Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1Bright, John
History
Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1
Bright, John
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
Here are only a dozen lines from a long article, and there are other
articles in the same paper to the same purport. I think, then, that I am
justified in condemning any Secretary for India who contents himself
with giving us the figures necessary to show the state of the finances,
which any clerk in the office could have done, and abstains from going
into the questions of the government of India and that policy upon which
alone you can base any solid hope of an improvement in the condition of
that country.
There is another point I would mention. The Governor-General of India
goes out knowing little or nothing of India. I know exactly what he does
when he is appointed. He shuts himself up to study the first volumes of
Mr. Mill's _History of India_, and he reads through this laborious
work without nearly so much effect in making him a good Governor-General
as a man might ignorantly suppose. He goes to India, a country of twenty
nations, speaking twenty languages. He knows none of those nations, and
he has not a glimmer of the grammar and pronunciation or meaning of
those languages. He is surrounded by half-a-dozen or a dozen gentlemen
who have been from fifteen to forty years in that country, and who have
scrambled from the moderate but sure allowance with which they began in
the Service to the positions they now occupy. He knows nothing of the
country or the people, and they are really unknown to the Government of
India. To this hour the present Governor-General has not travelled
through any considerable portion of the territory of India. If he did,
he would have to pay an increased insurance upon his life for travelling
through a country in which there are very few roads and no bridges at
all. Observe the position, then, in which the Governor-General is
placed. He is surrounded by an official circle, he breathes an official
air, and everything is dim or dark beyond it. You lay duties upon him
which are utterly beyond the mental or bodily strength of any man who
ever existed, and which he cannot therefore adequately perform.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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