enduring effect upon the Roman Empire and continues to exert it upon the
British in imprinting upon their rule in India a permanently military
character. The Roman administration began with this character, and never
lost it, at least in the frontier provinces. The governors were
pro-consuls or propraetors, or other officials[5] entrusted with the
exercise of an authority in its origin military rather than civil. A
governor’s first duty was to command the troops stationed in the
province. The camps grew into towns, and that which had been a group of
_canabae_ or market stalls, a sort of bazaar for the service of the
camp, sometimes became a municipality. One of the most efficient means
of unifying the Empire was found in the bringing of soldiers born in one
part of it to be quartered for many years together in another. Military
distinction was open to every subject, and military distinction might
lead to the imperial throne. So the English in India are primarily
soldiers. True it is that they went to India three centuries ago as
traders, that it was out of a trading company that their power arose,
and that this trading company did not disappear till 1858. The
covenanted civil service, to which Clive for instance belonged, began as
a body of commercial clerks. Nothing sounds more pacific. But the men of
the sword very soon began to eclipse the men of the quill and account
book. Being in the majority, they do so still, although for forty years
there have been none but petty frontier wars. Society is not in India,
as it is in England, an ordinary civil society occupied with the works
and arts of peace, with an extremely small military element. It is
military society, military first and foremost, though with an infusion
of civilian officials, and in some towns with a small infusion of
lawyers and merchants, as well as a still smaller infusion of
missionaries. Military questions occupy every one’s thoughts and talk. A
great deal of administrative or diplomatic work is done, and often
extremely well done, by officers in civil employment. Many of the
railways are primarily strategic lines, as were the Roman roads. The
railway stations are often placed, for military reasons, at a distance
from the towns they serve: and the cantonments where the Europeans,
civilians as well as soldiers, reside, usually built some way off from
the native cities, have themselves, as happened in the Roman Empire,
grown into regular towns. The traveller from peaceful England feels
himself, except perhaps in Bombay, surrounded by an atmosphere of
gunpowder all the time he stays in India.
Before we pass from the military aspects of the comparison let it be
noted that both Empires have been favoured in their extension and their
maintenance by the frontiers which Nature had provided. The Romans, when
once they had conquered Numidia, Spain, and Gaul, had the ocean and
nothing but the ocean (save for the insignificant exception of barbarous
Mauretania) to the west and north-west of them, an awesome and
untravelled ocean, from whose unknown further shore no enemy could
appear. To the south they were defended by the equally impassable
barrier of a torrid and waterless desert, stretching from the Nile to
the Atlantic. It was only on the north and east that there were
frontiers to be defended; and these two sides remained the quarters of
danger, because no natural barrier, arresting the progress of armies or
constituting a defensible frontier, could be found without pushing all
the way to the Baltic in one direction or to the ranges of Southern
Kurdistan, perhaps even to the deserts of Eastern Persia in the other.
The north and the east ultimately destroyed Rome. The north sent in
those Teutonic tribes which occupied the western provinces and at last
Italy herself, and those Slavonic tribes which settled between the
Danube, the Aegean, and the Adriatic, and permeated the older population
of the Hellenic lands. Perhaps the Emperors would have done better for
the Empire (whatever might have been the ultimate loss to mankind) if,
instead of allowing themselves to be disheartened by the defeat of
Varus, they had pushed their conquests all the way to the Baltic and the
Vistula, and turned the peoples of North and Middle Germany into
provincial Romans. The undertaking would not have been beyond the
resources of the Empire in its vigorous prime, and would have been
remunerative, if not in money, at any rate in the way of providing a
supply of fighting-men for the army. So too the Emperors might possibly
have saved much suffering to their Romanized subjects in South Britain
had they followed up the expedition of Agricola and subdued the peoples
of Caledonia and Ierne, who afterwards became disagreeable as Picts and
Scots. The east was the home of the Parthians, of the Persians, so
formidable to the Byzantine Emperors in the days of Kobad and Chosroes
Anushirwan, and of the tribes which in the seventh and eighth centuries,
fired by the enthusiasm of a new faith and by the prospect of booty,
overthrew the Roman armies and turned Egypt, Syria, Africa, Spain, and
ultimately the greater part of Asia Minor into Muhamadan kingdoms. Had
Rome been menaced on the south and west as she was generally menaced on
the east and sometimes on the north, her Empire could hardly have lived
so long. Had she possessed a natural barrier on the east like that which
the Sahara provided on the south she might have found it easy to resist,
and not so very hard even to subjugate, the fighting races of the north.
