Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎452r] (28/238)

Suitable to the Present Circumstances of India? 241
ment, must from the nature of the case fail to afford
security until some one of them succeeds in swallowing up
the others, and so re-establishing the one indivisible State.
And note that the same result would follow as certainly,
though less immediately, from a stoppage in any one of the
three departments mentioned. If the police were to strike
work, the decrees of the courts would be waste paper. If
the courts ceased to sit, the police would not know whom to
protect and whom to arrest. If the army w'ere to disband
itself, it would not be very long before both police and judges
found their commissions superseded by those of some foreign
conqueror or native usurper. I need not waste time by
showing how the same chain of necessary interdependence
embraces also the legislative, diplomatic and financial
departments of Government. And I should hardly have
thought it worth while to demonstrate that it cannot be
made to embrace the Education Department, were it not
that the Education Commissioners of 1883 notice, without
either endorsing or repudiating, the contention that the
claims of this department stand exactly on the same level
as those of the others.
Suppose, then, a sudden suspension of all provincial and
municipal disbursements for education, the other administra
tive departments continuing to draw their usual remittances.
Would the whole machine be paralyzed ? Surely not.
Everything would go on as before, except that school-
managers would be compelled either to reduce their
establishments, or to raise their fees, or to increase their
subscription lists ; and would on the other hand be free to
modify their arrangements to suit the wishes of subscribers
and customers without waiting for the approval of the
Government Inspector. Whether this would be a change
for better or for worse I will consider presently ; for the
moment I am only concerned to insist that, at all events,
the consequences would not be so appalling as to silence all
pleadings for economy.
Look at the same matter from the taxpayer’s point of
THIRD SERIES. VOL. XIII. O