What puzzles them is your constant disposition to
change, or as you call it, improvement. Their own life in every
detail being regulated by ancient usage, they cannot comprehend a
policy which is always bringing something new; they do not a bit
believe that the desire to make them comfortable and happy is the
root of it; they believe, on the contrary, that you are aiming at
something which they do not understand--that you mean to "take away
their religion;" in a word, that the end and object of all these continual
changes is to make Indians not what they are and what they like to be,
but something new and different from what they are, and what they
would not like to be.' In the East, in a word, we are attempting to put
new wine into old bottles-to pour what we can of a civilisation whose
spirit is progress into the form of a civilisation whose spirit is fixity,
and whether we shall succeed or not is perhaps the most interesting
question in an age abounding almost beyond example in questions of
political interest.
Historical inquiries show that the feeling of the Hindoos is the old
feeling, and that the feeling of the Englishman is a modern feeling.
' Old law rests,' as Sir Henry Maine puts it, 'not on contract but
on status.
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