Far more fortunate has been the position of the English in India. No
other of the great countries of the world is protected by such a
stupendous line of natural entrenchments as India possesses in the chain
of the Himalayas from Attock and Peshawur in the west to the point
where, in the far east, the Tsanpo emerges from Tibet to become in Upper
Assam the Brahmaputra. Not only is this mountain mass the loftiest and
most impassable to be found anywhere on our earth; it is backed by a
wide stretch of high and barren country, so thinly peopled as to be
incapable of constituting a menace to those who live in the plains south
of the Himalayas. And in point of fact the relations, commercial as well
as political, of India with Tibet, and with the Chinese who are
suzerains of Tibet, have been, at least in historical times, extremely
scanty. On the east, India is divided from the Indo-Chinese peoples,
Talains, Burmese and Shans, by a belt of almost impenetrable hill and
forest country: nor have these peoples ever been formidable neighbours.
It is only at its north-western angle, between Peshawur and Quetta (for
south of Quetta as far as the Arabian Sea there are deserts behind the
mountains and the Indus) that India is vulnerable. The rest of the
country is protected by a wide ocean. Accordingly the masters of India
have had only two sets of foes to fear; European maritime powers who may
arrive by sea after a voyage which, until our own time, was a voyage of
three or four months, and land powers who, coming from the side of
Turkistan or Persia, may find their way, as did Alexander the Great and
Nadir Shah, through difficult passes into the plains of the Punjab and
Sindh. This singular natural isolation of India, as it facilitated the
English conquest by preventing the native princes from forming alliances
with or obtaining help from powers beyond the mountains or the sea, so
has it also enabled the English to maintain their hold with an army
extraordinarily small in proportion to the population of the country.
The total strength of the Roman military establishment in the days of
Trajan, was for an area of some two and a half millions of square miles
and population of possibly one hundred millions, between 280,000 and
320,000 men. Probably four-fifths of this force was stationed on the
Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates. There were so few in most of the
inner provinces that, as some one said, the nations wondered where were
the troops that kept them in subjection.
The peace or ‘established’ strength of the British army in India is
nearly 230,000 men, of whom about 156,000 are natives and 74,000
Englishmen. To these there may be added the so-called ‘active reserve’
of natives who have served with the colours, about 17,000 men, and about
30,000 European volunteers. Besides these there are of course the troops
of the native princes, estimated at about 350,000 men, many of them,
however, far from effective. But as these troops, though a source of
strength while their masters are loyal, might under altered
circumstances be conceivably a source of danger, they can hardly be
reckoned as part of the total force disposable by the British
Government. Recently, however, about 20,000 of them have been organized
as special contingents of the British army, inspected and advised by
British officers, and fit to take their place with regiments of the
line.
It would obviously be impossible to defend such widely extended
dominions by a force of only 230,000 or 250,000 men, but for the
remoteness of all possibly dangerous assailants. The only formidable
land neighbour is Russia, the nearest point of whose territories in the
Pamirs is a good long way from the present British outposts, with a very
difficult country between. The next nearest is France on the Mekong
River, some 200 miles from British Burma, though a shorter distance from
Native States under British influence. As for sea powers, not only is
Europe a long way off, but the navy of Britain holds the sea. It was by
her command of the sea that Britain won India. Were she to cease to hold
it, her position there would be insecure indeed.
In another respect also the sharp severance of India from all the
surrounding countries may be deemed to have proved a benefit to the
English. It has relieved them largely if not altogether from the
temptation to go on perpetually extending their borders by annexing
contiguous territory. When they had reached the natural boundaries of
the Himalayas and the ranges of Afghanistan, they stopped. Beyond these
lie rugged and unprofitable highlands, and still more unprofitable
wildernesses. In two regions only was an advance possible: and in those
two regions they have yielded to temptation. They have crossed the
southern part of the Soliman mountains into Baluchistan in search for a
more ‘scientific’ frontier, halting for the present on the Amram range,
north-west of Quetta, where from the Khojak heights the eye, ranging
over a dark-brown arid plain, descries seventy miles away the rocks that
hang over Kandahar. They moved on from Arakhan and Tenasserim into Lower
Burma, whence in 1885 they conquered Upper Burma and proclaimed their
suzerainty over some of the Shan principalities lying further to the
east. But for the presence of France in these regions, which makes them
desire to keep Siam in existence as a so-called ‘Buffer State,’ manifest
destiny might probably lead them ultimately eastward across the Menam
and Mekong to Annam and Cochin China.
