“The Government have systematically resumed, of late years, all religious endowments; an extensive inquiry has been going on into all endowments, grants, and pensions; and in almost every one in which the continuance of religious endowments has been recommended by subordinate revenue authorities, backed by the Board of Revenue, the fiat of confiscation has been issued by the Government.”—(P. 17).
Again, there are many in England who would gladly reduce the landed possessions of great proprietors, like the Duke of Buccleuch and others, to more moderate dimensions; but they hardly venture to put forth speculations upon a measure which, in India, has been carried into positive and extensive execution.
The fourth chapter of Mr Kaye’s work contains a clear and admirable account of the recent settlement of the provinces of the Upper Ganges, in the course of which the reader will meet with the following passage:—
“There was a class of large landed proprietors, known as Talookdars, the territorial aristocracy of the country. The settlement officers seem to have treated these men as usurpers and monopolists, and to have sought every opportunity of reducing their tenures. It was not denied that such reduction was, on the whole, desirable, inasmuch as these large tenures interfered with the rights of the village proprietors. But the reduction was undertaken in too precipitate and arbitrary a manner; and the Court of Directors acknowledged that it had caused great practical embarrassment to Government, against whom numerous suits were instituted in the civil courts by the ousted talookdars, and many decided in their favour.”—(P. 265).
The redress afforded by these decisions of the civil courts has not, we fear, been sufficient to avert the ruin of such members of the “territorial aristocracy” as had the hardihood to withhold their adhesion to a scheme for their own extinction. The principle of that scheme was to grant, in the form of a per-centage on the revenue realised from the village communities of what had been his domain, a pension to the talookdar who was willing, for such a consideration, to give up all the other advantages of his hereditary position. Many of these men, or their immediate predecessors, had rendered us great service in the war by which we acquired the country; but they stood in the way of a favourite scheme, and before its irresistible advance they were compelled to retire. The provision made for their future wants may have been a liberal one; but how would the Duke of Buccleuch or the Marquess of Westminster like to be thus pensioned off?
The truth had better be frankly avowed; the object aimed at is, to get rid of the old territorial aristocracy altogether,—indeed, it is so stated by Mr Campbell in the following sentences:—
“It is, I think, a remarkable distinction between the manners of the natives and ours, and one which much affects our dealings with them, that there does not exist that difference of tone between the higher and lower classes—the distinction, in fact, of a gentleman. The lower classes are to the full as good and intelligent as with us; indeed, they are much more versed in the affairs of life, plead their causes better, make more intelligent witnesses, and have many virtues.
“But these good qualities are not in the same proportion in the higher classes; they cannot bear prosperity; it causes them to degenerate, especially if they are born to greatness. The only efficient men of rank (with, of course, a few exceptions) are those who have risen to greatness. The lowest of the people, if fate raise him to be an emperor, makes himself quite at home in his new situation, and shows an aptitude of manner and conduct unknown to Europeans similarly situated; but his son is altogether degenerate. Hence the impossibility of adapting to anything useful most of the higher classes found by us, and for all fresh requirements it is necessary to create a fresh class. From the acuteness and aptness to learn of the inferior classes, this can be done as is done in other countries.”—(Pp. 63, 64).
We fully subscribe to all that is here said in commendation of the lower classes of our Indian subjects, but we demur to the author’s very disparaging estimate of the capacity of the higher orders. Doubtless there are, or rather were, many dull men of rank on the banks of the Ganges; but are there none on those of the Thames?—no squires of cramped and confused notions, no fortunate inheritors of wealth content to wallow through life in utter disregard of the duties attaching to property, while fiercely jealous of its rights? It would be a sad day for our own landed aristocracy if Mr Campbell were to obtain sway in England, and try to rule that country upon the principles of which he approves in the East. But if he could, would our peasantry be permanently bettered by a change tending towards a destruction of all the gradations of society? If the reply to this query should be in the affirmative, we may contemplate with unalloyed satisfaction the progress of a system the description and defence of which is the main object of Mr Campbell’s work; but if we feel any hesitation as to the future effects of such a change in England, then, human nature being much the same in every clime, we ought to have some misgivings as to its eventual results in the East. We say eventual, because the immediate fruits of the measures described by Mr Campbell have, we are assured by him, and have heard from other quarters, been satisfactory and cheering. But is it probable that a whole nation should rest satisfied for ever in this state of flat and tame sufficiency? and can we wonder to find alongside of Mr Campbell’s picture of what ought to be the feelings towards the English of the present day on the banks of the Ganges, Mr F. H. Robinson’s gloomy account of what, in his opinion, those feelings really are? Having been compelled, as a member of the Board of Revenue, to make a communication to an old retired officer of Gardiner’s Irregular Horse, and to a Mussulman of rank, calculated to hurt the feelings of both, Mr Robinson thus describes what followed:—
“I shall never forget the looks of mortification, anger, and at first of incredulity, with which this announcement was received by both, nor the bitter irony with which the old Russuldar remarked, that no doubt the wisdom of the new-gentlemen (Sahiblogue, so they designate the English) had shown them the folly and ignorance of the gentlemen of the old time, on whom it had pleased God, nevertheless, to bestow the government of India.”—(P. 17).