That nothing was done to open up a military career to the Western-educated classes was not at first more than a sentimental grievance.  But when the years passed and they still waited for that larger share in the government and even in the administration of their country to which the British Parliament had recognised their claim as far back as the Act of 1833, their faith even in the professed purpose of British rule began to waver.  At first the leaders of the Indian intelligentsia, some of whom had learned the value of British institutions and of the freedom of British public life, not merely through English literature but through years of actual residence in England, preferred to hold the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy alone or chiefly responsible for the long delay in the fulfilment of hopes which they in fact regarded as rights.  Their confidence in British statesmanship and in the British Parliament remained unshaken for nearly thirty years after the Mutiny, though they were perhaps not unnaturally inclined to put their trust chiefly in the Liberal party which had been most closely associated with the promotion of a progressive policy towards India in the past.  Lord Lytton’s Viceroyalty confirmed them in the belief that from the Conservative party they had little to hope for, and his drastic Press Act of 1879, though not unprovoked by the virulent abuse of Government in some of the vernacular papers and the reckless dissemination of alarmist rumours during the worst period of the Afghan troubles, was held to foreshadow a return all along the line to purely despotic methods of government.  But his departure from India after Lord Beaconsfield’s defeat at the general election of 1880 and the return of the Liberal party to power quickened new hopes which Lord Ripon, when he became Viceroy in succession to Lord Lytton, showed every disposition to justify.

All the greater was the disillusionment when a measure, introduced for the purpose of abolishing “judicial disqualifications based on race distinctions,” not only provoked fierce opposition amongst the whole European community and even amongst the rank and file of the civil service, but was ultimately whittled down in deference to that opposition until the very principle at issue was virtually surrendered.  Indians resented this fresh assertion of racial superiority, and saw in the violence of the agitation, sometimes not far removed from threats of actual lawlessness, and in the personal abuse poured out by his own countrymen on the Queen’s representative, the survival amongst a large section of Europeans of the same hatred that had invented for a Viceroy who was determined to temper justice with mercy after the Mutiny the scornful nickname of “Clemency Canning.”