when it is combated by someone who may be considered to pass a better informed judgment than his, so long as such supposed better informed judgment cannot be ascribed to personal superiority—the acknowledgment of which would be harder—but to nothing more than the special circumstances of which such an opponent has had the advantage.
And apart from those “who filled such high positions” in India, it is indeed strange how often people attribute value to the opinions of persons who possess nothing to justify such attribution except the “memory of so many years spent in those lands.” This is the more peculiar, since the same people who attach value to that class of argument would probably be the last to accept anything they were told, say, about Dutch political economy on the strength of a forty or fifty years’ residence in Holland. There are persons who spent nearly as many years in Netherlands India without ever having come in contact either with the population or with the native Chiefs, and it is pitiful to reflect that the Council of India is often entirely or largely composed of such persons, indeed that means have been found to persuade the King to sign the appointments as Governor-General of men belonging to this kind of specialists.
When I said that the supposed ability of a newly appointed Governor-General should be considered as including the opinion that he was taken to be a genius, it was in no way my intention to recommend the appointment of geniuses. For in addition to the objection that one would be repeatedly compelled to leave so important a position unfilled, there is another plea against such a proposal. A genius could not work under the Colonial Department, and would therefore be unemployable for the purpose . . . as geniuses are apt to be in so many cases.
It might perhaps not be undesirable that the principal defects enumerated by me in the form of a diagnosis should draw the attention of those who are called to choose successive new Governors-General. Giving first prominence to the requirement that
