Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/223

Rh of natives. It is calculated that these latter now number a million and a quarter.

We must be careful not to contemn this bureaucracy. Indeed, such contempt would lie ill in the mouths of us Englishmen, who are energetically framing our own government more and more on bureaucratic lines. This system of a native civil service has been justly called one of the most successful of our achievements, and is certainly unparalleled in Asia. As for its quality, those who can look back to the past assert, with Sir John Strachey, that, "nothing in the recent history of India has been more remarkable than the improvement that has taken place in the standard of morality among the higher classes of native officials." Those who can speak with scarcely less authority of the present, say, with Sir Bampfylde Fuller, that, "in all my experience of native Indian officials I have rarely met one who was not loyal to his salt. Indeed, devotion to one's chief and to one's service is one of India's most conspicuous virtues." On the other hand, it should be remembered that all this depends for its existence, and for its standard, on that band of men at the top.

Secondly, it has been our policy since the Mutiny to reinvigorate and fortify, by indirect methods of advice and control, the native states, which, of course, are solely administered by natives and comprise so large a part of India. Of their loyalty the Mutiny gave full evidence, for, as Lord