India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

It is a perpetual astonishment to travellers to note the scale of living of every Englishman employed in India, in however mean a capacity. The enormous palaces of governors and lieutenant-governors, their country houses, their residences in the hills, their banquets and entertainments, their retinues of servants, their carriages and horses, their special trains on their journeyings, their tents, their armies of retainers and camp followers – these are only samples of the universal profusion; an equally noble hospitality reigns in every bungalow on the plains; and endless dinners of imported delicacies, with libations of imported wines, tempt night after night the inhabitants of the most solitary stations to forget the dismal fact that they are in Asia and far from their own land. No Collector’s wife will wear an article of Indian manufacture to save her soul from perdition, and all her furniture, even to her carpets, must be of English make.

I remember early in my travels having the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of a country station-master on the Indian Peninsular Railway, and being astonished to find him living in better style, and in a house larger than most English rectories, while we were driven out after luncheon by his lady in a charming phaeton drawn by a pair of stepping ponies. There was no reason, however, for astonishment. He lived as all Englishmen in India do, that is to say, about five times as well as in his rank of life he possibly could do at home, and he was worthy of his good fortune. Only it must not be supposed that the natives starving outside are at all proportionately the better for the brave living of their rulers. I, an English traveller, profited as a guest, and I am half ashamed to say how sumptuously I fared. But the poor ryot was, in fact, my host – not the other – for it was he whose labour fed me, though he did not share the meal.

I say, a traveller cannot fail to be impressed, and, if he have any powers of reflection, disagreeably so, with this profusion. There is surely no country in the world where in the midst of such starvation there is so much waste; certainly none where the expense of it all is borne so wholly and directly by the poor. I wonder whether any one has calculated the number of miles of macadamized road in the various Anglo-Indian cantonments, not a yard of which has ever served any purpose beyond that of enabling the officers’ wives to pay each other visits in their carriages? I wonder whether any one has calculated the numbers of absolutely useless clock towers and Gothic memorials erected by Sir Richard Temples to Sir Bartle Freres, and Sir Bartle Freres to Sir Richard Temples in the various Presidencies? I wonder whether any one has calculated how many hogsheads of champagne the water-drinking ryot has paid for in the last half-century as an unaccounted item of his yearly budget? These things strike the imagination of the traveller. They do not strike the resident in India. They are not arguments, but impressions; and yet they mean something.

If, however, the ryot must maintain the luxury of his English administrators before his own wants can be supplied, so, too, must he maintain the English trader to the ruin of his own trade. I am repeating native arguments when I complain that the necessity of considering the advantage of Manchester capitalists stands seriously in the way of an honest framer of the Indian Budget, and that, whereas the Finance Minister of every English colony is at liberty to raise money by import duties and generally does so, the Indian Minister is precluded from that source of revenue. I have argued the matter of Free Trade out with the native economists, and they seem to me perfectly to understand it. They know that as applied to England, a manufacturing country which imports its food, Free Trade is considered a necessity of financial life. But they deny that the doctrine applies with equal cogency to India. India, they say, is a produce-exporting country like the United States or the Australian colonies. It imports no single article of prime necessity, iron and coal perhaps excepted, and the cotton and other manufactured goods consumed there are luxuries only used by the rich, and especially by the Europeans. It is certain that no ryot in all India wears any cotton clothing of foreign make, or has his means of existence made one wit cheaper for him by Free Trade. Import duties, then, would tax the rich only, and the rich in India are hardly taxed at all. Yet, because Free Trade is of advantage to England, India must forgo her own advantage. This, the natives say, may be a political necessity, but it is not ruling India financially for India’s good. I confess I do not see where the flaw in their argument lies.

They say, moreover, that Free Trade in manufactured goods has destroyed the native industries and given nothing in their stead. When the hand-looms a hundred years ago were ruined in the English counties, the rural population migrated to the towns and found work in the great factories. But in India this has hardly at all happened. The ryot who used to weave is left without labour of any sort during his spare time, for distances are great and there is little demand for labour in the towns, and he remains of necessity idle, so that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a present of his labour has been made by Anglo-Indian finance to his English rival. The doctrine of advantage from buying in the cheapest market does not help him, for he buys nothing cheaper; and if the English manufacturer shares the advantage with any one in India, it is with the town consumer, not with the ryot. Every native economist, therefore, whom I have spoken with on the subject, would impose import duties on manufactured articles except machinery. Thus, they say, a tax would be levied upon the rich; and if it acted as a protection and stimulus to home manufactures, why, so much the better. With protection, factories could be established in the Indian country towns in which the surplus labour of the ryot would find employment, and so the injury done him be in part redressed. If this doctrine is unsound, I shall be glad to hear in what manner; for at present it seems to me to have not a little reason.[15 - Since this was written factories especially for cotton goods have been established by native enterprise in Bombay, but have been met in the interests of Lancashire by measures designed to limit their competition with imported goods. Lord Cromer with the same object imposed “countervailing excise duties” in Egypt.]

