ABSTRACT
The best way of learning how to govern a people is to consult the people themselves. Depend upon it, there is something worth keeping in their time-honoured usages. Much there may be to prune away, but there is sure to be a residue of good which will repay cultivation. The framework of the original constitution may have become overgrown with a good deal that is harmful; the ancient customs may, from vicissitudes of fortune, from oppression and hard times, have been turned to bad account; the old order of things may have been a good deal disturbed by contact with other races or by internal quarrels; but if the original polity can only be disentangled from the noxious accretions which have weakened or hidden it perhaps for ages, it will supply the true principles on which to govern. There is a capacity for self-government 211in every people, but it varies with race and climate. The highest excellence in any administration must always consist in the perception of this capacity, and in leading it into those channels for which it is best suited. We have conceded what may be called a limited self-government to the people of India; but we have made the concession without discernment of the varying capacities of the races and classes to whom it has been granted. We have dealt with all alike, neglecting distinctive national characteristics. We have failed to seize the true spirit of self-government in the East. Both in method and in scope we are wrong. We have, to use a homely illustration, tried to make legs do the work of arms, and arms the work of legs; and at the same time we have offered a sphere of activity where fingers are best employed. Just as the Burmese make their great gongs of a mixture of all sorts of metals, fine and base, so we manufacture civilization in the East. We melt down all the subject races into one huge mass, and then cast them ruthlessly in our Western mould. But the parallel ends here; for the Burmese gong has a true ring in it, whereas the product of our wholesale civilization has not. We have no art in our government. We do not understand the cultivation of human varieties. 212We would supply, at short notice, administrative machinery, on contract, to every country under the sun, and drive it by a big high-pressure compound engine at Whitehall; and we would supplant all indigenous processes by patents of our own. The result of our method is this: that the reforms which we endeavour to introduce strike no real root; the soil and climate are not congenial to the plant. The year 1986 will, I fear, find the millions of India not one whit more able to govern themselves than they are now. We have nowhere fostered the growth of real national life. We are endeavouring to create a New English India. The product will not be much to our credit.
