affairs by committees, which in some provinces were mainly constituted by popular election, and were even permitted to elect their own non-official chairmen, being thus endowed with a freedom of action beyond that enjoyed by town councils in Germany. We are often accused of having administered India on commercial principles for the benefit of Englishmen, and it would be difficult to maintain that Indian interests have never been sacrificed to our advantage. The countervailing excise upon Indian cotton goods stands to-day a witness against us. But through the business instincts of our race there runs a vein of knight-errantry-of what may be called the sporting spirit -the promptings of which have led us into strange inconsistencies, but to which the development of our Empire owes most of the interest it possesses from the philosophic point of view. Thus, while dominating Indian commerce in the interests of our own manufactures, we have taken pains to impress upon the Indian people that our domination cannot be justified. We have carefully instructed them in our own political tenets, under which the policy of the State should be determined not by those who receive payment for governing, but by those who provide the payment; and we cannot persistently disregard claims that we should put our principles into practice, and afford greater scope for the influence of non-official opinion. This is precisely what the new reforms are to accomplish. Legislative Councils will include a much larger proportion of elected non-official members than heretofore, and the elected members will enjoy wider opportunities for criticising and influencing the policy of the State.

British interests apart, will this change be for the general good? It will undoubtedly stimulate what is called 'political activity amongst the educated classes of India. But its effects will inevitably be to the disadvantage of the poor. However distasteful the idea may be to the many kind-hearted men who in politics take the Liberal side, we are sacrificing, in this case, philanthropy to politics. For the non-official opinion which now will have power to sway our administration will in no degree be the opinion of the mass of the people. It will represent the interests of certain privileged classes-interests which would in most cases be affected injuriously by legislative attempts to redress grievances, and would be strongly opposed to them. The most important and the most interesting figure in Indian economy is the cultivator, or ryot. To his labour the country still looks for ninetenths of its production, and he and his dependents represent the most numerous, the most industrious, and the most law-abiding class of the population. The Government has at various times undertaken legislation to protect him from arbitrary ejectment and rackrenting, but it is hardly too much to say that on every occasion its interference on his behalf has been opposed by the whole weight of non-official influence in Council. And if proprietors and employers are hostile to interference by legislation on behalf of the classes they

dominate, they oppose still more obstinately executive interference of any kind. Yet it is quite certain that it is only by the active intervention of the State that the ignorant and depressed can be secured in enjoyment of their legal rights, and that, for instance, a tenancy law which offers redress only if tenants will take the initiative against their landlords is practically useless to them. Even in England, and at the present day, it is an accepted belief in the highest quarters that poor men will only secure the land allotments that the law now offers them if ginger be administered' by the Executive Government to those who are immediately responsible for the working of the Act. Backed though they have been by an effective voting power, it has cost the English labouring classes many years of struggle to cast out from our Councils the doctrine of laissez faire which in its day brought philosopher and capitalist on to a common platform. In India the working classes are more ignorant, less enterprising : they have no votes and will have none. It is not proposed, and it would be impossible, to extend the franchise below the bourgeoisie. Hitherto the Government in India has been strong enough to override non-official opposition when necessary for the general good. This will no longer be the case. Non-officials will have a majority on the Legislative Councils of Provincial Governments, and, granting that they will not form so compact a body as to be always solid against the Government, any legislation which trenches upon vested interests will encounter so strong an opposition that the Government will be compelled to subordinate justice to expediency, and will hesitate to attack abuses when its efforts will entail not merely labour in office but bitterness in Council. It is not too much to say that the character of our administration will be radically changed. Measures will be determined by a consideration not of their intrinsic utility but of the feelings they will arouse amongst the classes which are represented in Council, and administration will become a task not of practical benevolence but of political dexterity. It may be urged that, even so, India will be in no worse case than England is at present. But to those who hold that the State justifies its existence by protecting the weak against the strong this will offer no solid consolation.

There is a general impression that the work of the English official Services in India is deserving of compliment, but it is scarcely realised that their administration conforms more closely to the ideal of a Government than any other system of rule which the world has known. For the efficient and benevolent management of public affairs knowledge is required, and capacity, but, above all, fairness of judgment; and this can only be expected when those in authority are under no temptation to use their knowledge and their power for any purpose but the public good. The general capacity of English officials in India has been secured by the method of their appointment. In knowledge they may be be somewhat deficient: infused

by whatever enthusiasm, trained to whatever industry, a foreigner can never entirely enter into the life and feelings of an Oriental race. But they are under no obligation, under no temptation, to take other than an absolutely disinterested view of the questions that come before them. They have no connexions in the country: the rules of Government prevent them from acquiring any pecuniary interests in it, and the transfer from place to place, to which the members of a Service are liable, checks any favouritism which is born of local experiences. The impression that an English official will do justice according to his lights, that before him a litigant will, so to speak, secure a fair run for his money, is the very strongest asset of our rule. We belong to a world the workings of which afford no trace whatever of the existence of justice: yet a cry for justice is insistently and passionately uttered by suffering humanity. And, judging by themselves, the oppressed only expect justice of those who are under no temptation to deny it, and they discern injustice, however unwarrantably, in every act of those whose interests it would serve. This suspicion grievously weakens the position of all Native officials in India. It is commonly said that an Indian would rather take his grievance to an English official than to one of his own countrymen, and there are few Anglo-Indian magistrates whose experiences will not illustrate this statement. Some years ago I was permitted to make a new departure in promoting two Native officials to the very responsible post of Settlement officer-of entrusting to them, that is to say, the task of reassessing land revenue. One of them was a Hindu, the other a Muhammedan. Both were officers of experience and proved integrity. Both discharged their new duties with efficiency and honesty. The Muhammedan, working in districts which are almost exclusively Hindu, escaped suspicion of favouritism, as he stood outside the ring of local interests. On the other hand, the awards of the Hindu aroused a storm of opposition which involved the Government in considerable difficulty. Every man whose payments were increased attributed his enhancement to personal dislike, or was not less annoyed by the suspicion that others had fared better than himself because of the Settlement officer's personal liking for them. Twice I have received from Muhammedans mass petitions for the substitution of English for Hindu magistrates in the charge of districts. There was nothing whatever against the ability or integrity of these gentlemen: but the interests of Hindus and Muhammedans were clashing in various ways at the time, and the latter thought it impossible that a Hindu magistrate should consider their case fairly. English officials may not in all cases have knowledge: they may not in all cases have capacity. But they are known to be disinterested, and in a country of divergent interests this qualification outweighs all others.