I was surprised to find, in an assemblage mainly of rich men, that most of those who composed the Bombay meeting already alluded to were in favour of some form of income tax. Not that they altogether denied its general unpopularity, but from the necessity they recognized of taxing wealth. They said that in one shape or other incomes had always till recently been taxed in India, and that, though there were great difficulties in the way of collecting any sort of income tax fairly, it had always been accepted. The present licence tax, they assured me, was much more hateful and far less profitable than any true tax on income, and seemed framed on purpose to distribute its pressure most unfairly. It seemed hardly credible, but according to present regulations the keeper of a small shop in the native quarter was taxed as highly for his trade as the richest English banker on ’Change; all the charge upon the latter’s income, though he might deal in millions, being twenty pounds per annum in the form of a trade licence. The present system was, in fact, only another advantage given by the framers of Indian budgets to English trade; and they assured me that the people who really prevented a proper income tax from being imposed in India were not the native tradesmen, but the English officials whose salaries would be directly touched by it. If it were possible to levy import duties and a tax on incomes, the agricultural poor might be relieved, but hardly in any other way. I offer these suggestions for what they may be considered worth.

The prime measure, however, of agricultural reform, on which all native India seems agreed, is the granting of a permanent revenue settlement to every province, such as was ninety years ago granted to Bengal, and limiting thereby the preposterous claim of the Government to all ownership in land. This right of State ownership has worked everywhere, or nearly everywhere, its full natural result of impoverishment and disaffection; and Bengal, which has been exempted from its action, has alone remained prosperous. I do not propose to argue out this great question here. But I intend to return to it on a future occasion; and it will be sufficient for me now to say, that the value placed by native opinion on a fixed revenue settlement is the cause of the strong agitation actually in progress against the Bengal Rent Bill. This measure, in spite of Lord Ripon’s immense popularity, is decidedly unpopular, and native politicians see in it a first blow struck at the prosperity of the only province which has hitherto escaped the universal drain of wealth into the Imperial coffers; nor am I without reason to believe that so it was intended, not by Lord Ripon, but by some of his advisers. At present, however, I only state the fact that a permanent settlement of the land revenue is urgently demanded by all India.[16 - It was, I believe, a maxim of Sir John Strachey’s that, in the interests of Finance, the Bengal Settlement must by hook or by crook be rescinded.]

To sum up, Indian economists are in favour, first, of import duties on manufactured goods such as are imposed in Australia and other colonies; secondly, of a shifting of the financial burden as far as possible from the agricultural poor to the commercial rich; and thirdly, of a renunciation by the Government of its indefinite claims upon the land. These views will probably be considered preposterous in England, where we have cut-and-dried principles of economy in contradiction to them. But it is certain that all native opinion is against us, and that our present system is bringing India very near to ruin. Surely, there must be something wrong in a state of things which has produced the spectacle of a Government, after having absorbed to itself the whole land rent of a country, still finding itself constantly in financial shifts. The Government of India, as landlord, does practically nothing for the land. All is squandered and spent on other things; and the people who till the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless. This I call the agricultural danger, and if it is not one I again ask where the flaw in my reasoning lies. At least it is a reasoning held by ninety-nine out of every hundred educated and intelligent Indians.

Note.– Since this was published, in 1884, some reduction, as already stated, has been made in the iniquitous salt tax; but most of the other economic evils still prevail, some of them in an exaggerated form. No attempt has been made, by the imposition of import duties, to re-create the lost native industries, nor has any permanent settlement of the land revenue been granted, notwithstanding the example of its astonishing success in restoring agricultural prosperity under very similar conditions in Egypt. Famines continue to be attributed by Viceroy after Viceroy, not to their true economic causes, but to the “act of God” in withholding the rain, which in spite of the forest laws is still in periodical default. Imperial expenditure has not been lessened, nor has the burden of personal debt on the ryot’s back been relieved. He is still the rack-rented tenant of an absentee state-landlord throughout the greater part of British India.

CHAPTER XIII

RACE HATRED

If agricultural distress is the major premiss of revolution in India, the growth of political education in the towns is its minor – political education, that is, unaccompanied by any corresponding growth of political power.

With all my belief in Asiatic progress, I confess that before my recent visit to India I was not prepared to find this latter at all so far advanced as in fact it is; and from first to last I remained astonished at the high level at which native intelligence in political science already stands. I had judged it till then by such scraps of Indian newspaper criticism as I had come across, quoted not seldom by English writers in a hostile sense, and I had judged it wrongly. The newspapers of India, at least those edited in English, are neither on a par with our own, nor do they bear an equal relation to the mental powers of those whose views they expound. I mean that, whereas in England an article in the “Times” or in one of the leading magazines, on a given subject, is, as a rule, intellectually superior to the speeches statesmen are delivering on the same subject, in India the oral arguments are always the best.[17 - The literary calibre of the native Indian press has immensely increased since this was written.] Nor is it too much to say that for conversation of a political character there are few races in the world which can equal those of India, or that it would be difficult from our own House of Commons to choose men capable of sustaining a successful argument with the best educated Indians on any of the subjects specially interesting to them. I was throughout struck by this. The native mind is quick, lucid, and, it seemed to me, also eminently judicial; and I found it distinguished by the absence of all such passionate exaggeration as I had been led to expect. Though in some of the public speeches I heard made at Calcutta the flowers of rhetoric were certainly not wanting, I did not find anything but what was substantial in the arguments used, and I was repeatedly conscious of being tempted myself to use stronger language than any which even at private meetings was indulged in by the speakers. It seemed to me that a great deal more might have been said without violating the truth, that evils were often minimized, advantages dwelt on, and that there was a general disposition to understate rather than exaggerate matters in discussion. Often in conversation I have been on the point of protesting against the too naïve confidence of men known as demagogues in the good faith of English political action, against their implicit trust in the virtue of reason and a just cause, and their belief that, when they should have proved their griefs to be well founded, relief would thereupon be given. They seemed intentionally to ignore the selfishness and indifference of party statesmanship in England with regard to India, and to be only too willing, in spite of political deceptions, still to be deceived.

