Kipling’s Proof
If officials in the Raj ever forgot who their boss was, they would bring the whole government down about their ears.
1889
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
© Maxwell Hamilton, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic.
Richmond Lock footbridge on a misty day in London. Under the cloak of humour, Kipling was reminding the governing classes in the British Raj that they must not play god to the people of India, because they would answer to God for how they treated them. In a society shaped by traditional Christian morality, said Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) in his examination of Democracy in America, “the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field; whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount.”
Introduction
In Kipling’s short story, Aurelian McGoggin, a British bureaucrat, has been boring everyone in Shimla with his conviction that there is neither God nor Hereafter, so we can only worry along somehow for the good of Humanity. In a tongue-in-cheek aside, Kipling gave a Raj-shaped twist to an argument that had been made by political thinkers from Moses to Alexis de Tocqueville.
I DO not say a word against this creed. It was made up in Town, where there is nothing but machinery and asphalt and building — all shut in by the fog. Naturally, a man grows to think that there is no one higher than himself, and that the Metropolitan Board of Works made everything. But in this country, where you really see humanity — raw, brown, naked humanity — with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies away.
Life, in India, is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one in particular at the head of affairs. For this reason. The Deputy is above the Assistant, the Commissioner above the Deputy, the Lieutenant-Governor above the Commissioner, and the Viceroy above all four, under the orders of the Secretary of State, who is responsible to the Empress. If the Empress be not responsible to her Maker — if there is no Maker for her to be responsible to — the entire system of Our administration must be wrong. Which is manifestly impossible.*
Abridged from ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’ (1889), by Rudyard Kipling.
* “Without a standard of justice external to human reason” said Margaret Thatcher in her James Bryce Lecture (1996) “there will be no necessary restraint on what men may legitimately do. … Religion teaches us that there is something higher than mankind, and therefore a need to restrain oneself in accordance with those higher standards.” See also US President John Adams on A Moral and Religious People.
