The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-11-13 00:00:00

THE PRINCE OF WALES IN INDIA.

The Times of Tuesday, published the following tele-
gram (Reuter's), announcing the arrival of the Prince
of Wales at Bombay :

BomBAY, Nov. 8, 640 P.M.

His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales landed here at
four o'clock this afternoon, accompanied by the Viceroy and
his suite, who had gone on board the Serapis, immediately
on her arrivaL On leaving the Serapi.i a procession was
formed astern of the Royal barge by the Admirals and Cap-
tains of the Queen's ships in their boats Salutes were fired
by the squadron and the shore batteries. All the ships in
harbour were dressed with flags and their yards manned,
forming a grand spectacle.
His Royal Highness, who wore the nnifotm of a Field.
Marshal, was received on landing by Sir Phillip Wodehonse,
Governor of Bombay ; Lord Napier of Magdala, Commander-
in-chief in India ; the lion. Sir Michael R. Westropp, Chief
Justice .1 Bombay ; and other high Civil and Military officials.
Upwards of 70 native Princes, Chiefs, and Sirdars, in glitter
log Oriental costume, were alma present. An address of
welcome was presented by the Municipality of Bombay, to
which the Prince briefly replied. A brilliant procession was
then formed, which proceeded at a slow pace towards the
Government House. Troops lined the road as far as the
native town, from which point the way was kept by the
police. The greeting given by the people to his Royal High-
ness was at once cordial and respectful The utmost enthu-
siasm was manifested along the whole line of route, a dense,
seething mass of people of all castes occupying every inch
of standing room from the greund to the housetops. it is
computed that nearly 200,t00 persons came from the Mofassil
alone.

As the Prince neared certain points, the excitement in-
creased, the mob gathering round the carriage and catching
the enthusiasm of the Europeans. Nevertheless, excellent
order prevailed. His Royal Highness looked very well, and
appeared highly gratified with the demonstrations in his
honour. The whole city is splendidly decorated, and there
is a series of eight triumphal arches along the route taken
by the procession.
His Royal Highness will hold a lev6s this evening at
Government House.
In celebration of the Prince's visit there will be a general
holiday until the 15th inst.
The Parsees met last Saturday at the splendid Fire
Temple belonging co the Ardaseer Hormnsjee Wadia family,
of Cowjee Castle, in order to offer prayers for the safe
arrival and departure from India of the Prince of Wales.

The Times also riublished the following telegram
from their Special Correspondent :

PARELL, Nov. 9, 12,5 a.m.
After dinner, the Prince received Saler Jung and other
Hyderabad Nobles.
The Viceroy gave the place of honour to the Prince in the
procession.

In connection with the foregoing, The Times of Tues-
day has the following leader :

The arrival of the Prince of Wales in India casts a vivid
light on the vastness of the British Empire, and the conse-
quent greatness of the responsibility lying on those who are
responsible for its welfare. We fear that the very facilities
of intercourse in these days tend to give thoughtless people
a parochial idea of the English Dominions. Yesterday we
published a long despatch which had been sent from Bombay
only at a quarter before four on the afternoon on the previous
day. Many persons may have read it without giving a thought
to the revolution which it signified in the connexion of India
with this country. It they were at all startled,it must have been
by the intimation that the message had come " vid Teheran." A
Persian stopping-place and the date of the despatch may,
perhaps, have suggested the vast change which has come
over our Eastern Errspire since it was separatt d from us by
a voyage round the Cape, and then by "the Overland Route."
We shall see how immensely important is this revolution if
we reflect that an Indian Mutiny could now be signalled to
London on the evening of the outbreak, and that troops
could leave for the Lust in a couple of days. India is now
ahnost as near to us as Saotland was within the memory of
men still living.

