But the suspicion arose from more general and permanent causes as well. There remains the standing sense of wrong, because an Englishman has the right to a different form of trial from an Indian. A magistrate with power to inflict a two years’ sentence on an Indian, may inflict only six months on a European. No Indian may try a criminal case against a European, and in criminal cases a European may claim a jury, with a majority of Europeans on it. Lord Ripon’s attempt gradually to modify these distinctions is one of the well-remembered events of his famous Viceroyalty—one of the many reasons which have endeared his name to India as no other Viceroy’s is endeared—but his endeavour was thwarted.
As to the separation of functions, the Viceroy’s Council, through Sir Harvey Adamson, has lately (March, 1908) promised an experiment with this purpose in Eastern Bengal; but in India generally the District Magistrate who tries cases himself, or arranges for their trial by his subordinates, also controls the police, and in nearly all cases the police bring the charge. The injustice of this arrangement, with all its opportunities for official influence on legal decisions, has long been so obvious that one would have thought the cost of the change was the only obstacle to it. But while I did not hear much about the danger of increased cost, I heard a great deal about the danger of diminished dignity, if the District Magistrate lost either half of his functions. After a battle of over half a century, we may hope, however, that this grievance is now to disappear.
On the other hand, I found that the old scandals about the police had survived Sir Andrew Fraser’s commission of inquiry (1902). Promotion still went in practice by the number of convictions obtained, and convictions too often depended on evidence derived by the police from the accused themselves—so-called “confessions,” extorted by means which, rightly or wrongly, were spoken of with horror among the people, and even among Anglo-Indians. Between his arrest and his sentence the prisoner was left in the hands of the police, and at their mercy, thus giving them the opportunity of compelling him to give evidence to his own detriment. Wherever I went in India I heard the same complaint of the unscrupulousness and corruption of the police. Some of the British police officers with whom I became intimate, appeared to be experienced and sympathetic men, struggling rather hopefully on the side of reform. But the pay of the ordinary native policeman is so ludicrously small (from 8s. to 10s. a month), even when the low scale of wages in India is considered, that the constant temptation to extortion can hardly be resisted, especially among a population so indifferent to this world and so deferential to authority, that even the innocent will volunteer bribes in hopes of being left in peace.
The drink question in Madras is much the same as in the rest of India. In a sense, it is worse even than in England, for we see one of the most temperate and frugal populations of the world gradually taking to drink as a new habit.[32] The increase of drink is largely due to education, largely to the example of Europeans and of Indians lately returned from Europe; partly, in Madras at all events, to Christianized Indians who claim the right of casting off all the old restrictions of Indian behaviour. As in England, the Government does not escape its share of blame, owing to the large revenue derived from the drink trade. The Excise or “Abkari” Department sells the licences by auction, the bidding is keen, and it is difficult to prevent the purchaser of a licence from setting up business in the most lucrative position he can find. By a series of resolutions in February, 1890, the Government of India declared its intention of reducing the drink traffic, especially by the restriction of shops. Nevertheless, the traffic has very largely increased, and if the number of shops has not increased in proportion, they have been opened near market places, bathing ghats, schools, hospitals, temples, factories, and other places of common resort, where, as Sir Frederic Lely has said, they serve as “veritable traps to catch the weak, the thirsty, and the tired.”
It is difficult to define how far the most paternal of Governments is responsible for the excesses of its children, to whom it refuses the common rights of grown men. The evils of the drink traffic in India were not to be compared with the evils I had seen in West and Central Africa, nor were they so pronounced in Madras as in Calcutta. But the growth of the drinking habit—mainly European in origin—must be added to the other more prominent causes of unrest, even among a population so peaceful and backward as Madras is considered to be in comparison with Poona. Hatred of drink as something equally deadly and foreign was one of the causes why the Swadeshi movement, starting from Eastern Bengal, had spread in less than two years throughout the whole country. Of that movement I had already seen many evidences. In Bombay I had seen the Indian cotton-mills working against time to meet the demand for saris and dhotis (women’s and men’s cloths) free from the taint of foreign profit. And now in Madras I found the Swadeshi movement very strong. “None but Swadeshi goods,” “Buy our Nationalist cottons,” “Try our Bande Mataram cigarettes,” were the most telling advertisements a shop could write up or insert in the native newspapers, which are particularly strong and excellent in Madras.
Dance of High Caste Girls in Madras.
[Face p. 122.
One wealthy Hindu had ventured even in manufacture to follow the extreme party which said: “Let the English go their way. We will ask no share in their government and take none. We will neither appeal to their law courts nor accept salaries as their officials. We must pay their taxes, but otherwise we will forget that these foreigners are among us at all.” He had determined to set up a cotton works without the aid even of imported machinery. Collecting members of the old weaving caste, he erected a bamboo factory of hand-looms, where they were turning out the beautiful fabrics of Indian work, little more expensive than the English machine-made stuffs and four times as durable. The experiment is exposed to some of the dangers of conscious revivals—the dangers of “Arts and Crafts.” But hand-loom weaving still retains a quite natural life in many parts of India, in spite of the British manufacturers’ long endeavours to kill the Indian weaving industry. When I visited his simple factory among the palms north of Madras, he told me he could not keep pace with the demands of the Hindu women. And if the women who buy cotton cloth for their saris and children’s bits of clothing are willing to give a few farthings more for native and national work, in a district where they have to toil all day for a wage of twopence, it shows that the national spirit, even in philosophic and devotional Madras, is reaching far beyond the limits of the class that our own most highly educated classes taunt and sneer at as “educated Indians.”