Kipling's India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic
philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips. You do not
talk of Humanity in India, because in India "you really see
humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing between it and the
blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot." Mr
Kipling's Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey
orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them
to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their
experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India,
it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.

_Tods' Amendment_ and _The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_ are printed
among _Plain Tales from the Hills_. They look forward to a whole
series of Anglo-Indian tales which present Mr Kipling's idea of the
English in India. Out of his later books we can illustrate a hundred
times his conviction that in India the simplest wisdom is the best.

But there are two kinds of simplicity. The one kind is illustrated in
a tale from _The Day's Work_; it is the right kind of simplicity. In
no story of Mr Kipling is the devoted service and practical
resourcefulness of the good Civilian so movingly celebrated as in the
story of _William the Conqueror_. It is the story of a famine, and of
how it was met by the servants of the Indian Government. The
administration of famine relief would seem to be a simple thing when
the grain has come by rail and only waits to be distributed. But the
district served by the little group of English in _William the
Conqueror_ was a district which did not understand the food of the
North, and, if it could not get the rice which it knew, was ready to
starve within reach of bagsful of unfamiliar wheat or rye. The hero of
the tale is finally reduced to distributing the Government rations to