It is indeed remarkable that, considering how much real ground of complaint there is against the present state of things, how just and deep are the causes of personal resentment stirring the minds of men, how galling to them are the everyday incidents of being ruled by an alien race, and how little prospect there is of any speedy change, there should be so few agitators of Indian opinion who speak even in secret of any real rupture with England as a thing to be desired. I hardly met with one on my travels seriously so minded; and all seemed vividly to remember the evils of their past history, and to see in them a warning of possible dangers in the future and a reason for caution in their words and actions. This, I say, was remarkable, and to one who, like myself, was seeking the germs of self-governing power in India, presented itself as a very hopeful sign. Froth, fury, and passionate denunciation I found little of in India. Of logical argument I found much, and of that reasoning from facts which is the best of all reasoning, and which in politics goes by the name of common sense.

While, however, I observed and am able to testify to the extreme moderation of what may be called the responsible leaders of native opinion in their purely political views, I could not fail in my intercourse with the educated of all classes to become aware of the ever-widening gulf of personal dislike which separates these from the individual Englishmen who rule them. The question of race hatred in India is a very delicate one to approach; and I am conscious of accepting no little responsibility in venturing to treat of it at all; and if I have resolved to attempt it, it is that I consider it would be affectation in a writer on India to pass over so marked and growing a feature of modern Indian society, and that there are cases where the truth at any risk should be told, and where facts, however painful and humiliating, are better stated in their nakedness, while they can still be stated calmly, than left to disclose themselves in some violent form at a day when calm judgement shall have become impossible.

It is my distinct impression, from all that I have seen and heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years make the continued connection between England and India altogether impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of violence, such as nothing in the past history of either will have equalled. We have seen within our own recollection a complete obliteration of kindly feelings in Ireland, brought about originally by injustice, later by want of understanding. We are seeing the same thing repeated through the same causes to-day in Egypt. And to-morrow we may well find the case of India equally hopeless. I do not believe it to be already so; but the injustice is there, and the people are beginning to be awake and to resent the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly affront them; and unless the English public at home, with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake too to the danger of its own indifference, the same irreparable results of a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered that, whereas Ireland and Egypt are countries comparatively insignificant in extent and population, and for that reason easily overawed by force, India is a vast continent peopled by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and that the convulsion when it comes will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. Let India once be united, as Ireland and Egypt are, in a common sentiment of hatred for all that is English, and our rule there will ipso facto cease. Let it once finally despair of English justice, and English force will be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal, India’s symbol, is a docile beast, and may be ridden by a child. He is sensible, temperate, and easily attached. But ill-treatment he will not bear for ever, and when he is angered in earnest, his vast bulk alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the strength of the strongest to guide him or control.

The account given me by the oldest and best informed of my native acquaintance (and I am not talking here of Bengali demagogues, but of men holding, it may be, or who have held high office under Government, and are deservedly trusted by it), of the gradual estrangement which has come about within their recollection between themselves and the English in India, is most instructive. In the days, they say, of their youth, thirty and forty years ago, though there were always among the Company’s officers men who from their abuse of power were disliked and justly feared, the general feeling of the natives towards the English civilian was one of respect and even of affection. The Indian character is affectionate, enthusiastic, and inclined to hero-worship; and the English in early days, from their superior knowledge and strength of character, exercised no little fascination on the native mind. Nearly all of the older men talk with reverence and esteem of certain teachers who instructed them in youth, and of certain early patrons to whom they owed their success in after life; and they willingly acknowledge the influence exercised over themselves and their generation by such individual example. The English official of that day, they affirm, had more power than now, but he exercised it with a greater sense of responsibility, and so of honour, in its discharge. He took pains to know the people; and in fact he knew them well. Except in the very highest ranks of the service he was readily accessible. He lived to a great extent among the people, and according to the customs of the people. He did not disdain to make friends with those of the better class, and occasionally he married among them, or at least contracted semi-matrimonial relations with the women of the land. This may have had its ill consequences in other ways, but it broke down the hedge of caste prejudice between East and West, and gave the official a personal interest in the people, which no mere sense of duty, however elevated, could supply. The Englishman of that day looked upon India not unfrequently as his second home, and, taking the evil with the good, treated it as such. England could only be reached by the Cape route. Travelling was tedious and expensive, the mails few and far between; and many a retired officer had at the end of his service become so wedded to the land of his adoption, that he ended his days in it in preference to embarking on a new expatriation. It is easy to understand from this that the Anglo-Indian official of the Company’s days loved India in a way no Queen’s official dreams of doing now. Also that, loving it, he served it better than now; and was better loved in return.

Steam communication, however, with England and the increased facility given by it of maintaining home associations, had, even before the death of the Company, begun to effect a change in the way of living of its officers, a change which the Mutiny of 1857 accentuated and finally made complete. Gradually, as a visit to England became easier, leave was more frequently applied for; and the officer, returned from furlough, brought back with him a renewed stock of Western prejudices. He no longer considered himself cut off from the political life of his own country, or occupied himself so exclusively with the politics of India; and he came to look forward to other ways of distinction than those the Indian service offered him. Lastly, the Mutiny itself, with the bitter memories it left behind, put an end to the contracting by Englishmen of native habits and native ties. With the introduction of railways, quick posts, and telegraphic messages, Englishwomen ceased to dread India as a field of marriage; and every official now dreamed of making an English home for himself in the station where he lived. Thus he cared yearly more and more for English news and English interests, and less and less for those of India.

