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

Life in Ancient India. By Mrs. Speir.

London : Smith and Elder.
THE distinguished writer of the political
article in the last number of the Quarterly
Review mentioned " the great Indian ques-
"tion" as one of those subjects which de-
manded the earnest attention of our people
and Legislature. Why the Indian question is
" great," and why it pressingly calls for settle-
ment, might well receive more elaborate illus-
tration than we can hope to afford it here.
Some obvious considerations may, however, be
briefly set forth.
In the first place, the position of India is at
this day unparalleled, not only as regards the
dependencies of the British Crown, but as re-
gards the whole world. There is no State
holding subject to it a country at all resem-
bling in extent of territory, in natural wealth
and fertility, and in populousness, the magni-
ficent peninsula now included under the name
of British India. Of its physical character
Mrs. Speir has given a correct and picturesque
description in her highly intelligent volume.
To the west, British India is bounded by the
Indus,—the most westward of the five rivers of
the Punjaub marking the present limit to
which British conquest has extended. To the
north, the splendid range of the Himalayas,
whose wonders and beauties have yet been
but partially explored by European enterprise,
form a magnificent natural boundary. To the
east, the Brahmapatra river is taken by Mrs.
Speir as our frontier, though some Bengal dis-
tricts stretch beyond it. We have already pene-
trated to Pegu, and at no distant date perhaps
our boundary to the east may touch directly
the Chinese empire, being separated only by
the river Thaleain. To the south British India,
is a peninsula, jutting into the ocean, with
the noble island of Ceylon attached to

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 originally 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-

DECEMBER 6, 1856.

lisation; while the future, under the actual system, is
misery by repression.
The whole case is so fairly stated in this
extract, that we are persuaded our readers will
pardon its length. The question remains,
what is to be done with India? If we persist
in treating it as a conquered country, in re
garding it as a military colony, there is great
danger,
whatever public works may be under-
taken, that the people, whose material prospe-
rity must in the long run bo inseparable from
the material prosperity of the country, will
languish and decline under our rule. There
may be danger in the opposite system,—in
holding, that is, the government of India in
trust for the benefit of the people ; in consi-
dering that the country belongs substantially
to those who inhabit it ; and in endeavouring
by every means in our power to cultivate their
faculties, and to improve their physical and
social state. But where our duty is so clearly
traced out, no thought of eventualities should
prevent our fulfilling it The material and
moral well-being of one hundred and thirty
millions of people is too sacred a charge to be
sacrificed either to purely selfish interests or to
timid fears. That policy should be unhesita-
tingly pursued which promises most advantage
to the people. In India the Government is
all-powerful—all measures of amelioration
must proceed from it ; and it is for this coun-
try, with the fate of India in its hands, to
seriously consider what system of government
can best be administered there. The states.
man who shall take up this great question
with earnestness and reverence, devoting to
its solution all his faculties, and appealing to
the enlightened genius of this country to sup-
port him, would become the great man of his
age. The harvest to be reaped is abundant ;
the labourers are but few.

It is instructive, in following Mrs. Speir
through her history of the ancient life of India,
to mark the numerous passages indicative of
the good disposition of the people of India,
and of their capacity for the highest arts of
life. In their epic poems the highest and
most generous virtues are inculcated ; their
codes, though disfigured by most singular
distinctions as to caste, are most urgent
in commanding reward for the good, punish-
ment for the bad, and the observance of
strict rules of justice. Such industrial arts
as agriculture, banking, and various kinds
of manufactures, were held in honour
in the earliest periods of their history. Insu-
rance of goods, travelling either by land or
sea, was known long previous to the Christian
era. Thousands of years ago the natives of
India had discovered means by which the
colourable matter of the InOigo plant " might
" be extraeted, oxygenated, and precipitated
from all the other matters combined with it."
Their skill in the manufacture of iron and
steel was still more remarkable :
Dr. Royle expresses astcnishment that " a primitive
people could have overcome the difficulties of smelting
iron and of forging steel," and that the difficulties were
overcome at a very remote period we have evidence. . .
It has lately been discovered that the far-famed Damascus
blades were of Indian steel manufactured in the west of
India. . . The Hindu method of boiling iron and green
leaves and wood together in a closed crucible appears to
excel even the methods most approved at Glasgow and
Sheffield, for Mr. Heath sass, "that iron is converted into
cast steel by the natives of India in two hours and a half,
while at Sheffield it requires at least four hours to melt
blistered steel." . . . . From the countries on the
Indus also came some of the most beautiful specimens of
arms exhibited in the Crustal Palace in 1t351, where'' a
dagger with pearls let into the centre of its blades," " a
dagger containing another within it," and "a dagger open.
mg With tive blades," were all sent by the Rajah of
Pattiala. which is a Sikh principality within the province
of Delhi.

