"Two modern British historians of India, while admitting the truth of this charge, have offered an explanation which may be stated in their own words: “Of general histories of British India, those written a century or more ago are, with hardly an exception, franker, fuller, and more interesting than those of the last fifty years. In days when no one dreamed that any one would ever be seditious to ask really fundamental questions (such as ‘What right have to be in India at all”), and when no one ever thought of any public but a British one, criticism was lively and well informed, judgment was passed without regard to political exigencies. Of late years, increasingly and no doubt naturally, all Indian questions have tended to be approached from the standpoint of administration: ‘Will this make for easier and quieter government?’ The writer of to-day inevitably has a world outside his own people, listening intently and as touchy as his own people as awift to take offence. ‘He that is not for us is against us’. This knowledge of an overhearing, even eavesdropping public, of being in partibus infidelium, exercises a constant silent censorship, which has made British-Indian history the worst patch in current scholarship."