I shall no doubt incur anger by saying it, but it is a fact that the Englishwoman in India during the last thirty years has been the cause of half the bitter feelings there between race and race. It was her presence at Cawnpore and Lucknow that pointed the sword of revenge after the Mutiny, and it is her constantly increasing influence now that widens the gulf of ill-feeling and makes amalgamation daily more impossible. I have over and again noticed this. The English collector, or the English doctor, or the English judge may have the best will in the world to meet their Indian neighbours and official subordinates on equal terms. Their wives will hear of nothing of the sort, and the result is a meaningless interchange of cold civilities.

Nothing in the world can be more dreary than the mixed assemblies of the Indian natives and their Anglo-Indian patrons – inverted Barmecide feasts, where everything is unreal but the meats and drinks, and all the rest is ill-concealed distrust. I have more than once assisted at them, and always with a painful feeling. Englishwomen in India look upon the land of their exile unaffectedly as a house of bondage, on its inhabitants as outside the pale of their humanity, and on the day of their departure home as the only star of hope on their horizon. The feeling may be a natural and an unavoidable one, for it is probable that race prejudices are more deeply rooted everywhere in women than in men, but I affirm that it is most unfortunate, and under the circumstances of growing education in the country, a very great and increasing danger.

The excuse commonly made by the Anglo-Indians for the lack of social cordiality between themselves and well-to-do natives is that the caste regulations of the latter bar real intercourse. A man who will neither eat with you nor drink with you, it is said, nor admit you to his own wife’s society, cannot be really intimate in your house. But I confess I cannot see the force of that argument. In my own case I certainly did not find that caste prejudices prevented my forming the most agreeable relations with a number of Indian gentlemen, Brahmins of high caste, and Mohammedans, as well as Parsis and native Christians, nor did I find any who did not seem quite willing to treat me on an equal footing. I found no difference of any insurmountable kind between their ideas and my own; not more, indeed, than would have been the case had they been Spaniards or Italians. The fact of their not breaking bread with me, I am sure, constituted no kind of obstacle to our kindly relations. On the other hand, it is obvious that, as regards the native Christians at least, the rule cannot apply. These have no caste prejudices, yet they are just as much excluded from the pale of English society as the rest.

It will hardly be credited in England, but in this present year of grace, 1884, no hotel-keeper in India dares receive a native guest into his house, not on account, of any ill-will of his own, but through fear of losing his custom. When I was at Bombay in the winter I was treated with the greatest kindness and attention by various members of the native community, and by none more so than by Mohammed Ali Rogay, the leading Mohammedan of the city. He had travelled in Europe, dressed in European dress, and had even so far adopted our manners as to subscribe to all the public charities and to drive a four-in-hand. Yet, happening one day to ask him to dine with me at my hotel, it was explained to me that this could not be, at least not in the public room, “lest the English guests should take offence and leave the house.”

In Bengal and Northern India things are still worse, and I think it is not too much to say that no native gentleman, whatever his rank, age, or character may be, can visit a place of public resort frequented by Englishmen, especially if he be in native dress, without a certain risk of insult and rough treatment. Railway travelling is notoriously dangerous for them in this respect, and nearly all my native acquaintances had tales to tell of abuse from English fellow-passengers, and of having been turned out of their places by the guards to accommodate these, and now and then of having been personally ill-treated and knocked about. Men of high position, therefore, or self-respect, are obliged, either to secure beforehand special compartments for their use, or to travel third class. The second class they are especially afraid of. I should not make this statement unless I had received it from unimpeachable sources. But I have been assured of its truth among others by two members of the Supreme Legislative Council at Calcutta, who separately narrated to me their experiences. I know also that one of the principal reasons with certain of the leading natives of the Presidency towns who have adopted the European dress has been to escape thereby from chance ill-usage.

A painful incident of this liability to insult occurred last winter in my presence, which, as ocular evidence is always best, I will relate. I had been staying at Patna with the principal Mohammedan nobleman of the city, the Nawab Villayet Ali Khan, a man of somewhat advanced age, and of deservedly high repute, not only with his fellow-citizens, but with our Government, who had made him a Companion of the Star of India for his services. On my departure by the morning train on the 7th January last, he and some thirty more of the leading inhabitants of Patna accompanied me to the station, and after I had entered the railway carriage remained standing on the platform, as orderly and respectable a group of citizens as need be seen. There was neither obstruction, nor noise, nor crowding. But the presence of “natives” on the platform became suddenly distasteful to an English passenger in the adjoining compartment. Thrusting his head out of window he began to abuse them and bid them be off, and when they did not move struck at them with his stick, and threatened the old Nawab especially with it if he came within his reach. I shall never forget the astonishment of the man when I interfered, or his indignation at my venturing to call him to account. It was his affair, not mine. Who was I that I should interpose myself between an Englishman and his natural right? Nor was it till, with great difficulty, I had procured the aid of the police, that he seemed to consider himself other than the aggrieved person. Now I can affirm that there was absolutely no reason for his conduct. He was a middle-aged man of respectable appearance – a surgeon-major, as it turned out, in command of a district in the Punjab; he was travelling with his wife; it was in the morning, when ideas are calmest, and he was otherwise without excuse for excitement. In fact, it was a plain, unmistakable act of class arrogance, such as it has never been my lot to witness in any other Eastern country that I have yet visited. Moreover, it was evident to me that it was no unusual occurrence. The railway officials and the police treated it as a matter of small importance, did their best to screen the offender, and declared themselves incompetent to do more than register my complaint. On the other hand, the Nawab and his friends confessed with shame that, though they were insulted, they were not surprised. It had happened to all of them too often before for them even to feel any special anger.

