The question of the admission of Indians to the Covenanted Civil Service was perhaps the most important single issue connected with the British empire in India during the 19th century. The administration and the political security of the raj both depended very largely on this civil service. It was for this reason that, in 1793, important administrative positions were restricted to Europeans. Natives were thought to lack political reliability and personal morality; an additional disqualification was their lack of familiarity with Western principles of judicial administration. The objectionable legal statement of discrimination was later replaced by an admirable series of pronouncements of equality. Nevertheless, the Indian Civil Service was still, in the middle of the 19th century, a European elite body both in composition and function. There thus existed a conflict between professed intentions and practical reality. This antithesis underlay the development of the issue from the committee-room cliché that it was in 1853 to the crucial political problem that it had become by 1879.