I used to watch them, I say, in the hot still air and the smell of dead oysters--it pushed up against your face like something solid--talking, talking in their long chairs, while the sweat stood out in little drops on their foreheads and trickled from time to time down their noses. There wasn't, I suppose, anything wrong with Robson, he was all right at bottom, but he annoyed me, irritated me in that smell. He was too cocksure altogether, of himself, of his School Board education, of life, of his 'views'. He was going to run India on new lines, laid down in some damned Manual of Political Science out of which they learn life in Board Schools and extension lectures. He would run his own life, I daresay, on the same lines, laid down in some other text book or primer. He hadn't seen anything, but he knew exactly what it was all like. There was nothing curious, astonishing, unexpected, in life, he was ready for any emergency. And we were all wrong, all on the wrong tack in dealing with natives! He annoyed me a little, you know, when the thermometer stood at 99, at 6 P.M., but what annoyed me still more was that they--the natives!--were all wrong too. They too had to be taught how to live--and die, too, I gathered. But his views were interesting, very interesting--especially in the long chairs there under the immense Indian sky, with the camp at our hands--just as it had been in the time of Moses and Abraham--and behind us the jungle for miles, and behind that India, three hundred millions of them listening to the piping voice of a Board School boy, are the inferior race, these three hundred millions--mark race, though there are more races in India than people in Peckham--and we, of course, are superior. They've stopped somehow on the bottom rung of the ladder of which we've very nearly, if not quite, reached the top. They've stopped there hundreds, thousands of years; but it won't take any time to lead 'em up by the hand to our rung. It's to be done like this: by showing them that they're our brothers, inferior brothers; by reason, arguing them out of their superstitions, false beliefs; by education, by science, by example, yes, even he did not forget example, and White, sitting by his side with his red nose and watery eyes, nodded approval. And all this must be done scientifically, logically, systematically: if it were, a Commissioner could revolutionize a province in five years, turn it into a Japanese India, with all the riots as well as all the vakils and students running up the ladder of European civilization to become, I suppose, glorified Board School angels at the top. "But you've none of you got any clear plans out here," he piped, "you never work on any system; you've got no point of view. The result is"--here, I think, he was inspired, by the dead oysters, perhaps--"instead or getting hold of the East, it's the East which gets hold of you."