“We certainly feel insulted,” writes one of them to me a day or two later, “but are powerless to take any action on it. We are used to such treatment from almost every Anglo-Indian.”

“We account for his conduct,” says another, “by supposing that he thought us (the natives) to be nothing less than brutes and wild creatures”; while a third remarks: —

“From this you will see how our ruling race treats us with scorn and contempt. Had we been in English dress, then we would not, perhaps, have been so much hated.”

“I beg to assure you,” writes a fourth, “that the incident was not” (an only) “one of its kind, but such treatment is becoming general. The alarm and dread with which the Anglo-Indians are regarded cannot be described. Alas! we are hated for no other reason but because we have a dark colour; because we put on a national dress; and because we are a conquered race.”

“Allow me to say that it will be difficult for England to hold India long if such a state of feeling is allowed to progress without any check.”

And so on through a mass of letters. I have hope now, however, that the Government, before whom I laid this case, is taking it up. The Nawab has lodged a formal complaint with the Collector; Lord Ripon has promised that it shall not be allowed to drop; and my only fear is that, through the procrastination with which all inconvenient complaints are met in India by the subordinate officials, the apology due to the offended gentlemen will be deferred so long that its effect will have been in great measure lost.[18 - The apology was made, a lame one enough and rather tardy; but as Mr. Primrose, Lord Ripon’s private secretary, remarks in his letter of August 29, 1884, forwarding me a copy of it, “The mere fact of a European addressing a formal apology to a native gentleman is worth something.”]

Another cause of the bad relations in modern times between the Indians and their English masters has been explained to me to be this: – Under the East India Company the official hierarchy, being the servants of a commercial corporation, were mainly recruited from certain families already connected by ties of service with India, and imbued with traditions of rule which, though far from liberal, were yet on the whole honourable to those who held them, and not antagonistic to native sympathies. The officer of the Company looked upon himself as the protector of native India against all comers, his own countrymen as well as others; and it was generally found that, where European planting and native interests clashed, the Collector or magistrate was inclined to favour the latter rather than the former in decisions which might come before him. As a rule he belonged to a rank of life superior to the non-official Anglo-Indian, and the distinction of class was felt. Indeed, it often happened that there was more sympathy of breeding between the Company’s servant and the well-born Hindu or Mohammedan gentleman than between the same servant and the English adventurer of the towns or the English indigo-planter of the country districts. With the adoption, however, of open competition for the civil service, another class of official has been introduced into India, who is distinctly of a lower social grade, and who in so far exercises less authority over his trading fellow-countrymen, and, the natives say, is less kind and considerate towards themselves. A young fellow, say the son of an Ulster farmer, is pitchforked by a successful examination into high authority in Bengal. He has no traditions of birth or breeding for the social position he is called to occupy, and is far more likely to hobnob with the commercial English of his district than to adapt himself to the ceremonial of politeness so necessary in Oriental intercourse. He is looked upon by the European planters as one socially their inferior, and by the well-bred native as little better than a barbarian. He is lowered, therefore, I am told, in the social scale, and is far more frequently under the influence of his tag-rag English fellow-countrymen than in former days. I cannot say that I have met with men of this description myself, but I have heard of them frequently, not only from the natives, but from the English too, as a new difficulty of the situation.

What I did notice was, that throughout the agitation on the Ilbert Bill, the planters had a considerable backing in the official world. It was evident that the two societies were united in a way which would have been impossible in old times, in their opposition to the native hopes. This change of class in the members of the Civil Service, and – what I am personally inclined to think more important still – their change of duties, must be considered if we are to estimate the increased irritation between race and race. The modern system of bureaucratic regularity, where all is done according to printed forms and fixed rules, entails on the civilians many hours daily of irksome office work, unknown in early times; and has had the double effect of wearying their zeal and of secluding them still further from the people. Red tape has strangled initiative in collectors, magistrates, and district officers, and has left them no time for personal intercourse with those they govern. “How can we sit gossiping with the natives,” say these, “when we can hardly get through our daily work as it is by the greatest economy of time?” A valid excuse, truly. Yet it was exactly by gossip that Lawrence and Nicholson, and Meadows Taylor gained their influence in former days.

I consider myself fortunate in having been at Calcutta at the precise moment when the Ilbert Bill controversy was at its fiercest, not on account of any special interest I took in the Bill itself, but for the instructive display of rival passions and motives it evoked. Lord Ripon has most unjustly been blamed for unnecessarily causing the conflagration. But in truth all the elements of a quarrel were there already in the strained relations just described as existing between Englishmen and natives; and it was an accident that the particular ground occupied by the Ilbert Bill should have been chosen on which to fight the battle of race prejudice. The history of the affair as viewed with natives’ eyes was this. When Lord Ripon arrived in India, he found the ill-feeling between the two classes very bitter, and he wisely determined on redressing, as far as in him lay, class disabilities, thus carrying out the liberal doctrines proclaimed over and again for India by his party while out of office. For such a work no man could have been better suited by temperament or conviction. It is hardly sufficiently understood in England how large a part personal integrity plays in acquiring the sympathy of Orientals for their rulers, and how impossible it is to govern them successfully either by the mere mechanical instruments of a system or by individual talents, however great, when these are divorced from principle. The display of ingenuity and tactical resource which imposes on our own political imagination and sways the House of Commons is absolutely valueless in the East; and charlatanism is at once detected and discounted by its acute intelligence. The Englishmen, therefore, who have succeeded most permanently in India have rarely been the most brilliant; and the names which will live there are not those which their English contemporaries have always ranked the highest. Moral qualities go farther; truth, courage, simplicity, disinterestedness, good faith – these command respect, and above all a solid foundation of religious belief. Such qualities the natives of India acknowledged from the first in Lord Ripon, and no amount of mere cleverness could have placed him on the pedestal on which he stands to-day with them – or rather, I should perhaps say, on which he stood until the desertion of the Home Government forced him into an abandonment of his position as a protector of the people.

