The Passing of Empire

by H. Fielding

I stared. "But I do not know you, except that I suppose you are elders of the town."

"We are," they said, "and you do not know us because you have not ever worried us in any way. When we had business together you did it quickly and decisively; otherwise you left us alone. You did not treat us as children. Therefore we are sorry you are going."

I laughed. I could not help it. To come and express regret at a man's leaving on the ground that they knew next to nothing of him and did not want to know more seemed unusual.

But it was true. And often, after, did I think over that "send-off" and take the lesson to heart.

Now what is true in Burma is true over all India. The local circumstances of course vary. A lumbadar in the North-West, for instance, does not quite correspond to a headman in Burma. The actual form in which the village was organised differs from place to place according to local needs. Even in Burma it differed a good deal. But the differences were only of form. In all India there were self-contained village communities within which, to a certain extent, caste, religion, and race were subordinated to local communal feeling.

And everywhere Government has killed it by turning the village officials into Government officials, responsible to Government and not to the village.

Thus there is now absolutely no organism a man can belong to. There are three hundred and fifty million individuals in India, and that is all. They are divided laterally into strata by caste and religion, and there is no influence to draw them together. All organised life is dead. Government by means of its official—the headman—interferes with almost every detail of life, regulating his conduct by rules drawn up in Secretariats by men who never knew what a village was, and the appeal is to another alien officer.

Further, all morality and all conduct are the outcome of corporate life, that is to say, of the village or of a larger unit. Morality is, in fact, where it is useful and true, the knowledge of how to get along with your fellow men and women, what conduct offends them and leads to the injury of society, what pleases them and tends to harmony and mutual happiness. It is not fixed, but adapts itself to changing circumstances of the society, and it is enforced by the opinion of that society.

But injure the society and both manners and morals are shaken. It is a common complaint of India to-day that the bonds of morality have greatly slackened and that manners have almost disappeared. This is attributed to the waning influence of religions. But, generally speaking, religions have not waned in India—on the contrary, their influences have increased. The people have become more and more in the power of religious systems. Therefore the cause given is absurd and untrue. It does not exist. Further, neither morality nor manners are the outcome of religion. On the contrary. Religions claim them to be so, but the claim is false. Manners and morals may be said to be the gravity which binds individuals into a community. They make the community and are themselves the outcome of the community. Destroy the community and you have destroyed the source from which manners and morals arise.

That has been done all through India. In another book I have pointed out how disastrously this has acted in Burma and how much the people feel it. I do not want to repeat myself. But if those officials who deplore the frequent cases of young girls running away with boys, of seduction, of adultery and other offences, of immature marriages, and other mistakes, would but realise that all these arise from the injury we have caused to society, there might be a change. All the human virtues, with no exception, either arise from or are increased by the aggregation of men into communities, and it is very difficult to keep them alive where no organic communities exist. Consider the words humanity, civilisation, patriotism, urbanity—their derivations and their meanings—and you will see this.