his reply was once more that he had never received the support and
encouragement which he had a right to expect from his European mentors,
and that it was often their indifference or worse that had chiefly
helped to raise a spirit of revolt against every form of Western
influence.

The case for the British administrator can be still more easily stated.
Britain has never sent out a finer body of public servants, take them
all in all, than those who have in the course of a few generations
rescued India from anarchy, secured peace for her at home and abroad,
maintained equal justice amidst jealous and often warring communities
and creeds, established new standards of tolerance and integrity, and
raised the whole of India to a higher plane of material prosperity and
of moral and intellectual development. They spend the best part of their
lives in an exile which cuts them off from most of the amenities of
social existence at home, and often involves the more or less prolonged
sacrifice of the happiest family ties. Those especially whose work lies
chiefly in the remote rural districts, far away from the few cities in
which European conditions of life to some extent prevail, are brought
daily into the very closest contact with the people, and because of
their absolute detachment from the prejudices and passions and material
interests by which Indian society, like all other societies, is largely
swayed, they enjoy the confidence of the people often in a higher degree
than Indian officials whose detachment can never be so complete. Their
task has been to administer well and to do the best in their power for
the welfare of the population committed to their charge. The Englishman,
as a rule, sticks to his own job. The British administrator's job had
been to administer, and he had not yet been told that it was also his
job to train up a nation on democratic lines and to instil into them the
principles of civic duty as such duty is understood in Western
countries. No doubt there were British administrators in India whose
innate conservatism, coupled with the narrowness which years of routine
work and official self-confidence are apt to breed, revolted against any
transfer of power to, or any recognition of equality with, the people of
the country they had spent their lives in ruling with unquestioned but,
as they at least conceived it, paternal authority. The conditions of
bureaucratic rule inevitably tended to produce an autocratic