The close of the long narrative of our efforts since 1773 to effect the single object of harmonizing our relations with Tibet having now been reached, it may be useful to draw here some practical conclusions from our past experience which may be a help for future action. And first I would make some observations on the agency through which our intentions have been carried into effect.
On several occasions in the course of this narrative I have referred to the relations of local officers with their Provincial Governments, of these Local Governments with the Supreme Government in India, and of the Indian Government with the Imperial Government in England. Since the days of Warren Hastings there has been a marked tendency towards centralization. More and more control has been exercised by London over Simla, by Simla over the Provincial Governments, by them, again, over their local officials. This tendency has been accentuated in the last few years. It has never been more pronounced than at the present time. And if the conduct of Tibetan affairs since 1873 may be taken as an example—as I think it may—there is not much evidence that it is producing satisfactory results.
It has been said, indeed, that if ever we lose India it will be in London. I am not of those who think we ever shall lose India, for I have much too great a faith in the common sense and spirit of my countrymen. Nor do I say that we are worse than other peoples in “trusting the man on the spot.” I think we are very much better. It requires a really big people to give their representatives rope; and a big people we are, and in the main the British nation has supported its Viceroys, Governors and their Agents better than any other nation have supported theirs, or we should not be in India now.
But of late the discretion and responsibility of the Government of India have been most seriously diminished. Secretaries of State, partly of their own initiative, and partly because active bands of faddists exert a disproportionately great influence upon them, while the more sensible members of the House of Commons, on account of their silence, exercise a disproportionately small influence, have interfered more and more in even the details of Indian administration. The system is no longer one of selecting the best available men, and then supporting them, on the assumption that in the unusual conditions under which we govern India, they will rule it better than anyone can from England. The system is now becoming one of directing the Government from England on lines which an ignorant British electorate is most likely to approve. The result is a general weakening all down the line. No one feels responsibility. And the British elector, who has been held up to the Englishman in India as the man who ultimately controls his actions, and who should, therefore, have the responsibility, simply shrugs his shoulders and asks what India has to do with him.
And while British administrators in India thus have less and less confidence placed in them, they on their part have little cause to be placing increasing confidence in their controllers and rulers. Those who control Indian affairs from London have, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, never been in India. They are as a rule personally unacquainted with Indian conditions. And the Cabinet is not composed of men with a wide and long experience of Imperial affairs; of Indian and Colonial, as well as English, questions; and of European and Asiatic diplomacy. It may occasionally include an ex-Viceroy of India, but it never includes a Colonial statesman, or an ex-Colonial Governor, or an ex-Ambassador, much less an Anglo-Indian administrator. It is almost exclusively composed of men with purely English Parliamentary experience, and a Minister is put in control of India who has not even seen it from the window of a railway-carriage, or probably spoken to a single Indian or Anglo-Indian in his life. Even when there does happen to be available a politician who has visited India and specially studied it, who, being a peer, has naturally some sympathy with the aristocratic inclination of Indian methods of rule, and who, being a Liberal, might be expected to infuse into any too aristocratic methods a sufficiency of the English democratic spirit, he is put (like Lord Crewe) to control Colonial affairs, while another politician who is noted for his specially democratic inclinations, and whose knowledge of India is purely literary, is put to control India. Such methods may in practice produce very fair results, just as the House of Lords does, on the whole, work remarkably well. But better methods would produce better results. By the present system the confidence of administrators can never be secured, and for that reason alone it stands in need of revision. The composition and action of the House of Lords are now subject to criticism, because peers, not being elected, are supposed to be out of touch with the feeling of the people. But, after all, the peers do live in Great Britain, they do know the country and the people and the conditions to a very great extent; and if, knowing all this, they do not yet possess the confidence of the people, how much less can it be expected that Englishmen in India could have any real confidence in the present method of governing India from England? If the composition and methods of the House of Lords need revision, how much more do the composition and methods of the Imperial Cabinet need reform?
Again, agents in India can hardly help feeling that under the existing system less attention is paid to their matured views than to the opinions of inexperienced British electors. Not only is it that the latter are near, while the former are distant, but also that the latter can turn the London controllers of Indian affairs out of office, while the former have to run the risk of being turned out themselves. It stands to reason that the Indian Secretary must be looking more to the will and wishes of the electors who put him where he is, and who may remove him, than to the advice of the agents in India whom he controls, and that he will be more influenced by the English agitator than by the Anglo-Indian subordinate. Indian administrators may say that a particular course is necessitated by local conditions. The Secretary of State will say that the man in the street in England will not understand or give his approval, and the Indian administrator will go by the board without appeal. An English Member of Parliament, holding strong views on an Indian question contrary to those held by the Secretary of State, may, by expressing them with sufficient force, help to remove a Secretary of State for India from office, or at least make him abandon or modify his policy. An Anglo-Indian administrator, if he holds views in opposition to those of the Secretary of State, will not damage the latter, but he may ruin his own career, as Sir Bampfylde Fuller ruined his, though events have shown his views to have been right. Under such conditions, Englishmen in India cannot be expected to have confidence in the present plan of ruling India directly from England.
One very natural result of this system is a resort to half-measures—deporting seditious agitators, and letting them out again a few months afterwards; allowing an agent in Tibet, but not at the capital, only halfway to it, where he runs every bit as much risk and has one-tenth part of the practical effect.
Secretaries of State lecture the Indian Government about the “wider view,” the “larger Imperial interests,” and so on; but administrators in India have a suspicion that, however broad the views of a Secretary of State may be, they are probably not much longer than the distance which separates him from the next General Election. In any case, whether or no he is looking—as indeed he ought, under the theory of our Constitution, to be looking—to the next General Election, he cannot be expected to have the same length of view as the Indian Government; for he is, after all, a bird of passage, in the India Office for a few years and then not heard of there again. And as to the larger Imperial interests, most British administrators are aware of them, for they have been about the world more than British politicians. They are well enough aware that Indian considerations must be weighed in the balance with other Imperial considerations, and that in the last resort it is the British statesman who must decide. But what they doubt is whether the full weight of the Indian considerations is ever put into the Imperial scale. Since 1873 every sort of consideration has been given more weight than the Indian in these Tibetan affairs, and the consequence is that they still drag on in as unsatisfactory a state now as they were thirty-seven years ago.
These are some defects of the present system, but there is little use in criticizing if no remedy is suggested for the supposed evil. The main remedy I would, with all deference, suggest is that the Parliamentary control, which must always exist, should be exercised, less by means of meddlesome and mischievous questions, and more by means of full debates, in which, on Indian affairs, both Houses always show great sense and dignity and restraint. Such debates, critical though they may be of the work of British administrators, assist, encourage, and educate rather than hamper them, and do not tend to impair that responsibility which should be theirs if India is to be well governed. They put faddists in their proper place, and let rounded common sense and wide experience in large affairs have their due influence. The British public probably do not expect any more than this of their Parliamentary representatives. In all likelihood they would be quite willing to allow a greater freedom to their representatives in India, and have no desire for their Parliamentary representatives, by incessant bombardment on trifling points, to be putting such pressure on the Secretary of State as to encourage any natural inclination he may already have to increased interference in the details of Indian administration.