A convict has been known when marching in his gang suddenly to lift up

his spade, and split the skull of the man who walked in front of him,

thus courting a certain death for no reason but to escape from the

monotony of toil. Another has doubled his punishment for fun by calling

out to the magistrates, “Gentlemen, pray remember that I am entitled to

an iron-gang, because this is the second time of my absconding.”

One of the strangest things about the advance of England is the

many-sided character of the form of early settlement: Central North

America we plant with Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of our

whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia with our transported

felons. Transportation has gone through many phases since the system

took its rise in the exile to the colonies under Charles II. of the

moss-troopers of Northumberland. The plan of forcing the exiles to labor

as slaves on the plantations was introduced in the reign of George II.,

and by an Act then passed offenders were actually put up to auction, and

knocked down to men who undertook to transport them, and make what they

could of their labor. In 1786, an Order in Council named the eastern

coast of Australia and the adjacent islands as the spot to which

transportation beyond the seas should be directed, and in 1787 the black

bar was drawn indelibly across the page of history which records the

foundation of the colony of New South Wales. From that time to the

present day the world has witnessed the portentous sight of great

countries in which the major portion of the people, the whole of the

handicraftsmen, were convicted felons.

There being no free people whatever in the “colonies” when first formed,

the governors had no choice but to appoint convicts to all the official

situations. The consequence was robbery and corruption. Recorded

sentences were altered by the convict-clerks, free pardons and grants of

land were sold for money. The convict overseers forced their gangmen to

labor not for government, but for themselves, securing secrecy by the

unlimited supply of rum to the men, who in turn bought native women with

all that they could spare. On the sheep-stations whole herds were

stolen, and those from neighboring lands driven in to show on

muster-days. Enormous fortunes were accumulated by some of the

emancipists, by fraud and infamy rather than by prudence, we are told,

and a vast number of convicts were soon at large in Sydney town itself,

without the knowledge of the police. As the settlements grew in years

and size, the sons of convict parents grew up in total ignorance, while

such few free settlers as arrived--“the ancients,” as they were styled,

or “the ancient nobility of Botany Bay”--were wholly dependent on

convict tutors for the education of their children--the “cornstalks” and

“currency girls;” and cock-fighting was the chief amusement of both

sexes. The newspapers were without exception conducted by gentleman

convicts, or “specials,” as they were called, who were assigned to the

editors for that purpose, and the police force itself was composed of

ticket-of-leave men and “emancipists.” Convicts were thus the only

schoolmasters, the only governesses, the only nurses, the only

journalists, and, as there were even convict clergymen and convict

university professors, the training of the youth of the land was

committed almost exclusively to the felon‘s care.

A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is simple and pathetic; it is

from the parents and guardians resident in Van Dieman‘s Land. They set

forth that there are 13,000 free children growing up in the colony, that

within six years alone 24,000 convicts have been turned into the island,

and of these but 4000 were women. The result is that their children are

brought up in the midst of profligacy and degradation.

The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal infamy degrees can be

conceived, was to be met with in the parties working in the

“chain-gangs” on the roads. “Assignees” too bad even for the whip of the

harshest, or the “beef and beer” of the most lenient master, brutalized

still further, if that were possible, by association with those as vile

as themselves, and followed about the country by women too infamous even

for service in the houses of the up-country settlers, or the gin-palaces

of the towns, worked in gangs upon the roads by day, whenever promises

of spirits or the hope of tobacco could induce them to work at all, and

found a compensation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting their

camp, and traversing the country, robbing and murdering those they met,

and sacking every homestead that lay in their track.

The clerk in charge of one of the great convict barracks was himself a

convict, and had an understanding with the men under his care that they

might prowl about at night and rob on condition that they should share

their gains with him, and that, if they were found out, he should

himself prosecute them for being absent without leave. Juries were

composed either of convicts, or of publicans dependent on the convicts

for their livelihood, and convictions were of necessity extremely rare.

In a plain case of murder the judge was known to say: “If I don‘t attend

to the recommendation to mercy, these fellows will never find a man

guilty again,” and jurymen would frequently hand down notes to the

counsel for the defense, and bid him give himself no trouble, as they

intended to acquit their friend.

The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in the courts was rife. It

has been given in evidence before a Royal Commission by a magistrate of

New South Wales that a Sydney free immigrant once had a tailor‘s bill

sent in which he did not owe, he having been but a few weeks in the

colony. He instructed a lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. He

afterward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor had sworn to

the bill, but the immigrant‘s lawyer, “to save trouble,” had called a

witness who swore to having paid it, which settled the case. Sometimes

there were not only convict witnesses and convict jurors, but convict

judges.

The assignment system was supposed to be a great improvement upon the

jail, but its only certain result was that convict master and convict

man used to get drunk together, while a night never passed without a

burglary in Sydney. Many of the convicts’ mistresses went out from

England as government free emigrants, taking with them funds subscribed

by the thieves at home and money obtained by the robberies for which

their “fancy men” had been convicted, and on their arrival at Sydney

succeeded in getting their paramours assigned to them as convict

servants. Such was the disparity of the sexes that the term “wife” was a

mockery, and the Female Emigration Society and the government vied with

each other in sending out to Sydney the worst women in all London, to

reinforce the ranks of the convict girls of the Paramatta factory. Even

among the free settlers, marriage soon became extremely rare. Convicts

were at the head of the colleges and benevolent asylums; the

custom-house officials were all convicts; one of the occupants of the

office of attorney-general took for his clerk a notorious convict, who

was actually recommitted to Bathurst after his appointment, and yet

allowed to return to Sydney and resume his duties.

The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment system was its gross

uncertainty. Some assigned convicts spent their time working for high

wages, living and drinking with their masters; others were mere slaves.

Whether, however, he be in practice well or ill treated, in the

assignment or apprenticeship system the convict is, under whatever name,

a slave, subject to the caprice of a master who, though he cannot

himself flog his “servant,” can have him flogged by writing a note or

sending his compliments to his neighbor the magistrate on the next run

or farm. The “whipping-houses” of Mississippi and Alabama had their

parallel in New South Wales; a look or word would cause the hurrying of

the servant to the post or the forge as a preliminary to a month in the

chain-gang “on the roads.” On the other hand, nothing under the

assignment system can prevent skilled convict workmen being paid and

pampered by their masters, whose interest it evidently becomes to get

out of them all the work possible through excessive indulgence, as

intelligent labor cannot be produced through the machinery of the

whipping-post, but may be through that of “beef and beer.”

Whatever may have been the true interest of the free settlers, cruelty

was in practice commoner than indulgence. Fifty and a hundred lashes,

months of solitary confinement, years of labor in chains upon the roads,

were laid upon convicts for such petty offenses as brawling,

drunkenness, and disobedience. In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then

in New South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions for disorderly

or dishonest conduct, and in a year the average was 3000 floggings, and

above 100,000 lashes. In Tasmania, where the convicts then numbered

15,000, the summary convictions were 15,000 and the lashes 50,000 a

year.

The criminal returns of Tasmania and New South Wales contain the

condemnation of the transportation system. In the single year of 1834,

one-seventh of the free population of Van Dieman‘s Land were summarily

convicted of drunkenness. In that year, in a population of 37,000,

15,000 were convicted before the courts for various offenses. Over a

hundred persons a year were at that time sentenced to death for crimes

of violence in New South Wales alone. Less than a fourth of the convicts

served their time without incurring additional punishment from the

police, and those who thus escaped proved generally in after-life the

worst of all, and even government officials were forced into admitting

that transportation demoralized far more persons than it reformed.

Hundreds of assigned convicts made their escape to the back country, and

became bushrangers; many got down to the coast, and crossed to the

Pacific islands, whence they spread the infamies of New South Wales

throughout all Polynesia. A Select Committee of the House of Commons

reported, in words characteristic of our race, that these convicts

committed, in New Zealand and the Pacific, “outrages at which humanity

shudders,” and which were to be deplored as being “injurious to our

commercial interests in that quarter of the globe.”

Transportation to New South Wales came to its end none too soon: in

fifty years, 75,000 convicts had been transported to that colony, and

30,000 to the little island of Tasmania in twenty years.

Were there no other argument for the discountenance of transportation,

it would be almost enough to say that the life in the convict-ship

itself makes the reformation of transported criminals impossible. Where

many bad men are brought together, the few not wholly corrupt who may be

among them have no opportunity for speech, and the grain of good that

may exist in every heart can have no chance for life; if not

inclination, pride at least leads the old hand to put down all acts that

are not vile, all words that are not obscene. Those who have sailed in

convict company say that there is something terrible in the fiendish

delight that the “old hands” take in watching the steady degradation of

the “new chums.” The hardened criminals invariably meet the less vile

with outrage, ridicule, and contempt, and the better men soon succumb to

ruffians who have crime for their profession, and for all their

relaxation vice.

To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are told, would be

impossible. The imagination will scarce suffice to call up dreams so

hideous. Four months of filthiness in a floating hell sink even the

least bad to the level of unteachable brutality. Mutiny is unknown; the

convicts are their own masters and the ship‘s, but the shrewd

callousness of the old jail-bird teaches all that there is nothing to be

gained even by momentary success. Rage and violence are seldom seen,

but there is a humor that is worse than blows,--conversation that

transcends all crime in infamy.

It will be long before the last traces of convict disease disappear from

Tasmania and New South Wales; the gold-find has done much to purify the

air, free selection may lead to a still more bright advance,

manufacturing may lend its help; but years must go by before Tasmania

can be prosperous or Sydney moral. Their history is not only valuable as

a guide to those who have to save West Australia, as General Bourke and

Mr. Wentworth saved New South Wales, but as an example, not picked from

ancient rolls, but from the records of a system founded within the

memory of living man, and still existent, of what transportation must

necessarily be, and what it may easily become.

The results of a dispassionate survey of the transportation system are

far from satisfactory. If deportation be considered as a punishment, it

would be hard to find a worse. Punishment should be equable,

reformatory, deterrent, cheap. Transportation is the most costly of all

the punishments that are known to us; it is subject to variations that

cannot be guarded against; it is severest to the least guilty and

slightest to the most hardened; it morally destroys those who have some

good remaining in them; it leaves the ruffianly malefactor worse if

possible than it finds him; and, while it is frightfully cruel and

vindictive in its character, it is useless as a deterrent because its

nature is unknown at home. Transportation to the English thief means

exile, and nothing more; it is only after conviction, when far away from

his uncaught associates, that he comes to find it worse than death.

