LORD MAYO'S INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION
The Mughal Government in its best days was a peripatetic one. Its
camp was its capital, and the abandonment of that method marked the
commencement of the false system of centralisation which in part led
to the dismemberment of the Delhi Empire. Lord Mayo realised this
fact, and by a well-planned system of tours he made himself
acquainted with the separate provinces under his rule. He laboured
hard to learn, not only each different system of local
administration, but also the character and qualities of the men who
conducted it. His genial presence and love of sport, combined with
indefatigable powers for real work, won for him the affection, as
well as the confidence of the District Officers throughout India. But
no one who did not actually accompany him knew the fatigue of body
and mind which he went through on the 21,763 miles of his Indian
journeys, nor can realise the serious risks which he ran by rapid
riding over bad roads or along precipices in the {172} hill tracts.
The only trip which was proposed to him for pleasure merely, he at
once rejected. It was a matter of daily occurrence, that, rising at
five o'clock, spending the whole day in travelling, receiving
officials or Native Chiefs, and inspecting public works, Lord Mayo
sat up half the night transacting business with his Foreign, or
Private, or Military Secretary.
In these tours he saw much to praise, but also much to amend. The
great Department of Public Works had during the previous twelve years
rushed to the front of the spending departments in India. In its
rapid development, it had to draw its officers from the Staff-Corps,
or wheresoever they could be obtained, sometimes with little regard
to their previous training for their new duties. Blunders and
extravagance had been the result--a result which had been the despair
of Lord Mayo's predecessors, and had given rise to grave scandals in
the Public Press.
Lord Mayo, alike on his tours and in his Cabinet, set himself to
remedy this state of things. 'There is scarcely a fault,' runs one of
his Minutes on a certain undertaking, 'which could have been
committed in the construction of a great work, which has not been
committed here. Estimates a hundred per cent. wrong--design
faulty--foundations commenced without the necessary examination of
substratum--no inquiry into the excess of cost over estimates during
progress.' In another case: 'I have read with great sorrow this
deplorable history of negligence, incapacity, and corruption;
negligence in the conduct of {173} every superior officer who was
connected with the construction of these buildings from the
beginning; incapacity to a greater or lesser extent on the part of
almost every subordinate concerned; corruption on the part of the
contractors.' Elsewhere: 'I have read the report on the barracks. It
is quite dreadful. There is not a man referred to who seems to have
done his duty, except one who was unmercifully snubbed. This report
will assist me in the reorganisation of the Department.'
But out of heart as he sometimes came away from such inspections, he
was unwilling to condemn the individual officers hastily, and his
eyes soon opened to the fact that the system itself was essentially
to blame. In the first place he found that the brain power of the
Department was overworked. Inspecting Officers were held responsible
for a larger area than they could possibly give attention to;
result--want of supervision. In the second place, a series of vast
works were scattered at one and the same moment over the whole
country without corresponding additions to the staff--too great
haste. In the third place, engineers were placed in executive charge
of wide tracts, while the amount of correspondence and purely office
work glued them to their chairs indoors, and precluded them from
overlooking what was going on outside--no personal management.
Lord Mayo's visit to certain railway works under construction by
private contractors, and about the same time to a building being
erected by the Public {174} Works Department, forced this last defect
of the system strongly on his mind. At the private contractors' works
he saw three European gentlemen, umbrella in hand and their heads
roofed over by enormous pith hats, standing out in the hottest sun,
and watching with their own eyes the native workmen as they set brick
upon brick. In the building under erection by the Public Works he
found only the coolies and bricklayers, without supervision of any
sort. On inquiry, the engineer in charge pleaded office duties, the
subordinate engineer pleaded the impossibility of looking after a
great many works at the same time throughout a considerable District;
and the net result was, that Government had to put up with loss of
money and bad masonry. Lord Mayo exclaimed: 'I see what we want--good
supervision and one thing at a time.'
Lord Mayo also found that the extravagance in Public Works was due in
a large measure to the practice of constructing them out of borrowed
money. He therefore laid down a strict rule that all ordinary works,
that is works not of the nature of a reproductive nature, and paying
interest, must be constructed out of current revenue.
'Any further increase to our debt,' he decisively wrote, 'cannot be
made without incurring danger of the gravest kind. I will incur no
responsibility of this sort, and nothing will tempt me to sanction in
time of peace the addition of a rupee of debt for the purpose of
meeting what is really ordinary and {175} unproductive expenditure.
It is a policy which, acting on my own strong convictions, and in
full concurrence with Her Majesty's Government, I am determined to
reverse.'
