CHAPTER VIII
LORD MAYO'S INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION
The Mughal Government in its best days was a peripatetic one. Its camp was its capital, and the abandonment of that method marked the commencement of the false system of centralisation which in part led to the dismemberment of the Delhi Empire. Lord Mayo realised this fact, and by a well-planned system of tours he made himself acquainted with the separate provinces under his rule. He laboured hard to learn, not only each different system of local administration, but also the character and qualities of the men who conducted it. His genial presence and love of sport, combined with indefatigable powers for real work, won for him the affection, as well as the confidence of the District Officers throughout India. But no one who did not actually accompany him knew the fatigue of body and mind which he went through on the 21,763 miles of his Indian journeys, nor can realise the serious risks which he ran by rapid riding over bad roads or along precipices in the hill tracts. The only trip which was proposed to him for pleasure merely, he at once rejected. It was a matter of daily occurrence, that, rising at five o'clock, spending the whole day in travelling, receiving officials or Native Chiefs, and inspecting public works, Lord Mayo sat up half the night transacting business with his Foreign, or Private, or Military Secretary.
In these tours he saw much to praise, but also much to amend. The great Department of Public Works had during the previous twelve years rushed to the front of the spending departments in India. In its rapid development, it had to draw its officers from the Staff-Corps, or wheresoever they could be obtained, sometimes with little regard to their previous training for their new duties. Blunders and extravagance had been the result—a result which had been the despair of Lord Mayo's predecessors, and had given rise to grave scandals in the Public Press.
Lord Mayo, alike on his tours and in his Cabinet, set himself to remedy this state of things. 'There is scarcely a fault,' runs one of his Minutes on a certain undertaking, 'which could have been committed in the construction of a great work, which has not been committed here. Estimates a hundred per cent. wrong—design faulty—foundations commenced without the necessary examination of substratum—no inquiry into the excess of cost over estimates during progress.' In another case: 'I have read with great sorrow this deplorable history of negligence, incapacity, and corruption; negligence in the conduct of every superior officer who was connected with the construction of these buildings from the beginning; incapacity to a greater or lesser extent on the part of almost every subordinate concerned; corruption on the part of the contractors.' Elsewhere: 'I have read the report on the barracks. It is quite dreadful. There is not a man referred to who seems to have done his duty, except one who was unmercifully snubbed. This report will assist me in the reorganisation of the Department.'
But out of heart as he sometimes came away from such inspections, he was unwilling to condemn the individual officers hastily, and his eyes soon opened to the fact that the system itself was essentially to blame. In the first place he found that the brain power of the Department was overworked. Inspecting Officers were held responsible for a larger area than they could possibly give attention to; result—want of supervision. In the second place, a series of vast works were scattered at one and the same moment over the whole country without corresponding additions to the staff—too great haste. In the third place, engineers were placed in executive charge of wide tracts, while the amount of correspondence and purely office work glued them to their chairs indoors, and precluded them from overlooking what was going on outside—no personal management.
Lord Mayo's visit to certain railway works under construction by private contractors, and about the same time to a building being erected by the Public Works Department, forced this last defect of the system strongly on his mind. At the private contractors' works he saw three European gentlemen, umbrella in hand and their heads roofed over by enormous pith hats, standing out in the hottest sun, and watching with their own eyes the native workmen as they set brick upon brick. In the building under erection by the Public Works he found only the coolies and bricklayers, without supervision of any sort. On inquiry, the engineer in charge pleaded office duties, the subordinate engineer pleaded the impossibility of looking after a great many works at the same time throughout a considerable District; and the net result was, that Government had to put up with loss of money and bad masonry. Lord Mayo exclaimed: 'I see what we want—good supervision and one thing at a time.'
Lord Mayo also found that the extravagance in Public Works was due in a large measure to the practice of constructing them out of borrowed money. He therefore laid down a strict rule that all ordinary works, that is works not of the nature of a reproductive nature, and paying interest, must be constructed out of current revenue.
'Any further increase to our debt,' he decisively wrote, 'cannot be made without incurring danger of the gravest kind. I will incur no responsibility of this sort, and nothing will tempt me to sanction in time of peace the addition of a rupee of debt for the purpose of meeting what is really ordinary and unproductive expenditure. It is a policy which, acting on my own strong convictions, and in full concurrence with Her Majesty's Government, I am determined to reverse.'
