The proud man’s contumely, the oppressor’s wrong,
The proud man’s contumely, the oppressor’s wrong,
The proud man’s contumely, the oppressor’s wrong,
The proud man’s contumely, the oppressor’s wrong,
it is difficult to repress the burning indignation of one’s spirit. What shame, what disgrace, that under the laws of England, and in a country to which we owe so much wealth and power, such a system of reckless and desperate injustice should for a long series of years have been practising! But if it be difficult to read of it without curses and imprecations, what must it have been to bear? How must the wretched, hopeless, harassed, persecuted, and outraged people have called on Brahma for that tenth Avatar which should sweep their invincible, their iron-handed and iron-hearted oppressors, as a swarm of locusts from their fair land! Let any one imagine what must be the state of confusion when the zemindars, or higher collectors of the revenues were thus plagued in the sphere of their arduous duties, and called out of it, to the distant capital. When they were degraded in the eyes, and removed from the presence of the ryots, what must have been the natural consequence, but neglect and license on the part of the ryot, only too happy to obtain a little temporary ease? But the ryots themselves did not escape, as we have already seen. Such, however, continued this dismal state of things to the very end of the century. Lord Cornwallis complained in 1790, “that excepting the class of shroffs and banyans, who reside almost entirely in great towns, the inhabitants of these provinces were hastily advancing to a general state of poverty and wretchedness.” Lord Cornwallis projectedhisplans, and in 1802, Sir Henry Strachey, in answer to interrogatories sent to the Indian judges,drew a gloomy picture of the result of all the schemes of finance and judicature that had been adopted. He represented that the zemindars, by the sale of their lands, in default of the payment of their stipulated revenue, were almost universally destroyed, or were reduced to the condition of the lowest ryots. That, in one year (1796) nearly one tenth of all the lands in Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, had been advertised for sale. That in two years alone, of the trial of the English courts, the accumulated causes threatened to arrest the course of justice: in one single district of Burdwan more than thirty thousand suits were before the judge; and that no candidate for justice could expect it in the course of an ordinary life. “The great men, formerly,” said Sir Henry, “were the Mussulman rulers, whose places we have taken, and the Hindoo zemindars. These two classes are now ruined and destroyed.” He adds, “exaction of revenue is now, I presume, and, perhaps, always was, the most prevailing crime throughout the country; and I know not how it is that extortioners appear to us in any other light than that of the worst and most pernicious species of robbers.” He tells us that the lands of the Mahrattas in the neighbourhood of his district, Midnapore, were more prosperous than ours, though they were without regular courts of justice, or police. “Where,” says he, “no battles are fought, the ryots remain unmolested by military exactions, and the zemindars are seldom changed, the country was in high cultivation, and the population frequently superior to our own.”
Such was the condition and treatment of the natives of Indostan, at the commencement of the present century. In another chapter, on our policy and conduct in this vast and important region—it remains only to take a rapid glance at the effect of these two centuries of despotism upon these subjected millions, and to inquire what we have since been doing towards a better state of things,—more auspicious to them, and honourable to ourselves.
We are accustomed to govern India—a country which God never gave us, by means which God will never justify.
Lord Erskine—Speech on Stockdale’s Trial.
Wehave traced something of the misery which a long course of avarice and despotism has inflicted on the natives of India, but we have not taken into the account its moral effect upon them. Generation after generation of Englishmen flocked over to Indostan, to gather a harvest of wealth, and to return and enjoy it at home. Generation after generation of Indians arose to create this wealth for their temporary visitors, and to sink deeper and deeper themselves into poverty. Happy had it been for them, had poverty and physical wretchedness come alone. But the inevitable concomitant of slavery and destitution appeared with them, and to every succeeding generation in a more appalling form—demoralization, vast as their multitude and dreadful as their condition. They were not more unhappy than they were degraded in spirit and debased in feeling. Ages of virtual though not nominal slavery, beneath Mahomedan and Christian masters, had necessarily done their usual work on the Hindus. They had long ceased to be the gentle, the pure-minded, the merciful Hindus. They had become cruel, thievish, murderous, licentious, as well as blindly superstitious. They had seen no religious purity, no moral integrity practised—how were they to become pure and honest? They had felt only cruelty and injustice—how were they to be anything but cruel and unjust? They had seen from age to age, from day to day, from hour to hour, every sacred tie of blood or honour, every moral obligation, every great and eternal principle of human action violated around them—how were they to reverence such things? How were they to regard them but as solemn and unprofitable mockeries? They were accordingly corrupted into a mean, lying, depraved, and perfidious generation—could the abject tools of a money-scraping race of conquerors be anything else?—was it probable? was it possible? Philosophers and poetical minds, when such, now and then, reached India, were astonished to find, instead of those delicate and spiritual children of Brahma, of whom they had read such delightful accounts—a people so sordid, and in many instances so savage and cruel. They had not calculated, as they might have done, the certain consequences of long years of slavery’s most fatal inflictions. Whatan eternal debt of generous and Christian retribution do we owe India for all this! What, indeed, are the pangs we have occasioned, the poverty we have created, the evils of all kinds that we have perpetrated, to the moral degradation we have induced, and the gross darkness, gross superstition, the gross sensuality we have thus, in fact, fostered and perpetuated? Had we appeared in India as Christians instead of conquerors; as just merchants instead of subtle plotters, shunning the name of tyrants while we aimed at the most absolute tyranny; had we been as conspicuous for our diffusion of knowledge as for our keen, ceaseless, and insatiable gathering of coin; long ago that work would have been done which is but now beginning, and our power would have acquired the most profound stability in the affections and the knowledge of the people.
At the period of which I have been speaking—the end of the last and the opening of the present century, the character of the Hindus, as drawn by eye witnesses of the highest authority, was most deplorable. Even Sir William Jones, than whom there never lived a man more enthusiastic in his admiration of the Hindu literature and antiquities, and none more ready to see all that concerned this people in sunny hues—even he, when he had had time to observe their character, was compelled to express his surprise and disappointment. He speaks of their cruelties with abhorrence: in his charge to the grand jury at Calcutta, June 10th, 1787, he observed, “Perjury seems to be committed by the meanest, and encouraged by some of the better sort of the Hindus and Mussulmans with as little remorse as if it were a proof of ingenuity, or even ofmerit”—that he had “no doubt that affidavits of any imaginary fact might be purchased in the markets of Calcutta as readily as any other article—and that, could the most binding form of religious obligation be hit upon, there would be found few consciences to bind.”
All the travellers and historians of the time, Orme, Buchanan, Forster, Forbes, Scott Waring, etc., unite in bearing testimony to their grossness, filth, and disregard of their words; their treachery, cowardice, and thievishness; their avarice, equal to that of the whites, and their cunning and duplicity more than European; their foul language and quarrelsome habits—all the features of a people depraved by hereditary oppression and moral neglect. Their horrid and barbarous superstitions, by which thousands of victims are destroyed every year, are now familiar to all Europe. Every particular of these evil lineaments of character were most strikingly attested by the Indian judges, in their answers to the circular of interrogatories put to them in 1801, already alluded to. They all coincided in describing the general moral character of the inhabitants as at the lowest pitch of infamy; that very few exceptions to that character were to be found; that there was no species of fraud or villany that the higher classes would not be guilty of; and that, in the lower classes, were to be added, murder, robbery, adultery, perjury, etc., on the slightest occasion. One of them, the magistrate of Juanpore, added, “I have observed, among the inhabitants of this country, some possessed of abilities qualified to rise to eminence in other countries,but a moral, virtuous man, I have never met amongst them.”
