ne; he may have to deal with a riot; he
may take a decision on which the lives of thousands of people may
depend. Well, I think that early call to responsibility, to a display
of energy, to the exercise of individual decision and judgment is what
makes the Indian Civil Service a grand career. And that is what
has produced an extraordinary proportion of remarkable men in that
service.

There is another elevating thought, that I should suppose is present
to all of you. To those who are already in important posts and those
who are by-and-by going to take them up. The good name of England is
in your keeping. Your conduct and the conduct of your colleagues in
other branches of the Indian Service decides what the peoples of India
are to think of British government and of those who represent it. Of
course you cannot expect the simple villager to care anything or to
know anything about the abstraction called the _raj_. What he knows is
the particular officer who stands in front of him, and with whom he
has dealings. If the officer is harsh or overbearing or incompetent,
the Government gets the discredit of it; the villager assumes that
Government is also harsh, overbearing, and incompetent. There is this
peculiarity which strikes me about the Indian Civil servant. I am not
sure that all of you will at once welcome it, but it goes to the root
of the matter. He is always more or less on duty. It is not merely
when he is doing his office work; he is always on duty. The great men
of the service have always recognised this obligation, that official
relations are not to be the beginning and the end of the duties of an
Indian administrator. It has been my pleasure and privilege during the
three or four years I have been at the India Office, to see a stream
of important Indian officials. I gather from them that one of the
worst drawbacks of the modern speeding up of the huge wheels of the
machine of Indian government is, that the Indian Civil servant has
less time and less opportunity than he used to have of bringing
himself into close contact with those with whose interests he is
concerned. One of these important officials told me the other day this
story. A retired veteran, an Indian soldier, had come to him and
said, "This is an odd state of things. The other day So-and-so, a
commissioner or what not, was coming down to my village or district.
We did the best we could to get a good camping-ground for him. We were
all eagerly on the