I had not been two days in Bombay when a placard caught my eye,

announcing a performance at the theater of “Romeo and Juliet, in the

Maratta tongue;” but the play had no Friar Lawrence, no apothecary, and

no nurse; it was nothing but a simple Maratta love-tale, followed by

some religious tableaux. In the first piece an Englishman was

introduced, and represented as kicking every native that crossed his

path with the exclamation of “Damned fool:” at each repetition of which

the whole house laughed. It is to be feared that this portion of the

play was “founded upon fact.” On my way home through the native town at

night, I came on a marriage procession better than any that I had seen.

A band of fifers were screaming the most piercing of notes in front of

an illuminated house, at which the horsemen and carriages were just

arriving, both men and women clothed in jeweled robes, and silks of a

hundred colors, that flashed and glittered in the blaze of the red

torches. The procession, like the greater number of the most gorgeous

ceremonials of Bombay, was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the

marriage of one of their own people; but it is a curious fact that night

marriages were forced upon the Parsees by the Hindoos, and one of the

conditions upon which the Parsees were received into India was, that

their marriage processions should take place at night.

The Caves of Elephanta have been many times described. The grandest

sight of India, after the Taj, is the three-faced bust of the Hindoo

Trinity, or God in his threefold character of Creator, Preserver, and

Destroyer. No Grecian sculpture that I have seen so well conveys the

idea of Godhead. The Greeks could idealize man, the Italians can paint

the saint, but the builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the

highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which distinguishes the heads

of the Creator and Preserver is not the meditation of the saint, but the

calm of unbounded power; and the Destroyer‘s head portends not

destruction, so much as annihilation, to the world. The central head is,

in its mysterious solemnity, that which the Sphinx should be, and is

not, but one attribute alone is common to the expression of all three

faces,--the presence of the Inscrutable.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE MOHURRUM.

Although Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital, and a thoroughly Hindoo

city, it is famed throughout India for the splendor with which its

people celebrate the Mohammedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in such a

way as to reach the town upon the day of the “taboot procession.”

The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country of Bombay, by the Western

Ghauts to the table-land of the Deccan, known as the Bhore Ghaut

incline, in which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into the

Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length, is far more

striking as an engineering work than the passage of the Alleghanies on

the Baltimore and Ohio track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada

railway works. The views from the carriage windows are singularly like

those in the Kaduganava Pass between Columbo and Kandy; in fact, the

Western Ghauts are of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the

hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else rent by

volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle-peaks.

The rainy season had not commenced, and the vegetation that gives the

Ghauts their charm was wanting, although the “mango showers” were

beginning, and spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot weather,

were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from the rains. One of the

early travelers to the Deccan told the good folks at home that after the

rains the spiders’ webs were so thickly laced across the jungle that the

natives of the country were in the habit of hiring elephants to walk

before them and force a passage! At the time of my visit, neither webs

nor jungle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harmless-looking

fellows. One effect of the approaching monsoon was visible from the

summit of the Ghaut, for the bases of the mountains were hid by the low

clouds that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held to be

unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so bad as the Kotree and

Kurrachee line, which runs only “weather permitting,” and is rendered

useless by two hours’ rain--a fall which, luckily for the shareholders,

occurs only about once in every seven years. On the Bhore Ghaut, on the

contrary, 220 inches in four months is not unusual, and “the rains” here

take the place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away

bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry season there is a

want of the visible presence of difficulties overcome, which detracts

from the interest of the line.

At daybreak at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had lasted without

intermission through the ten days’ fast, came to a sudden end, and the

police and European magistrates began to marshal the procession of the

taboots, or shrines, in the bazaar.

A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted on the walls,

announcing the order of the procession and the rules to be enforced. The

orders were that the procession to the river was to commence at 7 A.M.

and to end at 11 A.M., and that tomtom-ing, except during those hours,

would not be allowed. The taboots of the light cavalry, of three

regiments of native infantry, and of the followers of three English

regiments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were, however, to

start at six o‘clock; the order of precedence among the cantonment or

regimental taboots was carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms

forbidden.

When I reached the bazaar, I found the native police were working in

vain in trying to force into line a vast throng of bannermen, drummers,

and saints, who surrounded the various taboots or models of the house of

Ali and Fatima where their sons Hassan and Hoosein were born. Some of

the shrines were of the size and make of the dolls’-houses of our

English children, others in their height and gorgeousness resembled the

most successful of our burlesques upon Guy Fawkes: some were borne on

litters by four men; others mounted on light carts and drawn by

bullocks, while the gigantic taboot of the Third Cavalry required six

buffaloes for its transport to the river. Many privates of our native

infantry regiments had joined the procession in uniform, and it was as

strange to me to see privates in our service engaged in howling round a

sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with the tomtom, as it

must have been to the English in Lucknow in 1857 to hear the bands of

the rebel regiments playing “Cheer, boys, cheer.”

Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within their lines all day, to be

ready to suppress disturbances caused by the Moslem fanatics, who,

excited by the Mohurrum, often run amuck among their Hindoo neighbors.

In old times, quarrels between the Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and

dissenting Mussulmans, used to be added to those between Mohammedans and

Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but except upon the Afghan border

these feuds have all-but died out now.

At the head of the procession marched a row of pipers, producing sounds

of which no Highland regiment would have felt ashamed, followed by

long-bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horseback,

surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot placed on a cart, and drawn

by bullocks; boys swinging incense walked before and followed, and I

remarked a gigantic cross--a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit College for

this Mohammedan festivity. After each taboot there came a band of Hindoo

“tigers”--men painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and

wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of tigers, we had men

painted in the colors worn by “sprites” in an English pantomime, and

all--sprites and tigers--danced in the fashion of the medieval mummers.

