In our island home, we plume ourselves upon our hatred of political extraditions: we would scorn to ask the surrender of a political criminal of our own, we would die in the last ditch sooner than surrender those of another crown. What a contrast we find to this when we look at our conduct in the East! During the mutiny of 1857, some of our rebel subjects escaped into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We demanded their extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We insisted. The offer we finally accepted was, that they should be transported to the Portuguese settlement at Timor, we supplying transports. An Indian transport conveying these men to their island grave, but carrying the British flag, touched at Batavia in 1858, to the astonishment of the honest Dutchmen, who knew England as a defender of national liberty in Europe.
Although despotic, our government of India is not bad; indeed, the hardest thing that can be said of it is that it is too good. We do our duty by the natives manfully, but they care little about that, and we are continually hurting their prejudices and offending them in small things, to which they attach more importance than they do to great. To conciliate the Hindoos, we should spend £10,000 a year in support of native literature to please the learned, and £10,000 on fireworks to delight the wealthy and the low-caste people. Instead of this, we worry them with municipal institutions and benevolent inventions that they cannot and will not understand. The attempt to introduce trial by jury into certain parts of India was laudable, but it has ended in one of those failures which discredit the government in the eyes of its own subordinates. If there is a European foreman of jury, the natives salaam to him, and ask: “What does the sahib say?” If not, they look across the court to the native barristers, who hold up fingers, each of which means 1OOrs., and thus bid against each other for the verdict, for, while natives as a rule are honest in their personal or individual dealings, yet in places of trust—railway clerkships, secretaryships of departments, and so on—they are almost invariably willing to take bribes.
Throughout India, such trials as are not before a jury are conducted with the aid of native assessors as members of the court. This works almost as badly as the jury does, the judge giving his decision without any reference to the opinion of the assessors. The story runs that the only use of assessors is, that in an appeal—where the judge and assessors had agreed—the advocate can say that the judge “has abdicated his functions, and yielded to the absurd opinion of a couple of ignorant and dishonest natives,”—or, if the judge had gone against his client in spite of the assessors being inclined the other way, that the judge “has decided in the teeth of all experienced and impartial native opinion, as declared by the voices of two honest and intelligent assessors.”
Our introduction of juries is not an isolated instance of our somewhat blind love for “progress.” If in the already-published portions of the civil code—for instance, the parts which relate to succession, testamentary and intestate—you read in the illustrations York for Delhi, and Pimlico for Sultanpore, there is not a word to show that the code is meant for India, or for an Oriental race at all. It is true that the testamentary portion of the code applies at present only to European residents in India; but the advisability of extending it to natives is under consideration, and this extension is only a matter of time. The result of over-great rapidity of legislation, and of unyielding adherence to English or Roman models in the Indian codes, must be that our laws will never have the slightest hold upon the people, and that, if we are swept from India, our laws will vanish with us. The Western character of our codes, and their want of elasticity and of adaptability to Eastern conditions, is one among the many causes of our unpopularity.
The old-school Hindoos fear that we aim at subverting all their dearest and most venerable institutions, and the free-thinkers of Calcutta and the educated natives hate us because, while we preach culture and progress, we give them no chance of any but a subordinate career. The discontent of the first-named class we can gradually allay, by showing them the groundlessness of their suspicions; but the shrewd Bengalee baboos are more difficult to deal with, and can be met only in one way—namely, by the employment of the natives in offices of high trust, under the security afforded by the infliction of the most degrading penalties on proof of the smallest corruption. One of the points in which the policy of Akbar surpassed our own was in the association of qualified Hindoos with his Mohammedan fellow-countrymen in high places in his government. The fact, moreover, that native governments are still preferred to British rule, is a strong argument in favor of the employment by us of natives; for, roughly speaking, their governmental system differs from ours only in the employment of native officers instead of English. There is not now existent a thoroughly native government; at some time or other, we have controlled in a greater or less degree the governments of all the native States. To study purely native rule, we should have to visit Caboul or Herat, and watch the Afghan princes putting out each other‘s eyes, while their people are engaged in never-ending wars, or in murdering strangers in the name of God.
Natives might more safely be employed to fill the higher than the lower offices. It is more easy to find honest and competent native governors or councilmen than honest and efficient native clerks and policemen. Moreover, natives have more temptations to be corrupt, and more facilities for being so with safety, in low positions than in high. A native policeman or telegraph official can take his bribe without fear of detection by his European chief; not so a native governor, with European subordinates about him.
The common Anglo-Indian objections to the employment of natives in our service are, when examined, found to apply only to the employment of incompetent natives. To say that the native lads of Bengal, educated in our Calcutta colleges, are half educated and grossly immoral, is to say that, under a proper system of selection of officers, they could never come to be employed. All that is necessary at the moment is that we should concede the principle by appointing, year by year, more natives to high posts, and that, by holding the civil service examinations in India as well as in England, and by establishing throughout India well-regulated schools, we should place the competent native youths upon an equal footing with the English.
That we shall ever come to be thoroughly popular in India is not to be expected. By the time the old ruling families have died out, or completely lost their power, the people whom we rescued from their oppression will have forgotten that the oppression ever existed, and as long as the old families last, they will hate us steadily. One of the documents published in the Gazette of India, while I was at Simla, was from the pen of Asudulla Muhamadi, one of the best-known Mohammedans of the Northwest Provinces. His grievances were the cessation of the practice of granting annuities to the “sheiks of noble families,” the conferring of the “high offices of Mufti, Sudr’-Ameen, and Tahsildar,” on persons not of “noble extraction,” “the education of the children of the higher and lower classes on the same footing, without distinction,” “the desire that women should be treated like men in every respect,” and “the formation of English schools for the education of girls of the lower order.” He ended his State paper by pointing out the ill effects of the practice of conferring on the poor “respectable berths, thereby enabling them to indulge in luxuries which their fathers never dreamt of, and to play the upstart;” and declared that to a time-honored system of class government there had succeeded “a state of things which I cannot find words to express.” It is not likely that our rule will ever have much hold on the class that Asudulla represents, for not only is our government in India a despotism, but its tendency is to become an imperialism, or despotism exercised over a democratic people, such as we see in France, and are commencing to see in Russia.
We are leveling all ranks in India; we are raising the humblest men, if they will pass certain examinations, to posts which we refuse to the most exalted of nobles unless they can pass higher. A clever son of a bheestie, or sweeper, if he will learn English, not only may, but must rise to be a railway baboo, or deputy-collector of customs; whereas for Hindoo rajahs or Mohammedan nobles of Delhi creation, there is no chance of anything but gradual decline of fortune. Even our Star of India is democratic in its working: we refuse it to men of the highest descent, to confer it on self-made viziers of native States, or others who were shrewd enough to take our side during the rebellion. All this is very modern, and full of “progress,” no doubt; but it is progress toward imperialism, or equality of conditions under paternal despotism.
Not only does the democratic character of our rule set the old families against us, but it leads also to the failure of our attempt to call around us a middle class, an educated thinking body of natives with something to lose, who, seeing that we are ruling India for her own good, would support us heart and soul, and form the best of bucklers for our dominion. As it is, the attempt has long been made in name, but, as a matter of fact, we have humbled the upper class, and failed to raise a middle class to take its place. We have crushed the prince without setting up the trader in his stead.