Letters to the Editor
[In view of the length of many of the letters which we receive, we would again remind correspondents that we often cannot give space for long letters and that short ones are generally read with more attention. The length which we consider most suitable is about that of one of our paragraphs on " News of the Week."—Ed. 'SPECTATOR.]
THE COLOUR. BAR
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Edwyn Bevan need not go further than the head- quarters of the "Indian Empire Society " to discover the attitude of the senior members of the Indian Civil Service towards the Indian. I am sure at least some of his Indian acquaintances will be in a position to tell him of the difference they must have noticed in the manners of a Civil Servant at thirty and at forty or forty-five. At thirty he is a perfectly amiable young man, full of noble ideals and principles, as any graduate of a good university would be expected to be. But at the latter age he is haughty, exceedingly conscious of his own importance and intolerant of any other point of view. In short, he is then a " sun-dried bureaucrat " (to quote an immortal phrase used by Lord Morley in speaking of the British Official in India).
I remember having read in the Times five or six years ago a letter by a retired I. M. S. (Indian Medical Service), in which he wrote, inter alia, something like this: "To be happy an Englishman wants money, position, and sport. While in England he is lost in the mass, he has each of these in plenty in India."
There you are !
But I do not deny that in each generation India had a few Englishmen who really loved the country and its people and toiled, according to their light, for their well-being. My contention is that if only -the Englishman will have the good sense to behave east of Suez as he behaves west of it, half the bitterness and strife in the world will have disappeared
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