had and were likely to have such connections.

  This guarantee for impartiality would be much impaired if the
civil servants of Government, even though sent out in boyhood as
mere candidates for employment, should come to be furnished, in any
considerable proportion, by the class of society which supplies
Viceroys and Governors. Even the initiatory competitive examination
would then be an insufficient security. It would exclude mere
ignorance and incapacity; it would compel youths of family to start in
the race with the same amount of instruction and ability as other
people; the stupidest son could not be put into the Indian service
as he can be into the church; but there would be nothing to prevent
undue preference afterwards. No longer all equally unknown and unheard
of by the arbiter of their lot, a portion of the service would be
personally, and a still greater number politically, in close
relation with him. Members of certain families, and of the higher
classes and influential connections generally, would rise more rapidly
than their competitors, and be often kept in situations for which they
were unfit, or placed in those for which others were fitter. The
same influences would be brought into play which affect promotions
in the army: and those alone, if such miracles of simplicity there be,
who believe that these are impartial, would expect impartiality in
those of India. This evil is, I fear, irremediable by any general
measures which can be taken under the present system. No such will
afford a degree of security comparable to that which once flowed
spontaneously from the so-called double government.

  What is accounted so great an advantage in the case of the English
system of government at home has been its misfortune in India- that
it grew up of itself, not from preconceived design, but by
successive expedients, and by the adaptation of machinery originally
created for a different purpose. As the country on which its
maintenance depended was not the one out of whose necessities it grew,
its practical benefits did not come home to the mind of that
country, and it would have required theoretic recommendations to
render it acceptable. Unfortunately, these were exactly what it seemed
to be destitute of: and undoubtedly the common theories of
government did not furnish it with such, framed as those theories have
been for states of circumstances differing in all the most important
features from the case concerned. But in government, as in other
departments of human agency, almost all principles which have been
durable were first suggested by observation of some particular case in
which the general laws of nature acted in some new or previously
unnoticed combination of circumstances. The institutions of Great
Britain, and those of the United States, have the distinction of
suggesting most of the theories of government which, through good
and evil fortune, are now, in the course of generations, reawakening
political life in the nations of Europe. It has been the destiny of
the government of the East India Company to suggest the true theory of
the government of a semibarbarous dependency by a civilised country,
and after having done this, to perish. It would be a singular
fortune if, at the end of two or three more generations, this
speculative result should be the only remaining fruit of our
ascendancy in India; if posterity should say of us, that having
stumbled accidentally upon better arrangements than our wisdom would
ever have devised, the first use we made of our awakened reason was to
destroy them, and allow the good which had been in course of being
realised to fall through and be lost, from ignorance of the principles
on which it depended. Di meliora: but if a fate so disgraceful to
England and to civilisation can be averted, it must be through far
wider political conceptions than merely English or European practice
can supply, and through a much more profound study of Indian
experience, and of the conditions of Indian government, than either
English politicians, or those who supply the English public with
opinions, have hitherto shown any willingness to undertake.

                                    THE END
.