The Romans too sought for a scientific frontier, and hesitated often as
to the line they should select, sometimes pushing boldly eastward beyond
the Rhine and the Euphrates, sometimes receding to those rivers. Not
till the time of Hadrian did they create a regular system of frontier
defence, strengthened at many points by fortifications, among which the
forts that lie along the Roman Wall from the Tyne to the Solway are
perhaps the best preserved. So the English wavered for a time between
the line of the Indus and that of the Soliman range; so in the wild
mountain region beyond Kashmir they have, within the last few years,
alternately occupied and retired from the remote outpost of Chitral. It
has been their good fortune to have been obliged to fortify a
comparatively small number of points, and all of these are on the
north-west frontier.
There have been those who would urge them to occupy Afghanistan and
entrench themselves therein to resist a possible Russian invasion. But
for the present wiser counsels have prevailed. Afghanistan is a more
effective barrier in the hands of its own fierce tribes than it would be
as a part of British territory. A parallel may be drawn between the part
it has played of late years and that which Armenia played in the ancient
world from the days of Augustus to those of Heraclius. Both countries
had been the seats of short-lived Empires, Armenia in the days of
Tigranes, Afghanistan in those of Ahmed Shah. Both are wild and rugged
regions, the dwelling-places of warlike races. Christian Armenia was
hostile from religious sentiment to the enemies whom Rome had to fear,
the Persian Fire-worshippers. Musulman Afghanistan dreads the power of
Christian Russia. But the loyalty or friendship of the Armenian princes
was not always proof against the threats of the formidable Sassanids,
and the action of the Afghans is an element of uncertainty and anxiety
to the British rulers of India.
To make forces so small as those on which Rome relied and those which
now defend British India adequate for the work they have to do, good
means of communication are indispensable. It was one of the first tasks
of the Romans to establish such means. They were the great—indeed one
may say, the only—road builders of antiquity. They began this policy
before they had completed the conquest of Italy; and it was one of the
devices which assured their supremacy throughout the peninsula. They
followed it out in Gaul, Spain, Africa, Britain, and the East, doing
their work so thoroughly that in Britain some of the roads continued to
be the chief avenues of travel down till the eighteenth century. So the
English have been in India a great engineering people, constructing
lines of communication, first roads and afterwards railways, on a scale
of expenditure unknown to earlier ages. The potentates of elder days,
Hindu rajahs, and subsequently Pathans and Moguls, with other less
famous Musulman dynasties, have left their memorials in temples and
mosques, in palaces and tombs. The English are commemorating their sway
by railway works, by tunnels and cuttings, by embankments and bridges.
If India were to relapse into barbarism the bridges, being mostly of
iron, would after a while perish, and the embankments would in time be
swept away by torrential rains, but the rock-cuttings and the tunnels
would remain, as the indestructible paving-stones of the Roman roads,
and majestic bridges, like the Pont du Gard in Languedoc, remain to
witness to the skill and thoroughness with which a great race did its
work.
The opening up of India by railroads suggests not a few interesting
questions which, however, I can do no more than indicate here. Railroad
construction has imposed upon the Indian exchequer a strain all the
heavier because some lines, especially those on the north-west frontier,
having been undertaken from strategic rather than commercial motives,
will yield no revenue at all proportionate to their cost. It has been
suggested that although railroads were meant to benefit the peasantry,
they may possibly have increased the risk of famine, since they induce
the producer to export the grain which was formerly locally stored up in
good years to meet the scarcity of bad years. The comparative quickness
with which food can be carried by rail into a famine area does not—so it
is argued—compensate for the loss of these domestic reserves. Railways,
bringing the numerous races that inhabit India into a closer touch with
one another than was possible before, are breaking down, slowly but
surely, the demarcations of caste, and are tending towards an
assimilation of the jarring elements, racial and linguistic, as well as
religious, which have divided India into a number of distinct, and in
many cases hostile, groups. Centuries may elapse before this
assimilation can become a source of political danger to the rulers of
the country: yet we discern the beginnings of the process now,
especially in the more educated class. The Roman roads, being highways
of commerce as well as of war, contributed powerfully to draw together
the peoples whom Rome ruled into one imperial nationality. But this was
a process which, as we shall presently note, was for Rome an unmixed
gain, since it strengthened the cohesion of an Empire whose inhabitants
had every motive for loyalty to the imperial Government, if not always
to the particular sovereign. The best efforts of Britain may not succeed
in obtaining a similar attachment from her Indian subjects, and their
union into a body animated by one national sentiment might become an
element of danger against which she has never yet been required to take
precautions.
