civilian learns, a lesson which is rarely omitted from any of Mr Kipling’s Indian stories, is that practical men are better for being ready to take the world as they find it.  The men who worship the Great God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, most terrible, One-eyed, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk—­men who are set on saving their own particular business—­have no time for saving faces and phrases.  They have small respect for a principle.  They have seen too many principles break down under the particular instance.  Hence there is in all Mr Kipling’s work a disrespect of things which are printed and made much of in the contemporary British press; and this, again, has encouraged the idea that he is “reactionary,” contemptuous of the humanities, and enemy of all the best poets and philosophers.

It will perhaps be well to look a little closely at one or two of Mr Kipling’s Indian series.  They will help us to realise how the charges we are discussing have arisen and exactly how unreasonable they are.  The first of two excellent examples is the story of Tods’ Amendment. Tods’ Amendment is the story of a Bill brought in by the Supreme Legislative Council of India.  Tods was an English baby of six, and he mixed on friendly terms with Indians in the bazaar and with members of the Supreme Legislative Council.  The Council was at this time devising a new scheme of land tenure which aimed at “safeguarding the interests” of a few hundred thousand cultivators of the Punjab.  The Bill was beautiful on paper; and the Legal Member, who knew Tods, was settling the “minor details.”  The weak part of the business was that European legislators, dealing with natives, are often puzzled to know which details are the major and which the minor.  Also the Native Member was from Calcutta, and knew nothing about the Punjab.  Nevertheless, the Bill was known to be a beautiful Bill till Tods happened one evening to be sitting on the knee of the Legal Member, and to hear him mention The Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment.  Tods had heard the bazaar talking of a new plan for the Ryotwari, as bazaars talk when there is no white man to overhear.  Tods began to prattle, and the Legal Member began to listen, till he soon realised that there was only one drawback to the beautiful Bill.  The beautiful Bill, in short, was altogether wrong, more especially in the Council’s pet clause which so clearly “safeguarded the interests of the tenant.”  It therefore came about that the rough draft of the Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment was put away in the Legal Member’s private paper-box—­“and, opposite the twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal Member, are the words, ‘Tods’ Amendment.’”

The moral of the tale is not obscure.  A baby who runs in the bazaar is better able to legislate for India than a Supreme Legislative Council.  India, in short, is a vast and uncertain land, whose ways are not always learned in a lifetime by the men whose business it is.  The argument a fortiori—­namely, that amiable and humane political philosophers, well bred in the latest European theories of government, are even less likely to be infallible—­need not be pursued.