In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf railroad, Kurrachee would play a leading part. Not only the wheat and the cotton of the Punjaub and of the then irrigated Scinde, but the trade of Central Asia would flow down the Indus, and it is hardly too much to believe that the silks of China, the teas of Northern India, and the shawls of Cashmere will all of them one day find in Kurrachee their chief port. The earliest known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf. Chinese ships traded to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh centuries, bringing silk and iron, and it may be doubted whether any of the Russian routes will be able to compete with the more ancient Euphrates valley line of trade. Shorter, passing through countries well known and comparatively civilized, admitting at once of the use of land and water transport side by side, it is far superior in commercial and political advantages to any of the Russian desert roads. A route through Upper Persia has been proposed, but merchants of experience will tell you that greater facilities for trade are extended to Europeans in even the “closed” ports of China than upon the coasts of Persia, and the prospect of the freedom of trade upon a Persian railroad would be but a bad one, it may be feared.
The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the glory of many fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuzand Antioch, Cyprus and Rhodes, have a second history before them; Crete, Brindisi, and Venice will each obtain a renewal of their ancient fame. Alexander of Macedon was the first man who took a scientific view of the importance of the Gulf route, but we have hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson contained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the coast from the Indus to the Euphrates. The advantage to be gained from the completion of the railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf will not fall only to the share of India and Great Britain. Holland and Belgium are, in proportion to their wealth, at the least as greatly interested in the Euphrates route as are we ourselves, and should join us in its construction. The Dutch trade with Java would be largely benefited, and Dutch ports would become the shipping-places for Eastern merchandise on its way to England and northeast America, while, to the cheap manufactures of Liège, India, China, and Central Asia would afford the best of markets. If the line were a double one, to the west and north of Aleppo, one branch running to Constantinople and the other to the Mediterranean at Scanderoon, the whole of Europe would benefit by the Persian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, would gain also the power of protecting Persia against Russia, and of thus preventing the dominance of a crushing despotism throughout the Eastern world. In a thousand ways, however, the advantages of the line to all Europe are so plainly manifest, that the only question worth discussing is the nature of the difficulties that hinder its completion.
The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are political and financial, and both have been exaggerated without limit. The project for a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf has been compared tothat for the construction of a railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific. In 1858, the American line was looked on as a mere speculator‘s dream, while the Euphrates Railway was to be commenced at once; ten years have passed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact, while the Indian line has been forgotten.
It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a more difficult matter than that of crossing the Plains and Rocky Mountains. The distance from St. Louis to San Francisco is 1600 miles, that from Constantinople to Bussorah is but 1100 miles; or from Scanderoon to Bussorah only 700 miles. From London to the Persian Gulf is not so far as from New York to San Francisco. The American line had to cross two great snowy chains and a waterless tract of considerable width: the Indian route crosses no passes so lofty as those of the Rocky Mountains or so difficult as those of the Sierra Nevada, and is well watered in its whole length. On the American line there is little coal, if any, while the Euphrates route would be plentifully supplied with coal from the neighborhood of Bagdad. When the American line was commenced, the proposed track lay across unknown wilds: the Constantinople and Persian Gulf route passes through venerable towns, the most ancient of all the cities of the world, and the route itself is the oldest known highway of trade. The chief of all the advantages possessed by the Indian line which is wanting in America is the presence of ample labor on all parts of the road. Steamers are already running from Bombay and Kurrachee to the Persian Gulf; others on the Tigris, and a portion of the Euphrates; there is a much-used road from Bagdad to Aleppo; and a Turkish military road from Aleppo to Constantinople, to which city a direct railroad will soon be opened; and a telegraph-line belongingto an English company already crosses Asian Turkey from end to end. Notwithstanding the facilities, the Euphrates Railway is still a project, while the Atlantic and Pacific line will be opened in 1870.
Were the financial difficulties those which the supporters of the line have in reality to meet, it might be urged that there will be a great local traffic between Bussorah, Bagdad, and Aleppo, and from all these cities to the sea, and that the government mail subsidies will be huge, and the Indian trade, even in the worst of years, considerable. Were the indifference of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they should refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line, its importance would amply warrant a moderate addition to the debt of India.
The real difficulties that have to be encountered are political rather than financial; the covert opposition of France and Egypt is not less powerful for evil than is the open hostility of Russia. Happily for India, however, the territories of our ally Turkey extend to the Persian Gulf, for it must be remembered that for railway purposes Turkish rule, if we so please, is equivalent to English rule. As it happens, no active measures are needed to advance our line; but, were it otherwise, such intervention as might be necessary to secure the safety of the great highway for Eastern trade with Europe would be defensible were it exerted toward a purely independent government.
The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte must be direct and governmental. For a private company to conduct a great enterprise to a successful conclusion in Eastern countries is always difficult; but when the matter is political in its nature, or, if commercial, at least hindered on political grounds, a private company is powerless. It is, moreover, thepractice of Eastern governments to grant concessions of important works which they cannot openly oppose, but which in truth they wish to hinder, to companies so formed as to be incapable of proceeding with the undertaking. When others apply, the government answers them that nothing further can be done: “the concession is already granted.”
Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed. It might even be advisable that we should declare that the Euphrates Valley Railway through the Turkish territory from Constantinople and Scanderoon through Aleppo to Bagdad and Bussorah, and sufficient military posts to insure its security in time of war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and that we should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to commence our work, on pain of the withdrawal of our protection.
Our general principle of non-interference is always liable to be set aside on proof of the existence of a higher necessity for intervention than for adherence to our golden rule, and it may be contended that sufficient proof has been shown in the present instance. Whether public action is to be taken, or the matter to be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the Direct Route to India is one of the most pressing of the questions of the day.
When, in company with my fellow-passengers from Moultan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on board the then Commissioner of Scinde, who was on his way to take his seat as a member of Council at Bombay. A number of the leading men of Scinde came on board to bid farewell to him before he sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but for our annexation of the country, would be the reigning Ameers at this moment.
Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, surpassed in glittering pomp the caps and baldrics of these Scindee chieftains; neither could anything be stranger than their dress. One had on a silk coat of pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet slippers with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of dark amber with flowers in white lace. A third was clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber; and the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk and gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the strange-shaped Scindian hat; all had jeweled dirks, with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold their swords, and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them. The sight, however, of no number of sapphires, turquoises, and gold clothes could have reconciled me to a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced when our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship‘s side to the sound of the Lascars’ anchor-tripping chorus, and left the deck to the “Proconsul” and ourselves.
