|
EPILOGUE
In attempting to think out a problem like that of the future of India, one must inevitably take as a starting-point some more or less definite expectation, or, at any rate, desire, regarding the future of the world at large. The fundamental assumption on which my argument proceeds is that some rational and stable world-order is ultimately attainable. If that be denied—if it be asserted, for instance, that the more prolific nations and races will always tend to encroach upon the territory of the less prolific, and that the struggle for existence, in the shape of wars for territorial expansion, must go on to the end of time—then the attempt to apply reason to international problems becomes, if not absolutely futile, at any rate, comparatively uninteresting. Blind instinct' being, by hypothesis, the determining force in human affairs, and periods of civilization and rational progress being simply lucid intervals between recurrent crises of barbarism, why should we toil and struggle towards a foredoomed and self-defeating ideal ? And why, in particular, should we trouble our heads as to the future of India ? Let British rule maintain itself as long as it can, and then pass away in the welter of the next world-convulsion. Progress being illusory, or at best evanescent, why force it upon a country which, in its inmost heart, resents and despises it ?
This argument, pushed to its limits, would imply that constructive thought, in the political sphere, is an absurdity, since there is nothing ultimately good or ultimately bad in an incurably chaotic world. The wise man will confine his care to matters of immediate expediency, knowing that every seeming triumph of reason and order will, in the long run, have to be paid for—perhaps with usury.
But if, on the other hand, a rational world-order be not, in the nature of things, impossible, the future of India becomes a matter of absorbing interest, because it offers, so to speak, a test case. One of the great obstacles to a stable equilibrium among the peoples of the earth lies in the immense differences in the development of the different races. If, in a case so conspicuous as that of India, the obstacle can be overcome, and one-fifth of the human race can, in the course of a couple of centuries (say from A.D. 1800 to A.D. 2000) be emancipated from medievalism, and fitted to take an equal place among the peoples who are shaping the future, then the solution of the whole problem will at last be definitely in sight.
As to the general justification of our rule in India, up to the present point, we need have, I think, no qualms. It is rather surprising to find a philosophic historian like Lord Bryce—and, after him, Lord Morley—raising the question whether " the immediate result " of the influence of Europe upon Asia will be " to increase the sum of human happiness."* One is inclined to answer as Robert Bruce, in John Davidson's play, answers the question whether it might not have been better for Scotland if Rome had conquered her :
A subtle question, soldier. But profitless, requiring fate unwound.
The influence of Europe upon Asia is no mere accident which we can, as it were, think away, in order to speculate upon the course things would have taken if it had not happened. There is a sense in which (for instance) the result of the battle of Waterloo was an accident. A very
* Lord Bryce in The Roman and the British Empires, p. 73. Lord Morley in a. speech at Manchester, June, 1912. slight difference in the balance of motives governing the conduct of Grouchy would have led him to " march to the cannons," and would in all probability have turned the fortunes of the day. We can then, rationally (if not very profitably), conjecture what would have happened if Napoleon had won the battle—as Mr. G. M. Trevelyan has, in fact, done, with much ingenuity. But in order to imagine events so shaping themselves that Asia should not, in the nineteenth century, have undergone the influence of Europe, we have either to unmake and remake human nature, or else to go back into the prehistoric past, and, standing beside the conjectured cradle of mankind, speculate on what would have happened if the children had climbed out of the cradle on different sides, or in a different order. In other words, the relations between West and East proceed from causes so infinitely remote as to baffle analysis and present themselves to our imagination in the guise of fatality.
They were determined from the moment when the East adopted the static ideal of civilization, which happens to be in the long run false and impossible, and left the West to discover the dynamic ideal, which happens to be alone consonant with the inmost nature of things. From that moment it was inevitable that in the fullness of time— which practically means when the ocean had been transformed from a barrier into a highway—the East should be awakened, and to some extent dominated, by the West. Movement must always have the advantage over immobility, momentum over inertia. The ring-fence ideal broke down, not so much by reason of violence from without, as of disaffection from within. However intense may be the innate and cultivated conservatism of a people, it cannot resist the infiltration of knowledge ; and when it becomes known that other peoples exercise certain marvellous powers of locomotion, communication and production of commodities, whereby they attain great riches and power, the desire to share in these benefits becomes irresistible. In vain do the sages proclaim that they are not benefits at all, and strive to stop the breaches in the ring-fence. Human nature is too strong for them. When desirable things can be done and procured rapidly and economically, no section of mankind can, in the long run, be persuaded that it is better to go without them, or to do and procure them slowly and with infinite labour. Surely the one unmistakable lesson of the history of the past hundred years is that great disparities of material civilization cannot for ever co-exist on this tiny globe of ours. The railway, the telegraph and the automobile are penetrating, and are bound to penetrate, everywhere. Should they be superseded by still more efficient and economical devices, all the more rapidly will the whole world be permeated by the filaments of one great nervous system. The East was fated to fall under the influence of the West, because the East denied, while the West affirmed, the potency of Time as a factor in human affairs.
