Our second story is the story of Aurelian McGoggin.  Aurelian McGoggin had read too many books, and he had too many theories.  He also had a creed:  “It was not much of a creed.  It only proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry along somehow for the good of humanity.”  McGoggin had found it an excellent creed for a Government office, and he brought it to India and tried to teach it to all his friends.  His friends had found that life in India is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one particular at the head of affairs, and they objected.  They also warned McGoggin not to be too good for his work, and not to insist on doing it better than it needed to be done, because people in India wanted all their energy for bare life.  But McGoggin would not be warned, and one day, when he had steadily overworked and overtalked through the hot season, he was suddenly interrupted at the club, in the middle of an oration.  The doctor called it aphasia; but McGoggin only knew that he was struck sensationally dumb:  “Something had wiped his lips of speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and he was afraid.  For a moment he had lost his mind and memory—­which was preposterous and something for which his philosophy did not allow.  Henceforth he did not appear to know so much as he used to about things Divine.”

McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his story is really a tract—­a tract whose purpose is to convey that India is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism.  Mr Kipling’s India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips.  You do not talk of Humanity in India, because in India “you really see humanity—­raw, brown, naked humanity—­with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot.”  Mr Kipling’s Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India, it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.

Tods’ Amendment and The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin are printed among Plain Tales from the Hills.  They look forward to a whole series of Anglo-Indian tales which present Mr Kipling’s idea of the English in India.  Out of his later books we can illustrate a hundred times his conviction that in India the simplest wisdom is the best.