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.

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    almost everything that we look upon as progress, and they live, for the most part, in blind ignorance of the aims and ideas of their rulers. Among all the dangers to which our Indian dominion ltl+a is exposed, the ignorance of the people is the greatest. The task of removing or at least of diminishing this ignorance is the highest of our duties, but its accom- plishment can only come in a distant future, for we have 7 to deal not with a single country and a single people, but with a multitude of countries that we choose to include under the general name of India, and with a multitude of different peoples, constituting, perhaps, in numbers, one-fifth part of the population of the world. So long as this ignorance continues, no one can say what belief or suspicion or unreasoning panic may not spread like wildfire through the country, or what may be its con- sequences. No one now doubts that the mutiny of the Bengal army, whatever it may subsequently have become, had its real origin in a panic of this kind, in the general and honest belief of the soldiers that our Government in- tended to destroy their caste, which involved everything that was most valuable to them in this world and in the next. It is hardly less true now than it was in 1857 that we are liable at all times to such dangers as this. Nothing is too foolish or too extravagant for general acceptance. This ought never to be forgotten. Ominous signs from time to time appear which ought to remind us how easily in India a terrible conflagration may be lighted up. There is no limit to the liability of such a population to be influenced by the assurances or sugges- tions of religious fanatics and political agitators, or to be disturbed by interference with its prejudices and beliefs. It would thus be an error to suppose that the British Government is administered in a manner that altogether