Therefore I am unmoved by the sarcasm of that able Japanese writer, Okakura Kakuzo, when he exclaims: " You talk of the Yellow Peril—but what about the White Disaster ? " It was because Asia misread the essential nature of things that she was fated to undergo the influence of Europe. To ask whether that influence makes for happiness seems to me not unlike inquiring whether a child would not be happier if it could remain a child for ever.
It is true that the ring-fence theory was never formally adopted in India, as it was in China and Japan. How could it be, in the most invaded country in the world, with the possible exception of Italy ? There were too many practicable gaps in the physical ring-fence. But India fell a victim, no less than her neighbours, to the spiritual disease, endemic in Asia, of which the ring-fence theory is the most familiar symptom. Even to-day, do we not find pundits solemnly discussing whether it is lawful for a Hindu to cross the kala pani, and deciding in the negative by a majority of forty-five to one ? A century ago, the prohibition was absolute and unquestioned—and what clearer evidence could one require of unfitness to take part in the inevitable development of the real world ? A race which thus walled itself in behind Himalayas of arrogant ignorance, and then split itself up into a thousand segments of no less arrogant mutual exclusiveness, was manifestly predestined to a period of tutelage and probation ere it could fall into step with the advancing host of civilization. Ignorance and arrogance are poor defences against the resistless trend of human affairs, nor can any race, by taking council with its gods and its rishis, elect to stand still in a moving world.
The task of opening passes through the mountains of ignorance fell to England, and not to France or another, because England, at the critical period, happened to command the sea. The bait which lured her on was commercial advantage, and for some time, before she realized her true mission, she pursued that advantage unscrupulously and even ruthlessly. But it was not long before her better instincts awoke, and she saw herself, not in the light of an irresponsible trafficker, but of a guardian and trustee. It is upon her more and more perfect realization of the duties involved in this relationship that the success of her great undertaking, in my judgment, depends.
In any picture that we can form of a stable world-order, can we possibly imagine three hundred million people abjuring for ever the exercise of their will on political matters of any importance, and resting content to leave their national fortunes and their individual welfare in the unrestricted charge, primarily, of a body of alien administrators, and ultimately of the elective assembly of an alien nation, nearly half the world away ? If these three hundred million people belonged to an essentially low and unimprovable stock, such a solution of their destiny might be thinkable, though scarcely desirable. But, as we have seen, this is by no means the case. They are a blending of various races, almost all of relatively high potentialities. There is, indeed, a large infusion of a breed neither higher nor lower than our own, since it is ultimately the same. Nor is this composite race, when once awakened from the sheer apathy of a meagre life on the soil, by any means inclined to humility and subservience. It is much more apt to overvalue than to underrate its grounds for racial and historical self-complacency. Who can possibly believe that such a people will passively submit to perpetual tutelage? Or that any other people, which has its own work to do and its own troubles to face in the world, can permanently afford to hold them in subjection by what service-club declaimers call " the sword " ?
No doubt one may be deceived in anticipating that the coming world-order will be in the main democratic. The apparent drift towards democracy may be a false start, and order may be ultimately imposed by a confederation, or a conspiracy, of military autocracies. But that would mean a rearrangement of world-forces in which, most assuredly, the British rule in India could not subsist in anything like its present form. If, on the other hand, democratic institutions survive and develop, it is wholly inconceivable that an educated and civilized India should never aspire to take its fate into its own hands, or, so aspiring, should be forcibly balked of its will by a far smaller nation at the other side of the planet. This autocracy of a democracy is a paradox and a marvel which may, if we are wise, work out beneficently for the one party and gloriously for the other. But work out it must, for good or for ill— it cannot endure for ever.
