inspired by a desire more often to avoid party embarrassments at Westminster than to protect public servants, who have no means of defending themselves, against even the grossest forms of misrepresentation and calumny, leading straight to the revolver and the bomb of the political assassin.  The British civilian is not going to be frightened by one more risk added to the vicissitudes of an Indian career, but can you expect him to be proof against discouragement when many of his fellow-countrymen exhaust their ingenuity in extenuating or in casting upon him the primary responsibility for the new Indian gospel of murder which is being preached against him?  Mr. Montagu was well inspired in protesting against such “hostile, unsympathetic, and cowardly criticism” as was conveyed in Mr. Mackarness’s pamphlet; but this pamphlet was mere sour milk compared with the vitriol which the native Press had been allowed to pour forth day after day on the British official in India before any action was taken by Government to defend him.

The new Viceroy, who himself belongs to one of the most important branches of the British Civil Service, may be trusted to display in his handling of the British civilian the tact and sympathy required to sustain him in the performance of arduous duties which are bound to become more complex and exacting as our system of government departs further from the old patriarchal type.  Our task in India must grow more and more difficult, and will demand more than ever the best men that we can give to its accomplishment.  The material prizes which an Indian career has to offer may be fewer and less valuable, whilst the pressure of work, the penalties of exile, the hardship of frequent separation from kith and kin, the drawbacks of an always trying and often treacherous climate, will for the most part not diminish.  But the many sided interests and the real magnitude and loftiness of the work to be done in India will continue to attract the best Englishmen so long as they can rely upon fair treatment at the hands of the Mother Country.  If that failed them there would speedily be an end not only to the Indian Civil Service, but to British rule itself.  For the sword cannot govern, only maintain government, and can maintain it only as long as government itself retains the respect and acquiescence of the great masses of the Indian peoples which have been won, not by generals or by Secretaries of State, or even by Viceroys, but by the patient and often obscure spadework of the Indian Civil Service—­by its integrity, its courage, its knowledge, its efficiency, and its unfailing sense of justice.