Help me with this translation!

hmmm....this is my homework for the Saturday's English translation class....lacking general background information...it rather confuses me.  i need a deeper analysis of the sentence . could anybody here help me with this?

thanks in advance! with smile

This spirit of fair-play, which in the public school ,at any rate , is absorbed as the most inviolable  of traditions ,has stood our race in good stead in he professions and especially in the administration of dependencies ,where the obvious desire of the officials to deal justly and see fair-play in disputes between natives and Europeans has partly compensated for a want of sympathetic understanding ,which has kept the English strangers in lands of alien culture.

Thank you for your reply !

......where the obvious desire of the officials to deal justly and see fair-play in disputes between natives and Europeans has partly compensated for a want of sympathetic understanding ,which has kept the English strangers in lands of alien culture.

the meaning of " compensate" is unfamiliar to me. it likes a metaphor. and I think it is this verb that causes the trouble.