Meredith Townsend, a man of long (unofficial) Indian experience, and author of a clear-sighted though rather too pessimistic book, Asia and Europe, goes to the root of the matter when he writes :
The Indian Empire is a miracle, not in the rhetorician's sense, but in the theologian's sense. ... It is a miracle, as a floating island of granite -would be a miracle, or a bird of brass which flew and sang and lived on in mid-air. That is the fundamental fact which was more and more impressed on me every day I spent in India—a fact which people who have not been there do not realize, and which those who pass their lives there, forget. Lord Bryce, a very observant traveller, realized it to the full ; but, rather oddly, he writes as though the very wonder of the miracle were a source of strength to us. " The English," he says,
have impressed the imagination of the people by their resistless energy and their almost uniform success. . . . That over three hundred millions of men should be ruled by a few pale-faced strangers -from beyond the great sea . . . this seems too wonderful to be anything but the doing of some unseen and irresistible divinity. I heard at Lahore an anecdote which, slight as it is, illustrates the way in which the native thinks of these things. A tiger had escaped from the Zoological Gardens, and its keeper, hoping to lure it back, followed it. When all other inducements had failed, he lifted up his voice and solemnly adjured it in the name of the British Government, to which it belonged, to come back to its cage. The tiger obeyed.
Perhaps ; but how long will the tiger obey ? I do not doubt that Lord Bryce has rightly discerned one element in the complex feeling with which British rule is regarded by the mass of the people ; but it is necessarily a diminishing element. Familiarity, if it does not breed contempt, at any rate takes the edge off wonder. Our military successes are a mere legend to this generation ; our administrative successes are contested by Indian opinion, and are not, at best, of an awe-inspiring nature. It is hard to believe, in short, that our position can be permanently strengthened by its very marvellousness. Sir Alfred Lyall wrote in the eighties : " One thing is sure : the natives all discuss our rule still as a transitory state of existence, a huge structure that may vanish any day inexplicably as it appeared."
In the following passage, however, Lord Bryce puts his finger on one of the cardinal facts of the situation. " In the higher grades of the civil administration," he says, " there are only about twelve hundred persons ; and these twelve hundred control three hundred and fifteen millions, doing it with so little friction that they have ceased to be surprised at this extraordinary fact." That is exactly true. The British official goes to India young, before he has begun to think very seriously about things ; and by the time his mind has matured, he has become so habituated to the smooth working of the administrative machine that he regards it as a matter of course, and quite in the natural order of things. He is acutely conscious of imperfections in the mechanism, both from his own point of view and from that of the people entrusted to his charge ; but in the very existence of such a mechanism he sees nothing surprising. I do not say that this frame of mind is universal. On the contrary, one finds cases of a just appreciation of the marvel, and cases, too, of an exaggerated fear of it. But on the whole one may say that the typical Anglo-Indian (and still more, the typical memsahib) is serenely unconscious of the utter astoundingness of his and her position.
On the other hand, when we turn to the great men who built up the Indian Empire, we find that many of them fully realized that they were not laying bases for eternity. They saw, indeed, that the very success of their work must make the position of a foreign ruling caste ultimately untenable. Here is the passage—much better known, unfortunately, in India than England—in which Macaulay forecasts what seemed to him the most desirable development of the relation between the two countries :
The destinies of our Indian Empire are covered with thick darkness. ... It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system ; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge, they may in some future age demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own.
These words were spoken in 1833, before Macaulay went to India ; but there is not the slightest reason to suppose that experience led to any change in his views. A somewhat older contemporary of his, and an empire-builder in the sanest sense of the word, was Mountstuart Elphinstone, administrator of the Maharashtra and Governor of Bombay, where his ardour in the cause of education is commemorated in the Elphinstone College. No abler man has England sent to India ; and he spoke in the same sense as Macaulay, without Macaulay's note of hesitation. We find him writing to Mackintosh in 1819 :
I am afraid the belief that our Indian Empire will not be long-lived is reason and not prejudice. It is difficult to guess the death it may die. . . . The most desirable death for us to die of should be the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign nation to retain the government ; but this seems at an immeasurable distance. ... A time of separation must come ; and it is for our interest to have an early separation from a civilized people rather than a violent rupture with a barbarous nation.