The long series of measures by which Lord Mayo reorganised the Public Works Department lie beyond the scope of this volume. It must suffice to say that by stringently applying his principles 'of first finding the money, and improved supervision,' he not only effected a large saving during his own Viceroyalty, but rendered possible the subsequent expansion of the Department without financial disaster to the country.
Having thus reduced the expenditure to the utmost limit compatible with good work, Lord Mayo directed his earnest attention to the protection of the people against famine. He rejected at the outset a proposal which a Commission had made, of something very like a Poor Law for India. 'Having been engaged all my life in the administration of a Poor Law in one of the poorest countries in Europe, I may say ... first, that ordinary poverty in India does not need for its relief a poor-law system; secondly, that any sum which could be locally levied to relieve such famines as have from time to time occurred, would be ludicrously inadequate.'
At the same time he solemnly accepted the responsibility of the British Government to prevent wholesale death from starvation. He believed, also, that the Government had in its hand the means for accomplishing this object. 'By the construction of railways and the completion of great works of irrigation,' runs one of his earlier notes, 'we have it in our power, under God's blessing, to render impossible the return of those periodical famines which have disgraced our administration and cost an incredible amount of suffering, with the loss of many millions of lives.'
On Lord Mayo's arrival in Calcutta, he found awaiting him an elaborate Minute which Lord Lawrence had lately placed on record regarding the past history and the future extension of Indian railways. The narrative which the great civilian Viceroy thus left for his successor was full of encouragement, but by no means one of unmingled self-complacency. From the end of 1853, when we had twenty-one and a-half miles of railway in India, until the beginning of 1869, when Lord Lawrence left the country, only about 4000 miles of railway had been opened. These lines had been constructed by private companies, under a guarantee from the Indian Government. 'The money'—to use the words of the Duke of Argyll—'was raised on the credit and authority of the State, under an absolute guarantee of five per cent., involving no risk to the shareholders, and sacrificing on the part of Government every chance of profit, while taking every chance of loss.' In the absence of any inducements to economy, the guaranteed railways had cost £17,000 a mile, and were worked under a system of double supervision—expensive, dilatory, and complicated. It was become evident that the costliness of this plan rendered an adequate development of railways in India financially impossible.
Lord Mayo, assisted by General Strachey, resolved to supplement the expensive system of guaranteed lines by a network of State railways. Instead of guaranteeing five per cent. interest, the Government has raised the capital for these State railways at three to four per cent. Instead of an initial cost of £17,000 per mile for broad-gauge lines, it determined to construct narrow-gauge lines, at about £6000 per mile. For the old costly double management, the new system substituted a single firm control. Into the vexed question of the break of gauge it is not needful for me here to enter. It must suffice to say that Lord Mayo perfectly realised its disadvantages. His plan was to construct a system of narrow-gauge railways on a sufficient scale to allow of long lengths of haulage without break of gauge. Later experience has affirmed the practical convenience of the broader gauge. But, excepting in a few isolated spots, the system of State railways dates from Lord Mayo's Viceroyalty; and it is the system which, under various modern developments, is now absorbing within itself the whole railway system of India.
Lord Mayo's other great engine of internal development in the battle against famine was irrigation. A bare list of the works which he inaugurated, advanced, or carried out, would weary the reader. The Ganges Canal was extended, and, after seventeen years of deficit, took its place as a work no longer burdensome to the State. A new irrigation system, starting from the Ganges opposite Alígarh, and designed to water the whole lower part of the Doáb, from Fatehgarh to Allahábád, was commenced. The eastern half of Rohilkhand and the Western Districts of Oudh were at the same time being placed beyond peril of drought and famine by the Sárda Canal. Similar works for western Rohilkhand were being carried out by a canal from the Ganges. Plans were prepared, and the sanction of the Secretary of State partially obtained, for a project which would bring the waters of the Jumna to the arid tracts on the west of Delhi. While the Western Jumna Canal was thus to receive a vast extension, the Lower Jumna Canal was being pushed forward in the districts to the south-east of Delhi.
Proceeding farther down the Gangetic Valley, we find works of equal promise being carried on from the Son (Soane) river through the Province of Behar—the province destined in 1874 to be the next Indian tract which was to suffer dearth. On the seaboard, Orissa (the Province of Lower Bengal which had last passed through the ordeal) saw its districts placed beyond the peril that has from time immemorial hung over them, by a vast system of canals and the development of means of communication with the outside world. Still farther south, the Godávarí works were going forward. In the far west, projects for the drought-stricken districts of Sind were drawn up and investigated; while in Bombay, Madras, and other Provinces, many works of great local utility, although of less conspicuous extent, were initiated, pushed forward, or matured.
