In India, dress still serves the purpose of denoting rank. The peasant

is clothed in cotton, the prince in cloth of gold; and even religion,

caste, and occupation are distinguished by their several well-known and

unchanging marks. Indeed, the fixity of fashion is as singular in

Hindostan as its infinite changeableness in New York or France. The

patterns we see to-day in the Bombay bazaar are those which were popular

in the days of Shah Jehan. This regulation of dress by custom is one of

the many difficulties in the way of our English manufacturers in their

Indian ventures. There has been an attempt made lately to bring about

the commercial annexation of India to England: Lancashire is to

manufacture the Longee, Dhotee, and Saree, we are told; Nottingham or

Paisley are to produce us shumlas; Dacca is to give way to Norwich, and

Coventry to supersede Jeypoor. It is strange that men of Indian

knowledge and experience should be found who fail to point out the

absurdity of our entertaining hopes of any great trade in this

direction. The Indian women of the humbler castes are the only customers

we can hope to have in India; the high-caste people wear only ornamented

fabrics, in the making of which native manufacturers have advantages

which place them out of the reach of European competition: cheap labor;

workmen possessed of singular culture, and of a grace of expression

which makes their commonest productions poems in silk and velvet;

perfect knowledge of their customers’ wants and tastes; scrupulous

regard to caste conservatism--all these are possessed by the Hindoo

manufacturer, and absent in the case of the firms of Manchester and

Rochdale. As a rule, all Indian dress is best made by hand; only the

coarsest and least ornamented fabrics can be largely manufactured at

paying rates in England. As for the clothing of the poorer people, the

men for the most part wear nothing, the women little, and that little

washed often, and changed never. Even for the roughest goods we cannot

hope to undersell the native manufacturers by much in the presidency

towns. Up country, if we enter into the competition, it can scarcely

fail to be a losing one. England is not more unlikely to be clothed from

India than India from Great Britain. If European machinery is needed, it

will be erected in Yokohama, or in Bombay, not in the West Riding.

It is hardly to be believed that Englishmen have for some years been

attempting to induce the natives to adopt our flower patterns--peonies,

butterflies, and all. Ornament in India is always subordinate to the

purpose which the object has to serve. Hindoo art begins where English

ends. The principles which centuries of study have given us as the

maxims upon which the grammar of ornament is based are those which are

instinctive in every native workman. Every costume, every vase, every

temple and bazaar in India, gives eye-witness that there is truth in the

saw that the finest taste is consistent with the deepest slavery of

body, with the utmost slavishness of mind. A Hindoo of the lowest caste

will spurn the gift of a turban or a loin-cloth the ornamentation of

which consists not with his idea of symmetry and grace. Nothing could

induce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, masquerading dress as

maddens a Maori with delight and his friends with jealousy and

mortification. In art as in deportment, the Hindoo loves harmony and

quiet; and dress with the Oriental is an art: there is as much

feeling--as deep poetry--in the curves of the Hindoo Saree as in the

outlines of the Taj.

Umritsur is the spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and the Durbar Temple in

the center of the town is the holiest of their shrines. It stands, with

the sunbeams glancing from its gilded roof, in the middle of a very holy

tank, filled with huge weird fish-monsters that look as though they fed

on men, and glare at you through cruel eyes.

Leaving your shoes outside the very precincts of the tank, with the

police guard that we have stationed there, you skirt one side of the

water, and then leave the mosaic terrace for a still more gorgeous

causeway, that, bordered on either side by rows of golden

lamp-supporters, carries the path across toward the rich pavilion, the

walls of which are as thickly spread with gems as are those of Akbar‘s

palace. Here you are met by a bewildering din, for under the inner dome

sit worshipers by the score, singing with vigor the grandest of barbaric

airs to the accompaniment of lyre, harp, and tomtom, while in the

center, on a cushion, is a long-bearded gray old gooroo, or priest of

the Sikh religion--a creed singularly pure, though little known. The

effect of the scene is much enhanced by the beauty of the surrounding

houses, whose oriel windows overhang the tank, that the Sikh princes may

watch the evolutions of the lantern-bearing boats on nights when the

temple is illuminated. When seen by moonlight, the tank is a very

picture from the “Arabian Nights.”

This is a time of ferment in the Sikh religion. A carpenter named Ram

Singh--a man with all that combination of shrewdness and imagination, of

enthusiasm and worldliness, by which the world is governed--another

Mohammed or Brigham Young, perhaps--has preached his way through the

Punjaub, infusing his own energy into others, and has drawn away from

the Sikh Church some hundred thousand followers--reformers--who call

themselves the Kookas. These modern Anabaptists--for many are disposed

to look upon Ram Singh as another John of Leyden--bind themselves by

some terrible and secret oath, and the government fear that reformation

of religion is to be accompanied by reformation of the State of a kind

not advantageous to the English power. When Ram Singh lately proclaimed

his intention of visiting the Durbar Temple, the gooroos incited the

Sikh fanatics to attack his men with clubs, and the military police were

forced to interfere. There is now, however, a Kooka temple at Lahore.

In spite of religious ferment, there is little in the bazaar or temples

of Umritsur to remind one of the times--only some twenty years ago--when

the Sikh army crossed the Sutlej, and its leaders threatened to sack

Delhi and Calcutta, and drive the English out of India; it is

impossible, however, to believe that there is no undercurrent in

existence. Eighteen years cannot have sufficed to extinguish the Sikh

nationality, and the men who beat us at Chillianwallah are not yet dead,

or even old. When the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh returned from England in

1864 to bury his mother‘s body, the chiefs crowded round him as he

entered Lahore, and besought him to resume his position at their head.

His answer was a haughty “Jao!” (“Begone!”) If the Sikhs are to rise

once more, they will look elsewhere for their leader.

CHAPTER XI.

LAHORE.

Crossing in a railway journey of an hour one of the most fertile

districts of the Punjaub, I was struck with the resemblance of the

country to South Australia: in each great sweeps of wheat-growing lands,

with here and there an acacia or mimosa tree; in each a climate hot, but

dry, and not unhealthy;--singularly hot here for a tract in the latitude

of Vicksburg, near which the Mississippi is sometimes frozen.

Through groves of a yellow-blossomed, sweet-scented, weeping acacia,

much like laburnum, in which the fortified railway station seems out of

place, I reached the tomb-surrounded garden that is called Lahore--a

city of pomegranates, oleanders, hollyhocks, and roses. The date-groves

of Lahore are beautiful beyond description; especially so the one that

hides the Agra Bank.

Lahore matches Umritsur in the purity of its Orientalism, Agra in the

strength and grandeur of its walls: but it has no Tank Temple and no

Taj; the Great Mosque is commonplace, Runjeet Singh‘s tomb is tawdry,

and the far-famed Shalimar Gardens inferior to those of Pinjore. The

strangest sight of Lahore is its new railway station--a fortress of red

brick, one of many which are rising all over India. The fortification of

the railway stations is decidedly the next best step to that of having

no forts at all.

The city of Lahore is surrounded by a suburb of great tombs, in which

Europeans have in many cases taken up their residence by permission of

the owner, the mausoleums being, from the thickness of their walls, as

cool as cellars. Sometimes, however, a fanatical relative of the man

buried in the tomb will warn the European tenant that he will die within

a year--a prophecy which poison has once or twice brought to its

fulfillment in the neighborhood of Lahore and at Moultan.

Strolling in the direction of the Cabool Gate, I came on the

Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjaub, driving in an open carriage drawn by

camels; and passing out on to the plain, I met all the officers in

garrison returning on Persian ponies from a game at the Afghan sport of

“hockey upon horseback,” while a little farther were some English ladies

with hawks. Throughout the Northern Punjaub a certain settling down in

comfort on the part of the English officials is to be remarked, and the

adaptation of native habits to English uses, of which I had in one

evening‘s walk the three examples which I have mentioned, is a sign of a

tendency toward that making the best of things which in a newly-occupied

country precedes the entrance upon a system of permanent abode. Lahore

has been a British city for nineteen years, Bombay for two centuries and

more; yet Lahore is far more English than Bombay.

Although there are as yet no signs of English settlement in the Punjaub,

still the official community in many a Punjaub station is fast becoming

colonial in its type, and Indian traditions are losing ground. English

wives and sisters abound in Lahore, even the railway and canal officials

having brought out their families; and during the cool weather race

meetings, drag hunts, cricket matches, and croquet parties follow one

another from day to day, and Lahore boasts a volunteer corps. When the

hot season comes on, those who can escape to the hills, and the wives

and children of those who cannot go, run to Dalhousie, as Londoners do

to Eastbourne.

The healthy English tone of the European communities of Umritsur and

Lahore is reflected in the newspapers of the Punjaub, which are the best

in India, although the blunders of the native printers render the

“betting news” unintelligible, and the “cricket scores” obscure. The

columns of the Lahore papers present as singular a mixture of

incongruous articles as even the Government _Gazette_ offers to its

readers. An official notice that it will be impossible to allow more

than 560 elephants to take part in the next Lucknow procession follows a

report of the “ice meeting” of the community of Lahore, to arrange about

the next supply; and side by side with this is an article on the Punjaub

trade with Chinese Tartary, which recommends the government of India to

conquer Afghanistan, and to reoccupy the valley of Cashmere. A paragraph

notices the presentation by the Punjaub government to a native

gentleman, who has built a serai at his own cost, of a valuable gift;

another records a brush with the Wagheers. The only police case is the

infliction on a sweeper of a fine of thirty rupees for letting his

donkey run against a high-caste woman, whereby she was defiled; but a

European magistrate reprimands a native pleader for appearing in court

with his shoes on; and a notice from the Lieutenant-Governor gives a

list of the holidays to be observed by the courts, in which the “Queen‘s

Birthday” comes between “Bhudur Kalee” and “Oors data Gunjbuksh,” while

“Christmas” follows “Shubberat,” and “Ash Wednesday” precedes “Holee.”

As one of the holidays lasts a fortnight, and many more than a week, the

total number of _dies non_ is considerable; but a postscript decrees

that additional local holidays shall be granted for fairs and festivals,

and for the solar and lunar eclipse, which brings the no-court days up

to sixty or seventy, besides those in the Long Vacation. The Hindoos are

in the happy position of having also six new-year‘s days in every

twelvemonth; but the editor of one of the Lahore papers says that his

Mohammedan compositors manifest a singular interest in Hindoo feasts,

which shows a gratifying spread of toleration! An article on the

“Queen‘s English in Hindostan,” in the _Punjaub Times_, gives, as a

specimen of the poetry of Young Bengal, a serenade in which the skylark

carols on the primrose bush. “Emerge, my love,” the poet cries

“The fragrant, dewy grove

We‘ll wander through till gun-fire bids us part.”