To our disinterestedness we owe not only our hold upon the country,

our ability to carry through great schemes of beneficent reform without exciting the bitterness of private interests affected by them: we owe to it also the extraordinary economy of our administration, without which, in so poor a country as India, progressive government would have been impossible. No one who knows India and Egypt can pretend that the government of the latter is the more effective or the farther reaching of the two. Yet, in relation to population, it is by five times the more expensive, owing in great measure to the costliness of winning over influences, private and political, which are able to obstruct the action of the State. We have covered India with a network of railways and canals, which are not only of incalculable benefit to the people but pay their way and cost nothing to the taxpayer. This would have been impossible were it not for a minute regard for economy which to landlords and contractors must appear unworthy of a great Government, and which would speedily be dissipated if their interests could control the situation. Take for instance the acquisition of land for these and other public works. The considerations which may and which may not be taken into account in calculating its value are specified by law: authority to calculate the value is given to the Revenue officials of Government; persons who consider themselves aggrieved by too low a valuation may appeal to the Civil Court, but, if the Revenue award is upheld, upon them fall the costs of the appeal: to set the law in motion nothing more is required than an order of the Executive Government, describing the land, and affirming that it is needed for a public purpose. What margins for higher dividends, or more liberal wages, would English railways not have been enjoying had their land been acquired upon such a system! Yet it is clear that so simple, so drastic a procedure would never have been adopted by a Legislature that was influenced by the opinions of landlords and capitalists, and will be difficult to maintain when these classes have the power of moulding the action of the State to suit their wishes.

Again, in the matter of tenancy legislation what an object-lesson in really popular government-government for the benefit of the people-can India not give to England! In the Provinces of Northern and Central India the conditions of land tenure may be generally described as approximating to those of Ireland. The land is owned by proprietors who are sharply divided by class distinctions from their tenants, who spend little or nothing in the improvement of their tenants' land, and who are commonly absentees, managing through agents. The tenants are small holders, cultivating for subsistence, not for profit, too independent to save money against misfortune, and yet exposed to the greatest possible misfortunes in periodical famines. The conditions are precisely those which, if left to natural action and unregulated by the State, must evolve the bitterest antagonism between landlord and tenant, ending in the degradation

But the State has not

the practical enslavement of the latter. hesitated to intervene and to use its proper functions of controlling and moderating the struggle for life. Tenancy laws have been passed securing the mass of the tenants in possession of their holdings at a fair rent. Nor has the magnitude of the problem deterred the Government from accepting a responsibility without which its efforts would have been useless-the responsibility of deciding what is a fair rent in individual cases of dispute-nay, more, in some provinces, of settling rents in detail at periodic intervals. Mistakes have no doubt been made legislation in some cases has fixed its eyes too closely on the foreground, and, while protecting existing tenants, has not safeguarded from degradation the generations that are to come after. But it is impossible to deny that the law has been, generally, very beneficent and very efficacious, and that in the simplicity of its motives, the directness of its methods, and the completeness of its efforts it offers a striking contrast to the endeavours of the English Parliament to regulate the struggle between Irish landlords and their tenants. Legislation in tenants' interests has not, of course, been undertaken without consulting landlords, and in deference to landlords' wishes the State has never gone so far as enthusiasm, or even logic, might have led it—for instance, save in very special cases tenants have not been endowed with powers of transfer. But its concessions have been made voluntarily, and not of necessity. Had the interests of landlords been strongly represented on the Legislative Councils, had there been on those Councils a strong non-official element which the landlords could have attracted to their side, the State, however much it might have sympathised with the tenant, would have shrunk from championing his interests. And, in consequence, hundreds of thousands-nay, millions-of families that now cultivate their land in decent independence would have fallen, through rack-renting and eviction, into spiritless degradation. In the Province of Bengal, where for special reasons landlords are a stronger power than elsewhere, such tenancy legislation as has been undertaken has been shorn of its effective resources, and the Bengal Tenancy Act, though a monument of elaborate drafting, has done less for the cultivating classes than similar laws in any other province of India.

If we turn from legislation to the executive action of the State we shall find even more to illustrate the effectiveness of a Government which stands above class interests. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Indian administration is the periodic valuation of the land, primarily for fiscal purposes, which is termed a 'land revenue settlement.' As is generally known, a land tax has from time immemorial been in India the main source of State revenue. Of all direct taxes it has alone held its ground against the obstinate dislike with which Orientals regard imposts that are undisguised; and this because, in