India and Indian Engineering. / Three lectures delivered at the Royal Engineer Institute, Chatham, in July 1872

by J. G. Medley

He climbs gradually to a still higher position; perhaps becomes lieutenant-governor of a province as large as Germany, with 40 millions of inhabitants; retires at last from the service to spend the rest of his life in his native land, and finds his name and his services utterly unknown, not merely to the English public, but often to the very Government of which he had thought himself all this time the trusted servant.

It is this ignorance, and neglect of all services that are not done at home, except in very rare cases, which are the cause of so much irritation both in India and the colonies; a fourth-rate politician in England, a man who has no power or virtue whatever, save the vulgar “gift of the gab,” is better known and more thought of than the ablest servants of the State 5000 miles away. I have often thought how much good might be done by those in power, if instead of philosophising so much on the exact relations between England and her colonies, and demonstrating so clearly that as they pay no taxes to the Imperial exchequer, they have no right to be defended by the Imperial armies, care was taken to show that the colonies were really considered to be an integral part of the empire, and that good service done there was to be rewarded as if done at home; if a few more royal visits were paid, and a few more ribbons and stars occasionally bestowed; and if some means were found, either by life peerages or otherwise, for the State to avail itself of the experience of those who had grown grey in its service in distant lands, and for those men to feel that their talents and knowledge were valued at home in the great council of the nation. And if you say that you English at home are not interested in this matter, I beg leave to differ, and ask you fairly if every time you look at a map of the world, and see the red colour all over the globe which marks the extent of the British empire, and the great dependencies which have been conquered and colonized by that little island in the north-west corner of Europe, you do not feel a glow of honest pride in the thought that you too are a citizen of that empire on which the sun never sets, and whether that feeling is to be valued in pounds, shillings and pence, or rather, whether you are not willing to pay many pounds in exchange for the right to that feeling.

It is that abominable material philosophy of a certain school of the present day, which recognises nothing as really valuable that does not touch the grosser part of our nature, which sneers at patriotism and sentiment of any kind, and makes a god of selfishness, that sometimes frightens those who watch the enormous increase of our national wealth, and the decrease of regard for national duty, and makes them tremble lest we should one day have a rude awakening to the fact that a selfish and exclusive policy is as bad for nations as for individuals.

To return to our subject from this digression.

To those who cannot look upon their Indian life from the standpoint I have mentioned, a career in India is, it must be owned, but a dreary exile; the time for making fortunes, at any rate in the Government service, is gone; those who retire have seldom much beyond their very moderate pensions, and while the cost of living has steadily increased for many years past, salaries have remained stationary, or even diminished, and work has very much increased.

Thus, there can be no doubt that an Indian career has fewer attractions than formerly, and this has been the case ever since the Mutiny—that great landmark in Indian history whose significance is not even yet recognised. That great struggle, remember, was in no sense an uprising of the people against our rule, for, if it had been, we could not have held India for an hour. But though it was, primarily, a military revolt, caused and aggravated by overweening confidence and bad management, it was secondarily, a struggle of conservatism against the further progress of western innovations; it was a protest by caste and tradition against railways, telegraphs, and national education. Attacked under every possible disadvantage, outnumbered in every direction, with our arsenals in the enemy’s hands, and having to fight at the worst season of the year, that handful of the great Anglo-Saxon race turned fiercely to bay, supplied every deficiency by dauntless courage, wise policy, and heroic endurance, and broke the neck of the rebellion under the walls of Delhi, and in the residency of Lucknow, before a single fresh soldier had arrived from England.

Since the suppression of the Mutiny, our hold on the empire has been firmer than ever, but it owes less to prestige and more to actual strength. We have been less careful of respecting native opinion than before, more resolute to push on improvements, and the progress made in the last fifteen years in the material development of the country has been undoubtedly greater than in the previous fifty years. But much of the kindly feeling between the conquerors and conquered has gone, and will not soon be restored; the traditions and organizations of the Government services were destroyed, and have not yet been re-settled, and there is no longer that attachment to the country that was seen in the days of old John Company, kindest and best of masters. The remedy for this is not, I think, a return to the old state of things, which is indeed impossible, but more close and intimate relations between India and England, until our native subjects feel that they are really regarded as part of the British empire. The more they visit England, and the more we visit India, the more will each understand and appreciate the other. We have no enemy now in India, except popular ignorance, and that we are doing our best to remove by the most complete system of State education that has yet been devised in any country.

And now I must touch on a subject on which many of you will, perhaps, expect some information. How about the progress of Christianity in India? Well, I fear it must be owned that it is extremely slow. I dare say I might be contradicted by many missionaries, but then I am not a missionary. I have the highest respect for them as a body; many I have known personally, and know to be able men; but undoubtedly their success, if judged by the number of converts, is very small, in Upper India at least; and though doubtless they do much good by keeping up the schools that are attached to every mission, that good has very little to do with the progress of Christianity. As translators of the Bible into the various Indian languages, they have been more successful, and many of them are amongst the most accomplished linguists of the East.

I am inclined to think that much of this ill-success is owing to the forgetfulness of how universal and comprehensive Christianity is. The best proof of that is that, having originated in the East, it has yet so completely conquered the West. But in that conquest it has in some respects assumed a Western garb, and I fear our missionaries often forget that this Western garb is not essential, and that so long as the life and doctrine of the Great Master are followed and understood, the peculiar form to be taken by the latter is a matter of little importance. This is not the place to enter fully into a discussion of this sort, though it was impossible for me to avoid it altogether. But I believe I am only echoing the opinions of many thoughtful and earnest Christians, like the late excellent Bishop Cotton, of Calcutta, in saying that our efforts should be rather directed to create a native Indian Church, than to reproduce the Church of England in India; and that controversial epistles addressed to Western Churches, and dealing with questions arising out of the doctrines of Western philosophy, are puzzling rather than edifying to a convert in India.