Instead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime; instead of

reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms in villainy the already

infamous. To every bad man it gives the worst companions; the infamous

are to be reformed by association with the vile; while its effects upon

the colonies are described in every petition of the settlers, and

testified to by the whole history of our plantations in the antipodes,

and by the present condition of West Australia and Tasmania, from which,

however, New South Wales has happily escaped. We have come at last to

transportation in its most limited and restricted sense; the only

remaining step is to be quit of it altogether.

In conjunction with all punishment, we should secure some means of

separating the men one from another as soon as the actual punishment is

terminated: to settle them on land, to settle them with wives where

possible, should be our object. The work which really has in it

something of reformation is that which a man has to do, not in order

that he may avoid whipping, but that he may escape starvation; and it is

from this point of view that transportation is defensible. A man,

however bad, will generally become a useful member of society and a not

altogether neglectful father if allowed to settle upon land away from

his old associates; but morbid tendencies of every kind are strengthened

by close association with others who are laboring under a like

infirmity: and where the former convicts are allowed to hang together in

towns, nothing is to be expected better than that which is actually

found--namely, a state of society where wives speedily become as

villainous as their husbands, and where children are brought up to

emulate their fathers’ crimes.

To keep the men separate from each other, after the expiration of the

sentence, we need to send the convicts to a fairly populous country,

whence arises this great difficulty: if we send convicts to a populous

colony, we are met at once by a cry that we are forcing the workmen of

the colony into a one-sided competition; that we are offering an

unbearable insult to the free population; that, in attempting to reform

the felon, in allowing him to be absorbed into the colonial society, we

are degrading and corrupting the whole community on the chance of

possible benefit to our English villain. On the other hand, if we send

our convicts to an uninhabited land, such as New South Wales and

Tasmania were, such as West Australia is now, we build up an artificial

Pandemonium, whither we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of

the ruffians of the world, to form a community of which each member must

be sufficiently vile of himself to corrupt a nation.

If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can be avoided,

transportation might be replaced by short sentences and solitary

confinement, and low diet, to be followed by forced exile, under

regulations, to some selected colony, say the Ghauts of Eastern Africa,

opposite to Madagascar, or the highlands that skirt the Zambesi River.

Exile after punishment may often be the only way of providing for

convicts who would otherwise be forced to return to their former ways.

The difficulties in the way of discharged convicts seeking employment

are too terrible for them not to accept joyfully any simple plan for

emigration to a country where they are unknown.

In Western Australia, transportation has not been made subservient to

colonization, and both in consequence have failed.

On going on board the Bombay at King George‘s Sound, I at once found

myself in the East. The captain‘s crew of Malays, the native cooks in

long white gowns, the Bombay serangs in dark-blue turbans, red

cummerbunds, and green or yellow trowsers; the negro or Abyssinian

stokers, and passengers in coats of China-grass; the Hindoo

deck-sweepers playing on their tomtoms in the intervals of work; the

punkahs below; the Hindostanee names for every one on deck; and, above

all, the general indolence of everybody, all told of a new world.

A convict clerk superintended the coaling, which took place before we

left the harbor for Ceylon, and I remarked that the dejection of his

countenance exceeded that of the felon-laborers who worked in irons on

the quay. There is a wide-spread belief in England that unfair favor is

shown to “gentlemen convicts.” This is simply not the case; every

educated prisoner is employed at in-door work, for which he is suited,

and not at road-making, in which he might be useless; but there are few

cases in which he would not wish to exchange a position full of hopeless

degradation for that of an out-door laborer, who passes through his

daily routine drudgery (far from the prison) unknown, and perhaps in his

fancy all but free. The longing to change the mattock for the pen is the

result of envy, and confined to those who, if listened to, would prove

incapable of pursuing the pen-driver‘s occupation.

Under a fair and freshening breeze, we left the port of Albany, happy to

escape from a jail the size of India, even those of us who had been

forced to pass only a few days in West Australia.

CHAPTER XIV.

AUSTRALIA.

Pacing the deck with difficulty as the ship tore through the

lava-covered seas, before a favoring gale that caught us off Cape Lewin,

some of us discussed the prospects of the great south land as a whole.

In Australia, it is often said, we have a second America in its infancy;

but it may be doubted whether we have not become so used to trace the

march of empire on a westward course, through Persia and Assyria, Greece

and Rome, then by Germany to England and America, that we are too

readily prepared to accept the probability of its onward course to the

Pacific.

The progress of Australia has been singularly rapid. In 1830, her

population was under 40,000; in 1860, it numbered 1,500,000;

nevertheless, it is questionable how far the progress will continue. The

natural conditions of America in Australia are exactly reversed. All the

best lands of Australia are on her coast, and these are already taken up

by settlers. Australia has three-quarters the area of Europe, but it is

doubtful whether she will ever support a dense population throughout

even half her limits. The uses of the northern territory have yet to be

discovered, and the interior of the continent is far from being tempting

to the settler. Upon the whole, it seems likely that almost all the

imperfectly-known regions of Australia will in time be occupied by

pastoral crown tenants, but that the area of agricultural operations is

not likely to admit of indefinite extension. The central district of

Australia, to the extent, perhaps, of half the entire continent, lies

too far north for winter rains, too far south for tropical wet seasons,

and in these vast solitudes agriculture may be pronounced impossible,

sheep-farming difficult. As far as sufficient water for sheep and

cattle-stations is concerned, there will be no difficulty in retaining

this in tanks or raising it by means of wells, and the wool, tallow, and

even meat, will be carried by those railways for which the country is

admirably fitted, while the construction of locks upon the Murray and

its tributaries will enable steamers to carry the whole trade of the

Riverina. So far, all is well, but the arable lands of Australia are

limited by the rains, and apparently the limit is a sadly narrow one.

Once in awhile, a heavy winter rain appears to fall in the interior;

grass springs up, the lagoons are filled, the up-country squatters make

their fortunes, and all goes prosperously for a time. Accounts reach the

coast cities of the astonishing fertility of the interior, and hundreds

of settlers set off to the remotest districts. Two or three years of

drought then follow, and all the more enterprising squatters are soon

ruined, with a gain, however, sometimes of a few thousand square miles

of country to civilization.

Hitherto the Australians have not made so much as they should have done

of the country that is within their reach. The want of railroads is

incredible. There are but some 400 miles of railway in all

Australia--far less than the amount possessed by the single infant State

of Wisconsin. The sums spent upon the Victorian lines have deterred the

colonists from completing their railway system: £10,000,000 sterling

were spent upon 200 miles of road, through easy country in which the

land cost nothing. The United States have made nearly 40,000 miles of

railroad for less than £300,000,000 sterling; Canada made her 2000 miles

for £20,000,000, or ten times as much railroad as Victoria for only

twice the money. Cuba has already more miles of railroad than all

Australia.

Small as are the inhabited portions of Australia when compared with the

corresponding divisions of the United States, this country nevertheless

to English eyes is huge enough. The part of Queensland already peopled

is five times larger than the United Kingdom. South Australia and West

Australia are each of them nearly as large as British India, but of

these colonies the greater part is desert. Fertile Victoria, the size of

Great Britain, is only a thirty-fourth part of Australia.

In face of the comparatively small amount of good agricultural country

known to exist in Australia, the disproportionate size of the great

cities shows out more clearly than ever. Even Melbourne, when it comes

to be examined, has too much the air of a magnified Hobart, of a city

with no country at its back, of a steam-hammer set up to crack nuts.

Queensland is at present free from the burden of gigantic cities, but

then Queensland is in greater danger of becoming what is in reality a

slave republic.

Morally and intellectually, at all events, the colonies are thriving. A

literature is springing up, a national character is being grafted upon

the good English stock. What shape the Australian mind will take is at

present somewhat doubtful. In addition to considerable shrewdness and

purely Saxon capacity and willingness to combine for local objects, we

find in Australia an admirable love of simple mirth, and a serious

distaste for prolonged labor in one direction, while the down-rightness

and determination in the pursuit of truth, remarkable in America, are

less noticeable here.

The extravagance begotten of the tradition of convict times has not been

without effect, and the settlers waste annually, it is computed, food

which would support in Europe a population of twice their numbers.

This wastefulness is perhaps, however, in some degree a consequence of

the necessary habits of a pastoral people. The 8000 tons of tallow

exported annually by the Australias are said to represent the boiling

down of sheep enough to feed half a million of people for a twelvemonth.

Australian manners, like the American, resemble the French rather than

the British--a resemblance traceable, perhaps, to the essential

democracy of Australia, America, and France. One surface point which

catches the eye in any Australian ball-room, or on any race-course, is

clearly to be referred to the habit of mind produced by democracy--the

fact, namely, that the women dress with great expense and care, the men

with none whatever. This, as a rule, is true of Americans, Australians,

and French.

Unlike as are the Australians to the British, there is nevertheless a

singular mimicry of British forms and ceremonies in the colonies, which

is extended to the most trifling details of public life. Twice in

Australia was I invited to ministerial dinners, given to mark the

approaching close of the session; twice also was I present at university

celebrations, in which home whimsicalities were closely copied. The

governors’ messages to the Colonial Parliaments are travesties of those

which custom in England leads us to call “the Queen‘s.” The very

phraseology is closely followed. We find Sir J. Manners Button gravely

saying: “The representatives of the government of New South Wales and

of _my_ government have agreed to an arrangement on the border

duties....” The “my” in a democratic country like Victoria strikes a

stranger as pre-eminently incongruous, if not absurd.

The imitation of Cambridge forms by the University of Sydney is

singularly close. One almost expects to see the familiar blue gown of

the “bull-dog” thrown across the arm of the first college servant met

within its precincts. Chancellor, Vice-chancellor, Senate, Syndicates,

and even Proctors, all are here in the antipodes. Registrar, professors,

“seniors,” fees, and “petitions with the University seal attached;”

“Board of Classical Studies”--the whole corporation sits in borrowed

plumage; the very names of the colleges are being imitated: we find

already a St. John‘s. The Calendar reads like a parody on the volume

issued every March by Messrs. Deighton. Rules upon matriculation, upon

the granting of _testamurs_; prize-books stamped with college arms are

named, _ad eundem_ degrees are known, and we have imitations of

phraseology even in the announcement of prizes to “the most

distinguished candidates for honors in each of the aforesaid schools,”

and in the list of subjects for the Moral Science tripos. Lent Term,

Trinity Term, Michaelmas Term, take the place of the Spring, Summer, and

Fall Terms of the less pretentious institutions in America, and the

height of absurdity is reached in the regulations upon “academic

costume,” and on the “respectful salutation” by undergraduates of the

“fellows and professors” of the University. The situation on a hot-wind

day of a member of the Senate, in “black silk gown, with hood of scarlet

cloth edged with white fur, and lined with blue silk, black velvet

trencher cap,” all in addition to his ordinary clothing, it is to be

presumed, can be imagined only by those who know what hot winds are. We

English are great acclimatizers: we have carried trial by jury to

Bengal, tenant-right to Oude, and caps and gowns to be worn over loongee

and paejama at Calcutta University. Who are we, that we should cry out

against the French for “carrying France about with them everywhere”?

