort they may be. The long, straight, often very dull road of ordinary life stretches in front of us, and we like to look back and point out the turnings which we might have taken, and which would or might have led into different scenery. We do not really regret that we did not explore them. We are glad that something unexplored still comes within our field of vision. In our hearts we suspect that the lane whose opening we love to look at would only have led back into the dull, straight road. In our time we have taken risks and explored turnings, and they all led back to the same highway; but the unexplored ones preserve their romantic possibilities.

The present writer knew at one time a poor woman who, being exceedingly intelligent and having no edu

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cation, greatly exaggerated, at any rate in talk, the beneficial effect of education upon the mind. ‘Had I but been educated,' she would say, 'I should have understood'- some of the subtleties of theology or some insoluble philosophic difficulty like the reconcilement of free will and predestination. Just as short-sighted people will ask a person of average sight to read a clock or describe some object at an impossible distance, so she seemed to misjudge the power of those who had enjoyed the opportunities denied her. She got, however, considerable satisfaction out of the thought that her parents had refused on her behalf an offer of adoption from a rich woman who would have had her taught. She had, through no fault of her own, lost an opportunity which would have given her so she dreamed-mental delectation and freedom from the tyranny of puzzle forever. The thought was an everpresent comfort to her when the limitations of her ignorance irritated her active mind. Wisdom had been near to her, she fancied, and had lent her a certain dignity while not enlightening her. She liked to think of the glorious solutions which had so nearly been hers, as she stood among the puzzles of life. Her lost opportunity, as is so often the case, was a subject of selfcongratulation under the guise of a grievance, and perhaps in her heart she knew that it would have been of no great use to her if she had not lost it.

THE joint report in which the Secretary of State for India, and the Viceroy have laid before His Majesty's Government their views and recommendations as to the constitutional changes required to give effect to the pronouncement of August 20 last, has now been published. It constitutes in itself the justification, if any were required, of Mr. Montagu's mission to India, for certainly no more important, and, we think, no more able State Paper has been submitted in our time to the people of this country in regard to Indian affairs. The proposals which it contains for the better discharge of our great and increasing responsibilities towards a fifth of the human race will, we hope, be subjected to the close criticism which the authors of the report themselves in vite. But so broad and dispassionate a statement of the whole problem cannot at any rate fail to bring home to us how great are the responsibilities we have to discharge and how serious is the problem for which we have to find the right solution. The first half of the report is devoted to furnishing the material' on which an informed judgment can be based in regard to the proposals' set forth in the second half. It does not disguise either the magnitude or the difficulties of the task the profound ignorance of the enormous majority of the population whose horizon is confined to the village fields whence they draw their penurious livelihood; the deep lines of racial, religious, and social cleavage; the traditions of inherited hostility, still dangerously explosive, between the different communities, especially between Hindus

and Moslems; the political inertia of all but the numerically very small classes that have been drawn within the orbit of Western education, and, on the other hand, the potency, for good and, unfortunately, also for evil, of the ferment which Western education has introduced.

All these vital factors in the problem are set forth on the whole very fairly. Nor is any attempt made to cast the blame for the more disquieting features of the situation upon the system of government or upon its agents, whose efficiency and integrity and high standards of duty receive full and well-deserved recognition. The whole structure and machinery of government and administration are reviewed with great insight and full appreciation of the admirable results achieved. It is not in any definite breakdown of the system, nor in the vain hope of stirring the masses out of their quiescent conversatism, nor in the mere expediency of disarming by reasonable concessions the growing unrest among an educated minority, that the authors of the report seek the justification of the farreaching constitutional changes embodied in their proposals. 'Our reason,' they say frankly, 'is the faith that is in us.' They claim to have been able to show how 'step by step British policy in India has been steadily directed to a point at which the question of a self-governing India was bound to arise; how impulses, at first faint, have been encouraged by education and opportunity; how the growth quickened nine years ago'when the Morley-Minto reforms were enacted — ‘and was immeasurably

British policy

accelerated by the war.' It is in this spirit, we believe, that the British people will be most inclined to study the report and to assent to its general conclusions. The loyalty with which India as a whole has rallied to the British cause during the war, and our own growing consciousness of the fundamental principles at stake in this life and death struggle, have combined to make us visualize as never before the possibility of a closer association between India and the rest of the Empire as fellow members of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The presence for the second time of distinguished Indians as the representatives of India at the Imperial War Conference in London is already an earnest and a symbol of that closer partnership which can only be reached in its fullest sense when India, like the other members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, shall have qualified for selfgovernment.