Mr. Grant described the Bengalese as depraved and dishonest to a degree to which Europe could furnish no parallel; that they were “cunning, servile, intriguing, false, and hypocritically obsequious; that they, however, indemnified themselves for their passiveness to their superiors by their tyranny, cruelty, and violence to those in their power.” Amongst themselves he says, “discord, hatred, abuse, slanders, injuries, complaints, and litigations prevail to a surprising degree. No stranger can sit down among them without being struck with the temper of malevolent contention and animosity as a prominent feature in the character of the society. It is seen in every village: the inhabitants live amongst each other in a sort of repulsive state. Nay, it enters into almost every family: seldom is there a household without its internal divisions and lasting enmities, most commonly, too, on the score of interest. The women, too, partake of this spirit of discord. Held in slavish subjection by the men, they rise in furious passions against each other, which vent themselves in such loud, virulent, and indecent railings, as are hardly to be heard in any other part of the world.... Benevolence has been represented as a leading principle in the minds of the Hindus; but those who make this assertion know little of their character. Though a Hindu would shrink with horror from the idea of directly slaying a cow, which is a sacred animal amongst them, yet he who drives one in his cart, galled and excoriated as she is by the yoke, beats her unmercifully from hour to hour, without any care or consideration of the consequence.” Mr. Fraser Tytler, Lord Teignmouth, Sir James Mackintosh, and others, only expand the dark features of this melancholy picture; we need not therefore dwell largely upon it. The French missionary, the Abbé Dubois, and Mr. Ward, the English one, bear a like testimony. The latter, on the subject of Hindu humanity, asks—“Are these men and women, too, who drag their dying relations to the banks of rivers, at all seasons, day and night, and expose them to the heat and cold in the last agonies of death, without remorse; who assist men to commit self-murder, encouraging them to swing with hooks in their backs, to pierce their tongues and sides—to cast themselves on naked knives or bury themselves alive—throw themselves in rivers, from precipices, and under the cars of their idols;—who murder their own children—burying them alive, throwing them to the alligators, or hanging them up alive in trees, for the ants and crows, before their own doors, or by sacrificing them to the Ganges;—who burn alive, amidst savage shouts, the heart-broken widow, by the hands of her own son, and with the corpse of a deceased father;—who every year butcher thousands of animals, at the call of superstition, covering themselves with blood, consigning their carcases to the dogs, and carrying their heads in triumph through the streets? are these the benignant Hindus.”
It may be said that these cruelties are the natural growth of their superstitions. True; but, up to the period in question, who had endeavoured to correct, or who cared for their superstitions so that they paid their taxes? To this hour, or, at least, till but yesterday, many of these bloody superstitions have had the actual sanction of the British countenance! To this hour the dreadful indications of their cruel and treacherous character, apart from their superstitions,from time to time affright Europe. We have latterly heard much of the horrible deeds of the Thugs and Phasingars. Where such dreadful associations and habits are prevalent to the extent described, there must be a most monstrous corruption of morals, shocking neglect of the people, and consequent annihilation of everything like social security and civilization. In what, indeed, does the practice and temper of the Thugs differ from those of the Decoits, who abounded at the period in question? These were gangs of robbers who associated for their purposes, and practised by subtle subterfuge or open violence, as best suited the occasion. They went in troops, and made a common assault on houses and property, or dispersed themselves under various disguises, to inveigle their victims into their power. Mr. Dowdeswell, in a report to government, in 1809, says, “robbery, rape, and murder itself are not the worst figures in this horrid and disgusting picture. An expedient of common occurrence with the Decoits, merely to induce a confession of property supposed to be concealed, is to burn the proprietor with straws or torches until he discloses the property or perishes in the flames.” He mentions one man who was convicted of having committed fifteen murders in nineteen days, and adds that, “volumes might be filled with the atrocities of the Decoits, every line of which would make the blood run cold with horror.” He does, indeed, give some details of them of the most amazing and harrowing description.
Sir Henry Strachey in his Report already quoted, says, “the crime of decoity, in the district of Calcutta, has, I believe, greatly increased since the Britishadministration of justice. The number of convicts confined at the six stations of this division (independent of Zillah twenty-four pergunnahs) is about 4000. Of themprobably nine-tenths are decoits. Besides these, some hundreds of late years have been transported. The number of persons convicted of decoity, however great it may appear, is certainly small in proportion to those who are guilty of the crime. At Midnapore I find, by the reports of the police darogars, that in the year 1802, a period of peace and tranquillity, they sent intelligence of no less than ninety-three robberies, most of them, as usual, committed by large gangs. With respect to fifty-one of these robberies, not a man was taken, and for the remaining forty-two, very few, frequently only one or two in each gang.” Other judges describe the extent to which decoity existed, as being much vaster than was generally known, and calculated to excite the most general terror throughout the country.
