and a member of the Bengal Civil Service who had won his place and a university degree to boot in fair and open competition with the sons of the English.  He was cultured, of the world, and, if report spoke truly, had wisely and, above all, sympathetically ruled a crowded district in South-Eastern Bengal.  He had been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there.  His name, if the Viceroy recollected aright, was Mr. Grish Chunder De, M. A. In short, did anybody see any objection to the appointment, always on principle, of a man of the people to rule the people?  The district in South-Eastern Bengal might with advantage, he apprehended, pass over to a younger civilian of Mr. G. C. De’s nationality (who had written a remarkably clever pamphlet on the political value of sympathy in administration); and Mr. G. C. De could be transferred northward to Kot-Kumharsen.  The Viceroy was averse, on principle, to interfering with appointments under control of the Provincial Governments.  He wished it to be understood that he merely recommended and advised in this instance.  As regarded the mere question of race, Mr. Grish Chunder De was more English than the English, and yet possessed of that peculiar sympathy and insight which the best among the best Service in the world could only win to at the end of their service.

The stern, black-bearded kings who sit about the Council-board of India divided on the step, with the inevitable result of driving the Very Greatest of All the Viceroys into the borders of hysteria, and a bewildered obstinacy pathetic as that of a child.

‘The principle is sound enough,’ said the weary-eyed Head of the Red Provinces in which Kot-Kumharsen lay, for he too held theories.  ’The only difficulty is—­’

’Put the screw on the District officials; brigade De with a very strong Deputy Commissioner on each side of him; give him the best assistant in the Province; rub the fear of God into the people beforehand; and if anything goes wrong, say that his colleagues didn’t back him up.  All these lovely little experiments recoil on the District-Officer in the end,’ said the Knight of the Drawn Sword with a truthful brutality that made the Head of the Red Provinces shudder.  And on a tacit understanding of this kind the transfer was accomplished, as quietly as might be for many reasons.

It is sad to think that what goes for public opinion in India did not generally see the wisdom of the Viceroy’s appointment.  There were not lacking indeed hireling organs, notoriously in the pay of a tyrannous bureaucracy, who more than hinted that His Excellency was a fool, a dreamer of dreams, a doctrinaire, and, worst of all, a trifler with the lives of men.  ‘The Viceroy’s Excellence Gazette,’ published in Calcutta, was at pains to thank ’Our beloved Viceroy for once more and again thus gloriously vindicating the potentialities of the Bengali nations for extended executive and administrative duties in foreign parts