of its power and of its
infallibility in proportion as the latter began to be questioned and the
former to be attacked by the class of Indians who had learned to speak
the same language and to profess the same ideals.

The constant additions made to the huge machinery of administration in
order to meet the growing needs of the country on the approved lines of
a modern state resulted in increased centralisation. New departments
were created and old ones expanded, but even when the highest posts in
them were not specifically or in practice reserved for the Indian Civil
Service, it retained the supreme control over them as the _corps
d'elite_ from which most of the members of the Viceroy's Executive
Council, _i.e._ the Government of India, were recruited. The District
Officer remained the pivot and pillar of British administration
throughout rural India, and he kept as closely as he could in touch with
the millions of humble folk committed to his care, though the
multiplication of codes and regulations and official reports and
statistics involving heavy desk work kept him increasingly tied to his
office. But the secretariats, which from the headquarters of provincial
governments as well as from the seat of supreme government directed and
controlled the whole machine, became more and more self-centred, more
and more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience. Even the men with
district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial
secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick
to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe
the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided
themselves on being the repositories of all the _arcana_ of "good
government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be
regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only
Englishmen were competent to apply and which Indians were required to
accept as final whatever their wishes or their experience might be.

Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism
between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which
gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition
of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative
efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency
reached its apogee--himself the incarnation of efficiency and
unquestionably the