The long series of measures by which Lord Mayo reorganised the Public
Works Department lie beyond the scope of this volume. It must suffice
to say that by stringently applying his principles 'of first finding
the money, and improved supervision,' he not only effected a large
saving during his own Viceroyalty, but rendered possible the
subsequent expansion of the Department without financial disaster to
the country.
Having thus reduced the expenditure to the utmost limit compatible
with good work, Lord Mayo directed his earnest attention to the
protection of the people against famine. He rejected at the outset a
proposal which a Commission had made, of something very like a Poor
Law for India. 'Having been engaged all my life in the administration
of a Poor Law in one of the poorest countries in Europe, I may say
... first, that ordinary poverty in India does not need for its
relief a poor-law system; secondly, that any sum which could be
locally levied to relieve such famines as have from time to time
occurred, would be ludicrously inadequate.'
At the same time he solemnly accepted the responsibility of the
British Government to prevent wholesale death from starvation. He
believed, also, that the Government had in its hand the means for
accomplishing this object. 'By the construction of railways and the
completion of great works of irrigation,' runs {176} one of his
earlier notes, 'we have it in our power, under God's blessing, to
render impossible the return of those periodical famines which have
disgraced our administration and cost an incredible amount of
suffering, with the loss of many millions of lives.'
On Lord Mayo's arrival in Calcutta, he found awaiting him an
elaborate Minute which Lord Lawrence had lately placed on record
regarding the past history and the future extension of Indian
railways. The narrative which the great civilian Viceroy thus left
for his successor was full of encouragement, but by no means one of
unmingled self-complacency. From the end of 1853, when we had
twenty-one and a-half miles of railway in India, until the beginning
of 1869, when Lord Lawrence left the country, only about 4000 miles
of railway had been opened. These lines had been constructed by
private companies, under a guarantee from the Indian Government. 'The
money'--to use the words of the Duke of Argyll--'was raised on the
credit and authority of the State, under an absolute guarantee of
five per cent., involving no risk to the shareholders, and
sacrificing on the part of Government every chance of profit, while
taking every chance of loss.' In the absence of any inducements to
economy, the guaranteed railways had cost 17,000 pounds a mile, and
were worked under a system of double supervision--expensive,
dilatory, and complicated. It was become evident that the costliness
of this plan rendered an adequate development of railways in India
financially impossible.
{177} Lord Mayo, assisted by General Strachey, resolved to supplement
the expensive system of guaranteed lines by a network of State
railways. Instead of guaranteeing five per cent. interest, the
Government has raised the capital for these State railways at three
to four per cent. Instead of an initial cost of 17,000 pounds per
mile for broad-gauge lines, it determined to construct narrow-gauge
lines, at about 6000 pounds per mile. For the old costly double
management, the new system substituted a single firm control. Into
the vexed question of the break of gauge it is not needful for me
here to enter. It must suffice to say that Lord Mayo perfectly
realised its disadvantages. His plan was to construct a system of
narrow-gauge railways on a sufficient scale to allow of long lengths
of haulage without break of gauge. Later experience has affirmed the
practical convenience of the broader gauge. But, excepting in a few
isolated spots, the system of State railways dates from Lord Mayo's
Viceroyalty; and it is the system which, under various modern
developments, is now absorbing within itself the whole railway system
of India.
Lord Mayo's other great engine of internal development in the battle
against famine was irrigation. A bare list of the works which he
inaugurated, advanced, or carried out, would weary the reader. The
Ganges Canal was extended, and, after seventeen years of deficit,
took its place as a work no longer burdensome to the State. A new
irrigation system, starting from the Ganges opposite Aligarh, and
designed to water {178} the whole lower part of the Doab, from
Fatehgarh to Allahabad, was commenced. The eastern half of Rohilkhand
and the Western Districts of Oudh were at the same time being placed
beyond peril of drought and famine by the Sarda Canal. Similar works
for western Rohilkhand were being carried out by a canal from the
Ganges. Plans were prepared, and the sanction of the Secretary of
State partially obtained, for a project which would bring the waters
of the Jumna to the arid tracts on the west of Delhi. While the
Western Jumna Canal was thus to receive a vast extension, the Lower
Jumna Canal was being pushed forward in the districts to the
south-east of Delhi.
Proceeding farther down the Gangetic Valley, we find works of equal
promise being carried on from the Son (Soane) river through the
Province of Behar--the province destined in 1874 to be the next
Indian tract which was to suffer dearth. On the seaboard, Orissa (the
Province of Lower Bengal which had last passed through the ordeal)
saw its districts placed beyond the peril that has from time
immemorial hung over them, by a vast system of canals and the
development of means of communication with the outside world. Still
farther south, the Godavari works were going forward. In the far
west, projects for the drought-stricken districts of Sind were drawn
up and investigated; while in Bombay, Madras, and other Provinces,
many works of great local utility, although of less conspicuous
extent, were initiated, pushed forward, or matured.
