"You can be quite kind about it, you know," I suggested.
"Is that what you are to Government," he asked, "when you disagree with them?"
"I try to be," I said. "I put myself as far as I can in their position, and give them what I would like to receive myself."
Again it was quite a new idea to him that anyone should want criticism. He had been educated to believe that any doubt of what authority said was a sin, perhaps inevitable sometimes, but anyhow always to be concealed; and he had been told that everyone, from the Creator down, resented criticisms and would annihilate the critic. That anyone should prefer knowing the truth even if it prove him wrong seemed to him impossible. He did not like ever to admit he had been wrong. He thought truth was absolute and fixed, whereas it is relative and always growing. He had, unconsciously, the mind of the Pharisee in the Temple.
Now these three instances will point out what seems to me to be wrong in the previous training of young men sent to India, and in fact in all training. Their minds instead of being cultivated are stifled. They are taught to disregard fact and to accept authority in place of it. They are not only to do what they are told, which is right; but to think what they are told, which is wrong. And they do. They are taught to repeat in parrot manner stock phrases and imagine they are thinking. And this habit once acquired is difficult to get rid of. With most it never is got rid of. You will, for instance, find these shibboleths of the "disappearing Burman" and his "laziness" repeated by the highest officials who have been longest in the country, all of whom have facts in their office disproving them. And these are not the only prejudices nor even the principal. They are innumerable and serious. You will in consequence find that administration and even legislation are affected by them. The whole attitude of Government to the people it governs is vitiated in this way. There is a want of knowledge and understanding. In place of it are fixed opinions based usually on prejudice or on faulty observation, or on circumstances which have changed, and they are never corrected. Young secretaries read up back circulars, and repeat their errors indefinitely. That is "following precedent." They will quote you complacently:
"Freedom broadening slowly down
From precedent to precedent"
and never see the absurdity of the lines. Freedom is the disregard of precedent where the precedent is wrong or out of date.
There is throughout nearly all English officials (and non-officials) in India not only a disregard of facts about them, but a want of any real sympathy with the people among whom they live, which is astonishing. They often like the "natives," they often are kind to them, wish them well, and do their best for them, but that is not sympathy. Sympathy is understanding. It is being able to put yourself in another's place.
I could tell many stories illustrating this want of understanding. One will suffice. An official I knew well, an excellent fellow, kind-hearted, humorous, and able, holding a good position then and a high one now, with a charming wife, living amongst the Burmese and ruling them, with Burmese servants, clerks, and peons, and continual Burmese visitors of all classes, called his dog "Alaung." Now "Alaung" means something very similar to "Messiah," and is a sacred word. A parallel would be if, say, a Parsee in England called his dog "Christ." I have seen this official's servants wince when he called out to his dog. Yet I am sure it never struck him that there was anything out of the way in this nomenclature. I am sure he never dreamed he would hurt anyone's feelings by it, or he would not have done it. He certainly intended no jeer at the religion of his subordinates. It was simply that he wanted understanding.
Now sympathy is inherent in all children, and is the means whereby they acquire all the real knowledge they have. A girl being a mother to her doll, a boy being a soldier or hunter, is exercising and training the most valuable of all gifts—imaginative sympathy. It is the only emotion which brings real knowledge of the world about you. Without it you never understand anything.