This was not the utterance of a mood, but of a settled conviction ; for thirty-five years later we find him writing to his biographer, Sir T. E. Colebrooke :
The moral is that we must not dream of perpetual possession, but must apply ourselves to bring the natives into a state that will admit of their governing themselves in a manner that may be beneficial to our interest as well as their own and that of the rest of the world ; and to take the glory of the achievement, and the sense of having done our duty, for the chief reward of our exertions.
Very similar was the view of Sir Charles Metcalfe, who, in defending his policy of granting liberty to the press, wrote : " If my opponents' argument be that the spread of knowledge may eventually be fatal to our rule in India, I close with them on that point, and maintain that, whatever may be the consequences, it is our duty to communicate the benefits of knowledge. If India could be preserved as a part of the British Empire only by keeping its inhabitants in a state of ignorance, our domination would be a "curse to the country, and ought to cease." He went on, indeed, to argue that our rule was endangered by ignorance rather than by knowledge ; but he had at best no great confidence in the security of our position. " Our hold," he wrote in another place, " is so precarious that a very little mismanagement might accomplish our expulsion ; and the course of events may be of itself sufficient, without any mismanagement. . . . All our native establishments, military and civil, are the followers of fortune ; they serve us for their livelihood, and generally serve us well. From a sense of what is due to the hand that feeds them—which is one of the virtues that they most extol—they may often display fidelity under trying circumstances ; but in their inward feelings they partake more or less of the universal disaffection which prevails against us, not from bad government, but from natural and irresistible antipathy." This, to be sure, was written before the Mutiny, at a time when our military position was much weaker than it is now ; but it certainly cannot be said that we are more generally beloved than we were in Metcalfe's day.
Of Sir Henry Lawrence, " one who had known him well " wrote, " With all his love for the people and their interests, he felt that the rule of strangers was only tolerated because they could not help themselves." Lawrence himself is reported to have said : " We measure too much by English rules, and expect, contrary to all experience, that the energetic and aspiring among immense military masses should like our . . . arrogation to ourselves, even when we are notorious imbeciles, of all authority and all emolument." Though we have somewhat relaxed our exclusive grasp upon authority and emolument since Lawrence's day, on the other hand, the class of persons who have, at any rate, a plausible claim to share in these advantages has increased out of all proportion, and the resentment of exclusion has grown far more acute.
A year or two after the death of Henry Lawrence, we find a -much younger man, Alfred Lyall, expressing the same disquietudes. Writing to his family at Harbledown, he says :
I always find myself diverging into Indian politics, for I am interested heart and soul in the affairs of the country, and am always thinking of the probable fortunes of our Empire, and trying to conceive it possible to civilize and convert an enormous nation by the mechanical processes of the present times, by establishing schools and missionary societies. Also, having civilized them, and taught them the advantage of liberty and the use of European sciences, how are we to keep them under us, and to persuade them that it is for their good that we hold all the high offices of Government ? Well, it does not matter much to Harbledown.
Pity that it does not matter more to Harbledown—to the homes of England. It must matter much to them all some day whether England understands India or not.
Returning to the subject a little later, he writes :
The wildest as well as the shallowest notion of all seems to me that universally prevalent belief that education, civilization, and increased material prosperity will reconcile the people of India eventually to our rule. De Tocqueville's study of the Ancien Regime, and the causes of the Revolution . . . appears to me to demonstrate most logically that it was the increased prosperity and enlightenment of the French people which produced the. grand crash.*
Must we not hold it significant that men like Elphinstone, Lawrence and Lyall—men distinguished no less for their character and intelligence than for their sympathetic understanding of the Indian people—express freely their sense of the unnaturalness and probable impermanence of our power, while those who loudly postulate in the Englishman an indefeasible right to rule, and in the Indian an
* Sir Mortimer Durand's Life of Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, pp. 8o[and 95. innate craving to be ruled, are apt to be men whose intelligence we must take on trust, since they have given no other conspicuous proof of it ?
