of all our English
offices is the War Office. For this reason, and also because a military
life necessarily and rightly engenders a habit of implicit obedience to
orders, soldiers are generally less disposed than civilians to assume
personal responsibility and to act on their own initiative.
Nevertheless, whether in military or civil life, it may be said that the
spirit of decentralisation pervades the whole British administrative
system, and that it has given birth to a class of officials who have
both the desire and the capacity to govern, who constitute what Bacon
called[14] the _Participes curarum_, namely, "those upon whom Princes
doe discharge the greatest weight of their affaires," and who are
instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of
Imperialism.

The method of exercising the central control under the British system
calls for some further remarks. It varies greatly in different
localities.

Under the Indian system a council of experts is attached to the
Secretary of State in England. A good authority on this subject says[15]
that there can be no question of the advantage of this system.

No man, however experienced and laborious, could properly direct
and control the various interests of so vast an Empire, unless he
were aided by men with knowledge of different parts of the country,
and possessing an intimate acquaintance with the different and
complicated subjects involved in the government and welfare of so
many incongruous races.

On the assumption that India is to be governed from London, there can be
no doubt of the validity of this argument. But, as has been frequently
pointed out,[16] this system tends inevitably towards
over-centralisation, and if the British Government is to continue to
exercise a sort of [Greek: pantokratoria] to use an expressive Greek
phrase, over a number of outlying dependencies of very various types,
over-centralisation is a danger which should be carefully shunned. It is
wiser to obtain local knowledge from those on the spot, rather than from
those whose local experience must necessarily diminish in value in
direct proportion to the length of the period during which they have
been absent from the special locality, and who, moreover, are under a
strong temptation, after they leave the dependency, to exercise a
detailed control over their successors. It is greatly to be doubted,
therefore, whether, should the occasion arise