But the final stanza is the best:

“Then, Leila, come! nor longer cogitate;

Thy egress let no scruples dire retard;

Contiguous to the portals of thy gate

Suspensively I supplicate regard.”

The advertisements range from books on the languages of Dardistan to

government contracts for elephant fodder, or price-lists of English

beer; and an announcement of an Afghan history in the Urdu tongue is

followed by a prospectus of Berkhamstead Grammar School. King Edward

would rub his eyes were he to wake and find himself being advertised in

Lahore.

The Punjaub Europeans, with their English newspapers and English ways,

are strange governors for an empire conquered from the bravest of all

Eastern races little more than eighteen years ago. One of them, taking

up a town policeman‘s staff, said to me, one day, “Who could have

thought in 1850 that in 1867 we should be ruling the Sikhs with this?”

CHAPTER XII.

OUR INDIAN ARMY.

During my stay in Lahore, a force of Sikhs and Pathans was being raised

for service at Hong Kong by an officer staying in the same hotel with

myself, and a large number of men were being enlisted in the city by

recruiting parties of the Bombay army. In all parts of India, we are now

relying, so far as our native forces are concerned, upon the men who

only a few years back were by much our most dangerous foes.

Throughout the East, subjects concern themselves but little in the

quarrels of their princes, and the Sikhs are no exception to the rule.

They fought splendidly in the Persian ranks at Marathon; under Shere

Singh, they made their memorable stand at Chillianwallah; but, under

Nicholson, they beat the bravest of the Bengal sepoys before Delhi.

Whether they fight for us or against us is all one to them. They fight

for those who pay them, and have no politics beyond their pockets. So

far, they seem useful allies to us, who hold the purse of India. Unable

to trust Hindoos with arms, we can at least rule them by the employment

as soldiers of their fiercest enemies.

When we come to look carefully at our system, its morality is hardly

clear. As we administer the revenues of India, nominally at least, for

the benefit of the Indians, it might be argued that we may fairly keep

on foot such troops as are best fitted to secure her against attack; but

the argument breaks down when it is remembered that 70,000 British

troops are maintained in India from the Indian revenues for that

purpose, and that local order is secured by an ample force of military

police. Even if the employment of Sikhs in times of emergency may be

advisable, it cannot be denied that the day has gone by for permanently

overawing a people by means of standing armies composed of their

hereditary foes.

In discussing the question of the Indian armies, we have carefully to

distinguish between the theory and the practice. The Indian official

theory says that not only is the native army a valuable auxiliary to the

English army in India, but that its moral effect on the people is of

great benefit to us, inasmuch as it raises their self-respect, and

offers a career to men who would otherwise be formidable enemies. The

practice proclaims that the native troops are either dangerous or

useless by arming them with weapons as antiquated as the bow and arrow,

destroys the moral effect which might possibly be produced by a Hindoo

force by filling the native ranks with Sikh and Goorkha aliens and

heretics, and makes us enemies without number by denying to natives that

promotion which the theory holds out to them. The existing system is

officially defended by the most contradictory arguments, and on the most

shifting of grounds. Those who ask why we should not trust the natives,

at all events to the extent of allowing Bengal and Bombay men to serve,

and to serve with arms that they can use, in bodies which profess to be

the Bengal and Bombay armies, but which in fact are Sikh regiments which

we are afraid to arm, are told that the native army has mutinied times

without end, that it has never fought well except where, from the

number of British present, it had no choice but to fight, and that it is

dangerous and inefficient. Those who ask why this shadow of a native

army should be retained are told that its records of distinguished

service in old times are numerous and splendid. The huge British force

maintained in India, and the still huger native army, are each of them

made an excuse for the retention of the other at the existing standard.

If you say that it is evident that 70,000 British troops cannot be

needed in India, you are told that they are required to keep the 120,000

native troops in check. If you ask, Of what use, then, are the latter?

you hear that in the case of a serious imperial war the English troops

would be withdrawn, and the defense of India confided to these very

natives who in time of peace require to be thus severely held in check.

Such shallow arguments would be instantly exposed were not English

statesmen bribed by the knowledge that their acceptance as good logic

allows us to maintain at India‘s cost 70,000 British soldiers, who in

time of danger would be available for our defense at home.

That the English force of 70,000 men maintained in India in time of

peace can be needed there in peace or war is not to be supposed by those

who remember that 10,000 men were all that were really needed to

suppress the wide-spread mutiny of 1857, and that Russia--our only

possible enemy from without--never succeeded during a two years’ war in

her own territory in placing a disposable army of 60,000 men in the

Crimea. Another mutiny such as that of 1857 is, indeed, impossible, now

that we retain both forts and artillery exclusively in British hands;

and Russia, having to bring her supplies and men across almost boundless

deserts, or through hostile Afghanistan, would be met at the Khyber by

our whole Indian army, concentrated from the most distant stations at a

few days’ notice, fighting in a well-known and friendly country, and

supplied from the plains of all India by the railroads. Our English

troops in India are sufficiently numerous, were it necessary, to fight

both the Russians and our native army; but it is absurd that we should

maintain in India, in a time of perfect peace, at a yearly cost to the

people of that country of from fourteen to sixteen millions sterling, an

army fit to cope with the most tremendous disasters that could overtake

the country, and at the same time unspeakably ridiculous that we should

in all our calculations be forced to set down the native army as a cause

of weakness. The native rulers, moreover, whatever their unpopularity

with their people, were always able to array powerful levies against

enemies from without; and if our government of India is not a miserable

failure, our influence over the lower classes of the people ought, at

the least, to be little inferior to that exercised by the Mogul emperors

or the Maratta chiefs.

As for local risings, concentration of our troops by means of the

railroads that would be constructed in half a dozen years out of our

military savings alone, and which American experience shows us cannot be

effectually destroyed, would be amply sufficient to deal with them were

the force reduced to 30,000 men; and a general rebellion of the people

of India we have no reason to expect, and no right to resist should it

by any combination of circumstances be brought about.

The taxation required to maintain the present Indian army presses

severely upon what is in fact the poorest country in the world; the

yearly drain of many thousand men weighs heavily upon us; and our system

seems to proclaim to the world the humiliating fact, that under British

government, and in times of peace, the most docile of all peoples need

an army of 200,000 men, in addition to the military police, to watch

them, or keep them down.

Whatever the decision come to with regard to the details of the changes

to be made in the Indian army system, it is at least clear that it will

be expedient in us to reduce the English army in India if we intend it

for India‘s defense, and our duty to abolish it if we intend it for our

own. It is also evident that, after allowing for mere police

duties--which should in all cases be performed by men equipped as, and

called by the name of, police--the native army should, whatever its

size, be rendered as effective as possible, by instruction in the use of

the best weapons of the age. If local insurrections have unfortunately

to be quelled, they must be quelled by English troops; and against

European invaders, native troops, to be of the slightest service, must

be armed as Europeans. As the possibility of European invasion is

remote, it would probably be advisable that the native army should be

gradually reduced until brought to the point of merely supplying the

body-guards and ceremonial-troops; at all events, the practice of

overawing Sikhs with Hindoos, and Hindoos with Sikhs, should be

abandoned as inconsistent with the nature of our government in India,

and with the first principles of freedom.

There is, however, no reason why we should wholly deprive ourselves of

the services of the Indian warrior tribes. If we are to continue to hold

such outposts as Gibraltar, the duty of defending them against all

comers might not improperly be intrusted wholly or partly to the Sikhs

or fiery little Goorkhas, on the ground that, while almost as brave as

European troops, they are somewhat cheaper. It is possible, indeed,

that, just as we draw our Goorkhas from independent Nepaul, other

European nations may draw Sikhs from us. We are not even now the only

rulers who employ Sikhs in war; the Khan of Kokand is said to have many

in his service: and, tightly ruled at home, the Punjaubees may not

improbably become the Swiss of Asia.

Whatever the European force to be maintained in India, it is clear that

it should be local. The Queen‘s army system has now had ten years’

trial, and has failed in every point in which failure was prophesied.

The officers, hating India, and having no knowledge of native languages

or customs, bring our government into contempt among the people;

recruits in England dread enlistment for service they know not where;

and Indian tax-payers complain that they are forced to support an army

over the disposition of which they have not the least control, and which

in time of need would probably be withdrawn from India. Even the Dutch,

they say, maintain a purely colonial force in Java, and the French have

pledged themselves that, when they withdraw the Algerian local troops,

they will replace them by regiments of the line. England and Spain alone

maintain purely imperial troops at the expense of their dependencies.

Were the European army in India kept separate from the English service,

it would be at once less costly and more efficient, while the officers

would be acquainted with the habits of the natives and customs of the

country, and not, as at present, mere birds of passage, careless of

offending native prejudice, indifferent to the feelings of those among

whom they have to live, and occupied each day of their idle life in

heartily wishing themselves at home again. There are, indeed, to the

existing system drawbacks more serious than have been mentioned.

Sufficient stress has not hitherto been laid upon the demoralization of

our army and danger to our home freedom that must result from the

keeping in India of half our regular force. It is hard to believe that

men who have periodically to go through such scenes as those of 1857, or

who are in daily contact with a cringing dark-skinned race, can in the

long run continue to be firm friends to constitutional liberty at home;

and it should be remembered that the English troops in India, though

under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, are practically independent

of the House of Commons.

It is not only constitutionally that Indian rotation service is bad. The

system is destructive to the discipline of our troops, and a separate

service is the only remedy.

CHAPTER XIII.

RUSSIA.

For fifty years or more, we have been warned that one day we must

encounter Russia, and for fifty years Muscovite armies, conquering their

way step by step, have been advancing southward, till we find England

and Russia now all-but face to face in Central Asia.

Steadily the Russians are advancing. Their circular of 1864, in which

they declared that they had reached their wished-for frontier, has been

altogether forgotten, and all Kokand, and portions of Bokhara, have been

swallowed up, while our spies in St. Petersburg tell the Indian Council

that Persia herself is doomed. Although, however, the distance of the

Russian from the English frontiers has been greatly reduced of late, it

is still far more considerable than is supposed. Instead of the Russian

outposts being 100 miles from Peshawur, as one alarmist has said, they

are still 400; and Samarcand, their nearest city, is 450 miles in a

straight line over the summit of the Hindoo Koosh, and 750 by road from

our frontier at the Khyber. At the same time, we must, in our

calculations of the future, assume that a few years will see Russia at

the northern base of the Hindoo Koosh, and in a position to overrun

Persia and take Herat.

It has been proposed that we should declare to Russia our intention to

preserve Afghanistan as neutral ground; but there arises this

difficulty, that, having agreed to this plan, Russia would immediately

proceed to set about ruling Afghanistan through Persia. On the other

hand, it is impossible, as we have already found, to treat with

Afghanistan, as there is no Afghanistan with which to treat; nor can we

enter into friendly relations with any Afghan chief, lest his neighbor

and enemy should hold us responsible for his acts. If we are to have any

dealings with the Afghans, we shall soon be forced to take a side, and

necessarily to fight and conquer, but at a great cost in men and money.

