CHAPTER V.
THE BENGAL CIVIL SERVICE (continued).
Those who have seen Tom Taylor’s play, “The Overland Route” at the Haymarket Theatre, have probably been amused at the representation of the old civilians Sir Solomon Fraser, K.C.B., and Mr. Colepepper, who are two of the principal characters of the piece. It may also be said to afford a favourable opportunity for old Indians of seeing themselves as others see them. Sir Solomon is the representative of the old school of political officers, who passed the chief part of their life as residents in native independent states. Mr. Colepepper is the hard-working old man who finished his career in the service as a commissioner, without any special rewards or titles, and under some mysterious liability to Government for many thousands of pounds, certain vouchers having been lost in the mutinies. With reference to these imaginary individuals we will give a brief sketch of a few more of the many branches into which the career of an Indian civilian may develop itself.
The Political Department, as it was called, in India, was for a long time considered the most eligible and enviable line in which a young civil officer could shape his career. There was a time when the most promising young men were specially selected by Government, and sent off to the famous capital at Hyderabad to graduate under the guidance of the eminent chief Charles Metcalfe, then resident at that native court. Residents and Governor-General’s agents were formerly to be found in many parts of India. The resident was the officer who was supposed to advise, or, we ought to say, imperceptibly to influence, the independent native prince or princess to whose court he was accredited. The Governor-General’s agent was the representative of British authority, or, to put it more plainly, the instructor or bear-leader of those native princes whose authority was not independent, but who needed to be instructed or to be led according to their own individual capacity or incapacity in exercising their own limited power and jurisdiction. The officer employed in either position was supposed to be well-versed in all matters connected with the etiquette and ceremonial of native courts, and it was essential that he himself should be distinguished for his grave and imperturbable courtesy of demeanour and speech. He was expected to be a master of all the arts of intrigue, not so much for the purpose of carrying on any active intrigue, but rather for the sake of baffling those intrigues which are the life and breath of a native court, where mine must occasionally be met by counter-mine. For the word intrigue includes, and indeed usually consists of, the very smallest matters, in dealing with which the political officer only keeps his weapons sharpened in readiness to deal with any matter of real gravity and importance. A resident formerly was almost isolated from the fellowship of his own countrymen, save of those who constituted his own staff or assistants. But this form of society is always mentally unwholesome, as the chief finds no one who is prepared openly to differ from his opinions, or to maintain any serious argument against him. Hence the resident of the pre-mutiny period sometimes became a rather pompous self-opiniated punctilious and artificial sort of person, who is exemplified in Sir Solomon Fraser, K.C.B. The race of political officers is now comparatively extinct, and the circumstances under which they exist have been so materially altered by the introduction of railways and the general improvement in the means of interchanging ideas with their fellow-men, that any man who allowed himself to acquire the ways and habits, of his fossil predecessors would probably be deemed unfit for his post, although he will still be careful to observe the professional courtesy and demeanour for which we ought not to fail to give due credit to the members of the old school of politicals. Writing as we are with reference to the province of Bengal, it may be said that political residents are non-existent, and the few Governor-General’s agents, who are still employed at the Court of the Nawab of Morshedabad and on some of the frontier divisions, have been much shorn of their honours and emoluments.
