This book presents a unique record of the last seventeen years of the British Raj as seen through the eyes of a young officer of the Indian Political Service. Taken from Norvall Mitchell's own original memoir, written in the 1070's, his son, David, has edited the work to produce an account of a man for whom improving the lot of the masses, those "quiet people of India," met with ever-increasing frustration by the "dead hand" of British Indian bureaucracy.