This is an awful picture of a people approaching to one hundred millions, and of a great and splendid country, which has been for the most part in our hands for more than a century. It only remains now to inquire what has been done since the opening of the nineteenth century for the instruction and general amelioration of the condition of this vast multitude of human beings, and thereby for our own justification as a Christian nation. Warren Hastings said most truly, that throwing aside all pretences of any other kind that many were disposed to set up, the simple truth was that “by the sword India had been acquired, and by the sword it must be maintained.” If the forcible conquest of a country be, therefore, a crimeagainst the rights of nations and the principles of religion, what retribution can we make for our national offences, except by employing our power to make the subjected people happy and virtuous? But if we do not even hold conquest to be a crime, or war to be unchristian, where is the man that will not deem that we have assumed an awful responsibility on the plainest principles of the gospel, by taking into our hands the fate of so many millions of human creatures, thus degraded, thus ignorant and unhappy? It is impossible either to “do justice, to love mercy, or to walk humbly before God,” without as zealously seeking the social and eternal benefit of so great a people, as we have sought, and still seek, our own advantage, in the possession of their wealth. Over this important subject I am unfortunately bound to pass, by my circumscribed limits, in a hasty manner. The subject would require a volume. It is with pleasure, however, that we can point to certain great features in the modern history of improvement in India. It is with pleasure that we can say that some of the most barbarous rites of the Hindu superstitions have been removed. That infanticide, and the burning of widows have been abolished by the British influence; and that though the horrible immolations of Juggernaut are not terminated, they are no longer so unblushingly sanctioned, and even encouraged by British interference. These are great steps in the right path. To Colonel Walker, and Mr. Duncan, the governor of Bombay, immortal thanks and honour are due, for first leading the way in this track of great reforms, by at once discouraging, dissuading from, and finally abolishing infanticide in Guzerat. One of the most beneficial acts of theMarquis Wellesley’s government, was to put this horrible custom down in Saugur. How little anything, however, but the extraction of revenue had throughout all the course of our dominion in India been regarded till the present century, the Christian Researches of Mr. Buchanan made manifest. The publication of that book, coming as it did from a gentleman most friendly to our authorities there, was the commencement of a new era in our Indian history. It at once turned, by the strangeness of its details, the eyes of all the religious world on our Indian territories, and excited a feeling which more than any other cause has led to the changes which have hitherto been effected. At that period (1806), in making a tour through the peninsula of Indostan, he discovered that everything like attention to the moral or religious condition of either natives or colonists was totally neglected. That all the atrocious superstitions of the Hindus were not merely tolerated, but even sanctioned, and some of them patronized by our government. That though there were above twenty English regiments in India at that time,not one of them had a chaplain, (p. 80). That in Ceylon, where the Dutch had once thirty-two Protestant churches, we had then but two English clergymen in the whole island! (p. 93). That there were in it by computation 500,000 natives professing Christianity; who, however, “had not one complete copy of the Scriptures in the vernacular tongue,” and consequently, they were fast receding into paganism, (p. 95). That the very English were more notorious for their infidelity than for anything else, and by their presence did infinite evil to the natives. That, in that very year, when the governorof Bombay announced to the supreme government at Calcutta, his determination to attempt to extirpate infanticide from Guzerat—a practice, be it remembered, which in that province alonedestroyed annually 3000 children!23—this cool commercial body warned him, not “even for thespeculativesuccess of that benevolent project, to hazard theessential interestsof the state!” (p. 52). That all the horrors of burning widows were perpetrated to the amount of from seven hundred toone thousandof such diabolical scenes annually. That the disgusting and gory worship of Juggernaut was not merely practised, but was actually licensed and patronized by the English government. That very year it had imposed a tax on all pilgrims going to the temples in Orissa and Bengal, had appointed British officers, British gentlemen to superintend the management of this hideous worship and the receipt of its proceeds. That the internal rites of the temple consisted in one loathsome scene of prostitution, hired bands of women being kept for the purpose; its outward rites the crushing of human victims under the car of the idol.
Thus the Indian government had, in fact, instead of discouraging such practices in the natives, taken up the trade of public murderers, and keepers of houses of ill fame, and that under the sacred name of religious tolerance! A more awful state of things it is impossible to conceive; nor one which more forcibly demonstrates what the whole of this history proclaims, that there is no state of crime, corruption, or villany, which by being familiarized to them, and coming to regardthem as customary, educated men, and men of originally good hearts and pure consciences, will not eventually practise with composure, and even defend as right. What defences have we not heard in England of these very practices? It was not till recently that public opinion was able to put down the immolation of widows,24nor till this very moment that the Indian government has been shamed out of trading in murder and prostitution in the temples of Juggernaut. Thus, for more than thirty years has this infamous trade at Juggernaut been persisted in, from the startling exposure of it by Buchanan, and in the face of all the abhorrence and remonstrances of England—for more than a century and a half it has been tolerated. The plea on which it has been defended is that of delicacy towards theopinionsof the natives. That delicacy thus delicately extended where money was to be made, has not in a single case been practised for a single instant where our interest prompted a different conduct. We have seized on the lands of the natives; on their revenues; degraded their persons by the lash, or put them to death without any scruple. But this plea has been so strongly rebutted by one well acquainted with India, in the Oriental Herald, that before quitting this subject it will be well to quote it here. “The assumption that our empire is an empire of opinion in India, and that it would be endangered by restraining the bloody and abominable rites of the natives, is as false as the inference is unwarranted. Our empire isnotan empire of opinion, it is not even an empire of law: it has been acquired; it is still governed; and can only be retained, unless the whole system of its government is altered, by the direct influence of force. No portion of the country has been voluntarily ceded, from the love borne to us by the original possessors. We were first permitted to land on the sea coast to sell our wares, as humble and solicitous traders, till by degrees, sometimes by force and sometimes by fraud, we have possessed ourselves of an extent of territory containing nearly a hundred millions of human beings. We have put down the ancient sovereigns of the land, we have stripped the nobles of all their power; and by continual drains on the industry and resources of the people, we take from them all their surplus and disposable wealth. There is not a single province of that country that we have ever acquired but by the direct influence which our strength and commanding influence could enforce, or by the direct agency of warlike operations and superior skill in arms. There is not a spot throughout the whole of this vast region whereon we rule by any other medium than that by which we first gained our footing there—simple force. There is not a district in which the natives would not gladly see our places as rulers supplied by men of their own nation, faith, and manners, so that they might have a share in their own affairs; nor is there an individual, out of all the millions subject to our rule in Asia, whose opinion is ever asked as to the policy or impolicy of any law or regulation about to be made by our government, however it may press on the interests of those subject by its operation. It is a delusion which can never be too frequently exposed, to believe that our empire in India is an empire of opinion, or to imagine that we have any security for our possession of that country, except the superiority of our means for maintaining the dominion of force.”—vol. ii. p. 174.
Thepreceding chapter is an awful subject of contemplation for a Christian nation. An empire over one hundred millions acquired by force, and held by force for the appropriation of their revenues! Even this dominion of force is a fragile tenure. We even now watch the approaches of the gigantic power of Russia towards these regions with jealousy and alarm; and it is evident that at once security to ourselves, and atonement to the natives, are only to be found in the amelioration of their condition: in educating and Christianizing them, and in amalgamising them with British interests and British blood as much as possible. The throwing open of these vast regions, by the abolition of the Company’s charter of trade, to the enterprise and residence of our countrymen, now offers us ample means of moral retribution; and it is with peculiar interest that we now turn to every symptom of a better state of things.
