In the eyes of the disaffected Indian politician the really unpardonable sin of the Civil Service is that it constitutes the bulwark of British rule, the one permanent link between the Government of India and the manifold millions entrusted to their care.  I have already had occasion to show, incidentally, how unfounded is the charge that, through ignorance and want of sympathy, the British civilian is callous to the real interests and sentiments of the people in dealing with the larger problems of Indian statesmanship.  The contrary is the case, for to him belongs the credit of almost every measure passed during the last 50 years for the benefit of the Indian masses, and passed frequently in the teeth of vehement opposition from the Indian politician.  Nor is it surprising that it should be so.  For the Indian politician—­generally a townsman—­is, as a rule, drawn from and represents classes that have very little in common with the great bulk of the people, who are agriculturists.  The British civilian, on the other hand, often spends the best years of his life in rural districts, seldom even visited by the politician, and therefore knows much more about the needs and the feelings of the people among whom he lives and moves.  In the best sense of the word he is in fact the one real democrat in India.  The very fact that he is a bird of passage in the country makes him absolutely independent of the class interests and personal bias to which the politician is almost always liable.  Moreover, the chief, and perfectly legitimate, object to which the Anglo-Indian administrator is bound to address himself is, as Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal once candidly admitted, to capture “the heart, the mind of the people ... to secure, if not the allegiance, at least the passive, the generous acquiescence of the general mass of the population.”  To make his meaning perfectly clear, Mr. Pal instanced the rural reforms, the agricultural banks and other things which had been done in Lord Curzon’s time, “to captivate the mind of the teeming masses,” and he added that “he is a foolish politician in India who allows the Government to capture the mind of the masses to the exclusion of his own influence and his own countrymen.”  Mr. Pal is from his point of view perfectly logical, and so were the writers in the Yugantar, who, when they elaborated their scheme of revolutionary propaganda, declared that the first step must be to undermine the confidence of the people in their rulers and to destroy the spirit of contentedness under an alien yoke.  But could there be a more striking tribute to the intelligent and sympathetic treatment of the interests of the Indian masses by their British rulers than such admissions on the part of the enemies of British rule?