CROSSINGthe mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept on board.
I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rippled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming down in rich green masses into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the Swedish to the Greek.
The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even mass of green is broken here and there by the crimson cones of the “gold mohur” trees, resembles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain islands and the Western Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; as it is, the distances are over-great.
Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of defense is singularly weak. The absence of batteries from the entrance to so great a trading port strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-balls of the African admirals of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to which can easily be cut off, and its people starved. One advantage, however, of the erection ofbatteries at the harbor‘s mouth would be, that the present fort might be pulled down, unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half might be partly built on.
The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bombay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be said that she has “not one merchant solvent,” was chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which the shares in a land-reclamation company which never commenced its operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was intensified by the passage of the English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round the world.
Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely king than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hundred steamers and the thousands of native boats that are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon; cotton has built the great offices and stores of seven and eight stories high; cotton has furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers’ cottages on Staten Island.
The export of cotton from India rose from five millions’ worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions’ worth in 1864, and the total exports of Bombay increased in the same proportion, while the population of the city rose from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed to look at the East as standing still, but Chicago itself never took a grander leap than did Bombay between 1860 and 1864. The rebellion in America gave theimpetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity; and the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the only Indian raw products the export of which has increased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased twentyfold, of tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold in the last six years; and the export of Indian tea increased in five years from nothing to three or four hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports, those which we associate with the term “Eastern trade,” are standing still, while the raw produce trade is thus increasing:—spices, elephants’ teeth, pearls, jewels, bandannas, shellac, dates, and gum are all decreasing, although the total exports of the country have trebled in five years.
India needs but railroads to enable her to compete successfully with America in the growth of cotton, but the development of the one raw product will open out her hitherto unknown resources.
While staying at one of the great merchant-houses in the Fort, I was able to see that the commerce of Bombay has not grown up of itself. With some experience among hard workers in the English towns, I was, nevertheless, astonished at the work got through by senior clerks and junior partners at Bombay. Although at first led away by the idea that men who wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking-chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast, cannot be said to get through much work, I soon found that men in merchants’ houses at Bombay work harder than they would be likely to do at home. Their day begins at 6A.M., and, as a rule, they work from then till dinner at 8 or 9P.M., taking an hour for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelvehours’ work in the day, with the thermometer never under 90° all the night, is an exhausting life. Englishmen could not long survive the work, but the Bombay merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.
Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is not always May or June, and from November to March the climate is all-but perfect. Even in the hottest weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar is close at hand, for short excursions, whenever the time is found; while the Bombay mango is a fruit which may bear comparison with the peaches of Salt Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The Bombay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the beauties of their city, any more than Londoners have to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower; and as for “tropical indolence,” or “Anglo-Indian luxury,” the bull-dogs are the only members of the English community in India who can discover anything but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and, knowing this, the cunning brute always makes the boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead to the private rooms over the merchants’ houses in the Fort.
Bombay bazaar is the gayest of gay scenes. Besides the ordinary crowd of any “native town,” there are solemn Jains, copper-colored Jews, white-coated Portuguese, Persians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespangled nautch girls, and grinning Seedees. The Parseesare strongest of all the merchant peoples of Bombay in numbers, in intelligence, and in wealth. Among the shopkeepers of their race, there is an over-prominence of trade shrewdness in the expression of the face, and in the shape even of the head. The Louvre bust of Richelieu, in which we have the idea of a wheedler, is a common type in the Parsee shops of the Bombay bazaar. The Parsee people, however, whatever their looks, are not only in complete possession of Bombay, but are the dark-skinned race to which we shall have to intrust the largest share in the regeneration of the East. Trading as they do in every city between Galle and Astrakan, but everywhere attached to the English rule, they bear to us the relative position that the Greeks occupy toward Russia.
Both in religion and in education, the Parsees are, as a community, far in advance of the Indian Mohammedans, and of the Hindoos. Their creed has become a pure deism, in which God‘s works are worshiped as the manifestations or visible representatives of God on earth, fire, the sun, and the sea taking the first places; although in the climate of Bombay prayers to the sun must be made up of more supplications than thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught, and there is not a pauper in the whole tribe. In the education and elevation of women, no Eastern race has as yet done much, but the Parsees have done the most, and have paved the way for further progress.
In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee movement has had some effect even upon others than Parsees, and the Hindoos of Bombay City stand far before even those of Calcutta in the earnestness and success of their endeavors to promote the moral elevation of women. Nothing can be done toward the regeneration of India so long as the women of all classesremain in their present degradation; and although many native gentlemen in Bombay already recognize the fact, and act upon it, progress is slow, since there is no basis upon which to begin. The Hindoos will not send their wives to schools where there are European lady teachers, for fear of proselytism taking place; and native women teachers are not yet to be found; hence all teaching must needs be left to men. Nothing, moreover, can be done with female children in Western India, where girls are married at from five to twelve years old.
I had not been two days in Bombay when a placard caught my eye, announcing a performance at the theater of “Romeo and Juliet, in the Maratta tongue;” but the play had no Friar Lawrence, no apothecary, and no nurse; it was nothing but a simple Maratta love-tale, followed by some religious tableaux. In the first piece an Englishman was introduced, and represented as kicking every native that crossed his path with the exclamation of “Damned fool:” at each repetition of which the whole house laughed. It is to be feared that this portion of the play was “founded upon fact.” On my way home through the native town at night, I came on a marriage procession better than any that I had seen. A band of fifers were screaming the most piercing of notes in front of an illuminated house, at which the horsemen and carriages were just arriving, both men and women clothed in jeweled robes, and silks of a hundred colors, that flashed and glittered in the blaze of the red torches. The procession, like the greater number of the most gorgeous ceremonials of Bombay, was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the marriage of one of their own people; but it is a curious fact that night marriages were forced upon the Parsees by the Hindoos, and one of the conditions upon whichthe Parsees were received into India was, that their marriage processions should take place at night.