It might be possible to make friends of some of the frontier tribes by

giving them lands within our borders on condition of their performing

military service and respecting the lives and property of our merchants;

but the policy would be costly, and its results uncertain, while we

should probably soon find ourselves embroiled in Afghan politics.

Moreover, meddling in Afghanistan, long since proved to be a foolish and

a dangerous course, can hardly be made a wise one by the fact of the

Russians being at the gate.

Many would have us advance to Herat, on the ground that it is in

Afghanistan, and not on the plains of India, that Russia must be met;

but such is the fierceness of the Afghans, such the poverty of their

country, that its occupation would be at once a source of weakness and a

military trap to the invader. Were we to occupy Herat, we should have

Persians and Afghans alike against us; were the Russians to annex

Afghanistan, they could never descend into the plains of India without a

little diplomacy, or a little money from us, bringing the Afghan

fanatics upon their rear. When, indeed, we look carefully into the

meaning of those Anglo-Indians who would have us repeat our attempt to

thrash the Afghans into loving us, we find that the pith of their

complaint seems to be that battles and conquests mean promotion, and

that we have no one left in India upon whom we can wage war. Civilians

look for new appointments, military men for employment, missionaries for

fresh fields, and all see their opening in annexation, while the

newspapers echo the cry of their readers, and call on the Viceroy to

annex Afghanistan “at the cost of impeachment.”

Were our frontier at Peshawur a good one for defense, there could be but

little reason shown for an occupation of any part of Afghanistan; but,

as it is, the question of the desirability of an advance is complicated

by the lamentable weakness of our present frontier. Were Russia to move

down upon India, we should have to meet her either in Afghanistan or

upon the Indus: to meet her at Peshawur, at the foot of the mountains

and with the Indus behind us, would be a military suicide. Of the two

courses that would be open to us, a retreat to the Indus would be a

terrible blow to the confidence of our troops, and an advance to Cabool

or Herat would be an advance out of reach of our railroad

communications, and through a dangerous defile. To maintain our frontier

force at Peshawur, as we now do, is to maintain in a pestilential valley

a force which, if attacked, could not fight where it is stationed, but

would be forced to advance into Afghanistan or retreat to the Indus. The

best policy would probably be to withdraw the Europeans from Peshawur

and Rawul Pindee, and place them upon the Indus in the hills near

Attock, completing our railroad from Attock to Lahore and from Attock to

the hill station, and to leave the native force to defend the Khyber and

Peshawur against the mountain tribes. We should also encourage European

settlement in the valley of Cashmere. On the other hand, we should push

a short railroad from the Indus to the Bholan Pass, and there

concentrate a second powerful European force, with a view to resisting

invasion at that point, and of taking in flank and rear any invader who

might advance upon the Khyber. The Bholan Pass is, moreover, on the road

to Candahar and Herat; and, although it would be a mistake to occupy

those cities except by the wish of the Afghans, still the advance of the

Russians will probably one day force the Afghans to ally themselves to

us and solicit the occupation of their cities. The fact that the present

ruler of Herat is a mere tool of the Persians or feudatory of the Czar

will have no effect whatever on his country, for if he once threw

himself openly into Russian hands his people would immediately desert

him. So much for the means of defense against the Russians, but there is

some chance that we may have to defend India against another Mohammedan

invasion, secretly countenanced, but not openly aided, by Russia. While

on my way to England, I had a conversation on this matter with a

well-informed Syrian Pacha, but notorious Russian-hater. He had been

telling me that Russian policy had not changed, but was now, as ever, a

policy of gradual annexation; that she envied our position in India, and

hated us because our gentle treatment of Asiatics is continually held up

to her as an example. “Russia has attacked you twice in India, and will

attack you there again,” he said. Admitting her interference in the

Afghan war, I denied that it was proved that she had any influence in

Hindostan, or any hand in the rebellion of 1857. My friend made me no

spoken answer, but took four caskets that stood upon the table, and,

setting them in a row, with an interval between them, pushed the first

so that it struck the second, the second the third, and the third the

fourth. Then, looking up, he said, “There you have the manner of the

Russian move on India. I push No. 1, but you see No. 4 moves. 1

influences 2, 2 influences 3, and 3 influences 4; but 1 doesn‘t

influence 4. Oh, dear me, no! Very likely even 1 and 3 are enemies, and

hate each other; and if 3 thought that she was doing 1’s work, she would

kick over the traces at once. Nevertheless, she is doing it. In 1857,

Russia certainly struck at you through Egypt, and probably through

Central Asia also. Lord Palmerston was afraid to send troops through

Egypt, though, if that could have been largely done, the mutiny could

have been put down in half the time, and with a quarter the cost; and

Nana Sahib, in his proclamation, stated, not without reason, that Egypt

was on his side. The way you are being now attacked is this:--Russia and

Egypt are for the moment hand and glove, though their ultimate objects

are conflicting. Egypt is playing for the leadership of all Islam, even

of Moslems in Central Asia and India. Russia sees that this game is for

the time her game, as through Egypt she can excite the Turcomans,

Afghans, and other Moslems of Central Asia to invade India in the name

of religion and the Prophet, but, in fact, in the hope of plunder, and

can also at the same time raise your Mohammedan population in

Hindostan--a population over which you admit you have absolutely no

hold. Of course you will defeat these hordes whenever you meet them in

the field; but their numbers are incalculable, and their bravery great.

India has twice before been conquered from the north, from Central Asia,

and you must remember that behind these hordes comes Russia herself.

Mohammedanism is weak here, on the Mediterranean, I grant you; but it is

very strong in Central Asia--as strong as it ever was. Can you trust

your Sikhs, too? I doubt it.”

When I asked the Pacha how Egypt was to put herself at the head of

Islam, he answered:--“Thus. We Egyptians are already supporting the

Turkish empire. Our tribute is a million (francs), but we pay five

millions, of which four go into the Sultan‘s privy purse. We have all

the leading men of Turkey in our pay: 30,000 of the best troops serving

in Crete, and the whole of the fleet, are contributed by Egypt. Now,

Egypt had no small share in getting up the Cretan insurrection, and yet,

you see, she does, or pretends to do, her best to put it down. The

Sultan, therefore, is at the Viceroy‘s mercy, if you don‘t interfere. No

one else will if you do not. The Viceroy aims at being nominally, as he

is really, ‘the Grand Turk.’ Once Sultan, with Crete and the other

islands handed over to Greece or Russia, the present Viceroy commands

the allegiance of every Moslem people--thirty millions of your Indian

subjects included: that is, practically Russia commands that

allegiance--Russia practically, though not nominally, at Constantinople

wields the power of Islam, instead of being hated by every true

believer, as she would be if she annexed Turkey in Europe. Her real game

is a far grander one than that with which she is credited.” “Turkey is

your vassal,” the Pacha went on to say; “she owes her existence entirely

to you. Why not use her, then? Why not put pressure on the Sultan to

exert his influence over the Asian tribes--which is far greater than you

believe--for your benefit? Why not insist on your Euphrates route? Why

not insist on Egypt ceasing to intrigue against you, and annex the

country if she continues in her present course? If you wish to bring

matters to a crisis, make Abdul Aziz insist on Egypt being better

governed, or on the slave-trade being put down. You have made your name

a laughing-stock here. You let Egypt half bribe, half force Turkey into

throwing such obstacles in the way of your Euphrates route that it is no

nearer completion now than it ever was. You force Egypt to pass a law

abolishing the slave-trade and slavery itself, and you have taken no

notice of the fact that this law has never been enforced in so much as a

single instance. You think that you are all right now that you have

managed to force our government into allowing your troops to pass to and

fro through Egypt, thus making your road through the territory of your

most dangerous enemy. Where would you be in case of a war with Russia?”

When I pleaded that, if we were refused passage, we should occupy the

country, the Pacha replied: “Of course you would; but you need not

imagine that you will ever be refused passage. What will happen will be

that, just at the time of your greatest need, the floods will come down

from the mountains and wash away ten miles of the line, and all the

engines will go out of repair. You will complain: we shall offer to lay

the stick about the feet of all the _employés_ of the line. What more

would you have? Can we prevent the floods? When our government wished to

keep your Euphrates scheme from coming to anything, did they say: ‘Do

this thing, and we will raise Islam against you’? Oh no! they just

bribed your surveyors to be attacked by the Bedouin, or they bribed a

pacha to tell you that the water was alkaline and poisonous for the next

hundred miles, and so on, till your company was ruined, and the plan at

an end for some years. Your home government does not understand us

Easterns. Why don‘t you put your Eastern affairs into the hands of your

Indian government? You have two routes to India--Egypt and Euphrates

valley, and both are practically in the hands of your only great

enemy--Russia.”

In all that my Syrian friend said of the danger of our relying too much

upon our route across Egypt, and on the importance to us of the

immediate construction of the Euphrates Valley Railway line, there is

nothing but truth; but, in his fears of a fresh invasion of India by the

Mohammedans, he forgot that for fighting purposes the Mohammedans are no

longer one, but two peoples; for the Moslem races are divided into

Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mohammedans, who hate

each other far more fiercely than they hate us. Our Indian Moslems are

orthodox, the Afghans and Persians are dissenters, the Turks are

orthodox. If Egypt and Persia play Russia‘s game, we may count upon the

support of the Turks of Syria, of the Euphrates valley, and of India. To

unite Irish Catholics and Orangemen in a religious crusade against the

English would be an easy task by the side of that of uniting Sonnite and

Shiite against India. A merely Shiite invasion is always possible, but

could probably be met with ease, by opposition at the Khyber, and

resistance upon the Indus, followed by a rapid advance from the Bholan.

Russia herself is not without her difficulties with the strictest and

most fanatical Mohammedans. Now that she has conquered Bokhara, their

most sacred land, they hate her as fiercely as they hate us. The

crusade, if she provokes it, may be upon our side, and British

commanders in green turbans may yet summon the Faithful to arms, and

invoke the Prophet.

It is to be remarked that men who have lived long in India think that

our policy in the East has overwhelming claims on the attention of our

home authorities. Not only is Eastern business to be performed, and

Eastern intrigues watched carefully, but, according to these Indian

flies, who think that their Eastern cart-wheel is the world, Oriental

policy is to guide home policy, to dictate our European friendships, to

cause our wars.

No Englishman in England can sympathize with the ridiculous inability to

comprehend our real position in India which leads many Anglo-Indians to

cry out that we must go to war with Russia to “keep up our prestige;”

and, on the other hand, it need hardly be shown that, apart from the

extension of trade and the improvement of communication, we need not

trouble ourselves with alliances to strengthen us in the East. Supported

by the native population, we can maintain ourselves in India against the

world; unsupported by them, our rule is morally indefensible, and

therefore not long to be retained by force of arms.

