From Egypt to Japan

by Henry M. Field

Such is the position of England in India. She holds a citadel girt round with defences on every side, with strong walls without, and brave hearts within. I have been round about her towers, and marked well her bulwarks, and I see not why, so guarded and defended, she may not hold her Indian Empire for generations to come.

But there is a question back of all this. Might does not make right. A government may be established in power that is not established in justice. It may be that the English are to remain masters of India, yet without any right to that splendid dominion. As we read the thrilling stories of the Mutiny, it is almost with a guilty feeling (as if it betrayed a want of sympathy with all that heroism), that we admit any inquiry as to the cause of that fearful tragedy. But how came all this blood to be shed? Has not England something to answer for? If she has suffered terribly, did she not pay the penalty of her own grasping ambition? Nations, like individuals, often bring curses on themselves, the retribution of their oppressions and their crimes. The fact that men fight bravely, is no proof that they fight in a just cause. Nay, the very admiration that we feel for their courage in danger and in death, but increases our horror at the "political necessity" which requires them to be sacrificed. If England by her own wicked policy provoked the Mutiny, is she not guilty of the blood of her children? Thomas Jefferson, though a slaveholder himself, used to say that in a war of races every attribute of Almighty God would take part with the slave against his master; and Englishmen may well ask whether in the conflict which has come once, and may come again, they can be quite sure that Infinite Justice will always be on their side.

In these sentences I have put the questions which occur to an American travelling in India. Wherever he goes, he sees the English flag flying on every fortress—the sign that India is a conquered country. The people who inhabit the country are not those who govern it. With his Republican ideas of the right of every nation to govern itself, he cannot help asking: What business have the English in India? What right have a handful of Englishmen, so far from their native island, in another hemisphere, to claim dominion over two hundred millions of men?

As an American, I have not the bias of national feeling to lead me to defend and justify the English rule in India; though I confess that when, far off here in Asia, among these dusky natives, I see a white face, and hear my own mother tongue, I feel that "blood is thicker than water," and am ready to take part with my kindred against all comers. Even Americans cannot but feel a pride in seeing men of their own race masters of such a kingdom in the East. But this pride of empire will not extinguish in any fair mind the sense of justice and humanity.

"Have the English any right in India?" If it be "a question of titles," we may find it difficult to prove our own right in America, from which we have crowded out the original inhabitants. None of us can claim a title from the father of the human race. All new settlers in a country are "invaders." But public interest and the common law of the world demand that power, once established, should be recognized.

According to the American principle, that "all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed," there never was a just government in India, for the consent of the governed was never obtained. The people of India were never asked to give their "consent" to the government established over them. They were ruled by native princes, who were as absolute, and in general as cruel tyrants, as ever crushed a wretched population.

No doubt in planting themselves in India, the English have often used the rights of conquerors. No one has denounced their usurpations and oppressions more than their own historians, such as Mill and Macaulay. The latter, in his eloquent reviews of the lives of Clive and Warren Hastings, has spoken with just severity of the crimes of those extraordinary but unscrupulous men. For such acts no justification can be pleaded whatever. But as between Clive and Surajah Dowlah, the rule of the former was infinitely better. It would be carrying the doctrine of self-government to an absurd extent, to imagine that the monster who shut up English prisoners in the Black Hole had any right which was to be held sacred. The question of right, therefore, is not between the English and the people of India, but between the English and the native princes. Indeed England comes in to protect the people against the princes, when it gives them one strong master in place of a hundred petty tyrants. The King of Oude collecting his taxes by soldiers, is but an instance of that oppression and cruelty which extended all over India, but which is now brought to an end.

And how has England used her power? At first, we must confess, with but little of the feeling of responsibility which should accompany the possession of power. Nearly a hundred years ago, Burke (who was master of all facts relating to the history of India, and to its political condition, more than any other man of his time) bitterly arraigned the English government for its cruel neglect of that great dependency. He denounced his countrymen, the agents of the East India Company, as a horde of plunderers, worse than the soldiers of Tamerlane, and held up their greedy and rapacious administration to the scorn of mankind, showing that they had left no beneficent monuments of their power to compare with those of the splendid reigns of the old Moguls. In a speech in Parliament in 1783, he said:

"England has erected no churches, no palaces, no hospitals, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument either of State or beneficence behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the orang-outang or the tiger."

This is a fearful accusation. What answer can be made to it? Has there been any change for the better since the great impeacher of Warren Hastings went to his grave? How has England governed India since that day? She has not undertaken to govern it like a Model Republic. If she had, her rule would soon have come to an end. She has not given the Hindoos universal suffrage, or representation in Parliament. But she has given them something better—Peace and Order and Law, a trinity of blessings that they never had before. When the native princes ruled in India, they were constantly at war among themselves, and thus overrunning and harassing the country. Now the English government rules everywhere, and Peace reigns from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas.