It is difficult to define the colonial attitude, however academically, in a way that will satisfy both theeuropeans, principally English and French, who have ruled the empires, and the peoples who have been the direct or indirect subjects of that rule. Some elements stand out clearly. There was an enlightened self-interest that was rarely obscured. When Utilitarian doctrine had faded, the great servants of the East India Company, and then of the Imperial Crown of India, sometimes failed to see that Britain’s purposes were not all generous. On the other hand, it was always clear that the nabobs who returned, with fortunes they had earned by surviving the diseases of an alien climate, had given something at least in return. Far as it is from Jos. Sedley to the Bayard of India, the public view of empire included both. There is a difference between generations, but it is a difference of emphasis; the generations of Clive and Hastings lacked the righteous sense of mission of the age of Havelock and Outram; but surely they would have denied that Indians suffered by coming under their rule. A parallel conviction of mutual advantage governed the French in Algiers; and by the end of the century the ‘mission civilisatrice’; whether in its French or its British form, was a universal dogma.