His work is truly one of which his country may be proud, for a more disinterested zeal in the cause of a conquered people was never exhibited by one of the dominant race, than is evinced in this noble address to the Parliament of England on behalf of the subject millions of India.
Many, however, as Mr Cameron’s qualifications are for the task which he undertakes, there is one of much importance not to be found among them. He never served in the interior; never was burdened with the charge of a district; never spent six hours a day, at the least, in the crowded Babel of a Cutcherry,[[45]] with the thermometer at 98° in the shade. His Indian day was very different from that of the magistrate collector of which we have inserted Mr Campbell’s lively description. It was passed in the stillness of his library, or in the well-aired and well-ordered halls of a college, among educated young natives, mostly Bengalees, who were about as true specimens of Indian men as the exotics in a London conservatory are of British plants.
Such a life is compatible with the acquirement of great Oriental lore, but not with the attainment of that ready knowledge of native character which is picked up by far inferior intellects in the rough daily school of Cutcherry drudgery.
This reflection has somewhat damped our pleasure in perusing Mr Cameron’s eloquent and high-toned address. We devoutly hope to see our misgivings proved to be groundless; but in the mean time we must give one or two of our reasons for doubting whether the day is at hand when the natives of England and India may meet on terms of perfect parity in every walk of life. In the first place, to judge by precedent, we doubt the strict applicability to the present question of that drawn from the practice of ancient Rome. Of the people subjugated by Rome, a vast proportion were of the same race as their victors, with no peculiarities, personal or complexional, to check the amalgamation resulting from popular intermarriage. It is in Egypt that the closest similarity to our situation in India is likely to be found, and, judging by the contemptuous tone of Juvenal’s allusion to the people of that country in his 15th Satire, we can hardly imagine that, when employed in any public capacity, the “imbelle et inutile vulgus” were placed exactly on the same footing as the Roman knights who constituted the “covenanted service” of those days in that particular province.
The geographical circumstances were also different. Rome grew like a tree—its root in the eternal city, its branches stretching forth in continuous lines to the furthest extremities of its vast domain.
Our Indian empire springs from a transplanted offshoot of the parent State. No one part of it has a firmer hold on the soil than another. It is all equally loose. Our dominion is, in fact, based upon our ships, and it is to our ships that both Englishmen and natives, in touching on the possibility of our eventual downfall, always speak of our retreating or being driven. From our ships we sprung, and to our ships we shall some day perhaps return. It is in vain, therefore, to draw, from the practice of a purely continental empire like that of Rome, rules for the government of an essentially maritime dominion such as we have established on the Ganges. Ours is a power without a precedent, and perhaps, therefore, without a prognostic. There is nothing like it in the past, and its future will probably be stamped with the same singularity as has characterised its whole existence.
We must try, therefore, to better the condition of our subjects by means such as our own experience teaches us to be best adapted to their nature. To open to them at once the civil and military services; to give to any number of them that absolute right to preferment implied in their enrolment in the ranks of a peculiar body, would not, we imagine, be to follow the guidance of experience. Presumption on the one side, and the pride of race on the other, might lead to serious jarrings between the English and the Indian members, who, though standing in the ranks of the same service, would still differ from each other like the keys of a piano-forte. It would, we think, be safer to commence, as we have already suggested, by selecting for preferment individuals from the mass of our native subjects. Situations in the judicial and revenue department may be found or created which natives can fill with great credit; but their general fitness for the office of magistrate remains to be proved. It is easy to imagine a case wherein to leave the powers wielded by a magistrate in the hands of any one open to the influences from which a fellow-countryman alone can be secure, would be, to say the least, most imprudent. Besides, there is a duty, perhaps but imperfectly performed at present, and to which, at least in the lower provinces, a native functionary would be quite incompetent, and that is, affording protection to the people against the violence of Englishmen settled in the interior as merchants, landholders, or Indigo-planters. We have now before us a letter written in excellent English by a native of Bengal, in which the following passage occurs:—“The fact is, that European traders have obtained, in many places in the interior of the Bengal Presidency, almost uncontrolled power—a power which they are seldom sufficiently scrupulous not to exert to the injury of those with whom they come in contact. It is not exaggeration to say, each Indigo-factory, together with its surrounding estate, is a little kingdom within itself, wherein avarice and tyranny hold unlimited sway. The police is too feeble to render effectual aid in suppressing the lawless oppression of the factor.”
Now, let us figure to ourselves one of Mr Cameron’s slender dusky élèves on the bench as magistrate, and (to take what ought to be the mildest specimen of a gentle Englishman) the leading member of the Peace party at the House of Commons at the bar in an Indigo-planter, taxed with oppressing the Hindoo, and we shall easily see that the law must have an almost supernatural inherent majesty, if, under such circumstances, it can be effectually enforced and impartially administered.
The regulation of the intercourse between our own countrymen not in the service of Government, and our native subjects, will rise in importance with the progress of those works in which European agency is essential to insure success. Railways, electric telegraphs, improved cotton-cultivation, steam, and all other complicated machinery, must, if overspreading the country as many anticipate, bring with them a vast increase to the European section of the community, whose influence will still be out of all proportion to its commercial strength.
To give to this little section full scope for the development of its industrial energies, and yet to restrain it from abusing its strength to the injury of the native population, is in fact the only real service ever likely to be rendered by the Law Commissions and Legislative Councils called into existence by the enactment of last session.