With regard to Mr. Colepepper, who has been presented in the play as the type of the commissioner, we do not mean to say that the portrait will be actually recognised, as there are few now left who are able to identify the men who served their country so well and so patiently both before and during the mutinies; but we are inclined to think that someone has unconsciously sat for his portrait on this occasion, and we do not feel that he has anything to be ashamed of in it. A man who has spent his life under an Eastern sun, surrounded by Oriental influences, must not suppose that he is like his contemporaries who have never left the shores of England. His curious garb, his white sun-hat, his thin white coat and trousers, present as great a contrast to the broad-cloth garments and regulation hat of his English compeer as may be found in their respective thoughts and feelings. And we are not at all prepared to admit that all the mental advantage or even the physical superiority is on the side of the stay-at-home Englishman. It may be that the man who has served in India has attained all his Oriental learning and practical administrative experience in addition to his natural privileges and mental acquirements as an Englishman. He has, perhaps, seen some things from the wrong end of the telescope; but have his brethren in England always taken a more correct view of Indian objects? The heart and mind of the one have probably been enlarged by an enlightened sympathy for millions of new and strange people, whilst the other has passed his life in the narrow prejudices of his own profession or business, and in the surroundings of his own country parish. The one may have endured the burden and heat of the sun, which has blanched the colour from his cheeks, and left him a lean and yellow visage and disorganised liver. But is the other very much better off who has grown corpulent and unwieldy with too much good-living and too much old port wine, whilst his limbs are often racked by rheumatism, if he has not become a victim to gout and dyspepsia?
However, though there may be individual exceptions to every rule, the mind of the British public is tolerably well made up that Mr. Colepepper is a genuine specimen commissioner of the Indian Civil Service, and we are content to leave them in that belief. But the title of commissioner conveys no sort of distinct idea to the English mind. It is curious how wanting many Indian titles are in precision, or even in affording any suggestion of their meaning. We remember a story where a good-natured old commissioner was sitting at dinner next the colonel of a regiment which had just come to Calcutta from the North-West Provinces. The commissioner casually said to the colonel, “I am the animal which is called a commissioner in this part of the world.” The colonel was immensely delighted. He had been accustomed to their high mightinesses the commissioners of the North-West Provinces; and it was a strange thing to him to find a commissioner speaking almost disrespectfully of his own title. But there are commissioners and commissioners. The commissioner in Bengal is the officer in chief executive charge of a territorial division, each division containing six or seven separate districts, with a total population of about eight or ten millions inhabitants. There are some divisions in which for geographical reasons the area is smaller, and the population of the division less numerous. The commissioner is usually an officer in what may be called the prime of Indian official life, about forty years of age, and of about twenty years’ standing in his service. He is usually selected by Government from the executive officers known as collector-magistrates of districts, and the selection not unfrequently causes considerable jealousy and dissatisfaction, especially if the selected commissioner happens to be junior to any of the collector-magistrates in the division to which he is appointed. The commissioner is the local representative of Government in his own division. The Government sends its orders to him, and he passes them on to the collector-magistrates. On the same principle the collector-magistrates submit their reports to Government through the commissioner. He is the chief local authority, save that the district judges are entirely independent of him; and the judicial independent authority thus established is the recognised constitutional safety-valve, which is intended to provide against any injudicious or casual stretch of authority on the part of the executive. The commissioner is the head of the police throughout his division; but here again there are some subtle niceties of discipline and practice. The commissioner receives written reports from the police, through the district-magistrate, of the progress of their investigations in all heinous and important cases. But his power is limited. He cannot issue direct orders to the actual police officers investigating a case, so as to bid them arrest one suspected person or release another. He may offer friendly advice and suggestions to the magistrate with regard to the action of the police; and he may also, if dissatisfied with their proceedings, make unpleasant remarks and comments. But the discipline of the police force is regulated by a hierarchy of its own, consisting of district-superintendents and deputy inspectors-general, and an inspector general, who is equal in official rank to the commissioner, and in direct communication with Government. And as the commissioner may interfere with the police only under certain limitations, so, on the other hand, he must be very cautious to abstain from interference with any case the moment that it has been sent up by the police for trial before any magisterial or judicial officer. Any interference by the executive in the judicial trial of a case is strongly resented; but it is