directed some of his most forcible diatribes.[18] It has been already
pointed out that the commendable want of intellectual symmetry which is
the inherited possession of the Englishman gives him a very great
advantage as an Imperialist agent over those trained in the rigid and
bureaucratic school of Continental Europe. But the Englishman is a
Western, albeit an Anglo-Saxon Western, and, from the point of view of
all processes of reasoning, the gulf which separates any one member of
the European family from another is infinitely less wide than that which
divides all Westerns from all Orientals. Even the Englishman, therefore,
is constrained--sometimes much against his will--to bow down in that
temple of Logic, the existence of which the Oriental is disposed
altogether to ignore. Indeed, sometimes the choice lies between the
enforcement on the reluctant Oriental of principles based on
logic--occasionally on the very simple science of arithmetic--or
abandoning the work of civilisation altogether. From this point of view,
the dangers to which the British Empire is exposed by reason of fiscal
measures are due not, as was the case with Rome, to barbarous, but
rather to ultra-scientific finance. The following is a case in point.

The land-tax has always been the principal source from which Oriental
potentates have derived their revenues. For all practical purposes it
may be said that the system which they have adopted has generally been
to take as much from the cultivators as they could get. Reformers, such
as the Emperor Akbar, have at times endeavoured to introduce more
enlightened methods of taxation, and to carry into practice the
theories upon which the fiscal system in all Moslem countries is based.
Those theories are by no means so objectionable as is often supposed.
But the reforms which some few capable rulers attempted to introduce
have almost always crumbled away under the régime of their
successors.[19] In practice, the only limit to the demands of the ruler