The objects of the founders are set forth in the charter as “the

advancement of religion and morality, and the promotion of useful

knowledge;” but as there is no theological faculty, no religious test or

exercise whatever, the philosophy of the first portion of the phrase is

not easily understood.

In no Western institutions is the radicalism of Western thought so

thoroughly manifested as in the Universities; in no English colonial

institutions is Conservatism so manifest. The contrast between Michigan

and Sydney is far more striking than that between Harvard and old

Cambridge.

Of the religious position of Australia there is little to be said: the

Wesleyans, Catholics, and Presbyterians are stronger, and the other

denominations weaker, than they are at home. The general mingling of

incongruous objects and of conflicting races, characteristic of colonial

life, extends to religious buildings. The graceful Wesleyan church, the

Chinese joss-house, and the Catholic cathedral stand not far apart in

Melbourne. In Australia, the mixture of blood is not yet great. In South

Australia, where it is most complete, the Catholics and Wesleyans have

great strength. Anglicanism is naturally strongest where the race is

most exclusively British--in Tasmania and New South Wales.

As far as the coast tracts are concerned, Australia, as will be seen

from what has been said of the individual colonies, is rapidly ceasing

to be a land of great tenancies, and becoming a land of small freeholds,

each cultivated by its owner. It need hardly be pointed out that, in the

interests of the country and of the race, this is a happy change. When

English rural laborers commence to fully realize the misery of their

position, they will find not only America, but Australia also, open to

them as a refuge and future home. Looming in the distance, we still,

however, see the American problem of whether the Englishman can live out

of England. Can he thrive except where mist and damp preserve the juices

of his frame? He comes from the fogs of the Baltic shores, and from the

Flemish lowlands; gains in vigor in the south island of New Zealand. In

Australia and America--hot and dry--the type has already changed. Will

it eventually disappear?

It is still an open question whether the change of type among the

English in America and Australia is a climatic adaptation on the part of

nature, or a temporary divergence produced by abnormal causes, and

capable of being modified by care.

Before we had done our talk, the ship was pooped by a green sea, which,

curling in over her taffrail, swept her decks from end to end, and our

helmsmen, although regular old “hard-a-weather” fellows, had difficulty

in keeping her upon her course. It was the last of the gale, and when we

made up our beds upon the skylights, the heavens were clear of scud,

though the moon was still craped with a ceaseless roll of cloud.

CHAPTER XV.

COLONIES.

When a Briton takes a survey of the colonies, he finds much matter for

surprise in the one-sided nature of the partnership which exists between

the mother and the daughter lands. No reason presents itself to him why

our artisans and merchants should be taxed in aid of populations far

more wealthy than our own, who have not, as we have, millions of paupers

to support. We at present tax our humblest classes, we weaken our

defenses, we scatter our troops and fleets, and lay ourselves open to

panics such as those of 1853 and 1859, in order to protect against

imaginary dangers the Australian gold-digger and Canadian farmer. There

is something ludicrous in the idea of taxing St. Giles‘s for the support

of Melbourne, and making Dorsetshire agricultural laborers pay the cost

of defending New Zealand colonists in Maori wars.

It is possible that the belief obtains in Britain among the least

educated classes of the community that colonial expenses are rapidly

decreasing, if they have not already wholly disappeared; but in fact

they have for some years past been steadily and continuously growing in

amount.

As long as we choose to keep up such _propugnacula_ as Gibraltar, Malta,

and Bermuda, we must pay roundly for them, as we also must for such

costly luxuries as our Gold Coast settlements for the suppression of the

slave-trade; but if we confine the term “colonies” to English-speaking,

white-inhabited, and self-governed lands, and exclude on the one hand

garrisons such as Gibraltar, and on the other mere dependencies like the

West Indies and Ceylon, we find that our true colonies in North America,

Australia, Polynesia, and South Africa, involve us nominally in yearly

charges of almost two millions sterling, and, really, in untold

expenditure.

Canada is in all ways the most flagrant case. She draws from us some

three millions annually for her defense, she makes no contribution

toward the cost; she relies mainly on us to defend a frontier of 4000

miles, and she excludes our goods by prohibitive duties at her ports. In

short, colonial expenses which, rightly or wrongly, our fathers bore

(and that not ungrudgingly) when they enjoyed a monopoly of colonial

trade, are borne by us in face of colonial prohibition. What the true

cost to us of Canada may be is unfortunately an open question, and the

loss by the weakening of our home forces we have no means of computing;

but when we consider that, on a fair statement of the case, Canada would

be debited with the cost of a large portion of the half-pay and

recruiting services, of Horse Guards and War Office expenses, of arms,

accouterments, barracks, hospitals, and stores, and also with the

gigantic expenses of two of our naval squadrons, we cannot but admit

that we must pay at least three millions a year for the hatred that the

Canadians profess to bear toward the United States. Whatever may be the

case, however, with regard to Canada, less fault is to be found with the

cost of the Australian colonies. If they bore a portion of the half-pay

and recruiting expenses as well as the cost of the troops actually

employed among them in time of peace, and also paid their share in the

maintenance of the British navy--a share to increase with the increase

of their merchant shipping--there would be little to desire, unless,

indeed, we should wish that, in exchange for a check upon imperial

braggadocio and imperial waste, the Australians should also contribute

toward the expenses of imperial wars.

No reason can be shown for our spending millions on the defense of

Canada against the Americans or in aiding the New Zealand colonists

against the Maories that will not apply to their aiding us in case of a

European war with France, control being given to their representatives

over our public action in questions of imperial concern. Without any

such control over imperial action, the old American colonists were well

content to do their share of fighting in imperial wars. In 1689, in

1702, and in 1744, Massachusetts attacked the French, and, taking from

them Nova Scotia and others of their new plantations, handed them over

to Great Britain. Even when the tax-time came, Massachusetts, while

declaring that the English Parliament had no right to tax colonies, went

on to say that the king could inform them of the exigencies of the

public service, and that they were ready “to provide for them if

required.”

It is not likely, however, nowadays, that our colonists would, for any

long stretch of time, engage to aid us in our purely European wars.

Australia would scarcely feel herself deeply interested in the guarantee

of Luxembourg, nor Canada in the affairs of Servia. The fact that we in

Britain paid our share--or rather nearly the whole cost--of the Maori

wars would be no argument to an Australian, but only an additional proof

to him of our extraordinary folly. We have been educated into a habit of

paying with complacency other people‘s bills--not so the Australian

settler.

As far as Australia is concerned, our soldiers are not used as troops at

all. The colonists like the show of the red-coats, and the military

duties are made up partly of guard-of-honor work, and partly of the

labors of police. The colonists well know that in time of war we should

immediately withdraw our troops, and they trust wholly in their

volunteers and the colonial marine.

As long as we choose to allow the system to continue, the colonists are

well content to reap the benefit. When we at last decide that it shall

cease, they will reluctantly consent. It is more than doubtful whether,

if we were to insist to the utmost upon our rights as toward our

southern colonies, they would do more than grumble and consent to our

demands; and there is no chance whatever of our asking for more than our

simple due.

When you talk to an intelligent Australian, you can always see that he

fears that separation would be made the excuse for the equipment of a

great and costly Australian fleet--not more necessary then than now--and

that, however he may talk, he would, rather than separate from England,

at least do his duty by her.

The fear of conquest of the Australian colonies if we left them to

themselves is on the face of it ridiculous. It is sufficient, perhaps,

to say that the old American colonies, when they had but a million and a

half of people, defended themselves successfully against the then

all-powerful French, and that there is no instance of a self-protected

English colony being conquered by the foreigner. The American colonies

valued so highly their independence of the old country in the matter of

defense that they petitioned the Crown to be allowed to fight for

themselves, and called the British army by the plain name of

“grievance.”

As for our so-called defense of the colonies, in war-time we defend

ourselves; we defend the colonies only during peace. In war-time they

are ever left to shift for themselves, and they would undoubtedly be

better fit to do so were they in the habit of maintaining their military

establishments in time of peace. The present system weakens us and

them--us, by taxes and by the withdrawal of our men and ships; the

colonies, by preventing the development of that self-reliance which is

requisite to form a nation‘s greatness. The successful encountering of

difficulties is the marking feature of the national character of the

English, and we can hardly expect a nation which has never encountered

any, or which has been content to see them met by others, ever to become

great. In short, as matters now stand, the colonies are a source of

military weakness to us, and our “protection” of them is a source of

danger to the colonists. No doubt there are still among us men who would

have wished to have seen America continue in union with England, on the

principle on which the Russian conscripts are chained each to an old

man--to keep her from going too fast--and who now consider it our duty

to defend our colonies at whatever cost, on account of the “prestige”

which attaches to the somewhat precarious tenure of these great lands.

With such men it is impossible for colonial reformers to argue: the

stand-points are wholly different. To those, however, who admit the

injustice of the present system to the tax-payers of the mother-country,

but who fear that her merchants would suffer by its disturbance,

inasmuch as, in their belief, action on our part would lead to a

disruption of the tie, we may plead that, even should separation be the

result, we should be none the worse off for its occurrence. The

retention of colonies at almost any cost has been defended--so far as it

has been supported by argument at all--on the ground that the

connection conduces to trade, to which argument it is sufficient to

answer that no one has ever succeeded in showing what effect upon trade

the connection can have, and that as excellent examples to the contrary

we have the fact that our trade with the Ionian Islands has greatly

increased since their annexation to the kingdom of Greece, and a much

more striking fact than even this--namely, that while the trade with

England of the Canadian Confederation is only four-elevenths of its

total external trade, or little more than one-third, the English trade

of the United States was in 1860 (before the war) nearly two-thirds of

its total external trade, in 1861 more than two-thirds, and in 1866

(first year after the war) again four-sevenths of its total trade.

Common institutions, common freedom, and common tongue have evidently

far more to do with trade than union has; and for purposes of commerce

and civilization, America is a truer colony of Britain than is Canada.

