Unlike as are the Australians to the British, there is nevertheless a singular mimicry of British forms and ceremonies in the colonies, which is extended to the most trifling details of public life. Twice in Australia was I invited to ministerial dinners, given to mark the approaching close of the session; twice also was I present at university celebrations, in which home whimsicalities were closely copied. The governors’ messages to the Colonial Parliaments are travesties of those which custom in England leads us to call “the Queen‘s.” The very phraseology is closely followed. We find Sir J. Manners Button gravely saying: “The representatives of the government of New South Walesand ofmygovernment have agreed to an arrangement on the border duties....” The “my” in a democratic country like Victoria strikes a stranger as pre-eminently incongruous, if not absurd.
The imitation of Cambridge forms by the University of Sydney is singularly close. One almost expects to see the familiar blue gown of the “bull-dog” thrown across the arm of the first college servant met within its precincts. Chancellor, Vice-chancellor, Senate, Syndicates, and even Proctors, all are here in the antipodes. Registrar, professors, “seniors,” fees, and “petitions with the University seal attached;” “Board of Classical Studies”—the whole corporation sits in borrowed plumage; the very names of the colleges are being imitated: we find already a St. John‘s. The Calendar reads like a parody on the volume issued every March by Messrs. Deighton. Rules upon matriculation, upon the granting oftestamurs; prize-books stamped with college arms are named,ad eundemdegrees are known, and we have imitations of phraseology even in the announcement of prizes to “the most distinguished candidates for honors in each of the aforesaid schools,” and in the list of subjects for the Moral Science tripos. Lent Term, Trinity Term, Michaelmas Term, take the place of the Spring, Summer, and Fall Terms of the less pretentious institutions in America, and the height of absurdity is reached in the regulations upon “academic costume,” and on the “respectful salutation” by undergraduates of the “fellows and professors” of the University. The situation on a hot-wind day of a member of the Senate, in “black silk gown, with hood of scarlet cloth edged with white fur, and lined with blue silk, black velvet trencher cap,” all in addition to his ordinary clothing, it is to be presumed, can be imagined only by thosewho know what hot winds are. We English are great acclimatizers: we have carried trial by jury to Bengal, tenant-right to Oude, and caps and gowns to be worn over loongee and paejama at Calcutta University. Who are we, that we should cry out against the French for “carrying France about with them everywhere”?
The objects of the founders are set forth in the charter as “the advancement of religion and morality, and the promotion of useful knowledge;” but as there is no theological faculty, no religious test or exercise whatever, the philosophy of the first portion of the phrase is not easily understood.
In no Western institutions is the radicalism of Western thought so thoroughly manifested as in the Universities; in no English colonial institutions is Conservatism so manifest. The contrast between Michigan and Sydney is far more striking than that between Harvard and old Cambridge.
Of the religious position of Australia there is little to be said: the Wesleyans, Catholics, and Presbyterians are stronger, and the other denominations weaker, than they are at home. The general mingling of incongruous objects and of conflicting races, characteristic of colonial life, extends to religious buildings. The graceful Wesleyan church, the Chinese joss-house, and the Catholic cathedral stand not far apart in Melbourne. In Australia, the mixture of blood is not yet great. In South Australia, where it is most complete, the Catholics and Wesleyans have great strength. Anglicanism is naturally strongest where the race is most exclusively British—in Tasmania and New South Wales.
As far as the coast tracts are concerned, Australia, as will be seen from what has been said of the individualcolonies, is rapidly ceasing to be a land of great tenancies, and becoming a land of small freeholds, each cultivated by its owner. It need hardly be pointed out that, in the interests of the country and of the race, this is a happy change. When English rural laborers commence to fully realize the misery of their position, they will find not only America, but Australia also, open to them as a refuge and future home. Looming in the distance, we still, however, see the American problem of whether the Englishman can live out of England. Can he thrive except where mist and damp preserve the juices of his frame? He comes from the fogs of the Baltic shores, and from the Flemish lowlands; gains in vigor in the south island of New Zealand. In Australia and America—hot and dry—the type has already changed. Will it eventually disappear?
It is still an open question whether the change of type among the English in America and Australia is a climatic adaptation on the part of nature, or a temporary divergence produced by abnormal causes, and capable of being modified by care.
Before we had done our talk, the ship was pooped by a green sea, which, curling in over her taffrail, swept her decks from end to end, and our helmsmen, although regular old “hard-a-weather” fellows, had difficulty in keeping her upon her course. It was the last of the gale, and when we made up our beds upon the skylights, the heavens were clear of scud, though the moon was still craped with a ceaseless roll of cloud.
WHENa Briton takes a survey of the colonies, he finds much matter for surprise in the one-sided nature of the partnership which exists between the mother and the daughter lands. No reason presents itself to him why our artisans and merchants should be taxed in aid of populations far more wealthy than our own, who have not, as we have, millions of paupers to support. We at present tax our humblest classes, we weaken our defenses, we scatter our troops and fleets, and lay ourselves open to panics such as those of 1853 and 1859, in order to protect against imaginary dangers the Australian gold-digger and Canadian farmer. There is something ludicrous in the idea of taxing St. Giles‘s for the support of Melbourne, and making Dorsetshire agricultural laborers pay the cost of defending New Zealand colonists in Maori wars.
It is possible that the belief obtains in Britain among the least educated classes of the community that colonial expenses are rapidly decreasing, if they have not already wholly disappeared; but in fact they have for some years past been steadily and continuously growing in amount.
As long as we choose to keep up suchpropugnaculaas Gibraltar, Malta, and Bermuda, we must pay roundly for them, as we also must for such costly luxuries as our Gold Coast settlements for the suppression of the slave-trade; but if we confine the term “colonies” toEnglish-speaking, white-inhabited, and self-governed lands, and exclude on the one hand garrisons such as Gibraltar, and on the other mere dependencies like the West Indies and Ceylon, we find that our true colonies in North America, Australia, Polynesia, and South Africa, involve us nominally in yearly charges of almost two millions sterling, and, really, in untold expenditure.
Canada is in all ways the most flagrant case. She draws from us some three millions annually for her defense, she makes no contribution toward the cost; she relies mainly on us to defend a frontier of 4000 miles, and she excludes our goods by prohibitive duties at her ports. In short, colonial expenses which, rightly or wrongly, our fathers bore (and that not ungrudgingly) when they enjoyed a monopoly of colonial trade, are borne by us in face of colonial prohibition. What the true cost to us of Canada may be is unfortunately an open question, and the loss by the weakening of our home forces we have no means of computing; but when we consider that, on a fair statement of the case, Canada would be debited with the cost of a large portion of the half-pay and recruiting services, of Horse Guards and War Office expenses, of arms, accouterments, barracks, hospitals, and stores, and also with the gigantic expenses of two of our naval squadrons, we cannot but admit that we must pay at least three millions a year for the hatred that the Canadians profess to bear toward the United States. Whatever may be the case, however, with regard to Canada, less fault is to be found with the cost of the Australian colonies. If they bore a portion of the half-pay and recruiting expenses as well as the cost of the troops actually employed among them in time of peace, and also paid their share in the maintenance of the British navy—a share to increase with the increase of their merchant shipping—there would be little to desire, unless, indeed, we should wish that, in exchange for a check upon imperial braggadocio and imperial waste, the Australians should also contribute toward the expenses of imperial wars.