lint the popular imagination panes by the wonderful
closeness of the connection between Bombay and London to
fix on the landing of the Prince. The spectacle has been
one of the strangest which could be furnished by two distinct
forms of civilization. The Prince of Wales goes to the East
as the representative of the most complex, artificial,
delicate form of political society to be seen even in the
West. He stands in the place of a Sovereign who
reigns but does not govern. Looking merely at the
outward form of our Kingship, an Eastern might
think that we were not governed at all He might
ask where the motive power of the whole fabric lay. It
would be in vain to tell him about the respective functions
of Queen, Lords, and Commons ; for their several spheres of
action reveal but the mere husks of authority, and to find
how England is really governed we must look at English
society itself. If a Hindoo wishes to learn how a vast
Empire is ruled by a country no larger than a Native State,
he must study the subtlest political organisation in the
whole world. Centuries of settled rule, freedom from in-
vasion, national temperament, local institutions, a union of
self-will with obedience, the clashing of hereditary rule
against Democratic impulses, the mixture of old families and
new, a great literature, open speech, reverence for the past
and hope in the future, have all been needed to produce the
flexibility, the subtlety, the infinitely complex organisation
of a Western State. The East knows nothing of such a
society. Its forms of rule and life are simple and rigid.
There are separate classes cut off from each other by
impassable barriers; there are men born to obey, and
others to command; there is a rigid despotism whieh
the common maze would not dream of resisting;
there is absolute power, tempered by justice in British
dominions, and by caprice in others ; but every where
the forms of rule are simple and inflexible. Life
goes on In much the same way as it did centuries
ago. Our Criminal Code, our Law Courts, our Rail-
ways have done little more than scratch the surface of a
society which rests on thousands of years of tradition. Sheer
force has such a place in the social system of the East as it
had lost in ours before the Norman Conquest. Political duty,
law, equality have scarcely a definite meaning to multitudes
who welcome the futere King of a people to whom those
words denote the barriers between civilization and anarchy.
Rule in the East is as essentially personal as it is social in the
west. The individual will occupies as large a place in the
one sphere as public opinion or the utterance of the collec-
tive will does in the other. The Hindoos could scarcely
be made to understand the delicate political part which
belongs to an English nvereign or a Prince of Wales. The
Prince will be to them the symbol of the greatest Power in
the world; and the contrast between their conceptions and
the reality itself marks the difference between the East
and the IA est.

The pageant at Bombay has been splendid. Princes whose
names are scarcely known to the English people, but whose
families have a prouder lineage than the oldest of our aristo-
cracy, have come to welcome the Prince with a profusion of
pomp to which we can find a Western parallel only in
Mediaeval chivalry. Gorgeous dresses, masses of retainers,
the show and the glitter of what seems another age have
been arrayed in the streets of Bombay. All this pomp is the
more striking because Western civilization tends to be-
come more and more ashamed of merely personal parade.
We put our gaudy dresses on our servants. Our soldiers
seek to lay aside their trappings when they are off
duty. Even the Court finds it difficult to keep up a
moderate amount of formal splendour. We all tend to sink
into a shooting-coat style of negligence. But if we rush to
the East, as the Prince has done, we go back more than a
thousand years to a state of society in which splendour is a
necessary accompaniment of power. These marks of dis-
tinction may be trilling in themselves, but they are great
helps to the imagination, and better than anything else, per-
haps, do they enable the visitor t 3 the East to estimate the
enormous complexity of the elements which make up the
British Empire. Living mostly in London, visiting Continental
Courts, going from one great country house to another, receive
leg the loyal addresses of provincial towns, making speeche-
and going through the complex round of Royal duty, the
Prince has never seen mere taan a corner of the society over
which he is some day to rule. Be and all of us are apt to
think that England is everything. We seldom give a
thought to the fact that our forms of society, government,
and religion are merely provincial ; that England fills the
same place in a wend-wide Empire as Rome did eighteen
hundred years ago; that England is a heathen rather than
a Christian State; that our Mahomedan fellow-subjects
vastly outnumber the Christians of these islands • or
that our Government is the most despotic in the civilized
world. When we do think of these things our pro-
vincial ideas become tempered. Those who have lived in
the East see how vast is the responsibility we have
undertaken by becoming the rulers of India. It matters
not how we went there, for we must keep the power
we have got. It matters little whether our Indian Empire
Is a strength or a weakness to us, for in any case we must
continue to rule it. The people must be protected from the
rapacity, selfishness, sensuality, or cruelty of the native
rulers into whose hands they would fall the instant our backs
were turned. They must get the beat we can give them of
Western civilisation. In a dim way we all feel this to be a
duty, and, fortunately, the nation is liort in men whom the
love of power, the hatred of disorder, and the instinctive
wish to do their utmost make the best practical missionaries
ever sent to any nation.

In a country where Royalty can so powerfully set the
fashion, the Prince of Wales can do much to direct attention
to the affairs of our Indian Empire. His visit to the East
will do still more to give him an adequate idea of his own
immense responsibilities. Having seen the great cities, the
marks of old civilization, the thronging masses of people, he
will find that India has hitherto been a mere name to him,
and it will become a reality. Nothing could so powerfully
quicken the sense of responsibility as the sight of a vast coun-
trY, Peopled by 200,000,000 of souls lying absolutely at the
mercy of the power which is symbolised hy the British
Crown. Nothing could beget earnestness more than the re-
minder which the Prince will receive every hour of the lm-
measurable importance of the edicts framed ler a dumb.