The purposes for which they are principally tempted to interfere and
control the proceedings of their delegates are of two kinds. One is to
force English ideas down the throats of the natives; for instance,
by measures of proselytism, or acts intentionally or unintentionally
offensive to the religious feelings of the people. This misdirection
of opinion in the ruling country is instructively exemplified (the
more so, because nothing is meant but justice and fairness, and as
much impartiality as can be expected from persons really convinced) by
the demand now so general in England for having the Bible taught, at
the option of pupils or of their parents, in the Government schools.
From the European point of view nothing can wear a fairer aspect, or
seem less open to objection on the score of religious freedom. To
Asiatic eyes it is quite another thing. No Asiatic people ever
believes that a government puts its paid officers and official
machinery into motion unless it is bent upon an object; and when
bent on an object, no Asiatic believes that any government, except a
feeble and contemptible one, pursues it by halves. If Government
schools and schoolmasters taught Christianity, whatever pledges
might be given of teaching it only to those who spontaneously sought
it, no amount of evidence would ever persuade the parents that
improper means were not used to make their children Christians, or
at all events, outcasts from Hindooism. If they could, in the end,
be convinced of the contrary, it would only be by the entire failure
of the schools, so conducted, to make any converts. If the teaching
had the smallest effect in promoting its object it would compromise
not only the utility and even existence of the government education,
but perhaps the safety of the government itself. An English Protestant
would not be easily induced, by disclaimers of proselytism, to place
his children in a Roman Catholic seminary: Irish Catholics will not
send their children to schools in which they can be made
Protestants: and we expect that Hindoos, who believe that the
privileges of Hindooism can be forfeited by a merely physical act,
will expose theirs to the danger of being made Christians!

  Such is one of the modes in which the opinion of the dominant
country tends to act more injuriously than beneficially on the conduct
of its deputed governors. In other respects, its interference is
likely to be oftenest exercised where it will be most pertinaciously
demanded, and that is on behalf of some interest of the English
settlers. English settlers have friends at home, have organs, have
access to the public; they have a common language and common ideas
with their countrymen: any complaint by an Englishman is more
sympathetically heard, even if no unjust preference is intentionally
accorded to it. Now, if there be a fact to which all experience
testifies, it is that when a country holds another in subjection,
the individuals of the ruling people who resort to the foreign country
to make their fortunes are of all others those who most need to be
held under powerful restraint. They are always one of the chief
difficulties of the government. Armed with the prestige and filled
with the scornful overbearingness of the conquering nation, they
have the feelings inspired by absolute power without its sense of
responsibility.

  Among a people like that India the utmost efforts of the public
authorities are not enough for the effectual protection of the weak
against the strong; and of all the strong, the European settlers are
the strongest. Wherever the demoralising effect of the situation is
not in a most remarkable degree corrected by the personal character of
the individual, they think the people of the country mere dirt under
their feet: it seems to them monstrous that any rights of the
natives should stand in the way of their smallest pretensions: the
simplest act of protection to the inhabitants against any act of power
on their part which they may consider useful to their commercial
objects, they denounce, and sincerely regard, as an injury. So natural
is this state of feeling in a situation like theirs that even under
the discouragement which it has hitherto met with from the ruling
authorities it is impossible that more or less of the spirit should
not perpetually break out. The Government, itself free from this
spirit, is never able sufficiently to keep it down in the young and
raw even of its own civil and military officers, over whom it has so
much more control than over the independent residents.

  As it is with the English in India, so, according to trustworthy
testimony, it is with the French in Algiers; so with the Americans
in the countries conquered from Mexico; so it seems to be with the
Europeans in China, and already even in Japan: there is no necessity
to recall how it was with the Spaniards in South America. In all these
cases, the government to which these private adventurers are subject
is better than they, and does the most it can to protect the natives
against them. Even the Spanish Government did this, sincerely and
earnestly, though ineffectually, as is known to every reader of Mr.
Helps' instructive history. Had the Spanish Government been directly
accountable to Spanish opinion we may question if it would have made
the attempt: for the Spaniards, doubtless, would have taken part
with their Christian friends and relations rather than with Pagans.
The settlers, not the natives, have the ear of the public at home;
it is they whose representations are likely to pass for truth, because
they alone have both the means and the motive to press them
perseveringly upon the inattentive and uninterested public mind. The
distrustful criticism with which Englishmen, more than any other
people, are in the habit of scanning the conduct of their country
towards foreigners, they usually reserve for the proceedings of the
public authorities. In all questions between a government and an
individual the presumption in every Englishman's mind is that the
government is in the wrong. And when the resident English bring the
batteries of English political action to bear upon any of the bulwarks
erected to protect the natives against their encroachments, the
executive, with their real but faint velleities of something better,
generally find it safer to their parliamentary interest, and at any
rate less troublesome, to give up the disputed position than to defend