XX

"NATIVES"

No doubt the Gods laughed when Macaulay went to India. Among the

millions who breathed religion, and whose purpose in life was the

contemplation of eternity, a man intruded himself who could not even

meditate, and regarded all religion, outside the covers of the Bible, as

a museum of superstitious relics. Into the midst of peoples of an

immemorial age, which seemed to them as unworthy of reckoning as the

beating wings of a parrot's flight from one temple to the next, there

came a man in whose head the dates of European history were arranged in

faultless compartments, and to whom the past presented itself as a

series of Ministerial crises, diversified by oratory and political

songs. To Indians the word progress meant the passage of the soul

through aeons of reincarnation towards a blissful absorption into the

inconceivable void of indistinctive existence, as when at last a jar is

broken and the space inside it returns to space. For Macaulay the word

progress called up a bustling picture of mechanical inventions, an

increasing output of manufactured goods, a larger demand for improving

literature, and a growth of political clubs to promulgate the blessings

of Reform. The Indian supposed success in life to lie in patiently

following the labour and the observances of his fathers before him,

dwelling in the same simple home, suppressing all earthly desire, and

saving a little off the daily rice or the annual barter in the hope

that, when the last furrow was driven, or the last brazen pot hammered

out, there might still be time for the glory of pilgrimage and the

sanctification of a holy river. To Macaulay, success in life was the

going shop, the growing trade, a seat on the Treasury Bench, the

applause of listening Senates, and the eligible residence of deserving

age.

Thus equipped, he was instructed by the Reform Government which he

worshipped, to mark out the lines for Indian education upon a basis of

the wisdom common to East and West. Though others were dubious, he never

hesitated. From childhood he had never ceased to praise the goodness and

the grace that made the happy English child. As far as in him lay, he

would extend that gracious advantage to the teeming populations of

India. In spite of accidental differences of colour, due to climatic

influences, they too should grow as happy English children, lisping of

the poet's mountain lamb, and hearing how Horatius kept the bridge in

the brave days of old. They should advance to a knowledge of Party

history from the Restoration down to the Reform Bill. The great masters

of the progressive pamphlet, such as Milton and Burke, should be placed

in their hands. Those who displayed scientific aptitude should be

instructed in the miracle of the steam-engine, and economic minds should

early acquaint themselves with the mysteries of commerce, upon which, as

upon the Bible, the greatness of their conquerors was founded. Under

such influence, the soul of India would be elevated from superstitious

degradation, factories would supersede laborious handicrafts, artists,

learning to paint like young Landseer, would perpetuate the appearance

of the Viceregal party with their horses and dogs on the Calcutta

racecourse, and it might be that in the course of years the estimable

Whigs of India would return their own majority to a Front Bench in

Government House.

It was an enviable vision--enviable in its imperturbable

self-confidence. It no more occurred to Macaulay to question the

benefaction of English education and the supremacy of England's commerce

and Constitution than it occurred to him to question the contemptible

inferiority of the race among whom he was living, and for whom he mainly

legislated. In his essay on Warren Hastings he wrote:

"A war of Bengalis against Englishmen was like a war of

sheep against wolves, of men against demons.... Courage,

independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution

and his situation are equally unfavourable.... All those arts

which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar

to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal,

or to the Jew of the Dark Ages. What the horns are to the

buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the sting is to the

bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song, is to woman,

deceit is to the Bengali."

And yet, impenetrable as Macaulay's own ignorance of the Indian peoples

remained, his Minute of 1835, "to promote English literature and

science," and to decree that "all funds appropriated for education

should be employed in English education alone," has marked in Indian

history an era from which the present situation of the country dates.

It is true that the education has not gone far. The Government spends

less than twopence per head upon it; less than a tenth of what it spends

on the army. Only ten per cent. of the males in India can write or

read; only seven per thousand of the females. But, thanks chiefly to

Macaulay's conviction that if everyone were like himself the world would

be happy and glorious, there are now about a million Indians (or one in

three hundred) who can to some extent communicate with each other in

English as a common tongue, and there are some thousands who have become

acquainted with the history of English liberties, and the writings of a

few political thinkers. Together with railways, the new common language

has increased the sense of unity; the study of our political thinkers

has created the sense of freedom, and the knowledge of our history has

shown how stern and prolonged a struggle may be required to win that

possession which our thinkers have usually regarded as priceless. "The

one great contribution of the West to the Indian Nationalist movement,"

writes Mr. Ramsay Macdonald with emphasis, "is its theory of political

liberty."