{179} Lord Mayo, on his arrival in India, found two distinct sets of
views entertained in regard to education. In some Provinces, among
which Bombay held an honourable place, successful efforts had been
made to found Public Instruction on a popular basis. In other
Provinces--conspicuously in Bengal--high-class education flourished,
while scanty provision was made for the primary or indigenous
schools. The ultimate effect of this latter system, it was urged,
would 'filtrate' downwards. Its immediate result, however, was to arm
the rich and the powerful with a new weapon--knowledge--and to leave
the poor under their old weight of ignorance in their struggle for
life. Lord Mayo threw himself with characteristic energy into the
efforts which were being made to remedy this state of things.
'I dislike,' he wrote to a friend, 'this filtration theory. In Bengal
we are educating in English a few hundred Babus at great expense to
the State. Many of them are well able to pay for themselves, and have
no other object in learning than to qualify for Government employ. In
the meanwhile we have done nothing towards extending knowledge to the
million. The Babus will never do it. The more education you give
them, the more they will keep to themselves, and make their increased
knowledge a means of tyranny. If you wait till the bad English, which
the 400 Babus learn in Calcutta, filters down into the 40,000,000 of
Bengal, you will be ultimately a Silurian rock instead of a retired
judge. Let the Babus {180} learn English by all means. But let us
also try to do something towards teaching the three R's to "Rural
Bengal."'[1]
[Footnote 1: Referring to _The Annals of Rural Bengal_, which he had
read on his voyage out to India.]
The credit of giving effect to the measures then inaugurated belongs
to Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. His
educational reforms mark a new era in that Province.
In 1870 the Department of Public Instruction was educating 163,854
children in Lower Bengal at a cost of 186,598 pounds to the State. In
1874, when Sir George Campbell laid down the Lieutenant-Governorship,
he left 400,721 children being educated at a cost to Government of
228,151 pounds. He had, in the interval, covered Bengal with primary
schools; pieced together and resuscitated the old indigenous
mechanism of rural instruction, and, without actually curtailing
high-class education, had created a _bona fide_ system of public
instruction for the people of the country.
While Lord Mayo believed that State education in India must rest on
the broad basis of the indigenous and village school, he also
recognised the necessity of making special allowance for certain
classes. The Muhammadans--the old ruling class in India--had fallen
behind in the race of life under the British system of Public
Instruction. Lord Mayo discerned clearly how far this result was due
to their own neglect, and how far to the unsuitability or
uncongeniality of our educational methods. He urged {181} upon the
Local Governments the necessity of making special provision to meet
their wants; and the reforms on the lines which he indicated have
done much to remove the difficulty.
For another, and an even more backward class, Lord Mayo showed an
equal consideration. He perceived that the Poor White had become a
grave administrative problem in India. The truth is, our whole system
of State instruction in India had been designed, and rightly
designed, for the Natives. The poorer classes of the European
community were very inadequately provided for by the Government. Lord
Mayo thought that the first thing to be done was to place the
existing schools for European children on a sound and efficient basis
before building new ones. I have already referred to the Commission
of inquiry and reform which he appointed for the Lawrence Asylums. In
the Presidency towns, he exerted his influence, to use his own words,
'to increase the means of instruction for the Christian poor, and
especially of the class immediately above the poorest.' But his life
was cut short before he could accomplish the object which he had at
heart.
While Lord Mayo thus provided for the wider instruction of the people
of India, he also laboured to educate their rulers. At the time of
his accession, the Government did not know the population of a single
District of its most advanced Province, and the first census of
Bengal (taken under Lord Mayo's orders) unexpectedly disclosed an
extra population of {182} twenty-six millions, whose existence had
never been suspected, in that Lieutenant-Governorship alone.
No data were available up to that time for estimating the practical
effects which any natural calamity would have upon a Bengal District.
In 1866, when famine burst upon the Bengal seaboard, the Government
remained unaware that the calamity was imminent until it had become
irremediable, and scarcity had passed into starvation. The proportion
which the crops of a Province bears to its food requirements, the
movements of its internal or external trade, all the statistics of
the operations by which wealth is distributed or amassed, and by
which the necessities of one part of the country are redressed from
the superfluities of another, remained unknown factors in
administrative calculations of the most important practical sort.
