THICK RED TAPE

that is not to say that the governing class need be recruited entirely
from the well-born and well-to-do. It is the tradition which it
inherits that count, not the money or the blood.

In the public service generally, at home and abroad, there is
much to be said for the recruitment of the higher official grades,
or the commissioned officers of the armed Services, from a wider
social range, and for making indeed a special effort to recruit
those who by virtue of their own experience and upbringing have a
sympathetic understanding of the lives and outlook of the common
people in the cottage homes, whether of their own country or of
others. But the same argument does not necessarily hold good in
regard to official or military posts in parts of the dependent Empire
where the common people have utterly different economic stan-
dards and social lives from those of Europe. Experience in India
and elsewhere suggests that it is the educated classes of Britain
who have the most sympathetic understanding of the common
people around them.

Even so, the best among them cannot enable an alien officialdom
to identify itself with the life of the people. The district officer
lives close to the people in the rural areas, talks with people of all
classes, settles their disputes and has part in their local affairs; but
always as a superior, aloof, 'different3 being. When he becomes a
'secretariat-wallah' he grows even more superior and abstracted
from the common way of life. The British subaltern in the Indian
Army lived close to his men, talked their language, tried to under-
stand their cares; but he could not share their domestic lives or
identify himself with them. When he rose to staff rank he was too
apt to lose such human contact with the humble illiterate Indian
as he once had.

As the functions of government grow ever more elaborate, and
warfare ever more complicated and mechanized, that kind of
separation is still further enforced and extended. The young
British LC.S. officer of our day, working in an Indian district.,
was probably as devoted to the people in his charge, and as anxious
to learn and understand, not only their languages and customs,
but also their ways of thought and feeling, as were his forebears
whose names are still upon the lips of grandchildren and great-
grandchildren of the Indians whom they loved. But throughout

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