bond of union and a dividing line of severance far stronger and deeper
than it does in Western Europe. It largely replaces that national
feeling which is absent in India and among the Eastern peoples (except
the Chinese and Japanese) generally. Among Hindus and Musulmans
religious practices are inwoven with a man’s whole life. To the Hindu
more especially caste is everything. It creates a sort of nationality
within a nationality, dividing the man of one caste from the man of
another, as well as from the man who stands outside Hinduism altogether.
Among Muslims there is indeed no regular caste (though evident traces of
it remain among the Muhamadans of India); but the haughty exclusiveness
of Islam keeps its votaries quite apart from the professors of other
faiths. The European in India, when he converses with either a Hindu or
a Musulman, feels strongly how far away from them he stands. There is
always a sense of constraint, because both parties know that a whole
range of subjects lies outside discussion, and must not be even
approached. It is very different when one talks to a native Christian of
the upper ranks. There is then no great need for reserve save, of
course, that the racial susceptibilities of the native gentleman who
does not belong to the ruling class must be respected. Community of
religion in carrying the educated native Christian far away from the
native Hindu or Muslim, brings him comparatively near to the European.
Because he is a Christian he generally feels himself more in sympathy
with his European rulers than he does with his fellow subjects of the
same race and colour as himself.
Here I touch a matter of the utmost interest when one thinks of the more
remote future of India. Political consequences greater than now appear
may depend upon the spread of Christianity there, a spread whose
progress, though at present scarcely perceptible in the upper classes,
may possibly become much more rapid than it has been during the last
century. I do not say that Hinduism or Islam is a cause of hostility to
British rule. Neither do I suggest that a Christian native population
would become fused with the European or Eurasian population. But if the
number of Christians, especially in the middle and upper ranks of Indian
society, were to increase, the difficulty of ascertaining native
opinion, now so much felt by Indian administrators, would be perceptibly
lessened, and the social separation of natives and Europeans might
become less acute, to the great benefit of both sections of the
population.
When we turn back to the Roman Empire how striking is the absence of any
lines of religious demarcation! One must not speak of toleration as the
note of its policy, because there was nothing to tolerate. All religions
were equally true, or equally useful, each for its own country or
nation. The satirist of an age which had already lost belief in the
Olympian deities might scoff at the beast-gods of Egypt and the
fanaticism which their worship evoked. But nobody thought of converting
the devotees of crocodiles or cats. A Briton brought up by the Druids,
or a Frisian who had worshipped Woden in his youth, found, if he was
sent to command a garrison in Syria, no difficulty in attending a
sacrifice to the Syrian Sun-god, or in marrying the daughter of the
Sun-god’s priest. Possibly the first injunctions to have regard to
religion in choosing a consort that were ever issued in the ancient
world were such as that given by St. Paul when he said, ‘Be not
unequally yoked together with unbelievers.’ Christianity had a reason
for this precept which the other religions had not, because to it all
the other religions were false and pernicious, drawing men away from the
only true God. We may accordingly say that, old-established and strong
as some of the religions were which the Romans found when they began to
conquer the Mediterranean countries, religion did not constitute an
obstacle to the fusion of the peoples of those countries into one Roman
nationality.
When the Monotheistic religions came upon the scene, things began to
change. Almost the only rebellions against Rome which were rather
religious than political, were those of the Jews. When in the fourth,
fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, sharp theological controversies
began to divide Christians, especially in the East, dangers appeared
such as had never arisen from religious causes in the days of
heathenism. Schisms, like that of the Donatists, and heresies, began to
trouble the field of politics. The Arian Goths and Vandals remained
distinct from the orthodox provincials whom they conquered. In Egypt, a
country always prone to fanaticism, the Monophysite antagonism to the
orthodoxy of the Eastern Emperors was so bitter that the native
population showed signs of disaffection as early as the time of
Justinian, and they offered, a century later, scarcely any resistance to
those Musulman invaders from Arabia whom they disliked no more than they
did their own sovereign at Constantinople.
