tion to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and
of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in
special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.
Whilst from lack of any settled policy Indian education was drifting on
to rocks and quicksands, and the personal influence of Englishmen on the
younger generation diminished in an officialised educational service,
gradual changes in the material conditions of European life in India
tended to keep British and Indians more rather than less apart. Greater
facilities of travel between England and India, and the growth of "hill
stations" in which Europeans congregated during the hot season, made it
easier for Englishwomen to live in India, though, when the time came for
children to be sent home for their education, the choice continued to
lie between separation of husband and wife, or of mother and children.
But if the presence of a larger feminine element was calculated to
exercise a refining and restraining influence on Anglo-Indian society,
it did not promote the growth of intimate social relations between
Europeans and Indians, as Indian habits and domestic institutions, and
especially the seclusion of women, created an even greater barrier,
which only slowly and rarely yielded to the influences of Western
education, between European and Indian ladies than between the men of
the two races. Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be
haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained painfully present
to a generation who, whether Indians or British, had lived through that
tempest, and if to Indians the Mutiny recalled such scenes as "The
Blowing of Indians from British Guns" which the great Russian painter
Verestchagin depicted with the same realism as the splendid pageant of
the entry of the Prince of Wales into Delhi in 1876, it was the horrors
of Cawnpore that chiefly dwelt in the minds of Europeans. Many
Englishmen and Englishwomen owed their lives during the Mutiny to the
devotion and courage of Indians who helped them to escape, and sheltered
them sometimes for months at no slight risk to themselves. But the
spirit of treachery and cruelty revealed in the Mutiny and personified
in a Nana Sahib, who had disappeared into space but, according to
frequently recurrent rumour, was still alive somewhere, chilled the
feelings of trustfulness and goodwill of an earlier generation. Again,
whilst there was a
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