Lord Mayo endeavoured to remedy this state of things by two distinct
sets of operations. He organised a Statistical Survey of India, and
he created a Department of Agriculture and Commerce. The first census
of all India was taken under his orders. The Statistical Survey has
produced a printed account of each district, town, and village,
carefully compiled upon local inquiry, and disclosing the whole
economic and social facts in the life of the people. He designed the
Department of Agriculture and Commerce to perform for India the
double set of duties discharged by the Board of Trade and the new
(1891) Agricultural Department in England. The Government {183} is
the great landlord of India. It has not only to adjust its enormous
rental so as to render it as little burdensome as possible to the
people, but it has also to assist the people, by means of irrigation
works and cash advances, in developing the resources of their fields.
At the same time, it has to administer a vast area of State forests.
Lord Mayo, in inaugurating an Agricultural Department, clearly laid
down the limits within which the Department could profitably act. He
realised the folly of imagining that we can teach the Indian
husbandman his own trade by means of steam-ploughs and 'ammoniac
manures.' 'I do not know,' he once wrote, 'what is precisely meant by
"ammoniac manure." If it means guano, superphosphate, or any
artificial product of that kind, we might as well ask the people of
India to manure their ground with champagne.' In another of his
Viceregal notes he puts the case thus: 'In connection with
agriculture we must be careful of two things. First, we must not
ostentatiously tell Native husbandmen to do things which they have
been doing for centuries. Second, we must not tell them to do things
which they can't do, and have no means of doing. In either case they
will laugh at us, and they will learn to disregard really useful
advice when it is given.'
Lord Mayo was deeply convinced that the permanent amelioration of the
lot of the Indian people must rest with themselves. He looked forward
to the time when municipal administration would largely {184} aid the
officials by means of local self-government. Nor did he shrink from
the responsibilities which the creation of such institutions
involved. 'We have lately inaugurated,' he said to his Legislative
Council, 'a system of lending to Municipalities which we believe will
contribute much to the health, wealth, and comfort of the inhabitants
of towns.' He publicly declared the development of municipal
government to be among the chief of the many great services which Sir
Donald Macleod, as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had rendered to
India.
'A man,' he said, 'who has succeeded in establishing municipal
institutions, which have always been in every country in the world
the basis of civil government, and the first germ of civilisation, is
entitled to the highest praise. I believe by his wise rule and
regulations he has induced numbers of the Natives to take an active
part in the administration of their municipal affairs, and has by
that means laid the foundation of a future which should be most
beneficial.' In his own great measure of provincial finance and local
government, which I have detailed in Chapter VI, Lord Mayo had the
same end in view.
'The operation of this Resolution,' he inserted with his own hand in
the orders of Government, 'in its full meaning and integrity will
afford opportunities for the development of self-government, for
strengthening Municipal Institutions, and for the association of
Natives and Europeans, to a greater extent than heretofore, in the
administration of affairs.' He {185} summed up his main purpose in
the following memorable words:--'The object in view being the
instruction of many peoples and races in a good system of
administration.'
Space precludes me from entering upon the legislative work of Lord
Mayo. That work was voluminous, and of a most searching character.
But it was practically conducted by the two eminent jurists, Sir
Henry Maine and Sir Fitzjames Stephen, who held in succession the
office of Law Member of Council during Lord Mayo's Viceroyalty. It
has, moreover, been narrated by Sir Fitzjames Stephen himself, in
full detail, in my larger _Life of Lord Mayo_.
* * * * * * *
In the foregoing pages many will miss a familiar feature of the Earl
of Mayo's Viceroyalty. In India, hospitality forms one of the public
duties of the governing race--a duty which they discharge, some
laboriously, all to the best of their ability. The splendid
hospitalities of Lord Mayo to all ranks and all races, amounted to an
additional source of strength to the British Rule. He regarded it a
proud privilege that it fell to his lot to present, for the first
time, a son of the English Sovereign to the people and Princes of
India. His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh's progress touched
chords in the oriental imagination which had lain mute since the
overthrow of the Delhi throne, and called forth an outburst of
loyalty such as had never before been awakened in the history of our
rule. It was the seal of peace; an {186} act of oblivion for the
struggle which placed India under the Crown, and for the painful
memories which that struggle left behind.
In his ceremonial as in his official duties, the Earl of Mayo had the
ease of conscious strength. His noble presence, the splendour of his
hospitality, and his magnificence of life, seemed in him only a
natural complement of rare administrative power. The most charming of
Indian novels,[2] in portraying an ideal head of Indian society,
unconsciously delineates Lord Mayo. But indeed it would be almost
impossible to draw a great Indian Viceroy in his social aspects
without the sketch insensibly growing into his portrait. Alike in the
Cabinet and the drawing-room there was the same calm kindness and
completeness. Sir Fitzjames Stephen, not given to hero-worship, has
said: 'I never met one to whom I felt disposed to give such heartfelt
affection and honour.'
[Footnote 2: _Dustypore_, by Sir Henry Cunningham.]
{187}