The report clearly shows and states emphatically that, while self-government must henceforth be the goal of British policy in India, it can only be reached by gradual and experimental stages. The transition from a form of government which, however paternal, has been essentially autocratic to a popular form based on representative institutions, must always be difficult and, unless cautiously initiated, dangerous, especially in such a country as India, to whose history and traditions and social conditions democracy is in most respects thoroughly foreign. The most important changes contemplated in the report as the first steps on the road towards the goal will affect primarily the sphere of provincial government, to be enlarged at last by practical measures of decentralization, long overdue. Within that sphere the

principle of specific devolution is to be applied by the transfer of certain limited powers of government and administration to Indian 'Ministers,' associated with, but distinct from, the Governor-in-Council, and responsible for the exercise of those powers to the Legislative Council, in which there is to be an Indian majority elected on the broadest franchise possible under existing conditions. The machinery by which these changes are to be effected is ingenious and, perhaps unavoidably, very complicated, and there are many points wisely reserved for further inquiries on the spot, such as the nature of the franchise and the extent of the transferred powers in the different provinces. If and as the experiment is adjudged to have succeeded, the field can be periodically enlarged on similar lines, until it finally includes the whole sphere of provincial government and administration, and can then ultimately be extended to the actual government of India, whose supreme authority and responsibility to the Secretary of State and the British Parliament the report professes to maintain meanwhile in all essentials intact. There are many other far-reaching recommendations, such as the substitution for the Viceroy's Legislative Council of two Chambers, one a Council of State constituted on conservative lines, and the other an Indian Legislative Assembly with a large elected majority; the creation of a Council of Princes, which will draw the native states and British-administered India closer together; the revival of periodic Parliamentary inquiries into the state of India, and the transfer of the India Office charges to the British Estimates. Altogether the report offers a bold scheme of constructive statesmanship which requires very close study, for only very close study can

show how far the principles laid down are effectively carried out in practice. Its ultimate success or failure will depend on the Indians themselves. It gives them real work to do, and it makes them accountable for how they do it. Great will be the responsibility of those whom the report calls 'the politically-minded classes.' If, reject

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ing once and for all the dangerous counsels of impatient visionaries and bitter fanatics, they respond whole-heartedly to this generous appeal, the trust placed in them will be justified, and India will be carried a long stage forward along the road on which we are pledged to set her feet.

GERMANY'S ECONOMIC FUTURE Military force is terrible, but economic force is strong also.-Mr. BONAR LAW.

A CONSIDERABLE and significant change has apparently recently come over the German attitude with regard to the war. It will be remembered that from its outset until a comparatively short time ago reliance was almost wholly placed, alike by statesmen and by responsible newspapers, on the power to compel the enemies of the Fatherland to assent to a peace consonant with German wishes. In the early days of the conflict the capture of their colonies was regarded with stoicism, if not with contempt, on the ground that the issues of the war would be decided on the battlefields of Europe. The successes against Russia in 1915, and the military collapse of the latter last year were hailed as clear proofs that this policy would be successful, especially when the unlimited submarine campaign was adopted, with Government promises of complete and early success. Even so lately as last spring, the Chancellor boasted that the military situation. was never better, and that only a determined effort was needed to pro

duce an early enemy collapse. During the past few months, however, there has been a marked change. For one thing, the German people seem to be growing a little tired of boastful promises unfulfilled. For another, the economic difficulties are acute, and show no prospect of improvement, while for a third it has been gradually realized what an enormous leeway will have to be made up after the war. As hopes of early peace recede, minds are turned to the probable future, especially from the economic point of view, and the prospects seem far from alluring. The real significance of Herr von Kühlmann's speech lay in the indications which it afforded of German middle-class opinion; and other evidences of what that is or is rapidly becoming are to be found in the numerous articles and dissertations recently published by leading newspapers with regard to the economic future. These may well be considered with care in this country, especially in connection with Mr. Bonar Law's speech, emphasizing the preponderance of economic force possessed by the Allies. Lord Emmott's recent utterance in the House of