They went out younger in those days; sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, were the usual ages. The usual age for Haileybury cadets was twenty. Clive, Warren Hastings, Nicholson and John Lawrence went out at eighteen, Henry Lawrence at seventeen, Meadows Taylor at fifteen. Many of the administrators were soldiers first, and they too went out young. Lord Roberts, for instance, landed in India when he was sixteen. Addiscombe cadets joined at sixteen or seventeen. When Haileybury was abolished the average age was raised to twenty-three or more, and at that age it now remains.
Thus, as the first year in India is also spent in training out there, a man is now not far from twenty-five before he is allowed to act independently; he used to be twenty-one or less. This is a great difference.
In England the age when a boy attains his majority and has full freedom before the law is twenty-one, and in order to elucidate this question I have tried to discover why the law of England fixed twenty-one. In Rome a boy was legally of age as regards his person at fourteen though he had a curator over his property till he was twenty-five. Therefore this age of twenty-one does not come from Roman law. It seems to have arisen from a general consensus of observation that at twenty-one the average young man is fit to be free and should be free. There seems to be about that age a critical mental stage of adolescence corresponding to the physical stage at fourteen. However this may be, there seems to be no doubt that to keep a young man in tutelage till he is twenty-four or twenty-five is bad for him. The powers of initiative and the sense of responsibility which mature at twenty-one atrophy thereafter if not fully used. And no book learning can replace this. Thus nowadays tutelage is too long continued.
Again, education began later in those days than now, and there was less of it. Boys ran wild far more than now, when they are cramped up in schools and conventions at a very early age.
Thus the men of old had individualities; they had not been steam-rollered flat by public school and university; their boyish enthusiasm and friendliness were still in them. They had no prejudices, had never heard of the Oriental mind, were not convinced beforehand that every Oriental was a liar and a thief, but were prepared to take men as they found them. They were willing and eager to learn. Their minds were open as yet to new impressions. They had not been "fortified by fixed principles" to "safeguard them" against acquiring any sympathy with Eastern peoples. Therefore they did so understand and sympathise.
If you will read the records of the past you will see this in a most marked degree. Englishmen had Indian friends; how rarely do they have such now! They knew the people's talk, their folk-lore and their tales. They looked on them as fellow-humans. And the feeling was reciprocated. Look, for instance, at how they kept the same servants all their service. Nowadays there is a general howl of the badness of Indian servants and their untrustworthiness. It was not so then. One of the most pleasing features of that old life was the affection often shown between masters and servants. Dickens has noted it. How much of that do you find now? Not much. A little still there is—who should know better than I? And if now it is so rare, where is the fault? Good masters make good servants. And it requires so little goodness in the master—only a little consideration, a friendly word sometimes. They give back far more than they receive. If there are many bad servants, who makes them bad? Their masters; those with whom they began their service, who did not know how to treat them, how to help them, how to keep them. At Arcot the Sepoys gave the rice to their officers and took the conjee themselves; how many regiments would do that now?
I do not say that there was ever close personal intercourse between English and Indian; there was not, and in the nature of things there could not be. But there were mutual consideration and mutual respect. "We have different ways and different customs; we have different skins. But underneath it all we are both men." So they thought in the old days.
Thus in the old days the embryo official came out young, free from prejudices, full of enthusiasms, ready to learn, to read, to mark, learn, and inwardly digest all phases of Oriental life about him. Even thirty years ago when I first went to India there were many of this type still left. They thought it their duty, as it was their pleasure, to study the people in order to understand what lay beneath their customs. It must be thirty years ago that an old civilian turned on me sharply when I made some ignorant remark about some Malabar custom and said: "The custom has arisen out of the circumstances of life and no peculiarity of nature in the people. All peoples are much alike in fundamentals, and great apparent differences are but superficial, and arise from environment."
The absurd doctrine of the "Oriental mind" had not then arisen to be an excuse for ignorance and want of understanding. Nowadays it is supposed to be the mark of culture to talk of it; to the old officials it would have been the mark of a fool; they thought it their duty to study the people.
But it is not so now. Young civilians come out with their minds already closed, and, as a rule, closed they remain. The harm is done in England before they start. Let me give instances.