No More Learning

The Government sends out weird Civilians now and again; but McGoggin
was the queerest exported for a long time. He was clever--brilliantly
clever--but his cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping to
the study of the vernaculars, he had read some books written by a
man called Comte, I think, and a man called Spencer, and a Professor
Clifford. [You will find these books in the Library. ] They deal with
people's insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs.
There was no order against his reading them; but his Mamma should have
smacked him.

They fermented in his head, and he came out to India with a rarefied
religion over and above his work. It was not much of a creed. It only
proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and
that you must worry along somehow for the good of Humanity.

One of its minor tenets seemed to be that the one thing more sinful than
giving an order was obeying it. At least, that was what McGoggin said;
but I suspect he had misread his primers.

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,
and most folk come back to simpler theories.
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. At Home men are to be excused. They are stalled up a good
deal and get intellectually "beany. " When you take a gross, "beany"
horse to exercise, he slavers and slobbers over the bit till you can't
see the horns.

But the bit is there just the same. Men do not get "beany" in India. The
climate and the work are against playing bricks with words.

If McGoggin had kept his creed, with the capital letters and the endings
in "isms," to himself, no one would have cared; but his grandfathers on
both sides had been Wesleyan preachers, and the preaching strain came
out in his mind. He wanted every one at the Club to see that they had no
souls too, and to help him to eliminate his Creator. As a good many men
told him, HE undoubtedly had no soul, because he was so young, but it
did not follow that his seniors were equally undeveloped; and, whether
there was another world or not, a man still wanted to read his papers in
this. "But that is not the point--that is not the point! " Aurelian used
to say.