A new impulse is given to both commerce and agriculture. The march of improvement in the cultivation and manufacture of various productions isbegun. The growth of wheat is encouraged, and even large quantities of fine flour imported thence into England. The indigo trade has become amazing by the improvement in the manipulation of that article. Sugar, coffee, opium, cotton, spices, rice, every product of this rich and varied region, will all find a greater demand, and consequently a greater perfection from culture, under these circumstances. There is, in fact, no species of vegetable production which, in this glorious country, offering in one part or another the temperature of every known climate, may not be introduced. Such is the fertility of the land under good management, that the natives often now make 26l.per acre of their produce. The potato is becoming as much esteemed there as it has long been in Europe and America. Tea is likely to become one of its most important articles of native growth. Our missionaries of various denominations—episcopalians, catholics, baptists, methodists, moravians, etc., are zealously labouring to spread knowledge and Christianity; and there is nothing, according to the Christian brahmin, Rammohun Roy, which the Indian people so much desire as an English education. Let that be given, and the fetters of caste must be broken at once. The press, since the great struggle in which Mr. Buckingham was driven from India for attempting its freedom, has acquired a great degree of freedom. The natives are admitted to sit on petty juries; slavery is abolished; and last, and best, education is now extensively and zealously promoted. The Company was bound by the terms of its charter in 1813 to devote 10,000l.annually to educating natives in the English language and English knowledge, which,though but a trifling sum compared with the vast population, aided by various private schools, must have produced very beneficial effects. Bishop Heber states that on his arrival in Bengal he found that there were fifty thousand scholars, chiefly under the care of Protestant missionaries. These are the means which must eventually make British rule that blessing which it ought to have been long ago. These are the means by which we may atone, and more than atone, for all our crimes and our selfishness in India. But let us remember that we are—after the despotism of two centuries, after oceans of blood shed by us, and oceans of wealth drained by us from India, and after that blind and callous system of exaction and European exclusion which has perpetuated all the ignorance and all the atrocities of Hindu superstition, and laid the burthen of them on our own shoulders—but at this moment on the mere threshold of this better career. Let us remember that still, at this hour, Indostan is, in fact, theIreland of the East! It is a country pouring out wealth upon us, while it is swarming with a population of one hundred millions in the lowest state of poverty and wretchedness. It swarms with robbers and assassins of the most dreadful description: and it is impossible that it should be otherwise. It is said to be happy and contented under our rule; but such a happiness as its boldest advocates occasionally give us a glimpse of, may God soon remove from that oppressed country. Indeed, such are the features of it, even as drawn by its eulogists, as make us wonder that such wretchedness should exist under English sway. Our travellers describe the mass of the labouring people as stunted in stature, especially the women; as halffamished, and with hardly a rag to their backs. Mr. Tucker, himself a Director, and Deputy-Chairman of the Court of Directors, asks, “Whether it be possible for them to believe that a government, which seems disposed to appropriate a vast territory asuniversal landlord, and to collect, notrevenue, butrent, can have any other view than to extract from the people the utmost portion which they can pay?” and adds, that “if the deadly hand of the tax-gatherer perpetually hover over the land, and threaten to grasp that which is not yet called into existence, its benumbing influence must be fatal, and the fruits of the earth will be stifled in the very germ.”
Yet this is the constant system; and the poor ryots who cultivate farms of from six to twenty-four acres, but generally of the smaller kind, requiring only one plough, which, with other implements and a team of oxen, costs about 6l., are compelled to farm not such as they chose, but such as are allotted to them; to pay from one-half to two-thirds of their gross produce. If they attempt to run away from it, they are brought back and flogged, and forced to work. If after all, they cannot pay their quota, Sir Thomas Munro tells you, “it must be assessed upon the rest.” That where a cropeven is less than the seed, the peasantryshould always be made to pay the fullrent where they can. And that all complaints on the part of the ryot, “should be listened to with very great caution.” Is it any wonder that Indostan is, and always has been full of robbers? Is this system not enough to make men run off, and do anything but work thus without hope? But it is not merely the work: look at the task-masters set over them. “A very largeproportion of the talliars,” says Sir Thomas Munro, “are themselves thieves; all the kawilgars are themselves robbers exempting them; and though they are now afraid to act openly, there is no doubt that many of them still secretly follow their former practices. Many potails and curnums also harbour thieves; so that no traveller can pass through the ceded districts without being robbed, who does not employ his own servants or those of the village to watch at night; and even this precaution is often ineffectual. Many offenders are taken, but great numbers also escape, for connivance must also be expected among the kawilgars and the talliars, who are themselves thieves; and the inhabitants are often backward in giving information from the fear ofassassination.” Colonel Stewart in 1825, asserted in his “Considerations on the Policy of the Government of India,” that “if we look for absolute and bodily injury produced by our misgovernment, he did not believe that all the cruelties practisedin the lifetimeof the worst tyrant that ever sat upon a throne, even amounted to the quantity of human suffering inflicted by the Decoitsin one yearin Bengal.” The prevalence of Thugs and Phasingars does not augur much improvement in this respect yet; nor do recent travellers induce us to believe that the picture of popular misery given us about half a dozen years ago by the author of “Reflections on the Present state of British India,” is yet become untrue.
“Hitherto the poverty of the cultivating classes, men who have both property and employment, has been alone considered; but the extreme misery to which the immense mass of the unemployed population are reduced, would defy the most able pen adequately to describe, or the most fertile imagination to conceive.... On many occasions of ceremony in families of wealthy individuals, it is customary to distribute alms to the poor; sometimes four annas, about three-pence, and rarely more than eight annas each. When such an occurrence is made known, the poor assemble in astonishing numbers, and the roads are covered with them from twenty to fifty miles in every direction. On their approaching the place of gift, no notice is taken of them, though half famished, and almost unable to stand, till towards the evening, when they are called into an inclosed space, and huddled together for the night, in such crowds, that notwithstanding their being in the open air, it is surprising how they escape suffocation. When the individual who makes the donation perceives that all the applicants are in the inclosure, (by which process he guards against the possibility of any poor wretch receiving his bounty twice), he begins to dispense his alms, either in the night, or on the following morning, by taking the poor people, one by one, from the place of their confinement, and driving them off as soon as they have received their pittance. The number of people thus accumulated, generally amounts to from twenty to fifty thousand; and from the distance they travel, and the hardships they endure for so inconsiderable a bounty, some idea may be formed of their destitute condition.
“In the interior of Bengal there is a class of inhabitants who live by catching fish in the ditches and rivulets; the men employing themselves during the whole day, and the women travelling to the nearestcity, often a distance of fifteen miles, to sell the produce. The rate at which these poor creatures perform their daily journey is almost incredible, and the sum realized is so small as scarcely to afford them the necessaries of life. In short, throughout the whole of the provinces the crowds of poor wretches who are destitute of the means of subsistence are beyond belief. On passing through the country, they are seen to pick the undigested grains of food from the dung of elephants, horses, and camels; and if they can procure a little salt, large parties of them sally into the fields at night, and devour the green blades of corn or rice the instant they are seen to shoot above the surface. Such, indeed, is their wretchedness that they envy the lot of the convicts working in chains upon the roads, and have been known to incur the danger of criminal prosecution, in order to secure themselves from starving by the allowance made to those who are condemned to hard labour.”
Such is the condition of these native millions, from whose country our countrymen, flocking over there, according to the celebrated simile of Burke, “like birds of prey and of passage, to collect wealth, have returned with most splendid fortunes to England.” What is the avowed slavery of some half million of negroes in the West Indies, who have excited so much interest amongst us, to the virtual slavery of thesehundred millionsof Hindus in their own land? It is declared that these poor creatures are happy under our government,—but it should be recollected that so it has been, and is, said of the negroes; and it should be also recollected what Sir John Malcolm said, in 1824, in a debate at the India-house—himself agovernor and a laudator of our system, that “even the instructed classes of natives have a hostile feeling towards us, which was not likely to decrease from the necessity they were under of concealing it. My attention,” he said, “has been during the last five-and-twenty years particularly directed to this dangerous species of secret war carried on against our authority, which isalways carried onby numerous though unseen hands. The spirit is kept up by letters, by exaggerated reports, and by pretended prophecies. When the time appears favourable from the occurrence of misfortune to our arms, from rebellion in our provinces, or from mutiny in our troops, circular letters and proclamations are dispersed over the country with a celerity that is incredible.Such documents are read with avidity.Their contents are in most cases the same. The English are depicted asusurpersof low caste, and as tyrants, who have sought India only to degrade them, to rob them of their wealth, and subvert their usages and religion. The native soldiers are always appealed to, and the advice to them is in all instances I have met with, the same,—‘your European tyrants are few in number—murder them!’”