A fourth agency working for fusion which the Roman Empire possessed, and
which the English in India want, is to be found in language and
literature. The conquests of Rome had been preceded by the spread of the
Greek tongue and of Greek culture over the coasts of the Eastern
Mediterranean. Even in the interior of Asia Minor and Syria, though the
native languages continued to be spoken in the cities as late as the
time of Tiberius[27], and probably held their ground in country
districts down till the Arab conquest, Greek was understood by the
richer people, and was a sort of _lingua franca_ for commerce from
Sicily to the Euphrates[28]. Greek literature was the basis of
education, and formed the minds of the cultivated class. It was indeed
familiar to that class even in the western half of the Empire, through
which, by the time of the Antonines, Latin had begun to be generally
spoken, except in remote regions such as the Basque country and the
banks of the Vaal and North-Western Gaul. As the process of unification
usually works downwards from the wealthier and better educated to the
masses, it was of the utmost consequence that the upper class should
have, in these two great languages, a factor constantly operative in the
assimilation of the ideas of peoples originally distinct, in the
diffusion of knowledge, and in the creation of a common type of
civilization. Just as the use of Latin and of the Vulgate maintained a
sort of unity among Christian nations and races even in the darkest and
most turbulent centuries of the Middle Ages, so the use of Latin and
Greek throughout the whole Roman Empire powerfully tended to draw its
parts together. Nor was it without importance that all the subjects of
the Empire had the same models of poetic and prose style in the
classical writers of Greece and in the Latin writers of the pre-Augustan
and Augustan age. Virgil in particular became the national poet of the
Empire, in whom imperial patriotism found its highest expression.
-----
Footnote 27:
As in Lycaonia; cf. Acts xiv.
Footnote 28:
There is a curious story that when the head of Crassus was brought to
the Parthian king a passage from the _Bacchae_ of Euripides was
recited by a Greek who was at the Court.
-----
Very different have been the conditions of India. When the British came,
they found no national literature, unless we can apply that name to the
ancient Sanskrit epics, written in a tongue which had ceased to be
spoken many centuries before. Persian and Arabic were cultivated
languages, used by educated Musulmans and by a few Hindu servants of the
Musulman princes. The _lingua franca_ called Hindustani or Urdu, which
had sprung up in the camps of the Mogul Emperors, was becoming a means
of intercourse over Northern India, but was hardly used throughout the
South. Only a handful of the population were sufficiently educated to be
accessible to the influences of any literature, or spoke any tongue
except that of their own district. At present five great languages[29],
branches of the Aryan family, divide between them Northern,
North-Western and Middle India, and four others[30] of the Dravidian
type cover Southern India: while many others are spoken by smaller
sections of the people. The language of the English conquerors, which
was adopted as the official language in 1835, is the parent tongue of
only about 250,000 persons out of 287,000,000, less than one in one
thousand. An increasing number of natives of the educated class have
learnt to speak it, but even if we reckon in these, it affects only the
most insignificant fraction of the population. I have already observed
that it was an advantage for England in conquering India, and is an
advantage for her in ruling it, that the inhabitants are so divided by
language as well as by religion and (among the Hindus) by caste that
they could not combine to resist her. Rome had enjoyed, in slighter
measure, a similar advantage. But whereas in the Roman Empire Greek and
Latin spread so swiftly and steadily that the various nationalities soon
began to blend, the absence in India of any two such dominant tongues
and the lower level of intellectual progress keep the vast bulk of the
Indian population without any general vehicle for the interchange of
thought or for the formation of any one type of literary and scientific
culture. There is therefore no national literature for India, nor any
prospect that one will arise. No Cicero forms prose style, no Virgil
inspires an imperial patriotism. The English have established places of
higher instruction on the model not so much of Oxford and Cambridge as
of the Scottish Universities and the new University Colleges which have
recently sprung up in England, together with five examining
Universities. Through these institutions they are giving to the
ambitious youth of India, and especially to those who wish to enter
Government employment or the learned professions, an education of a
European type, a type so remote from the natural quality and
proclivities of the Indian mind that it is not likely to give birth to
any literature with a distinctively Indian character. Indeed the chief
effect of this instruction has so far been to make those who receive it
cease to be Hindus or Musulmans without making them either Christians or
Europeans. It acts as a powerful solvent, destroying the old systems of
conventional morality, and putting little in their place. The results
may not be seen for a generation or two. When they come they may prove
far from happy.
-----
Footnote 29:
Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and Gujarati.
Footnote 30:
Telugu, Tamil, Kanarese, Malayalam.
-----
If in the course of ages any one language comes to predominate in India
and to be the language not only of commerce, law, and administration,
but also of literature, English is likely to be that language; and
English will by that time have also become the leading language of the
world[31]. This will tend both to unify the peoples of India and (in a
sense) to bring them nearer to their rulers. By that time, however, if
it ever arrives, so many other changes will also have arrived that it is
vain to speculate on the type of civilization which will then have been
produced.
-----
Footnote 31:
It is estimated that English is at present spoken by about 115
millions of persons, Russian by 80 millions, German by 70, Spanish by
50, French by 45. Of these English is increasing the most swiftly,
Russian next, and then German.
