India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey.

  • John Strachey
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    525/552 page 495
    of the more vigorous races of India, although their time has not come for competitive examinations. Few would go farther than I would go in opening the public service in India to Natives “ of proved merit and ability,” but it is well to avoid “ political hypocrisy.” “ Is there,” Lord Salisbury asked, “ any man who will have the hardihood to tell me that it is within the range of possibility that a man in India should be appointed Lieutenant-Governor of a province, or Chief Commis- sioner, or Commander-in-Chief of the Army, or Viceroy, without any regard whatever to his race ? ” Some will answer even this question in the affirmative. There will always be people ready to accept with composure any political folly, provided that it involves some triumph of sentiment over sense, and some appearance of national humiliation^ When we say that we cannot always ignore differences of race, this is only another way of saying that the English in India are a handful of foreigners responsible for the government of nearly 300 millions of people. I have said that we are foreigners in India in a different sense from that in which we are foreigners in Paris, and that the people of one Indian province are often almost as much foreigners to the people of another province as we are ourselves ; still, we are foreigners, and although I suppose that no foreign government was ever accepted with less repugnance than that with which the British Government is accepted in India, the fact remains that there never was a country, and never will be, in which the government ~of foreigners is really popular. It would be the beginning of the end of our empire if we were to forget this elementary fact, and were to entrust the greater executive powers to the hands of Natives, on the assumption that they will
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