No reason can be shown for our spending millions on the defense of Canada against the Americans or in aiding the New Zealand colonists against the Maories that will not apply to their aiding us in case of a European war with France, control being given to their representatives over our public action in questions of imperial concern. Without any such control over imperial action, the old American colonists were well content to do their share of fighting in imperial wars. In 1689, in 1702, and in 1744, Massachusetts attacked the French, and, taking from them Nova Scotia and others of their new plantations, handed them over to Great Britain. Even when the tax-time came, Massachusetts, while declaring that the English Parliament had no right to tax colonies, went on to say that the king could inform them of the exigencies of the public service, and that they were ready “to provide for them if required.”
It is not likely, however, nowadays, that our colonists would, for any long stretch of time, engage to aid us in our purely European wars. Australia would scarcely feel herself deeply interested in the guarantee of Luxembourg, nor Canada in the affairs of Servia. The fact that we in Britain paid our share—or rather nearly the whole cost—of the Maori wars would be no argument to an Australian, but only an additional proof to him of our extraordinary folly. We have been educated into a habit of paying with complacency other people‘s bills—not so the Australian settler.
As far as Australia is concerned, our soldiers are not used as troops at all. The colonists like the show of the red-coats, and the military duties are made up partly of guard-of-honor work, and partly of the labors of police. The colonists well know that in time of war we should immediately withdraw our troops, and they trust wholly in their volunteers and the colonial marine.
As long as we choose to allow the system to continue, the colonists are well content to reap the benefit. When we at last decide that it shall cease, they will reluctantly consent. It is more than doubtful whether, if we were to insist to the utmost upon our rights as toward our southern colonies, they would do more than grumble and consent to our demands; and there is no chance whatever of our asking for more than our simple due.
When you talk to an intelligent Australian, you can always see that he fears that separation would be made the excuse for the equipment of a great and costly Australian fleet—not more necessary then than now—and that, however he may talk, he would, rather than separate from England, at least do his duty by her.
The fear of conquest of the Australian colonies if we left them to themselves is on the face of it ridiculous. It is sufficient, perhaps, to say that the old American colonies, when they had but a million and a half of people, defended themselves successfully against the then all-powerful French, and that there is no instance of a self-protected English colony being conquered by the foreigner. The American colonies valued so highly their independence of the old country in the matter of defense that they petitioned the Crown to be allowed to fight for themselves, and called the British army by the plain name of “grievance.”
As for our so-called defense of the colonies, in war-time we defend ourselves; we defend the colonies only during peace. In war-time they are ever left to shift for themselves, and they would undoubtedly be better fit to do so were they in the habit of maintaining their military establishments in time of peace. The present system weakens us and them—us, by taxes and by the withdrawal of our men and ships; the colonies, by preventing the development of that self-reliance which is requisite to form a nation‘s greatness. The successful encountering of difficulties is the marking feature of the national character of the English, and we can hardly expect a nation which has never encountered any, or which has been content to see them met by others, ever to become great. In short, as matters now stand, the colonies are a source of military weakness to us, and our “protection” of them is a source of danger to the colonists. No doubt there are still among us men who would have wished to have seen America continue in union with England, on the principle on which the Russian conscripts are chained each to an old man—to keep her from going too fast—and who now consider it our duty to defend our colonies at whatever cost, on account of the “prestige” which attaches to the somewhat precarious tenure of these great lands. With such men it is impossible for colonial reformers to argue: the stand-points are wholly different. To those, however, who admit the injustice of the present system to the tax-payers of the mother-country, but who fear that her merchants would suffer by its disturbance, inasmuch as, in their belief, action on our part would lead to a disruption of the tie, we may plead that, even should separation be the result, we should be none the worse off for its occurrence. The retention of colonies at almost any cost has been defended—so far as it hasbeen supported by argument at all—on the ground that the connection conduces to trade, to which argument it is sufficient to answer that no one has ever succeeded in showing what effect upon trade the connection can have, and that as excellent examples to the contrary we have the fact that our trade with the Ionian Islands has greatly increased since their annexation to the kingdom of Greece, and a much more striking fact than even this—namely, that while the trade with England of the Canadian Confederation is only four-elevenths of its total external trade, or little more than one-third, the English trade of the United States was in 1860 (before the war) nearly two-thirds of its total external trade, in 1861 more than two-thirds, and in 1866 (first year after the war) again four-sevenths of its total trade. Common institutions, common freedom, and common tongue have evidently far more to do with trade than union has; and for purposes of commerce and civilization, America is a truer colony of Britain than is Canada.
It would not be difficult, were it necessary, to multiply examples whereby to prove that trade with a country does not appear to be affected by union with or separation from it. Egypt (even when we carefully exclude from the returns Indian produce in transport) sends us nearly all such produce as she exports, notwithstanding that the French largely control the government, and that we have much less footing in the country than the Italians, and no more than the Austrians or Spanish. Our trade with Australia means that the Australians want something of us and that we need something of them, and that we exchange with them our produce as we do in a larger degree with the Americans, the Germans, and the French.
The trade argument being met, and it being rememberedthat our colonies are no more an outlet for our surplus population than they would be if the Great Mogul ruled over them, as is seen by the fact that of every twenty people who leave the United Kingdom, one goes to Canada, two to Australia, and sixteen to the United States, we come to the “argument” which consists in the word “prestige.” When examined, this cry seems to mean that, in the opinion of the utterer, extent of empire is power—a doctrine under which Brazil ought to be nineteen and a half times, and China twenty-six times as powerful as France. Perhaps the best answer to the doctrine is a simple contradiction: those who have read history with most care well know that at all times extent of empire has been weakness. England‘s real empire was small enough in 1650, yet it is rather doubtful whether her “prestige” ever reached the height it did while the Cromwellian admirals swept the seas. The idea conveyed by the words “mother of free nations” is every bit as good as that contained in the cry “prestige,” and the argument that, as the colonists are British subjects, we have no right to cast them adrift so long as they wish to continue citizens, is evidently no answer to those who merely urge that the colonists should pay their own policemen.
It may, perhaps, be contended that the possession of “colonies” tends to preserve us from the curse of small island countries, the dwarfing of mind which would otherwise make us Guernsey a little magnified. If this be true, it is a powerful argument in favor of continuance in the present system. It is a question, however, whether our real preservation from the insularity we deprecate is not to be found in the possession of true colonies—of plantations such as America, in short—rather than in that of mere dependencies. Thatwhich raises us above the provincialism of citizenship of little England is our citizenship of the greater Saxondom which includes all that is best and wisest in the world.
