The purification of that service from the time of Clive onwards; its ...

The purification of that service from

the time of

Clive onwards; its arrogant detachment from native life; its self-devotion and efficiency; its close association with the English Universities and Public Schools: all these things had combined to create, and to diffuse, such an ideal of a disinterested ruling class as could be accepted by the national pride and not disowned by the national conscience.

But the mention of India is enough to remind us that not for many generations to come can the contribution of Victorian England to history be assessed, because no one can yet say which of the ideas or which of the institutions generated in an age so fertile and constructive will in the end be found to have taken root and to be bearing.

In the India of to-day, who will undertake to determine what elements come from the East India Company, what from Macaulay's Education Minute, what from the Queen's Proclamation of 1857? The Company, in a

dispatch which shows the hand of the elder

Mill, had laid it down that in compensation for the authority they had ceded to their conquerors, young Indians of rank should be trained for the administration of India: a policy of which an education in the arts and

sciences of the West was the necessary outcome

and agency, and which the Proclamation might be thought to have converted into a promise.

Was the Queen's promise kept? The Queen did not always think so. The Mutiny could not be forgotten; and the colour pub, of which the earlier invaders were hardly conscious, grew firmer as easier communications brought women in increasing numbers to India.

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