Behind the tigers and buffoons there followed women, walking in their

richest dress. The nautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all

the East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be compared with

the Cashmere nautch of Lahore.

Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks on horseback, wearing

turbans of the honorable green which denotes direct descent from the

Prophet, though the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of

the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohammedan writers, wears a green

turban, as being an “honorary” descendant of Mohammed.

Thousands of men and women thronged the road down which the taboots were

forced to pass, or sat in the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot

of their family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing and

tomtom-beating like the rest.

Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the elegance of their

gait. In the hot weather, the saree is the sole garment of the Hindoo

women, and lends grace to the form without concealing the outlines of

the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned limbs. The saree is

eight yards long, but of such soft thin texture that it makes no show

upon the person. It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo

habits, that at this Mohammedan festival the Mohammedan women should all

be wearing the long seamless saree of the conquered Hindoos.

In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was nothing distinctively

Mohammedan. Hindoos joined in the festivities, and “Portuguese,” or

descendants of the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the

time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed high-sounding names

and titles, and now form a large proportion of the inhabitants of towns

in the Bombay Presidency. The temptation of a ten days’ holiday is too

great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the Christians or

Hindoos.

The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-side, where the taboots,

one after the other, made their exit from ten days of glory into

unfathomable slush; and such was the number of the “camp taboots,” as

those of the native soldiers in our service are styled, and the “bazaar

taboots,” or city contributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not

completed when the illumination and fireworks commenced.

After dark, the bazaar was lit with colored fires, and with the ghostly

paper-lanterns that give no light; and the noise of tomtoms and

fire-crackers recommenced in spite of proclamations and police-rules.

Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the Mohurrum would cause

as many fires in Hindostan as Independence-day in the United States;

but, although houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are never

burnt down, for nothing but water can damage mud. We could have played

our way into Lucknow in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we

contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell.

During the day I had been amused with the sayings of some British

recruits, who were watching the immersion ceremonies, but in the evening

one of them was in the bazaar, uproariously drunk, kicking every native

against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an officer of another

regiment, who did not like to interfere: “I‘m a private soldier, I know,

but I‘m a gentleman; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I knows a

cloud when I sees it, damned if I don‘t.” On the other hand, in some

fifty thousand natives holiday-making that day, many of them Christians

and low-caste men, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken man was

not to be seen.

It is impossible to overestimate the harm done to the English name in

India by the conduct of drunken soldiers and “European loafers.” The

latter class consists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway

sailors from Calcutta,--men who, traveling across India and living at

free quarters on the trembling natives, become ruffianly beyond

description from the effect upon their originally brutal natures of the

possession of unusual power.

The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as that of the Mohurrum has

been one of the many causes which have led us to believe that the

Mohammedans form a considerable proportion of the population of

Hindostan, but the census in the Northwest Provinces revealed the fact

that they had there been popularly set down as three times as numerous

as they are, and it is probable that the same is the case throughout all

India. Not only are the Indian Mohammedans few, but their Mohammedanism

sits lightly on them: they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in

ceremonies, in daily life, and all-but Hindoos in their actual worship.

On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me that the Hindoos do not

scruple to attend the commemoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares

there is a temple which is used in common by Mohammedans and Hindoos,

and throughout India, among the low-caste people, there is now little

distinction between the religions. The descendants of the Mohammedan

conquerors, who form the leading families in several native States, and

also in Oude itself, are among the most dangerous of our Indian

subjects, but they appear to have but little hold upon the humble

classes of their fellow-worshipers, and their attempts to stir up their

people to active measures against the English have always failed. On the

other hand, we have hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our

consideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still more numerous

hill-tribes, and permitted our governments to act as though the Hindoos

and the Sikhs were the only inhabitants of Hindostan.

CHAPTER XIX.

ENGLISH LEARNING.

The English traveler who crosses India from Calcutta to Bombay is struck

with the uncivilized condition of the land. He has heard in England of

palaces and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of the grace

of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls, of the Taj, of the Pearl

Mosque, of a civilization as perfect as the European and as old as the

Chinese. When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them naked

barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe

only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in

the climate of their land. The stories we are told at home are in no

sense false:--the Hindoos, of all classes, are graceful in their

carriage; their tombs and mosques are of extraordinary beauty, their art

patterns the despair of our best craftsmen; the native poetry is at

least equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest building in the world.

Every word is true, but the whole forms but a singularly small portion

of the truth. The religious legends, the art patterns, the perfect

manner and the graceful eye and taste seem to have descended to the

Hindoos of to-day from a generation whose general civilization they have

forgotten. The poetry is confined to a few members of a high-caste race,

and is mainly an importation from abroad; the architecture is that of

the Moslem conquerors. Shan Jehan, a Mohammedan emperor and a foreigner,

built the Taj; Akbar the Great, another Turk, was the designer of the

Pearl Mosque; and the Hindoos can no more be credited with the

architecture of their early conquerors than they can with the railways

and bridges of their English rulers, or with the waterworks of Bombay

City. The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely native races,

the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the Bengalees mere savages, and

the tribes of Central India but little better than the Australian

aborigines or the brutes. Throughout India there are remains of an early

civilization, but it has vanished as completely as it has in Egypt; and

the Cave-temples stand as far from the daily life of Hindostan as the

Pyramids do from that of Egypt.

