institutions of the Indian peoples. When we remember how large a share of real government is the personal administration of detail, the enforcement of law or regulation upon the individual citizen, and that in the overwhelming majority of cases this work must always be left to native officials, it is evident that the formal virtues of British law and justice must admit much elasticity and much perversion in the actual processes of administration.
“No one can deny that this system of civil and criminal administration is vastly superior to anything which India ever possessed under former rulers. Its defects arise chiefly from causes extraneous to it. The unblemished integrity and unswerving devotion to duty of the officials, whether English or Indian, who occupy the higher posts, no one will call in question. The character of the subordinate officials is not always so entirely above suspicion, and the course of justice is too often perverted by a lamentable characteristic of the Oriental mind. ‘Great is the rectitude of the English, greater is the power of a lie’ is a proverbial saying throughout India. Perhaps the least satisfactory of the government departments is the police. A recent writer says, ‘It is difficult to imagine how a department can be more corrupt.’ This, too, may be an over-statement. But, taken on the whole, the rank and file of the Indian police are probably not of higher integrity and character than those of New York.” [9]
Now one sentence of this statement deserves special attention. “Its defects arise chiefly from causes extraneous to it.” This is surely incorrect. It is an essential part of our system that the details of administration shall be in native hands: no one can contemplate any considerable displacement of lower native officials by English; the latter could not do the work and would not if they could, nor could the finances, always precarious, possibly admit of so huge an increase of expenditure as would be involved by making the government of India really British in its working. The tendency, in fact, is all the other way, and makes for the