And as for the hints thrown out that the newly-published plague regulations were but a sop, a blind, hiding a very different policy; what then? Was it possible for any government to do more than legislate for the present? Who but fools imagined that it could or would bind itself to definite action in conditions which could only be guessed at?
So the tale of unreality went on. Here was a well-written, well-reasoned article on the cow-killing grievance; but Chris, being a wielder of the pen himself, happened to know the writer, and could remember seeing him eating beefsteaks at the Temple dinners.
Again, in a paragraph headed 'Government Greed and Peasant Poverty.' Could any detail overcome the indubitable fact that India had the cheapest civilised government in the world?
He ran his eye down another column, and caught the phrase 'social progress' above a signature which he knew to be that of a man who had just married a child of ten.
And what was this? 'The Government to which is opposed the entire intelligence of the nation!' Brave words these, when the proportion between such intelligence and the general ignorance was withheld! What was it? Ten thousand to one!
'The political training of the mass of the people is still, it is true, somewhat incomplete.' It might well be that when the percentage of mere literates was almost negligible.
'Even the Mohammedan policy was better than the English one. True, it did not allow freedom of the press....'
Ye gods! Freedom of the press when there was not a newspaper in all the length and breadth of the land! Could unreality, bunkum, call it what you will, go further than that?
Chris pushed himself back from the table, back from the boiled egg, back from the newspaper, back, so far as he could, from himself, with an odd sound between a laugh, a sob, and a curse.
Was that all? Was that sort of ungenerous, unreliable, almost unimaginable drivel the only indictment which such as he had to bring against those who had depolarised life? Who had neither given India a creed, nor taken one away? Was that the only arraignment for the tyranny of pain such as his?