OUR INDIAN STEWARDSHIP.
As a humble unit of the great English public, I have read with feelings of dismay the terrible indictment brought by Mr. Seymour Keay, in the last number of this journal, against our Indian administration. Hearing such things we must all ask ourselves to what extent are the charges set forth in 'The Spoliation of India' well founded? The allegations are specific, and involve charges of national breach of trust on a great scale. How are such charges to be either proved or disproved? England is herself ultimately responsible for the work of her servants in India. What means does she possess of taking an account of this Indian stewardship, so that her servants in the far East may be either acquitted or condemned? In the parable, the householder planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country. But a day of reckoning came at last. Wherever there is a trust, due account should be rendered. If the present charges are false, they should, after proper inquiry, be declared so, in justice to the Indian administration. If they contain even a portion of truth, still more necessary is it that justice should be done in fulfilment of a great national duty.
Mr. Seymour Keay does not blame individuals or even classes. He blames the system. And the essence of his argument is that the defects of our rule in India are simply what, under such circumstances, must be expected from the ordinary and admitted weaknesses of human nature. Individuals will always be found who follow the golden rule of unselfishness. But ordinary men naturally prefer their own interests to those of others. And he points out that a government of officials, not responsible to the people of India, and practically unsupervised even by their own countrymen at home, would naturally and almost unconsciously establish a system favourable to their own patronage and power, 'a system providing too much for the interests of the governors themselves, and too little for the welfare of the governed.' A presumption of this sort seems not unreasonable. It is in accordance with our experience of bureaucratic rule in France and other European countries. And the evil is naturally intensified where the officials are foreigners, and aliens in race and language. Relentlessly following up this clue, the writer examines one after