open to a commissioner to set the public prosecutor in motion, or to employ special counsel to look after the effective prosecution of a difficult and important case. Eventually, if a particular case, or any class of cases, becomes of such deep interest as to require the attention of Government—or if the Government has called for a report—it is the commissioner who has to represent the whole of the facts to Government, and it is then open to him to express his opinion unreservedly on the good or bad conduct of the police, and this is also his opportunity for pointing out to Government any defects that may have occurred in the judicial proceedings. But in this part of the business he will do well to temper his words with discretion. If the commissioner expresses an opinion, in his report to Government, that the magistrate or judge who tried the case has made any serious mistake as to his facts or to his law, this practically amounts to a proclamation of war. The Government on receiving the commissioner’s report to this effect will not be in a hurry to pronounce an opinion. It will probably send the report of the commissioner to the judges of the High Court, and will request them to inquire and report what the magistrate or judge has to say on his own behalf. Of course the magistrate or judge in most instances stoutly maintains that he was right, and it may be that the judges of the High Court also take the part of the judge or magistrate, or at all events extenuate his errors. Then the Government may either give the commissioner an opportunity for a rejoinder, or it may proceed to put an end to the case by passing a decision on it. The approved Government secretariat style of decision is to find a little fault with everybody; and the principle of decisions of this kind is simple and obvious, because it discourages all the officers concerned from desiring again to bring their quarrels or differences into prominence, so that they will not come up bothering the Government again for a long time to come. It may be observed that the Government is usually very careful to agree as far as possible with the judges of the High Court, and to throw over the complainant commissioner. So the commissioner probably finds, to his annoyance, that he has taken a great deal of trouble to do his duty, with the highly satisfactory result that he is told, like a naughty boy, not to do it again.
The commissioner is also the chief revenue authority throughout his division, the collectors being his subordinates in this capacity, whilst he himself is directly subject to the control of the Board of Revenue. In most parts of Bengal, the collection of the ordinary Land Revenue gives no trouble. The instalments of the Government Revenue are paid in with a punctuality which would gratify any Government under the sun. This is one of the fortunate results of the much-abused permanent settlement in Bengal, the very mention of which is so like a red rag to a bull with some persons, that we shall say no more about it, except to observe that there are some other well-informed persons who believe that if there had been no permanent settlement in Bengal in 1793, there would have been no British authority left in India in 1883. According to the true British method of procedure, the Government being now fully secure in its own share of the Land Revenue from the land-owners, has so altered and modified the laws which it made for the protection of the land-owners in the collection of their rents that it leaves them to collect them as best they may. The latest device is to compel the land-owner to sue his defaulting tenants in the civil courts, as they are pleasantly called, so that the Government derives a large indirect revenue through its stamp laws, an ad valorem stamp being required on the institution of a suit; whilst the costs of the case are a heavy addition to the tenant’s rent if the suit is decided against him, as it must almost always be decided from the nature of things. But this is all the result of pure benevolence and the well-meaning but possibly misguided kindness of those philanthropists who have constituted themselves the champions of the poor tenant, with no very complete understanding of the poor tenant’s real wants and necessities. Be this as it may, the commissioner and the collector have now very little trouble in the collection of the Government land revenue in Bengal. Occasionally a landed estate, as it is officially called, is sold by auction for non-payment of revenue; and if the owner of the defaulting estate is dissatisfied, he appeals to the commissioner to quash the auction sale. But it is very seldom that an estate is sold at auction, except with the wish and knowledge of the owners. An auction-sale conveys a clear and indefeasible title on the purchaser, who can thus afford to pay a much higher price for the property than if he attempted to buy it privately, for where there are many shareholders in an estate it almost passes the skill of the most able legal conveyancer to devise a perfect title exhaustive of all previously existing rights and encumbrances. With regard to the other revenue duties of a commissioner, they are more easily enumerated than they can be described or made intelligible. He has to provide for the management of the estates of minors, lunatics, and others, which have come under the control of the Court of Wards. He has to keep an eye on the great gains or losses arising from alluvion and diluvion along the banks of the huge rivers which sweep through Bengal, changing their courses and washing away their banks, not merely by a few yards, but sometimes by miles at a time. The commissioner has to look after the excise revenue of the districts under him. He must take thought regarding the application of the stamp laws, and be prepared to explain to the Board of Revenue the reason