-----
These considerations have shown us how different have been the results
of English from those of Roman conquest. In the latter case a double
process began from the first. The provinces became assimilated to one
another, and Rome became assimilated to them, or they to her. As her
individuality passed to them it was diluted by their influence. Out of
the one conquering race and the many conquered races there was growing
up a people which, though many local distinctions remained, was by the
end of the fourth century A.D. tending to become substantially one in
religion, one in patriotism, one in its type of intellectual life and of
material civilization. The process was never completed, because the end
of the fourth century was just the time when the Empire began, not from
any internal dissensions, but from financial and military weakness, to
yield to invasions and immigrations which forced its parts asunder. But
it was so far completed that Claudian could write in the days of
Honorius: ‘We who drink of the Rhone and the Orontes are all one
nation.’ In this one huge nation the city and people of Rome had been
merged, their original character so obliterated that they could give
their name to the world. But in India there has been neither a fusion of
the conquerors and the conquered, nor even a fusion of the various
conquered races into one people. Differences of race, language, and
religion have prevented the latter fusion: yet it may some day come. But
a fusion of conquerors and conquered seems to be forbidden by climate
and by the disparity of character and of civilization, as well as by
antagonisms of colour and religion. The English are too unlike the races
of India, or any one of those races, to mingle with them, or to come to
form, in the sense of Claudian’s words, one people.
The nations and tribes that were overcome and incorporated by Rome were
either the possessors of a civilization as old and as advanced as was
her own, or else, like the Gauls and the Germans, belonged to stocks
full of intellectual force, capable of receiving her lessons, and of
rapidly rising to the level of her culture. But the races of India were
all of them far behind the English in material civilization. Some of
them were and are intellectually backward; others, whose keen
intelligence and aptitude for learning equals that of Europeans, are
inferior in energy and strength of will. Yet even these differences
might not render an ultimate fusion impossible. It is religion and
colour that seem to place that result beyond any horizon to which our
eyes can reach. The semi-barbarous races of Southern Siberia will become
Russians. The Georgians and Armenians of Transcaucasia, unless their
attachment to their national churches saves them, may become Russians.
Even the Turkmans of the Khanates will be Russians one day, as the
Tatars of Kazan and the Crimea are already on the way to become. But the
English seem destined to remain quite distinct from the natives of
India, neither mingling their blood nor imparting their character and
habits.
So too, it may be conjectured, there will not be, for ages to come, any
fusion of Americans with the races of the Philippine Isles.
The observation that Rome effaced herself in giving her name and laws to
the world suggests an inquiry into what may be called the retroactive
influence of India upon England. In the annals of Rome, war, conquest,
and territorial expansion pervade and govern the whole story. Her
constitutional, her social, her economic history, from the end of the
Samnite wars onwards, is substantially determined by her position as a
ruling State, first in Italy and then in the Mediterranean world. It was
the influence upon the City of the phenomena of her rule in the
provinces that did most to destroy not only the old constitution but the
old simple and upright character of the Roman people. The provinces
avenged themselves upon their conquerors. In the end, Rome ceases to
have any history of her own, except an architectural history, so
completely is she merged in her Empire. To a great extent this is true
of Italy as well as of Rome. Italy, which had subjected so many
provinces, ends by becoming herself a province—a province no more
important than the others, except in respect of the reverence that
surrounded her name. Her history, from the time of Augustus till that of
Odovaker and Theodorich the Ostrogoth, is only a part of the history of
the Empire. Quite otherwise with England. Though England has founded
many colonies, sent out vast bodies of emigrants, and conquered wide
dominions, her domestic history has been, since she lost Normandy and
Aquitaine, comparatively little affected by these frequent wars and this
immense expansion. One might compose a constitutional history of
England, or an economic and industrial history, or an ecclesiastical
history, or a literary history, or a social history, in which only few
and slight references would need to be made to either the colonies or
India. England was a great European power before she had any colonies or
any Indian territories: and she would be a great European power if all
of these transmarine possessions were to drop off. Only at a few moments
in the century and a half since the battle of Plassy have Indian affairs
gravely affected English politics. Every one remembers Fox’s India Bill,
in 1783, and the trial of Warren Hastings, and the way in which the
Nabobs seemed for a time to be demoralizing society and politics. It was
in India that the Duke of Wellington first showed his powers. It was
through the Indian opium trade that England first came into collision
with China. The notion that Russian ambition might become dangerous to
the security of Britain in India had something to do with the Crimean
War, and with the subsequent policy towards the Turks followed by
England down to 1880. The deplorable Afghan War of 1878-9 led, more
perhaps than anything else, to the fall of Lord Beaconsfield’s Ministry
in 1880. Other instances might be added in which Indian questions have
told upon the foreign policy of Great Britain, or have given rise to
parliamentary strife; although, by a tacit convention between the two
great parties in England, efforts are usually made—and made most
wisely—to prevent questions of Indian administration from becoming any
further than seems absolutely necessary matters of party controversy.
