The Press. — London, England, 1856-12-06 00:00:00

1168 dependency. Mrs. Speir writes with imagina tive force : It might assist us in remembering these divisions if we imagined India sketched out as the rude outline of a human figure ; such a figure as that, for instance, of Orion, or Aldebaran, in the maps of the stars. The Himalaya mountains would be the head ; Sindh, Malwa, ice., would be a bare right arm, with projecting ornaments and wea pons ; the peninsula would give the bony legs, partially visible, as the Ghats of Southern India; the basin of the Ganges would represent smooth folds of drapery falling over the left arm; and lastly Bengal, with the Ganges, divided into many streams, would be the hand of our figure, with extended fingers. The countries of France, Austria, Prussia, with Germany, Spain, and Italy, all joined to gether, would not equal British India in ex tant. Its population is nearly half the entire population of Europe, or about equal to that of the great European empires, Russia, France, and Austria. We must go back to the days of the Roman empire to find a dependency at all equal to this in magnitude and natural re sources. In the next place, British India is peculiar in being regarded and governed as a con quered country, the people having no rights save such as the Indian Government is pleased to concede. It is generally characteristic of the system of government prevailing in the modern world that when powerful States gain acquisitions of territory, the property and privileges of the native inhabitants are respected. The government is chanced, but the social system is little altered. There is no wide-spread confiscation of property. Even the great Napoleon shrank from any new settlement of the countries he annexed to his empire. The exceptions to this rule are the cases of those countries inhabited by races so uncivilised as scarcely to recognise the institution of property. The red man of the American continent, and the black man of Australia, inevitably recede befor3 the ad vance of a civilisation incompatible with their instincts and habits. Their races are not subjugated—they die out. In India the native population subsists, though it subsists on the whole, we fear, in a degraded state., its peasants remain to till the soil and to recruit our armies ; and its merchants frequently rise to groat eminence in commercial pur suits. Evidently there is a wide distinc tion between the ingenious people of Ilindostan, capable of adapting themselves to the arts and usages of modern times, and the barbarous races who are dying out in other parts of the world. The peculiarity in the condition of India is, that the people are neither incorporated with the British empire and attain the rights of citizens, nor are they driven back by the encroachments of a supe rior race from the soil on which they have been accustomed to dwell. They remain a conquered people ;—a hundred and thirty millions of native Indians engaged in indus trial occupations, constituting the entire body of agriculturists, a main portion of the ct,m mercial class, and the rank and file of our Indian army, yet without the slightest voice in the government of their country, without a vestige of political or municipal privilege— emphatically a conquered people, at the absolute disposal and mercy of their British masters. It is this circumstance which makes India, from a governmental point of view, the pheno- menon that it is. Were it a dependency of Russia, with its despotic monarchy, we should still think it strange that Russia had the power, or found it to her interest, to maintain this absolute ascendancy. But the fact is much more strange when it is contrasted with the genius of British freedom, and the general principles of our colonial system. With the single exception of India, we concede that our colonies are entitled to the privileges of self-government—that, in fact, the country belongs to those who inhabit it " Crown lands" and " sovereign rights " are little more than terms when applied to Canada and Australia. Those countries have Legislatures which deal with all questions of revenue and all owner ship of unappropriated land for their own use and benetit. In India tkere is no Legislature; the people—neither native inhabitants nor British residents—have no voice in questions of revenue or land. The government is the most secret and most despotic that can be THE PRESS. imagined. Emigration to our other colonies is encouraged; emigration to British India is unknown. We state these circumstances not to con demn the governmental system which pre ' veils in India, but to show how peculiar and exceptional it is. Hence we may infer that it is impossible for the system to be lasting. We cannot for ever continue to treat India as ' a conquered country. It is doubtful whether, independent of all other considerations, we can afford to do so. The alarming and in creasing deficit in the revenue warns us of the peril attending the maintenance of immense public establishments—civil and military— to permanently retain India as a conquered country. The policy to be adopted in future is the most serious and urgent question of our day. If it be held that it would be imprudent to relax in any degree the stringency of our government in India, or to concede to the native people any part whatever in the management of affairs, it would become for that reason more our duty to see that the system of government established was the best that could be devised to promote their material welfare and favour their advance ment. That all government should be for the benefit of the governed is not less true in Asia than in Europe, in India than in England or in Canada. Granting that from the force of circumstances our rule in India must be despotic, the question remains how it can be made most beneficial, so as to attach the people to British connection, and render them anxious to defend and maintain it. The natives of India have little taste for self-government ; it is a boon they do not covet. Their exclusion would certainly excite no dis content while their character remains as it is. But they have a very keen desire for the ac quisition of property. This main element of a middle class subsists among them in full force, and it strikes us that it should be the object of our Government to give to this dis position all practicable development. Un happily, our policy has had a directly contrary effect. The formation of a middle class must be impracticable while the Government usurps the proprietorship of all land. The question has been more warmly dis cussed on the Continent than in England, whether on the whole British rule has or has not been beneficial to the wli ole body of the people. We fear that on a fair judgment of the question the " Noes " would have it. The lowest class of all may not be worse off than it WAS under the rule of its native lords and kings ; but the higher and middle classes, save within the magic circle of the presidencies where the principles of British government have been established, have rapidly and woefully degenerated. The strength of India as a self-sustaining country has wasted away; and foreign