In point of character, Sir Herbert Edwardes ranks very high among the heroes of British India, He was one of the strongest men of a masterful generation ; and he was the bosom friend and confidant of John Nicholson, a man not to be suspected of taking or tolerating sentimental or pusillanimous views of any situation whatever. Hear, then, what Herbert Edwardes has to say :
If we would, but think of it a bit, is not our Indian Empire just the most abnormal and unnatural thing in all this topsy-turvy fallen world of ours ? And is it not, then, the most unreasonable thing to take it so easy as we do, and assume that it will go on for ever ? Surely it would be no great wonder if India, now so topsy-turvy, wey to go turvy-topsy some fine day, and right itself, as it were, in the creation. . . .
God would never have put upon two hundred millions of men the heavy trial of being subject to thirty millions of foreigners, merely to have their roads improved, their canals constructed upon more scientific principles, their letters carried by a penny post, their messages flashed by lightning, their erroneous notions of geography corrected ; nor even to have their internal quarrels stopped and peace restored, and life in many ways ameliorated. . . . This free and sympathizing country, which has now a heart for Italy, and shouts across these narrower seas " Italy for the Italians ! " should* lift that voice still higher and shout across the world " India for the Indians ! " In short, England, taught by both past and present, should set before her the noble policy of first fitting India for freedom and then setting her free.
It may take years, it may take a century, to fit India for self-government, but it is a thing worth doing and a thing that may be done. It is a distinct and intelligible policy for England to pursue—a way for both countries out of the embarrassments of their twisted destinies.*
* The omission, for brevity's sake, of a portion of this paragraph, has forced me here and in the following sentence, to substitute " should " for " would." The sense is unaffected.
* Our Indian Empire: Its Beginning and End, by Major-General Sir H. B. Edwardes, K.C.B. (1861). It is only fair to add that Edwardes believed in the conversion of India to Christianity. " Until she is leavened with Christianity," he wrote, " she will be unfit for freedom." And again : " If we pursue the ignis fatuus of secular education in a pagan land, destitute of other light, then we English will lose India without those Indians gaining any future."
The half-century which has elapsed since these words were written does not seem to me (though it does seem to others) to lend encouragement to the idea of a formal Christianization of India. But if we give a liberal interpretation to the phrase " leavened with Christianity," we may perhaps admit that even here Edwardes was not so far wrong. And, this question of method apart, do not sound sense and right feeling breathe from every syllable of the passage I have quoted ?
In calling the course he advocated "a distinct and intelligible policy," Edwardes went to the heart of the matter. He might justly have called it " the only intelligible policy ; " for the alternative policy of staking our all on the permanence of the raj postulates a rigidity of conditions unknown in human affairs. Everyone admits that India is changing rapidly before our eyes," and that measures to which the Government is committed must accelerate the process. Is the dogma that, change how it may, it can never so change as to be capable of managing its own affairs, a reasonable, an intelligible doctrine ?
There is, indeed, one intelligible argument in favour of the assumption of permanence, though, for obvious reasons, it is not often openly stated. " Of course," it may be said, " we do not deny the ultimate mutability of human affairs, or doubt that our Indian Empire is subject to the law of change. But it is for the good of India that we should hold on as long as possible ; and to that end we must loudly assert that we are here for ever and a day, since any admission to the contrary would fatally diminish our prestige." I do not say that this argument is quite without weight, or that inconveniences would not result from any sudden and sensational proclamation of the temporary nature of our rule. But, closely examined, the argument will be found to move in a circle. For the prestige which would be impaired is needed to support a permanent, autocratic rule, imposed without regard to the will or feelings of the people. If the nature of our rule can be gradually altered—or rather, not its nature, but its theory—so that it shall be recognized as a collaboration with all that is best in the Indian character towards the great end of creating a united, self-respecting India, then the prestige of the heaven-sent autocrat, the infallible, inevitable, immovable sahib, will no longer be essential to the efficiency of government. In other words, by insisting on the perpetuity of the raj, we create the conditions which compel us to rely upon prestige, which means, after all, a certain measure of illusion. I am a great believer—as it would seem Herbert Edwardes was too—in the ultimate wisdom of looking facts in the face. If both England and India can be induced to do so, the romance of their association may resolve itself into beneficent reality for themselves and for the world.