It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely rapid since the

day when we arrived in India. Just as it is almost impossible, by any

exertion of the mind, to realize in Mexico the fact that the present

degraded Aztecs are the same people whom the Spaniards found, only some

three hundred years ago, dwelling in splendid palaces, and worshiping

their unknown gods in golden temples through the medium of a sacred

tongue, so now it is difficult to believe that the pauperized

inhabitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude are the sons

of the chivalrous warriors who fought in the last century against Clive.

The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empires from a distance, we

are dazzled by the splendor of the kings and priests; drawing near, we

find an oppressed and miserable slave class, from whose hard earnings

the wealth of the great is wrung; called on to govern the country, we

extinguish the kings and priests in the fashion in which Captain Hodson,

in 1857, shot the last sons of the Imperial family of India in a dry

ditch, while we were transporting the last Mogul, along with our native

thieves, in a convict-ship to British Burmah. There remains the slave

class, and little else. We may select a few of these to be our policemen

and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another handful to wear red coats

and be our guards and the executioners of their countrymen; we may teach

a few to chatter some words of English, and then, calling them great

scoundrels, may set them in our railway stations and our offices; but

virtually, in annexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling class,

and reduce the government to a mere imperialism, where one man rules and

the rest are slaves. No parallel can be drawn in Europe or North America

to that state of things which exists wherever we carry our arms in the

East: were the President and Congress in America, and all the wealthy

merchants of the great towns, to be destroyed to-morrow, the next day

would see the government proceeding quietly in the hands of another set

every bit as intelligent, as wise, and good. In a lesser degree, the

same would be the case in England or in France. The best example that

could be given nearer home of that which occurs continually in the East

would be one which would suppose that the Emperor and nobility in Russia

were suddenly destroyed, and the country left in the hands of the

British ambassador and the late serfs. Even this example would fail to

convey a notion of the extent of the revolution which takes place on

the conquest by Britain of an Eastern country; for in the East the

nobles are better taught and the people more ignorant than they are in

Russia, and the change causes a more complete destruction of poetry, of

literature, and of art.

It being admitted, then, that we are in the position of having, in

Hindostan, a numerous and ignorant, but democratic people to govern from

without, there comes the question of what should be the general

character of our government. The immediate questions of the day may be

left to our subordinates in India; but the direction and the tendencies

of legislation are matters for us at home. There can be nothing more

ridiculous than the position of those of our civilians in India who,

while they treat the natives with profound contempt, are continually

crying out against government from at home, on the ground set forth in

the shibboleth of “India for the Indians.” If India is to be governed by

the British race at all, it must be governed from Great Britain. The

general conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by the English

people, and nothing but the execution of our decrees, the collection of

evidence, and the framing of mere rules, left to our subordinates in the

East.

First among the reforms that must be introduced from London is the

general instruction in the English language of the native population.

Except upon a theory that will fairly admit of the forcing upon a not

unwilling people of this first of all great means of civilization, our

presence in India is wholly indefensible. Unless also that be done, our

presence in India, or that of some nation stronger than us and not more

scrupulous, must endure forever; for it is plainly impossible that a

native government capable of holding its own against Russia and America

can otherwise be built up in Hindostan. Upon the contrary

supposition,--namely, that we do not intend at any time to quit our hold

on India,--the instruction of the people in our language becomes still

more important. Upon the second theory, we must teach them English, the

language of the British government; upon the first, English, the

language of the world. Upon either theory, we must teach them English.

Nothing can better show the trivial character of the much-talked-of

reforms introduced into India in the last few years, since our Queen has

assumed the imperial throne of Hindostan, than the fact that no progress

whatever has been made in a matter of far more grave importance than are

any number of miles of railway, canal, or Grand Trunk roads. Our

civilians in India tell us that, if you teach the natives English, you

expose them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, and us to

revolt--an exposure which speaks not too highly of the government which

is forced to make it. Our military officers, naturally hating the

country to which they now are exiled, instead of being sent as formerly

of their own free will, tell you that every native who can speak English

is a scoundrel, a liar, and a thief, which is, perhaps, if we except the

Parsees, not far from true at present, when teaching is given only to a

few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices in which money

passes through native hands. Their opinion has no bearing whatever upon

a general instruction of the people, under which we should evidently be

able to pick our men, as we now pick them for all employments in which a

knowledge of English is not required.

A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in naturalizing their language in

a country twice as large as Europe: in the whole of South America, the

Central States, and Mexico. Not only there, but in the United States,

the Utes and Comanches, wild as they are, speak Spanish, while their own

language is forgotten. In the west of Mexico there is no trace of pure

Spanish blood, there is even comparatively little mixture--yet Spanish,

and that of the best, is spoken, to the exclusion of every other

language, in Manzanillo and Acapulco. This phenomenon is not confined to

the Western world. In Bombay Presidency, five millions of so-called

Portuguese--who, however, for the most part are pure Hindoos--speak a

Latin tongue, and worship at the temples of the Christian God. French

makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada, we find the Huron

Indians French in language and religion. English alone, it would seem,

cannot be pressed upon any of the dark-skinned tribes. In New Zealand,

the Maories know no English; in Natal, the Zulus; in India, the Hindoos.

The Dutch, finally expelled from South Africa in 1815 and from Ceylon in

1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the natives of those lands

than have the English--masters of them since the Dutch expulsion.

To the early abolition or total non-existence of slavery in the British

colonies, we may, perhaps, trace our unfortunate failure to spread our

mother-tongue. Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, all practiced a slavery of

the widest kind; all had about them not native servants, frequently

changing from the old master to the new, and passing unheeded to

whatever service money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic

slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably, to die within the

house where they were reared, to whom the language of the master was

taught, because your Spanish grandee, with power of life and death over

his family slaves, was not the man to condescend to learn his servants’

tongue in order that his commands should be more readily understood.

