Complaints of the aloofness of the British civilian very seldom proceed either from Indians of the upper classes or from the humbler folk.  They generally proceed from the new, more or less Western-educated middle class whose attitude towards British officials is seldom calculated to promote cordial relations; and they are also sometimes inspired by another class of Indian who, one may hope, will before long have vanished, but whom of all others the civilian is bound to keep at arm’s length.  There are men who would get a hold upon him, if he is a young man, by luring him into intrigues with native women, or by inveigling him into the meshes of the native moneylender, or who, by less reprehensible means, strive to establish themselves on a footing of intimacy with him merely in order to sell to other Indians the influence which they acquire or pretend to have acquired over him.  Cases of this kind are no doubt rare, and growing more and more rare, as social conditions are passing away which in earlier days favoured them.  Less objectionable, but nevertheless to be kept also at arm’s length, is the far more numerous class of natives known in India as umedwars, who are always anxious to seize on to the coat tails of the Anglo-Indian official in order to heighten their own social status, and, if possible, to wheedle out of Government some of those minor titles or honorific distinctions to which Indian society attaches so much importance.

In other branches of the public service selection has not always operated as successfully as the competitive system for the Civil Service.  Men are too often sent out as lawyers or as doctors, or even, as I have already pointed out, to join the Education Department, with inadequate qualifications, and they are allowed to enter upon their work without any knowledge of the language and customs of the people.  Such cases are generally the result of carelessness or ignorance at home, but some of them, I fear, can only be described as “jobs”—­and there is no room in India for jobs.  The untravelled Indian is also brought into contact to-day with an entirely different class of Englishman.  The globe-trotter, who is often an American, though the native cannot be expected to distinguish between him and the Englishman, constantly sins from sheer ignorance against the customs of the country.  Then, again, with railways and telegraphs and the growth of commerce and industry a type of Englishman has been imported to fill subordinate positions in which some technical knowledge is required, who, whatever his good qualities, is much rougher and generally much more strongly imbued with, or more prone to display, a sense of racial superiority.  Nor is he kept under the same discipline as Tommy Atkins, who is generally an easy-going fellow, and looks upon the native with good-natured, if somewhat contemptuous, amusement, though he, too, is sometimes a rough customer when he gets “above himself,” or when his temper is ruffled by prickly heat, that most common but irritating of hot-weather ailments.  In this connexion the remarkable growth of temperance among British soldiers in India is doubly satisfactory.