From the foundation, separation would be harmless, does not of necessity follow the conclusion, separation is to be desired. This much only is clear—that we need not hesitate to demand that Australia should do her duty.
With the more enlightened thinkers of England, separation from the colonies has for many years been a favorite idea, but as regards the Australias it would hardly be advisable. If we allow that it is to the interest both of our race and of the world that the Australias should prosper, we have to ask whether they would do so in a higher degree if separated from the mother-country than if they remained connected with her and with each other by a federation. It has often been said that, instead of the varying relations which now exist between Britain and America, we should have seen a perfect friendship had we but permitted the American colonies to go their way in peace; but the example does not hold in the case of Australia, which is by no means wishful to go at all.
Under separation we should, perhaps, find the colonies better emigration-fields for our surplus population than they are at present. Many of our emigrants who flock to the United States are attracted by the idea that they are going to become citizens of a new nation instead of dependents upon an old one. On the separation of Australia from England we might expect that a portion of these sentimentalists would be diverted from a colony necessarily jealous of us so long as we hold Canada, to one which from accordance of interests is likely to continue friendly or allied. This argument,however, would have no weight with those who desire the independence of Canada, and who look upon America as still our colony.
Separation, we may then conclude, though infinitely better than a continuance of the existing one-sided tie, would, in a healthier state of our relations, not be to the interest of Britain, although it would perhaps be morally beneficial to Australia. Any relation, however, would be preferable to the existing one of mutual indifference and distrust. Recognizing the fact that Australia has come of age, and calling on her, too, to recognize it, we should say to the Australian colonists: “Our present system cannot continue; will you amend it, or separate?” The worst thing that can happen to us is that we should “drift” blindly into separation.
After all, the strongest of the arguments in favor of separation is the somewhat paradoxical one that it would bring us a step nearer to the virtual confederation of the English race.
A regular and uniform system of spelling of native names and other words has lately been brought into common use in India, and adopted by the government. Not without hesitation, I have decided upon ignoring this improvement, and confining myself to spellings known to and used by the English in England, for whom especially I am writing.
I am aware that there is no system in the spelling, and that it is scientifically absurd; nevertheless, the new government spelling is not yet sufficiently well understood in England to warrant its use in a book intended for general circulation. The scientific spelling is not always an improvement to the eye, moreover: Talookdars of Oude may not be right, but it is a neater phrase than “Taâlukhdars of Awdh;” and it will probably be long before we in England write “kuli” for coolie, or adopt the spelling “Tátá hordes.”
WEfailed to sight the Island of Cocoas, a territory where John Ross is king—a worthy Scotchman, who having settled down in mid-ocean, some hundreds of miles from any port, proceeded to annex himself to Java and the Dutch. On being remonstrated with, he was made to see his error; and, being appointed governor of and consul to himself and laborers, now hoists the union-jack, while his island has a red line drawn under its name upon the map. Two days after quitting John Ross‘s latitudes, we crossed the line in the heavy noonday of the equatorial belt of calms. The sun itself passed the equator the same day; so, after having left Australia at the end of autumn, I suddenly found myself in Asia in the early spring. Mist obscured the skies except at dawn and sunset, when there was a clear air, in which floated cirrocumuli with flat bases—clouds cut in half, as it seemed—and we were all convinced that Homer must have seen the Indian Ocean, so completely did the sea in the equatorial belt realize his epithet “purple” or “wine-dark.” All day long the flying-fish—“those good and excellent creatures of God,” as Drake styled them—were skimming over the water on every side. The Elizabethan captain, who knew their delicacy of taste, attributed their freedom from the usual slime of fish, and their wholesome nature, to “their continued exercise in both air and water.” The heat was great, and I made the discovery thatAustralians as well as Americans can put their feet above their heads. It may be asserted that the height above the deck of the feet of passengers on board ocean steamers varies directly as the heat, and inversely as the number of hours before dinner.
In the afternoon of the day we crossed the line, we sighted a large East Indiaman lying right in our course, and so little way was she making that, on coming up with her, we had to port our helm, in order not to run her down. She hailed us, and we lay-to while she sent a boat aboard us with her mail; for although she was already a month out from Calcutta and bound for London, our letters would reach home before she was round the Cape—a singular commentary upon the use of sailing ships in the Indian seas. Before the boat had left our side, the ships had floated so close together, through attraction, that we had to make several revolutions with the screw in order to prevent collision.
When we, who were all sleeping upon deck, were aroused by the customary growl from the European quartermaster of “Four o‘clock, sir! Going to swab decks, sir! Get up, sir!” given with the flare of the lantern in our eyes, we were still over a hundred miles from Galle; but before the sun had risen, we caught sight of Adam‘s Peak, a purple mass upon the northern sky, and soon we were racing with a French steamer from Saigon, and with a number of white-sailed native craft from the Maldives. Within a few hours, we were at anchor in a small bay, surrounded with lofty cocoa-palms, in which were lying, tossed by a rolling swell, some dozen huge steamers, yard-arm to yard-arm—the harbor of Point de Galle. Every ship was flying her ensign, and in the damp hot air the old tattered union-jacks seemed brilliant crimson, and the dull green ofthe cocoa-palms became a dazzling emerald. The scene wanted but the bright plumage of the Panama macaws.
Once seated in the piazza of the Oriental Company‘s hotel, the best managed in the East, I had before me a curious scene. Along the streets were pouring silent crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at the first glance supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices; their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop, and caught at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb. As they drew near, mustaches began to show, and I saw that they were men, while walking with them were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more rough and “manly” than their husbands. Petticoat and chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and time after time I had to look twice before I could fix the passer‘s sex. My rule at last became to set down everybody that was womanly as a man, and everybody that was manly as a woman. Cinghalese, Kandians, Tamils from South India, and Moormen with crimson caftans and shaven crowns, formed the body of the great crowd; but, besides these, there were Portuguese, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutchmen, and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled Arabian woman or a Veddah—one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle. Ceylon has never been independent, and in a singular mixture of races her ports bear testimony to the number of the foreign conquests.
Two American missionaries were among the passers-by, but one of them, detecting strangers, came up to the piazza in search of news. There had been no loss of national characteristics in these men;—they were brimful of the mixture of earnestness and quaint profanity which distinguishes the New England puritan: one of them described himself to me as “just a kind of journeyman soul-saver, like.”
The Australian strangers were not long left unmolested by more serious intruders than grave Vermonters. The cry of “baksheesh”—an Arabian word that goes from Gibraltar to China, and from Ceylon to the Khyber Pass, and which has reached us in the form of “boxes” in our phrase Christmas-boxes—was the first native word I heard in the East, at Galle, as it was afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of the beggars was an Albino, fair as a child in a Hampshire lane; one of those strange sports of nature from whom Cinghalese tradition asserts the European races to be sprung.
