best London clubs were
debarred, when they landed in Bombay, even from calling on their English
friends at the Yacht Club. Europeans could see nothing in this but the
right of every club to restrict its membership and frame its regulations
as it chooses. Indians could see nothing in it but humiliating racial
discrimination. The question has now been more or less solved by the
creation in most of the large cities in India of new clubs to which
Indians and Europeans are equally eligible, and in which those who
choose can meet on terms of complete equality and good fellowship. But
it constituted one of the grievances which contributed to the
estrangement of the Western educated classes during the latter part of
the last century.

Though social friction assisted that estrangement its chief cause lay
much deeper. After the Mutiny government under the direct authority of
the Crown lost the flexibility which the vigilant control of the British
Parliament had imparted to the old system of government under the East
India Company with every periodical renewal of its charter. The system
remained what it had inevitably been from the beginning of British rule,
a system devised by foreigners and worked by foreigners--at its best a
trusteeship committed to them for the benefit of the people of India,
but to be discharged on the sole judgment and discretion of the British
trustees. The Mutiny shook the finer faith which had contemplated the
finality some day or other of the trusteeship and introduced Western
education into India as the agency by which Indians were to be prepared
to resume when that day came the task of governing and protecting
themselves. There was a tacit assumption now, if never officially
formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that
assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in
discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was
discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more
and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger
issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational
experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of
Indians who claimed both a share in the administration and a voice in
the framing of policy. Executive and administrative functions were
vested practically in the same hands, _i.e._ in the hands of a great and
ubiquitous bureaucracy more and more jealous