out the peninsula the native prefers, in civil and still more in
criminal cases, to be tried by an English judge. It would be
impossible, I think, to render a more flattering testimony to British
rule.' But these are facts which had no signification for Lord Ripon. He
pursued a policy which, designedly or undesignedly, was calculated to
bring our rule to an end. 'Lord Ripon's resolution,' some one told
Baron Huebner, 'means nothing or means this: The Government foresees that
the time will come when we must leave India to herself.' Then there was
the Ilbert Bill, placing Europeans in the country districts under the
jurisdiction of native judges. How could the natives of all classes fail
to look upon this as another evidence that the reins of power were
dropping from our nerveless hands? The point of the whole matter was
thus put by one of the civilians to Baron Huebner:--'The principle, that
the jurisdiction over European subjects of the Crown must be reserved
for judges and magistrates who are also European subjects, has always
been maintained. And it has always been recognized that in this
principle lies the only possible effectual guarantee to Europeans living
in country districts against the perjury and false witness so common
among the rural populations.' The Ilbert Bill proposed to take away
these safeguards from the European, and would have left him at the mercy
of native judges and native witnesses, whose only idea of justice is to
make a few rupees out of its administration.

The school of Radicals represented only too numerously in the present
Parliament--unreasoning, ignorant of India, impulsive, narrow and
insular--is also represented among the more recent importations of
'competition wallahs.' Baron Huebner met with many of them. 'In their
opinion,' he says, 'the ideal of a sound English policy is the
dismemberment of the British Empire, and above all the abandonment of
India. To save England, it is necessary first to destroy her.' To the
shrewd and experienced Austrian diplomatist, these ideas seem to be
absolutely ruinous, but the oddity of it is that thousands of persons in
England cling to them with a sort of idolatry, as if within them was
compressed the sum and substance of human wisdom. The Radical party
to-day lives upon these theories of dismemberment, although it is
careful to keep its ultimate aim as much as possible in the background.
In India, its adherents are doing an immense amount of harm. Ba