The Caves of Elephanta have been many times described. The grandest sight of India, after the Taj, is the three-faced bust of the Hindoo Trinity, or God in his threefold character of Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. No Grecian sculpture that I have seen so well conveys the idea of Godhead. The Greeks could idealize man, the Italians can paint the saint, but the builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which distinguishes the heads of the Creator and Preserver is not the meditation of the saint, but the calm of unbounded power; and the Destroyer‘s head portends not destruction, so much as annihilation, to the world. The central head is, in its mysterious solemnity, that which the Sphinx should be, and is not, but one attribute alone is common to the expression of all three faces,—the presence of the Inscrutable.
ALTHOUGHPoonah is the ancient Maratta capital, and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout India for the splendor with which its people celebrate the Mohammedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in such a way as to reach the town upon the day of the “taboot procession.”
The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country ofBombay, by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of the Deccan, known as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into the Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length, is far more striking as an engineering work than the passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore and Ohio track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada railway works. The views from the carriage windows are singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between Columbo and Kandy; in fact, the Western Ghauts are of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else rent by volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle-peaks.
The rainy season had not commenced, and the vegetation that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting, although the “mango showers” were beginning, and spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot weather, were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from the rains. One of the early travelers to the Deccan told the good folks at home that after the rains the spiders’ webs were so thickly laced across the jungle that the natives of the country were in the habit of hiring elephants to walk before them and force a passage! At the time of my visit, neither webs nor jungle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harmless-looking fellows. One effect of the approaching monsoon was visible from the summit of the Ghaut, for the bases of the mountains were hid by the low clouds that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so bad as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which runs only “weather permitting,” and is rendered useless by two hours’ rain—a fall which, luckily for the shareholders, occurs only about once in every seven years. On theBhore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 inches in four months is not unusual, and “the rains” here take the place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry season there is a want of the visible presence of difficulties overcome, which detracts from the interest of the line.
At daybreak at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had lasted without intermission through the ten days’ fast, came to a sudden end, and the police and European magistrates began to marshal the procession of the taboots, or shrines, in the bazaar.
A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted on the walls, announcing the order of the procession and the rules to be enforced. The orders were that the procession to the river was to commence at 7A.M.and to end at 11A.M., and that tomtom-ing, except during those hours, would not be allowed. The taboots of the light cavalry, of three regiments of native infantry, and of the followers of three English regiments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were, however, to start at six o‘clock; the order of precedence among the cantonment or regimental taboots was carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms forbidden.
When I reached the bazaar, I found the native police were working in vain in trying to force into line a vast throng of bannermen, drummers, and saints, who surrounded the various taboots or models of the house of Ali and Fatima where their sons Hassan and Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines were of the size and make of the dolls’-houses of our English children, others in their height and gorgeousness resembled the most successful of our burlesques upon Guy Fawkes: some were borne on litters by four men;others mounted on light carts and drawn by bullocks, while the gigantic taboot of the Third Cavalry required six buffaloes for its transport to the river. Many privates of our native infantry regiments had joined the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to me to see privates in our service engaged in howling round a sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with the tomtom, as it must have been to the English in Lucknow in 1857 to hear the bands of the rebel regiments playing “Cheer, boys, cheer.”
Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within their lines all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances caused by the Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the Mohurrum, often run amuck among their Hindoo neighbors. In old times, quarrels between the Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mussulmans, used to be added to those between Mohammedans and Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but except upon the Afghan border these feuds have all-but died out now.
At the head of the procession marched a row of pipers, producing sounds of which no Highland regiment would have felt ashamed, followed by long-bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horseback, surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot placed on a cart, and drawn by bullocks; boys swinging incense walked before and followed, and I remarked a gigantic cross—a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit College for this Mohammedan festivity. After each taboot there came a band of Hindoo “tigers”—men painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of tigers, we had men painted in the colors worn by “sprites” in an English pantomime, and all—sprites and tigers—danced in the fashion of the medievalmummers. Behind the tigers and buffoons there followed women, walking in their richest dress. The nautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all the East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore.
Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks on horseback, wearing turbans of the honorable green which denotes direct descent from the Prophet, though the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohammedan writers, wears a green turban, as being an “honorary” descendant of Mohammed.
Thousands of men and women thronged the road down which the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot of their family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing and tomtom-beating like the rest.
Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the elegance of their gait. In the hot weather, the saree is the sole garment of the Hindoo women, and lends grace to the form without concealing the outlines of the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but of such soft thin texture that it makes no show upon the person. It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo habits, that at this Mohammedan festival the Mohammedan women should all be wearing the long seamless saree of the conquered Hindoos.
In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was nothing distinctively Mohammedan. Hindoos joined in the festivities, and “Portuguese,” or descendants of the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed high-sounding names and titles, and now form a large proportion of the inhabitants of towns in the BombayPresidency. The temptation of a ten days’ holiday is too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the Christians or Hindoos.
The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-side, where the taboots, one after the other, made their exit from ten days of glory into unfathomable slush; and such was the number of the “camp taboots,” as those of the native soldiers in our service are styled, and the “bazaar taboots,” or city contributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not completed when the illumination and fireworks commenced.
After dark, the bazaar was lit with colored fires, and with the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light; and the noise of tomtoms and fire-crackers recommenced in spite of proclamations and police-rules. Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the Mohurrum would cause as many fires in Hindostan as Independence-day in the United States; but, although houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are never burnt down, for nothing but water can damage mud. We could have played our way into Lucknow in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell.
During the day I had been amused with the sayings of some British recruits, who were watching the immersion ceremonies, but in the evening one of them was in the bazaar, uproariously drunk, kicking every native against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an officer of another regiment, who did not like to interfere: “I‘m a private soldier, I know, but I‘m a gentleman; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don‘t.” On the other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday-making that day, many of them Christians and low-castemen, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken man was not to be seen.
It is impossible to overestimate the harm done to the English name in India by the conduct of drunken soldiers and “European loafers.” The latter class consists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway sailors from Calcutta,—men who, traveling across India and living at free quarters on the trembling natives, become ruffianly beyond description from the effect upon their originally brutal natures of the possession of unusual power.
