On the other hand the Indian races, many of them quite as intellectual as the European, have been far from standing still. Quite apart from such education as they have been receiving in Government schools and colleges, the knowledge of the facts of the Western World and its ways has been spread far and wide among them by their ever-increasing intercourse with European travellers, and the facilities they have themselves acquired of travel. If every Government school in India were closed to-morrow, and every native newspaper suppressed, I doubt if the spread of such information would be greatly checked, this class of facts being conveyed from mouth to mouth rather than by writing; and it is at any rate certain that, at least in the towns of India, Englishmen are appraised pretty generally at their real value, and their moral weaknesses and intellectual limitations are known to every one, even the poorest.
I confess I do not see how this unfortunate tendency of things is to be mended by any rules or regulations issued to the Anglo-Indian Civil Service. I am the more in despair about it, because I have noticed precisely the same evil growth, though in a less dangerous form, in Egypt. When I first knew Egypt, seven years before the British occupation, the best possible relations existed between Englishmen and native Egyptians. There was much familiar intercourse and respect on either side, and English travellers, rare in those days, were proud to be invited to the houses of rich Cairo Moslems, while among the poor in the villages they were always welcome. But the false position assumed by our people since the occupation of 1882, that of rulers and ruled, the rulers being aliens and affecting airs of race superiority over the natives, has destroyed all this. Pleasant social relations can only continue where those concerned meet on an equal human footing, and of all inequalities the inequality of race is the most unsocial. In India things have gone so far that I doubt if any measure, short of placing the administration of the country wholly into native hands, by abolishing the covenanted Civil Service as a privileged body and reducing the Europeans employed to the position of well paid servants not masters, would induce Englishmen to forgo their pretension of exclusiveness, and bring them down to the level of their merits, whatever these might be, as useful paid employés.
As to the concluding Chapter, that on “The Future of Self-Government,” I leave it without comment as it was written twenty-five years ago, though I should have liked to have drawn from it a moral and to have applied it to the state of things we see in India to-day. That, however, is forbidden me in deference to the present difficulties of government, and also as being alien to the historical character of the present volume. The suppression, nevertheless, of free thought and speech in India, by the new press laws, and the revival of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial, is a subject which I cannot let pass without a protest, lest I should seem to approve. Such methods of government are not only repugnant to me, but are, I am sure, as futile as they are reactionary. If persisted in, they can only mean that the Government relying on them has no serious intention of true progressive reform.
CHAPTER XII
THE AGRICULTURAL DANGER
I believe it to be an axiom in politics that all social convulsions have been preceded by a period of growing misery for the agricultural poor, combined with the growing intelligence of the urban populations. Certainly this was the case in Europe at the time of the Reformation, and again, following the lead of France, in the last century; and, most certainly and immediately under our own observation, it has been the case in Ireland and in Egypt at the present day. Where there is complete ignorance, misery may be accumulated almost without limit by a despotic power. Where the mass of the population is prosperous, no growth of knowledge need be feared. But it is at the point where education and starvation meet that the flame breaks forth. This is a truism. Yet there are few who recognize how absolutely true it is of India.
No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the Indian peasant is. Travelling by either of the great lines of railway which bisect the Continent, one need hardly leave one’s carriage to be aware of this. From Madras to Bombay, and from Bombay again to the Ganges valley, distances by rail of seven hundred and eight hundred miles, one passes not half a dozen towns, nor a single village which has a prosperous look. The fields, considering the general lightness of the soil, are not ill-cultivated; but there is much waste land; and in the scattered villages there is an entire absence of well-built houses, enclosed gardens, or large groves of fruit trees, the signs of individual wealth which may be found in nearly every other Oriental country. The houses are poorer than in Asia Minor or Syria, or even Egypt, and are uniform in their poverty. There are no residences of any wealthier class than the poorest, and the little congregations of mud huts are without redeeming feature in the shape of stone-built mansion or whitewashed dwelling at all superior to the rest. Such exceptions one finds in every province of the Ottoman Empire, except perhaps in Irak, and one finds them in Persia. But throughout the great central plateau of the Indian peninsula, they are wholly absent.
Nor is the aspect of poverty less startling if one looks closer. Entering a Deccan[14] village one is confronted with peasants nearly naked, and if one asks for the head man, one finds him no better clothed than the rest. The huts are bare of furniture; the copper pots are rare; the women are without ornaments. These are the common signs of indigence in the East; and here they are universal. Questioning the peasants, one ascertains not only that they do not eat meat, for this is often against their religious custom, but also that they eat rice itself only on holidays. Their ordinary food is millet mixed with salt and water, and flavoured with red peppers; and of this they partake only sufficient to support life. Of luxuries other than the red peppers they seem entirely destitute.