But it is necessary that both parties should adopt this salutary principle, and that India should realize how much she has to learn and to unlearn before she can reasonably claim an equal place among the civilized nations of the world. Rapid as her progress has been in some respects, the essential fact is that the great mass of her people are at this moment given over to beliefs, prejudices and habits a thousand years behind those of races who live efficiently in the real world. A country which has lain for twenty or thirty centuries under the maleficent spell of caste, fetishism, cow-and-Brahmin worship, and almost equally enervating metaphysics, cannot all of a sudden wake up, rub its eyes, and claim to be a civilized nation. There is now, as we have seen, every likelihood of a great and fairly rapid change in the mental condition of the masses; and until that change has had time to make itself felt, it would be madness for India to attempt to stand alone.
Another fact which must be looked in the face, is that the unification of India is not an accomplished reality, but a far-off ideal. British rule has done much to promote it, but it is still a vision of the educated few rather than an efficient factor in the general consciousness.* Mr. Edwyn Bevan, in his thoughtful book on Indian Nationalism, uses a telling and very just image, when he speaks of India as a patient who has suffered many fractures, and British rule as the plaster-of-Paris packing round the broken limbs. The premature removal of the casing would undo all the surgeon's work, and leave the patient a hopeless cripple.
A third fact is that, even if India threw off British rule, and deliberately made up her mind to relapse into eighteenth-century anarchy, she would certainly not be permitted to do so. The world would not stand by and see the chaos of Mexico repeated on a vaster scale. There is more than one Power that would ask for nothing better than a pretext for stepping into England's shoes, and" forcing peace and order upon India by methods probably far more drastic than those of the British Administration. When Rajah Dinkur Rao, the Gwalior Prime Minister, assured Sir Alfred Lyall that " the natives prefer a bad
* Sir Madhava Rao, formerly Minister of the Baroda state, said to Lord Roberts : " We have heard the cry of ' India for the Indians ' which some of your philanthropists have raised in England ; but you have only to go to the Zoological Gardens and open the doors of the cages, and you would very soon see what would be the result of putting that theory into practice. There would be a terrific fight among the animals, which would end in the tiger walking proudly over the dead bodies of the rest." " Whom do you consider to be the tiger ? " Lord Roberts inquired. " The Muhammadan from the North," was the reply. Forty-one Years in India, Vol. II., p. 388. This conversation dates from more than a quarter of a century ago ; but the condition to which it points is not one to be quickly remedied. government to our best patent institutions," Sir Alfred's comment was : " I know he is right; " and we hear the same story on every hand. But the alternative of reverting to the sort of bad government they are said to like, is not, in fact, open to the Indian people. They may easily fall under a worse government than ours, but it will have none of the imagined charms of the good old days of Maratha and Pindari, begar and chauth* For a brief interval, no doubt, chaos may be revived; but assuredly it will not be suffered to endure. India has once for all been drawn into the stream of the world-movement, and her ancient backwater is for ever closed to her.
Impatient spirits are fond of urging that political free-dam should precede social reform : and I certainly would not maintain that the one should be entirely postponed to the other. If a nation had to be thoroughly civilized before it was fit for self-government, the world would indeed be in a parlous state. What people can boast itself fully emancipated from degrading superstitions, and evil traditions, and survivals of ancient blindness and folly ? If India's feet were once firmly set upon the upward path, we might reasonably fall to discussing the point at which she might be left to her own devices without danger of relapse. But the truth is that the upward movement has barely begun, and only in certain limited classes. The great mass of the people are practically untouched by the spirit of progress ; they do not want it; they resent it; and so long as that frame of mind subsists, some outward stimulus is necessary to prevent a general slip-back.- The actual resentment of the rudiments of civilization is, I believe, dying away, at all events in certain districts. It is quite conceivable that, when once the decisive impulse is given, things may move with gathering momentum, and that fifty or sixty years may see a surprising change. But, in the meantime, to start India off on an independent career would be like sending
* Forced labour and blackmail. a great liner to sea with wrangling landsmen for officers and a crew of children.