The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as that of the Mohurrum has been one of the many causes which have led us to believe that the Mohammedans form a considerable proportion of the population of Hindostan, but the census in the Northwest Provinces revealed the fact that they had there been popularly set down as three times as numerous as they are, and it is probable that the same is the case throughout all India. Not only are the Indian Mohammedans few, but their Mohammedanism sits lightly on them: they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies, in daily life, and all-but Hindoos in their actual worship. On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me that the Hindoos do not scruple to attend the commemoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares there is a temple which is used in common by Mohammedans and Hindoos, and throughout India, among the low-caste people, there is now little distinction between the religions. The descendants of the Mohammedan conquerors, who form the leading families in several native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the most dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they appear to have but little hold upon the humble classes of their fellow-worshipers, and their attempts to stirup their people to active measures against the English have always failed. On the other hand, we have hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our consideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still more numerous hill-tribes, and permitted our governments to act as though the Hindoos and the Sikhs were the only inhabitants of Hindostan.
THEEnglish traveler who crosses India from Calcutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condition of the land. He has heard in England of palaces and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of the grace of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls, of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of a civilization as perfect as the European and as old as the Chinese. When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in the climate of their land. The stories we are told at home are in no sense false:—the Hindoos, of all classes, are graceful in their carriage; their tombs and mosques are of extraordinary beauty, their art patterns the despair of our best craftsmen; the native poetry is at least equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest building in the world. Every word is true, but the whole forms but a singularly small portion of the truth. Thereligious legends, the art patterns, the perfect manner and the graceful eye and taste seem to have descended to the Hindoos of to-day from a generation whose general civilization they have forgotten. The poetry is confined to a few members of a high-caste race, and is mainly an importation from abroad; the architecture is that of the Moslem conquerors. Shan Jehan, a Mohammedan emperor and a foreigner, built the Taj; Akbar the Great, another Turk, was the designer of the Pearl Mosque; and the Hindoos can no more be credited with the architecture of their early conquerors than they can with the railways and bridges of their English rulers, or with the waterworks of Bombay City. The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely native races, the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the Bengalees mere savages, and the tribes of Central India but little better than the Australian aborigines or the brutes. Throughout India there are remains of an early civilization, but it has vanished as completely as it has in Egypt; and the Cave-temples stand as far from the daily life of Hindostan as the Pyramids do from that of Egypt.
It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely rapid since the day when we arrived in India. Just as it is almost impossible, by any exertion of the mind, to realize in Mexico the fact that the present degraded Aztecs are the same people whom the Spaniards found, only some three hundred years ago, dwelling in splendid palaces, and worshiping their unknown gods in golden temples through the medium of a sacred tongue, so now it is difficult to believe that the pauperized inhabitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude are the sons of the chivalrous warriors who fought in the last century against Clive.
The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empiresfrom a distance, we are dazzled by the splendor of the kings and priests; drawing near, we find an oppressed and miserable slave class, from whose hard earnings the wealth of the great is wrung; called on to govern the country, we extinguish the kings and priests in the fashion in which Captain Hodson, in 1857, shot the last sons of the Imperial family of India in a dry ditch, while we were transporting the last Mogul, along with our native thieves, in a convict-ship to British Burmah. There remains the slave class, and little else. We may select a few of these to be our policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another handful to wear red coats and be our guards and the executioners of their countrymen; we may teach a few to chatter some words of English, and then, calling them great scoundrels, may set them in our railway stations and our offices; but virtually, in annexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling class, and reduce the government to a mere imperialism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. No parallel can be drawn in Europe or North America to that state of things which exists wherever we carry our arms in the East: were the President and Congress in America, and all the wealthy merchants of the great towns, to be destroyed to-morrow, the next day would see the government proceeding quietly in the hands of another set every bit as intelligent, as wise, and good. In a lesser degree, the same would be the case in England or in France. The best example that could be given nearer home of that which occurs continually in the East would be one which would suppose that the Emperor and nobility in Russia were suddenly destroyed, and the country left in the hands of the British ambassador and the late serfs. Even this example would fail to convey a notion of the extent of therevolution which takes place on the conquest by Britain of an Eastern country; for in the East the nobles are better taught and the people more ignorant than they are in Russia, and the change causes a more complete destruction of poetry, of literature, and of art.
It being admitted, then, that we are in the position of having, in Hindostan, a numerous and ignorant, but democratic people to govern from without, there comes the question of what should be the general character of our government. The immediate questions of the day may be left to our subordinates in India; but the direction and the tendencies of legislation are matters for us at home. There can be nothing more ridiculous than the position of those of our civilians in India who, while they treat the natives with profound contempt, are continually crying out against government from at home, on the ground set forth in the shibboleth of “India for the Indians.” If India is to be governed by the British race at all, it must be governed from Great Britain. The general conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by the English people, and nothing but the execution of our decrees, the collection of evidence, and the framing of mere rules, left to our subordinates in the East.
First among the reforms that must be introduced from London is the general instruction in the English language of the native population. Except upon a theory that will fairly admit of the forcing upon a not unwilling people of this first of all great means of civilization, our presence in India is wholly indefensible. Unless also that be done, our presence in India, or that of some nation stronger than us and not more scrupulous, must endure forever; for it is plainly impossible that a native government capable of holdingits own against Russia and America can otherwise be built up in Hindostan. Upon the contrary supposition,—namely, that we do not intend at any time to quit our hold on India,—the instruction of the people in our language becomes still more important. Upon the second theory, we must teach them English, the language of the British government; upon the first, English, the language of the world. Upon either theory, we must teach them English. Nothing can better show the trivial character of the much-talked-of reforms introduced into India in the last few years, since our Queen has assumed the imperial throne of Hindostan, than the fact that no progress whatever has been made in a matter of far more grave importance than are any number of miles of railway, canal, or Grand Trunk roads. Our civilians in India tell us that, if you teach the natives English, you expose them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, and us to revolt—an exposure which speaks not too highly of the government which is forced to make it. Our military officers, naturally hating the country to which they now are exiled, instead of being sent as formerly of their own free will, tell you that every native who can speak English is a scoundrel, a liar, and a thief, which is, perhaps, if we except the Parsees, not far from true at present, when teaching is given only to a few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices in which money passes through native hands. Their opinion has no bearing whatever upon a general instruction of the people, under which we should evidently be able to pick our men, as we now pick them for all employments in which a knowledge of English is not required.