I am glad to be able to bear testimony to the fact that no Viceroy, Lord Canning possibly excepted, ever enjoyed such popularity as Lord Ripon did in the early part of last winter. Wherever I went in India I heard the same story; from the poor peasants of the south who for the first time had learned the individual name of their ruler; from the high-caste Brahmins of Madras and Bombay; from the Calcutta students; from the Mohammedan divines of Lucknow; from the noblemen of Delhi and Hyderabad – everywhere his praise was in all men’s mouths, and moved the people to surprise and gratitude. “He is an honest man,” men said, “and one who fears God,” and in this consciousness all have seemed willing once more to possess their souls in patience. To say that Lord Ripon has been a failure in India, through any fault of his own, is to say the reverse of a fact patent to the whole native world. He has been the most successful governor India has ever had, because the most loved; and the only sense in which he can be said to have failed is in so far as he has failed to seek the favour of the English ruling class or impose his will on the Home Government.

Of his legislative measures I must speak with less enthusiasm. The spirit in which they were brought forward was Lord Ripon’s own; but the drafting of the Bills was the work of others; and they have been doubtless disappointing. Thus, the Local Self-Government Bill, though admirable in idea as marking a first step towards native administration, is in itself a poor thing, and is appreciated as such even by Lord Ripon’s most cordial admirers. The powers it grants are too exiguous, the ground it covers is too small, the checks it imposes are too stringent, for the Bill to excite any great enthusiasm with the natives, and it is difficult for an Englishman to peruse its provisions without wonder at its ever having gained the name of an important measure of reform. Put in a few words, the Local Self-Government Bill means that the native communities are to be allowed to mend their own roads, to levy their own water rates, and devise their own sanitation, on the condition and provided that the Commissioner of the district does not think them incapable of doing so. This for the first time after a hundred years of English rule! I know what the natives think of the measure, and how little it fulfils their expectations; but no higher tribute can be paid to Lord Ripon’s popularity than that they have been sincerely grateful to him for it.

Thus, too, the Ilbert Bill, of which we have heard so much. It was in itself an infinitesimal measure of relief from native disabilities. It provided that native judges, under certain exceptional conditions, in country districts, should have jurisdiction over Englishmen, a jurisdiction long ago fully granted them in Ceylon with no ill results, and also granted in India in the presidency towns. The only province, as far as I could learn, which would have been at all seriously affected by the Bill was Bengal, where the English planters saw in it a check to their system of managing and mismanaging their coolies. I heard a good deal about this from some Assam planters with whom I sailed on my way out to India, and I know that that is how they regarded it. “It is all nonsense,” these told me, “to suppose you can get on without an occasional upset with the niggers, and our English magistrates understand this. But if we had native magistrates we should be constantly getting run in for assault.” In other districts, however, where milder manners prevail, there seemed to be no such dread of the Bill; and as to the probability of any real abuse of their position by native judges with Englishwomen, I am certain that the whole thing was purely fictitious. But the agitation against the Bill became dangerous from the fact that it was all along fostered by the Anglo-Indian officials, who chose the Bill as a battlefield on which to contest the principle of Lord Ripon’s Liberal policy. In the Local Self-Government Bill they had seen a first blow struck at their monopoly of power, and they seem to have made up their minds to permit no second blow. They were aided by the English lawyers, who recognized in it a menace to their professional advancement; and by the planters for the reasons I have given; and, following the example of the “Times,” the whole press of England soon joined in the cry. The natives, too, from first to last, fought the battle as one of principle, though with far more moderation than their assailants.

I was present in Calcutta on the day when the compromise, negotiated by Sir Auckland Colvin, was announced to the public, and I know the effect it produced on native politicians. It was everywhere looked on as a surrender, and a disgraceful one; and there was a moment when it was doubtful whether popular indignation would not vent itself in more than words. But Lord Ripon’s personal popularity saved the situation, and moderate counsels prevailed. It was recognized even by the most violent that the pusillanimity of the Home Government, not of the Viceroy, was in fault; and it was felt that, should popular indignation turn now upon Lord Ripon, no Viceroy would ever again dare befriend the people. The compromise, therefore, was accepted with what grace was possible, and bitter feelings were concealed, and the day of indignation postponed.