why the stamp revenue increases in one district and decreases in another district. This is sometimes a rather difficult task, as the collector in whose district an increase is shown blandly attributes it to the abundance of the harvest; whilst, unfortunately, the collector of the district in which a decrease appears also attributes the decrease to the abundance of the harvest; and though it is perfectly possible that there may be some truth in each of these explanations, it will not do for the commissioner to send up both explanations to the Board in their conflicting nudity and crudity. The commissioner has also to superintend the collection of that very curious tax which is known under the name of the license-tax. It is the only existing form of direct personal taxation, and is apparently called the license-tax because the Government was not permitted to call it an income-tax. A previous Government had taken much credit to itself for the abolition of the income-tax, and neither political party in England is now willing to allow itself to be connected with the re-imposition of the income-tax. But as some sort of direct taxation was deemed necessary, and is admittedly necessary, in order to reach the rich trading classes, it was introduced under the name of a license-tax, whilst it is only a disguised and deformed income-tax, utterly failing to produce the amount which would be derived from a well-administered income-tax, and only tolerated because the taxpayers subject to it are well aware that almost any change in the law is likely to add to the amount of their taxation. The original income-tax was abolished when it had begun to work, quite smoothly, in Lower Bengal, and the chief defects of the law had been eradicated and cured. Its ghost, the license-tax, now reigns in its stead, and people who pay the license-tax receive a license to do nothing, or, in some cases, to carry on the business for which they have to pay another license-tax under the local municipal laws.
The commissioner of a division has his head-quarters at one of the principal stations of the districts subject to his authority; but he is expected to make at least one tour of inspection in the course of the year, so as to visit all his districts. In some divisions the railways now make travelling easy, and his visitations can be made at any time that suits his convenience. But there are some divisions in which there are no railways, and even the local roads are hardly passable except at certain times of the year. In some parts the broad rivers afford the only means of communication, and he has to travel by boat or steamer. The commissioner’s visit of inspection in remote districts is one of the important events of the year. The officials, with their usual hospitality, make every effort to welcome and entertain him. The principal native residents of the district come in from their country residences with a large band of their retainers to pay their respects to him, and to represent their wishes, and also their grievances. He has to inspect the public offices and to satisfy himself in many matters of detail, such, for instance, as the amount of treasure contained in the collector’s treasury, and the number of stamps, including postage stamps, which are or ought to be in the collector’s custody. He has to visit all the local schools and pose as an amateur examiner in history and mathematics and the vernacular languages. He must inspect the local jail and lunatic asylum; not interfering in their management, as they are under special departments, but recording in the visitor’s book his opinion on what he sees, and on what he conceives to be wanting for the improvement of these establishments. He must inspect the old burial-grounds, and see that due care is taken of the monuments and tombstones of the otherwise long-forgotten dead. The opportunity of his visit will probably be taken to hold a public meeting to encourage subscriptions in support of some local charitable institutions, such as hospitals and dispensaries, or for the construction of some new work of public utility, such as a new road or bridge. And if any local feuds or factions exist, either among the English residents or in different sections of the native community, he is expected to act as a peace-maker, and to devise a modus vivendi for the future.
The duties of a commissioner are almost as varied and numerous as it is possible to imagine, but he must also fully appreciate the doctrine lately enunciated by Mr. Gladstone regarding the duties of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is not sufficient that he shall deal with all the work that comes to his hand, but he must have time to look about him, and seek for and make work, and initiate those reforms and improvements for which there is such ample opportunity in almost every condition of civilised society. He must be prepared for disappointment as well as encouragement in his endeavours to do good. Sometimes his own subordinates fail to support or adopt his proposals, or a zealous and active subordinate who gladly and eagerly carried out his plans is removed to some other sphere of usefulness, whilst his successor is a man who cares for nothing but his own ideas and abhors all unnecessary responsibility. Sometimes the Government discredits and discountenances his well-meant proposals, and he is graciously informed that local knowledge is always wrong—a curious paradox at first sight, but not by any means devoid of truth when analysed from the broader Government point of view. On the whole, the life and work of a commissioner is, or ought to be, exceedingly enjoyable to a man of active mind and body; but when mental and bodily activity are impaired, it only remains for a commissioner to retire like Mr. Colepepper to his native country to spend the remainder of his days in dignified repose.