Another reason may have caused the Portuguese and other dominant races

of the later middle ages to have insisted that their slaves should learn

the language of the master and the government; namely, that in learning

the new, the servile families would speedily forget the older tongue,

and thus become as incapable of mixing in the conspiracies and

insurrections of their brother natives as Pyrenean shepherd dogs of

consorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever their reasons,

however, the Spaniards succeeded where we have failed.

The greatest of our difficulties are the financial. No cheap system is

workable by us, and our dear system we have not the means to work. The

success of our rule immediately depends upon the purity and good feeling

of the rulers, yet there are villages in British India where the people

have never seen a white man, and off the main roads, and outside the

district towns, the sight of a European official is extremely rare. To

the inhabitants of the greater portion of rural India, the governor who

symbolizes British rule is a cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman; himself

not improbably a Bengal mutineer in 1857, or drawn from the classes whom

our most ignorant sepoys themselves despised. It is not easy to see how

this vital defect can be amended, except by the slow process of raising

up a native population that we can trust and put in office, and this is

impossible unless we encourage and reward the study of the English

tongue. The most needed of all social reforms in India, an improvement

in the present thoroughly servile condition of the native women, could

itself in no way be more easily brought about than by the

familiarization of the Hindoos with English literature; and that

greatest of all the curses of India, false-swearing in the courts, would

undoubtedly be both directly and indirectly checked by the introduction

of our language. The spread of the English tongue need be no check to

that of the ancient classical languages of the East; the two studies

would go hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while we

spend annually in India a large sum upon our chaplains and church

schools, we toss only one-hundredth part of the sum--a paltry few

thousands of rupees--to the native colleges, where the most venerable of

languages--Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian--are taught by the men who

alone can thoroughly understand them. At the moment when England,

Germany, and America are struggling for the palm in the teaching of

Oriental literature--when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are contending

with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and Harvard, in translating and

explaining Eastern books--our government in India is refusing the

customary help to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the

teachers of the language.

So long as the natives remain ignorant of the English tongue, they

remain ignorant of all the civilization of our time--ignorant alike of

political and physical science, of philosophy and true learning. It is

needless to say that, if French or German were taught them instead of

English, they would be as well off in this respect; but English, as the

tongue of the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its acquisition

by the Hindoos will soon place the government of India in native hands,

and thus, gradually relieving us of an almost intolerable burden, will

civilize and set free the people of Hindostan.

CHAPTER XX.

INDIA.

“All general observations upon India are necessarily absurd,” said to me

at Simla a distinguished officer of the Viceroy‘s government; but,

although this is true enough of theories that bear upon the customs,

social or religious, of the forty or fifty peoples which make up what in

England we style the “Hindoo race,” it has no bearing on the

consideration of the policy which should guide our actual administration

of the Empire.

England in the East is not the England that we know. Flousy Britannia,

with her anchor and ship, becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism,

ruling a sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives’ own good,

and certainly for no one else‘s, by laws and in a manner opposed to

every tradition and every prejudice of the whole of the various tribes

of which this vast population is composed--scheming, annexing,

out-manœuvring Russia, and sometimes, it is to be feared, out-lying

Persia herself.

In our island home, we plume ourselves upon our hatred of political

extraditions: we would scorn to ask the surrender of a political

criminal of our own, we would die in the last ditch sooner than

surrender those of another crown. What a contrast we find to this when

we look at our conduct in the East! During the mutiny of 1857, some of

our rebel subjects escaped into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We

demanded their extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We insisted.

The offer we finally accepted was, that they should be transported to

the Portuguese settlement at Timor, we supplying transports. An Indian

transport conveying these men to their island grave, but carrying the

British flag, touched at Batavia in 1858, to the astonishment of the

honest Dutchmen, who knew England as a defender of national liberty in

Europe.

Although despotic, our government of India is not bad; indeed, the

hardest thing that can be said of it is that it is too good. We do our

duty by the natives manfully, but they care little about that, and we

are continually hurting their prejudices and offending them in small

things, to which they attach more importance than they do to great. To

conciliate the Hindoos, we should spend £10,000 a year in support of

native literature to please the learned, and £10,000 on fireworks to

delight the wealthy and the low-caste people. Instead of this, we worry

them with municipal institutions and benevolent inventions that they

cannot and will not understand. The attempt to introduce trial by jury

into certain parts of India was laudable, but it has ended in one of

those failures which discredit the government in the eyes of its own

subordinates. If there is a European foreman of jury, the natives salaam

to him, and ask: “What does the sahib say?” If not, they look across the

court to the native barristers, who hold up fingers, each of which means

1OOrs., and thus bid against each other for the verdict, for, while

natives as a rule are honest in their personal or individual dealings,

yet in places of trust--railway clerkships, secretaryships of

departments, and so on--they are almost invariably willing to take

bribes.

Throughout India, such trials as are not before a jury are conducted

with the aid of native assessors as members of the court. This works

almost as badly as the jury does, the judge giving his decision without

any reference to the opinion of the assessors. The story runs that the

only use of assessors is, that in an appeal--where the judge and

assessors had agreed--the advocate can say that the judge “has abdicated

his functions, and yielded to the absurd opinion of a couple of ignorant

and dishonest natives,”--or, if the judge had gone against his client in

spite of the assessors being inclined the other way, that the judge “has

decided in the teeth of all experienced and impartial native opinion, as

declared by the voices of two honest and intelligent assessors.”

Our introduction of juries is not an isolated instance of our somewhat

blind love for “progress.” If in the already-published portions of the

civil code--for instance, the parts which relate to succession,

testamentary and intestate--you read in the illustrations York for

Delhi, and Pimlico for Sultanpore, there is not a word to show that the

code is meant for India, or for an Oriental race at all. It is true that

the testamentary portion of the code applies at present only to European

residents in India; but the advisability of extending it to natives is

under consideration, and this extension is only a matter of time. The

result of over-great rapidity of legislation, and of unyielding

adherence to English or Roman models in the Indian codes, must be that

our laws will never have the slightest hold upon the people, and that,

if we are swept from India, our laws will vanish with us. The Western

character of our codes, and their want of elasticity and of adaptability

to Eastern conditions, is one among the many causes of our unpopularity.

The old-school Hindoos fear that we aim at subverting all their dearest

and most venerable institutions, and the free-thinkers of Calcutta and

the educated natives hate us because, while we preach culture and

progress, we give them no chance of any but a subordinate career. The

discontent of the first-named class we can gradually allay, by showing

them the groundlessness of their suspicions; but the shrewd Bengalee

baboos are more difficult to deal with, and can be met only in one

way--namely, by the employment of the natives in offices of high trust,

under the security afforded by the infliction of the most degrading

penalties on proof of the smallest corruption. One of the points in

which the policy of Akbar surpassed our own was in the association of

qualified Hindoos with his Mohammedan fellow-countrymen in high places

in his government. The fact, moreover, that native governments are still

preferred to British rule, is a strong argument in favor of the

employment by us of natives; for, roughly speaking, their governmental

system differs from ours only in the employment of native officers

instead of English. There is not now existent a thoroughly native

government; at some time or other, we have controlled in a greater or

less degree the governments of all the native States. To study purely

native rule, we should have to visit Caboul or Herat, and watch the

Afghan princes putting out each other‘s eyes, while their people are

engaged in never-ending wars, or in murdering strangers in the name of

God.

Natives might more safely be employed to fill the higher than the lower

offices. It is more easy to find honest and competent native governors

or councilmen than honest and efficient native clerks and policemen.

Moreover, natives have more temptations to be corrupt, and more

facilities for being so with safety, in low positions than in high. A

native policeman or telegraph official can take his bribe without fear

of detection by his European chief; not so a native governor, with

European subordinates about him.

The common Anglo-Indian objections to the employment of natives in our

service are, when examined, found to apply only to the employment of

incompetent natives. To say that the native lads of Bengal, educated in

our Calcutta colleges, are half educated and grossly immoral, is to say

that, under a proper system of selection of officers, they could never

come to be employed. All that is necessary at the moment is that we

should concede the principle by appointing, year by year, more natives

to high posts, and that, by holding the civil service examinations in

India as well as in England, and by establishing throughout India

well-regulated schools, we should place the competent native youths upon

an equal footing with the English.

That we shall ever come to be thoroughly popular in India is not to be

expected. By the time the old ruling families have died out, or

completely lost their power, the people whom we rescued from their

oppression will have forgotten that the oppression ever existed, and as

long as the old families last, they will hate us steadily. One of the

documents published in the _Gazette of India_, while I was at Simla, was

from the pen of Asudulla Muhamadi, one of the best-known Mohammedans of

the Northwest Provinces. His grievances were the cessation of the

practice of granting annuities to the “sheiks of noble families,” the

conferring of the “high offices of Mufti, Sudr’-Ameen, and Tahsildar,”

on persons not of “noble extraction,” “the education of the children of

the higher and lower classes on the same footing, without distinction,”

“the desire that women should be treated like men in every respect,” and

“the formation of English schools for the education of girls of the

lower order.” He ended his State paper by pointing out the ill effects

of the practice of conferring on the poor “respectable berths, thereby

enabling them to indulge in luxuries which their fathers never dreamt

of, and to play the upstart;” and declared that to a time-honored system

of class government there had succeeded “a state of things which I

cannot find words to express.” It is not likely that our rule will ever

have much hold on the class that Asudulla represents, for not only is

our government in India a despotism, but its tendency is to become an

imperialism, or despotism exercised over a democratic people, such as we

see in France, and are commencing to see in Russia.

We are leveling all ranks in India; we are raising the humblest men, if

they will pass certain examinations, to posts which we refuse to the

most exalted of nobles unless they can pass higher. A clever son of a

bheestie, or sweeper, if he will learn English, not only may, but must

rise to be a railway baboo, or deputy-collector of customs; whereas for

Hindoo rajahs or Mohammedan nobles of Delhi creation, there is no chance

of anything but gradual decline of fortune. Even our Star of India is

democratic in its working: we refuse it to men of the highest descent,

to confer it on self-made viziers of native States, or others who were

shrewd enough to take our side during the rebellion. All this is very

modern, and full of “progress,” no doubt; but it is progress toward

imperialism, or equality of conditions under paternal despotism.

Not only does the democratic character of our rule set the old families

against us, but it leads also to the failure of our attempt to call

around us a middle class, an educated thinking body of natives with

something to lose, who, seeing that we are ruling India for her own

good, would support us heart and soul, and form the best of bucklers for

our dominion. As it is, the attempt has long been made in name, but, as

a matter of fact, we have humbled the upper class, and failed to raise a

middle class to take its place. We have crushed the prince without

setting up the trader in his stead.

The wide-spread hatred of the English does not prove that they are bad

rulers; it is merely the hatred that Easterns always bear their masters;

yet masters the Hindoos will have. Even the enlightened natives do not

look with longing toward a future of self-government, however distant.

