"Christian England" is agonizing over the pitiful condition of
the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say
anent her own awful record in India. It were well for John
Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making
frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem. The
oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian
Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were
as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient
Bengalese at the hands of Great Britain. The history of
every barbarous prince of the Orient, in those dark days
when might made right and plunder was the recognized
prerogative of royalty; the annals of every potentate who
has reigned by the grace of Allah and kneeled to kiss
the robe of the prophet, may be searched in vain for a
parallel in unbounded rapacity and calculating atrocity.
England's despoilment of India constitutes the supreme
crime of all the ages, the acknowledged acme of infamy-
Europe never dreaded Alaric the Visigoth, nor hated Attila
the Scourge of God, as India dreads and detests John Bull,
"the white beast from over the black water." He has not
persecuted because of difference of religious dogma, as
have the Mohammedan Sultans and the Christian Czars.
That kind of enterprise doesn't pay, and John Bull never
wastes on theological sentiment one ounce of energy that
can be coined into cash.
A British trading company had leased land at Madras and
Calcutta, for which it paid rent to the native powers. For
the protection of its warehouses it was permitted to built
forts and keep a few armed police, but was in no sense
independent. Its position in India was analogous to that of
British capitalists in America who are operating a mine or
factory and have been authorized to police their property.
The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political
nonentity, the empire of the Great Mogul was divided
among nominal viceroys who were really independent
sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent. The teeming millions of
India were, for the most part, as unfitted by nature and
occupation for the fatigues of war, as were the countless
host which Xerxes led into Greece, or Darius hurled upon
the steel-crested phalanxes of that bloody prototype of John
Bull, Alexander the Macedonian marauder. The
governments of India were showy rather than strong, and a
condition of semi-anarchy had been engendered by the
frequent incursions of fierce tribes of robbers, the jealousies
and ambitions of rival nabobs and the mischievous
schemes of a French adventurer named Dupleix. The
company continued to augment its forces until strong
enough not only to protect its own property, but to
overawe the native governments. Then, on one dishonest
pretext or another, it began the work of transforming India
into a British province. Robert Clive succeeded in
accomplishing in Asia what Dr. Jamieson attempted with far
better excuse in South Africa. Rival powers applied to the
company for assistance, and it mattered not with which it
allied itself, both were in the end destroyed or enslaved,
compelled to pour their wealth into the coffers of the British
corporations. No crime was too horrible, no breach of faith
too brazen if it promised to further the ambition and
increase the gains of the company. Its policy was to unite
with a weak government to plunder a strong one, then, by
subjugating its ally, to make itself master of both. By
treasons and stratagems, by forged treaties and briberies,
by infamies planned in cold blood and executed with more
than Kurdish barbarity, the garden spot of the earth, with its
teeming millions and inestimable wealth, was made to pay
tribute to British greed. Macaulay, the eulogist of both Lord
Clive and Warren Hastings, thus describes India when
Great Britain, without a shadow of excuse, laid her
marauding paw upon it in the same manner and for the
self-same purpose that Cortez invaded the halls of the
Montezumas:
"The people of India when we subdued them, were ten
times as numerous as the vanquished Americans (the
Indian subjects of Montezuma), and were at the same time
quite as highly civilized as the victorious Spaniards. They
had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or
Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the
cathedrals of Seville. They could show bankers richer than
the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, Viceroys whose
splendors far surpassed that of Ferdinand the
Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery
which would have astonished the Great Captain. It might
have been expected that every Englishman who takes any
interest in any part of history would be curious to know how
a handful of their countrymen, separated from their home
by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few
years, one of the greatest empires of the world. Yet,
unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not
only insipid, but positively distasteful." Good God! Is it any
wonder that British readers should find the conquest of
India "positively distasteful?" Is it not quite natural that
Englishmen had rather read of Turkish atrocities in Armenia
than of British atrocities in India? Lord Macaulay rehearses
all the treacheries and cruelties and double-dealings by
which "a handful of his countrymen subjugated one of the
greatest empires of the world," then complains that British
readers find such a catalogue of horrors positively
distasteful! Did he expect even Englishmen to become
enthusiastic over the hiring of British troops to the infamous
Surajah Dowlah for the massacre of the brave Rohillas?
Did he expect them to peruse with pleasurable pride the
robbery of the Princesses of Oude, the brutal execution of
Nuncomar, or the forged treaty by which Ormichund was
entrapped? Having painted the atrocities and craven
cowardice of Chief Justice Impey, could he reasonably
expect them to be proud of this representative Englishman
in India? Having told us that Lord Clive was a freebooter in
his boyhood and a butcher in his prime, did he anticipate
that even Englishmen would be proud of this countryman of
theirs who founded the British Empire in India? Lord
Macaulay gives us the following description of conditions in
Bengal under British Domination, then wonders that his
countrymen find its perusal "positively distasteful."
"They (the servants of the East India company) covered
with their protection a set of native dependents, who ranged
through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror
wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor
was armed with all the power of his master. And his
master was armed with all the power of the company.
Enormous fortunes were thus accumulated at Calcutta,
while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the
last extremity of wretchedness. They had been
accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like
this. They found the little finger of the company thicker
than the loins of the Surajah Dowlah. It resembled the
government of evil genii rather than the government of
human tyrants."