The beggars were soon driven off by the hotel servants, and better licensed plunderers began their work. “Ah safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah mooney stone, ah opal, ah amtit, ah!” was the cry from every quarter, and jewel-sellers of all the nations of the East descended on us in a swarm. “Me givee you written guarantee dis real stone;” “Yes, dat real stone; but disgoodstone—dat no good stone—no water. Ah, see!” “Dat no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good stone: all dese bad stone, reg‘lar England stone. You go by next ship? No? Ah, den you come see me shop. Dese ship-passenger stone—humbuk stone. Ship gone, den you come me shop; see good stone. When you come? eh? when you come?” “Ah, safeer, ah catty-eye, ah pinkee collal!” Meanwhile every Galle-dwelling European, at the bar of the hotel, was adding to the din by shouting to the native servants, “Boy, turn out these fellows, and stop their noise.” This cry of “boy” is a relic of the old Dutch times: it was the Hollander‘s term for his slave, and hence for every member of the inferior race. The first servant that I heard called “boy” was a tottering, white-haired old man.
The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One thousand three hundred and seventy years ago, the Chinese records tell us that Ceylon, then tributary to the empire, sent presents to the Brother of the Moon, one of the gifts being a “lapis-lazuli spittoon.” It is probable that some portion of the million and a half pounds sterling which are annually absorbed in this small island, but four-fifths the size of Ireland, is consumed in the setting of the precious stones for native use; every one you meet wears four or five heavy silver rings, and sovereigns are melted down to make gold ornaments.
Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers, I went with some of my Australian friends to stroll upon the ramparts and enjoy the evening salt breeze. We met several bodies of white-faced Europeans, sauntering like ourselves, and dressed like us in white trowsers and loose white jackets and pith hats. What we looked like I do not know, but they resembled ships’ stewards. At last it struck me that they were soldiers, and upon inquiring I found that these washed-out dawdlers represented a British regiment of the line. I was by this time used to see linesmen out of scarlet, having beheld a parade in bushranger-beards and blue-serge “jumpers” at Taranaki in New Zealand; but one puts up easier with the soldier-bushranger than with the soldier-steward.
The climate of the day had been exquisite with its bright air and cooling breeze, and I had begun to think that those who knew Acapulco and Echuca could afford to laugh at the East, with its thermometer at 88°. The reckoning came at night, however, for by dark all the breeze was gone, and the thermometer, instead of falling, had risen to 90° when I lay down to moan and wait for dawn. As I was dropping off to sleep at aboutfour o‘clock, a native came round and closed the doors, to shut out the dangerous land-breeze that springs up at that hour. Again, at half-past five, it was cooler, and I had begun to doze, when a cannon-shot, fired apparently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with something more than a start. I remembered the saying of the Western boy before Petersburg, when he heard for the first time the five o‘clock camp-gun, and called to his next neighbor at the fire, “Say, Bill, did you hap to hear how partic‘lar loud the day broke just now?” for it was the morning-gun, which in Ceylon is always fired at the same time, there being less than an hour‘s difference between the longest and shortest days. Although it was still pitch dark, the bugles began to sound theréveilleon every side—in the infantry lines, the artillery barracks, and the lines of the Malay regiment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten minutes afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was eating plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool room lit by the beams of the morning sun, so short is the April twilight in Ceylon.
It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat: a European can labor in the open air in South Australia with the thermometer at 110° in the shade, while, with a thermometer at 88°, the nights are unbearable in Ceylon. To discover whether the climate of a place be really hot, examine its newspapers; and if you find the heat recorded, you may make up your mind that it is a variable climate, but if no “remarkable heat” or similar announcements appear, then you may be sure that you are in a permanently hot place. It stands to reason that no one in the tropics ever talks of “tropical heat.”
In so equable a climate, the apathy of the Cinghalese is not surprising; but they are not merely lazy, theyare a cowardly, effeminate, and revengeful race. They sleep and smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing themselves only once in the day to snatch a bowl of curry and rice, or to fleece a white man; and so slowly do the people run the race of life that even elephantiasis, common here, does not seem to put the sufferer far behind his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mystery when expounded under this climate. See a few Cinghalese stretched in the shade of a cocoa-palm, and you can conceive Buddha sitting cross-legged for ten thousand years contemplating his own perfection.
The second morning that I spent in Galle, the captain of theBombaywas kind enough to send his gig for me to the landing-steps at dawn, and his Malay crew soon rowed me to the ship, where the captain joined me, and we pulled across the harbor to Watering-place Point, and bathed in the shallow sea, out of the reach of sharks. When we had dressed, we went on to a jetty, to look into the deep water just struck by the rising sun. I should have marveled at the translucency of the waters had not the awful clearness with which the bottoms of the Canadian lakes stand revealed in evening light been fresh within my memory, but here the bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceivable brilliancy of color, and tenanted by still more gorgeous fish. Of the two that bore the palm, one was a little fish of mazarine blue, without a speck of any other color, and perfect too in shape; the second, a silver fish, with a band of soft brown velvet round its neck, and another about its tail. In a still more sheltered cove the fish were so thick that dozens of Moors were throwing into the water, with the arm-twist of a fly-fisher, bare hooks, which they jerked through the shoal and into the air, never failing to bring them up clothed with a fish, caught most times by the fin.
In the evening, two of us tried a native dinner, at a house where Cinghalese gentlemen dine when they come into Galle on business. Our fare was as follows: First course: a curry of the delicious seir-fish, a sort of mackerel; a prawn curry; a bread-fruit and cocoanut curry; a Brinjal curry, and a dish made of jackfruit, garlic, and mace; all washed down by iced water. Second course: plantains, and very old arrack in thimble-glasses, followed by black coffee. Of meat there was no sign, as the Cinghalese rarely touch it; and, although we liked our vegetarian dinner, my friend passed a criticism in action on it by dining again at the hotel-ordinary one hour later. We agreed, too, that the sickly smell of cocoanut would cleave to us for weeks.
Starting with an Australian friend, at the dawn of my third day in the island, I took the coach by the coast road to Columbo. We drove along a magnificent road in an avenue of giant cocoanut-palms, with the sea generally within easy sight, and with a native hut at each few yards. Every two or three miles, the road crossed a lagoon, alive with bathers, and near the bridge was generally a village, bazaar, and Buddhist temple, built pagoda-shape, and filled with worshipers. The road was thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese; and now and again we would pass a Buddhist priest in saffron-colored robes, hastening along, his umbrella borne over him by a boy clothed from top to toe in white. The umbrellas of the priests are of yellow silk, and shaped like ours, but other natives carry flat-topped umbrellas, gilt, or colored red and black. The Cinghalese farmers we met traveling to their temples in carts drawn by tiny bullocks. Such was the brightness of the air, that the people, down to the very beggars, seemed clad in holiday attire.