The natives of India watch with great interest the advance of Russia;

not that they believe that they would be any better off under her than

under us, but that they would like, at all events, to see some one

thrash us, even if in the end they lost by it; just as a boy likes to

see a new bully thrash his former master, even though the later be also

the severer tyrant. That the great body of the people of India watch

with feverish excitement the advance of Russia is seen from the tone of

the native press, which is also of service to us in demonstrating that

the mass of the Hindoos are incapable of appreciating the benefits, and

even of comprehending the character, of our rule. They can understand

the strength which a steady purpose gives; they cannot grasp the

principles which lie at the root of our half-mercantile, half-benevolent

despotism.

No native believes that we shall permanently remain in India; no native

really sympathized with us during the rebellion. To the people of India

we English are a mystery. We profess to love them, and to be educating

them for something they cannot comprehend, which we call freedom and

self-government; in the mean time, while we do not plunder them, nor

convert them forcibly, after the wont of the Mogul emperors, we kick and

cuff them all round, and degrade the nobles by ameliorating the

condition of humbler men.

No mere policy of disarmament or of oppression can be worth much as a

system for securing lasting peace, for if our Irish constabulary cannot

prevent the introduction of Fenian arms to Cork and Dublin, how doubly

impossible must it be to guard a frontier of five or six thousand miles

by means of a police force which itself cannot be trusted! That

prolonged disarmament causes our subjects to forget the art of war is

scarcely true, and if true would tell both ways. The question is not one

of disarmament, and suppression of rebellion: it is that of whether we

can raise up in India a people that will support our rule; and if this

is to be done, there must be an end of cuffing.

Were the Hindoos as capable of appreciating the best points of our

government as they are of pointing out the worst, we should have nothing

to fear in comparison with Russia. Drunken, dirty, ignorant, and

corrupt, the Russian people are no fit rulers for Hindostan. Were our

rival that which she pretends to be,--a civilized European Power with “a

mission” in the East; were she even, indeed, an enlightened commercial

Power, with sufficiently benevolent instincts but with no policy outside

her pocket, such as England was till lately in the East, and is still in

the Pacific,--we might find ourselves able to meet her with open arms,

and to bring ourselves to believe that her advance into Southern Asia

was a gain to mankind. As it is, the Russians form a barbarous horde,

ruled by a German emperor and a German ministry, who, however, are as

little able to suppress degrading drunkenness and shameless venality as

they are themselves desirous of promoting true enlightenment and

education. “Talk of Russian civilization of the East!” an Egyptian once

said to me; “why, Russia is an organized barbarism; why--the Russians

are--why they are--why--nearly as bad as _we_ are!” It should be

remembered, too, that Russia, being herself an Asiatic power, can never

introduce European civilization into Asia. All the cry of “Russia!

Russia!” all this magnifying of the Russian power, only means that, the

English being the strong men most hated by the weak men of Southern

Asia, the name of the next strongest is used to terrify them. The

offensive strength of Russia has been grossly exaggerated by alarmists,

who forget that, if Russia is to be strong in Bokhara and Khiva, it will

be Bokharan and Khivan strength. In all our arguments we assume that

with three-fourths of her power in Asia, and with her armies composed

of Asians, Russia will remain a European Power. Whatever the composition

of her forces, it may be doubted whether India is not a stronger empire

than her new neighbor. The military expenditure of India is equal to

that of Russia; the homogeneousness of the Northern Power is at the best

inferior to that of India; India has twice the population of Russia,

five times her trade, and as large a revenue. To the miserable military

administration of Russia, Afghanistan would prove a second Caucasus, and

by their conduct we see that the Afghans themselves are not terrified by

her advance. The people with whom an Asiatic prince seeks alliances are

not those whom he most fears. That the Afghans are continually

intriguing with Russia against us, merely means that they fear us more

than they fear Russia.

Russia will one day find herself encountering the English or Americans

in China, perhaps, but not upon the plains of Hindostan. Wherever and

whenever the contest comes, it can have but one result. Whether upon

India or on England falls the duty of defense, Russia must be beaten. A

country that was fifty years conquering the Caucasus, and that could

never place a disposable force of 60,000 men in the Crimea, need give no

fear to India, while her grandest offensive efforts would be ridiculed

by America, or by the England of to-day. To meet Russia in the way that

we are asked to meet her means to meet her by corruption, and a system

of meddling Eastern diplomacy is proposed to us which is revolting to

our English nature. Let us by all means go our own way, and let Russia

go hers. If we try to meet the Russian Orientals with craft, we shall be

defeated; let us meet them, therefore, with straightforwardness and

friendship, but, if necessary, in arms.

It is not Russia that we need dread, but, by the destruction of the

various nationalities in Hindostan by means of centralization and of

railroads, we have created an India which we cannot fight. India

herself, not Russia, is our danger, and our task is rather to conciliate

than to conquer.

CHAPTER XIV.

NATIVE STATES.

Quitting Lahore at night, I traveled to Moultan by a railway which has

names for its stations such as India cannot match. Chunga-Munga,

Wanrasharam, Cheechawutnee, and Chunnoo, follow one another in that

order. During the night, when I looked out into the still moonlight, I

saw only desert, and trains of laden camels pacing noiselessly over the

waste sands; but in the morning I found that the whole country within

eye-shot was a howling wilderness. Moultan, renowned in warlike history

from Alexander‘s time to ours, stands upon the edge of the great sandy

tract once known as the “Desert of the Indies.” In every village,

bagpipes were playing through the livelong night. There are many

resemblances to the Gaelic races to be found in India; the Hindoo girl‘s

saree is the plaid of the Galway peasantess, or of the Trongate

fishwife; many of the hill-tribes wear the kilt; but the Punjaubee pipes

are like those of the Italian pfiferari rather than those of the Scotch

Highlander.

The great sandy desert which lies between the Indus and Rajpootana has,

perhaps, a future under British rule. Wherever snowy mountains are met

with in warm countries, yearly floods, the product of the thaws, sweep

down the rivers that take their rise in the glaciers of the chain, and

the Indus is no exception to the rule. Were the fall less great, the

stream less swift, Scinde would have been another Cambodia, another

Egypt. As it is, the fertilizing floods pour through the deep river-bed

instead of covering the land, and the silt is wasted on the Arabian

Gulf. No native State with narrow boundaries can deal with the great

works required for irrigation on the scale that can alone succeed; but,

possessing as we do the country from the defiles whence the five rivers

escape into the plains to the sandy bars at which they lose themselves

in the Indian Seas, we might convert the Punjaub and Scinde into a

garden which should support a happy population of a hundred millions,

reared under our rule, and the best of bulwarks against invasion from

the north and west.

At Umritsur I had seen those great canals that are commencing to

irrigate and fertilize the vast deserts that stretch to Scinde. At

Jullundur I had already seen their handiwork in the fields of cotton,

tobacco, and wheat that blossom in the middle of a wilderness; and if

the whole Punjaub and Indus valley can be made what Jullundur is, no

outlay can be too costly a means to such an end. There can be no reason

why, with irrigation, the Indus valley should not become as fertile as

the valley of the Nile.

After admiring in Moultan, on the one hand, the grandeur of the citadel

which still shows signs of the terrible bombardment which it suffered at

our hands after the murder by the Sikhs of Mr. Van Agnew in 1848, and,

on the other hand, the modesty of the sensitive mimosa which grows

plentifully about the city, I set off by railway for Sher Shah, the

point at which the railway comes to its end upon the banks of the united

Jhelum and Chenab, two of the rivers of the Punjaub. The railway company

once built a station on the river-bank at Sher Shah, but the same

summer, when the floods came down, station and railway alike disappeared

into the Indus. Embanking the river is impossible, from the cost of the

works which would be needed; and building wing-dams has been tried, with

the remarkable effect of sending off the river at right angles to the

dam to devastate the country opposite.

The railway has now no station at Sher Shah, but the Indus-steamer

captains pick out a good place to lie alongside the bank, and the rails

are so laid as to bring the trains alongside the ships. After seeing

nothing but flat plains from the time of leaving Umritsur, I caught

sight from Sher Shah of the great Sooleiman chain of the Afghan

Mountains, rising in black masses through the fiery mist that fills the

Indus valley.

I had so timed my arrival on board the river-boat that she sailed the

next morning, and after a day‘s uneventful steaming, varied by much

running aground, when we anchored in the evening we were in the native

State of Bhawulpore.

While we were wandering about the river-shore in the evening, I and my

two or three European fellow-travelers, we met a native, with whom one

of our number got into conversation. The Englishman had heard that

Bhawulpore was to be annexed, so he asked the native whether he was a

British subject, to which the answer was to the effect that he did not

know. “To whom do you pay your taxes?” “To the government.” “Which

government? the English government or the Bhawulpore government?” His

answer was that he did not care so long as he had to pay them to

somebody, and that he certainly did not know.

Little as our Bhawulpore friend knew or cared about the color of his

rulers, he was nevertheless, according to our Indian government

theories, one of the people who ought to be most anxious for the advent

of English rule. Such has been the insecurity of life in Bhawulpore,

that, of the six last viziers, five have been murdered by order of the

Khan, the last of all having been strangled in 1862; and no native State

has been more notorious than Bhawulpore for the extravagance and gross

licentiousness of the reigning princes. The rulers of Bhawulpore,

although nominally controlled by us, have hitherto been absolute

despots, and have frequently put to death their subjects out of mere

whimsy. For years the country has been torn by ceaseless revolutions, to

the ruin of the traders and the demoralization of the people; the taxes

have been excessive, peculation universal, and the army has lived at

free quarters. The Khans were for many years in such dread of attempts

upon their lives, that every dish for their table was tasted by the

cooks; the army was mutinous, all appointments bought and sold, and the

Khans being Mohammedans, no one need pay a debt to a Hindoo.

Bhawulpore is no exceptional case; everywhere we hear of similar deeds

being common in native States. One of the native rulers lately shot a

man for killing a tiger that the rajah had wounded; another flogged a

subject for defending his wife; abduction, adultery, and sale of wives

are common among them. Land is seized from its holders without

compensation being so much as offered to them; extortion, torture, and

denial of justice are common, open venality prevails in all ranks, and

no native will take the pledged word of his king, while the revenues,

largely made up of forced loans, are wasted on all that is most vile.

