Actual India

stricts. In this chapter I propose to begin at the bottom, inasmuch as the executive responsibility is very largely devolved upon the units who compose the great body of British administration in India. That body, practically speaking, is the Indian Civil Service, with its subsidiary branches. Unlike the civil services of other countries, the Indian Civil Service is a special department with its own entrance qualifications, its own grades, its own emoluments, and its particular duties. When we speak of the Civil Service at Home we include in the term all classes of Government servants. The Secretary to the Board of Trade and the postal clerk who sells you a shilling's worth of stamps are equally members of the Civil Service. But the Indian Civil Service does not include all the Departments of Government, such as the Public Works, the Medical, the Police, the Postal, the Educational Departments, and so forth. These are run on their own lines, and though a member of the Civil Service may be put at the head, say, of the Police, or the Post Office in a province, such departments are necessarily manned by officers with special qualifications, whose careersare entirely devoted to those branches of the administration. The Indian Civil Service consists of a body of men appointed after examination in England, to whom are entrusted the administrative, the executive, and the judicial charge of the districts into which India is divided, and the conduct of the various bure...