As we journeyed on, we began to find more variety in the scenery and vegetation, and were charmed with the scarlet-blossomed cotton-tree, and with the areca, or betel-nut palm. The cocoanut groves, too, were carpeted with an undergrowth of orchids and ipecacuanha, and here and there was a bread-fruit tree or an hibiscus.
In Ceylon we have retained the Dutch posting system, and small light coaches, drawn by four or six small horses at a gallop, run over excellent roads, carrying, besides the passengers, two boys behind, who shout furiously whenever vehicles or passengers obstruct the mails, and who at night carry torches high in the air, to light the road. Thus we dashed through the bazaars and cocoa groves, then across the golden sands covered with rare shells, and fringed on the one side with the bright blue dancing sea, dotted with many a white sail, and on the other side with deep green jungle, in which were sheltered dark lagoons. Once in a while, we would drive out on to a plain, varied by clumps of fig and tulip trees, and, looking to the east, would sight the purple mountains of the central range; then, dashing again into the thronged bazaars, would see little but the bright palm-trees relieved upon an azure sky. The road is one continuous village, for the population is twelve times as dense in the western as in the eastern provinces of Ceylon. No wonder that ten thousand natives have died of cholera within the last few months! All this dense coast population is supported by the cocoanut, for there are in Ceylon 200,000 acres under cocoa-palms, which yield from seven to eight hundred million cocoa-nuts a year, and are worth two millions sterling.
Near Bentotté, where we had lunched off horrible oysters of the pearl-yielding kind, we crossed the KalugangaRiver, densely fringed with mangrove, and in its waters saw a python swimming bravely toward the shore. Snakes are not so formidable as land-leeches, the Cinghalese and planters say, and no one hears of many persons being bitten, though a great reward for an antidote to the cobra bite has lately been offered by the Rajah of Travancore.
As we entered what the early maps style “The Christian Kyngdom of Colombo,” though where they found their Christians no one knows, our road lay through the cinnamon gardens, which are going out of cultivation, as they no longer pay, although the cinnamon laurel is a spice-grove in itself, giving cinnamon from its bark, camphor from the roots, clove oil from its leaves. The plant grows wild about the island, and is cut and peeled by the natives at no cost save that of children‘s labor, which they do not count as cost at all. The scene in the gardens that still remain was charming: the cinnamon-laurel bushes contrasted well with the red soil, and the air was alive with dragon-flies, moths, and winged-beetles, while the softness of the evening breeze had tempted out the half-caste Dutch “burgher” families of the city, who were driving and walking clothed in white, the ladies with their jet hair dressed with natural flowers. The setting sun threw brightness without heat into the gay scene.
A friend who had horses ready for us at the hotel where the mail-coach stopped, said that it was not too late for a ride through the fort, or European town inside the walls; so, cantering along the esplanade, where the officers of the garrison were enjoying their evening ride, we crossed the moat, and found ourselves in what is perhaps the most graceful street in the world:—a double range of long low houses of bright white stone, with deep piazzas, buried in masses ofbright foliage, in which the fire-flies were beginning to play. In the center of the fort is an Italian campanile, which serves at once as a belfry, a clock-tower, and a light-house. In the morning, before sunrise, we climbed this tower for the view. The central range stood up sharply on the eastern sky, as the sun was still hid behind it, and to the southeast there towered high the peak where Adam mourned his son a hundred years. In color, shape, and height, the Cinghalese Alps resemble the Central Apennines, and the view from Columbo is singularly like that from Pesaro on the Adriatic. As we looked landwards from the campanile, the native town was mirrored in the lake, and outside the city the white-coated troops were marching by companies on to the parade-ground, whence we could faintly hear the distant bands.
Driving back in a carriage, shaped like a street cab, but with fixed venetians instead of sides and windows, we visited the curing establishment of the Ceylon Coffee Company, where the coffee from the hills is dried and sorted. Thousands of native girls are employed in coffee-picking at the various stores, but it is doubted whether the whole of this labor is not wasted, the berries being sorted according to their shape and size—characteristics which seem in no way to affect the flavor. The Ceylon exporters say that if we choose to pay twice as much for shapely as for ill-shaped berries, it is no business of theirs to refuse to humor us by sorting.
The most remarkable institution in Columbo is the steam factory where the government make or mend such machinery as their experts certify cannot be dealt with at any private works existing in the island. The government elephants are kept at the same place, but I found them at work up country on the Kandy road.
In passing through the native town upon Slave Island, we saw some French Catholic priests in their working jungle dresses of blue serge. They have met with singular successes in Ceylon, having made 150,000 converts, while the English and American missions have between them only 30,000 natives. The Protestant missionaries in Ceylon complain much of the planters, whom they accuse of declaring, when they wish to hire men, that “no Christian need apply;” but it is a remarkable fact that neither Protestants nor Catholics can make converts among the self-supported “Moormen,” the active pushing inhabitants of the ports, who are Mohammedans to a man. The chief cause of the success of the Catholics among the Cinghalese seems to be the remarkable earnestness of the French and Italian missionary priests. Our English missionaries in the East are too often men incapable of bearing fatigue or climate; ignorant of every trade, and inferior even in teaching and preaching powers to their rivals. It is no easy matter to spread Christianity among the Cinghalese, the inventors of Buddhism, the most ancient and most widely spread of all the religions of the world. Every Buddhist firmly believes in the potential perfection of man, and is incapable of understanding the ideas of original sin and redemption; and a Cinghalese Buddhist—passionless himself—cannot comprehend the passionate worship that Christianity requires. The Catholics, however, do not neglect the Eastern field for missionary labor. Four of their bishops from Cochin China and Japan were met by me in Galle, upon their way to Rome.
Our drive was brought to an end by a visit to the old Dutch quarter—a careful imitation of Amsterdam; indeed, one of its roads still bears the portentous Batavian name of Dam Street. Their straight canals, andformal lines of trees, the Hollanders have carried with them throughout the world; but in Columbo, not content with manufacturing imitation canals, that began and ended in a wall, they dug great artificial lakes to recall their well-loved Hague.
The same evening, I set off by the new railway for Kandy and Nuwara Ellia (pronounced Nooralia) in the hills. Having no experience of the climate of mountain regions in the tropics, I expected a merely pleasant change, and left Columbo wearing my white kit, which served me well enough as far as Ambe Pusse—the railway terminus, which we reached at ten o‘clock at night. We started at once by coach, and had not driven far up the hills in the still moonlight before the cold became extreme, and I was saved from a severe chill only by the kindness of the coffee-planter who shared the back seat with me, and who, being well clad in woolen, lent me his great-coat. After this incident, we chatted pleasantly without fear of interruption from our sole companion—a native girl, who sat silently chewing betel all the way—and reached Kandy before dawn. Telling the hotel servants to wake me in an hour, I wrapped myself in a blanket—the first I had seen since I left Australia—and enjoyed a refreshing sleep.