Most intelligent Hindoos would like to see the Russians drive us out of

India, not that any of them think that the Russians would be better

rulers or kinder men, but merely for the pleasure of seeing their

traditional oppressors beaten. What, then, are we to do? The only

justification for our presence in India is the education for freedom of

the Indian races; but at this moment they will not have freedom as a

gift, and many Indian statesmen declare that no amount of education will

ever fit them for it. For a score of centuries the Hindoos have bribed

and taken bribes, and corruption has eaten into the national character

so deeply, that those who are the best of judges declare that it can

never be washed out. The analogy of the rise of other races leads us to

hope, however, that the lapse of time will be sufficient to raise the

Hindoos as it has raised the Huns.

The ancients believed that the neighborhood of frost and snow was fatal

to philosophy and to the arts; to the Carthaginians, Egyptians, and

Phœnicians, the inhabitants of Gaul, of Germany, and of Britain were

rude barbarians of the frozen North, that no conceivable lapse of time

could convert into anything much better than talking bears--a piece of

empiricism which has a close resemblance to our view of India. It is

idle to point to the tropics and say that free communities do not exist

within those limits: the map of the world will show that freedom exists

only in the homes of the English race. France, the authoress of modern

liberty, has failed as yet to learn how to retain the boon for which she

is ever ready to shed her blood; Switzerland, a so-called free State, is

the home of the worst of bigotry and intolerance; the Spanish republics

are notoriously despotisms under democratic titles; America, Australia,

Britain, the homes of our race, are as yet the only dwelling-spots of

freedom.

There is much exaggeration in the cry that self-government, personal

independence, and true manliness can exist only where the snow will lie

upon the ground, that cringing slavishness and imbecile submission

follow the palm-belt round the world. If freedom be good in one country,

it is good in all, for there is nothing in its essence which should

limit it in time or place: the only question that is open for debate is

whether freedom--an admitted good--is a benefit which, if once conferred

upon the inhabitants of the tropics, will be maintained by them against

invasion from abroad and rebellion from within; if it be given bit by

bit, each step being taken only when public opinion is fully prepared

for its acceptance, there can be no fear that freedom will ever be

resigned without a struggle. We should know that Sikhs, Kandians,

Scindians, Marattas, have fought bravely enough for national

independence to make it plain that they will struggle to the death for

liberty as soon as they can be made to see its worth. It will take years

to efface the stain of a couple of hundred years of slavery in the

negroes of America, and it may take scores of years to heal the deeper

sores of Hindostan; but history teaches us to believe that the time will

come when the Indians will be fit for freedom.

Whether the future advent of a better day for India be a fact or a

dream, our presence in the country is justifiable. Were we to quit

India, we must leave her to Russia or to herself. If to Russia, the

political shrewdness and commercial blindness of the Northern Power

would combine to make our pocket suffer by loss of money as much as

would our dignity by so plain a confession of our impotence; while the

unhappy Indians would discover that there exists a European nation

capable of surpassing Eastern tyrants in corruption by as much as it

already exceeds them in dull weight of leaden cruelty and oppression. If

to herself, unextinguishable anarchy would involve our Eastern trade and

India‘s happiness in a hideous and lasting ruin.

If we are to keep the country, we must consider gravely whether it be

possible properly to administer its affairs upon the present

system--whether, for instance, the best supreme government for an

Eastern empire be a body composed of a chief invariably removed from

office just as he begins to understand his duty, and a council of

worn-out Indian officers, the whole being placed in the remotest corner

of Western Europe, for the sake of removing the government from the

“pernicious influence of local prejudice.”

India is at this moment governed by the Indian Council at Westminster,

who are responsible to nobody. The Secretary of State is responsible to

Parliament for a policy which he cannot control, and the Viceroy is a

head-clerk.

India can be governed in two ways; either in India or in London. Under

the former plan, we should leave the bureaucracy in India independent,

preserving merely some slight control at home--a control which should,

of course, be purely parliamentary and English; under the other

plan--which is that to which it is to be hoped the people of England

will command their representatives to adhere--India would be governed

from London by the English nation, in the interests of humanity and

civilization. Under either system, the Indian Council in London would be

valuable as an advising body; but it does not follow, because the

Council can advise, that therefore they can govern, and to delegate

executive power to such a board is on the face of it absurd.

Whatever the powers to be granted to the Indian Council, it is clear

that the members should hold office for the space of only a few years.

So rapid is the change that is now making a nation out of what was ten

years ago but a continent inhabited by an agglomeration of distinct

tribes, that no Anglo-Indian who has left India for ten years is

competent even to advise the rulers, much less himself to share in the

ruling, of Hindostan. The objection to the government of India by the

Secretary of State is, that the tenant of the office changes frequently,

and is generally ignorant of native feelings and of Indian affairs. The

difficulty, however, which attends the introduction of a successful plan

for the government of India from London is far from being irremovable,

while the objection to the paternal government of India by a Viceroy is

that it would be wholly opposed to our constitutional theories, unfitted

to introduce into our Indian system those democratic principles which we

have for ten years been striving to implant, and even in the long run

dangerous to our liberties at home.

One reason why the Indian officials cry out against government from St.

James‘s Park is, because they deprecate interference with the Viceroy;

but were the Council abolished, except as a consultative body, and the

Indian Secretaryship of State made a permanent appointment, it is

probable that the Viceroy would be relieved from that continual and

minute interference with his acts which at present degrades his office

in native eyes. The Viceroy would be left considerable power, and

certainly greater power than he has at present, by the Secretary of

State;--that which is essential is merely, that the power of control,

and responsible control, should lie in London. The Viceroy would, in

practice, exercise the executive functions, under the control of a

Secretary of State, advised by an experienced Council and responsible to

Parliament, and we should possess a system under which there would be

that conjunction of personal responsibility and of skilled advice which

is absolutely required for the good government of India.