A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in naturalizing their language in a country twice as large asEurope: in the whole of South America, the Central States, and Mexico. Not only there, but in the United States, the Utes and Comanches, wild as they are, speak Spanish, while their own language is forgotten. In the west of Mexico there is no trace of pure Spanish blood, there is even comparatively little mixture—yet Spanish, and that of the best, is spoken, to the exclusion of every other language, in Manzanillo and Acapulco. This phenomenon is not confined to the Western world. In Bombay Presidency, five millions of so-called Portuguese—who, however, for the most part are pure Hindoos—speak a Latin tongue, and worship at the temples of the Christian God. French makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada, we find the Huron Indians French in language and religion. English alone, it would seem, cannot be pressed upon any of the dark-skinned tribes. In New Zealand, the Maories know no English; in Natal, the Zulus; in India, the Hindoos. The Dutch, finally expelled from South Africa in 1815 and from Ceylon in 1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the natives of those lands than have the English—masters of them since the Dutch expulsion.
To the early abolition or total non-existence of slavery in the British colonies, we may, perhaps, trace our unfortunate failure to spread our mother-tongue. Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, all practiced a slavery of the widest kind; all had about them not native servants, frequently changing from the old master to the new, and passing unheeded to whatever service money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably, to die within the house where they were reared, to whom the language of the master was taught, because your Spanish grandee, with power of life and deathover his family slaves, was not the man to condescend to learn his servants’ tongue in order that his commands should be more readily understood. Another reason may have caused the Portuguese and other dominant races of the later middle ages to have insisted that their slaves should learn the language of the master and the government; namely, that in learning the new, the servile families would speedily forget the older tongue, and thus become as incapable of mixing in the conspiracies and insurrections of their brother natives as Pyrenean shepherd dogs of consorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever their reasons, however, the Spaniards succeeded where we have failed.
The greatest of our difficulties are the financial. No cheap system is workable by us, and our dear system we have not the means to work. The success of our rule immediately depends upon the purity and good feeling of the rulers, yet there are villages in British India where the people have never seen a white man, and off the main roads, and outside the district towns, the sight of a European official is extremely rare. To the inhabitants of the greater portion of rural India, the governor who symbolizes British rule is a cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman; himself not improbably a Bengal mutineer in 1857, or drawn from the classes whom our most ignorant sepoys themselves despised. It is not easy to see how this vital defect can be amended, except by the slow process of raising up a native population that we can trust and put in office, and this is impossible unless we encourage and reward the study of the English tongue. The most needed of all social reforms in India, an improvement in the present thoroughly servile condition of the native women, could itself in no way be more easily brought aboutthan by the familiarization of the Hindoos with English literature; and that greatest of all the curses of India, false-swearing in the courts, would undoubtedly be both directly and indirectly checked by the introduction of our language. The spread of the English tongue need be no check to that of the ancient classical languages of the East; the two studies would go hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while we spend annually in India a large sum upon our chaplains and church schools, we toss only one-hundredth part of the sum—a paltry few thousands of rupees—to the native colleges, where the most venerable of languages—Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian—are taught by the men who alone can thoroughly understand them. At the moment when England, Germany, and America are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Oriental literature—when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and Harvard, in translating and explaining Eastern books—our government in India is refusing the customary help to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the teachers of the language.
So long as the natives remain ignorant of the English tongue, they remain ignorant of all the civilization of our time—ignorant alike of political and physical science, of philosophy and true learning. It is needless to say that, if French or German were taught them instead of English, they would be as well off in this respect; but English, as the tongue of the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its acquisition by the Hindoos will soon place the government of India in native hands, and thus, gradually relieving us of an almost intolerable burden, will civilize and set free the people of Hindostan.
“ALLgeneral observations upon India are necessarily absurd,” said to me at Simla a distinguished officer of the Viceroy‘s government; but, although this is true enough of theories that bear upon the customs, social or religious, of the forty or fifty peoples which make up what in England we style the “Hindoo race,” it has no bearing on the consideration of the policy which should guide our actual administration of the Empire.
England in the East is not the England that we know. Flousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship, becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives’ own good, and certainly for no one else‘s, by laws and in a manner opposed to every tradition and every prejudice of the whole of the various tribes of which this vast population is composed—scheming, annexing, out-manœuvring Russia, and sometimes, it is to be feared, out-lying Persia herself.
In our island home, we plume ourselves upon our hatred of political extraditions: we would scorn to ask the surrender of a political criminal of our own, we would die in the last ditch sooner than surrender those of another crown. What a contrast we find to this when we look at our conduct in the East! During the mutiny of 1857, some of our rebel subjects escaped into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We demandedtheir extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We insisted. The offer we finally accepted was, that they should be transported to the Portuguese settlement at Timor, we supplying transports. An Indian transport conveying these men to their island grave, but carrying the British flag, touched at Batavia in 1858, to the astonishment of the honest Dutchmen, who knew England as a defender of national liberty in Europe.
Although despotic, our government of India is not bad; indeed, the hardest thing that can be said of it is that it is too good. We do our duty by the natives manfully, but they care little about that, and we are continually hurting their prejudices and offending them in small things, to which they attach more importance than they do to great. To conciliate the Hindoos, we should spend £10,000 a year in support of native literature to please the learned, and £10,000 on fireworks to delight the wealthy and the low-caste people. Instead of this, we worry them with municipal institutions and benevolent inventions that they cannot and will not understand. The attempt to introduce trial by jury into certain parts of India was laudable, but it has ended in one of those failures which discredit the government in the eyes of its own subordinates. If there is a European foreman of jury, the natives salaam to him, and ask: “What does the sahib say?” If not, they look across the court to the native barristers, who hold up fingers, each of which means 1OOrs., and thus bid against each other for the verdict, for, while natives as a rule are honest in their personal or individual dealings, yet in places of trust—railway clerkships, secretaryships of departments, and so on—they are almost invariably willing to take bribes.
Throughout India, such trials as are not before ajury are conducted with the aid of native assessors as members of the court. This works almost as badly as the jury does, the judge giving his decision without any reference to the opinion of the assessors. The story runs that the only use of assessors is, that in an appeal—where the judge and assessors had agreed—the advocate can say that the judge “has abdicated his functions, and yielded to the absurd opinion of a couple of ignorant and dishonest natives,”—or, if the judge had gone against his client in spite of the assessors being inclined the other way, that the judge “has decided in the teeth of all experienced and impartial native opinion, as declared by the voices of two honest and intelligent assessors.”
