A
Extract from the dispatch of the Board of Directors of the East India Company to the Government of India, December 10, 1834, accompanying the Government of India Act, 1833.[1]
[Footnote 1: Tradition ascribes this piece to the pen of James Mill. His son, J.S. Mill, was the author of the protest by the Company against the transfer to the Crown in 1858.]
103. By clause 87 of the Act it is provided that no person, by reason of his birth, creed, or colour, shall be disqualified from holding any office in our service.
104. It is fitting that this important enactment should be understood in order that its full spirit and intention may be transfused through our whole system of administration.
105. You will observe that its object is not to ascertain qualification, but to remove disqualification. It does not break down or derange the scheme of our government as conducted principally through the instrumentality of our regular servants, civil and military. To do this would be to abolish or impair the rules which the legislature has established for securing the fitness of the functionaries in whose hands the main duties of Indian administration are to be reposed—rules to which the present Act makes a material addition in the provisions relating to the college at Haileybury. But the meaning of the enactment we take to be that there shall be no governing caste in British India; that whatever other tests of qualification may be adopted, distinctions of race or religion shall not be of the number; that no subject of the king, whether of Indian or British or mixed descent, shall be excluded either from the posts usually conferred on our uncovenanted servants in India, or from the covenanted service itself, provided he be otherwise eligible consistently with the rules and agreeably to the conditions observed and exacted in the one case and in the other.
106. In the application of this principle, that which will chiefly fall to your share will be the employment of natives, whether of the whole or the mixed blood, in official situations. So far as respects the former class—we mean natives of the whole blood—it is hardly necessary to say that the purposes of the legislature have in a considerable degree been anticipated; you well know, and indeed have in some important respects carried into effect, our desire that natives should be admitted to places of trust as freely and extensively as a regard for the due discharge of the functions attached to such places will permit. Even judicial duties of magnitude and importance are now confided to their hands, partly no doubt from considerations of economy, but partly also on the principles of a liberal and comprehensive policy; still a line of demarcation, to some extent in favour of the natives, to some extent in exclusion of them, has been maintained; certain offices are appropriated to them, from certain others they are debarred—not because these latter belong to the covenanted service, and the former do not belong to it, but professedly on the ground that the average amount of native qualifications can be presumed only to rise to a certain limit. It is this line of demarcation which the present enactment obliterates, or rather for which it substitutes another, wholly irrespective of the distinction of races. Fitness is henceforth to be the criterion of eligibility.
107. To this altered rule it will be necessary that you should, both in your acts and your language, conform; practically, perhaps, no very marked difference of results will be occasioned. The distinction between situations allotted to the covenanted service and all other situations of an official or public nature will remain generally as at present.
108. Into a more particular consideration of the effects that may result from the great principle which the legislature has now for the first time recognised and established we do not enter, because we would avoid disquisition of a speculative nature. But there is one practical lesson which, often as we have on former occasions inculcated it on you, the present subject suggests to us once more to enforce. While, on the one hand, it may be anticipated that the range of public situations accessible to the natives and mixed races will gradually be enlarged, it is, on the other hand, to be recollected that, as settlers from Europe find their way into the country, this class of persons will probably furnish candidates for those very situations to which the natives and mixed race will have admittance. Men of European enterprise and education will appear in the field; and it is by the prospect of this event that we are led particularly to impress the lesson already alluded to on your attention. In every view it is important that the indigenous people of India, or those among them who by their habits, character, or position may be induced to aspire to office, should, as far as possible, be qualified to meet their European competitors.
Thence, then, arises a powerful argument for the promotion of every design tending to the improvement of the natives, whether by conferring on them the advantages of education, or by diffusing among them the treasures of science, knowledge, and moral culture. For these desirable results, we are well aware that you, like ourselves, are anxious, and we doubt not that, in order to impel you to increased exertion for the promotion of them, you will need no stimulant beyond a simple reference to the considerations we have here suggested.
109. While, however, we entertain these wishes and opinion, we must guard against the supposition that it is chiefly by holding out means and opportunities of official distinction that we expect our Government to benefit the millions subjected to their authority. We have repeatedly expressed to you a very different sentiment. Facilities of official advancement can little affect the bulk of the people under any Government, and perhaps least under a good Government. It is not by holding out incentives to official ambition, but by repressing crime, by securing and guarding property, by creating confidence, by ensuring to industry the fruit of its labour, by protecting men in the undisturbed enjoyment of their rights, and in the unfettered exercise of their faculties, that Governments best minister to the public wealth and happiness. In effect, the free access to office is chiefly valuable when it is a part of general freedom.