" I have been given," writes an old friend who
on August 15th will cease to represent the King-Emperor in an ancient but compara- tively little-known Indian State, " eight weeks in which to sort out, burn or otherwise dispose of tz,000 files dating back from 1835. The inevitable result is that much that is of interest and value will go down the drain. . . . This doesn't seem to make sense." As I read these words I remembered, though not as clearly as I could have wished, the staid and rather lugubrious photographs of the lonely
Englishmen who had compiled, in a century, this great mass of paperasserie ; they hung outside the billiard-room in the Residency, their whiskers diminishing in luxuriance as you passed along the line. Year after year they had written their despatches, holding—single- handed—the mirror up to the slow, tortuous, occasionally violent life of an Asiatic community of some two million souls. Much of what they wrote must have been very tedious, and some of it was probably unsound. But for each of them his duty must have assumed at times that urgent and hypnotic importance which it commonly does when men are completely on their own, and among those 12,000 files there must be many papers which at the time seemed to their authors —and sometimes to their remote superiors as well—to have a capital significance. It is not easy to feel sentimental about files ; but con- tinuity of service must always compel a certain respect and it seems a pity that the archives in which it is enshrined should have to be liquidated so brusquely. I suppose the same sort of thing is happening all over India.
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