But no one who has spent any time in India can fail to be struck with the many-sided activities revealed in all the non-political conventions and conferences and congresses held annually all over the country.

Within the last 12 months there have been philanthropic and religious conferences like the All India Temperance Conference, the Christian Endeavour Convention, the Theosophical Convention, social conferences like the Indian National Social Conference, the Moslem Educational Congress, and the Sikh Educational Conference, economic conferences like the Industrial Conference held at Lahore in connexion with the Punjab Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition, not to speak of many others, such as the Rajput Conference, the Hindu Punjab Conference, the Kshatrya Conference, the Parsee Conference, &c., which dealt with the narrower interests of particular castes or communities, but nevertheless gathered together representatives of those interests from all parts of India, or any rate from a whole province.

Some of these meetings may be made to subserve political purposes.

Others, like the Parsee Conference, betray reactionary tendencies in the most unexpected places, for the Parsee community, which has thriven more than any other on Western education and has prided itself upon being the most progressive and enlightened of all Indian communities, is the last one in which one would have looked for the triumph, however temporary, of a strangely benighted orthodoxy.
But the majority of these gatherings represent an honest and earnest attempt to apply, as far as possible, the teachings of Western experience to the solution of Indian problems, and to subject Indian customs and beliefs to the test of modern criticism.

They apply themselves, moreover, chiefly to questions in which no alien Government like that of India can take the initiative without serious risk of being altogether ahead of native opinion and arousing dangerous antagonism.