It would not be difficult, were it necessary, to multiply examples

whereby to prove that trade with a country does not appear to be

affected by union with or separation from it. Egypt (even when we

carefully exclude from the returns Indian produce in transport) sends us

nearly all such produce as she exports, notwithstanding that the French

largely control the government, and that we have much less footing in

the country than the Italians, and no more than the Austrians or

Spanish. Our trade with Australia means that the Australians want

something of us and that we need something of them, and that we exchange

with them our produce as we do in a larger degree with the Americans,

the Germans, and the French.

The trade argument being met, and it being remembered that our colonies

are no more an outlet for our surplus population than they would be if

the Great Mogul ruled over them, as is seen by the fact that of every

twenty people who leave the United Kingdom, one goes to Canada, two to

Australia, and sixteen to the United States, we come to the “argument”

which consists in the word “prestige.” When examined, this cry seems to

mean that, in the opinion of the utterer, extent of empire is power--a

doctrine under which Brazil ought to be nineteen and a half times, and

China twenty-six times as powerful as France. Perhaps the best answer to

the doctrine is a simple contradiction: those who have read history with

most care well know that at all times extent of empire has been

weakness. England‘s real empire was small enough in 1650, yet it is

rather doubtful whether her “prestige” ever reached the height it did

while the Cromwellian admirals swept the seas. The idea conveyed by the

words “mother of free nations” is every bit as good as that contained in

the cry “prestige,” and the argument that, as the colonists are British

subjects, we have no right to cast them adrift so long as they wish to

continue citizens, is evidently no answer to those who merely urge that

the colonists should pay their own policemen.

It may, perhaps, be contended that the possession of “colonies” tends to

preserve us from the curse of small island countries, the dwarfing of

mind which would otherwise make us Guernsey a little magnified. If this

be true, it is a powerful argument in favor of continuance in the

present system. It is a question, however, whether our real preservation

from the insularity we deprecate is not to be found in the possession of

true colonies--of plantations such as America, in short--rather than in

that of mere dependencies. That which raises us above the provincialism

of citizenship of little England is our citizenship of the greater

Saxondom which includes all that is best and wisest in the world.

From the foundation, separation would be harmless, does not of necessity

follow the conclusion, separation is to be desired. This much only is

clear--that we need not hesitate to demand that Australia should do her

duty.

With the more enlightened thinkers of England, separation from the

colonies has for many years been a favorite idea, but as regards the

Australias it would hardly be advisable. If we allow that it is to the

interest both of our race and of the world that the Australias should

prosper, we have to ask whether they would do so in a higher degree if

separated from the mother-country than if they remained connected with

her and with each other by a federation. It has often been said that,

instead of the varying relations which now exist between Britain and

America, we should have seen a perfect friendship had we but permitted

the American colonies to go their way in peace; but the example does not

hold in the case of Australia, which is by no means wishful to go at

all.

Under separation we should, perhaps, find the colonies better

emigration-fields for our surplus population than they are at present.

Many of our emigrants who flock to the United States are attracted by

the idea that they are going to become citizens of a new nation instead

of dependents upon an old one. On the separation of Australia from

England we might expect that a portion of these sentimentalists would be

diverted from a colony necessarily jealous of us so long as we hold

Canada, to one which from accordance of interests is likely to continue

friendly or allied. This argument, however, would have no weight with

those who desire the independence of Canada, and who look upon America

as still our colony.

Separation, we may then conclude, though infinitely better than a

continuance of the existing one-sided tie, would, in a healthier state

of our relations, not be to the interest of Britain, although it would

perhaps be morally beneficial to Australia. Any relation, however, would

be preferable to the existing one of mutual indifference and distrust.

Recognizing the fact that Australia has come of age, and calling on her,

too, to recognize it, we should say to the Australian colonists: “Our

present system cannot continue; will you amend it, or separate?” The

worst thing that can happen to us is that we should “drift” blindly into

separation.

After all, the strongest of the arguments in favor of separation is the

somewhat paradoxical one that it would bring us a step nearer to the

virtual confederation of the English race.

PART IV.

INDIA.

A regular and uniform system of spelling of native names and other words

has lately been brought into common use in India, and adopted by the

government. Not without hesitation, I have decided upon ignoring this

improvement, and confining myself to spellings known to and used by the

English in England, for whom especially I am writing.

I am aware that there is no system in the spelling, and that it is

scientifically absurd; nevertheless, the new government spelling is not

yet sufficiently well understood in England to warrant its use in a book

intended for general circulation. The scientific spelling is not always

an improvement to the eye, moreover: Talookdars of Oude may not be

right, but it is a neater phrase than “Taâlukhdars of Awdh;” and it will

probably be long before we in England write “kuli” for coolie, or adopt

the spelling “Tátá hordes.”

CHAPTER I.

MARITIME CEYLON.

We failed to sight the Island of Cocoas, a territory where John Ross is

king--a worthy Scotchman, who having settled down in mid-ocean, some

hundreds of miles from any port, proceeded to annex himself to Java and

the Dutch. On being remonstrated with, he was made to see his error;

and, being appointed governor of and consul to himself and laborers, now

hoists the union-jack, while his island has a red line drawn under its

name upon the map. Two days after quitting John Ross‘s latitudes, we

crossed the line in the heavy noonday of the equatorial belt of calms.

The sun itself passed the equator the same day; so, after having left

Australia at the end of autumn, I suddenly found myself in Asia in the

early spring. Mist obscured the skies except at dawn and sunset, when

there was a clear air, in which floated cirrocumuli with flat

bases--clouds cut in half, as it seemed--and we were all convinced that

Homer must have seen the Indian Ocean, so completely did the sea in the

equatorial belt realize his epithet “purple” or “wine-dark.” All day

long the flying-fish--“those good and excellent creatures of God,” as

Drake styled them--were skimming over the water on every side. The

Elizabethan captain, who knew their delicacy of taste, attributed their

freedom from the usual slime of fish, and their wholesome nature, to

“their continued exercise in both air and water.” The heat was great,

and I made the discovery that Australians as well as Americans can put

their feet above their heads. It may be asserted that the height above

the deck of the feet of passengers on board ocean steamers varies

directly as the heat, and inversely as the number of hours before

dinner.

In the afternoon of the day we crossed the line, we sighted a large East

Indiaman lying right in our course, and so little way was she making

that, on coming up with her, we had to port our helm, in order not to

run her down. She hailed us, and we lay-to while she sent a boat aboard

us with her mail; for although she was already a month out from Calcutta

and bound for London, our letters would reach home before she was round

the Cape--a singular commentary upon the use of sailing ships in the

Indian seas. Before the boat had left our side, the ships had floated so

close together, through attraction, that we had to make several

revolutions with the screw in order to prevent collision.

When we, who were all sleeping upon deck, were aroused by the customary

growl from the European quartermaster of “Four o‘clock, sir! Going to

swab decks, sir! Get up, sir!” given with the flare of the lantern in

our eyes, we were still over a hundred miles from Galle; but before the

sun had risen, we caught sight of Adam‘s Peak, a purple mass upon the

northern sky, and soon we were racing with a French steamer from Saigon,

and with a number of white-sailed native craft from the Maldives. Within

a few hours, we were at anchor in a small bay, surrounded with lofty

cocoa-palms, in which were lying, tossed by a rolling swell, some dozen

huge steamers, yard-arm to yard-arm--the harbor of Point de Galle. Every

ship was flying her ensign, and in the damp hot air the old tattered

union-jacks seemed brilliant crimson, and the dull green of the

cocoa-palms became a dazzling emerald. The scene wanted but the bright

plumage of the Panama macaws.

Once seated in the piazza of the Oriental Company‘s hotel, the best

managed in the East, I had before me a curious scene. Along the streets

were pouring silent crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at the

first glance supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices; their hair

carried off the face with a decorated hoop, and caught at the back by a

high tortoise-shell comb. As they drew near, mustaches began to show,

and I saw that they were men, while walking with them were women naked

to the waist, combless, and far more rough and “manly” than their

husbands. Petticoat and chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and

time after time I had to look twice before I could fix the passer‘s sex.

My rule at last became to set down everybody that was womanly as a man,

and everybody that was manly as a woman. Cinghalese, Kandians, Tamils

from South India, and Moormen with crimson caftans and shaven crowns,

formed the body of the great crowd; but, besides these, there were

Portuguese, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutchmen,

and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled Arabian woman or a

Veddah--one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle. Ceylon has never

been independent, and in a singular mixture of races her ports bear

testimony to the number of the foreign conquests.

Two American missionaries were among the passers-by, but one of them,

detecting strangers, came up to the piazza in search of news. There had

been no loss of national characteristics in these men;--they were

brimful of the mixture of earnestness and quaint profanity which

distinguishes the New England puritan: one of them described himself to

me as “just a kind of journeyman soul-saver, like.”

The Australian strangers were not long left unmolested by more serious

intruders than grave Vermonters. The cry of “baksheesh”--an Arabian word

that goes from Gibraltar to China, and from Ceylon to the Khyber Pass,

and which has reached us in the form of “boxes” in our phrase

Christmas-boxes--was the first native word I heard in the East, at

Galle, as it was afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of the beggars

was an Albino, fair as a child in a Hampshire lane; one of those strange

sports of nature from whom Cinghalese tradition asserts the European

races to be sprung.

The beggars were soon driven off by the hotel servants, and better

licensed plunderers began their work. “Ah safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah

mooney stone, ah opal, ah amtit, ah!” was the cry from every quarter,

and jewel-sellers of all the nations of the East descended on us in a

swarm. “Me givee you written guarantee dis real stone;” “Yes, dat real

stone; but dis _good_ stone--dat no good stone--no water. Ah, see!” “Dat

no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good stone: all dese bad stone,

reg‘lar England stone. You go by next ship? No? Ah, den you come see me

shop. Dese ship-passenger stone--humbuk stone. Ship gone, den you come

me shop; see good stone. When you come? eh? when you come?” “Ah, safeer,

ah catty-eye, ah pinkee collal!” Meanwhile every Galle-dwelling

European, at the bar of the hotel, was adding to the din by shouting to

the native servants, “Boy, turn out these fellows, and stop their

noise.” This cry of “boy” is a relic of the old Dutch times: it was the

Hollander‘s term for his slave, and hence for every member of the

inferior race. The first servant that I heard called “boy” was a

tottering, white-haired old man.

The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One thousand three hundred and

seventy years ago, the Chinese records tell us that Ceylon, then

tributary to the empire, sent presents to the Brother of the Moon, one

of the gifts being a “lapis-lazuli spittoon.” It is probable that some

portion of the million and a half pounds sterling which are annually

absorbed in this small island, but four-fifths the size of Ireland, is

consumed in the setting of the precious stones for native use; every one

you meet wears four or five heavy silver rings, and sovereigns are

melted down to make gold ornaments.

Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers, I went with some of

my Australian friends to stroll upon the ramparts and enjoy the evening

salt breeze. We met several bodies of white-faced Europeans, sauntering

like ourselves, and dressed like us in white trowsers and loose white

jackets and pith hats. What we looked like I do not know, but they

resembled ships’ stewards. At last it struck me that they were soldiers,

and upon inquiring I found that these washed-out dawdlers represented a

British regiment of the line. I was by this time used to see linesmen

out of scarlet, having beheld a parade in bushranger-beards and

blue-serge “jumpers” at Taranaki in New Zealand; but one puts up easier

with the soldier-bushranger than with the soldier-steward.

The climate of the day had been exquisite with its bright air and

cooling breeze, and I had begun to think that those who knew Acapulco

and Echuca could afford to laugh at the East, with its thermometer at

88°. The reckoning came at night, however, for by dark all the breeze

was gone, and the thermometer, instead of falling, had risen to 90° when

I lay down to moan and wait for dawn. As I was dropping off to sleep at

about four o‘clock, a native came round and closed the doors, to shut

out the dangerous land-breeze that springs up at that hour. Again, at

half-past five, it was cooler, and I had begun to doze, when a

cannon-shot, fired apparently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with

something more than a start. I remembered the saying of the Western boy

before Petersburg, when he heard for the first time the five o‘clock

camp-gun, and called to his next neighbor at the fire, “Say, Bill, did

you hap to hear how partic‘lar loud the day broke just now?” for it was

the morning-gun, which in Ceylon is always fired at the same time, there

being less than an hour‘s difference between the longest and shortest

days. Although it was still pitch dark, the bugles began to sound the

_réveille_ on every side--in the infantry lines, the artillery barracks,

and the lines of the Malay regiment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten

minutes afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was eating

plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool room lit by the beams of

the morning sun, so short is the April twilight in Ceylon.

It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat: a European can

labor in the open air in South Australia with the thermometer at 110° in

the shade, while, with a thermometer at 88°, the nights are unbearable

in Ceylon. To discover whether the climate of a place be really hot,

examine its newspapers; and if you find the heat recorded, you may make

up your mind that it is a variable climate, but if no “remarkable heat”

or similar announcements appear, then you may be sure that you are in a

permanently hot place. It stands to reason that no one in the tropics

ever talks of “tropical heat.”

In so equable a climate, the apathy of the Cinghalese is not surprising;

but they are not merely lazy, they are a cowardly, effeminate, and

revengeful race. They sleep and smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing

themselves only once in the day to snatch a bowl of curry and rice, or

to fleece a white man; and so slowly do the people run the race of life

that even elephantiasis, common here, does not seem to put the sufferer

far behind his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mystery when expounded under

this climate. See a few Cinghalese stretched in the shade of a

cocoa-palm, and you can conceive Buddha sitting cross-legged for ten

thousand years contemplating his own perfection.

The second morning that I spent in Galle, the captain of the _Bombay_

was kind enough to send his gig for me to the landing-steps at dawn, and

his Malay crew soon rowed me to the ship, where the captain joined me,

and we pulled across the harbor to Watering-place Point, and bathed in

the shallow sea, out of the reach of sharks. When we had dressed, we

went on to a jetty, to look into the deep water just struck by the

rising sun. I should have marveled at the translucency of the waters had

not the awful clearness with which the bottoms of the Canadian lakes

stand revealed in evening light been fresh within my memory, but here

the bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceivable brilliancy

of color, and tenanted by still more gorgeous fish. Of the two that bore

the palm, one was a little fish of mazarine blue, without a speck of any

other color, and perfect too in shape; the second, a silver fish, with a

band of soft brown velvet round its neck, and another about its tail. In

a still more sheltered cove the fish were so thick that dozens of Moors

were throwing into the water, with the arm-twist of a fly-fisher, bare

hooks, which they jerked through the shoal and into the air, never

failing to bring them up clothed with a fish, caught most times by the

fin.

In the evening, two of us tried a native dinner, at a house where

Cinghalese gentlemen dine when they come into Galle on business. Our

fare was as follows: First course: a curry of the delicious seir-fish, a

sort of mackerel; a prawn curry; a bread-fruit and cocoanut curry; a

Brinjal curry, and a dish made of jackfruit, garlic, and mace; all

washed down by iced water. Second course: plantains, and very old arrack

in thimble-glasses, followed by black coffee. Of meat there was no sign,

as the Cinghalese rarely touch it; and, although we liked our vegetarian

dinner, my friend passed a criticism in action on it by dining again at

the hotel-ordinary one hour later. We agreed, too, that the sickly smell

of cocoanut would cleave to us for weeks.

Starting with an Australian friend, at the dawn of my third day in the

island, I took the coach by the coast road to Columbo. We drove along a

magnificent road in an avenue of giant cocoanut-palms, with the sea

generally within easy sight, and with a native hut at each few yards.

Every two or three miles, the road crossed a lagoon, alive with bathers,

and near the bridge was generally a village, bazaar, and Buddhist

temple, built pagoda-shape, and filled with worshipers. The road was

thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese; and now and again we would pass

a Buddhist priest in saffron-colored robes, hastening along, his

umbrella borne over him by a boy clothed from top to toe in white. The

umbrellas of the priests are of yellow silk, and shaped like ours, but

other natives carry flat-topped umbrellas, gilt, or colored red and

black. The Cinghalese farmers we met traveling to their temples in carts

drawn by tiny bullocks. Such was the brightness of the air, that the

people, down to the very beggars, seemed clad in holiday attire.

As we journeyed on, we began to find more variety in the scenery and

vegetation, and were charmed with the scarlet-blossomed cotton-tree, and

with the areca, or betel-nut palm. The cocoanut groves, too, were

carpeted with an undergrowth of orchids and ipecacuanha, and here and

there was a bread-fruit tree or an hibiscus.

In Ceylon we have retained the Dutch posting system, and small light

coaches, drawn by four or six small horses at a gallop, run over

excellent roads, carrying, besides the passengers, two boys behind, who

shout furiously whenever vehicles or passengers obstruct the mails, and

who at night carry torches high in the air, to light the road. Thus we

dashed through the bazaars and cocoa groves, then across the golden

sands covered with rare shells, and fringed on the one side with the

bright blue dancing sea, dotted with many a white sail, and on the other

side with deep green jungle, in which were sheltered dark lagoons. Once

in a while, we would drive out on to a plain, varied by clumps of fig

and tulip trees, and, looking to the east, would sight the purple

mountains of the central range; then, dashing again into the thronged

bazaars, would see little but the bright palm-trees relieved upon an

azure sky. The road is one continuous village, for the population is

twelve times as dense in the western as in the eastern provinces of

Ceylon. No wonder that ten thousand natives have died of cholera within

the last few months! All this dense coast population is supported by the

cocoanut, for there are in Ceylon 200,000 acres under cocoa-palms, which

yield from seven to eight hundred million cocoa-nuts a year, and are

worth two millions sterling.

Near Bentotté, where we had lunched off horrible oysters of the

pearl-yielding kind, we crossed the Kaluganga River, densely fringed

with mangrove, and in its waters saw a python swimming bravely toward

the shore. Snakes are not so formidable as land-leeches, the Cinghalese

and planters say, and no one hears of many persons being bitten, though

a great reward for an antidote to the cobra bite has lately been offered

by the Rajah of Travancore.

As we entered what the early maps style “The Christian Kyngdom of

Colombo,” though where they found their Christians no one knows, our

road lay through the cinnamon gardens, which are going out of

cultivation, as they no longer pay, although the cinnamon laurel is a

spice-grove in itself, giving cinnamon from its bark, camphor from the

roots, clove oil from its leaves. The plant grows wild about the island,

and is cut and peeled by the natives at no cost save that of children‘s

labor, which they do not count as cost at all. The scene in the gardens

that still remain was charming: the cinnamon-laurel bushes contrasted

well with the red soil, and the air was alive with dragon-flies, moths,

and winged-beetles, while the softness of the evening breeze had tempted

out the half-caste Dutch “burgher” families of the city, who were

driving and walking clothed in white, the ladies with their jet hair

dressed with natural flowers. The setting sun threw brightness without

heat into the gay scene.

A friend who had horses ready for us at the hotel where the mail-coach

stopped, said that it was not too late for a ride through the fort, or

European town inside the walls; so, cantering along the esplanade, where

the officers of the garrison were enjoying their evening ride, we

crossed the moat, and found ourselves in what is perhaps the most

graceful street in the world:--a double range of long low houses of

bright white stone, with deep piazzas, buried in masses of bright

foliage, in which the fire-flies were beginning to play. In the center

of the fort is an Italian campanile, which serves at once as a belfry, a

clock-tower, and a light-house. In the morning, before sunrise, we

climbed this tower for the view. The central range stood up sharply on

the eastern sky, as the sun was still hid behind it, and to the

southeast there towered high the peak where Adam mourned his son a

hundred years. In color, shape, and height, the Cinghalese Alps resemble

the Central Apennines, and the view from Columbo is singularly like that

from Pesaro on the Adriatic. As we looked landwards from the campanile,

the native town was mirrored in the lake, and outside the city the

white-coated troops were marching by companies on to the parade-ground,

whence we could faintly hear the distant bands.

Driving back in a carriage, shaped like a street cab, but with fixed

venetians instead of sides and windows, we visited the curing

establishment of the Ceylon Coffee Company, where the coffee from the

hills is dried and sorted. Thousands of native girls are employed in

coffee-picking at the various stores, but it is doubted whether the

whole of this labor is not wasted, the berries being sorted according to

their shape and size--characteristics which seem in no way to affect the

flavor. The Ceylon exporters say that if we choose to pay twice as much

for shapely as for ill-shaped berries, it is no business of theirs to

refuse to humor us by sorting.

The most remarkable institution in Columbo is the steam factory where

the government make or mend such machinery as their experts certify

cannot be dealt with at any private works existing in the island. The

government elephants are kept at the same place, but I found them at

work up country on the Kandy road.

