Nowadays he is sent out with his personality crushed, and it gets still
more crushed out there. He becomes in time not a living soul but a
motor-engine to drive a machine. Whatever knowledge he acquires is of
the people's faults and not their virtues. When you hear an official
praised as "knowing the Indian" or "the Burman," you know that it means
that he knows his faults. He knows the criminal trying to escape, the
villager trying to evade revenue. It doesn't mean that he knows more
than this. Some do, especially among the police and the forest
officers, but then they have no influence.
As showing the difference between the old officer and the new I make
the following extract from _A City of Sunshine_, by Alexander
Allardyce. Few books on the East have been written with a clearer
understanding.
"Mr. Eversley, the collector, was an official of a type that has almost
passed away. He had been brought up in the strictest traditions of the
Haileybury school and had adhered all his life to the conservative
principles of the 'old civilianism.' When the 'Competition Wallah'
came in, Eversley foresaw certain ruin to the English interests in
India. 'Competition Wallahs!' he used to exclaim--'as well put the
country under a commission of schoolmasters at once. But we'll lose
the country with all this Latin and Greek; take my word for it we'll
soon lose the country.' Mr. Eversley had never been able to make a
hexameter in the whole course of his life, and there is grave reason to
doubt that he was ignorant of even the barest elements of the Greek
accidence. But he had acquired a marvellous colloquial familiarity
with the Eastern vernaculars, and he knew the habits and feelings of
the Bengalee better than any other officer in the Lower Provinces.
There was no chance of Eversley falling into such a blunder as that
which was laid to the charge of Muffington Prigge, the magistrate of
the neighbouring district of Lallkor, who once, in taking the
deposition of a witness in a criminal case, had expressed his
displeasure that evidence of such importance should be given on the
authority of a third person, and ordered the police to bring 'Fidwi'
before him. The witness gave his evidence in the third person out of
respect. Instead of saying 'I saw' he said 'Fidwi (your slave) saw.'
Muffington Prigge's judgments had been more than once spoken of with
encomiums by Mr. Justice Tremer in the Appeal side of the High Court,
but Mr. Eversley's law never came before the High Court except to be
reprobated. Lawyers complained that he did not know even the rudiments
of the Codes; but there was no magistrate in the Lower Provinces whose
decisions were received with more general satisfaction or from whose
judgments there were fewer appeals. His rough-and-ready way of
settling cases was better relished than the elaborate findings of the
Lallkor archon which were generally unintelligible to the suitors till
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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