In a vast number of cases, the reigning families have degenerated to

such an extent, that the scepter has come into the hands of some mere

driveler, whom, for the senselessness of his rule, it has at last been

necessary to depose. Those who have made idiocy their study, know that

in the majority of cases the infirmity is the last stage of the

declension of a race worn out by hereditary perpetuation of luxury,

vice, or disease the effect of vice. Every ruling family in the East,

save such as slave marriages have reinvigorated, is one of these

run-down and exhausted breeds. Not only unbounded tyranny and extortion,

but incredible venality and corruption, prevail in the greater number of

native States. The Rajah of Travancore, as it is said, lately requiring

some small bungalow to be added to a palace, a builder contracted to

build it for 10,000rs. After a time, he came to apply to be let off, and

on the Rajah asking him the reason, he said: “Your highness, of the

10,000rs., your prime minister will get 5000rs., his secretary 1000rs.,

the baboos in his office another 2000rs., the ladies of the zenana

1000rs., and the commander of your forces 500rs.; now, the bungalow

itself will cost 500rs., so where am I to make my profit?” Corruption,

however, pervades in India all native institutions; it is not enough to

show that native States are subject to it, unless we can prove that it

is worse there than in our own dominions.

The question whether British or native rule be the least distasteful to

the people of India is one upon which it is not easy to decide. It is

not to be expected that our government should be popular with the

Rajpoot chiefs, or with the great nobles of Oude, but it may fairly be

contended that the mass of the people live in more comfort, and, in

spite of the Orissa case, are less likely to starve, in English than in

native territory. No nation has at any time ever governed an alien

empire more wisely or justly than we the Punjaub. The men who cry out

against our rule are the nobles and the schemers, who, under it, are

left without a hope. Our leveling rule does not even, like other

democracies, raise up a military chieftainship. Our native officers of

the highest rank are paid and treated much as are European sergeants,

though in native States they would of course be generals and princes.

Want of promotion for sepoys and educated native civilians, and the

degrading treatment of the high-caste people by the English, were

causes, among others, of the mutiny. The treatment of the natives cannot

easily be reformed; if we punish or discourage such behavior in our

officers, we cannot easily reach the European planters and the railway

officials, while punishment itself would only make men treat the natives

with violence instead of mere disdain, when out of sight of their

superiors. There is, however, reason to believe that in many districts

the people are not only well off under our government, but that they

know it. During the native rule in Oude, the population was diminished

by a continual outpour of fugitives. The British district of Mirzapore

Chowhare, on the Oude frontiers, had a rural population of over 1000 to

each square mile--a density entirely owing to the emigration of the

natives from their villages in Oude. Again, British Burmah is draining

of her people Upper Burmah, which remains under the old rulers; and

throughout India the eye can distinguish British territories from the

native States by the look of prosperity which is borne by all our

villages.

The native merchants and townsfolk generally are our friends. It is

unfortunately the fact, however, that the cultivators of the soil, who

form three-fourths of the population of India, believe themselves worse

off under us than in the native States. They say that they care not who

rules so long as their holdings are secured to them at a fixed rent,

whereas under our system the zemindars pay us a fixed rent, but in many

districts exact what they please from the competing peasants--a practice

which, under the native system, was prevented by custom. In all our

future land-settlements, it is to be hoped that the agreement will be

made, not with middlemen, but directly with the people.

It is not difficult to lay down certain rules for our future behavior

toward the native States. We already exercise over the whole of them a

control sufficient to secure ourselves against attack in time of peace,

but not sufficient to relieve us from all fear of hostile action in time

of internal revolt or external war. It might be well that we should

issue a proclamation declaring that, for the future, we should

invariably recognize the practice of adoption of children by the native

rulers, as we have done in the case of the Mysore succession; but that,

on the other hand, we should require the gradual disbandment of all

troops not needed for the preservation of internal peace. We might well

commence our action in this matter by calling upon the native rulers to

bind themselves by treaty no longer to keep on foot artillery. In the

event of an invasion of Hindostan, a large portion of our European force

would be needed to overawe the native princes and prevent their marching

upon our rear. It is impossible to believe that the native States would

ever be of assistance to us except in cases where we could do without

their help. During the mutiny, the Nepaulese delayed their promised

march to join us until they were certain that we should beat the

mutineers, and this although the Nepaulese are among our surest friends.

After the mutiny, it came to light that Lucknow and Delhi--then native

capitals--had been centers of intrigue, although we had “Residents” at

each, and it is probable that Hyderabad and Cashmere City are little

less dangerous to us now than was Delhi in 1857.

There is one native State, that of Cashmere and Jummoo, which stands

upon a very different footing from the rest. Created by us as late as

1846,--when we sold this best of all the provinces conquered by us from

the Maharajahs of Lahore to a Sikh traitor, Gholab Singh, an ex-farmer

of taxes, for three-quarters of a million sterling, which he embezzled

from the treasury of Lahore,--the State of Cashmere has been steadily

misgoverned for twenty years. Although our tributary, the Maharajah of

Cashmere forbids English travelers to enter his dominions without leave

(which is granted only to a fixed number of persons every year), to

employ more than a stated number of servants, to travel except by

certain passes for fear of their meeting his wives, to buy provisions

except of certain persons, or to remain in the country after the 1st

November under any circumstances whatever. He imprisons all native

Christians, prohibits the exportation of grain whenever there is a

scarcity in our territory, and takes every opportunity that falls in his

way of insulting our government and its officials. Our Central Asian

trade has been all-but entirely destroyed by the duties levied by his

officers, and Russia is the Maharajah‘s chosen friend. The unhappy

people of the Cashmere valley, sold by us, without their consent or

knowledge, to a family which has never ceased to oppress them, petition

us continually for relief, and, by flocking into our Punjaub territory,

give practical testimony to the wrongs they suffer.

In this case of Cashmere, there is ample ground for immediate repurchase

or annexation, if annexation it can be called to remove or buy out a

feudatory family which was unjustly raised to power by us twenty-two

years ago, and which has broken every article of the agreement under

which it was placed upon the tributary throne. The only reason which has

ever been shown against the resumption by us of the government of the

Cashmere valley is the strange argument that, by placing it in the hands

of a feudatory, we save the expense of defending the frontier against

the dangerous hill-tribes; although the revenues of the province, even

were taxation much reduced, would amply suffice to meet the cost of

continual war, and although our experience in Central India has shown

that many hill-tribes which will not submit to Hindoo rajahs become

peaceable at once upon our annexation of their country. Were Cashmere

independent and in the hands of its old rulers, there would be ample

ground for its annexation in the prohibition of trade, the hinderance to

the civilization of Central Asia, the gross oppression of the people,

the existence of slavery, and the imprisonment of Christians; as it is,

the non-annexation of the country almost amounts to a crime against

mankind.

Although the necessity of consolidation of our empire and the

progressive character of our rule are reasons for annexing the whole of

the native States, there are other and stronger arguments in favor of

leaving them as they are; our policy toward the Nizam must be regulated

by the consideration that he is now the head of the Moslem power in

India, and that his influence over the Indian Mohammedans may be made

useful to us in our dealings with that dangerous portion of our people.

Our military arrangements with the Nizam are, moreover, on the best of

footings. Scindia is our friend, and no bad ruler, but some interference

may be needed with the Guicodar of Baroda and with Holkar. Our policy

toward Mysore is now declared, and consists in respecting the native

rule if the young prince proves himself capable of good government; and

we might impose similar conditions upon the remaining princes, and also

suppress forced labor in their States as we have all-but suppressed

suttee.

In dealing with the native princes, it is advisable that we should

remember that we are no interlopers of to-day coming in to disturb

families that have been for ages the rulers of the land. Many of the

greatest of the native families were set up by ourselves; and of the

remainder, few, if any, have been in possession of their countries so

long as have the English of Madras or Bombay.

The Guicodars of Baroda and the family of Holkar are descended from

cowherds, and that of Scindia from a peasant, and none of them date back

much more than a hundred years. The family of the Nabobs of Arcot,

founded by an adventurer, is not more ancient, neither is that of Nizam:

the great Hyder Ali was the son of a police-constable, and was unable to

read or write. While we should religiously adhere to the treaties that

we have made, we are bound, in the interests of humanity, to intervene

in all cases where it is certain that the mass of the people would

prefer our rule, and where they are suffering under slavery or gross

oppression.

Holkar has permitted us to make a railway across his territory, but he

levies such enormous duties upon goods in transit as to cramp the

development of trade in a considerable portion of our dominions. Now,

the fact that a happy combination of circumstances enabled the cowherd,

his ancestor, to seize upon a certain piece of territory a hundred years

ago can have given his descendants no prescriptive right to impede the

civilization of India; all that we must aim at is to so improve our

governmental system as to make the natives themselves see that our rule

means the moral advancement of their country.

The best argument that can be made use of against our rule is that its

strength and minuteness enfeeble the native character. When we annex a

State, we put an end to promotion alike in war and learning; and under

our rule, unless it change its character, enlightenment must decline in

India, however much material prosperity may increase.

Under our present system of exclusion of natives from the Indian Civil

Service, the more boys we educate, the more vicious and discontented men

we have beneath our rule. Were we to throw it open to them, under a plan

of competition which would admit to the service even a small number of

natives, we should at least obtain a valuable body of friends in those

admitted, and should make the excluded feel that their exclusion was in

some measure their own fault. As it is, we not only exclude natives from

our own service, but even to some extent from that of the native States,

whose levies are often drilled by English officers. The Guicodar of

Baroda‘s service is popular with Englishmen, as it has become a custom

that when he has a review he presents each of his officers with a year‘s

full pay.

Our plan of shutting out the natives from all share in the government

not only makes our rule unpopular, but gives rise to the strongest of

all the arguments in favor of the retention of the existing native

States, which is, that they offer a career to shrewd and learned

natives, who otherwise would spend their leisure in devising plots

against us. One of the ablest men in India, Madhava Rao, now premier of

Travancore, was born in our territory, and was senior scholar of his

year in the Madras College. That such men as Madhava Rao and Salar Jung

should be incapable of finding suitable employment in our service is one

of the standing reproaches of our rule.

Could we but throw open our service to the natives, our government

might, with advantage to civilization, be extended over the whole of the

native States; for, whether we are ever to leave India or whether we are

to remain there till the end of time, there can be no doubt but that the

course best adapted to raise the moral condition of the natives is to

mould Hindostan into a homogeneous empire sufficiently strong to stand

by itself against all attacks from without, and internally governed by

natives, under a gradually weakened control from at home. If, after

careful trial, we find that we cannot educate the people to become

active supporters of our power, then it will be time to make use of the

native princes and grandees; but it is to be hoped that the people, as

they become well taught, will also become the mainstay of our democratic

rule.

The present attitude of the mass of the people is one of indifference

and neutrality, which in itself lends a kind of passive strength to our

rule. During the mutiny of 1857, the people neither aided nor opposed

us; and even had the whole of the land-owners been against us, as were

those of Oude, it is doubtful whether they could have raised their

villagers and peasants. Were our policemen relatively equal to their

officers and to the magistrates, we should never hear of native

disaffection, but we cannot count upon the attachment of the people so

long as it is possible for our constables to procure confessions by the

bribery of villagers or the application of pots full of wasps to their

stomachs.