THEearly morning was foggy and cold as an October dawn in an English forest; but before I had been long in the gardens of the Government House, the sun rose, and the heat returned once more. After wandering among the petunias and fan-palms of the gardens, I passed on into the city, the former capital of the Kandian or highland kingdom, and one of the holiest of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was never conquered by the Portuguese or Dutch while they held the coasts, and was not overrun by us till 1815, while it has several times been in rebellion since that date. The people still retain their native customs in a high degree: for instance, the Kandian husband does not take his wife‘s inheritance unless he lives with her on her father‘s land: if she lives with him, she forfeits her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is expressly maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy and polyandry, although the maritime Cinghalese are governed, as are the English in Ceylon and at the Cape, by the civil code of Holland.
The difference between the Kandian and coast Cinghalese is very great. At Kandy, I found the men wearing flowing crimson robes and flat-topped caps, while their faces were lighter in color than those of the coast people, and many of them had beards. The women also wore the nose-ring in a different way, and were clothed above as well as below the waist. It ispossible that some day we may unfortunately hear more of this energetic and warlike people.
The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The Upper Town is one great garden, so numerous are the sacred groves, vocal with the song of the Eastern orioles, but here and there are dotted about pagoda-shaped temples, identical in form with those of Tartary two thousand miles away, and from these there proceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost drowns the song. One of these temples contains the holiest of Buddhist relics, the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly carried in a grand procession. When we first annexed the Kandian kingdom, we recognized the Buddhist Church, made our officers take part in the procession of the Sacred Tooth, and sent a State offering to the shrine. Times are changed since then, but the Buddhist priests are still exempt from certain taxes. All round the sacred inclosures are ornamented walls, with holy sculptured figures; and in the Lower Town are fresh-water lakes and tanks, formed by damming the Mavaliganga River, and also, in some measure, holy. An atmosphere of Buddhism pervades all Kandy.
From Kandy, I visited the coffee-district of which it is the capital and center, but I was much disappointed with regard to the amount of land that is still open to coffee-cultivation. At the Government Botanic Garden at Peredenia (where the jalap plant, the castor-oil plant, and the ipecacuanha were growing side by side), I was told that the shrub does not flourish under 1500 nor over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea-level, and that all the best coffee-land is already planted. Coffee-growing has already done so much for Ceylon that it is to be hoped that it has not reached its limit: in thirty-three years it has doubled her trade ten times, and to England alone she now sends two millions’ worth of coffee everyyear. The central district of the island, in which lie the hills and coffee-country, is, with the exception of the towns, politically not a portion of Ceylon: there are English capital, English management, and Indian labor, and the cocoa-palm is unknown; Tamil laborers are exclusively employed upon the plantations, although the carrying trade, involving but little labor, is in the hands of the Cinghalese. No such official discouragement is shown to the European planters in Ceylon as that which they experience in India; and were there but more good coffee-lands and more capital, all would be well. The planters say that, after two years’ heavy expenditure and dead loss, 20 per cent. can be made by men who take in sufficient capital, but that no one ever does take capital enough for the land he buys, and that they all have to borrow from one of the Columbo companies at 12 per cent., and are then bound to ship their coffee through that company alone. It is regarded as an open question by many disinterested friends of Ceylon whether it might not be wise for the local government to advance money to the planters; but besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection to this course, that the government, becoming interested in the success of coffee-planting, might also come to connive at the oppression of the native laborers. This oppression of the people lies at the bottom of that Dutch system which is often held up for our imitation in Ceylon.
Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java system forget that it is not denied that in the tropical islands, with an idle population and a rich soil, compulsory labor may be the only way of developing the resources of the countries, but they fail to show the justification for our developing the resources of the country by such means. The Dutch culture-system putsa planter down upon the crown lands, and, having made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out how he shall repay the government. Forced labor—under whatever name—is the natural result.
The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs by princely salaries and vast percentage upon the crops their people raise, and force the native agriculturists to grow spices for the Royal Market of Amsterdam. Of the purchase of these spices the government has a monopoly: it buys them at what price it will, and, selling again in Europe to the world, clears annually some £4,000,000 sterling by the job. That plunder, slavery, and famine often follow the extension of their system is nothing to the Dutch. Strict press-laws prevent the Dutch at home from hearing anything of the discontent in Java, except when famine or insurrection calls attention to the isle; and £4,000,000 a year profit, and half the expenses of their navy paid for them by one island in the Eastern seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced people by starvation.
The Dutch often deny that the government retains the monopoly of export; but the fact of the matter is that the Dutch Trading Company, who have the monopoly of the exports of the produce of crown lands—which amount to two-thirds of the total exports of the isle—are mere agents of the government.
It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the culture-system, the Dutch principle of making a profit out of the countries which they rule is inconsistent with the position of a Christian nation. It is the ancient system of countries having possessions in the East, and upon our side we are not able to show any definite reasons in favor of our course of scrupulously keeping separate the Indian revenue, and spendingIndian profits upon India and Cinghalese in Ceylon, except such reasons as would logically lead to our quitting India altogether. That the Dutch should make a profit out of Java is perhaps not more immoral than that they should be there. At the same time, the character of the Dutch system lowers the tone of the whole Dutch nation, and especially of those who have any connection with the Indies, and effectually prevents future amendment. With our system, there is some chance of right being done, so small is our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no surplus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free from that bane of Java,—the desire of the local authorities to increase as much as possible the valuable productions of their districts, even at the risk of famine, provided only that they may hope to put off the famine until after their time—a desire that produces the result that subaltern Dutch officers who observe in their integrity the admirable rules which have been made for the protection of the native population are heartily abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled.
Not to be carried away by the material success of the Dutch system, it is as well to bear in mind its secret history. A private company—the Dutch Trading Society—was founded at Amsterdam in 1824, the then King being the largest shareholder. The company was in difficulties in 1830, when the King, finding he was losing money fast, sent out as Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend Van den Bosch. The next year, the culture-system, with all its attendant horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den Bosch, the Dutch Trading Society being made agents for the government. The result was the extraordinary prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the merchant-king of a private fortune of fabulous amount.
The Dutch system has been defended by every conceivable kind of blind misrepresentation; it has even been declared, by writers who ought certainly to know better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxation! Even the blindest admirers of the system are forced, however, to admit that it involves the absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total exclusion from knowledge of the Java people.
