brains, I will find them a dozen passages in which history is shown to
admonish us, in the language of Burke--"How weary a step do those
take who endeavour to make out of a great mass a true political
personality!" They are words much to be commended to those zealots
in India--how many a weary step has to be taken before they can form
themselves into a mass that has a true political personality! My
warning may be wasted, but anybody who has a chance ought to try to
appeal to the better, the riper, mind of educated India. Time has gone
on with me, experience has widened. I have never lost my invincible
faith that there is a better mind in all civilised communities--and
that this better mind, if you can reach it, if statesmen in time to
come can reach that better mind, can awaken it, can evoke it, can
induce it to apply itself to practical purposes for the improvement
of the conditions of such a community, they will earn the crown of
beneficent fame indeed. Nothing strikes me much more than this, when
I talk of the better mind of India--there are subtle elements,
religious, spiritual, mystical, traditional, historical in what we may
call for the moment the Indian mind, which are very hard for the most
candid and patient to grasp or to realise in their full force. But our
duty, and it is a splendid duty, is to try. I always remember a little
passage in the life of a great Anglo-Indian, Sir Henry Lawrence, a
very simple passage, and it is this, "No one ever ate at Sir Henry
Lawrence's table without learning to think more kindly of the
natives." I wish I could know that at every Anglo-Indian table to-day,
nobody has sat down without leaving it having learned to think a
little more kindly of the natives. One more word on this point. Bad
manners, overbearing manners are disagreeable in all countries: India
is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political
crime.