In the matter of the annexation of those native States which still

cumber the earth, we are not altogether free agents. We swallow up

States like Bhawulpore just as Russia consumes Bokhara. Everywhere

indeed, in Asia, strong countries must inevitably swallow up their

weaker neighbors. Failure of heirs, broken treaties, irregular

frontiers--all these are reasons or assumed reasons for advance; but the

end is certain, and is exemplified in the march of England from Calcutta

to Peshawur and of Russia from the Aral to Turkestan. Our experience in

the case of the Punjaub shows that even honest discouragement of farther

advances on the part of the rulers of the stronger power will not always

suffice to prevent annexation.

CHAPTER XV.

SCINDE.

Near Mithun Kote, we steamed suddenly into the main stream of the Indus,

the bed of which is here a mile and a quarter wide. Although the river

at the time of my visit was rising fast, it was far from being at its

greatest height. In January, it brings down but forty thousand cubic

feet of water every second, but in August it pours down four hundred and

fifty thousand. The river-bed is rarely covered with running water, but

the stream cuts a channel for itself upon one shore, and flows in a

current of eight or nine miles an hour, while the remainder of the bed

is filled with half-liquid sand.

The navigation of the Indus is monotonous enough. Were it not for the

climate, the view would resemble that on the Maas, near Rotterdam,

though with alligators lining the banks instead of logs from the Upper

Meuse; but climate affects color, and every country has tints of its

own. California is golden, New Zealand a black-green, Australia yellow,

the Indus valley is of a blazing red. Although every evening the

Beloochee Mountains came in sight as the sun sank down behind them, and

revealed their shapes in shadow, all through the day the landscape was

one of endless flats. The river is a dirty flood, now swift, now

sluggish, running through a country in which sand deserts alternate only

with fields of stone. Villages upon the banks there are none, and from

town to town is a day‘s journey at the least. The only life in the view

is given by an occasional sail of gigantic size and curious shape,

belonging to some native craft or other on her voyage from the Punjaub

to Kurrachee. On our journey down the Indus, we passed hundreds of

ships, but met not one. They are built of timber, which is plentiful in

the Himalayas, upon the head-waters of the river, and carry down to the

sea the produce of the Punjaub. The stream is so strong, that the ships

are broken up in Scinde, and the crews walk back 1000 miles along the

bank. In building his ships upon the Hydaspes, and sailing them down the

Indus to its mouth, Alexander did but follow the custom of the country.

The natives, however, break up their ships at Kotree, whereas the

Macedonian intrusted his to Nearchus for the voyage to the Gulf of

Persia and a survey of the coast.

Geographically, the Indus valley is but a portion of the Great Sahara.

Those who know the desert well, say that from Cape Blanco to Khartoom,

from Khartoom to Muscat, from Muscat to Moultan, the desert is but one;

the same in the absence of life, the same in such life as it does

possess. The Valley of the Nile is but an oasis, the Gulfs of Persia and

of Aden are but trifling breaks in its vast width. Rainless, swept by

dry hot winds laden with prickly sand, traversed everywhere by low

ranges of red and sunburnt rocks, strewn with jagged stones, and dotted

here and there with a patch of dates gathered about some ancient well,

such is the Sahara for a length of near six thousand miles. On the Indus

banks, the sand is as salt as it is at Suez, and there are as many

petrified trees between Sukkur and Kurrachee as there are in the

neighborhood of Cairo.

Our days on board were all passed upon one plan. Each morning we rose at

dawn, which came about half-past four, and, watching the starting of the

ship from the bank where she had been moored all night, we got a cool

walk in our sleeping-clothes before we bathed and dressed. The heat then

suffocated us quietly till four, when we would reassert the majesty of

man by bathing, and attempting to walk or talk till dinner, which was at

five. At dark we anchored, and after watching the water-turtles at their

play, or hunting for the monstrous water-lizards known as

“gos,”--apparently the ichneumons called in Egypt “gots,”--or sometimes

fishing for great mud-fish with wide mouths and powerful teeth, we would

resume our sleeping-clothes (in which, but for the dignity of the Briton

in the eyes of the native crew, we should have dined and spent the day).

At half-past seven or eight, we lay down on deck, and forgot our sorrows

in sleep, or engaged in a frantic struggle with the cockroaches. In the

latter conflict we--in our dreams at least--were not victorious, and

once in an awful trance I believed myself carried off by one leg in the

jaws of a gigantic cockroach, and pushed with his feelers down into his

horrid hole.

Each hour passed on the Indus differs from the others only in the

greater or less portion of it which is devoted to getting off the

sand-banks. After steaming gallantly down a narrow but deep and swift

piece of the river, we would come to a spot at which the flood would

lose itself in crossing its bed from one bank to the other. Backing the

engines, but being whirled along close to the steep bank by the

remaining portion of the current, we soon felt a shock, the recoil from

which upset us, chairs and all, it being noticeable that we always fell

up stream, and not with our heads in the direction in which the ship

was going. As soon as we were fairly stuck, the captain flew at the

pilot, and kicked him round the deck--a process always borne with

fortitude, although the pilot was changed every day. The only pilot

never kicked was one who came on board near Bhawulpore, and who carried

a jeweled tulwar, or Afghan scimetar, but even he was threatened. The

kicking over, an entry of the time of grounding was made by the captain

in the pilot‘s book, and the mate was ordered out in a boat to sound,

while the native soldiers on board the flats we were towing began

quietly to cook their dinner. The mate having found a sort of channel,

though sometimes it had a ridge across it over which the steamer could

not pass without touching, he returned for a kedge, which he fixed in

the sand, and we were soon warped up to it by the use of the capstan,

the native crew singing merrily the while. Every now and then, however,

we would take the ground in the center of the ship, and with deep water

all round, and then, instead of getting off, we for hours together only

pivoted round and round. One of the Indus boats, with a line regiment on

board, was once aground for a month near Mithun Kote, to the entire

destruction of all the wild boars in the neighborhood.

The kicking of the unfortunate pilots was not a pleasant sight, but

there were sometimes comic incidents attached to our periodic

groundings. Once I noticed that the five men who were constantly

sounding with colored poles in different parts of the ship and flats,

had got into a monotonous chorus of “pánché----é pot” (“five feet”)--we

drawing only three, so that we went ahead confidently at full speed,

when suddenly we ran aground with a violent shock. On the re-sounding of

our course by the boat‘s crew, we found that our pole-men must, for

some time past, have been guessing the soundings to save the trouble of

looking. These fellows richly deserved a kicking, but the pilots are

innocent of any fault but inability to keep pace with the rapid changes

of the river-course.

Another curious scene took place one day when we were steaming down a

reach in which the river made many sudden twists and turns. We had on

board a merchant from the Persian Gulf, a devout Mohammedan. In the

afternoon, he carried his praying-carpet on to the bridge between the

paddle-boxes, and there, turning to the west, commenced to pray. The sun

was on his left, but almost facing him; in an instant, round whirled the

ship, making her course between two sand-bars, and Mecca and the sun

into the bargain were right behind our worshiper. This was too much even

for his devotion, so, glancing at the new course, he turned his carpet,

and, looking in the fresh direction, recommenced his prayers. After a

minute or two, back went the ship, and we began again to steer a

southerly course. All this time the Persian kept his look of complete

abstraction, and remained unshaken through all his difficulties. This

seriousness in face of events which would force into shouts of laughter

any European congregation is a characteristic of a native. It is strange

that Englishmen are nowhere so easily provoked to loud laughter as in a

church or college chapel, natives at no time so insusceptible of

ridicule as when engaged upon the services of their religions.

The shallowness of the Indus, its impracticability for steamships during

some months of the year, and the many windings of the stream--all these

things make it improbable that the river will ever be largely available

for purposes of trade; at the same time, the Indus valley must

necessarily be the line taken by the commerce of the Punjaub, and

eventually by that of some portions of Central Asia, and even of

Southern China. Whether Kurrachee becomes our great Indian port, or

whether our railway be made through Beloochistan, a safe and speedy road

up the Indus valley for troops and trade is needed.

If we take into consideration the size of India, the amount of its

revenues, and the length of time during which we have occupied that

portion of its extent which we at present hold, it is impossible to

avoid the conclusion that not even in Australia have railways been more

completely neglected than they have been in India. We have opened but

4000 miles, or one mile for every 45,000 people. Nothing has been

touched as yet but the Grand Trunk and great military and postal routes,

and even these are little more than half completed. Even the Bombay and

Calcutta mail line and the Calcutta and Lahore lines are hardly

finished; the Peshawur line and the Indus road not yet begun. While at

home people believe that the Euphrates Valley Railway is under

consideration, they will find, if they come out to India, that to reach

Peshawur in 34° N. latitude they must go to Bombay in 18°, if not to

Galle in 6°. Even if they reach Kurrachee, they will find it a month‘s

journey to Peshawur. While we are trying to tempt the wool and shawls of

Central Asia down to Umritsur and Lahore, the goods with which we would

buy these things are sent round by the Cape of Good Hope and Calcutta.

It is true that the Indus line will be no easy one to make. To bridge

the river at Mithun Kote or even at Kotree would be difficult enough,

and were it to be bridged at Sukkur, where there is rock, and a narrow

pass upon the river, the line from Sukkur to Kurrachee would be exposed

to depredation from the frontier tribes. The difficulties are great,

but the need is greater, and the argument of the heavy cost of

river-side railroads should not weigh with us in the case of lines

required for the safety of the country. The Lahore and Peshawur, the

Kotree and Moultan, the Kotree and Baroda, and the Baroda and Delhi

lines, instead of being set one against the other for comparison, should

be simultaneously completed as necessary for the defense of the empire,

and as forming the trunk lines for innumerable branches into the

cotton-and wheat-growing districts.

One of the branches of the Indus line will have to be constructed from

the Bholan Pass to Sukkur, where we lay some days embarking cotton.

Sukkur lies on the Beloochistan side; Roree fort--known as the “Key of

Scinde,” the seizure of which by us provoked the great war with the

Ameers--on an island in mid-stream; and Bukkur City on the eastern or

left bank; and the river, here narrowed to a width of a quarter of a

mile, runs with the violence of a mountain torrent.

Sukkur is one of the most ancient of Indian cities, and was mentioned as

time-worn by the Greek geographers, while tradition says that its

antiquities attracted Alexander; but towns grow old with great rapidity

in India, and, once ancient in their look, never to the eye become in

the slightest degree older.

In Sukkur I first saw the Scindee cap, which may be described as a tall

hat with the brim atop; but the Scindees were not the only

strangely-dressed traders in Sukkur and Roree: there were high-capped

Persians, and lean Afghans with long gaunt faces and high cheek-bones,

and furred merchants from Central Asia. It is even said that goods find

their way overland from China to Sukkur, through Eastern Persia and

Beloochistan, the traders preferring to come round four thousand miles

than to cross the main chain of the Himalayas or pass through the

country of the Afghans.

