Page:The empire and the century.djvu/651

 to be turned out by force. I trust, however, I may have said enough to show that the contingency of our either being turned out under compulsion or leaving voluntarily is sufficiently remote to justify us in proceeding to consider our relationship with India under the assumption that we are to remain there for many a long day to come.

But if we are to retain our connection with India the feeling of the British people certainly is that we must regard not merely our own selfish interests, but the good of the people as well. This is, at any rate, the feeling of the agents in India. I am not sure indeed that some of us have not an even keener feeling in this regard than many a home-staying Englishman. Contact with the warm-hearted people of India brings sympathy with them. From one cause or another—international rivalry and the weakness of the native Governments surrounding our original factories—we were driven into using force against them; and though a commonly accepted theory is that those who use force become brutal and tyrannical, much actual experience leads me to form a precisely opposite conclusion. There were no more sympathetic Anglo-Indian administrators than those of a century ago, who had been engaged in actual war with the people. They were, no doubt, severe against men who had recklessly brought the horrors of war upon the whole population, but for the innocent majority they had nothing but sympathy. And as one who has had himself, in a lesser degree, to employ the might of the British Empire against a weaker race, I can testify to the ardent desire which such an experience awakens in one to make up to the innocent people, in any way one can, for the punishment which the wickedness, or maybe incapacity, or even merely ignorance, of their rulers has brought upon them. As a boy I could never believe the master who said when he caned me that he was hurting himself much more than he was hurting me. And I know that the Tibetans thoroughly disbelieved my