I consider the attitude of native opinion on this occasion vastly creditable to the political good sense of India, though it would be highly dangerous to trust to it another time. The evil done will certainly reappear, and be repaid upon Lord Ripon’s successors. Down to the last year the natives of India, completely as they had lost faith in the official system and in the honest purpose of their covenanted rulers, still looked to the Home Government as an ultimate Court of Appeal, able to defend them if not always willing. The weakness, however, of the Cabinet on this occasion to resist a wholly unjust and unscrupulous attack upon them was now apparent, and I doubt extremely whether they will ever again have confidence in Ministerial professions. The Government was entirely committed to the passing of the Bill, yet it gave way before the clamour of an insignificant section of the public, abetted by the sworn enemies of all reform in India – the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy. The spectacle was not an edifying one, and I know that the natives appreciated it entirely on its merits, and I am much mistaken if they did not also come to the conclusion that the justice of a course was insufficient for its triumph in politics, and that the only path of victory henceforth lay through agitation. If this is so, there is little chance of peace in the future of the sort which governments love.

I do not like to complain of evils without at the same time suggesting remedies, but it is difficult to recommend an immediate remedy for the evils I have been depicting. The ill-feeling which exists between the English in India and the natives is due to causes too deep-seated in the system we have introduced, and until that system is changed, little real good will be effected. I would, however, point out that there is as yet no true hatred of race between Englishmen and Indians, but rather one of class only, and that it is yet within our power in England to change the threatened curse into a blessing. The quarrel in India up to the present moment is with the Anglo-Indians only, not with the English nation; and though recent disappointments have begun to shake their confidence in the Home Government, the natives have not wholly lost their belief in the sympathy of the land where liberty was born. Between the two classes – the English of India and the English of England – they still draw a distinct line, and race hatred in its true sense will not have been reached until this line is obliterated. They say, and truly, that in England such of them as go there find justice, and more than justice, that they are treated as equals, and that they enjoy all civil and social rights. They come back proud of being British subjects, and preserve none but agreeable recollections of the Imperial Island. They do not wish for separation from its Government, and are loyal before all others to its Crown. But the contrast of their subject-life in their own land strikes them all the more painfully on their return, and they are determined to procure reform. “Reform, not Revolution,” is their motto, but reform they have made up their minds to have.

With regard to the direction any new change should take, the educated natives argue thus: Purely English Administration, they say, in India has had its day and needs to be superseded. It has wrought much good in the past by the introduction of order and method, by raising the standard of public morality, and by widening the field of public interests. As such it deserves thanks, the thanks of a sick man for his nurse, of a minor for his guardian, of a child for his preceptor. But further than this, India’s gratitude cannot go. It cannot be blind to the increasing deficiencies of those who rule it, or forgo for ever the exercise of returning strength and coming maturity. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy has become too hard a master; it has forgot its position as a servant; it has forgot the trust with which it was charged; it has sought its own interests only, not those of India; it has wasted the wealth of the country on its high living. Like many another servant, it has come to look upon the land as its own, and to order all things in it to its own advantage. Lastly, it has proved itself incapable of sympathy with those whose destinies it is shaping. It neither loves India nor has been able to command its love; and by an incapacity of its nature it is now exciting trouble, even where it is most anxious to soothe and to cajole. Meanwhile the sick man is recovering, the child is growing up, the minor is about to come of age. He has learned most of what his tutors had to teach him, and his eyes are open to the good and the evil, the wisdom and the want of wisdom, the strength and the weakness of his guardians. He desires a participation in the management of his own affairs and a share in the responsibility of rule. To speak practically, the Civil Service of India must be so remodelled as to make the gradual replacement of Englishmen by natives in all but the highest posts henceforth a certainty.

It is not proposed, I believe, by any section of the Indian public to extend present demands farther than this. But, as with all political reformers there is an ideal towards which they look as the goal of their endeavours, so in India the goal of advanced thinkers is complete administrative independence for the various provinces on the model of the Australian colonies. Their thought is that by degrees legislation as well as administration should be vested in native hands. First it may be by an introduction of the elective system into the present councils, and afterwards by something more truly parliamentary. The supreme Imperial Government all wish to preserve, for none are more conscious than the Indians that they are not yet a nation, but an agglomeration of nations so mixed and interblended, and so divided by diversity of tongues and creeds, that they could not stand alone. An Imperial Government and an Imperial army will remain a necessity for India. But they see no reason whatever why the practical management of all provincial matters should not, in a very few years, be vested in their hands. That the present system of finance and the exploitation of India to the profit of Englishmen would have to be abandoned is of course certain. But there is nothing in India itself to make this undesirable.

I refrain here from any attempt to sketch a plan of ultimate self-government for India, but I have argued the matter out with the natives, and I intend in a future chapter to set it forth in detail. Suffice it now to say that a change of some sort is immediately necessary, or at least an assured prospect of change, if worse calamities are to be avoided. The danger I foresee is that, with an immense agricultural population chronically starved, and a town population becoming every day more and more enlightened and more and more enraged at its servitude, time may not be given for the slow growth of opinion in England as to the need of change. I am convinced that if at the present moment any serious disaffection were to arise in the native army, such as occurred in 1857, it would not lead to a revolt only. It would be joined, as the other was not, by the whole people. The agricultural poor would join it because of their misery, the townsmen in spite of themselves, because of their deep resentment against the Anglo-Indians, and the native servants of the Crown because of the checks placed on their advancement. The voice of reason, such as now prevails in the academical discussions of the educated class, would then be drowned in the general noise, and only the sense of anger and revenge remain. I know that many of the most enlightened Indian thinkers dread this, and that their best hope is to make the reality of their grievances, the just causes of their anger, heard in time by the English people. They still trust in the English people if they could only make them hear. But they are beginning to doubt the possibility of attracting their attention, and they are very nearly in despair. Soon they may find it necessary to trust no one in the world but themselves. To-day their motto is “Reform.” Let us not drive them to make it “Revolution” to-morrow.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOHAMMEDAN QUESTION

