ABSTRACT
The people of India possess an instinctive capacity for local self-government which centuries of misrule have not eradicated. The inhabitants of an Indian village under their own princes formed a sort of petty republic, the affairs of which were managed by hereditary officers, any unfit person being set aside by popular judgment in favour of a more acceptable member of his family. It is by reason of the British administration only that the popular authority of the village headman has been sapped, that the responsibility of the village accountant and record-keeper has been destroyed, and the judicial powers of the Punchayet, or Committee of Five, subverted. A costly and mechanical centralisation took the place of a system of local self-government and local arbitration. The old 171order can, of course, never be restored in its integrity, but the development of local institutions which Lord Ripon’s policy inaugurated was designed to reconcile if possible the traditional forms of a native authority with the wants of a modern civilisation. It was a decisive advance in the right direction, of delegating the administration of local affairs to local bodies, who, however inferior they may be to the district officers in knowledge of the principles of administration, have the compensating advantage of a far more direct interest in the result. The administration has been localised, and the trading, manufacturing, and banking classes, no less than the agricultural, have been endowed again with corporate life.