How far are these evils diminished since the last great political change in India—since the abolition of the Company’s charter, and they became, not the commercial monopolists, but the governors of India? Dr. Spry, of the Bengal Medical Staff, can answer that in his “Modern India,” published in 1837. The worthy doctor describes himself as a short time ago (1833) being on an expedition to reduce some insurrectionary Coles in the provinces of Benares and Dinapore. “Next morning,” he says, “Feb. 9th,we went out in three parties to burn and destroy villages! Good fun, burning villages!” The mode of expression would lead one to suppose that the doctor extremely enjoyed “the good fun of burning villages;” but the general spirit of his work being sensible and humane, we are bound to suppose that his expressions and his notes of admiration are ironical, and meant to indicate the abhorrence such acts deserves; for he immediately tells us that these Coles seemed very inoffensive sort of people, and laid down their arms in large numbers the moment they were invited to do so.
Dr. Spry tells us that the Anglo-Indian government, in 1836, had come to the admirable resolution to make the English language the vernacular tongue throughout Indostan. That would be, in effect, to make it entirely an English land—to leaven it rapidly, and for ever, with the spirit, the laws, the literature, and the religion of England. It is impossible to make the English language the vernacular tongue, without at the same time producing the most astonishing moral revolution which ever yet was witnessed on the earth. English ideas, English tastes, English literature and religion, must follow as a matter of course. It is curious, indeed, already to hear of the instructed natives of Indostan holding literary and philosophical meetings in English forms, debating questions of morals and polite letters, and adducing the opinions of Milton, Shakspeare, Newton, Locke, etc. Dr. Spry states that the Committee of Public Instruction are about to establish schools for educating the natives in English, at Patnah, Dacca, Hazeeribagh, Gohawati, and other places; and that the nativeprinces in Nepaul, Manipúr, Rajpootanah, the Punjaub, etc. were receiving instruction in English, and desirous to promote it in their territories. This is most encouraging; but Dr. Spry gives us other facts of a less agreeable nature. From these we learn that the ancient canker of India, excessive and unremitting exaction, is at this moment eating into the very vitals of the country as actively as ever. He says that “it is in the territories of the independent native chiefs and princes that great and useful works are found, and maintained. In our territories, the canals, bridges, reservoirs, wells, groves, temples, and caravansaries, the works of our predecessors, from revenues expressly appropriated to such undertakings, are going fast to decay, together with the feelings which originated them; and unless a new and more enlightened policy shall be followed, of which the dawn may, perhaps, be distinguished, will soon leave not a trace behind. A persistence for a short time longer in our selfish administration will level the face of the country, as it has levelled the ranks of society, and leave a plain surface for wiser statesmen to act on.
“At present, the aspect of society presents no middle class, and the aspect of the country is losing all those great works of ornament and utility with which we found it adorned. Great families are levelled, and lost in the crowd; and great cities have dwindled into farm villages. The work of destruction is still going on; and unless we act on new principles will proceed with desolating rapidity. How many thousand links by which the affections of the people are united to the soil, and to their government, are every year broken and destroyed by our selfishness and ignorance;and yet, if our views in the country extended beyond the returns of a single harvest, beyond the march of a single detachment, or the journey of a single day, we could not be so blind to their utility and advantage.” He adds: “By our revenue management we have shaken the entire confidence of the rural population, who now no longer lay out their little capital in village improvement, lest our revenue officers, at the expiration of their leases, should take advantage of their labours, and impose an additional rent.... With regard to Hindustan, those natives who are unfriendly to usmight with justice declare our conduct to be more allied to Vandalism than to civilization.... Burke’s severe rebuke still holds good,—that if the English were driven from India, they would leave behind them no memorial worthy of a great and enlightened nation; no monument of art, science, or beneficence; no vestige of their having occupied and ruled over the country, except such traces as the vulture and the tiger leave behind them.”—pp. 10–18. He tells us that a municipal tax was imposed under pretence of improving and beautifying the towns, but that the improvements very soon stopped, while the tax is still industriously collected. In the appendix to his first volume, we find detailed all the miseries of the ryots as we have just reviewed them; and he tells us that of this outraged class areeleven-twelfths of the population! and quotes the following sentence from “The Friend of India.” “A proposal was some time since made, or rather a wish expressed, to domesticate the art of caricaturing in India. Here is a fine subject. The artist should first draw the lean and emaciated ryot, scratching the earth at the tail of a ploughdrawn by two half-starved, bare-ribbed bullocks. Upon his back he would place the more robust Seeputneedar, and upon his shoulders the Durputneedar; he, again, should sustain the well-fed Putneedar; and, seated upon his shoulders should be represented, to crown the scene, the big zemindar, that compound of milk, sugar, and clarified butter.... The poor ryot pays for all! He is drained by these middle-men; he is cheated by his banker out of twenty-four per cent. at least; and his condition is beyond description or imagination.”
Dr. Spry attests the present continuance of those scenes of destitution and abject wretchedness which I have but a few pages back alluded to. He has seen the miserable creatures picking up the grains of corn from the soil of the roads. “I have seen,” says he, “hundreds of famishing poor, traversing the jungles of Bundlecund, searching for wild berries to satisfy the cravings of hunger. Many, worn down by exhaustion or disease, die by the road-side, while mothers, to preserve their offspring from starvation, sell or give them to any rich man they can meet!” He himself, in 1834, was offered by such a mother her daughter of six years old for fourteen shillings!—vol. i. 297.
These are the scenes and transactions in our great Indian empire—that splendid empire which has poured out such floods of wealth into this country; in which such princely presents of diamonds and gold have been heaped on our adventurers; from the gleanings of which so many happy families in England25“live athome at ease,” and in the enjoyment of every earthly luxury and refinement. For every palace built by returned Indian nabobs in England; for every investment by fortunate adventurers in India stock; for every cup of wine and delicious viand tasted by the families of Indian growth amongst us, how many of these Indians themselves are now picking berries in the wild jungles, sweltering at the thankless plough only to suffer fresh extortions, or snatching with the bony fingers of famine, the bloated grains from the manure of the high-ways of their native country!
