"The great, tall, shy man modestly approached the table and laid his father's sword and his father's medals on it as a token of obeisance. "After a while the scribe glanced up with angry and distracted expression, pushed all these tributes away disdainfully, and in a bitter voice complained of interruption. "'Sir,' said the Subadar, 'these are the medals of my father who fought for you. This sword has been red with the blood of my own fellow-countrymen slain by my father in defence of your Raj, but as they do not interest you I will take them away.'" So he went away. But why blame the young civilian? He is as his teachers made him. I doubt not that he too once had a personality before his teachers killed it. It is a common shibboleth amongst English writers on India that the "Oriental understands only personal government," and it is exactly the frame of mind that can invent such sayings that is the great stumbling-block to our understanding India. For neither in this nor in any other fundamental attitude does the East differ from the West. Look at England under Gladstone. There was again government by personality, and the country let him do things it would allow no one else to do. Nowadays in England the personality has gone on both sides, as well as self-government. We gave India government by personality, that is to say, a government wherein alien laws, alien ideas, alien methods were rendered endurable by the medium through which they reached the people. Therefore in the beginning, say from a hundred and fifty years ago till fifty years ago, the government and people were well suited to each other. In that time neither changed very greatly. Change there was, of course, but it was slow and slight. Then from the middle of the last century the rate of change was accelerated. Now life is change, and without change you can have only death; therefore there is nothing to regret in this. Had the change been in drawing more nearly together it would have been entirely fortunate. But it was not so. They were more nearly together in the beginning than ever since, and all progress has been away from each other. Instead of time bringing greater community of thought, greater mutual respect, and better understanding, with every year that passed, it widened and deepened the gulf between them. Instead of government becoming more suited to the people, it has grated on them more and more; instead of its efficiency increasing with the perfection of the machine, it has become less. In development, in intricacy, the government of to-day is to the government of a hundred years ago as a "Mauretania" to a "Great Eastern"; but whereas of old the wheels went easily, now they stick and try to stop; were there not a strong driving power behind them they would stop. Let us see how this has occurred.