all have to grapple with another prejudice which is even
more mischievous, because it forms a kind of icy barrier between the
Hindus and their rulers, and makes anything like a feeling of true
fellowship between the two utterly impossible.

That prejudice consists in looking upon our stay in India as a kind of
_moral_ exile, and in regarding the Hindus as an inferior race,
totally different from ourselves in their moral character, and, more
particularly in what forms the very foundation of the English
character, respect for truth.

I believe there is nothing more disheartening to any high-minded young
man than the idea that he will have to spend his life among human
beings whom he can never respect or love--natives, as they are called,
not to use even more offensive names--men whom he is taught to
consider as not amenable to the recognized principles of self-respect,
uprightness, and veracity, and with whom therefore any community of
interests and action, much more any real friendship, is supposed to be
out of the question.

So often has that charge of untruthfulness been repeated, and so
generally is it now accepted, that it seems almost Quixotic to try to
fight against it.

Nor should I venture to fight this almost hopeless battle, if I were
not convinced that such a charge, like all charges brought against a
whole nation, rests on the most flimsy induction, and that it has
done, is doing, and will continue to do more mischief than anything
that even the bitterest enemy of English dominion in India could have
invented. If a young man who goes to India as a civil servant or as a
military officer, goes there fully convinced that the people whom he
is to meet with are all liars, liars by nature or by national
instinct, never restrained in their dealings by any regard for truth,
never to be trusted on their word, need we wonder at the feelings of
disgust with which he thinks of the Hindus, even before he has seen
them; the feelings of distrust with which he approaches them, and the
contemptuous way in which he treats them when brought into contact
with them for the transaction of public or private business? When such
tares have once been sown by the enemy, it will be difficult to gather
them up. It has become almost an article of faith with every Indian
civil servant that all Indians are liars; nay, I know I shall never be
forgiven for my heresy in venturing to doubt it.

Now, quite apart from India, I feel most str