our ideas. I am leading up to a practical point. The district officers
representing British rule to the majority of the people of India, are
overloaded with work in their official relations, and I know there are
highly experienced gentlemen who say that a little of the looseness of
earlier days is better fitted than the regular system of latter days,
to win and to keep personal influence, and that we are in danger of
creating a pure bureaucracy. Honourable, faithful, and industrious the
servants of the State in India are and will be, but if the present
system is persisted in, there is a risk of its becoming rather
mechanical, perhaps I might even say rather soulless; and attention to
this is urgently demanded. Perfectly efficient administration, I need
not tell the House, has a tendency to lead to over-centralisation. It
is inevitable. The tendency in India is to override local authority,
and to force administration to run in official grooves. For my own
part I would spare no pains to improve our relations with native
Governments, and more and more these relations may become of potential
value to the Government of India. I would use my best endeavours to
make these States independent in matters of administration. Yet all
evidence tends to show we are rather making administration less
personal, though evidence also tends to show that the Indian people
are peculiarly responsive to sympathy and personal influence. Do not
let us waste ourselves in controversy, here or elsewhere, or in mere
anger; let us try to draw to our side the men who now influence the
people. We have every good reason to believe that most of the people
of India are on our side. I do not say for a moment that they like us.
It does not come easy, in west or east, to like foreign rule. But in
their hearts they know that their solid interest is bound up with the
law and order that we preserve.

There is a Motion on the Paper for an inquiry by means of a