The people of India, it must be remembered, had
experienced the tyranny of the Brahman and Buddhist, of
Moslem and even the terrible Mahratta; they had groaned
beneath the exactions of the Great Moguls, plundering
viceroys and robber chiefs; they had paid tribute to
Aurungzebe and to Hyder Ali, but here we are told they
never experienced such tyranny and pitiless despoliation as
under the rule of Christian England, and this upon the
testimony of an Englishman! Now that British preachers
and pamphleteers are agonizing over Mohammedan
atrocities in Armenia, let us see what the latter thought of
Christian domination in India. "If," says the Mussulman
historian of those unhappy times, "if to so many military
qualifications, they (English) knew how to join the art of
government--if they exerted as much ingenuity and
solicitude in relieving the people of God, as they do in
whatever concerns their military affairs, no nation in the
world would be preferable to them, or worthier of command;
but the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and
are reduced to poverty and distress. Oh God! come to
the assistance of thine afflicted servants, and deliver them
from the oppressions they suffer."
Lord Clive, having acquired an immense fortune, concluded
to round out his political career by inaugurating a reform
that would in some manner atone for his past excesses,
and did succeed in giving India more than a Roman peace
and abating some of the worst abuses; but the reform was
ephemeral. In his essay on Warren Hastings, Lord
Macaulay--who wonders that the conquest of India is
"distasteful" reading to Englishmen--gives us the following
pen-picture of conditions under the administration of his
ideal:
"The delay and the expense, grievous as they are, form
the smallest part of the evil which English law, imported
without modifications into India, could not fail to produce.
The strongest feelings of our nation, honor, religion, female
modesty, rose up against the innovation. Arrest on mesne
process was the first step in most civil proceedings; and to
a native of rank arrest was not merely a restraint, but a foul
personal indignity. That the apartments of a woman of
quality should be entered by strange men, or that her face
should be seen by them, are in the East intolerable
outrages--outrages which are more dreaded than death,
and which can be expiated only by the shedding of blood.
To these outrages the most distinguished families of
Bengal, Bahar and Orissa were now exposed. A reign of
terror began--a reign of terror heightened by mystery. No
man knew what was next to be expected from this strange
tribunal. It had collected round itself an army of the worst
part of the native population--informers, and false
witnesses, and common barrators, and agents of chicane;
and above all, a banditti of bailiffs' followers compared
with whom the retainers of the worst English spunging-
houses, in the worst times, might be considered as upright
and tender-hearted. There were instances in which men of
the most venerable dignity, persecuted without cause by
extortioners, died of rage and shame in the grip of the vile
alguazils of Impey. The harems of noble Mohammedans--
sanctuaries respected in the East by governments that
respected nothing else--were burst open by gangs of
bailiffs. The Mussulmans, braver and less accustomed to
submission than the Hindoos, sometimes stood on their
defense and shed their blood in the doorway, while
defending, sword in hand, the sacred apartments of their
women. No Mahratta invasion had ever spread through the
province such dismay as this inroad of English lawyers. All
the injustice of former oppressions, Asiatic and European,
appeared as a blessing when compared with the justice of
the Supreme Court."
No wonder that "Christian England" is horrified by the
atrocities of the Moslems in Armenia! She cannot
understand persecution for the sake of religious opinion--
having done her dirty work for the sake of the almighty
dollar. It is true, that a Hastings, with his forged treaties
and despoilment of ancient "bee-gums," is no longer
governor-general of India; it is true that an Impey no longer
deals out "Justice" in that unhappy land; but the industrial
condition of the toiling millions is worse to-day than when
they were being despoiled to erect the Peacock throne at
Delhi, adorned with its "Mountain of Light." Sir David
Wedderbun--who will be accepted as authority even by our
Anglomaniacs--says: "Our civil courts are regarded as
institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the
poor, and many are fain to seek a refuge from their
jurisdiction in native territory." "We do not care for
the people of India," writes Florence Nightingale; "the
saddest sight to be seen in India--nay, probably in the
world--is the peasant of our Eastern Empire." Miss
Nightingale declares that the Indian famines, which every
few years cost millions of lives, are due to British taxation,
which deprives the ryots of the means of cultivation and
reduces them to a condition far worse than the worst
phases of American slavery. Mr. H. M. Hyndman, an
English writer of repute, declares that in India men and
women cannot get food, because they cannot save money
to buy it, so terrible are the burdens laid by Christian
England on that unhappy people. Just as Ireland exported
food to England during her most devastating "famines," so
does India send food to the "Mother Country" in the
discharge of governmental burdens, while her own people
are starving by millions. Henry George, who has never
been suspected of anti-English tendencies, says: "The
millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes
of many conquerors, but worst of all is the steady grinding
weight of English domination--a weight which is literally
crushing millions out of existence, and, as shown by
English writers, is inevitably tending to a most frightful and
widespread catastrophe."
"Christian England" wouldn't murder a Moslem because of
his religion--she's too good for that; but she starves millions
to death to fill her purse, then tries to square herself with
God and man by singing psalms and pointing the finger of
scorn at the barbarities of Islam.