WHITE BABOOS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.'] SIR,—You are not quite right about the demon of writing. The abuse against which an outcry has been raised for very many years has nothing to do with discussing schemes of improvement on paper or anything of the sort. What Lord Curzon wants to do is to prevent the accumulation of use- less reports and statistics, trivial cases often being reported upon by half-a-dozen different officers, and elaborate statistics being yearly collected and printed on subjects which would do very well with a two-page report eve ry five years. Thus district officers are kept at their desks when they ought to he riding about their districts. The Frontier War might never have broken out if the Commissioner of Peshawar had been in his district instead of sitting in his office in the hills. Another serious evil caused by the same thing is the growth of vast establishments of lazy clerks who copy these reports, &c. These establishments grow like snowballs, for it is almost a proverb that when a baboo gets into an office he looks about to make work for nine other baboos. Every baboo has four brothers, two uncles, a father, and five female relations to support, and he soon points out that he has so much work that he must have two subordinates to help him, and then his two uncles come in on probation, Stc. If Lord Curzon knocks that scribbling on the head, and has more things decided on the spot by the district officer, he will have done one of the best things he ever did. There would be a howl from the native Press, and the Little Englanders would echo it, but it would save "the people of India" a great deal of money, and what is much more important, the districts would be properly looked after. I have just had a ease which illustrates this. A Bengali pleader in M— sent his son to the College, and wanted to put him into a form higher than the one for which he was qualified. His father applied to the Inspector of Schools, who refused to make an exception in his favour. An appeal to the Director of Public Instruction had the same result. Now the pleader has sent me a copy of a long-winded appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor. This will go to Naini Tal and be read and discussed by ten idle clerks, who have no business to see it at all, but are glad of an excuse to knock off work. Then they will hand it to the head of their section, who will write a bad prcis of it. The chief native superintendent will then take it and write a report on it, citing all the rules and orders on the subject. Then the Under-Secretary to the Govern- meni-Will read the sheaf of docamenta and write his decision. Then the junior secretary will do the same, confirming or reversing the decision as he thinks fit. Then the Lieutenant- Governor's private secretary will add some notes, and probably boil down the whole result and take it to his chief, who may ask the Under Secretary to write a fresh report, and the latter half of the game will be replayed. Otherwise he will scrawl on the top sheet "Decline to interfere with the Inspector's decision." Thus some tw,?nty officers will have given on an average an hour a piece to a case which the Inspector ought to have been allowed to decide six months back by simply saying "No, you can't," sans appe/, as the French say. Probably fifty cases of similar importance are being reported on at the present moment. The Inspector himself ought to be examining schools, instead of which most of his time is spent in his office examining nonsense like this.
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