In another art, the granite rocks in the now
" silent quarries of Bijanugur still . show dis-
" tinctly the marks of the chisels that hewed
" out the huge blocks with which the grandest
"of old Indian cities was constructed." The
elaborate splendour of their architecture is
well known. In the science of astronomy
they were peculiarly skilful. " The lofty dial
and extraordinary mural instruments for as-
,. tronomical purposes near Delhi immortalise
the memory of the Raja Jeyor Jaya Sing, who
reigned from 1699 to 1743 " In metaphysics
Hindoo philosophers anticipated the specula-
tions of the most subtle German investigators.
In medicine the high attainment of Hindoo
Practitioners, was attested by the flourishing

THE PRESS.

schools in Calcutta and other places. " And,"
concludes Mrs. Speir :

That India has not lost her ancient skill in arts and
manufactures, we have had ample evidence in the exquisite
muslins, embroideries, shawls, and kincobs, the dyes and
scents, the magnificent carved furniture, the gold and
silver filagree, the trophies of jewelled arms, and other
attractions of the Indian department of our Great Exhibi-
tion in 1851, and that of Paris in 1855.

We have dwelt on these details, because
there is a dispositicn on the part of the
modern school of Indian politicians to depre-
ciate the capacity of the native character.
From this disposition Mrs. Speir is not quite
free. She thinks that the learned and gene-
rous Rammohun Roy and the sagacious and
open-minded Dwarkanath Tagore are no more
average specimens of Hindoos than Robert
Burns or Robert Bloomfield are of British
ploughmen. Granted. But because the
agricultural class does not every day produce
eminent poets, is it, therefore, unfit for the
ordinary and indispensable work which it has
to perform ? The Hindoo character is singu-
larly docile, and it is, besides, both ingenious
and patient. It wants force for the higher
enterprises of life, but it is peculiarly adapted
to succeed in trading and commercial opera-
tions, and in all industrial arts. It has, also,
when fair opportunity is afforded, a great
faculty of acquisition; and this desire of pro-
perty in every shape may be made, under a
generous system of government, a lever for
raising the social state of the people, and for
developing the resources and increasing the
wealth of the country.
. . _

The volume of Mrs. Speir is beautifully
printed and illustrated. She has been careful
to collect her materials for the ancient life
of India from the most authentic native
sources, and has produced a volume in which
research and reflection are happily blended
with—so far as the subject with allow—a
popular style of treatment.

Media'val Philosophy; or, a Treatise of Moral
and Metaphysical Philosophy from the Fifth
to the Fourteenth Century. By F. D. Maurice,
M.A. London : Griffin and Co.
WE cannot attempt within our present limits
more than a purely descriptive notice of Mr.
Maurice's new volume. A scientific examina-
tion of the doctrines there expounded would
be foreign to our office ; while to test the
accuracy of Mr. 'Maurice's statements would
involve an inquiry, not indeed out of the
critic's province, but wholly beyond the scope
of the journalist.
In the second volume of this series Mr.
Maurice had concluded his account of the
later Greek philosophers, and, in order to
make each department complete, had brought
down his inquiries some years later than the
commencement of the volume before us. He
now turns his attention to the Latin philoso-
phers, or Feh o olm en properly so called, and,
retracing his steps fur about a century, intro-
duces us first to the writings of Boethius.
Boethius was the founder of the mediaeval
scholasticism. Born of a distinguished Roman
family, and Minister to Theodorie the Goth,
he grafted on to the speculative character of
Greek philosophy the practical tone both of his
race and his profession. His " Quadrivium,"
which formed the basis of medieval educa-
tion, consisted of astronomy, geometry, arith-
metic, and music. He was also the great cham-
pion of what is commonly known as the scho-
lastic logic. He declared in favour of the most
decided form of Realism—that, namely, which
holds that universals (or, at least, as Mr.
Mansel qualifies it, genera and species) are
substances, and not mere notions ; awl he
also boldly maintained the exclusive utility
of deduction in the discovery of truth.
The prominent figure in Mr. Maurice's
second chapter is Johannes Scotus, or John
the Irishman ; but before making us more
particularly acquainted with that worthy, he
offers his readers some valuable observations
on the general aspect of the age. He contends
that the study of logic, in spite of its abuses,
was of inestimable service in the cause of
intellectual culture :

If he [the student of rhetoric] had not been reminded
by his studies that words themselves are subject to laws ;
it lugic and grammar had not become the principal and
most characteristic parts of his culture ; be would have

1169

been more liable than he was to abuse them as mere instru-
ments of his craft.

