etted to the regiment. No other
system was indeed possible so long as no attempt was made to give to
Indians any higher military training, or to hold out to them any
prospects of promotion beyond those within their reach by enlistment in
the ranks. These Indian officers, drawn from races that had acquired a
martial reputation and often from families with whom military service
was an hereditary tradition, were as a rule not only very fine fighters
but gallant native gentlemen, between whom and their British officers
there existed very cordial relations, human and professional, based upon
an instinctive recognition of differences of education and similarities
of tastes on both sides. But such a system, however well it worked in
practice for the production of a reliable fighting machine, was not
calculated to train the Indians to protect themselves.

That nothing was done to open up a military career to the
Western-educated classes was not at first more than a sentimental
grievance. But when the years passed and they still waited for that
larger share in the government and even in the administration of their
country to which the British Parliament had recognised their claim as
far back as the Act of 1833, their faith even in the professed purpose
of British rule began to waver. At first the leaders of the Indian
_intelligentsia_, some of whom had learned the value of British
institutions and of the freedom of British public life, not merely
through English literature but through years of actual residence in
England, preferred to hold the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy alone or chiefly
responsible for the long delay in the fulfilment of hopes which they in
fact regarded as rights. Their confidence in British statesmanship and
in the British Parliament remained unshaken for nearly thirty years
after the Mutiny, though they were perhaps not unnaturally inclined to
put their trust chiefly in the Liberal party which had been most closely
associated with the promotion of a progressive policy towards India in
the past. Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty confirmed them in the belief that
from the Conservative party they had little to hope for, and his drastic
Press Act of 1879, though not unprovoked by the virulent abuse of
Government in some of the vernacular papers and the reckless
dissemination of alarmist rumours during the worst period of the Afghan
troubles, was held to foreshadow a return all along the line to purely
despotic methods of g