greatest and most indefatigable administrator that
Britain sent out to India during that period. It would be unfair to
suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow
prejudice or sordid jealousy. Indians who resented their exclusion from
the share in the administration of their country for which they believed
their education to have qualified them, and which they claimed as the
fulfilment of repeated promises and of the declared purpose of British
rule, may not have been free from a human appetite for loaves and
fishes. British officials who were loath to recognise those claims, or
to concede to Indians any substantial proportion of their privileged
posts and emoluments, may have been not always unselfishly indifferent
to the material interests and prospects of the services to which they
belonged, if not to their own personal interests and prospects. But
apart from any such considerations, the attitude of both parties was
governed by the firm belief, not in itself discreditable to either, that
it possessed the better knowledge of the needs and interests and wishes
of the vast populations of India, still too ignorant and inarticulate to
give expression of their own to them. The lamentable effects of the
estrangement between British administrators and the very class of
Indians whose co-operation it had been one of the main objects of
British policy ever since the Act of 1833 to promote, never stood
clearly revealed till the sudden wave of unrest that followed the
Partition of Bengal, and it is upon future co-operation between them
that the success of the great constitutional experiment now being made
must ultimately depend. It is therefore well to try to understand the
conflicting sentiments and opinions which drove asunder the moderate but
progressive Western-educated Indian and the earnest but conservative
British administrator, and ended by bringing them almost into open
conflict. The Western-educated Indian claimed recognition at our hands
first and foremost because he was the product of the educational system
we ourselves imposed upon India. His limitations, intellectual and
moral, were largely due to the defects of that system, just as his
political immaturity was largely due to our failure to provide him with
opportunities of acquiring experience in administrative work and public
life. Where careers had been opened up to him in the liberal professions
he had often achieved great distinction--at t