In passing through the native town upon Slave Island, we saw some French

Catholic priests in their working jungle dresses of blue serge. They

have met with singular successes in Ceylon, having made 150,000

converts, while the English and American missions have between them only

30,000 natives. The Protestant missionaries in Ceylon complain much of

the planters, whom they accuse of declaring, when they wish to hire men,

that “no Christian need apply;” but it is a remarkable fact that neither

Protestants nor Catholics can make converts among the self-supported

“Moormen,” the active pushing inhabitants of the ports, who are

Mohammedans to a man. The chief cause of the success of the Catholics

among the Cinghalese seems to be the remarkable earnestness of the

French and Italian missionary priests. Our English missionaries in the

East are too often men incapable of bearing fatigue or climate; ignorant

of every trade, and inferior even in teaching and preaching powers to

their rivals. It is no easy matter to spread Christianity among the

Cinghalese, the inventors of Buddhism, the most ancient and most widely

spread of all the religions of the world. Every Buddhist firmly believes

in the potential perfection of man, and is incapable of understanding

the ideas of original sin and redemption; and a Cinghalese

Buddhist--passionless himself--cannot comprehend the passionate worship

that Christianity requires. The Catholics, however, do not neglect the

Eastern field for missionary labor. Four of their bishops from Cochin

China and Japan were met by me in Galle, upon their way to Rome.

Our drive was brought to an end by a visit to the old Dutch quarter--a

careful imitation of Amsterdam; indeed, one of its roads still bears the

portentous Batavian name of Dam Street. Their straight canals, and

formal lines of trees, the Hollanders have carried with them throughout

the world; but in Columbo, not content with manufacturing imitation

canals, that began and ended in a wall, they dug great artificial lakes

to recall their well-loved Hague.

The same evening, I set off by the new railway for Kandy and Nuwara

Ellia (pronounced Nooralia) in the hills. Having no experience of the

climate of mountain regions in the tropics, I expected a merely pleasant

change, and left Columbo wearing my white kit, which served me well

enough as far as Ambe Pusse--the railway terminus, which we reached at

ten o‘clock at night. We started at once by coach, and had not driven

far up the hills in the still moonlight before the cold became extreme,

and I was saved from a severe chill only by the kindness of the

coffee-planter who shared the back seat with me, and who, being well

clad in woolen, lent me his great-coat. After this incident, we chatted

pleasantly without fear of interruption from our sole companion--a

native girl, who sat silently chewing betel all the way--and reached

Kandy before dawn. Telling the hotel servants to wake me in an hour, I

wrapped myself in a blanket--the first I had seen since I left

Australia--and enjoyed a refreshing sleep.

CHAPTER II.

KANDY.

The early morning was foggy and cold as an October dawn in an English

forest; but before I had been long in the gardens of the Government

House, the sun rose, and the heat returned once more. After wandering

among the petunias and fan-palms of the gardens, I passed on into the

city, the former capital of the Kandian or highland kingdom, and one of

the holiest of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was never conquered by the

Portuguese or Dutch while they held the coasts, and was not overrun by

us till 1815, while it has several times been in rebellion since that

date. The people still retain their native customs in a high degree: for

instance, the Kandian husband does not take his wife‘s inheritance

unless he lives with her on her father‘s land: if she lives with him,

she forfeits her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is expressly

maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy and polyandry,

although the maritime Cinghalese are governed, as are the English in

Ceylon and at the Cape, by the civil code of Holland.

The difference between the Kandian and coast Cinghalese is very great.

At Kandy, I found the men wearing flowing crimson robes and flat-topped

caps, while their faces were lighter in color than those of the coast

people, and many of them had beards. The women also wore the nose-ring

in a different way, and were clothed above as well as below the waist.

It is possible that some day we may unfortunately hear more of this

energetic and warlike people.

The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The Upper Town is one

great garden, so numerous are the sacred groves, vocal with the song of

the Eastern orioles, but here and there are dotted about pagoda-shaped

temples, identical in form with those of Tartary two thousand miles

away, and from these there proceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost drowns

the song. One of these temples contains the holiest of Buddhist relics,

the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly carried in a grand procession. When

we first annexed the Kandian kingdom, we recognized the Buddhist Church,

made our officers take part in the procession of the Sacred Tooth, and

sent a State offering to the shrine. Times are changed since then, but

the Buddhist priests are still exempt from certain taxes. All round the

sacred inclosures are ornamented walls, with holy sculptured figures;

and in the Lower Town are fresh-water lakes and tanks, formed by damming

the Mavaliganga River, and also, in some measure, holy. An atmosphere of

Buddhism pervades all Kandy.

From Kandy, I visited the coffee-district of which it is the capital and

center, but I was much disappointed with regard to the amount of land

that is still open to coffee-cultivation. At the Government Botanic

Garden at Peredenia (where the jalap plant, the castor-oil plant, and

the ipecacuanha were growing side by side), I was told that the shrub

does not flourish under 1500 nor over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea-level,

and that all the best coffee-land is already planted. Coffee-growing has

already done so much for Ceylon that it is to be hoped that it has not

reached its limit: in thirty-three years it has doubled her trade ten

times, and to England alone she now sends two millions’ worth of coffee

every year. The central district of the island, in which lie the hills

and coffee-country, is, with the exception of the towns, politically not

a portion of Ceylon: there are English capital, English management, and

Indian labor, and the cocoa-palm is unknown; Tamil laborers are

exclusively employed upon the plantations, although the carrying trade,

involving but little labor, is in the hands of the Cinghalese. No such

official discouragement is shown to the European planters in Ceylon as

that which they experience in India; and were there but more good

coffee-lands and more capital, all would be well. The planters say that,

after two years’ heavy expenditure and dead loss, 20 per cent. can be

made by men who take in sufficient capital, but that no one ever does

take capital enough for the land he buys, and that they all have to

borrow from one of the Columbo companies at 12 per cent., and are then

bound to ship their coffee through that company alone. It is regarded as

an open question by many disinterested friends of Ceylon whether it

might not be wise for the local government to advance money to the

planters; but besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection to

this course, that the government, becoming interested in the success of

coffee-planting, might also come to connive at the oppression of the

native laborers. This oppression of the people lies at the bottom of

that Dutch system which is often held up for our imitation in Ceylon.

Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java system forget that it is

not denied that in the tropical islands, with an idle population and a

rich soil, compulsory labor may be the only way of developing the

resources of the countries, but they fail to show the justification for

our developing the resources of the country by such means. The Dutch

culture-system puts a planter down upon the crown lands, and, having

made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out how he shall repay

the government. Forced labor--under whatever name--is the natural

result.

The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs by princely salaries

and vast percentage upon the crops their people raise, and force the

native agriculturists to grow spices for the Royal Market of Amsterdam.

Of the purchase of these spices the government has a monopoly: it buys

them at what price it will, and, selling again in Europe to the world,

clears annually some £4,000,000 sterling by the job. That plunder,

slavery, and famine often follow the extension of their system is

nothing to the Dutch. Strict press-laws prevent the Dutch at home from

hearing anything of the discontent in Java, except when famine or

insurrection calls attention to the isle; and £4,000,000 a year profit,

and half the expenses of their navy paid for them by one island in the

Eastern seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced people by

starvation.

The Dutch often deny that the government retains the monopoly of export;

but the fact of the matter is that the Dutch Trading Company, who have

the monopoly of the exports of the produce of crown lands--which amount

to two-thirds of the total exports of the isle--are mere agents of the

government.

It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the culture-system, the

Dutch principle of making a profit out of the countries which they rule

is inconsistent with the position of a Christian nation. It is the

ancient system of countries having possessions in the East, and upon our

side we are not able to show any definite reasons in favor of our course

of scrupulously keeping separate the Indian revenue, and spending

Indian profits upon India and Cinghalese in Ceylon, except such reasons

as would logically lead to our quitting India altogether. That the Dutch

should make a profit out of Java is perhaps not more immoral than that

they should be there. At the same time, the character of the Dutch

system lowers the tone of the whole Dutch nation, and especially of

those who have any connection with the Indies, and effectually prevents

future amendment. With our system, there is some chance of right being

done, so small is our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no

surplus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free from that bane of

Java,--the desire of the local authorities to increase as much as

possible the valuable productions of their districts, even at the risk

of famine, provided only that they may hope to put off the famine until

after their time--a desire that produces the result that subaltern Dutch

officers who observe in their integrity the admirable rules which have

been made for the protection of the native population are heartily

abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled.

Not to be carried away by the material success of the Dutch system, it

is as well to bear in mind its secret history. A private company--the

Dutch Trading Society--was founded at Amsterdam in 1824, the then King

being the largest shareholder. The company was in difficulties in 1830,

when the King, finding he was losing money fast, sent out as

Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend Van den

Bosch. The next year, the culture-system, with all its attendant

horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den Bosch, the Dutch Trading

Society being made agents for the government. The result was the

extraordinary prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the

merchant-king of a private fortune of fabulous amount.

The Dutch system has been defended by every conceivable kind of blind

misrepresentation; it has even been declared, by writers who ought

certainly to know better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland

draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxation! Even the

blindest admirers of the system are forced, however, to admit that it

involves the absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total

exclusion from knowledge of the Java people.

The Ceylon planters have at present political as well as financial

difficulties on their hands. They have petitioned the Queen for

“self-government for Ceylon,” and for control of the revenue by

“representatives of the public”--excellent principles, if “public” meant

public, and “Ceylon,” Ceylon; but, when we inquire of the planters what

they really mean, we find that by “Ceylon” they understand Galle and

Columbo Fort, and by “the public” they mean themselves. There are at

present six unofficial members of the Council: of these, the whites have

three members, the Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the

planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a Council to which

supreme power shall be intrusted in the disposition of the revenues.

They are, indeed, careful to explain that they in no way desire the

extension of representative institutions to Ceylon.

The first thing that strikes the English traveler in Ceylon is the

apparent slightness of our hold upon the country. In my journey from

Galle to Columbo, by early morning and mid-day, I met no white man; from

Columbo to Kandy, I traveled with one, but met none; at Kandy, I saw no

whites; at Nuwara Ellia, not half a dozen. On my return, I saw no whites

between Nuwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there was a white man in the

railway-station; and on my return by evening from Columbo to Galle, in

all the thronging crowds along the roads there was not a single

European. There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who live and

die and never see a white man. Out of the two and a quarter millions of

people who dwell in what the planters call the “colony of Ceylon,” there

are but 3000 Europeans, of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and 250 our

civilians. Of the European non-official class, there are but 1300

persons, or about 500 grown-up men. The proposition of the Planters’

Association is that we should confide the despotic government over two

and a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hindoo laborers to

these 500 English Christian employers. It is not the Ceylon planters who

have a grievance against us, but we who have a serious complaint against

them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly provide for all the

costs of her defense.

