“I hope I am making no false or arrogant claim,” he said, “when I say that the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception. I do not thereby mean to claim that Europeans are universally or even generally truthful, still less do I mean that Asiatics deliberately or habitually deviate from the truth. The one proposition would be absurd, the other insulting. But undoubtedly truth took a high place in the moral codes of the West before it had been similarly honoured in the East, where craftiness and diplomatic wile have always been held in much repute. We may prove it by the common innuendo that lurks in the words ‘Oriental diplomacy,’ by which is meant something rather tortuous and hypersubtle. The same may be seen in Oriental literature. In your epics truth will often be extolled as a virtue; but quite as often it is attended with some qualification, and very often praise is given to successful deception practised with honest aim.” The Viceroy, addressing his Bengali audience, went on to say that “he knew no country where mare’s-nests were more prolific than here”; and he warned them especially against flattery and vituperation, and afterwards against eloquence. “In India,” he said, “there are two sets of people, the reticent and the eloquent. I dare say you know to which class the people in this part of the country belong. I am sometimes lost in admiration at the facility with which they speak in a foreign language, and I envy the accomplishment. All I say to you is, do not presume upon this talent.” Towards the conclusion of the speech, he introduced the following sentences:— “Learn that the true salvation of India will not come from without, but must be created within. It will not be given you by enactment of the British Parliament, or of any Parliament at all.... Be true Indians—that is the prompting of nationality.... In India I see the claim constantly advanced that a man is not merely a Bengali, or an Uriya, or a Mahratta, or a Sikh, but a member of the Indian nation. I do not think it can yet be said that there is any Indian nation, though in the distant future some approach to it may be evolved. However that may be, the Indian is most certainly a member of the British Empire.”[4] Neither these contradictory remarks on nationality, nor the Viceroy’s well-intentioned exposition of the national tendency to deceit, were received by the audience and their friends in a properly chastened spirit. But the _Amrita Bazar Patrika_, next to the _Bengalee_, perhaps the most influential Indian paper in Calcutta, contented itself with the following extract from Lord Curzon’s book, called “Problems of the Far East” (p. 155 of the edition quoted), where, writing of his conversation with the President of the Korean Foreign Office, he said:—