“Damn the sacred cause of higher culture!” replied Ancram, with an unruffled countenance. “What has it done out here? Filled every sweeper’s son of them with an ambition to sit on an office stool and be a gentleman!—created by thousands a starveling class that find nothing to do but swell mass-meetings on the Maidan and talk sedition that gets telegraphed from Peshawur to Cape Comorin. I advertised for a baboo the other day, and had four hundred applications—fifteen rupees a month, poor devils! But the Dayes were a fortnight in getting a decent cook on twenty.” “Bentinck should have thought of that; it’s too late now. You can’t bestow a boon on the masses in a spirit of progressiveness and take it away sixty years later in a spirit of prudence. It’s decent enough of Church to be willing to bear the consequences of somebody else’s blunder; but blunders of that kind have got to take their place in the world’s formation and let the ages retrieve them. It’s the only way.” “Oh, I agree with you. Church is an ass: he ought not to attempt it.” “Why do you fellows let him?” Ancram looked in Doyle’s direction as he answered—looked near him, fixed his eyes, with an effect of taking a view at the subject round a corner, upon the other man’s tobacco-jar. The trick annoyed Doyle; he often wished it were the sort of thing one could speak about. “Nobody is less amenable to reason,” he said, “than the man who wants to hit his head against a stone wall, especially if he thinks the world will benefit by his inconvenience. And, to make matters worse, Church has complicated the thing with an idea of his duty toward the people at home who send out the missionaries. He doesn’t think it exactly according to modern ethics that they should take up collections in village churches to provide the salvation of the higher mathematics for the sons of fat _bunnias_ in the bazar—who could very well afford to pay for it themselves.” “He can’t help that.” Ancram finished his claret. “I believe he has some notion of advertising it. And after he has eliminated the missionary who teaches the Georgics instead of the Gospels, and devoted the educational grants to turning the gentle Hindoo into a skilled artisan, he thinks the cause of higher culture may be pretty much left to take care of itself. He believes we could bleed Linsettiah and Pattore and some of those chaps for endowments, I fancy, though he doesn’t say so.” “Better try some of the smaller natives. A maharajah won’t do much for a C. I. E. or an extra gun nowadays: it isn’t good enough. He knows that all Europe is ready to pay him the honours of royalty whenever he chooses to tie up his cooking-pots and go there. He’ll save his money and buy hand-organs with it, or panoramas, or sewing-machines. Presently, if this adoration of the Eastern potentate goes on at home, we shall have the maharajah whom we propose to honour receiving our proposition with his thumb applied to his nose and all his fingers out!”