tually to our rule."
Hence he was prepared to accept--perhaps rather more entirely than it
deserved to be accepted--the statement of that very astute Brahmin, Sir
Dinkur Rao, himself the minister of an important native State, that "the
natives prefer a bad native Government to our best patent institutions."
These, and similar oracular statements, have now become the commonplaces
of all who deal with questions affecting India. That there is much
truth in them cannot be gainsaid, but they are still often too much
ignored by one section of the British public, who, carried away by
home-made sentiment, forget that of all national virtues gratitude for
favours received is the most rare, while by another section they are
applied to the advocacy of a degree of autonomous rule which would be
disastrous to the interests, not only of India itself, but also to the
cause of all real civilised progress.

The point, however, on which in conversation Lyall was wont to insist
most strongly was that the West was almost incomprehensible to the East,
and, _vice versa_, that the Western could never thoroughly understand
the Oriental. In point of fact, when we talk of progress, it is
necessary to fix some standard by which progress may be measured. We
know our Western standard; we endeavour to enforce it; and we are so
convinced that it gives an accurate measure of human moral and material
advancement that we experience a shock on hearing that there are large
numbers of even highly educated human beings who hold that the standard
is altogether false. Yet that, Lyall would argue, is generally the
Oriental frame of mind. Fatalism, natural conservatism and ignorance
lead the uneducated to reject our ideas, while the highly educated often
hold that our standard of progress is too material to be a true
measure, and that consequently, far from advancing, we are standing
still or even retrograding. Lyall, personifying a Brahmin, said,
"Politics I cannot help regarding as the superficial aspect of deeper
problems; and for progress, the latest incarnation of European
materialism, I have an incurable distrust." These subtle intellectuals,
in fact, as Surendranath Banerjee, one of the leaders of the Swadeshi
movement, told Dr. Wegener,[48] hold that the English are "stupid and
ignorant," and, therefore, wholly unfit to govern India.

I remember Lyall, who, as Sir Mortimer Durand says, had a very keen
sense of humour, telling me an anecdote which is wh