In ancient times there was considerable intercourse between China and

Hindostan; at the end of the seventh century, indeed, the Chinese

invaded India through Nepaul, and captured five hundred cities. It is to

be hoped that the next few years may see a railway built from Rangoon to

Southern China, and from Calcutta to the Yang-tse-Kiang, a river upon

which there are ample stores of coal, which would supply the

manufacturing wants of India.

After viewing from a lofty tower the flat country in the direction of

Shikapore, we spent one of our Sukkur evenings upon the island of Roree

watching the natives fishing. Casting themselves into the river on the

top of skins full of air, or more commonly on great earthenware

pitchers, they floated at a rapid pace down with the whirling stream,

pushing before them a sunken net which they could close and lift by the

drawing of a string. About twice a minute they would strike a fish, and,

lifting their head, would impale the captive on a stick slung behind

their back, and at once lower again the net in readiness for further

action.

Sukkur, like seven other places that I had visited within a year, has

the reputation of being the hottest city in the world, and the joke on

the boats of the Indus flotilla is that Moultan is too hot to bear, and

Sukkur much hotter; but that Jacobabad, on the Beloochee frontier, near

Sukkur, is so hot that the people come down thence to Sukkur for the hot

season, and find its coolness as refreshing as ordinary mortals do that

of Simla. Hot as is Sukkur, it is fairly beaten by a spot at the foot

of the Ibex Hills, near Sehwan. I was sleeping on the bridge with an

officer from Peshawur, when the crew were preparing to put off from the

bank for the day‘s journey. We were awakened by the noise; but, as we

sat up and rubbed our eyes, a blast of hot wind came down from the

burnt-up hills, laden with fine sand, and of such a character that I got

a lantern--for it was not fully light--and made my way to the deck

thermometer. I found it standing at 104°, although the hour was 4·15

A.M. At breakfast-time, it had fallen to 100°, from which it slowly

rose, until at 1 P.M. it registered 116° in the shade. The next night,

it never fell below 100°. This was the highest temperature I experienced

in India during the hot weather, and it was, singularly enough, the same

as the highest which I recorded in Australia. No part of the course of

the Indus is within the tropics, but it is not in the tropics that the

days are hottest, although the nights are generally unbearable on

sea-level near the equator.

At Kootree, near Hydrabad, the capital of Scinde, where the tombs of the

Ameers are imposing, if far from beautiful, we left the Indus for the

railway, and, after a night‘s journey, found ourselves upon the

sea-shore at Kurrachee.

CHAPTER XVI.

OVERLAND ROUTES.

Of all the towns in India, Kurrachee is the least Indian. With its

strong southwesterly breeze, its open sea and dancing waves, it is to

one coming from the Indus valley a pleasant place enough; and the

climate is as good as that of Alexandria, though there is at Kurrachee

all the dust of Cairo. For a stranger detained against his will to find

Kurrachee bearable there must be something refreshing in its breezes:

the town stands on a treeless plain, and of sights there are none,

unless it be the sacred alligators at Muggur Peer, where the tame

“man-eaters” spring at a goat for the visitor‘s amusement as freely as

the Wolfsbrunnen trout jump at the gudgeon.

There is no reason given why the alligators’ pool should be reputed

holy, but in India places easily acquire sacred fame. About Peshawur

there dwell many hill-fanatics, whose sole religion appears to consist

in stalking British sentries. So many of them have been locked up in the

Peshawur jail that it has become a holy place, and men are said to steal

and riot in the streets of the bazaar in order that they may be

consigned to this sacred temple.

The nights were noisy in Kurrachee, for the great Mohammedan feast of

the Mohurrum had commenced, and my bungalow was close to the lines of

the police, who are mostly Belooch Mohammedans. Every evening, at dusk,

fires were lighted in the police-lines and the bazaar, and then the

tomtom-ing gradually increased from the gentle drone of the daytime

until a perfect storm of “tom-a-tom, tomtom, tom-a-tom, tomtom,” burst

from all quarters of the town, and continued the whole night long,

relieved only by blasts from conch-shells and shouts of “Shah Hassan!

Shah Hoosein! Wah Allah! Wah Allah!” as the performers danced round the

flames. I heartily wished myself in the State of Bhawulpore, where there

is a license-tax on the beating of drums at feasts. The first night of

the festival I called up a native servant who “spoke English,” to make

him take me to the fires and explain the matter. His only explanation

was a continual repetition of “Dat Mohurrum, Mohammedan Christmas-day.”

When each night, about dawn, the tomtom-ing died away once more, the

chokedars--or night watchmen--woke up from their sound sleep, and began

to shout “Ha ha!” into every room to show that they were awake.

[Illustration]

The chokedars are well-known characters in every Indian station: always

either sleepy and useless, or else in league with the thieves, they are

nevertheless a recognized class, and are everywhere employed. At

Rawul-Pindee and Peshawar, the chokedars are armed with guns, and it is

said that a newly-arrived English officer at the former place was lately

returning from a dinner-party, when he was challenged by the chokedar of

the first house he had to pass. Not knowing what reply to make, he took

to his heels, when the chokedar fired at him as he ran. The shot woke

all the chokedars of the parade, and the unfortunate officer received

the fire of every man as he passed along to his house at the farther end

of the lines, which he reached, however, in perfect safety. It has been

suggested that, for the purpose of excluding all natives from the lines

at night, there should be a shibboleth or standing parole of some

word which no native can pronounce. The word suggested is

“Shoeburyness.”

Although chokedars were silent and tomtom-ing subdued during the

daytime, there were plenty of other sounds. Lizards chirped from the

walls of my room, and sparrows twittered from every beam and rafter of

the roof. When I told a Kurrachee friend that my slippers, my brushes,

and soldier‘s writing-case had all been thrown by me on to the chief

beam during an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the enemy, he replied

that for his part he paraded his drawing-room every morning with a

double-barreled gun, and frequently fired into the rafters, to the

horror of his wife.

In a small lateen-rigged yacht lent us by a fellow-traveler from

Moultan, some of us visited the works which have long been in progress

for the improvement of the harbor of Kurrachee, and which form the sole

topic of conversation among the residents in the town. The works have

for object the removal of the bar which obstructs the entrance to the

harbor, with a view to permit the entry of larger ships than can at

present find an anchorage at Kurrachee.

The most serious question under discussion is that of whether the bar is

formed by the Indus silt or merely by local causes, as, if the former

supposition is correct, the ultimate disposition of the ten thousand

millions of cubic feet of mud which the Indus annually brings down is

not likely to be affected by such works as those in progress at

Kurrachee. When a thousand sealed bottles were lately thrown into the

Indus for it to be seen whether they would reach the bar, the result of

the “great bottle trick,” as Kurrachee people called it, was that only

one bottle reached and not one weathered a point six miles to the

southward of the harbor. The bar is improving every year, and has now

some twenty feet of water, so that ships of 1000 tons can enter except

in the monsoon, and the general belief of engineers is that the

completion of the present works will materially increase the depth of

water.

The question of this bar is not one of merely local interest: a single

glance at the map is sufficient to show the importance of Kurrachee.

Already rising at an unprecedented pace, having trebled her shipping and

quadrupled her trade in ten years, she is destined to make still greater

strides as soon as the Indus Railway is completed, and finally--when the

Persian Gulf route becomes a fact--to be the greatest of the ports of

India.

That a railway must one day be completed from Constantinople or from

some port on the Mediterranean to Bussorah on the Persian Gulf is a

point which scarcely admits of doubt. From Kurrachee or Bombay to London

by the Euphrates valley and Constantinople is all-but a straight line,

while from Bombay to London by Aden and Alexandria is a wasteful curve.

The so-called “Overland Route” is half as long again as would be the

direct line. The Red Sea and Isthmus route has neither the advantage of

unbroken sea nor of unbroken land transit; the direct route with a

bridge near Constantinople might be extended into a land road from India

to Calais or Rotterdam. The Red Sea line passes along the shores of

Arabia, where there is comparatively little local trade; the Persian

Gulf route would develop the remarkable wealth of Persia, and would

carry to Europe a local commerce already great. At the entrance of the

Persian Gulf, near Cape Mussendoom or Ormuz, we should establish a free

port on the plan of Singapore. In 1000 A.D., the spot now known as Ormuz

was a barren rock, but a few years of permanent occupation of the spot

as a free port changed the barren islet into one of the wealthiest

cities in the world. The Red Sea route crosses Egypt, the direct route

crosses Turkey; and it cannot be too strongly urged that in war time

“Egypt” means Russia or France, while “Turkey” means Great Britain.

In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf railroad, Kurrachee would

play a leading part. Not only the wheat and the cotton of the Punjaub

and of the then irrigated Scinde, but the trade of Central Asia would

flow down the Indus, and it is hardly too much to believe that the silks

of China, the teas of Northern India, and the shawls of Cashmere will

all of them one day find in Kurrachee their chief port. The earliest

known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf. Chinese ships traded

to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh centuries, bringing silk and iron, and

it may be doubted whether any of the Russian routes will be able to

compete with the more ancient Euphrates valley line of trade. Shorter,

passing through countries well known and comparatively civilized,

admitting at once of the use of land and water transport side by side,

it is far superior in commercial and political advantages to any of the

Russian desert roads. A route through Upper Persia has been proposed,

but merchants of experience will tell you that greater facilities for

trade are extended to Europeans in even the “closed” ports of China than

upon the coasts of Persia, and the prospect of the freedom of trade upon

a Persian railroad would be but a bad one, it may be feared.

The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the glory of many

fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuz and Antioch, Cyprus and Rhodes,

have a second history before them; Crete, Brindisi, and Venice will each

obtain a renewal of their ancient fame. Alexander of Macedon was the

first man who took a scientific view of the importance of the Gulf

route, but we have hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson

contained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the coast from the

Indus to the Euphrates. The advantage to be gained from the completion

of the railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf will not fall

only to the share of India and Great Britain. Holland and Belgium are,

in proportion to their wealth, at the least as greatly interested in the

Euphrates route as are we ourselves, and should join us in its

construction. The Dutch trade with Java would be largely benefited, and

Dutch ports would become the shipping-places for Eastern merchandise on

its way to England and northeast America, while, to the cheap

manufactures of Liège, India, China, and Central Asia would afford the

best of markets. If the line were a double one, to the west and north of

Aleppo, one branch running to Constantinople and the other to the

Mediterranean at Scanderoon, the whole of Europe would benefit by the

Persian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, would gain also the

power of protecting Persia against Russia, and of thus preventing the

dominance of a crushing despotism throughout the Eastern world. In a

thousand ways, however, the advantages of the line to all Europe are so

plainly manifest, that the only question worth discussing is the nature

of the difficulties that hinder its completion.

