“Why?” he bluntly asked.

Shelton was not anxious to explain his views, and he did not reply.

His friend repeated: 

“Why don’t you think we’re doing good in India?”

“Well,” said Shelton gruffly, “how can progress be imposed on nations from outside?”

The Indian civilian, glancing at Shelton in an affectionate and doubtful way, replied: 

“You have n’t changed a bit, old chap.”

“No, no,” said Shelton; “you ’re not going to get out of it that way.  Give me a single example of a nation, or an individual, for that matter, who ’s ever done any good without having worked up to it from within.”

Crocker, grunting, muttered, “Evils.”

“That ’s it,” said Shelton; “we take peoples entirely different from our own, and stop their natural development by substituting a civilisation grown for our own use.  Suppose, looking at a tropical fern in a hothouse, you were to say:  ’This heat ’s unhealthy for me; therefore it must be bad for the fern, I ’ll take it up and plant it outside in the fresh air.’”

“Do you know that means giving up India?” said the Indian civilian shrewdly.

“I don’t say that; but to talk about doing good to India is—­h’m!”

Crocker knitted his brows, trying to see the point of view his friend was showing him.

“Come, now!  Should we go on administering India if it were dead loss?  No.  Well, to talk about administering the country for the purpose of pocketing money is cynical, and there ’s generally some truth in cynicism; but to talk about the administration of a country by which we profit, as if it were a great and good thing, is cant.  I hit you in the wind for the benefit of myself—­all right:  law of nature; but to say it does you good at the same time is beyond me.”

“No, no,” returned Crocker, grave and anxious; “you can’t persuade me that we ’re not doing good.”

“Wait a bit.  It’s all a question of horizons; you look at it from too close.  Put the horizon further back.  You hit India in the wind, and say it’s virtuous.  Well, now let’s see what happens.  Either the wind never comes back, and India gasps to an untimely death, or the wind does come back, and in the pant of reaction your blow—­that’s to say your labour—­is lost, morally lost labour that you might have spent where it would n’t have been lost.”

“Are n’t you an Imperialist?” asked Crocker, genuinely concerned.

“I may be, but I keep my mouth shut about the benefits we ’re conferring upon other people.”

“Then you can’t believe in abstract right, or justice?”

“What on earth have our ideas of justice or right got to do with India?”

“If I thought as you do,” sighed the unhappy Crocker, “I should be all adrift.”

“Quite so.  We always think our standards best for the whole world.  It’s a capital belief for us.  Read the speeches of our public men.  Does n’t it strike you as amazing how sure they are of being in the right?  It’s so charming to benefit yourself and others at the same time, though, when you come to think of it, one man’s meat is usually another’s poison.  Look at nature.  But in England we never look at nature—­there’s no necessity.  Our national point of view has filled our pockets, that’s all that matters.”