To a scheme which involves the government of India from at home, it may

be objected that India cannot be so well understood in London as in

Calcutta. So far from this being the case, there is but little doubt

among those who best know the India of to-day, that while men in

Calcutta understand the wants of the Bengalee, and men in Lahore the

feelings of the Sikh, India, as a whole, is far better understood in

England than in any presidency town.

It must be remembered, that with India within a day of England by

telegraph, and within three weeks by steam, the old autocratic

Governor-General has become impossible, and day by day the Secretary of

State in London must become more and more the ruler of India. Were the

Secretary of State appointed for a term of years, and made immovable

except by a direct vote of the House of Commons, no fault could be

found with the results of the inevitable change: as it is, however, a

council of advice will hardly be sufficient to prevent gross blundering

while we allow India to be ruled by no less than four Secretaries of

State in a single year.

The chief considerations to be kept in view in the framing of a system

of government for India are briefly these:--a sufficient separation of

the two countries to prevent the clashing of the democratic and paternal

systems, but, at the same time, a control over the Indian administration

by the English people active enough to insure the progressive

amelioration of the former; the minor points to be borne in mind are

that in India we need less centralization, in London more permanence,

and, in both, increased personal responsibility. All these requirements

are satisfied by the plan proposed, if it be coupled with the separation

of the English and Indian armies, the employment of natives in our

service, and the creation of new governments for the Indus territories

and Assam. Madras, Bombay, Bengal, Assam, the Central Provinces, Agra,

the Indus, Oude, and Burmah would form the nine presidencies, the

Viceroy having the supreme control over our officers in the native

States, and not only should the governors of the last seven be placed

upon the same footing with those of Madras and Bombay, but all the local

governors should be assisted by a council of ministers who should

necessarily be consulted, but whose advice should not be binding on the

governors. The objections that are raised against councils do not apply

to councils that are confined to the giving of advice, and the ministers

are needed, if for no other purpose, at least to divide the labor of the

Governor, for all our Indian officials are at present overworked.

This is not the place for the suggestion of improvements in the details

of Indian government. The statement that all general observations upon

India are necessarily absurd is not more true of moral, social,

educational, and religious affairs than of mere governmental matters:

“regulation system” and “non-regulation system;” “permanent settlement”

and “thirty years’ settlement;” native participation in government, or

exclusion of natives--each of these courses may be good in one part of

India and bad in another. On the whole, however, it may be admitted that

our Indian government is the best example of a well-administered

despotism, on a large scale, existing in the world. Its one great fault

is over-centralization; for, although our rule in India must needs be

despotic, no reason can be shown why its despotism should be minute.

The greatest of the many changes in progress in the East is that India

is being made--that a country is being created under that name where

none has yet existed; and it is our railroads, our annexations, and

above all our centralizing policy that are doing the work. There is

reason to fear that this change will be hastened by the extension of our

new codes to the former “non-regulation provinces,” and by government

from at home, where India is looked upon as one nation, instead of from

Calcutta, where it is known to be still composed of fifty; but so rapid

is the change, that already the Calcutta people are as mistaken in

attempting to laugh down our phrase “the people of India,” as we were

during the mutiny when we believed that there was an “India” writhing in

our clutches. Whether the India which is being thus rapidly built up by

our own hands will be friendly to us, or the reverse, depends upon

ourselves. The two principles upon which our administration of the

country might be based have long since been weighed against each other

by the English people, who, rejecting the principle of a holding of

India for the acquisition of prestige and trade, have decided that we

are to govern India in the interest of the people of Hindostan. We are

now called on to deliberate once more, but this time upon the method by

which our principle is to be worked out. That our administration is

already perfect can hardly be contended so long as no officer not very

high in our Indian service dares to call a native “friend.” The first of

all our cares must be the social treatment of the people, for while by

the Queen‘s proclamation the natives are our fellow-subjects, they are

in practice not yet treated as our fellow-men.

CHAPTER XXI.

DEPENDENCIES.

When, on my way home to England, I found myself off Mocha, with the

Abyssinian highlands in sight, and still more when we were off Massowah,

with the peaks of Talanta plainly visible, I began to recall the

accounts which I had heard at Aden of the proposed British colony on the

Abyssinian table-lands, out of which the home government has since been

frightened. The question of the desirability or the reverse of such a

colony raises points of interest on which it would be advisable that

people at home should at once take up a line.

As it has never been assumed that Englishmen can dwell permanently even

upon high hills under the equator, the proposition for European

colonization or settlement of tropical Africa may be easily dismissed,

but that for the annexation of tropical countries for trade purposes

remains. It has hitherto been accepted as a general principle regulating

our intercourse with Eastern nations, that we have a moral right to

force the dark-skinned races to treat us in the same fashion as that in

which we are treated by our European neighbors. In practice we even now

go much further than this, and inflict the blessings of Free Trade upon

the reluctant Chinese and Japanese at the cannon‘s mouth. It is hard to

find any law but that of might whereby to justify our dealings with

Burmah, China, and Japan. We are apt to wrap ourselves up in our

new-found national morality, and, throwing upon our fathers all the

blame of the ill which has been done in India, to take to ourselves

credit for the good; but it is obvious to any one who watches the

conduct of our admirals, consuls, and traders in the China seas, that it

is inevitable that China should fall to us as India fell, unless there

should be a singular change in opinion at home, or unless, indeed, the

Americans should be beforehand with us in the matter. To say this, is

not to settle the disputed question of whether in the present improved

state of feeling, and with the present control exercised over our

Eastern officials by a disinterested press at home, and an interested

but vigilant press in India and the Eastern ports, government of China

by Britain might not be for the advantage of the Chinese and the world,

but it is at least open to serious doubt whether it would be to the

advantage of Great Britain. Our ruling classes are already at least

sufficiently exposed to the corrupting influences of power for us to

hesitate before we decide that the widening of the national mind

consequent upon the acquisition of the government of China would

outweigh the danger of a spread at home of love of absolute authority,

and indifference to human happiness and life. The Americans, also, it is

to be hoped, will pause before they expose republicanism to the shock

that would be caused by the annexation of despotically-governed States.