There are still several positions in the life of a civilian which may be worthy of more than passing notice. When an officer has elected to join the judicial branch of the service, he in course of time becomes the judge of a district, an officer of much authority and dignity, and not badly remunerated. The position of a judge has one feature in it which makes it highly commendable, especially in contrast with that of the collector-magistrate, who has elected the executive branch. The latter officer has many masters, and his time is never his own, and even his private house is not sacred against the invasions of emergent business. But the judge has but one master, the High Court. He goes to his court at a fixed hour, and leaves it also at the appointed time, and he regulates these hours according to his own convenience. His business is carried on solely in his court; when he leaves his court his work is at an end. It would be considered both unbecoming and irregular for any suitor or pleader to seek to follow him to his own house. The duty of a judge is not so difficult as some people suppose. It is a well-known truism that in almost all law-suits the difficulty is to ascertain the real facts of the case. If the facts are found, the application of the law to those facts is a comparatively simple process. In the court of a district judge there are pleaders of good ability and considerable legal acquirements, who are not likely to allow him to be misled as to the law, however much they may strive to twist the facts of a case in favour of their client. The greater part of a judge’s work consists in hearing appeals from the decisions of the native judges subordinate to him, so that he has only to deal with the written evidence on the record, the effect of which has been usually well-weighed and represented in the decision of the subordinate judge. The judge, therefore, can easily master the leading facts of a case as set forth in the decision of the lower court, before he begins to hear the arguments of the counsel who appear to impugn or to support that decision. A case may be more or less complicated, but for a man of ordinary capacity and common sense it is a pleasant intellectual entertainment to listen to the arguments of the contending pleaders. Most of the leading pleaders can speak English well, and state their cases and arguments with a lucidity which might meet with the approval of Matthew Arnold. It only remains for the judge to prepare and pronounce his decision; and if he is a prudent man he will write out his decision in the quiet and privacy of his own study. This is the more necessary because the judge’s decision in its turn may become the subject of appeal to the High Court, and it therefore behoves a judge to try to make his decision impregnable.
The most difficult part of a judge’s duty consists in trying criminal cases at the sessions. When an accused person is committed by a magistrate on a charge of murder or any other offence with which the magistrate cannot deal finally, he is tried by the sessions judge and by a jury of his countrymen. The prosecution is usually conducted by the Government pleader, whilst the accused retains the services of the best counsel that he can afford to pay. The judge records the evidence in English with his own hand, being himself the interpreter of the actual words in the native language in which it is delivered, whilst simultaneously a native clerk records, or is supposed to record, the actual words spoken by the witness. This imposes a severe task on the judge. He has to listen to what the witness says in the vernacular, he has to interpret and record its meaning in English, and he has to consider the effect of each successive question and answer on the whole of the witnesses’ evidence. This triple mental operation is very severe, and imposes too hard a strain upon the judge. When the evidence for the prosecution and the defence is completed, and the counsel on either side have exhausted their eloquence, the judge has the pleasure of summing up the evidence and directing the jury in their vernacular language, a rather arduous task, but we have heard many men do it with much credit to themselves. Perhaps some of our judges in England would not be quite at ease if they had to sum up the evidence and address an English jury in French, or in dog-Latin; but the suggestion may convey to the reader some idea of the difficulty to which an English judge in India is subject. Finally, the judge records his decision elaborately in English, in case the prisoner, if convicted, should appeal to the High Court against his sentence.