'Sir C. Trevelyan relies doubtless on Lord Stanley, and we do not
dream of denying that the Secretary of State has provocation
enough to excuse the unusual course he seems obliged to pursue.
To send a reform to Calcutta is, at present, simply to lay it
aside. It will probably not even be answered for two years,
certainly not carried in five. Even when sanctioned, it will have
to pass through a crucible through which no plan can escape
entire. That weary waiting for Calcutta, of which all men, from
Lord Stanley to the people of Singapore, now bitterly complain,
may well tempt the Secretary to carry on his plans by the first
mode offered to his hand.'

Here are only a dozen lines from a long article, and there are other
articles in the same paper to the same purport. I think, then, that I am
justified in condemning any Secretary for India who contents himself
with giving us the figures necessary to show the state of the finances,
which any clerk in the office could have done, and abstains from going
into the questions of the government of India and that policy upon which
alone you can base any solid hope of an improvement in the condition of
that country.

There is another point I would mention. The Governor-General of India
goes out knowing little or nothing of India. I know exactly what he does
when he is appointed. He shuts himself up to study the first volumes of
Mr. Mill's _History of India_, and he reads through this laborious
work without nearly so much effect in making him a good Governor-General
as a man might ignorantly suppose. He goes to India, a country of twenty
nations, speaking twenty languages. He knows none of those nations, and
he has not a glimmer of the grammar and pronunciation or meaning of
those languages. He is surrounded by half-a-dozen or a dozen gentlemen