he Bar, on the Bench, in
literature--and he had proved himself quite competent to fill all the
posts accessible to him in the public services. Without his assistance
in the many subordinate branches the everyday work of administration
could not have been carried on for a day. He contended that he must
intuitively be a better judge than aliens, who were, after all, birds of
passage, of the needs and interests and wishes of his own
fellow-countrymen, and a better interpreter to them of so much of
Western thought and Western civilisation as they could safely absorb
without becoming denationalised. His complaint was that his own best
efforts and best intentions were constantly thwarted by the rigid
conservatism and aloofness of the European, official and unofficial,
wrapped up in his racial and bureaucratic superiority. He admitted that
he might not yet be able to discharge with the European's efficiency the
legislative or administrative responsibilities for which he had hitherto
been denied the necessary training, but he protested against being kept
altogether out of the water until he had learnt to swim, especially
when there was so little disposition ever to teach him to swim. What he
lacked in the way of efficiency he alone, he argued, could supply in the
way of sympathy with and understanding of his own people. When it was
objected that he represented only a very small minority of Indians, and
formed, indeed, a class widely divided from the vast majority of his
fellow-countrymen, and that the democratic institutions for which he
clamoured were unsuited to the traditions and customs of his country, he
replied that in every country the impulse towards democratic
institutions had come in the first instance from small minorities and
had always been regarded at first as subversive and revolutionary. If,
again, it was objected that the moderate and reasonable views he
expressed were not the views of the more ambitious politicians who
professed to be the accredited interpreters of Western-educated India,
that there were many amongst them whose aims were more or less openly
antagonistic to all the ideals for which British rule stands, and were
directed in reality not to the establishment of democratic institutions
but to the maintenance of caste monopoly and other evils inherent to the
Hindu social system, and that in the political arena he seemed incapable
of asserting himself against these dangerous and reactionary elements,