Lord Mayo, on his arrival in India, found two distinct sets of views entertained in regard to education. In some Provinces, among which Bombay held an honourable place, successful efforts had been made to found Public Instruction on a popular basis. In other Provinces—conspicuously in Bengal—high-class education flourished, while scanty provision was made for the primary or indigenous schools. The ultimate effect of this latter system, it was urged, would 'filtrate' downwards. Its immediate result, however, was to arm the rich and the powerful with a new weapon—knowledge—and to leave the poor under their old weight of ignorance in their struggle for life. Lord Mayo threw himself with characteristic energy into the efforts which were being made to remedy this state of things.
'I dislike,' he wrote to a friend, 'this filtration theory. In Bengal we are educating in English a few hundred Bábus at great expense to the State. Many of them are well able to pay for themselves, and have no other object in learning than to qualify for Government employ. In the meanwhile we have done nothing towards extending knowledge to the million. The Bábus will never do it. The more education you give them, the more they will keep to themselves, and make their increased knowledge a means of tyranny. If you wait till the bad English, which the 400 Bábus learn in Calcutta, filters down into the 40,000,000 of Bengal, you will be ultimately a Silurian rock instead of a retired judge. Let the Bábus learn English by all means. But let us also try to do something towards teaching the three R's to "Rural Bengal."'1
1 Referring to The Annals of Rural Bengal, which he had read on his voyage out to India.
The credit of giving effect to the measures then inaugurated belongs to Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. His educational reforms mark a new era in that Province.
In 1870 the Department of Public Instruction was educating 163,854 children in Lower Bengal at a cost of £186,598 to the State. In 1874, when Sir George Campbell laid down the Lieutenant-Governorship, he left 400,721 children being educated at a cost to Government of £228,151. He had, in the interval, covered Bengal with primary schools; pieced together and resuscitated the old indigenous mechanism of rural instruction, and, without actually curtailing high-class education, had created a bonâ fide system of public instruction for the people of the country.
While Lord Mayo believed that State education in India must rest on the broad basis of the indigenous and village school, he also recognised the necessity of making special allowance for certain classes. The Muhammadans—the old ruling class in India—had fallen behind in the race of life under the British system of Public Instruction. Lord Mayo discerned clearly how far this result was due to their own neglect, and how far to the unsuitability or uncongeniality of our educational methods. He urged upon the Local Governments the necessity of making special provision to meet their wants; and the reforms on the lines which he indicated have done much to remove the difficulty.
For another, and an even more backward class, Lord Mayo showed an equal consideration. He perceived that the Poor White had become a grave administrative problem in India. The truth is, our whole system of State instruction in India had been designed, and rightly designed, for the Natives. The poorer classes of the European community were very inadequately provided for by the Government. Lord Mayo thought that the first thing to be done was to place the existing schools for European children on a sound and efficient basis before building new ones. I have already referred to the Commission of inquiry and reform which he appointed for the Lawrence Asylums. In the Presidency towns, he exerted his influence, to use his own words, 'to increase the means of instruction for the Christian poor, and especially of the class immediately above the poorest.' But his life was cut short before he could accomplish the object which he had at heart.
While Lord Mayo thus provided for the wider instruction of the people of India, he also laboured to educate their rulers. At the time of his accession, the Government did not know the population of a single District of its most advanced Province, and the first census of Bengal (taken under Lord Mayo's orders) unexpectedly disclosed an extra population of twenty-six millions, whose existence had never been suspected, in that Lieutenant-Governorship alone.
No data were available up to that time for estimating the practical effects which any natural calamity would have upon a Bengal District. In 1866, when famine burst upon the Bengal seaboard, the Government remained unaware that the calamity was imminent until it had become irremediable, and scarcity had passed into starvation. The proportion which the crops of a Province bears to its food requirements, the movements of its internal or external trade, all the statistics of the operations by which wealth is distributed or amassed, and by which the necessities of one part of the country are redressed from the superfluities of another, remained unknown factors in administrative calculations of the most important practical sort.
