Indian speeches (1907-1909)

by John Morley

INDIAN PROBATIONERS

(OXFORD. JUNE 13, 1909)

[The Vice Chancellor of Oxford University and the teachers of the
Indian Civil Service probationers gave a dinner to the probationers
on Saturday at the New Masonic Hall, Oxford, to meet the Secretary of
State for India. The Vice Chancellor was in the chair]

It is a great honour that it should fall to me to be the first Secretary of State to address this body of probationers and others. Personally I am always delighted at any reason, good or bad, that brings me to Oxford. A great deal of Cherwell water has flowed under Magdalen Bridge, since I was an undergraduate here, and I have a feeling of nostalgia, when I think of Oxford and come to Oxford. The reminiscences of one's younger days are apt to have in older times an ironical tinge, but that is not for any of you to-day to consider. I am glad to know that of the fifty odd members of the Civil Service who are going out this autumn, not less than half are Oxford men, nearly all of them, Oxford bred, and even the three or four who are not Oxford bred, are practically, so far as can be, Oxford men. Now I will go a little wider. An Indian Minister is rather isolated in the public eye, amid the press and bustle of the political energies, perplexities, interests, and partisan passions that stir and concentrate attention on our own home affairs. Yet let me assure you that there is no ordinary compensation for that isolation in the breast of an Indian Minister. He finds the richest compensation in the enormous magnitude and endless variety of all the vast field of interests, present and still more future, that are committed to his temporary charge. Though his charge may be temporary, I should think every Secretary of State remembers that even in that fugitive span he may either do some good or, if he is unhappy, he may do much harm.

This week London has been enormously excited by the Imperial Press Conference. I was rather struck by the extraordinarily small attention, almost amounting to nothing, that was given to the Dominion that you here are concerned with. No doubt an Imperial Conference raises one or two very delicate questions, as to whether common citizenship is to be observed, or whether the relations between India and the Colonies should remain what they are. I am not going to expatiate upon that to-night, but it did occur to me in reading all these proceedings that the part of Hamlet was rather omitted, because India after all is the only real Empire. You there have an immense Dominion, an almost countless population, governed by foreign rulers. That is what constitutes an Empire. I observed it all with a rather grim feeling in my mind, that, if anything goes wrong in India, the whole of what we are talking about now, the material and military conditions of the Empire as a whole, might be strangely altered and convulsed. One of the happy qualities of youth—and there is no pleasure greater than to see you in that blissful stage, for one who has passed beyond, long beyond it—is not to be, I think I am right, in a hurry, not to be too anxious either for the present or future measure of the responsibilities of life and a career. You will forgive me if I remind you of what I am sure you all know—that the civil government of 230,000,000 persons in British India is in the hands of some 1,200 men who belong to the Indian Civil Service. Let us follow that. Any member of a body so small must be rapidly placed in a position of command, and it is almost startling to me, when I look round on the fresh physiognomies of those who are going out, and the not less fresh physiognomies of those who have returned, to think of the contrast between your position, and that, we will say, of some of your Oxford contemporaries who are lawyers, and who have to spend ever so many years in chambers in Lincoln's Inn or the Temple waiting for briefs that do not come. Contrast your position with that of members who enter the Home Civil Service, an admirable phalanx; but still for a very long time a member who enters that service has to pursue the minor and slightly mechanical routine of Whitehall. You will not misunderstand me, because nobody knows better than a Minister how tremendous is the debt that he owes to the permanent officials of his department. Certainly I have every reason to be the last man to underrate that. Well, any of you may be rapidly placed in a position of real command with inexorable responsibilities. I am speaking in the presence of men who know better than I do, all the details, but it is true that one of you in a few years may be placed in command of a district and have 1,000,000 human beings committed to his charge. He may have to deal with a famine; he may have to deal with a riot; he may take a decision on which the lives of thousands of people may depend. Well, I think that early call to responsibility, to a display of energy, to the exercise of individual decision and judgment is what makes the Indian Civil Service a grand career. And that is what has produced an extraordinary proportion of remarkable men in that service.