writers do not hesitate to say that this has been the direct object of our Indian system. To make our rule more secure, we have reduced the people to the rank of serfs. On the ancient life of the native people of India, Mrs. Speir's volume contains much im portant matter, though the cast of the book is more historical and antiquarian than social. She diligently examines all Indian histories, poems, and codes, and piecing out the know • ledge thus gained with inscriptions and coins, she reconstructs the ancient fabric of Indian life, showing of what materials it was com posed, and what its ideas, habitudes, laws, and belief. She supposes, on excellent authority, that municipal institutions are inseparable from Hindoo life. Each village formed a district, and, to some extent, independent community, presided over by its headman, an officer orig inally representing the King, or the lord of th soil, but afterwards identified with the people, and paid by fees receivable from them. The Hindoo village system, as de scribed by Mrs. Speir, has many points of resemblance to the municipal institutions pre vailing in Russia at the present day : The headman of the village still receives a certain allowance from the King or Government, but the greater part of his income is now derived from fees paid by the villagers ; this system is supposed by General Briggs to have accompanied Hindus into every settlement they have made, whether in India, or beyond its confines. There are three things which he considers inseparable, SATURDAY, viz., the Sanskrit language, serfdom, and municipal insti- tutions, and although this system is no longer found in Malwa, or in great part of the Madras Presidency, yet there is reason to believe that it did once exist throughout the country ; each village having its own registrar, watch. man, cartwright, washerman, tarber, goldsmith, and poet, who also served as schoolmaster. And in further evidence that the institution travelled with the language, we have the statement of Sir Stamford Rattles, that Bali, an island to the east of Java, possesses municipal institutions, the Sanskrit language, and the Brahmanical religion ; and, again, in Java there are village associations bearing the Indian name Nagri, which Mr. Crawford mentions as corporations governed by officers of their own election. This system is still characteristic of India, where " village communities " are noted "as the indestructible atoms from which empires are formed." " Village communities," says Sir Charles Metcalfe, " are little republics, having nearly everything they can want within themselves ; they seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down. Hindu, Paten, Mongol, Mahratta, Sikh, English, are all masters in turn, but the village community remains the same. In times of trouble they arm and fortify themselves. . . . collect their cattle within their walls ; and let the enemy pass unprovoked. If plunder and devastation be directed against themselves, and the force employed be irresistible, they flee to friendly v►llages, but when the storm has passed over, they return and resume their occupations." Thus, instead of finding India all divided between lords and slaves, we discover a rich material of middle class, which from the earliest ages has maintained an amount of independence most encouraging to those benevolent re• formers and hopefel governors, who from time to time spring up to bless and regenerate our perplexing Indian empire. The drawback to the encouraging view of Mrs. Speir is, that in the rural districts of India "this rich material of middle class " is gradually dying out under our rule. It is so far from being encouraged by our system of government that it is repressed in the most effectual manner. Orders of society can only be preserved in India, as in other countries, by an independent proprietary. Ownership of the soil is the first element of social order and agricultural prosperity. But the Indian Government has usurped all property in the soil, and hence the higher and middle classes sink together, leaving only the cultivators of the land, who are so watched, asseined, and mulcted, that instead of rising, as it might be supposed they would do, under a system of government which at least preserves order, they fall lower in the social scale, sinking under the pressure of excessive rents to a state of all but universal serfdom. This is the conclusion drawn by intelligent foreigners from a careful consideration of the past and present state of India. The able and laborious Belgian author, M. Brialmont, the first volume of whose history of the Duke of Wellington is before us, in noticing the wise and benevolent efforts of the Duke, when he commanded in India as Colonel Wellesley, to ameliorate the condition of the Indian people, after quoting a great number of autho rities to show that their social state is de clining, observes : We must conclude from these testimonies, and these indisputable facts, that the English administration has been fatal to the material welfare of the Indians. This administration has been little more favorable to their moral state. Yet it has achieved soma progress with which it must in justice be credited. Thus it has estab- lished a rigid police, which in the conquered or protected States has rapidly diminished the proportion of crimes; it has done away with innumerable acts of oppression on the part of the native Governments; it has put an end to in- ternal revolts, provoked in certain States by the turbulence of certain chiefs; it has conceded to the Indians liberty of the press and of worship, and the sacred right of trial by jury; it has suppressed many barbarous usages, though fewer than might have been expected from a nation so en lightened; its missionaries have successfully manifested in some countries the light of the Gospel; and, finally, good schools have been opened in the principal centres of popu lation. This last benefit, however, can never produce great results while castes are suffered to exist, while nothing is done for the material benefit of the people, and while the natives are s)stematically excluded from all important offices in the army, the administration, and the revenue. As the conclusion from what we have said, it appears that England has been more anxious to possess India than to civilise it; to render its population incapable of govern ing themselves, than to plant amongst them those branches of knowledge and of arts which ordinarily inspire those who acquire them with a desire to emancipate themselves. This policy may be able but assuredly it is little liberal. The conscience of Wellesley (Colonel I did not permit ►im to unction it. We gather from his correspondence that the welfare of the Indians gave him more concern than the interest of England. Probably he believed that it would be more easy to secure the fidelity of the natives by bene• fits. and that ultimately it would be more advantageous to favour the development of their wealth than to dry up its sources by endeavouring to profit by it too rapidly. He looked to the future, and not to the present ; and the future, in the system of Wellesley, was prosperity by civi-