"Moral idealism not only prevented the British from leaving India between the world wars, it also created the peculiarly disadvantageous circumstances in which they stayed on. For it was the moral idealism of the liberals – first of the Liberal Party proper, and later of liberals in the Labour and Conservative parties – which gratuitously helped in raising up Indian discontent and the demand for independence in Britain's face. British higher education in India...turned out not the engineers, scientists and technicians which India needed, but unemployables of "liberal" education, good at best for low-grade clerking, but believing themselves to be a deprived élite – apt material for political dreaming and scheming... The form of British education in India was a fundamental mistake. As the chief executive of a great American company...told an American journalist in the 1920s: "If I were running the country, I'd close every university tomorrow. It was a crime to teach them to be clerks, lawyers and politicians till they'd been taught to raise food." Having created an intelligentsia, the British proceeded to encourage it, step by step, to entertain larger and larger political ambitions."