Lord Mayo endeavoured to remedy this state of things by two distinct sets of operations. He organised a Statistical Survey of India, and he created a Department of Agriculture and Commerce. The first census of all India was taken under his orders. The Statistical Survey has produced a printed account of each district, town, and village, carefully compiled upon local inquiry, and disclosing the whole economic and social facts in the life of the people. He designed the Department of Agriculture and Commerce to perform for India the double set of duties discharged by the Board of Trade and the new (1891) Agricultural Department in England. The Government is the great landlord of India. It has not only to adjust its enormous rental so as to render it as little burdensome as possible to the people, but it has also to assist the people, by means of irrigation works and cash advances, in developing the resources of their fields. At the same time, it has to administer a vast area of State forests.
Lord Mayo, in inaugurating an Agricultural Department, clearly laid down the limits within which the Department could profitably act. He realised the folly of imagining that we can teach the Indian husbandman his own trade by means of steam-ploughs and 'ammoniac manures.' 'I do not know,' he once wrote, 'what is precisely meant by "ammoniac manure." If it means guano, superphosphate, or any artificial product of that kind, we might as well ask the people of India to manure their ground with champagne.' In another of his Viceregal notes he puts the case thus: 'In connection with agriculture we must be careful of two things. First, we must not ostentatiously tell Native husbandmen to do things which they have been doing for centuries. Second, we must not tell them to do things which they can't do, and have no means of doing. In either case they will laugh at us, and they will learn to disregard really useful advice when it is given.'
Lord Mayo was deeply convinced that the permanent amelioration of the lot of the Indian people must rest with themselves. He looked forward to the time when municipal administration would largely aid the officials by means of local self-government. Nor did he shrink from the responsibilities which the creation of such institutions involved. 'We have lately inaugurated,' he said to his Legislative Council, 'a system of lending to Municipalities which we believe will contribute much to the health, wealth, and comfort of the inhabitants of towns.' He publicly declared the development of municipal government to be among the chief of the many great services which Sir Donald Macleod, as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had rendered to India.
'A man,' he said, 'who has succeeded in establishing municipal institutions, which have always been in every country in the world the basis of civil government, and the first germ of civilisation, is entitled to the highest praise. I believe by his wise rule and regulations he has induced numbers of the Natives to take an active part in the administration of their municipal affairs, and has by that means laid the foundation of a future which should be most beneficial.' In his own great measure of provincial finance and local government, which I have detailed in [Chapter VI], Lord Mayo had the same end in view.
'The operation of this Resolution,' he inserted with his own hand in the orders of Government, 'in its full meaning and integrity will afford opportunities for the development of self-government, for strengthening Municipal Institutions, and for the association of Natives and Europeans, to a greater extent than heretofore, in the administration of affairs.' He summed up his main purpose in the following memorable words:—'The object in view being the instruction of many peoples and races in a good system of administration.'
Space precludes me from entering upon the legislative work of Lord Mayo. That work was voluminous, and of a most searching character. But it was practically conducted by the two eminent jurists, Sir Henry Maine and Sir Fitzjames Stephen, who held in succession the office of Law Member of Council during Lord Mayo's Viceroyalty. It has, moreover, been narrated by Sir Fitzjames Stephen himself, in full detail, in my larger Life of Lord Mayo.
In the foregoing pages many will miss a familiar feature of the Earl of Mayo's Viceroyalty. In India, hospitality forms one of the public duties of the governing race—a duty which they discharge, some laboriously, all to the best of their ability. The splendid hospitalities of Lord Mayo to all ranks and all races, amounted to an additional source of strength to the British Rule. He regarded it a proud privilege that it fell to his lot to present, for the first time, a son of the English Sovereign to the people and Princes of India. His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh's progress touched chords in the oriental imagination which had lain mute since the overthrow of the Delhi throne, and called forth an outburst of loyalty such as had never before been awakened in the history of our rule. It was the seal of peace; an act of oblivion for the struggle which placed India under the Crown, and for the painful memories which that struggle left behind.
In his ceremonial as in his official duties, the Earl of Mayo had the ease of conscious strength. His noble presence, the splendour of his hospitality, and his magnificence of life, seemed in him only a natural complement of rare administrative power. The most charming of Indian novels,2 in portraying an ideal head of Indian society, unconsciously delineates Lord Mayo. But indeed it would be almost impossible to draw a great Indian Viceroy in his social aspects without the sketch insensibly growing into his portrait. Alike in the Cabinet and the drawing-room there was the same calm kindness and completeness. Sir Fitzjames Stephen, not given to hero-worship, has said: 'I never met one to whom I felt disposed to give such heartfelt affection and honour.'
2 Dustypore, by Sir Henry Cunningham.