There exists as yet (so far as I have been able to discover) no plausible scheme for national organization apart from British rule. The Gaekwar of Baroda, speaking to Mr. Pryce Collier, "hinted at a federation of states under a central government; " and this, no doubt, is the idea which naturally suggests itself. But no one has applied any constructive imagination to the task of drawing up detailed proposals for serious discussion. "When I have asked why this obvious preliminary to self-government was neglected, the answer has been that anyone who dared to put forward such proposals would be prosecuted, and perhaps deported. If this be so—if a calm and un-provocative survey of possibilities in the matter of national organization would be treated by the Government as seditious—there could not be a better example of the purblind policy against which my whole argument is directed. Government ought to place no obstacle in the way of any feeling-forward of the Indian mind towards a stable and ordered method of self-regulation. If the ideal to be aimed at were, in a general way, clear and accepted, the course of intellectual and social training-necessary for its realization would be immensely facilitated. It is because no ideal is proposed—no goal, however distant, offered to hope and endeavour—that national sentiment is so apt to wander off into visions of catastrophic revolution, without plan, without forecast, without any reasonable or probable expectation of the achievement of lasting good. Mr. E. B. Havell enlarges on the splendid results attained by Indian master-builders (as distinct from architects) who go to work, it would seem, without any definite plan. That may be possible in building palaces, but not in building states.* It would
* It may be said that the British constitution was not designed, but grew. Yes : but a modern state, which aspires to peaceful development, cannot wait for its constitution to grow. It must start with some definite scheme of national life, which does not exclude, of course, the probability of subsequent growth. be madness for India to throw off her present organization without any clear conception of that which was to take its place. Her architect-statesmen ought to devote earnest thought and care to designing her ultimate polity, and the Government ought to encourage them to do so. If she has no architect-statesmen capable of working out the problem, and producing a scheme or schemes which shall offer reasonable chances of success, the inference is that she is still more unripe for self-government than I, for my part, imagine her to be.*
It may be asked who is to be the judge as to when India is ripe for swaraj, and whether there is any likelihood that India and England will ever come to a peaceful agreement on that point. I reply that we need not cross this bridge before we come to it. Let me add that I do not think the difficulty at all a serious one. If India earnestly applies herself to the task of qualifying for recognition as a self-respecting, self-directing member of the Grand Committee of civilized nations, she will one day make foreign tutelage such a manifest superfluity that it will cease and determine almost by process of nature. One imagines that the ultimate discussion may be rather between the forward and the backward party in India itself, than between India as a whole and England. It is almost inconceivable, at any rate, that England should attempt to maintain by force of arms her autocracy over a country unanimously demanding independence, and giving evidence, by that very unanimity, of a highly-developed national self-consciousness. As soon as the Indian people are capable of forming a sane political judgment, that judgment will command respect. So long, on the contrary, as the withdrawal of outside control would hand over the patient, inarticulate masses to mere anarchy
* So, too, it were greatly to be desired that at least one or two Indian politicians should show a statesman-like realization of the larger issues of the .emigration question discussed in Chapter VII. I have not come across any very penetrating forecast of the economic future of India, though'in such a- work there could be no question of " sedition." and class-exploitation, we cannot honourably renounce the responsibihty which, wisely or unwisely, we have once for all assumed.
Indian patriotism should take particular note of the history of the Mutiny, and realize the causes of its failure. They fall, as I understand the matter, under three heads. In the first place, there was no national idea for the people to rally to ; and this, it may be said with some truth, is now changed ; a similar movement to-day would probably call forth a wider popular response. In the second place, there was no statesmanship or generalship behind the revolt; and who can say that, now or in the near future, a similar movement would bring to light a more adequate provision of these qualities ? " You give us no opportunity to develop them I " it may be said ; but, in the case of statesmanship, this is not true. Many able politicians have, in fact, been developed ; but is there any one of such conspicuous genius that he could reasonably hope to command universal respect, and grapple successfully with the giant problems, first of the war itself, and secondly of the reconstruction that would have to be faced after the overthrow of the British power ? I have a sincere admiration for some of the leaders of the National movement, but,' frankly, I do not see a Cromwell on the horizon ; and no lesser man could, under present circumstances, give to insurrection the slightest chance of a prosperous issue. The third reason for the failure of the Mutiny is intimately connected with the second, and may almost be said to be included in it. If there had been any brain, any insight or foresight, behind the movement, it would not have taken the form of a headlong relapse into barbarism. In Deussen's very instructive book, which I have already quoted more than once, there occurs the following curious passage :
The chief sights of Cawnpore consist of a Memorial Church, a disused well, surmounted by a beautiful statue of an Angel, and other monuments, all referring to the Mutiny, as the English term the rebellion of 1857. Had the rebels attained their end . . . they would have been held in honour by their nation, as we honor Schill, Scharnhorst, Blucher, and the other heroes of the Wars of he Wars of Independence. As they were overthrown, they are now termed mutineers and their memory decried.
