English settlers have friends at home, have organs, have
access to the public; they have a common language and common ideas
with their countrymen: any complaint by an Englishman is more
sympathetically heard, even if no unjust preference is intentionally
accorded to it. Now, if there be a fact to which all experience
testifies, it is that when a country holds another in subjection,
the individuals of the ruling people who resort to the foreign country
to make their fortunes are of all others those who most need to be
held under powerful restraint. They are always one of the chief
difficulties of the government. Armed with the prestige and filled
with the scornful overbearingness of the conquering nation, they
have the feelings inspired by absolute power without its sense of
responsibility.
Among a people like that India the utmost efforts of the public
authorities are not enough for the effectual protection of the weak
against the strong; and of all the strong, the European settlers are
the strongest. Wherever the demoralising effect of the situation is
not in a most remarkable degree corrected by the personal character of
the individual, they think the people of the country mere dirt under
their feet: it seems to them monstrous that any rights of the
natives should stand in the way of their smallest pretensions: the
simplest act of protection to the inhabitants against any act of power
on their part which they may consider useful to their commercial
objects, they denounce, and sincerely regard, as an injury.
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