There is another elevating thought, that I should suppose is present to all of you. To those who are already in important posts and those who are by-and-by going to take them up. The good name of England is in your keeping. Your conduct and the conduct of your colleagues in other branches of the Indian Service decides what the peoples of India are to think of British government and of those who represent it. Of course you cannot expect the simple villager to care anything or to know anything about the abstraction called the raj. What he knows is the particular officer who stands in front of him, and with whom he has dealings. If the officer is harsh or overbearing or incompetent, the Government gets the discredit of it; the villager assumes that Government is also harsh, overbearing, and incompetent. There is this peculiarity which strikes me about the Indian Civil servant. I am not sure that all of you will at once welcome it, but it goes to the root of the matter. He is always more or less on duty. It is not merely when he is doing his office work; he is always on duty. The great men of the service have always recognised this obligation, that official relations are not to be the beginning and the end of the duties of an Indian administrator. It has been my pleasure and privilege during the three or four years I have been at the India Office, to see a stream of important Indian officials. I gather from them that one of the worst drawbacks of the modern speeding up of the huge wheels of the machine of Indian government is, that the Indian Civil servant has less time and less opportunity than he used to have of bringing himself into close contact with those with whose interests he is concerned. One of these important officials told me the other day this story. A retired veteran, an Indian soldier, had come to him and said, "This is an odd state of things. The other day So-and-so, a commissioner or what not, was coming down to my village or district. We did the best we could to get a good camping-ground for him. We were all eagerly on the look-out for him. He arrived with his attendants. He went into his tent. He immediately began to write. He went on writing. We thought he had got very urgent business to do. We went away. We arrived in the morning soon after dawn. He was still writing, or he had begun again. So concerned was he both in the evening and in the morning with his writing that we really had nothing from him but a polite salaam." This may or may not be typical, but I can imagine it is possible, at all events. That must be pure mischief. If I were going to remain Indian Secretary for some time to come, my every effort would be devoted to an abatement of that enormous amount of writing. You applaud that sentiment now, and you will applaud it more by-and-by.

Upon this point of less time being devoted to writing and more time to cultivating social relations with the people, it is very easy for us here, no doubt, to say you ought to cultivate social relations. Yet I can imagine a man who has done a hard day's office work—I am sure I should feel it myself—is not inclined to launch out upon talk and inquiries among the people with whom he is immediately concerned. It may be asking almost in a way too much from human nature. Still, that is the thing to aim at. The thing to aim at is—all civilians who write and speak say the same—to cultivate social amenities so far as you can, I do not mean in the towns, but in the local communities with which many of you are going to be concerned. I saw the other day a letter from a lady, not, I fancy, particularly sentimental about the matter, and she said this: "There would be great improvement if only better social relations could be established with Indians personally. I do wish that all young officials could be primed before they came out with the proper ideas on this question." Well, I have no illusions whatever as to my right or power of priming you. I think each of us can see for himself the desirability of every one who goes out there, having certain ideas in his head as to his own relations with the people whom he is called upon to govern. That is the mission with which we have to charge you, and it is as momentous a mission as was ever confided to any great military commander or admiral of the fleet—this mission of yours to place yourself in touch with the people whom you have to govern. I am under no illusions that I can plant new ideas in your minds compared with the ideas that may be planted by experienced heads of Indian Government. The other day I saw a letter of instructions from a very eminent Lieutenant-Governor to those of the next stage below him, as to the attitude that they were to take to the new civilians when they arrived, and you 24 or 25 gentlemen will get the benefit of those instructions if you are going to that province. I do not think there is any reason why I should not mention his name—it was Sir Andrew Fraser, the retired Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal—and those instructions as to the temper that was to be inculcated upon newcomers, were marked by a force, a fulness, and a first-hand aptitude that not even the keenest Secretary of State could venture to approach. I know that exile is hard. It is very easy for us here to preach. Exile is and must be hard, but I feel confident that under the guidance of the high officers there, under whom you will find yourselves, you will take care not to ignore the Indian; not to hold apart and aloof from the Indian life and ways; not to believe that you will not learn anything by conversation with educated Indians. And while you are in India, and among Indians, and responsible to Indians, because you are as responsible to them as you are to us here, while you are in that position, gentlemen, do not live in Europe all the time. Whether or not—if I may be quite candid—it was a blessing either for India or for Great Britain that this great responsibility fell upon us, whatever the ultimate destiny and end of all this is to be, at any rate I know of no more imposing and momentous transaction than the government of India by you and those like you. I know of no more imposing and momentous transaction in the vast scroll of the history of human government.