Our introduction of juries is not an isolated instance of our somewhat blind love for “progress.” If in the already-published portions of the civil code—for instance, the parts which relate to succession, testamentary and intestate—you read in the illustrations York for Delhi, and Pimlico for Sultanpore, there is not a word to show that the code is meant for India, or for an Oriental race at all. It is true that the testamentary portion of the code applies at present only to European residents in India; but the advisability of extending it to natives is under consideration, and this extension is only a matter of time. The result of over-great rapidity of legislation, and of unyielding adherence to English or Roman models in the Indian codes, must be that our laws will never have the slightest hold upon the people, and that, if we are swept from India, our laws will vanish with us. The Western character of our codes, and their want of elasticity and of adaptability to Eastern conditions, is one among the many causes of our unpopularity.
The old-school Hindoos fear that we aim at subvertingall their dearest and most venerable institutions, and the free-thinkers of Calcutta and the educated natives hate us because, while we preach culture and progress, we give them no chance of any but a subordinate career. The discontent of the first-named class we can gradually allay, by showing them the groundlessness of their suspicions; but the shrewd Bengalee baboos are more difficult to deal with, and can be met only in one way—namely, by the employment of the natives in offices of high trust, under the security afforded by the infliction of the most degrading penalties on proof of the smallest corruption. One of the points in which the policy of Akbar surpassed our own was in the association of qualified Hindoos with his Mohammedan fellow-countrymen in high places in his government. The fact, moreover, that native governments are still preferred to British rule, is a strong argument in favor of the employment by us of natives; for, roughly speaking, their governmental system differs from ours only in the employment of native officers instead of English. There is not now existent a thoroughly native government; at some time or other, we have controlled in a greater or less degree the governments of all the native States. To study purely native rule, we should have to visit Caboul or Herat, and watch the Afghan princes putting out each other‘s eyes, while their people are engaged in never-ending wars, or in murdering strangers in the name of God.
Natives might more safely be employed to fill the higher than the lower offices. It is more easy to find honest and competent native governors or councilmen than honest and efficient native clerks and policemen. Moreover, natives have more temptations to be corrupt, and more facilities for being so with safety, in low positions than in high. A native policeman or telegraphofficial can take his bribe without fear of detection by his European chief; not so a native governor, with European subordinates about him.
The common Anglo-Indian objections to the employment of natives in our service are, when examined, found to apply only to the employment of incompetent natives. To say that the native lads of Bengal, educated in our Calcutta colleges, are half educated and grossly immoral, is to say that, under a proper system of selection of officers, they could never come to be employed. All that is necessary at the moment is that we should concede the principle by appointing, year by year, more natives to high posts, and that, by holding the civil service examinations in India as well as in England, and by establishing throughout India well-regulated schools, we should place the competent native youths upon an equal footing with the English.
That we shall ever come to be thoroughly popular in India is not to be expected. By the time the old ruling families have died out, or completely lost their power, the people whom we rescued from their oppression will have forgotten that the oppression ever existed, and as long as the old families last, they will hate us steadily. One of the documents published in theGazette of India, while I was at Simla, was from the pen of Asudulla Muhamadi, one of the best-known Mohammedans of the Northwest Provinces. His grievances were the cessation of the practice of granting annuities to the “sheiks of noble families,” the conferring of the “high offices of Mufti, Sudr’-Ameen, and Tahsildar,” on persons not of “noble extraction,” “the education of the children of the higher and lower classes on the same footing, without distinction,” “the desire that women should be treated like men in every respect,” and “the formation of English schools forthe education of girls of the lower order.” He ended his State paper by pointing out the ill effects of the practice of conferring on the poor “respectable berths, thereby enabling them to indulge in luxuries which their fathers never dreamt of, and to play the upstart;” and declared that to a time-honored system of class government there had succeeded “a state of things which I cannot find words to express.” It is not likely that our rule will ever have much hold on the class that Asudulla represents, for not only is our government in India a despotism, but its tendency is to become an imperialism, or despotism exercised over a democratic people, such as we see in France, and are commencing to see in Russia.
We are leveling all ranks in India; we are raising the humblest men, if they will pass certain examinations, to posts which we refuse to the most exalted of nobles unless they can pass higher. A clever son of a bheestie, or sweeper, if he will learn English, not only may, but must rise to be a railway baboo, or deputy-collector of customs; whereas for Hindoo rajahs or Mohammedan nobles of Delhi creation, there is no chance of anything but gradual decline of fortune. Even our Star of India is democratic in its working: we refuse it to men of the highest descent, to confer it on self-made viziers of native States, or others who were shrewd enough to take our side during the rebellion. All this is very modern, and full of “progress,” no doubt; but it is progress toward imperialism, or equality of conditions under paternal despotism.
Not only does the democratic character of our rule set the old families against us, but it leads also to the failure of our attempt to call around us a middle class, an educated thinking body of natives with something to lose, who, seeing that we are ruling India for herown good, would support us heart and soul, and form the best of bucklers for our dominion. As it is, the attempt has long been made in name, but, as a matter of fact, we have humbled the upper class, and failed to raise a middle class to take its place. We have crushed the prince without setting up the trader in his stead.
The wide-spread hatred of the English does not prove that they are bad rulers; it is merely the hatred that Easterns always bear their masters; yet masters the Hindoos will have. Even the enlightened natives do not look with longing toward a future of self-government, however distant. Most intelligent Hindoos would like to see the Russians drive us out of India, not that any of them think that the Russians would be better rulers or kinder men, but merely for the pleasure of seeing their traditional oppressors beaten. What, then, are we to do? The only justification for our presence in India is the education for freedom of the Indian races; but at this moment they will not have freedom as a gift, and many Indian statesmen declare that no amount of education will ever fit them for it. For a score of centuries the Hindoos have bribed and taken bribes, and corruption has eaten into the national character so deeply, that those who are the best of judges declare that it can never be washed out. The analogy of the rise of other races leads us to hope, however, that the lapse of time will be sufficient to raise the Hindoos as it has raised the Huns.
The ancients believed that the neighborhood of frost and snow was fatal to philosophy and to the arts; to the Carthaginians, Egyptians, and Phœnicians, the inhabitants of Gaul, of Germany, and of Britain were rude barbarians of the frozen North, that no conceivable lapse of time could convert into anythingmuch better than talking bears—a piece of empiricism which has a close resemblance to our view of India. It is idle to point to the tropics and say that free communities do not exist within those limits: the map of the world will show that freedom exists only in the homes of the English race. France, the authoress of modern liberty, has failed as yet to learn how to retain the boon for which she is ever ready to shed her blood; Switzerland, a so-called free State, is the home of the worst of bigotry and intolerance; the Spanish republics are notoriously despotisms under democratic titles; America, Australia, Britain, the homes of our race, are as yet the only dwelling-spots of freedom.
