The case for the British administrator can be still more easily stated. Britain has never sent out a finer body of public servants, take them all in all, than those who have in the course of a few generations rescued India from anarchy, secured peace for her at home and abroad, maintained equal justice amidst jealous and often warring communities and creeds, established new standards of tolerance and integrity, and raised the whole of India to a higher plane of material prosperity and of moral and intellectual development. They spend the best part of their lives in an exile which cuts them off from most of the amenities of social existence at home, and often involves the more or less prolonged sacrifice of the happiest family ties. Those especially whose work lies chiefly in the remote rural districts, far away from the few cities in which European conditions of life to some extent prevail, are brought daily into the very closest contact with the people, and because of their absolute detachment from the prejudices and passions and material interests by which Indian society, like all other societies, is largely swayed, they enjoy the confidence of the people often in a higher degree than Indian officials whose detachment can never be so complete. Their task has been to administer well and to do the best in their power for the welfare of the population committed to their charge. The Englishman, as a rule, sticks to his own job. The British administrator's job had been to administer, and he had not yet been told that it was also his job to train up a nation on democratic lines and to instil into them the principles of civic duty as such duty is understood in Western countries. No doubt there were British administrators in India whose innate conservatism, coupled with the narrowness which years of routine work and official self-confidence are apt to breed, revolted against any transfer of power to, or any recognition of equality with, the people of the country they had spent their lives in ruling with unquestioned but, as they at least conceived it, paternal authority. The conditions of bureaucratic rule inevitably tended to produce an autocratic temper. But it was not merely in obedience to that temper that they shrank from any changes that would weaken the administration; the best of them at least had a strong sense of their responsibilities as guardians and protectors of the simple and ignorant masses committed to their care. They might be inclined to judge the Western-educated class of Indians too harshly, and to identify them too closely with the type that was beginning to dominate the Indian National Congress, but the form in which the question of yielding to Indians any substantial part of their authority presented itself to their minds was by no means an entirely selfish one. "Are we justified," they asked, "in transferring our responsibilities for the welfare and good government of such a large section of the human