'him at it, they are selfish usurpers, on a par in criminality with
any of those whose ambition and rapacity have sported from age to
age with the destiny of masses of mankind.

  As it is already a common, and is rapidly tending to become the
universal, condition of the more backward populations, to be either
held in direct subjection by the more advanced, or to be under their
complete political ascendancy; there are in this age of the world
few more important problems than how to organise this rule, so as to
make it a good instead of an evil to the subject people; providing
them with the best attainable present government, and with the
conditions most favourable to future permanent improvement. But the
mode of fitting the government for this purpose is by no means so well
understood as the conditions of good government in a people capable of
governing themselves. We may even say that it is not understood at
all.

  The thing appears perfectly easy to superficial observers. If
India (for example) is not fit to govern itself, all that seems to
them required is that there should be a minister to govern it: and
that this minister, like all other British ministers, should be
responsible to the British Parliament. Unfortunately this, though
the simplest mode of attempting to govern a dependency, is about the
worst; and betrays in its advocates a total want of comprehension of
the conditions of good government. To govern a country under
responsibility to the people of that country, and to govern one
country under responsibility to the people of another, are two very
different things. What makes the excellence of the first is that
freedom is preferable to despotism: but the last is despotism. The
only choice the case admits is a choice of despotisms: and it is not
certain that the despotism of twenty millions is necessarily better
than that of a few, or of one. But it is quite certain that the
despotism of those who neither hear, nor see, nor know anything
about their subjects, has many chances of being worse than that of
those who do. It is not usually thought that the immediate agents of
authority govern better because they govern in the name of an absent
master, and of one who has a thousand more pressing interests to
attend to. The master may hold them to a strict responsibility,
enforced by heavy penalties; but it is very questionable if those
penalties will often fall in the right place.

  It is always under great difficulties, and very imperfectly, that
a country can be governed by foreigners; even when there is no extreme
disparity, in habits and ideas, between the rulers and the ruled.
Foreigners do not feel with the people. They cannot judge, by the
light in which a thing appears to their own minds, or the manner in
which it affects their feelings, how it will affect the feelings or
appear to the minds of the subject population. What a native of the
country, of average practical ability, knows as it were by instinct,
they have to learn slowly, and after all imperfectly, by study and
experience. The laws, the customs, the social relations, for which
they have to legislate, instead of being familiar to them from
childhood, are all strange to them. For most of their detailed
knowledge they must depend on the information of natives; and it is
difficult for them to know whom to trust. They are feared,
suspected, probably disliked by the population; seldom sought by
them except for interested purposes; and they are prone to think
that the servilely submissive are the trustworthy. Their danger is
of despising the natives; that of the natives is of disbelieving
that anything the strangers do can be intended for their good. These
are but a part of the difficulties that any rulers have to struggle
with who honestly attempt to govern well a country in which they are
foreigners. To overcome these difficulties in any degree will always
be a work of much labour, requiring a very superior degree of capacity
in the chief administrators, and a high average among the
subordinates: and the best organisation of such a government is that
which will best ensure the labour, develop the capacity, and place the
highest specimens of it in the situations of greatest trust.
Responsibility to an authority which bas gone through none of the
labour, acquired none of the capacity, and for the most part is not
even aware that either, in any peculiar degree, is required, cannot be
regarded as a very effectual expedient for accomplishing these ends.

  The government of a people by itself has a meaning and a reality;
but such a thing as government of one people by another does not and
cannot exist. One people may keep another as a warren or preserve
for its own use, a place to make money in, a human cattle farm to be
worked for the profit of its own inhabitants. But if the good of the
governed is the proper business of a government, it is utterly
impossible that a people should directly attend to it. The utmost they
can do is to give some of their best men a commission to look after
it; to whom the opinion of their own country can neither be much of
a guide in the performance of their duty, nor a competent judge of the
mode in which it has been performed. Let any one consider how the
English themselves would be governed if they knew and cared no more
about their own affairs than they know and care about the affairs of
the Hindoos. Even this comparison gives no adequate idea of the
state of the case: for a people thus indifferent to politics
altogether would probably be simply acquiescent and let the government
alone: whereas in the case of India, a politically active people
like the English, amidst habitual acquiescence, are every now and then
interfering, and almost always in the wrong place. The real causes
which determine the prosperity or wretchedness, the improvement or
deterioration, of the Hindoos are too far off to be within their
ken. They have not the knowledge necessary for suspecting the
existence of those causes, much less for judging of their operation.
The most essential interests of the country may be well administered
without obtaining any of their approbation, or mismanaged to almost
any excess without attracting their notice.