Nor has the chasm of race antipathy been at all narrowed. All the causes of ill-will noted by me in 1884 are still existent in an aggravated form, and find stronger ground of action now; and there is one besides, unnoticed then, which may perhaps be added. There can be no question that the twenty-five years which have elapsed since 1884 have seen a change in the attitude of the white races of mankind towards their fellow men of other hue and lineage, and in their avowed conduct towards them. The old religious teaching, Christianity’s best claim to the world’s regard, was that all men were brothers at least in the sight of God, but this has given place to a pseudo-scientific doctrine of the fundamental inequalities of the human kind which, true as a statement of fact, has been exaggerated and made political use of to excuse white selfishness and white exclusiveness, and to reinforce the white man’s pretension of rightful dominion over the non-white world at large. I call this “pseudo-science,” because nothing really of the sort exists under the world’s natural law. Darwin’s rule of the “Struggle of Nature” and the “Survival of the fittest” included no assertion of superiority in one race rather than another, giving it dominion over the rest, nor has any species in the world’s natural history prevailed in this way. Its survival has been, not by its greater strength or even by its greater cunning, but by its better adaptability to its local surroundings. Yet it is common to hear Darwin quoted as an authority favourable to imperial domination and race intolerance in lands unsuited to European survival, and it is precisely under conditions such as we find in India that these arguments find most favour with Englishmen. As a rule the English in the East, missionaries apart, are not much of Christians, and their tendency is to become less and less so in the progress of modern ideas.
On the other hand the Indian races, many of them quite as intellectual as the European, have been far from standing still. Quite apart from such education as they have been receiving in Government schools and colleges, the knowledge of the facts of the Western World and its ways has been spread far and wide among them by their ever-increasing intercourse with European travellers, and the facilities they have themselves acquired of travel. If every Government school in India were closed to-morrow, and every native newspaper suppressed, I doubt if the spread of such information would be greatly checked, this class of facts being conveyed from mouth to mouth rather than by writing; and it is at any rate certain that, at least in the towns of India, Englishmen are appraised pretty generally at their real value, and their moral weaknesses and intellectual limitations are known to every one, even the poorest.