We have been within the past two years in a position of considerable difficulty. But the difficulties of Indian government are not the result—be sure of this—of any single incident or set of incidents. You see it said that all the present difficulties arose from the partition of Bengal. I have never believed that. I do not think well of the operation, but that does not matter. I was turning the other day to the history of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta. In 1899—the partition of Bengal, as you know, was much later—what did they say? "There exists at present"—at present in 1899—"an increasing hostility to what is European and English among the educated classes." "No one can have," this Oxford report goes on, "any real knowledge of India without a deep sense of the splendid work done by the Indian Civil Service. The work is recognised by the Indian people. They thoroughly appreciate the benefits of our rule, they are bound to us by self-interest, but they do not like us." It is intelligible, but that is a result to be carefully guarded against by demeanour, by temper, by action—to be guarded against at every turn. Every one would agree that anything like a decisive and permanent estrangement between the Indians and the Europeans would end in dire failure and an overwhelming catastrophe. I am coming to other ground. The history of the last six months has been important, anxious, and trying. Eight months ago there certainly was severe tension. That tension has now relaxed, and the great responsible officials on the spot assure me that the position of the hour and the prospects are reassuring. We have kept the word which was given by the Sovereign on November 1 last year in the message to the people of India commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assumption of the powers of government in India by the Crown, the transfer of the power from the old Company to the Crown. We have kept our word. We have introduced and carried through Parliament a measure, as everybody will admit, of the highest order of importance. It was carried through both Houses with excellent deliberation. I have been in Parliament a great many years. I have never known a project discussed and conducted with such knowledge, and such a desire to avoid small, petty personal incidents. The whole proceeding was worthy of the reputation of Parliament.

You are entering upon your duties at a stage of intense interest. Sir Charles Elliott, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, wrote the other day, that this is "the most momentous change ever effected by Parliament in the constitution of the Government of India since 1858." He goes on to say that no prudent man would prophesy. No, and I do not prophesy. How could I? It depends upon two things. It depends, first of all, upon the Civil Service. It depends on the Civil Service, and it depends on the power of Indians with the sense and instincts of government, to control wilder spirits without the sense or the instincts of government. As for the Civil Service, which is the other branch on which all depends, it is impossible not to be struck with the warmest admiration of the loyal and manful tone in which leading members of the Civil Service have expressed their resolution to face the new tasks that this legislation will impose upon them. I have not got it with me now, but certain language was used by Sir Norman Baker, who is now the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. I think I quoted it in the House of Lords, and, if I could read it to you, it would be far better than any speech of mine in support of the toast I am going to propose to you. There never was a more manful and admirable expression of the devotion of the service, than the promise of their cordial, whole-hearted, and laborious support of the policy which they have now got to carry through. I am certain there is not one of you who will fall short, and I am speaking in the presence of those who are not probationers, but persons proved. There is not one of you who, when the time comes, will not respond to the call, in the same spirit in which Sir Norman Baker responded.

I am now going to take you, if you will allow me, for a moment, to a point of immediate and, I can almost say, personal interest. Everybody will agree, as I say, that we have fulfilled within the last six or eight months the pledges that were given by the Sovereign in November. An Indian gentleman has been placed on the Council of the Viceroy—not an everyday transaction. It needed some courage to do it, but it was done. Before that, two Indians were placed on the Council of India that sits in my own office at Whitehall. We have passed through Parliament, as I have already described to you, the Councils Act.