I wonder whether the happy and fortunate—made happy and fortunate by the wealth of India, ever think of these things?—whether the idea ever comes across them in the luxurious carriage, or at the table crowded with the luxuries of all climates?—whether theyglance in a sudden imagination from the silken splendour of their own abodes, to the hot highways and the pestilential jungles of India, and see those naked, squalid, famishing, and neglected creatures, thronging from vast distances to the rich man’s dole, or feeding on the more loathsome dole of the roads? It is impossible that a more strange antithesis can be pointed out in human affairs. We turn from it with even a convulsive joy, to grasp at the prospects of education in that singular country. Let the people be educated, and they will soon cease to permit oppression. Let the English engage themselves in educating them, and they will soon feel all the sympathies of nature awaken in their hearts towards these unhappy natives. In the meantime these are all the features of a country suffering under the evils of a long and grievous thraldom. They are the growth of ages, and are not to be removed but by a zealous and unwearying course of atoning justice. Spite of all flattering representations to the contrary, the British public should keep its eye fixed steadily on India, assuring itself that a debt of vast retribution is their due from us; and that we have only to meet the desire now anxiously manifested by the natives for education, to enable us to expiate towards the children all the wrongs and degradations heaped for centuries on the fathers; and to fix our name, our laws, our language and religion, as widely and beneficently there as in the New World!
Wemay dismiss the French in a few pages, merely because they are only so much like their neighbours. It would have been a glorious circumstance to have been able to present them as an exception; but while they have shown as little regard to the rights or feelings of the people whose lands they have invaded for the purpose of colonization, they seem to have been on the whole more commonplace in their cruelties. In Guiana they drove back the Indians as the Dutch and the Portuguese did in their adjoining settlements. In the West Indies, they exterminated or enslaved the natives very much as other Europeans did. They were as assiduous as any people in massacring the Charaibs, and they suffered perhaps more than any other nation from the Charaibs in return. Their historian, Du Tertre, describes them as returning from a slaughtering expedition in St. Christopher’s “bien joyeux;” so that it would appear as though they executed the customary murders of the time, with their accustomed gaiety. In the Mauritius they found nobody to kill. In Madagascar, they alternately massacred andwere massacred themselves, and finally driven out of of the country by the exasperated natives for their cruelties. If they made themselves masters of countries of equal importance with the Spaniards, Portuguese, English, or even the Dutch, they had not the art to make them so, for if we include Louisiana, Canada, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Madagascar, Mauritius, Guiana, various West Indian islands and settlements on the Indian and African coasts, the amount of territory is vast. The value of it to them, however, at no time, was ever proportionate in the least degree to the extent; and no European nation has been so unfortunate in the loss of colonies. Their attempt to possess themselves of Florida was abortive, but it was attended by a circumstance which deserves recording.
The Spaniards hearing that some Frenchmen had made a settlement in Florida about 1566, a fleet sailed thither, and discovered them at Fort Carolina. They attacked them, massacred the majority, and hanged the rest upon a tree, with this inscription,—“Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” They were Huguenots. Dominic de Gourgues, a Gascon of the same faith, a skilful and intrepid seaman, an enemy to the Spaniards, from whom he had received personal injuries, passionately fond of his country, of hazardous expeditions, and of glory, sold his estate, built some ships, and with a select band of his own stamp, embarked for Florida. He found, attacked, and defeated the Spaniards. All that he could catch he hung upon trees, with this inscription,—“Not as Spaniards, but as assassins;”—a sentence which, had it been executed with equal justice on all who deserved it in that day, wouldhave half depopulated Europe; for almost every man who went abroad was an assassin; and the rest who stayed at home applauded, and therefore abetted. Having thus satisfied his indignant sense of justice, de Gourgues returned home, and the French abandoned the country.
The French seemed to take the firmest hold on Canada; but their powerful neighbours, the English, took even that from them, as they had done their Acadia (Nova Scotia), Hudson’s Bay, Newfoundland, Cape Breton, and the Island of St. John.
In all these settlements, they treated the Indians just as creatures that might be spared or destroyed,—driven out or not, as it best suited themselves. Francis I. invaded the papal charter to Spain and Portugal of all the New World, with an expression very characteristic of him. “What! shall the kings of Spain and Portugal quietly divide all America between them, without suffering me to take a share as their brother? I would fain see the article of Adam’s will that bequeaths that vast inheritance to them!” But he did not seem to suspect for a moment, that if Adam’s will could be found, the most conspicuous clause in it would have been that the earth should be fairly divided amongst his children; and that one family should not covet the heritage of another, much less that Cain should be always murdering Abel. Accordingly, Samuel de Champlain, whose name has been given to Lake Champlain, had scarcely laid the foundations of Quebec, the future capital of Canada, than the subjects of Francis began to violate every clause which could possibly have been in Adam’s will. Champlain found the Indians divided amongst themselves, and headopted the policy since employed by the English in the East with so much greater success, not exactly that recommended by the apostle, to live in peace with all men, as far as in you lies, but to set your neighbours by the ears, so that you may take the advantage of their quarrels and disasters.
One of the greatest curses which befel the North American Indians on the invasion of the Europeans, was, that several of theserefinedandChristiannations came and took possession of neighbouring regions. Being indeed so refined and Christian, one might naturally have supposed that this would prove a happy circumstance for the savages. One would have supposed that thus surrounded on all sides, as it were, by the light of civilization and the virtue of Christianity, nothing could possibly prevent the savages from becoming civilized and Christian too. One would have supposed that such miserable, cruel, and dishonest savages, seeing whichever way they turned, nothing but images of peace, wisdom, integrity, self-denial, generosity, and domestic happiness, would have become speedily and heartily ashamed of themselves. That they would have been fairly overwhelmed with the flood of radiance covering those nations which had been for so many ages in the possession of Christianity. That they would have been penetrated through and through with the benevolence and goodness, the sublime graces, and winning sweetness of so favoured and regenerated a race! Nothing of the sort, however, took place. The savages looked about them, and saw people more powerful, indeed, but in spirit and practice ten times more savage than themselves. What a precious crew of hypocrites must they haveregarded these white invaders when they heard them begin to talk of their superior virtue, and to call them barbarians! There were the French in Canada, Nova Scotia, and other settlements; there were the Dutch in their Nova Belgia, and the English in Massachusets, all regarding each other with the most deadly hatred, and all rampant to wrest, either from the Indians, or from one another, the very ground that each other stood upon.
The people brought with them from Europe, crimes and abominations that the Indians never knew. The Indians never fought for conquest, but to defend their hunting grounds—lands which their ancestors had inhabited for generations, and which they firmly believed were given to them by the Great Spirit; but these white invaders had a boundless and quenchless thirst for every region that they could set their eyes upon. They claimed it by pretences, of which the simple Indians could neither make head nor tail—they talked of popes and kings on the other side of the water as having given them the Indians’ countries, and the Indians could not conceive what business these kings and popes had with them. But the whites had arguments which theycould notwithstand—gunpowder and rum! They forced a footing in the Indian countries, and then they gave them rum to take away their brains, that they might take away first their peltries, and then more land. There is nothing in history more horrible than the conduct to which the Dutch, French and English resorted in their rivalries in the north-east of America. Each party subdued the tribes of Indians in their own immediate neighbourhood, by force and fraud, and then employed them against the Indians who were in alliance with their rivals. Instead of mutually, as Christians should, inculcating upon them the beauty and the duty, and the advantages of peace, they instigated them, by every possible means, and by the most devilish arguments, to betray and exterminate one another, and not only one another, but to betray and exterminate, if possible, their white rivals. They made them furious with rum, and put fire-arms into their hands, and hounded them on one another with a demoniac glee. They took credit to themselves for inducing the Indians toscalpone another! They gave them a premium upon these horrible outrages, and we shall see that even the Puritans of New England gave at length so much as 1000l.for every Indian scalp that could be brought to them! They excited these poor Indians by the most diabolical means, and by taking advantage of their weak side, the proneness to vengeance, to acts of the most atrocious nature, and then they branded them, when it was convenient, as most fearful and bloody savages, and on that plea drove them out of their rightful possessions, or butchered them upon them.