The Ceylon planters have at present political as well as financial difficulties on their hands. They have petitioned the Queen for “self-government for Ceylon,” and for control of the revenue by “representatives of the public”—excellent principles, if “public” meant public, and “Ceylon,” Ceylon; but, when we inquire of the planters what they really mean, we find that by “Ceylon” they understand Galle and Columbo Fort, and by “the public” they mean themselves. There are at present six unofficial members of the Council: of these, the whites have three members, the Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a Council to which supreme power shall be intrusted in the disposition of the revenues. They are, indeed, careful to explain that they in no way desire the extension of representative institutions to Ceylon.
The first thing that strikes the English traveler in Ceylon is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the country. In my journey from Galle to Columbo, by early morning and mid-day, I met no white man; from Columbo to Kandy, I traveled with one, but met none; at Kandy, I saw no whites; at Nuwara Ellia, not half a dozen. On my return, I saw no whites between Nuwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there was a white man in the railway-station; and on my return by eveningfrom Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging crowds along the roads there was not a single European. There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who live and die and never see a white man. Out of the two and a quarter millions of people who dwell in what the planters call the “colony of Ceylon,” there are but 3000 Europeans, of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and 250 our civilians. Of the European non-official class, there are but 1300 persons, or about 500 grown-up men. The proposition of the Planters’ Association is that we should confide the despotic government over two and a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hindoo laborers to these 500 English Christian employers. It is not the Ceylon planters who have a grievance against us, but we who have a serious complaint against them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly provide for all the costs of her defense.
Some of the mountain views between Kandy and Nuwara Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack the New Zealand snows; but none can match, for variety and color, that which I saw on may return from the ascent to the Kaduganava Pass, where you look over a foreground of giant-leaved talipot and slender areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with banyan-tree groves and broken by wooded hills. On either side, the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with bright green—the wet rice-lands, or terraced paddy-fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop throughout the year.
In the union of rich foliage with deep color and grand forms, no scenery save that of New Zealand can bear comparison with that of the hill country of Ceylon, unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java and the far Eastern Isles.
Spendingbut a single day in Madras—an inferior Columbo—I passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians “The Benighted Presidency.” Small as are the houses, poor as are the shops, every one looks well-to-do, and everybody happy, from the not undeservedly famed cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the shore. Coffee and good government have of late done much for Madras.
The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is altogether inferior to the fine-weather swell on the west coast of New Zealand, and only to be dignified and promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before they reach Ceylon, or the pork and molasses when off Nantucket light-ship. The row through the first roller in the lumbering Massullah boat, manned by a dozen sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the first and second lines of spray, and then the dash for shore, the crew singing their measured “Ah! lah! lálala!—ah! lah! lálala!” the stroke coming with the accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking with excitement, is a more pretentious ceremony than that which accompanies the crossing of Hokitika bar, but the passage is a far less dangerous one. The Massullahboats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but built without nails, so that they “give” instead of breaking up when battered by the sand on one side and the seas upon the other. This is a very wise precaution in the case of boats which are always made to take the shore broadside on. The first sea that strikes the boat either shoots the passenger on to the dry sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught by the natives on the beach, but the Massullah boat herself gets a terrible banging before the crew can haul her out of reach of the seas.
Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steaming between light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sunderabunds till we had been many hours in “the river.” After lying right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was English; there was nothing tropical about it except the mist upon the land; and low villas and distant factory-chimneys reminded one of the Thames between Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building on our right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost imposing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the extravagance of the King that the government of India has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to pay his debts, and deduct them from his income of £120,000 a year; for we pay into the privy purse of the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly sum that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria.Whatever income is allowed to native princes, they always spend the double. The experience of the Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this respect. Removed from that slight restraint upon expenditure which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution forces upon reigning kings, native princes supported by European governments run recklessly into debt. The commission which was sitting upon the debts of the King of Oude while I was in Calcutta warned him that, if he offended a second time, government would for the future spend his income for him. It is not the King‘s extravagance alone, however, that is complained of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has now become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For nine years he has never left his palace, yet he spends, we are told, from £200,000 to £250,000 a year.
In his extravagance and immorality the King of Oude does not stand alone in Calcutta. His mode of life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his vices are mimicked by every young Bengalee baboo. It is a question whether we are not responsible for the tone which has been taken by “civilization” in Calcutta. The old philosophy has gone, and left nothing in its place; we have by moral force destroyed the old religions in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether the character of our Indian government, at once leveling and paternal, has not much to do with the spread of careless sensuality is a question before answering which it would be well to look to France, where a similar government has for sixteen years prevailed. In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is fast degrading the French citizen to the moral level of the Bengalee baboo.
The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view of the Government House from the Park Reserve—a miniature Sahara since its trees were destroyed by the great cyclone. The Viceroy‘s dwelling, though crushed by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and astonishing design, is an imposing building; but it is the only palace in the “city of palaces”—a name which must have been given to the pestiferous city by some one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool and London. The true city of palaces is Lucknow.
In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that unbounded hospitality of the great mercantile houses in the East of which I have since acquired many pleasing remembrances. The luxury of “the firm” impresses the English traveler; the huge house is kept as a hotel; every one is welcome to dinner, breakfast, and bed in the veranda, or in a room, if he can sleep under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every one is welcome, down to the friend of a friend‘s friend; and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most hospitable welcome from the other clerks, even when all the partners are away. “If Brown is not there, Smith will be, and if he‘s away, why then Johnson will put you up,” is the form of invitation to the hospitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are on table between five and six, and tea and iced drinks are ready at all times, from dawn to breakfast—a ceremony which takes place at ten. To the regular meals you come in or not as you please, and no one trained in Calcutta or Bombay can conceive offense being taken by a host at his guest accepting, without consulting him, invitations to dine out in the city, or to spend somedays at a villa in its outskirts. Servants are in the corridors by day and night at the call of guests, and your entertainers tell you that, although they have not time to go about with you, servants will always be ready to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the carriage of some member of the firm.
The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of Galle, though the constituents are not the same. Greeks, Armenians, and Burmese, besides many Eurasians, or English-speaking half-castes, mingle with the mass of Indian Mohammedans and Hindoos. The hot weather having suddenly set in, the Calcutta officials, happier than the merchants—who, however, care little about heat when trade is good—were starting for Simla in a body, “just as they were warming to their work,” as the Calcutta people say, and, finding that there was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I, too, determined to set off.
