Though social friction assisted that estrangement its chief cause lay much deeper. After the Mutiny government under the direct authority of the Crown lost the flexibility which the vigilant control of the British Parliament had imparted to the old system of government under the East India Company with every periodical renewal of its charter. The system remained what it had inevitably been from the beginning of British rule, a system devised by foreigners and worked by foreigners--at its best a trusteeship committed to them for the benefit of the people of India, but to be discharged on the sole judgment and discretion of the British trustees. The Mutiny shook the finer faith which had contemplated the finality some day or other of the trusteeship and introduced Western education into India as the agency by which Indians were to be prepared to resume when that day came the task of governing and protecting themselves. There was a tacit assumption now, if never officially formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of Indians who claimed both a share in the administration and a voice in the framing of policy. Executive and administrative functions were vested practically in the same hands, _i.e._ in the hands of a great and ubiquitous bureaucracy more and more jealous 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.