Some of the mountain views between Kandy and Nuwara Ellia are full of

grandeur, though they lack the New Zealand snows; but none can match,

for variety and color, that which I saw on may return from the ascent to

the Kaduganava Pass, where you look over a foreground of giant-leaved

talipot and slender areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet

blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with banyan-tree groves

and broken by wooded hills. On either side, the deep valley-bottoms are

carpeted with bright green--the wet rice-lands, or terraced

paddy-fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop throughout

the year.

In the union of rich foliage with deep color and grand forms, no scenery

save that of New Zealand can bear comparison with that of the hill

country of Ceylon, unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java and the far

Eastern Isles.

CHAPTER III.

MADRAS TO CALCUTTA.

SPENDING but a single day in Madras--an inferior Columbo--I passed on to

Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs

about the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians “The

Benighted Presidency.” Small as are the houses, poor as are the shops,

every one looks well-to-do, and everybody happy, from the not

undeservedly famed cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the shore.

Coffee and good government have of late done much for Madras.

The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is altogether inferior to

the fine-weather swell on the west coast of New Zealand, and only to be

dignified and promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination

which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before they reach Ceylon,

or the pork and molasses when off Nantucket light-ship. The row through

the first roller in the lumbering Massullah boat, manned by a dozen

sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the first and second

lines of spray, and then the dash for shore, the crew singing their

measured “Ah! lah! lálala!--ah! lah! lálala!” the stroke coming with the

accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking with excitement, is a more

pretentious ceremony than that which accompanies the crossing of

Hokitika bar, but the passage is a far less dangerous one. The

Massullah boats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but built

without nails, so that they “give” instead of breaking up when battered

by the sand on one side and the seas upon the other. This is a very wise

precaution in the case of boats which are always made to take the shore

broadside on. The first sea that strikes the boat either shoots the

passenger on to the dry sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught

by the natives on the beach, but the Massullah boat herself gets a

terrible banging before the crew can haul her out of reach of the seas.

Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-tree, but seeing no

land, we entered the Hoogly, steaming between light-houses, guard-ships,

and buoys, but not catching a glimpse of the low land of the

Sunderabunds till we had been many hours in “the river.” After lying

right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, we started on our run up

to Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene

was English; there was nothing tropical about it except the mist upon

the land; and low villas and distant factory-chimneys reminded one of

the Thames between Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where

large ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building on our

right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost

imposing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of Oude, the place

where, it is said, are carried on deeds become impossible in Lucknow.

Such has been the extravagance of the King that the government of India

has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to pay his debts, and

deduct them from his income of £120,000 a year; for we pay into the

privy purse of the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly sum

that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria. Whatever income is

allowed to native princes, they always spend the double. The experience

of the Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this respect.

Removed from that slight restraint upon expenditure which the fear of

bankruptcy or revolution forces upon reigning kings, native princes

supported by European governments run recklessly into debt. The

commission which was sitting upon the debts of the King of Oude while I

was in Calcutta warned him that, if he offended a second time,

government would for the future spend his income for him. It is not the

King‘s extravagance alone, however, that is complained of. Always

notorious for debauchery, he has now become infamous for his vices. One

of his wives was arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls

for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For nine years he has never

left his palace, yet he spends, we are told, from £200,000 to £250,000 a

year.

In his extravagance and immorality the King of Oude does not stand alone

in Calcutta. His mode of life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his

vices are mimicked by every young Bengalee baboo. It is a question

whether we are not responsible for the tone which has been taken by

“civilization” in Calcutta. The old philosophy has gone, and left

nothing in its place; we have by moral force destroyed the old religions

in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether the character of our

Indian government, at once leveling and paternal, has not much to do

with the spread of careless sensuality is a question before answering

which it would be well to look to France, where a similar government has

for sixteen years prevailed. In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is

fast degrading the French citizen to the moral level of the Bengalee

baboo.

The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view of the Government

House from the Park Reserve--a miniature Sahara since its trees were

destroyed by the great cyclone. The Viceroy‘s dwelling, though crushed

by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and astonishing

design, is an imposing building; but it is the only palace in the “city

of palaces”--a name which must have been given to the pestiferous city

by some one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool and London.

The true city of palaces is Lucknow.

In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that unbounded hospitality

of the great mercantile houses in the East of which I have since

acquired many pleasing remembrances. The luxury of “the firm” impresses

the English traveler; the huge house is kept as a hotel; every one is

welcome to dinner, breakfast, and bed in the veranda, or in a room, if

he can sleep under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and

sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always without notice to the

butlers or the cooks, but every one is welcome, down to the friend of a

friend‘s friend; and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to

members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most hospitable welcome

from the other clerks, even when all the partners are away. “If Brown is

not there, Smith will be, and if he‘s away, why then Johnson will put

you up,” is the form of invitation to the hospitalities of an Eastern

firm. The finest of fruits are on table between five and six, and tea

and iced drinks are ready at all times, from dawn to breakfast--a

ceremony which takes place at ten. To the regular meals you come in or

not as you please, and no one trained in Calcutta or Bombay can conceive

offense being taken by a host at his guest accepting, without consulting

him, invitations to dine out in the city, or to spend some days at a

villa in its outskirts. Servants are in the corridors by day and night

at the call of guests, and your entertainers tell you that, although

they have not time to go about with you, servants will always be ready

to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the carriage of some member

of the firm.

The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of Galle, though the

constituents are not the same. Greeks, Armenians, and Burmese, besides

many Eurasians, or English-speaking half-castes, mingle with the mass of

Indian Mohammedans and Hindoos. The hot weather having suddenly set in,

the Calcutta officials, happier than the merchants--who, however, care

little about heat when trade is good--were starting for Simla in a body,

“just as they were warming to their work,” as the Calcutta people say,

and, finding that there was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I,

too, determined to set off.

The heat was great at night, and the noisy native crows and whistling

kites held durbars inside my window in the only cool hour of the

twenty-four--namely, that which begins at dawn--and thus hastened my

departure from Calcutta by preventing me from taking rest while in it.

Hearing that at Patna there was nothing to be seen or learnt, I traveled

from Calcutta to Benares--500 miles--in the same train and railway

carriage. Our first long stoppage was at Chandernagore, but, as the

native baggage-coolies, or porters, howl the station names in their own

fashion, I hardly recognized the city in the melancholy moan of

“Orn-dorn-orn-gorne,” which welcomed the train, and it was not till I

saw a French infantry uniform upon the platform that I remembered that

Chandernagore, a village belonging to the French, lies hard by Calcutta,

to which city it was once a dangerous rival. It is said that the French

retain their Indian dependencies, instead of selling them to us as did

the Dutch, in order that they may ever bear in mind the fact that we

once conquered them in India; but it would be hard to find any real

ground for their retention, unless they are held as centers for the

Catholic missions. We will not even permit them to be made smuggling

depots, for which purpose they would be excellently adapted. The whole

of the possessions in India of the French amount together to only

twenty-six leagues square. Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French

Indian dependency of which the name is often heard in Europe, is cut

into several portions by strips of British territory, and the whole of

the French-Indian dependencies are mere specks of land isolated in our

vast territories. The officer who was lounging in the station was a

native; indeed, in the territory of Chandernagore there are but 230

Europeans, and but 1500 in all French India. He made up to my

compartment as though he would have got in, which I wished that he would

have done, as natives in the French service all speak French, but,

seeing a European, he edged away to a dark uncomfortable compartment.

This action was, I fear, a piece of silent testimony to the prejudice

which makes our people in India almost invariably refuse to travel with

a native, whatever may be his rank.

As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal, where the East Indian Railway

taps the Ganges, the station scenes became more and more interesting. We

associate with the word “railway” ideas that are peculiarly

English:--shareholders and directors, guards in blue, policemen in dark

green, and porters in brown corduroy; no English institution, however,

assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station-masters and sparrows

alone are English; everything else on a Bengal railway is purely

Eastern. Sikh irregulars jostle begging fakeers in the stations; palkees

and doolies--palankeens and sedans, as we should call them--wait at the

back doors; ticket-clerks smoke water-pipes; an ibis drinks at the

engine-tank; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame elephant

reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph-wire, on which sits a hoopoe,

while an Indian vulture crowns the post.

When we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the only natural objects

which for 1600 miles break the level of the great plain of Hindostan,

people of the central tribes, small-headed and savage-looking, were

mingled with the Hindoos at the stations. In blackness there was not

much difference between the races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black

as Guinea negroes.

As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well-filled skin upon his

back appeared at every station, and came running to the native cars in

answer to the universal long-drawn shout of “Ah! ah! Bheestie--e!”

The first view of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm. The Thames below

Gravesend half dried up would be not unlike it; indeed, the river itself

is as ugly as the Mississippi or Missouri, while its banks are more

hideous by far than theirs. Beyond Patna, the plains, too, become as

monotonous as the river,--flat, dusty, and treeless, they are in no way

tropical in their character; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the

tropics. I afterward found that a man may cross India from the Irawaddy

to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no tropical cultivation. The

aspect of the Ganges valley is that of Cambridgeshire, or of parts of

Lincoln seen after harvest time, and with flocks of strange and

brilliant birds and an occasional jackal thrown in. The sun is

hot--not, indeed, much hotter than in Australia, but the heat is of a

different kind from that encountered by the English in Ceylon or the

West Indies. From a military point of view, the plains may be described

as a parade-ground continued to infinity; and this explains the success

of our small forces against the rebels in 1857, our cavalry and

artillery having in all cases swept their infantry from these levels

with the utmost ease.

A view over the plains by daylight is one which in former times some old

Indians can never have enjoyed. Many a lady in the days of palki-dawk

has passed a life in the Deccan table-land without ever seeing a

mountain, or knowing she was on the top of one. Carried up and down the

ghauts at night, it was only by the tilting of her palki that she could

detect the rise or fall, for day traveling for ladies was almost unknown

in India before it was introduced with the railways.

At Patna, the station was filled with crowds of railway coolies, or

navvies, as we should say, who, with their tools and baggage, were

camped out upon the platform, smoking peacefully. I afterward found that

natives have little idea of time-tables and departure hours. When they

want to go ten miles by railway, they walk straight down to the nearest

station, and there smoke their hookahs till the train arrives--at the

end of twenty-four hours or ten minutes, as the case may be. There is

but one step that the more ignorant among the natives are in a hurry to

take, and that is to buy their tickets. They are no sooner come to the

terminus than with one accord they rush at the native ticket-clerk,

yelling the name of the station to which they wish to go. In vain he

declares that, the train not being due for ten or fifteen hours, there

is plenty of time for the purchase. Open-mouthed, and wrought up almost

to madness, the passengers dance round him, screaming “Burdwan!” or

“Serampoor!” or whatever the name may be, till at last he surrenders at

discretion. There is often no room for all who wish to go; indeed, the

worst point about the management of the railways lies in the defective

accommodation for the native passengers, and their treatment by the

English station-masters is not always good: I saw them on many occasions

terribly kicked and cuffed; but Indian station-masters are not very

highly paid, and are too often men who cannot resist the temptations to

violence which despotic power throws in their way. They might ask with

the Missourian in the United States army when he was accused of

drunkenness, “Whether Uncle Sam expected to get all the cardinal virtues

for fifteen dollars a month?”