I am not talking of imaginary horrors—I am speaking with all the soberness which the contemplation of such things will permit—of a deliberate system of policy pursued by the French, Dutch, and English, in these regions for a full century, and which eventually terminated in the destruction of the greater part of these Indian nations, and in the expulsion of the remainder. We shall see that even the English urged their allies—the Five Nations—continually to attack and murder the French and their Indian allies;and in all their wars with the French in Canada, hired, or bribed, or compelled these savages to accompany them, and commit the very devastations for which they afterwards upbraided them, and which they made a plea for their extirpation. But of that anon; my present business is with the French; and though the facts which I have now to relate regard their conduct rather in our colonies than their own, yet they cannot be properly introduced anywhere else; and they could not have been introduced impartially here without these few preliminary observations.
The French were soon stripped of their other settlements in this quarter by the English. It was from Canada that they continued to annoy their rivals of New York and New England, till finally driven thence by the victory of Wolfe at Quebec; and it was principally on the northern side of the St. Lawrence that their territory lay. On that side, the great tribe of the Adirondacks, or, as they termed them, the Algonquins, lay, and became their allies; with tribes of inferior note. On the south side lay the great nation of the Iroquois, so termed by them; or “The Five Nations of United Indians,” as they were called by the English. These were very warlike nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senekas—whose territories extended along the south-eastern side of the St. Lawrence, into the present States of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire—a country eighty leagues in length, and more than forty broad.
To drive out these nations, so as to deprive them of any share in the profitable fur trade which the Algonquins carried on for them, and to get possessionof so fine a country, Champlain readily accompanied the Algonquins in an expedition of extermination against them. The Algonquins knew all the intricacies of the woods, and all the modes and stratagems of Indian warfare; and, aided by the arms and ammunition of the French, they would soon have accomplished Champlain’s desire of exterminating the Iroquois, had not the Dutch, then the possessors of New York, furnished the Iroquois also with arms and ammunition, for it was not to their interest that these five nations, who brought their furs to them, should be reduced.
In 1664 the English dispossessed the Dutch of their Nova Belgia, and turned it into New York; and began to trade actively with the Indian nations for their furs. The French, who had hoped to monopolise this trade, which they had found very profitable, by exterminating the Iroquois, and throwing the whole hunting business into the hands of tribes in their alliance, now saw the impolicy of having vainly attacked so powerful a race as that of the Iroquois, or Five Nations. They now used every means to reconcile them, and win them over. They sent Jesuit missionaries, who lived in the simplest manner amongst them, and with their powers of insinuation and persuasion laboured to give them favourable ideas of their nation. But the English were as zealous in their endeavours, and, as might naturally be expected, succeeded in engrossing all the fur trade with the Iroquois, who had received so many injuries from the French.26Irritated by this circumstance, the French again determined on the ferocious scheme of exterminating the Iroquois. Nursing this horrible resolve, they waited their opportunity, and put upon themselves a desperate restraint, till they should have collected a force in the colony equal to the entire annihilation of the Iroquois people. This time seemed to have arrived in 1687, when, under Denonville, they had a population of 11,249 persons, one third of whom were capable of bearing arms. Having a disposable force of near 4,000 people, they were secure in their own mind of the accomplishment of their object; but, to make assurance doubly sure,they hit upon one of those schemes that have been so much applauded through all Christian Europe, under the name of “happy devices,”—“profound strokes of policy,”—“chefs d’œuvres of statesmanship,”—that is, in plain terms, plans of the most wretched deceit, generally for the compassing of some piece of diabolical butchery or oppression. The “happy device,” in this instance, was to profess a desire for peace and alliance, in order to get the most able Indian chiefs into their power before they struck the decisive blow. There was a Jesuit missionary residing amongst the Iroquois—the worthy Lamberville. This good man, like his brethren in the South, whose glorious labours and melancholy fate we have already traced, had won the confidence of the Iroquois by his unaffected piety, his constant kindness, and his skill in healing their differences and their bodily ailments. They looked upon him as a father and a friend. The French, on their part, regarded this as a fortunate circumstance,—not as one might have imagined, because it gave them a powerful means of reconciliation and alliance with this people, but because it gave them a means of effecting their murderous scheme. They assured Lamberville that they were anxious to effect alasting peacewith the Iroquois, for which purpose they begged him to prevail on them to send their principal chiefs to meet them in conference. He found no difficulty in doing this, such was their faith in him. The chiefs appeared, and were immediately clapped in irons, embarked at Quebec, and sent to the galleys!
I suppose there are yet men calling themselves Christians, and priding themselves on the depth of their policy, that will exclaim—“Oh, capital!—whata happy device!” But who that has a head or a heart worthy of a man will not mark with admiration the conduct of the Iroquois on this occasion. As soon as the news of this abominable treachery reached the nation, it rose as one man, to revenge the insult and to prevent the success of that scheme which now became too apparent. In the first place they sent for Lamberville, who had been the instrument of their betrayal, and—put him to death! No, they didnotput him to death. That was what theChristianswould have done, without any inquiry or any listening to his defence. ThesavageIroquois thus addressed him—“We are authorised by every motive to treat you as an enemy; but we cannot resolve to do it. Your heart has had no share in the insult that has been put upon us; and it would be unjust to punish you for a crime you detest still more than ourselves. But you must leave us. Our rash young men might consider you in the light of a traitor, who delivered up the chiefs of our nation to shameful slavery.” These savages, whom Europeans have always termed Barbarians, gave the Missionary guides, who conducted him to a place of safety, and then flew to arms.27
The wretched Denonville and his politic people soon found themselves in a situation which they richly merited. They had a numerous and warlike nation thus driven to the highest pitch of irritation, surrounding them in the woods. On the borders of the lakes, or in the open country, the French could and did carry devastation amongst the Iroquois; but on the other hand the Indians, continually sallying from the forests, laid waste the French settlements, destroyedthe crops of the planters, and drove them from their fields. The French became heartily sick of the war they had thus wickedly raised, and were on the point of putting an end to it when one of their own Indian allies, a Huron, called by the English authors Adario, but by the French Le Rat, one of the bravest and most intelligent chiefs that ever ranged the wilds of America, prevented it by a stratagem as cunning, and more successful, than their own. He delivered an Iroquois prisoner with some story of an aggravated nature to the French commandant of the fort of Machillimakinac, who, not aware of Denonville being in treaty with the Iroquois, put him to death, and thus roused again all the ancient flame.
