mall
numerically but constantly increasing in numbers and still more rapidly
in activity and influence, saw, however, in an autocratic form of
government, of which it even questioned the efficiency, an
insurmountable barrier to the aspirations which Western education had
taught it to entertain. The list of graduates from Indian Universities
lengthened every year, the number of schools and colleges in which young
Indians acquired at least the rudiments of Western knowledge grew and
multiplied in every province. Western-educated Indians flocked to the
bar; they showed themselves qualified for most of the liberal
professions; they filled every post that was open to them in the public
services. But where, they asked with growing impatience, was the
fulfilment of the hopes which they had founded on the Queen's
Proclamation of 1858? There had been perhaps no departure from the
letter of the Proclamation, but had its spirit been translated into
effective practice? Was it never to be interpreted in the same generous
sense in which a still earlier generation of British administrators had
interpreted their mission as a means to train the Indians to protect and
govern themselves?

The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old
qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign
expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British
army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in
addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West
border. The menace of Russia's persistent expansion towards India
through Central Asia and the ascendancy for which she was at the same
time striving in the Near East and the Far East, and later on the far
more real menace of German aspirations to world-dominion, lent added
importance to the maintenance of an efficient Indian army as an
essential factor in the defensive forces of the Empire. But there was no
departure from the old system under which not only were army
administration and all the higher commands reserved for British
officers, but the whole army was kept as a fighting machine entirely
dependent upon British leadership. The native officers of an Indian
regiment, mostly promoted from the ranks, could in no circumstances rise
to a position in which they might give orders to a British officer,
whilst, however senior in years and service, they were under the orders
of the youngest British subaltern gaz