hwart our efforts to gain the goodwill and confidence
of the Native population.

Yet another danger to the permanence of our rule in India lies in the
endeavours of well-intentioned faddists to regulate the customs and
institutions of eastern races in accordance with their own ideas.
The United Kingdom is a highly civilized country, and our habits and
convictions have been gradually developed under the influences of our
religion and our national surroundings. Fortunately for themselves,
the people of Great Britain possess qualities which have made them
masters of a vast and still expanding Empire. But these qualities have
their defects as well as their merits, and one of the defects is a
certain insularity of thought, or narrow-mindedness--a slowness to
recognize that institutions which are perfectly suitable and right for
us may be quite unsuited, if not injurious, to other races, and that
what may not be right for us to do is not necessarily wrong for people
of a different belief, and with absolutely different traditions and
customs.

Gradually the form of Government in the United Kingdom has become
representative and democratic, and it is therefore assumed by some
people, who have little, if any, experience of the east, that
the Government of India should be guided by the utterances of
self-appointed agitators who pose as the mouth-pieces of an oppressed
population. Some of these men are almost as much aliens[3] as
ourselves, while others are representatives of a class which, though
intellectually advanced, has no influence amongst the races in whom
lies the real strength of India. Municipal self-government has been
found to answer well in the United Kingdom, and it is held, therefore,
that a similar system must be equally successful in India. We in
England consume animal food and alcoholic liquors, but have no liking
for opium; an effort has accordingly been made to deprive our Asiatic
fellow-subjects, who, as a rule, are vegetarians, and either total
abstainers or singularly abstemious in the matter of drink, of a small
and inexpensive stimulant, which they find necessary to their health
and comfort. British institutions and ideas are the embodiment of
what long experience has proved to us to be best for ourselves; but
suddenly to establish these institutions and enforce these ideas on
a community which is not prepared for them, does not want them, and
cannot understand them, must only lead to suspicion and disco