It is a contribution of which we may well be proud--we of whom

Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die. Whatever the failures of

unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay's spirit could point to this

contribution as sufficient counterbalance. From the works of such

teachers as Mill, Cobbett, Bagehot, and Morley, the mind of India has

for the first time derived the principles of free government. But of all

its teachers, I suppose the greatest and most influential has been

Burke. Since we wished to encourage the love of freedom and the

knowledge of constitutional government, no choice could have been

happier than that which placed the writings and speeches of Burke upon

the curriculum of the five Indian universities. Fortunately for India,

the value of Burke has been eloquently defined by Lord Morley, who has

himself contributed more to the future constitutional freedom of India

than any other Secretary of State. In one passage in his well-known

volume on Burke, he has spoken of his "vigorous grasp of masses of

compressed detail, his wide illumination from great principles of human

experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great political

ends of Justice and Freedom, his large and generous interpretation of

expediency, the morality, the vision, the noble temper." Writing of

Burke's three speeches on the American War, Lord Morley declares:

"It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most

perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for one

who approaches the study of public affairs, whether for knowledge

or for practice. They are an example without fault of

all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an

actor, of great political situations should strive by night and

day to possess."

For political education, one could hardly go further than that. "The

most perfect manual in any literature"--let us remember that decisive

praise. Or if it be said that students require style rather than

politics, let us recall what Lord Morley has written of Burke's style:

"A magnificence and elevation of expression place him

among the highest masters of literature, in one of its highest

and most commanding senses."

But it is frequently asserted that what Indian students require is, not

political knowledge, or literary power, but a strengthening of

character, an austerity both of language and life, such as might

counteract the natural softness, effeminacy, and the tendency to

deception which Macaulay and Lord Curzon so freely informed them of. For

such strengthening and austerity, on Lord Morley's showing, no teacher

could be more serviceable than Burke:

"The reader is speedily conscious," he writes, "of the precedence

in Burke of the facts of morality and conduct, of the

many interwoven affinities of human affection and historical

relation, over the unreal necessities of mere abstract logic....

Besides thus diffusing a strong light over the awful tides of

human circumstance, Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men

to use a grave diligence in caring for high things, and in making

their lives at once rich and austere."

Here are the considered judgments of a man who, by political experience,

by literary power, and the study of conduct, has made himself an

unquestioned judge in the affairs of State, in letters, and in morality.

As examples of the justice of his eulogy let me quote a few sentences

from those very speeches which Lord Morley thus extols--the speeches on

the American War of Independence. Speaking on Conciliation with the

Colonies in 1775, Burke said:

"Permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but

temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not

remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not

governed which is perpetually to be conquered.... Terror is

not always the effect of force, and an armament is not a victory."

Speaking of the resistance of a subject race to the predominant power,

Burke ironically suggested:

"Perhaps a more smooth and accommodating spirit of

freedom in them would be more acceptable to us. Perhaps

ideas of liberty might be desired more reconcilable with an

arbitrary and boundless authority. Perhaps we might wish

the colonists to be persuaded that their liberty is more secure

when held in trust for them by us (as their guardians during

a perpetual minority) than with any part of it in their own

hands."

And, finally, speaking of self-taxation as the very basis of all our

liberties, Burke exclaimed:

"They (British statesmen) took infinite pains to inculcate

as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people

must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess

the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty

could subsist."

It was the second of these noble passages that I once heard declaimed on

the sea-beach at Madras to an Indian crowd by an Indian speaker, who,

following the precepts of Lord Morley, then Secretary of State for

India, had made Burke's speeches his study by day and night. That phrase

describing the ruling Power as the guardians of a subject race during a

perpetual minority has stuck in my mind, and it recurred to me when I

read that Burke's writings and speeches had been removed from the

University curriculum in India. Carlyle's _Heroes_ and Cowper's

_Letters_ have been substituted--excellent books, the one giving the

Indians in rather portentous language very dubious information about

Odin, Luther, Rousseau, and other conspicuous people; the other telling

them, with a slightly self-conscious simplicity, about a melancholy

invalid's neckcloths, hares, dog, and health. Such subjects are all very

well, but where in them do we find the magnificence and elevation of

expression, the sacred gift of inspiring men to make their lives at once

rich and austere, and the other high qualities that Lord Morley found in

"the most perfect manual in any literature"? Reflecting on this new

decision of the Indian University Council, or whoever has taken on

himself to cut Burke out of the curriculum, some of us may find two

passages coming into the memory. One is a passage from those very

speeches of Burke, where he said, "To prove that the Americans ought not

to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself."

The other is Biglow's familiar verse, beginning "I du believe in

Freedom's cause, Ez fur away ez Payris is," and ending:

"It's wal enough agin a king

To dror resolves an' triggers,--

But libbaty's a kind o' thing

Thet don't agree with niggers."