The Indian railways are all made and worked by companies; but as the

government guarantees the interest of five per cent., which only the

East Indian, or Calcutta and Delhi, line can pay, it interferes much in

the management. The telegraph is both made and worked by government; and

the reason why the railways were not put upon the same footing is that

the government of India was doubtful as to the wisdom of borrowing

directly the vast sum required, and doubtful also of the possibility of

borrowing it without diminishing its credit.

The most marked among the effects of railways upon the state of India

are, as a moral change, the weakening of caste ties--as a physical, the

destruction of the Indian forests. It is found that if a rich native

discovers that he can, by losing caste in touching his inferiors, travel

a certain distance in a comfortable second-class carriage for ten

rupees, while a first-class ticket costs him twenty, he will often risk

his caste to save his pound; still, caste yields but slowly to railways

and the telegraph. It is but a very few years since one of my friends

received a thousand rupees for pleading in a case which turned on the

question whether the paint-spot on Krishna‘s nose, which is also a caste

sign, should be drawn as a plain horizontal crescent, or with a pendant

from the center. It is only a year since, in Orissa, it was seen that

Hindoo peasants preferred cannibalism, or death by starvation, to

defilement by eating their bullocks.

As for the forests, their destruction has already in many places changed

a somewhat moist climate to one of excessive drought, and planting is

now taking place with a view both to supplying the railway engines and

bringing back the rains. On the East Indian line, I found that they

burnt mixed coal and wood, but the Indian coal is scarce and bad, and

lies entirely in shallow “pockets.”

The train reached Mogul-Serai, the junction for Benares, at midnight of

the day following that on which it left Calcutta, and, changing my

carriage at once, I asked how long it would be before we started, to

which the answer was, “half an hour;” so I went to sleep. Immediately,

as it seemed, I was awakened by whispering, and, turning, saw a crowd of

boys and baggage-coolies at the carriage-door. When I tried to discover

what they wanted, my Hindostanee broke down, and it was some time before

I found that I had slept through the short journey from Mogul-Serai, and

had dozed on in the station till the lights had been put out, before the

coolies woke me. Crossing the Ganges by the bridge of boats, I found

myself in Benares, the ancient Varanasi, and sacred capital of the

Hindoos.

CHAPTER IV.

BENARES.

In the comparative cool of early morning, I sallied out on a stroll

through the outskirts of Benares. Thousands of women were stepping

gracefully along the crowded roads, bearing on their heads the

water-jars, while at every few paces there was a well, at which hundreds

were waiting along with the bheesties their turn for lowering their

bright gleaming copper cups to the well-water to fill their skins or

vases. All were keeping up a continual chatter, women with women, men

with men: all the tongues were running ceaselessly. It is astonishing to

see the indignation that a trifling mishap creates--such gesticulation,

such shouting, and loud talk, you would think that murder at least was

in question. The world cannot show the Hindoo‘s equal as a babbler; the

women talk while they grind corn, the men while they smoke their

water-pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; when not talking, he is

playing on his tomtom.

The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred Monkeys, I found

thronged with worshipers, and garlanded in every part with roses: it

overhangs one of the best holy tanks in India, but has not much beauty

or grandeur, and is chiefly remarkable for the swarms of huge,

fat-paunched, yellow-bearded, holy monkeys, whose outposts hold one

quarter of the city, and whose main body forms a living roof to the

temple. A singular contrast to the Doorgha Khond was the Queen‘s

College for native students, built in a mixture of Tudor and Hindoo

architecture. The view from the roof is noticeable, depending as it does

for its beauty on the mingling of the rich green of the timber with the

gay colors of the painted native huts. Over the trees are seen the

minarets at the river-side, and an unwonted life was given to the view

by the smoke and flames that were rising from two burning huts, in

widely-separated districts of the native town. It is said that the

natives, whenever they quarrel with their neighbors, always take the

first opportunity of firing their huts; but in truth the huts in the hot

weather almost fire themselves, so inflammable are their roofs and

sides.

When the sun had declined sufficiently to admit of another excursion, I

started from my bungalow, and, passing through the elephant-corral, went

down with a guide to the ghauts, the observatory of Jai Singh, and the

Golden Temple. From the minarets of the mosque of Aurungzebe I had a

lovely sunset view of the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges; but the real

sight of Benares, after all, lies in a walk through the tortuous

passages that do duty for streets. No carriages can pass them, they are

so narrow. You walk preceded by your guide, who warns the people, that

they may stand aside and not be defiled by your touch, for that is the

real secret of the apparent respect paid to you in Benares; but the

sacred cows are so numerous and so obstinate that you cannot avoid

sometimes jostling them. The scene in the passages is the most Indian in

India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo princes spending a week in

purification at the holy place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and

houses, the deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the smoke

and sickening smell from the “burning ghauts” that meets you, mingled

with a sweeter smell of burning spices, as you work your way through

the vast crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river‘s

bank--all alike are strange to the English traveler, and fill his mind

with that indescribable awe which everywhere accompanies the sight of

scenes and ceremonies that we do not understand. When once you are on

the Ganges bank itself, the scene is wilder still:--a river front of

some three miles, faced with lofty ghauts, or flights of river stairs,

over which rise, pile above pile, in sublime confusion, lofty palaces

with oriel windows hanging over the sacred stream; observatories with

giant sun-dials, gilt domes (_golden_, the story runs), and silver

minarets. On the ghauts, rows of fires, each with a smouldering body; on

the river, boat-loads of pilgrims, and fakeers praying while they float;

under the houses, lines of prostrate bodies--those of the sick--brought

to the sacred Ganges to die--or, say our government spies, to be

murdered by suffocation with sacred mud; while prowling about are the

wolf-like fanatics who feed on putrid flesh. The whole is lit by a

sickly sun fitfully glaring through the smoke, while the Ganges stream

is half obscured by the river fog and reek of the hot earth.

The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are ornamented with

paintings of every beast that walks and bird that flies, with monsters,

too--pink and green and spotted--with griffins, dragons, and

elephant-headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there are

representations of red-coated soldiers--English, it would seem, for they

have white faces, but so, the Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies,

who are certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting leads to

the decoration with pink and yellow spots of the very cows. The tiger is

the commonest of all the figures on the walls--indeed, the explanation

that the representations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured in

tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the belief that the tiger must

have been worshiped in India at some early date. All Easterns are

inclined to worship the beasts that eat them: the Javanese light

floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles; the Scindees at Kurrachee

venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eating alligator; the hill-tribes

pray to snakes; indeed, to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air

of devil-worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape:

the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated by infernal

music, they are often worshiped with obscene and hideous rites. There is

even something cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tomtoms; the

sound seems to connect itself with widow-burning, with child-murder,

with Juggernauth processions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom

has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics; its booming is

bound up with the thousand barbarisms of false religion. If the scene on

the Benares ghauts is full of horrors, we must not forget that Hindooism

is a creed of fear and horror, not of love.

The government of India has lately instituted an inquiry into the

alleged abuses of the custom of taking sick Hindoos to the Ganges-side

to die, with a view to regulating or suppressing the practice which

prevails in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Benares, Bengal

people are still taken to the river-side, but not so other natives, as

Hindoos dying anywhere in the sacred city have all the blessings which

the most holy death can possibly secure; the Benares Shastra, moreover,

forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases of it in the city,

although I had seen many near Calcutta. Not only are aged people brought

from their sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocated

with the Ganges water poured down their throats, but, owing to the

ridicule which follows if they recover, or the selfishness of their

relatives, the water is often muddier than it need be: hence the phrase

“ghaut murder,” by which this custom is generally known. Similar customs

are not unheard of in other parts of India, and even in Polynesia and

North America. The Veddahs, or black aborigines of Ceylon, were, up to

very lately, in the habit of carrying their dying parents or children

into the jungle, and, having placed a chatty of water and some rice by

their side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. Under pressure

from our officials, they are believed to have ceased to act thus, but

they continue, we are told, to throw their dead to the leopards and

crocodiles. The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone

those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men, but it is probable

that, among the rude races, the custom which seems to be a relic of

human sacrifice has not been so grossly abused as it has been by the

Bengal Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of many similar

barbarities that disgrace the religion of the Hindoos, but it is fast

sharing the fate of suttee and infanticide.

As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most unholy-looking

visitors to the sacred town. Fierce Rajpoots, with enormous turbans

ornamented with zig-zag stripes: Bengal bankers, in large purple

turbans, curling their long white mustaches, and bearing their critical

noses high aloft as they daintily picked their way over the garbage of

the streets; and savage retainers of the rajahs staying for a season at

their city palaces, were to the traveler‘s eye no very devout pilgrims.

In truth, the immoralities of the “holy city” are as great as its

religious virtues, and it is the chosen ground of the loose characters

as well as of the pilgrims of the Hindoo world.

In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar, hardly the slightest

trace of European dressing was to be perceived: the varnished boots of

the wealthier Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English

trade--a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essential

conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any quantity of old army

clothing to be got for the asking, you never see a rag of it on a native

back--not even on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to

an out-door servant, he will cut it into strips and wear them as a

puggree round his head; but this is about the only thing he will accept,

unless to sell it in the bazaar.

As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains of laden camels

that were winding slowly through the tortuous streets, I saw a European

soldier cheapening a bracelet with a native jeweler. He was the first

_topee wallah_ (“hat-fellow,” or “European”) that I had seen in Benares

City. Calcutta is the only town in Northern India in which you meet

Europeans in your walks or rides, and, even there, there is but one

European to every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including

troops, children, and officials of all kinds, far less than as many

thousands of Europeans as there are millions of natives.

The evening after that on which I visited the native town, I saw in

Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the India hated and dreaded by our

troops--by day a blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more

deadly fog--a hot white fog, into which the sun disappears half an hour

before his time for setting, and out of which he shoots soon after seven

in the morning, to blaze and kill again--a pestiferous fever-breeding

ground-fog, out of which stand the tops of the palms, though their

stems are invisible in the steam. Compared with our English summer

climate, it seems the atmosphere of another planet.