Rulers of India: The Earl of Mayo

by William Wilson Hunter

Lord Mayo endeavoured to remedy this state of things by two distinct sets of operations. He organised a Statistical Survey of India, and he created a Department of Agriculture and Commerce. The first census of all India was taken under his orders. The Statistical Survey has produced a printed account of each district, town, and village, carefully compiled upon local inquiry, and disclosing the whole economic and social facts in the life of the people. He designed the Department of Agriculture and Commerce to perform for India the double set of duties discharged by the Board of Trade and the new (1891) Agricultural Department in England. The Government is the great landlord of India. It has not only to adjust its enormous rental so as to render it as little burdensome as possible to the people, but it has also to assist the people, by means of irrigation works and cash advances, in developing the resources of their fields. At the same time, it has to administer a vast area of State forests.

Lord Mayo, in inaugurating an Agricultural Department, clearly laid down the limits within which the Department could profitably act. He realised the folly of imagining that we can teach the Indian husbandman his own trade by means of steam-ploughs and 'ammoniac manures.' 'I do not know,' he once wrote, 'what is precisely meant by "ammoniac manure." If it means guano, superphosphate, or any artificial product of that kind, we might as well ask the people of India to manure their ground with champagne.' In another of his Viceregal notes he puts the case thus: 'In connection with agriculture we must be careful of two things. First, we must not ostentatiously tell Native husbandmen to do things which they have been doing for centuries. Second, we must not tell them to do things which they can't do, and have no means of doing. In either case they will laugh at us, and they will learn to disregard really useful advice when it is given.'

Lord Mayo was deeply convinced that the permanent amelioration of the lot of the Indian people must rest with themselves. He looked forward to the time when municipal administration would largely aid the officials by means of local self-government. Nor did he shrink from the responsibilities which the creation of such institutions involved. 'We have lately inaugurated,' he said to his Legislative Council, 'a system of lending to Municipalities which we believe will contribute much to the health, wealth, and comfort of the inhabitants of towns.' He publicly declared the development of municipal government to be among the chief of the many great services which Sir Donald Macleod, as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had rendered to India.

'A man,' he said, 'who has succeeded in establishing municipal institutions, which have always been in every country in the world the basis of civil government, and the first germ of civilisation, is entitled to the highest praise. I believe by his wise rule and regulations he has induced numbers of the Natives to take an active part in the administration of their municipal affairs, and has by that means laid the foundation of a future which should be most beneficial.' In his own great measure of provincial finance and local government, which I have detailed in [Chapter VI], Lord Mayo had the same end in view.

'The operation of this Resolution,' he inserted with his own hand in the orders of Government, 'in its full meaning and integrity will afford opportunities for the development of self-government, for strengthening Municipal Institutions, and for the association of Natives and Europeans, to a greater extent than heretofore, in the administration of affairs.' He summed up his main purpose in the following memorable words:—'The object in view being the instruction of many peoples and races in a good system of administration.'

Space precludes me from entering upon the legislative work of Lord Mayo. That work was voluminous, and of a most searching character. But it was practically conducted by the two eminent jurists, Sir Henry Maine and Sir Fitzjames Stephen, who held in succession the office of Law Member of Council during Lord Mayo's Viceroyalty. It has, moreover, been narrated by Sir Fitzjames Stephen himself, in full detail, in my larger Life of Lord Mayo.

In the foregoing pages many will miss a familiar feature of the Earl of Mayo's Viceroyalty. In India, hospitality forms one of the public duties of the governing race—a duty which they discharge, some laboriously, all to the best of their ability. The splendid hospitalities of Lord Mayo to all ranks and all races, amounted to an additional source of strength to the British Rule. He regarded it a proud privilege that it fell to his lot to present, for the first time, a son of the English Sovereign to the people and Princes of India. His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh's progress touched chords in the oriental imagination which had lain mute since the overthrow of the Delhi throne, and called forth an outburst of loyalty such as had never before been awakened in the history of our rule. It was the seal of peace; an act of oblivion for the struggle which placed India under the Crown, and for the painful memories which that struggle left behind.

In his ceremonial as in his official duties, the Earl of Mayo had the ease of conscious strength. His noble presence, the splendour of his hospitality, and his magnificence of life, seemed in him only a natural complement of rare administrative power. The most charming of Indian novels,² in portraying an ideal head of Indian society, unconsciously delineates Lord Mayo. But indeed it would be almost impossible to draw a great Indian Viceroy in his social aspects without the sketch insensibly growing into his portrait. Alike in the Cabinet and the drawing-room there was the same calm kindness and completeness. Sir Fitzjames Stephen, not given to hero-worship, has said: 'I never met one to whom I felt disposed to give such heartfelt affection and honour.'

² Dustypore, by Sir Henry Cunningham.