There is much exaggeration in the cry that self-government, personal independence, and true manliness can exist only where the snow will lie upon the ground, that cringing slavishness and imbecile submission follow the palm-belt round the world. If freedom be good in one country, it is good in all, for there is nothing in its essence which should limit it in time or place: the only question that is open for debate is whether freedom—an admitted good—is a benefit which, if once conferred upon the inhabitants of the tropics, will be maintained by them against invasion from abroad and rebellion from within; if it be given bit by bit, each step being taken only when public opinion is fully prepared for its acceptance, there can be no fear that freedom will ever be resigned without a struggle. We should know that Sikhs, Kandians, Scindians, Marattas, have fought bravely enough for national independence to make it plain that they will struggle to the death for liberty as soon as they can be made to see its worth. It will take years to efface the stain of a couple of hundred years of slavery in the negroes of America, and it may take scores of years toheal the deeper sores of Hindostan; but history teaches us to believe that the time will come when the Indians will be fit for freedom.
Whether the future advent of a better day for India be a fact or a dream, our presence in the country is justifiable. Were we to quit India, we must leave her to Russia or to herself. If to Russia, the political shrewdness and commercial blindness of the Northern Power would combine to make our pocket suffer by loss of money as much as would our dignity by so plain a confession of our impotence; while the unhappy Indians would discover that there exists a European nation capable of surpassing Eastern tyrants in corruption by as much as it already exceeds them in dull weight of leaden cruelty and oppression. If to herself, unextinguishable anarchy would involve our Eastern trade and India‘s happiness in a hideous and lasting ruin.
If we are to keep the country, we must consider gravely whether it be possible properly to administer its affairs upon the present system—whether, for instance, the best supreme government for an Eastern empire be a body composed of a chief invariably removed from office just as he begins to understand his duty, and a council of worn-out Indian officers, the whole being placed in the remotest corner of Western Europe, for the sake of removing the government from the “pernicious influence of local prejudice.”
India is at this moment governed by the Indian Council at Westminster, who are responsible to nobody. The Secretary of State is responsible to Parliament for a policy which he cannot control, and the Viceroy is a head-clerk.
India can be governed in two ways; either in India or in London. Under the former plan, we shouldleave the bureaucracy in India independent, preserving merely some slight control at home—a control which should, of course, be purely parliamentary and English; under the other plan—which is that to which it is to be hoped the people of England will command their representatives to adhere—India would be governed from London by the English nation, in the interests of humanity and civilization. Under either system, the Indian Council in London would be valuable as an advising body; but it does not follow, because the Council can advise, that therefore they can govern, and to delegate executive power to such a board is on the face of it absurd.
Whatever the powers to be granted to the Indian Council, it is clear that the members should hold office for the space of only a few years. So rapid is the change that is now making a nation out of what was ten years ago but a continent inhabited by an agglomeration of distinct tribes, that no Anglo-Indian who has left India for ten years is competent even to advise the rulers, much less himself to share in the ruling, of Hindostan. The objection to the government of India by the Secretary of State is, that the tenant of the office changes frequently, and is generally ignorant of native feelings and of Indian affairs. The difficulty, however, which attends the introduction of a successful plan for the government of India from London is far from being irremovable, while the objection to the paternal government of India by a Viceroy is that it would be wholly opposed to our constitutional theories, unfitted to introduce into our Indian system those democratic principles which we have for ten years been striving to implant, and even in the long run dangerous to our liberties at home.
One reason why the Indian officials cry out againstgovernment from St. James‘s Park is, because they deprecate interference with the Viceroy; but were the Council abolished, except as a consultative body, and the Indian Secretaryship of State made a permanent appointment, it is probable that the Viceroy would be relieved from that continual and minute interference with his acts which at present degrades his office in native eyes. The Viceroy would be left considerable power, and certainly greater power than he has at present, by the Secretary of State;—that which is essential is merely, that the power of control, and responsible control, should lie in London. The Viceroy would, in practice, exercise the executive functions, under the control of a Secretary of State, advised by an experienced Council and responsible to Parliament, and we should possess a system under which there would be that conjunction of personal responsibility and of skilled advice which is absolutely required for the good government of India.
To a scheme which involves the government of India from at home, it may be objected that India cannot be so well understood in London as in Calcutta. So far from this being the case, there is but little doubt among those who best know the India of to-day, that while men in Calcutta understand the wants of the Bengalee, and men in Lahore the feelings of the Sikh, India, as a whole, is far better understood in England than in any presidency town.
It must be remembered, that with India within a day of England by telegraph, and within three weeks by steam, the old autocratic Governor-General has become impossible, and day by day the Secretary of State in London must become more and more the ruler of India. Were the Secretary of State appointed for a term of years, and made immovable except by a directvote of the House of Commons, no fault could be found with the results of the inevitable change: as it is, however, a council of advice will hardly be sufficient to prevent gross blundering while we allow India to be ruled by no less than four Secretaries of State in a single year.
The chief considerations to be kept in view in the framing of a system of government for India are briefly these:—a sufficient separation of the two countries to prevent the clashing of the democratic and paternal systems, but, at the same time, a control over the Indian administration by the English people active enough to insure the progressive amelioration of the former; the minor points to be borne in mind are that in India we need less centralization, in London more permanence, and, in both, increased personal responsibility. All these requirements are satisfied by the plan proposed, if it be coupled with the separation of the English and Indian armies, the employment of natives in our service, and the creation of new governments for the Indus territories and Assam. Madras, Bombay, Bengal, Assam, the Central Provinces, Agra, the Indus, Oude, and Burmah would form the nine presidencies, the Viceroy having the supreme control over our officers in the native States, and not only should the governors of the last seven be placed upon the same footing with those of Madras and Bombay, but all the local governors should be assisted by a council of ministers who should necessarily be consulted, but whose advice should not be binding on the governors. The objections that are raised against councils do not apply to councils that are confined to the giving of advice, and the ministers are needed, if for no other purpose, at least to divide the labor of the Governor, for all our Indian officials are at present overworked.