After a long criticism of the opinion advanced
by M. Guizot on the creed of Johannes, Mr.
Maurice proceeds to give his own exposition
of his tenets. In his works is to be found
the completest exhibition of Christian Pla-
tonism. His doctrine of " primordial causes "
is exactly that of Plato's Nisi, accommodated
to the revealed notion of God. But there is
another point in the teaching of Johannes
which wo doubt not has contributed largely
towards the favorable verdict passed on him
by Mr. Maurice. He denies the eternity of
punishment :

Wherefore ( says the Doctor), if evil and death and
misery is repugnant to the nature that has been so formed,
neither is constituted in Him who is the cause of all
things. I wonder on what principle you deliberate and
hesitate, thinking that evil and the death of eternal
torments can remain for ever in that humanity the whole
of which the Word of God took into Himself and re-
deemed.

In the third chapter, embracing the tenth
and eleventh centuries, Lanfranc and Anselm,
successively Primates of England, are chosen
as representative men. We are now approach•
ing a period in which the Church assumes a
more prominent position in connection with
philosophy ; and accordingly we find that
Lanfranc and Anselm were both monks. The
mind of the former was imbued with the
notion of law and obedience. Though au
Italian by birth, he thoroughly adopted the
Norman temper :

He was maintaining not only what seemed to him, but
what really was, the great secret of the power which the
Norman scholar, as well as the Norman warrior, was exer-
cising in that day. All his victories were owing to his
caring more for the commands of the superior than fur
any judgment of his own.

An amusing anecdote is told of Lanfranc'a
humility :

While he was reading aloud one day at the table, the
presiding monk, who was probably a Norman, and, like
Herlwin, knew more of swords than of the quantities of
words, corrected him for saying docere. The learned
Italian immediately shortened the middle syllable,
" knowing," his biographer says, " that he owed more
obedience to Christ than to Donatus ; that it was not a
capital crime to violate prosody, but that not to obey one
who commanded him in the name of God, was a serious
error."

As neither, however, of these two schoolmen
helped either to introduce any new doctrine, or
settle any controverted one, in the moral and
metaphysical philosophy of their day, we shall
hasten on to the twelfth century and the
memorable heresies of Abelard.

The two points in which Abelard was at
variance with the orthodoxy of the day were
in logic, the nature of universals ; in theology,
the nature of the Trinity. The doctrine in
vogue among the Realists of the twelfth cen-
tury was that the universal exists in every
individual—that is, that there is a certain
universal essence of humanity, in virtue of
which man is what he is, which exists in
every individual equally, who differ indeed in
the qualities which make one man Socrates
and another Plato, but in no other way.
Abelard's objection to this theory is, says Mr.
Maurice, " obvious and plausible," but he does
not give us his own opinion of its real value.
Why may not Socrates, says Abelard, in this case
be at Rome and at Athens at the same time ?
For, whatever the universal thing receives, it
receives in its whole quantity ; and, therefore,
when the universal man receives the form of
Socraticity, wherever man is Socrates must
be. This objection certainly is plausible, but
it seems to us to beg the question at issue.
Why are we to believe that whatsoever the
universal thing receives it receives in its
whole quantity? This is a point, at all events,
which Mr. Maurice should explain ; but he
does not. A subsequent modification of
realism, adopted by his antagonist, William of
Champeaux, was answered by Abelard with
equal ingenuity; but the above specimen will
probably satisfy our readers. His own
opinions, though certainly not identical with
the naked nominalism of later times, appear,
as far as we can judge from Mr. Maurice's ex-
position, to have very little in common with
the modern theory of conceptualism. But we
must take the opportunity of observing that
Mr. Maurice, never, perhaps, a very lucid
critb:, has in this volume added to the diffi-
culty of understanding him by writing too
exclusively from his own intellectual standing-

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