In this war, such were the barbarities of the French and their Indian allies, that they roused a spirit of revenge that soon brought the most cruel evils upon themselves. They laid waste the villages of the Five Nations with fire. Near Cadarakui Fort, they surprised and put to death the inhabitants of two villages who had settled there at their own invitation, and on their faith, but whom they now feared might act as spies against them. Many of these people were given up to a body of the Canadian Indians, calledPrayingorChristianIndians, to be tormented at the stake. In another village finding only two old men, they were cut to pieces, and put into the war kettle for thePraying Indiansto feast on.28To revenge these unheard of abominations, the Five Nations carried a war of retaliation into Canada. They came suddenly in July of the next year, 1688, upon Montreal, 1200 strong, while Denonville and his lady werethere; burnt and laid waste all the plantations round it, and made a terrible massacre of men, women, and children. Above a thousand French are said to have been killed on this occasion, and twenty-six taken, most of whom were burnt alive. In the autumn they returned, and carried fire and tomahawk through the island; and had they known how to take fortified places would have driven the French entirely out of Canada. As it was, they reduced them to the most frightful state of distress.
To such a pitch of fury did the French rise against the Five Nations through the sufferings which they received at their hands, that they now seemed to have lost the very natures of men. It is to the eternal disgrace of both French and English that they instigated and bribed the Indians to massacre and scalp their enemies—but it seems to be the peculiar infamy of the French to have imitated the Indians in their most barbarous customs, and have even prided themselves on displaying a higher refinement in cruelty than the savages themselves. The New Englanders, indeed, are distinctly stated by Douglass, to have handed over their Indian prisoners to be tormented by their Naraganset allies, but with the French this savage practice seems to have been frequent. I have just noticed a few instances of such inhuman conduct; but the old governor, Frontenac, stands pre-eminent above all his nation for such deeds. From 1691 to 1695, nothing was more common than for his Indian prisoners to be given up to his Indian allies to be tormented. One of the most horrible of these scenes on record was perpetrated under his own eye at Montreal in 1691. The intendant’s lady, the Jesuits, and manyinfluential people used all possible intreaties to save the prisoner from such a death, but in vain. He was given up to theChristianIndians ofLoretto, and tormented in such a manner as none but a fiend could tolerate.29There was only one step beyond this, and that was for the French to enact the torturers themselves. That step was reached in 1695, at Machilimakinak Fort; and whoever has not strong nerves had better pass the following relation, which yet seems requisite to be given if we are to understand the full extent of the inflictions the American Indians have received from Europeans.
The successes of the Iroquois had driven the French to madness—and the prisoner was an Iroquois. “The prisoner being made fast to a stake, so as to have room to move round it, aFrenchmanbegan the horrid tragedy by broiling the flesh of the prisoner’s legs, from his toes to his knees, with the red-hot barrel of a gun. His example was followed by anUtawawa, and they relieved one another as they grew tired. The prisoner all this while continued his death-song, till they clapped a red-hot frying-pan on his buttocks, when he cried out ‘Fire is strong, and too powerful.’ Then all their Indians mocked him as wanting courage and resolution. ‘You,’ they said, ‘a soldier and a captain, as you say, and afraid of fire:—you are not a man.’”
They continued their torments for two hours without ceasing. AnUtawawa, being desirous to outdo theFrenchin their refined cruelty, split a furrow from the prisoner’s shoulder to his garter, and, filling it with gunpowder, set fire to it. This gave him exquisitepain, and raised excessive laughter in his tormentors. When they found his throat so much parched that he was no longer able to gratify their ears with his howling, they gave him water to enable him to continue their pleasure longer. But, at last, his strength failing, anUtawawaflayed off his scalp, and threw burning coals on his skull. Then they untied him, and bid him run for his life. He began to run, tumbling like a drunken man. They shut up the way to the east; and made him run westward, the way, as they think, to the country of miserable souls. He had still force left to throw stones, till they put an end to his misery by knocking him on the head with one. After this, every one cut a slice from his body, to conclude the tragedy with a feast.30
Such is the condition to which the practice of injustice and cruelty can reduce men calling themselves civilized. We need not pursue further the history of the French in Canada, which consists only in bickerings with the English and butchery of the Indians. Having, therefore, given this specimen of their treatment of the natives in their colonies, or in the vicinity of them, we will dismiss them with an incident illustrative of their policy, which occurred in Louisiana.
When the French settled themselves in that country, they found, amongst the neighbouring tribes, the Natchez the most conspicuous. Their country extended from the Mississippi to the Appalachian mountains. It had a delightful climate, and was a beautiful region, well watered, most agreeably enlivened with hills, fine woods, and rich open prairies. Numbers of the French flocked over into this delicious country, and itwas believed that it would form the centre of the great colony they hoped to found in that part of America. If the Natchez were such a people as Chateaubriand has pictured them, they must have been a noble race indeed. They were, like the Peruvians, worshippers of the sun, and had vast temples erected to their god. They received the French as the natives of most discovered countries have received the Europeans, with the utmost kindness. They even assisted them in forming their new plantations amongst them, and the most cordial and advantageous friendship appeared to have grown between the two nations. Such friendship, however, could not possibly exist between the common run of Europeans and Indians. The Europeans did not go so far from home for friendship; they went for dominion. Accordingly, the French soon threw off the mask of friendship, and treated their hosts as slaves. They seized on whatever they pleased, dictated their will to the Natchez, as their masters, and drove them from their cultivated fields, and inhabited them themselves. The deceived and indignant people did all in their power to stop these aggressions. They reasoned, implored, and entreated, but in vain. Finding this utterly useless, they entered into a scheme to rid themselves of their oppressors, and engaged all the neighbouring nations to aid in the design. A secret and universal league was established amongst the Indian nations wherever the French had any settlements. They were all to be massacred on a certain day. To apprise all the different nations of the exact day, the Natchez sent to every one of them a little bundle of bits of wood, each containing the same number, and that number being the numberof the days that were to precede the day of general doom. The Indians were instructed to burn in each town one of these pieces of wood every day, and on the day that they burnt the last they were simultaneously to fall on the French, and leave not one alive. As usual, the success of the conspiracy was defeated by the compassion of an individual. The wife, or mother, of the great chief of the Natchez had a son by a Frenchman, and from this son she learned the secret of the plot. She warned the French commandant of the circumstance, but he treated her warning with indifference. Finding, therefore, that she could not succeed in putting the French on their guard against a people they had now come to despise, she resolved that, if she could not avert the fate of the whole, she would at least afford a chance of safety to a part. The bits of wood were deposited in the temple of the sun, and her rank gave her access to the temple. She abstracted a number of the bits of wood, and thus precipitated the day of rising in that province. The Natchez, on the burning of the last piece, fell on the French, and, out of two hundred and twenty-two French, massacred two hundred,—men, women, and children. The remainder were women, whom they retained as prisoners.