Dr. Deussen omits to mention the reason why the well is " disused "—namely, that it contains the bodies of some six-score butchered women and children. Even if Nana Sahib, Azimoolah Khan and Tantia Topi had been ultimately victorious, it is doubtful whether Blucher, Schill and Scharnhorst would have welcomed them with open arms to the Elysium of Liberators.* And the infamies of Cawnpore were only the culmination of a campaign of massacre, which, in its very nature, was foredoomed to failure. Had the British been encountered by civilized, enlightened, organized patriotism, which offered them, if beaten in fair fight, an honourable retreat from the country, with their women and children unharmed, it is not at all improbable that they might have weakened in the unequal struggle. Faced with the alternative of victory or massacre, they set their teeth and chose victory. That is why to-day, over the battered ruins of the Residency at Lucknow, " the banner of England blows." And that is why no fair-minded Indian ought to blame us if we take all reasonable precautions against the recurrence of a frenzy which was, and would be again, far more calamitous to his country than to ours.
The moral of these reflections is that Indian self-government is bound to come, almost automatically, as soon as the country is intellectually, morally and socially prepared for it; whereas any attempt to upset the existing order, while the nation is imperfectly welded together and but slowly emerging from barbarism, would, even if it nominally succeeded, mean a reversion to anarchy which the world could not and would not permit. Should England get into
* This is one of the passages which would have been differently worded if I could, at the time of writing, have foreseen the events of the past three years. (1917) serious trouble elsewhere, India might doubtless achieve the expulsion of her depleted garrison and her " sun-dried bureaucrats " with their mountainous " files." But they would in all probability only make room for a more domineering garrison, and another breed of bureaucrats, perhaps congenitally yellow of hue.
I suggest, then, that patience and unwearied effort in the cause of enlightenment ought to be the watchword of sane Indian patriotism. It should in especial devote itself, not merely to the ventilation of grievances, but to constructive thinking-forward. Nothing could more effectually reinforce the demand for ultimate self-government than some unmistakable proofs of the power of reasoned political forecast, as distinct from the power to carry on a mere campaign of criticism and opposition, however able. But if we ask for patience, sanity and constructive thought on the part of our Indian friends, we must meet them with similar qualities on our own side. We must not take our stand on a dogma of perpetuity which is as unpractical as it is unphilosophical. We must recognize—I repeat the phrase for the twentieth time, for it puts the matter in a nutshell—that our rule is a means, not an end. It is not a good in itself, but an alternative to greater evils. Only on condition that it is recognized as such can it ever be tolerable to enlightened and self-respecting Indians—the class which we have ourselves done so much to enlarge, and which must inevitably go on growing. We can reasonably ask these Indians to co-operate with us in the enfranchisement of their countrymen—enfranchisement, in the first instance, from age-old spiritual and social bonds—but we cannot expect them to co-operate loyally in measures confessedly directed to perpetual enthralment.
I am no belittler of our work in India. In my heart I am perhaps irrationally proud of it. We have lavishly spent on India the best we had to spend in talent and in character. It has been a very real sacrifice, not only national but individual. For, though the Indian services may offer the lordliest life on earth' it is also one of the most laborious and most thankless. Anglo-Indian biography is, in the main, very tragic reading. In saying so I do not think merely of the thousands who have laid down their lives in and for India, but also of the two or three-score men, from Viceroys downwards, who might be called conspicuous successes. Many of them have sacrificed their health, almost all their peace of mind, to their splendid but almost superhuman responsibilities. The " land of regrets " is also, and above all, the land of disappointments, and of the patient endurance of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and, not infrequently, bitter and undeserved humiliation.
" If tears be the price of empery. Lord God ! we ha paid in full—"
and most of all in those unshed tears that, dropping inwardly, sear the greatest souls.
Without skulking behind a " perhaps " or an " almost," I make bold to call our rule in India the most heroic adventure in history. But every adventure must have an end ; and if this one could, by miracle, be eternalized, that would only mean that it had missed the highest success. An end must come ; and this book is inspired, however inadequately, by the desire and hope that it may be a glorious one. Or at least, if fate has otherwise decreed, and a tragic doom impends, let us endeavour that history may not have to find the tragische Schuld in our own unintelligence. |
