The constant additions made to the huge machinery of administration in order to meet the growing needs of the country on the approved lines of a modern state resulted in increased centralisation.  New departments were created and old ones expanded, but even when the highest posts in them were not specifically or in practice reserved for the Indian Civil Service, it retained the supreme control over them as the corps d’elite from which most of the members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, i.e. the Government of India, were recruited.  The District Officer remained the pivot and pillar of British administration throughout rural India, and he kept as closely as he could in touch with the millions of humble folk committed to his care, though the multiplication of codes and regulations and official reports and statistics involving heavy desk work kept him increasingly tied to his office.  But the secretariats, which from the headquarters of provincial governments as well as from the seat of supreme government directed and controlled the whole machine, became more and more self-centred, more and more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience.  Even the men with district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided themselves on being the repositories of all the arcana of “good government.”  Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only Englishmen were competent to apply and which Indians were required to accept as final whatever their wishes or their experience might be.

Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency reached its apogee—­himself the incarnation of efficiency and unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that Britain sent out to India during that period.  It would be unfair to suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow prejudice or sordid jealousy.  Indians who resented their exclusion from the share in the administration of their country for which they believed their education to have qualified them, and which they claimed as the fulfilment of repeated promises and of the declared purpose of British rule, may not have been free from a human appetite for loaves and fishes.  British officials who were loath to recognise those claims, or to concede to Indians any substantial proportion of their privileged posts and emoluments, may have been not always unselfishly