It is never well to have travelled from Dan to Beersheba and to record that one has found all barren; and in my present chapter I shall endeavour to paint the brighter side of the India which I saw last winter. The material misery of her peasantry has been enough described, and the bitter feeling of her townsmen educated to a sense of their fallen estate as a conquered people; and it remains to me to show the compensating good which by the mysterious law which rules all human things is being born out of their otherwise unredeemed misfortunes. The apologists of British rule boast that they have given India peace, and peace doubtless is a noble gift; but it has given her far more than this. What really deserves all Indian thanks, and is indeed an inestimable acquisition, because it contains within it the germs of a reconquest of all the rest, is that it has given her liberty of thought. This is a new possession which India never had, and never perhaps would have had, but for English influences, and it is difficult not to see in it a gift undesigned, but which, like the last treasure issuing from Pandora’s box, is destined to transform the curse of conquest into the blessing of a wider hope.

I am not one of those who love the East only in its picturesque aspects, and I have no quarrel with Europe because it has caused the East to change. I note, indeed, the destruction of much that was good and noble and of profit in the past by the unthinking and often selfish action of Western methods; but I do not wish the past back in its integrity, or regret the impulse given to a new order there of thought and action. I know that time never really goes back upon its steps, and no one more readily accepts than myself the doctrine that what is gone in human history is irrevocably gone. On the contrary, I see in the connection of East and West a circumstance ultimately of profit to both; and while the beauty of its old world is being fast destroyed, and the ancient order of its institutions subverted, I look forward with unbounded expectation to the new cosmos which shall be constructed from the ruins. I am anxious, indeed, to save what can still be saved of the indigenous plan, and to use in reconstruction something of the same materials; but I see that the new edifice may well be made superior to the old, and I should be altogether rejoiced if it should be my lot to share, however humbly, in the work of its rebuilding.

To speak plainly, the ancient order of Asiatic things, beautiful as it was, had in it the germs of death, for the one reason that it did not change. India especially, in old days, did not change. Conquerors came and went; dynasties rose and perished; and years of peace and war, of plenty and of famine, trod closely on each other’s heels, while men were born and lived and died in the same thoughts. It was the natural life, the remnant of a society which still followed the law of instinct rather than of reason; but even in the natural world health must be attended with growth or it will turn into decay. The intellectual growth of India by the middle of last century had long stopped; and there was no sign anywhere, when our English traders first appeared, of a new beginning. Thought had resolved itself into certain formulae from which there seemed no escape; and the brain of the body politic, unused and oppressed with its own mental restrictions, was growing every generation weaker.

We have seen the ultimate result of such inaction in other lands, in Asia Minor, in Persia, and, till within recent memory, in countries nearer home. It was seen everywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, and seems to be a condition natural to all human societies at a certain stage of their growth. If too long prolonged it would seem they die, leaving their places empty, as in Babylonia, or being absorbed in other more vigorous societies, as the Byzantines were absorbed by the then vigorous Turks. In almost every case the intellectual awakening has been quickened from without, by the presence near it of an intelligence more living than its own and generally hostile, and it may safely be affirmed that the action and reaction of nations on each other’s intellectual life is in itself a natural and necessary law of their development. Thus Mediaeval Europe owed the new birth of its thought to the invasion in the eighth century of the cultivated and chivalrous Moors through Spain; and the Catholic Church reformed its lax discipline, not four hundred years ago, in the presence of advancing hosts from Western Asia. Something of the same process, therefore, may be also traced in the counter-wave which has now for the last hundred years and more been driving Europe back in menace to the East. Asia has been awakened by it at last to her danger, and is slowly informing herself with the victorious reason of the West, and assimilating to her needs that intellectual daring which is her adversary’s strength. And nowhere more so than in India. After its long sleep the Indian intellect is rising everywhere refreshed, and is attempting each day more boldly to strike out new lines of speculation on the very subjects where it had been most closely and most hopelessly confined.

All this India indubitably owes to England. Nor is there any point on which the intellectual methods of the West have been brought more strongly to bear in Asia than on its creeds. The ancient monotony of religious practice divorced from religious intelligence, is slowly giving place to intrusive questionings which will not be appeased by mere formulae, and men of all faiths are discussing and reasoning where a hundred years ago they only asserted. We have witnessed within the last generation something of this everywhere in Western Asia, but in India it is perhaps still more marked; and it seems certain that, whatever evil may have been there wrought to other interests, the interests of its religions will have been served by our rule, unconsciously, perhaps, and unwillingly, but none the less really. Paradoxical as it may sound, the wholly secular rule of aliens, whose boast it is that they have established no State creed, will be found to have renewed the life of faiths and given them a stronger, because a more intelligent, mode of being. The spiritual believer will be strengthened; and the very pagan will be no longer “suckled in a creed outworn,” but in living beliefs which will seek to exercise a moral influence on his conduct more and more for good. To speak precisely, what I see will be the outcome of such education as England is giving to the Indian races is a reformation of each of their several religious faiths, leading to purer thought in their followers, and above all to purer practice.

The creeds of India, speaking generally, are four: the Hindu, which under various forms embraces four-fifths of the whole population; the Mohammedan, which is principally powerful in the North of India and Bengal, and which includes a census of fifty millions; the Christian (Roman Catholic), found mainly in the extreme South; and the Parsi.