Yet, if these instances be all put together, they are less numerous and
momentous than might have been expected when one considers the magnitude
of the stake which Britain holds in India. And even when we add to these
the effect of Indian markets upon British trade, and the undeniable
influence of the possession of India upon the thoughts and aspirations
of Englishmen, strengthening in them a sense of pride and what is called
an imperial spirit, we shall still be surprised that the control of this
vast territory and of a population more than seven times as large as
that of the United Kingdom has not told more forcibly upon Britain, and
coloured her history more deeply than it has in fact done. Suppose that
England had not conquered India. Would her domestic development, whether
constitutional or social, have taken a course greatly different from
that which it has actually followed? So far as we can judge, it would
not. It has been the good fortune of England to stand far off from the
conquered countries, and to have had a population too large to suffer
sensibly from the moral evils which conquest and the influx of wealth
bring in their train[32].
-----
Footnote 32:
The absence of slavery and the existence of Christianity will of
course present themselves to every one’s mind as other factors in
differentiating the conditions of the modern from those of the Roman
world.
-----
The remark was made at the outset of this discussion that the contact of
the English race with native races in India, and the process by which
the former is giving the material civilization, and a tincture of the
intellectual culture of Europe to a group of Asiatic peoples, is only
part of that contact of European races with native races and of that
Europeanizing of the latter by the former which is going on all over the
world. France is doing a similar work in North Africa and Madagascar.
Russia is doing it in Turkistan and on the Amur; and may probably be
soon engaged upon it in Manchuria. Germany is doing it in tropical
Africa. England is doing it in Egypt and Borneo and Matabililand. The
people of the United States are entering upon it in the Philippine
Islands. Every one of these nations professes to be guided by
philanthropic motives in its action. But it is not philanthropy that has
carried any of them into these enterprises, nor is it clear that the
result will be to increase the sum of human happiness.
It is in India, however, that the process has been in progress for the
longest time and on the largest scale. Even after a century’s experience
the results cannot be adequately judged, for the country is in a state
of transition, with all sorts of new factors, such as railways, and
newspapers, and colleges, working as well upon the humbler as upon the
wealthier sections of the people. Three things, however, the career of
the English in India has proved. One is, that it is possible for a
European race to rule a subject native race on principles of strict
justice, restraining the natural propensity of the stronger to abuse
their power. India has been, and is, ruled upon such principles. When
oppression or cruelty is perpetrated, it is not by the European official
but by his native subordinates, and especially by the native police,
whose delinquencies the European official cannot always discover. Scorn
or insolence is sometimes displayed towards the natives by Europeans,
and nothing does more to destroy the good effects of just government
than such displays of scorn. But again, it is seldom the European civil
officials, but either private persons or occasionally junior officers in
the army, who are guilty of this abuse of their racial superiority.
The second thing is that a relatively small body of European civilians,
supported by a relatively small armed force, can maintain peace and
order in an immense population standing on a lower plane of
civilization, and itself divided by religious animosities bitter enough
to cause the outbreak of intestine wars were the restraining hand
withdrawn.
The third fact is that the existence of a system securing these benefits
is compatible with an absolute separation between the rulers and the
ruled. The chasm between them has in these hundred years of intercourse
grown no narrower. Some even deem it wider, and regret the fact that the
European official, who now visits England more easily and frequently,
does not identify himself so thoroughly with India as did his
predecessors some seventy years ago. As one of the greatest problems of
this age, and of the age which will follow, is and must be the relation
between the European races as a whole on the one hand, and the more
backward races of a different colour on the other hand, this
incompatibility of temper, this indisposition to be fused, or, one may
almost say, this impracticability of fusion, is a momentous result, full
of significance for the future. It was quite otherwise with that first
effort of humanity to draw itself together, which took shape in the
fusion of the races that Rome conquered, and the creation of one
Greco-Roman type of civilization for them. But the conditions of that
small ancient world were very different from those by which mankind
finds itself now confronted.
It is impossible to think of the future and to recall that first impulse
towards the unity of mankind which closed fourteen centuries ago,
without reverting once more to the Roman Empire, and asking whether the
events which caused, and the circumstances which accompanied, its
dissolution throw any light on the probable fate of British dominion in
the East.