Foreigners do not feel with the people. They cannot judge, by the
light in which a thing appears to their own minds, or the manner in
which it affects their feelings, how it will affect the feelings or
appear to the minds of the subject population. What a native of the
country, of average practical ability, knows as it were by instinct,
they have to learn slowly, and after all imperfectly, by study and
experience. The laws, the customs, the social relations, for which
they have to legislate, instead of being familiar to them from
childhood, are all strange to them. For most of their detailed
knowledge they must depend on the information of natives; and it is
difficult for them to know whom to trust. They are feared,
suspected, probably disliked by the population; seldom sought by
them except for interested purposes; and they are prone to think
that the servilely submissive are the trustworthy. Their danger is
of despising the natives; that of the natives is of disbelieving
that anything the strangers do can be intended for their good. These
are but a part of the difficulties that any rulers have to struggle
with who honestly attempt to govern well a country in which they are
foreigners. To overcome these difficulties in any degree will always
be a work of much labour, requiring a very superior degree of capacity
in the chief administrators, and a high average among the
subordinates: and the best organisation of such a government is that
which will best ensure the labour, develop the capacity, and place the
highest specimens of it in the situations of greatest trust.
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