to govern.  That is the mission with which we have to charge you, and it is as momentous a mission as was ever confided to any great military commander or admiral of the fleet—­this mission of yours to place yourself in touch with the people whom you have to govern.  I am under no illusions that I can plant new ideas in your minds compared with the ideas that may be planted by experienced heads of Indian Government.  The other day I saw a letter of instructions from a very eminent Lieutenant-Governor to those of the next stage below him, as to the attitude that they were to take to the new civilians when they arrived, and you 24 or 25 gentlemen will get the benefit of those instructions if you are going to that province.  I do not think there is any reason why I should not mention his name—­it was Sir Andrew Fraser, the retired Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal—­and those instructions as to the temper that was to be inculcated upon newcomers, were marked by a force, a fulness, and a first-hand aptitude that not even the keenest Secretary of State could venture to approach.  I know that exile is hard.  It is very easy for us here to preach.  Exile is and must be hard, but I feel confident that under the guidance of the high officers there, under whom you will find yourselves, you will take care not to ignore the Indian; not to hold apart and aloof from the Indian life and ways; not to believe that you will not learn anything by conversation with educated Indians.  And while you are in India, and among Indians, and responsible to Indians, because you are as responsible to them as you are to us here, while you are in that position, gentlemen, do not live in Europe all the time.  Whether or not—­if I may be quite candid—­it was a blessing either for India or for Great Britain that this great responsibility fell upon us, whatever the ultimate destiny and end of all this is to be, at any rate I know of no more imposing and momentous transaction than the government of India by you and those like you.  I know of no more imposing and momentous transaction in the vast scroll of the history of human government.

We have been within the past two years in a position of considerable difficulty.  But the difficulties of Indian government are not the result—­be sure of this—­of any single incident or set of incidents.  You see it said that all the present difficulties arose from the partition of Bengal.  I have never believed that.  I do not think well of the operation, but that does not matter.  I was turning the other day to the history of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta.  In 1899—­the partition of Bengal, as you know, was much later—­what did they say?  “There exists at present”—­at present in 1899—­“an increasing hostility to what is European and English among the educated classes.”  “No one can have,” this Oxford report goes on, “any real knowledge of India without a deep sense of the splendid work done by the Indian Civil Service.  The work is recognised by the Indian people.  They thoroughly