The heat was great at night, and the noisy native crows and whistling kites held durbars inside my window in the only cool hour of the twenty-four—namely, that which begins at dawn—and thus hastened my departure from Calcutta by preventing me from taking rest while in it. Hearing that at Patna there was nothing to be seen or learnt, I traveled from Calcutta to Benares—500 miles—in the same train and railway carriage. Our first long stoppage was at Chandernagore, but, as the native baggage-coolies, or porters, howl the station names in their own fashion, I hardly recognized the city in the melancholy moan of “Orn-dorn-orn-gorne,” which welcomed the train, and it was not till I saw a French infantry uniform upon the platform that I remembered that Chandernagore, a village belonging to the French, lies hard by Calcutta, to which city it was once a dangerous rival. Itis said that the French retain their Indian dependencies, instead of selling them to us as did the Dutch, in order that they may ever bear in mind the fact that we once conquered them in India; but it would be hard to find any real ground for their retention, unless they are held as centers for the Catholic missions. We will not even permit them to be made smuggling depots, for which purpose they would be excellently adapted. The whole of the possessions in India of the French amount together to only twenty-six leagues square. Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French Indian dependency of which the name is often heard in Europe, is cut into several portions by strips of British territory, and the whole of the French-Indian dependencies are mere specks of land isolated in our vast territories. The officer who was lounging in the station was a native; indeed, in the territory of Chandernagore there are but 230 Europeans, and but 1500 in all French India. He made up to my compartment as though he would have got in, which I wished that he would have done, as natives in the French service all speak French, but, seeing a European, he edged away to a dark uncomfortable compartment. This action was, I fear, a piece of silent testimony to the prejudice which makes our people in India almost invariably refuse to travel with a native, whatever may be his rank.
As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal, where the East Indian Railway taps the Ganges, the station scenes became more and more interesting. We associate with the word “railway” ideas that are peculiarly English:—shareholders and directors, guards in blue, policemen in dark green, and porters in brown corduroy; no English institution, however, assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station-mastersand sparrows alone are English; everything else on a Bengal railway is purely Eastern. Sikh irregulars jostle begging fakeers in the stations; palkees and doolies—palankeens and sedans, as we should call them—wait at the back doors; ticket-clerks smoke water-pipes; an ibis drinks at the engine-tank; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame elephant reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph-wire, on which sits a hoopoe, while an Indian vulture crowns the post.
When we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the only natural objects which for 1600 miles break the level of the great plain of Hindostan, people of the central tribes, small-headed and savage-looking, were mingled with the Hindoos at the stations. In blackness there was not much difference between the races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black as Guinea negroes.
As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well-filled skin upon his back appeared at every station, and came running to the native cars in answer to the universal long-drawn shout of “Ah! ah! Bheestie—e!”
The first view of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm. The Thames below Gravesend half dried up would be not unlike it; indeed, the river itself is as ugly as the Mississippi or Missouri, while its banks are more hideous by far than theirs. Beyond Patna, the plains, too, become as monotonous as the river,—flat, dusty, and treeless, they are in no way tropical in their character; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the tropics. I afterward found that a man may cross India from the Irawaddy to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no tropical cultivation. The aspect of the Ganges valley is that of Cambridgeshire, or of parts of Lincoln seen after harvest time, and with flocks of strange and brilliantbirds and an occasional jackal thrown in. The sun is hot—not, indeed, much hotter than in Australia, but the heat is of a different kind from that encountered by the English in Ceylon or the West Indies. From a military point of view, the plains may be described as a parade-ground continued to infinity; and this explains the success of our small forces against the rebels in 1857, our cavalry and artillery having in all cases swept their infantry from these levels with the utmost ease.
A view over the plains by daylight is one which in former times some old Indians can never have enjoyed. Many a lady in the days of palki-dawk has passed a life in the Deccan table-land without ever seeing a mountain, or knowing she was on the top of one. Carried up and down the ghauts at night, it was only by the tilting of her palki that she could detect the rise or fall, for day traveling for ladies was almost unknown in India before it was introduced with the railways.
At Patna, the station was filled with crowds of railway coolies, or navvies, as we should say, who, with their tools and baggage, were camped out upon the platform, smoking peacefully. I afterward found that natives have little idea of time-tables and departure hours. When they want to go ten miles by railway, they walk straight down to the nearest station, and there smoke their hookahs till the train arrives—at the end of twenty-four hours or ten minutes, as the case may be. There is but one step that the more ignorant among the natives are in a hurry to take, and that is to buy their tickets. They are no sooner come to the terminus than with one accord they rush at the native ticket-clerk, yelling the name of the station to which they wish to go. In vain he declares that, the trainnot being due for ten or fifteen hours, there is plenty of time for the purchase. Open-mouthed, and wrought up almost to madness, the passengers dance round him, screaming “Burdwan!” or “Serampoor!” or whatever the name may be, till at last he surrenders at discretion. There is often no room for all who wish to go; indeed, the worst point about the management of the railways lies in the defective accommodation for the native passengers, and their treatment by the English station-masters is not always good: I saw them on many occasions terribly kicked and cuffed; but Indian station-masters are not very highly paid, and are too often men who cannot resist the temptations to violence which despotic power throws in their way. They might ask with the Missourian in the United States army when he was accused of drunkenness, “Whether Uncle Sam expected to get all the cardinal virtues for fifteen dollars a month?”
The Indian railways are all made and worked by companies; but as the government guarantees the interest of five per cent., which only the East Indian, or Calcutta and Delhi, line can pay, it interferes much in the management. The telegraph is both made and worked by government; and the reason why the railways were not put upon the same footing is that the government of India was doubtful as to the wisdom of borrowing directly the vast sum required, and doubtful also of the possibility of borrowing it without diminishing its credit.
The most marked among the effects of railways upon the state of India are, as a moral change, the weakening of caste ties—as a physical, the destruction of the Indian forests. It is found that if a rich native discovers that he can, by losing caste in touching his inferiors, travel a certain distance in a comfortable second-classcarriage for ten rupees, while a first-class ticket costs him twenty, he will often risk his caste to save his pound; still, caste yields but slowly to railways and the telegraph. It is but a very few years since one of my friends received a thousand rupees for pleading in a case which turned on the question whether the paint-spot on Krishna‘s nose, which is also a caste sign, should be drawn as a plain horizontal crescent, or with a pendant from the center. It is only a year since, in Orissa, it was seen that Hindoo peasants preferred cannibalism, or death by starvation, to defilement by eating their bullocks.
As for the forests, their destruction has already in many places changed a somewhat moist climate to one of excessive drought, and planting is now taking place with a view both to supplying the railway engines and bringing back the rains. On the East Indian line, I found that they burnt mixed coal and wood, but the Indian coal is scarce and bad, and lies entirely in shallow “pockets.”
The train reached Mogul-Serai, the junction for Benares, at midnight of the day following that on which it left Calcutta, and, changing my carriage at once, I asked how long it would be before we started, to which the answer was, “half an hour;” so I went to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed, I was awakened by whispering, and, turning, saw a crowd of boys and baggage-coolies at the carriage-door. When I tried to discover what they wanted, my Hindostanee broke down, and it was some time before I found that I had slept through the short journey from Mogul-Serai, and had dozed on in the station till the lights had been put out, before the coolies woke me. Crossing the Ganges by the bridge of boats, I found myself in Benares, the ancient Varanasi, and sacred capital of the Hindoos.