The excellence of the highways of communication provided by the wise
energy of the Romans and of the English has contributed not only to the
easier defence of the frontiers of both Empires, but also to the
maintenance of a wonderfully high standard of internal peace and order.
Let any one think of the general state of the ancient world before the
conquests of Rome, and let him then think of the condition not merely of
India after the death of the Emperor Aurungzeb, but of the chief
European countries as they stood in the seventeenth century, if he
wishes to appreciate what Rome did for her subjects, or what England has
done in India. In some parts of Europe private war still went on two
hundred and fifty years ago. Almost everywhere robber bands made
travelling dangerous and levied tribute upon the peasantry. Even in the
eighteenth century, and even within our own islands, Rob Roy raided the
farmers of Lennox, and landlords in Connaught fought pitched battles
with one another at the head of their retainers. Even a century ago the
coasts of the Mediterranean were ravaged by Barbary pirates, and
brigandage reigned unchecked through large districts of Italy. But in
the best days of the Roman Empire piracy was unknown; the peasantry were
exempt from all exactions except those of the tax-gatherer; and the
great roads were practically safe for travellers. Southern and western
Europe, taken as a whole, would seem to have enjoyed better order under
Hadrian and the Antonines than was enjoyed again until nearly our own
times. This was the more remarkable because the existence of slavery
must have let loose upon society, in the form of runaway slaves, a good
many dangerous characters. Moreover, there remained some mountainous
regions where the tribes had been left practically to themselves under
their own rude customs. These enclaves of barbarism within civilized
territory, such as was Albania, in the central mountain knot of which no
traces of Roman building have been found, and the Isaurian country in
Asia Minor, and possibly the Cantabrian land on the borders of
south-western Gaul and northern Spain, where the Basque tongue still
survives, do not appear to have seriously interfered with the peace and
well-being of the settled population which dwelt around them, probably
because the mountaineers knew that it was only by good behaviour that
they could obtain permission to enjoy the measure of independence that
had been left to them. The parts of provincial Africa which lay near the
desert were less orderly, because it was not easy to get behind the wild
tribes who had the Sahara at their back.
The internal peace of the Roman Empire was, however, less perfect than
that which has been established within the last sixty years in India.
Nothing surprises the visitor from Europe so much as the absolute
confidence with which he finds himself travelling unprotected across
this vast country, through mountains and jungles, among half savage
tribes whose languages he does not know, and that without seeing, save
at rare intervals, any sign of European administration. Nor is this
confined to British India. It is almost the same in Native States. Even
along the lofty forest and mountain frontier that separates the native
(protected) principality of Sikkim from Nepal—the only really
independent Indian State—an Englishman may journey unarmed and alone,
except for a couple of native attendants, for a week or more. When he
asks his friends at Darjiling, before he starts, whether he ought to
take a revolver with him, they smile at the question. There is not so
complete a security for native travellers, especially in native States,
for here and there bands of brigands called Dacoits infest the tracks,
and rob, sometimes the wayfarer, sometimes the peasant, escaping into
the recesses of the jungle when the police are after them. But dacoity,
though it occasionally breaks out afresh in a few districts, has become
much less frequent than formerly. The practice of Thuggi which seventy
years ago still caused many murders, has been extirpated by the
unceasing energy of British officers. Crimes of violence show a
percentage to the population which appears small when one considers how
many wild tribes remain. The native of course suffers from violence more
frequently than does the European, whose prestige of race, backed by the
belief that punishment will surely follow on any injury done to him,
keeps him safe in the wildest districts[6].
-----
Footnote 6:
An incident like the murder in 1889 of the British Resident at
Manipur, a small Protected State in the hill country between Assam and
Burma, is so rare and excites so much surprise and horror as to be the
best proof of the general tranquillity. In that case there had been
some provocation, though not on the part of the Resident himself, an
excellent man of conciliatory temper.
-----
I have referred to the enclaves within the area of the Roman Empire
where rude peoples were allowed to live after their own fashion so long
as they did not disturb the peace of their more civilized neighbours.
One finds the Indian parallel to these districts, not so much in the
Native States, for these are often as advanced in the arts of life, and,
in a very few instances, almost as well administered, as British
territory, but rather in the hill tribes, which in parts of central, of
north-western, and of southern India, have retained their savage or
semi-savage customs, under their own chiefs, within the provinces
directly subject to the Crown. These tribes, as did the Albanians and
Basques, cleave to their primitive languages, and cleave also to their
primitive forms of ghost-worship or nature-worship, though Hinduism is
beginning to lay upon them its tenacious grasp. Of one another’s lives
and property they are not very careful. But they are awed by the
European and leave him unmolested.