The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are political and

financial, and both have been exaggerated without limit. The project for

a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf has been compared to

that for the construction of a railroad from the Missouri to the

Pacific. In 1858, the American line was looked on as a mere speculator‘s

dream, while the Euphrates Railway was to be commenced at once; ten

years have passed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact, while the Indian

line has been forgotten.

It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a more difficult

matter than that of crossing the Plains and Rocky Mountains. The

distance from St. Louis to San Francisco is 1600 miles, that from

Constantinople to Bussorah is but 1100 miles; or from Scanderoon to

Bussorah only 700 miles. From London to the Persian Gulf is not so far

as from New York to San Francisco. The American line had to cross two

great snowy chains and a waterless tract of considerable width: the

Indian route crosses no passes so lofty as those of the Rocky Mountains

or so difficult as those of the Sierra Nevada, and is well watered in

its whole length. On the American line there is little coal, if any,

while the Euphrates route would be plentifully supplied with coal from

the neighborhood of Bagdad. When the American line was commenced, the

proposed track lay across unknown wilds: the Constantinople and Persian

Gulf route passes through venerable towns, the most ancient of all the

cities of the world, and the route itself is the oldest known highway of

trade. The chief of all the advantages possessed by the Indian line

which is wanting in America is the presence of ample labor on all parts

of the road. Steamers are already running from Bombay and Kurrachee to

the Persian Gulf; others on the Tigris, and a portion of the Euphrates;

there is a much-used road from Bagdad to Aleppo; and a Turkish military

road from Aleppo to Constantinople, to which city a direct railroad will

soon be opened; and a telegraph-line belonging to an English company

already crosses Asian Turkey from end to end. Notwithstanding the

facilities, the Euphrates Railway is still a project, while the Atlantic

and Pacific line will be opened in 1870.

Were the financial difficulties those which the supporters of the line

have in reality to meet, it might be urged that there will be a great

local traffic between Bussorah, Bagdad, and Aleppo, and from all these

cities to the sea, and that the government mail subsidies will be huge,

and the Indian trade, even in the worst of years, considerable. Were the

indifference of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they should

refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line, its importance would

amply warrant a moderate addition to the debt of India.

The real difficulties that have to be encountered are political rather

than financial; the covert opposition of France and Egypt is not less

powerful for evil than is the open hostility of Russia. Happily for

India, however, the territories of our ally Turkey extend to the Persian

Gulf, for it must be remembered that for railway purposes Turkish rule,

if we so please, is equivalent to English rule. As it happens, no active

measures are needed to advance our line; but, were it otherwise, such

intervention as might be necessary to secure the safety of the great

highway for Eastern trade with Europe would be defensible were it

exerted toward a purely independent government.

The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte must be direct and

governmental. For a private company to conduct a great enterprise to a

successful conclusion in Eastern countries is always difficult; but when

the matter is political in its nature, or, if commercial, at least

hindered on political grounds, a private company is powerless. It is,

moreover, the practice of Eastern governments to grant concessions of

important works which they cannot openly oppose, but which in truth they

wish to hinder, to companies so formed as to be incapable of proceeding

with the undertaking. When others apply, the government answers them

that nothing further can be done: “the concession is already granted.”

Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed. It might even be

advisable that we should declare that the Euphrates Valley Railway

through the Turkish territory from Constantinople and Scanderoon through

Aleppo to Bagdad and Bussorah, and sufficient military posts to insure

its security in time of war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and

that we should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to commence our

work, on pain of the withdrawal of our protection.

Our general principle of non-interference is always liable to be set

aside on proof of the existence of a higher necessity for intervention

than for adherence to our golden rule, and it may be contended that

sufficient proof has been shown in the present instance. Whether public

action is to be taken, or the matter to be left to private enterprise,

it is hard to resist the conclusion that the Direct Route to India is

one of the most pressing of the questions of the day.

When, in company with my fellow-passengers from Moultan, I left

Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on board the then Commissioner of Scinde,

who was on his way to take his seat as a member of Council at Bombay. A

number of the leading men of Scinde came on board to bid farewell to him

before he sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but for our

annexation of the country, would be the reigning Ameers at this moment.

Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, surpassed in

glittering pomp the caps and baldrics of these Scindee chieftains;

neither could anything be stranger than their dress. One had on a silk

coat of pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet slippers

with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of dark amber with flowers in

white lace. A third was clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with

amber; and the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk and

gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the strange-shaped Scindian

hat; all had jeweled dirks, with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold

their swords, and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them. The

sight, however, of no number of sapphires, turquoises, and gold clothes

could have reconciled me to a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I

rejoiced when our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship‘s side to

the sound of the Lascars’ anchor-tripping chorus, and left the deck to

the “Proconsul” and ourselves.

CHAPTER XVII.

BOMBAY.

Crossing the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay

in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba

Point and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting up the

distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped

anchor it was dark, so I slept on board.

I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mountains of the Deccan,

and revealing the wooded summits of the islands, while a light land

breeze rippled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive with the

bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming

down in rich green masses into the sea itself lent a singular softness

to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all

nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the Swedish to the

Greek.

The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even mass of green

is broken here and there by the crimson cones of the “gold mohur” trees,

resembles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical than Indian,

but there is nothing tropical and little that is Eastern in the bustle

of the bay. The lines of huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by

the still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with a

sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek relief by

turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain islands and the Western

Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; as it is, the

distances are over-great.

Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of defense is

singularly weak. The absence of batteries from the entrance to so great

a trading port strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New York,

and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-balls of

the African admirals of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay

merchants to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a

reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of view, Kurrachee

is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to which can easily be cut

off, and its people starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of

batteries at the harbor‘s mouth would be, that the present fort might be

pulled down, unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the

protection of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the

broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half might be

partly built on.

The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result of the late

increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline of which, in 1865

and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city in

the last-named year. The panic, from which Bombay has now so far

recovered that it can no longer be said that she has “not one merchant

solvent,” was chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which

the shares in a land-reclamation company which never commenced its

operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was intensified by the

passage of the English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round the

world.

Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely king than in Bombay.

Cotton has collected the hundred steamers and the thousands of native

boats that are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon; cotton

has built the great offices and stores of seven and eight stories high;

cotton has furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New

Yorkers’ cottages on Staten Island.

The export of cotton from India rose from five millions’ worth in 1859

to thirty-eight millions’ worth in 1864, and the total exports of Bombay

increased in the same proportion, while the population of the city rose

from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed to look at the East as

standing still, but Chicago itself never took a grander leap than did

Bombay between 1860 and 1864. The rebellion in America gave the

impetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity; and the Indian

cotton-trade, though checked by the peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and

jute are not the only Indian raw products the export of which has

increased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased twentyfold, of

tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold in the last six years; and the

export of Indian tea increased in five years from nothing to three or

four hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports, those which we

associate with the term “Eastern trade,” are standing still, while the

raw produce trade is thus increasing:--spices, elephants’ teeth, pearls,

jewels, bandannas, shellac, dates, and gum are all decreasing, although

the total exports of the country have trebled in five years.

India needs but railroads to enable her to compete successfully with

America in the growth of cotton, but the development of the one raw

product will open out her hitherto unknown resources.

While staying at one of the great merchant-houses in the Fort, I was

able to see that the commerce of Bombay has not grown up of itself. With

some experience among hard workers in the English towns, I was,

nevertheless, astonished at the work got through by senior clerks and

junior partners at Bombay. Although at first led away by the idea that

men who wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking-chairs upon

the balcony for an hour after breakfast, cannot be said to get through

much work, I soon found that men in merchants’ houses at Bombay work

harder than they would be likely to do at home. Their day begins at 6

A.M., and, as a rule, they work from then till dinner at 8 or 9 P.M.,

taking an hour for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay was

during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve hours’ work in the

day, with the thermometer never under 90° all the night, is an

exhausting life. Englishmen could not long survive the work, but the

Bombay merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from Canada to

Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who

has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external

aid, you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that Scotland has

not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.

Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is not always May or

June, and from November to March the climate is all-but perfect. Even in

the hottest weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar is close

at hand, for short excursions, whenever the time is found; while the

Bombay mango is a fruit which may bear comparison with the peaches of

Salt Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The Bombay merchants

have not time, indeed, to enjoy the beauties of their city, any more

than Londoners have to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower; and

as for “tropical indolence,” or “Anglo-Indian luxury,” the bull-dogs are

the only members of the English community in India who can discover

anything but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each dog has his

servant to attend to all his wants, and, knowing this, the cunning brute

always makes the boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead

to the private rooms over the merchants’ houses in the Fort.

Bombay bazaar is the gayest of gay scenes. Besides the ordinary crowd of

any “native town,” there are solemn Jains, copper-colored Jews,

white-coated Portuguese, Persians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespangled

nautch girls, and grinning Seedees. The Parsees are strongest of all

the merchant peoples of Bombay in numbers, in intelligence, and in

wealth. Among the shopkeepers of their race, there is an over-prominence

of trade shrewdness in the expression of the face, and in the shape even

of the head. The Louvre bust of Richelieu, in which we have the idea of

a wheedler, is a common type in the Parsee shops of the Bombay bazaar.

The Parsee people, however, whatever their looks, are not only in

complete possession of Bombay, but are the dark-skinned race to which we

shall have to intrust the largest share in the regeneration of the East.

Trading as they do in every city between Galle and Astrakan, but

everywhere attached to the English rule, they bear to us the relative

position that the Greeks occupy toward Russia.

Both in religion and in education, the Parsees are, as a community, far

in advance of the Indian Mohammedans, and of the Hindoos. Their creed

has become a pure deism, in which God‘s works are worshiped as the

manifestations or visible representatives of God on earth, fire, the

sun, and the sea taking the first places; although in the climate of

Bombay prayers to the sun must be made up of more supplications than

thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught, and there is not a

pauper in the whole tribe. In the education and elevation of women, no

Eastern race has as yet done much, but the Parsees have done the most,

and have paved the way for further progress.

In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee movement has had

some effect even upon others than Parsees, and the Hindoos of Bombay

City stand far before even those of Calcutta in the earnestness and

success of their endeavors to promote the moral elevation of women.

Nothing can be done toward the regeneration of India so long as the

women of all classes remain in their present degradation; and although

many native gentlemen in Bombay already recognize the fact, and act upon

it, progress is slow, since there is no basis upon which to begin. The

Hindoos will not send their wives to schools where there are European

lady teachers, for fear of proselytism taking place; and native women

teachers are not yet to be found; hence all teaching must needs be left

to men. Nothing, moreover, can be done with female children in Western

India, where girls are married at from five to twelve years old.