This is not the place for the suggestion of improvements in the details of Indian government. The statement that all general observations upon India are necessarily absurd is not more true of moral, social, educational, and religious affairs than of mere governmental matters: “regulation system” and “non-regulation system;” “permanent settlement” and “thirty years’ settlement;” native participation in government, or exclusion of natives—each of these courses may be good in one part of India and bad in another. On the whole, however, it may be admitted that our Indian government is the best example of a well-administered despotism, on a large scale, existing in the world. Its one great fault is over-centralization; for, although our rule in India must needs be despotic, no reason can be shown why its despotism should be minute.
The greatest of the many changes in progress in the East is that India is being made—that a country is being created under that name where none has yet existed; and it is our railroads, our annexations, and above all our centralizing policy that are doing the work. There is reason to fear that this change will be hastened by the extension of our new codes to the former “non-regulation provinces,” and by government from at home, where India is looked upon as one nation, instead of from Calcutta, where it is known to be still composed of fifty; but so rapid is the change, that already the Calcutta people are as mistaken in attempting to laugh down our phrase “the people of India,” as we were during the mutiny when we believed that there was an “India” writhing in our clutches. Whether the India which is being thus rapidly built up by our own hands will be friendly to us, or the reverse, depends upon ourselves. Thetwo principles upon which our administration of the country might be based have long since been weighed against each other by the English people, who, rejecting the principle of a holding of India for the acquisition of prestige and trade, have decided that we are to govern India in the interest of the people of Hindostan. We are now called on to deliberate once more, but this time upon the method by which our principle is to be worked out. That our administration is already perfect can hardly be contended so long as no officer not very high in our Indian service dares to call a native “friend.” The first of all our cares must be the social treatment of the people, for while by the Queen‘s proclamation the natives are our fellow-subjects, they are in practice not yet treated as our fellow-men.
WHEN, on my way home to England, I found myself off Mocha, with the Abyssinian highlands in sight, and still more when we were off Massowah, with the peaks of Talanta plainly visible, I began to recall the accounts which I had heard at Aden of the proposed British colony on the Abyssinian table-lands, out of which the home government has since been frightened. The question of the desirability or the reverse of such a colony raises points of interest on which it would be advisable that people at home should at once take up a line.
As it has never been assumed that Englishmen can dwell permanently even upon high hills under the equator, the proposition for European colonization or settlement of tropical Africa may be easily dismissed, but that for the annexation of tropical countries for trade purposes remains. It has hitherto been accepted as a general principle regulating our intercourse with Eastern nations, that we have a moral right to force the dark-skinned races to treat us in the same fashion as that in which we are treated by our European neighbors. In practice we even now go much further than this, and inflict the blessings of Free Trade upon the reluctant Chinese and Japanese at the cannon‘s mouth. It is hard to find any law but that of might whereby to justify our dealings with Burmah, China, and Japan. We are apt to wrap ourselves up in our new-found national morality, and, throwing upon our fathers all the blame of the ill which has been done in India, to take to ourselves credit for the good; but it is obvious to any one who watches the conduct of our admirals, consuls, and traders in the China seas, that it is inevitable that China should fall to us as India fell, unless there should be a singular change in opinion at home, or unless, indeed, the Americans should be beforehand with us in the matter. To say this, is not to settle the disputed question of whether in the present improved state of feeling, and with the present control exercised over our Eastern officials by a disinterested press at home, and an interested but vigilant press in India and the Eastern ports, government of China by Britain might not be for the advantage of the Chinese and the world, but it is at least open to serious doubt whether it would be to the advantage of Great Britain. Our ruling classes are already at least sufficiently exposed to the corrupting influences ofpower for us to hesitate before we decide that the widening of the national mind consequent upon the acquisition of the government of China would outweigh the danger of a spread at home of love of absolute authority, and indifference to human happiness and life. The Americans, also, it is to be hoped, will pause before they expose republicanism to the shock that would be caused by the annexation of despotically-governed States. In defending the Japanese against our assaults, and those of the active but unsuccessful French, they may unhappily find, as we have often found, that protection and annexation are two words for the same thing.
Although the disadvantages are more evident than the advantages of the annexation for commercial purposes of such countries as Abyssinia, China, and Japan, the benefits are neither few nor hard to find. The abstract injustice of annexation cannot be said to exist in the cases of Afghanistan and Abyssinia, as the sentiment of nationality clearly has no existence there, and as the worst possible form of British government is better for the mass of the people than the best conceivable rule of an Abyssinian chief. The dangers of annexation in the weakening and corrupting of ourselves may not unfairly be set off against the blessings of annexation to the people, and the most serious question for consideration is that of whether dependencies can be said “to pay.” Social progress is necessary to trade, and we give to mankind the powerful security of self-interest that we will raise the condition of the people, and, by means of improved communications, open the door to civilization.
It may be objected to this statement that our exaggerated conscientiousness is the very reason why our dependencies commercially are failures, and why it isuseless for us to be totaling up our loss and profits while we willfully throw away the advantages that our energy has placed in our hands. If India paid as well as Java, it may be shown, we should be receiving from the East 60 millions sterling a year for the support of our European officials in Hindostan, and the total revenue of India would be 200 or 250 millions, of which 80 millions would be clear profit for our use in England; in other words, Indian profits would relieve us from all taxation in England, and leave us a considerable and increasing margin toward the abolition of the debt. The Dutch, too, tell us that their system is more agreeable to the natives than our own clumsy though well-meant efforts for the improvement of their condition, which, although not true, is far too near the truth to allow us to rest in our complacency.
The Dutch system having been well weighed at home, and deliberately rejected by the English people as tending to the degradation of the natives, the question remains how far dependencies from which no profits are exacted may be advantageously retained for mere trade purposes. At this moment, our most flourishing dependencies do not bear so much as their fair share of the expenses of the empire:—Ceylon herself pays only the nominal and not the real cost of her defense, and Mauritius costs nominally £150,000 a year, and above half a million really in military expenses, of which the colony is ordered to pay £45,000 and grumbles much at paying it. India herself, although charged with a share of the non-effective expenses of our army, escapes scot-free in war-time, and it is to be remarked that the throwing upon her of a small portion of the cost of the Abyssinian war was defended upon every ground except the true one—namely, that as an integral part of the empire she ought to bear her share inimperial wars. It is true that, to make the constitutional doctrine hold, she also ought to be consulted, and that we have no possible machinery for consulting her—a consideration which of itself shows our Indian government in its true light.