In defending the Japanese against our assaults, and those of the active

but unsuccessful French, they may unhappily find, as we have often

found, that protection and annexation are two words for the same thing.

Although the disadvantages are more evident than the advantages of the

annexation for commercial purposes of such countries as Abyssinia,

China, and Japan, the benefits are neither few nor hard to find. The

abstract injustice of annexation cannot be said to exist in the cases of

Afghanistan and Abyssinia, as the sentiment of nationality clearly has

no existence there, and as the worst possible form of British government

is better for the mass of the people than the best conceivable rule of

an Abyssinian chief. The dangers of annexation in the weakening and

corrupting of ourselves may not unfairly be set off against the

blessings of annexation to the people, and the most serious question for

consideration is that of whether dependencies can be said “to pay.”

Social progress is necessary to trade, and we give to mankind the

powerful security of self-interest that we will raise the condition of

the people, and, by means of improved communications, open the door to

civilization.

It may be objected to this statement that our exaggerated

conscientiousness is the very reason why our dependencies commercially

are failures, and why it is useless for us to be totaling up our loss

and profits while we willfully throw away the advantages that our energy

has placed in our hands. If India paid as well as Java, it may be shown,

we should be receiving from the East 60 millions sterling a year for the

support of our European officials in Hindostan, and the total revenue of

India would be 200 or 250 millions, of which 80 millions would be clear

profit for our use in England; in other words, Indian profits would

relieve us from all taxation in England, and leave us a considerable and

increasing margin toward the abolition of the debt. The Dutch, too, tell

us that their system is more agreeable to the natives than our own

clumsy though well-meant efforts for the improvement of their condition,

which, although not true, is far too near the truth to allow us to rest

in our complacency.

The Dutch system having been well weighed at home, and deliberately

rejected by the English people as tending to the degradation of the

natives, the question remains how far dependencies from which no profits

are exacted may be advantageously retained for mere trade purposes. At

this moment, our most flourishing dependencies do not bear so much as

their fair share of the expenses of the empire:--Ceylon herself pays

only the nominal and not the real cost of her defense, and Mauritius

costs nominally £150,000 a year, and above half a million really in

military expenses, of which the colony is ordered to pay £45,000 and

grumbles much at paying it. India herself, although charged with a share

of the non-effective expenses of our army, escapes scot-free in

war-time, and it is to be remarked that the throwing upon her of a small

portion of the cost of the Abyssinian war was defended upon every ground

except the true one--namely, that as an integral part of the empire she

ought to bear her share in imperial wars. It is true that, to make the

constitutional doctrine hold, she also ought to be consulted, and that

we have no possible machinery for consulting her--a consideration which

of itself shows our Indian government in its true light.

Whether, indeed, dependencies pay or do not pay their actual cost, their

retention stands on a wholly different footing from that of colonies.

Were we to leave Australia or the Cape, we should continue to be the

chief customers of those countries: were we to leave India or Ceylon,

they would have no customers at all; for, falling into anarchy, they

would cease at once to export their goods to us and to consume our

manufactures. When a British Governor of New Zealand wrote that of every

Maori who fell in war with us it might be said that, “from his

ignorance, a man had been destroyed whom a few months’ enlightenment

would have rendered a valuable consumer of British manufactured goods,”

he only set forth with grotesque simplicity considerations which weigh

with us all; but while the advance of trade may continue to be our chief

excuse, it need not be our sole excuse for our Eastern dealings--even

for use toward ourselves. Without repeating that which I have said with

respect to India, we may especially bear in mind that, although the

theory has suffered from exaggeration, our dependencies still form a

nursery of statesmen and of warriors, and that we should irresistibly

fall into national sluggishness of thought, were it not for the

world-wide interests given us by the necessity of governing and

educating the inhabitants of so vast an empire as our own.

One of the last of our annexations was close upon our bow as we passed

on our way from Aden up the Red Sea. The French are always angry when

we seize on places in the East, but it is hardly wonderful that they

should have been perplexed about Perim. This island stands in the

narrowest place in the sea, in the middle of the deep water, and the

Suez Canal being a French work, and Egypt under French influence, our

possession of Perim becomes especially unpleasant to our neighbors. Not

only this, but the French had determined themselves to seize it, and

their fleet, bound to Perim, put in to Aden to coal. The Governor had

his suspicions, and, having asked the French admiral to dinner, gave him

unexceptionable champagne. The old gentleman soon began to talk, and

directly he mentioned Perim, the Governor sent a pencil-note to the

harbor-master to delay the coaling of the ships, and one to the

commander of a gunboat to embark as many artillerymen and guns as he

could get on board in two hours, and sail for Perim. When the French

reached the anchorage next day, they found the British flag flying, and

a great show of guns in position. Whether they put into Aden on their

way back to France, history does not say.

Perim is not the only island that lies directly in the shortest course

for ships, nor are the rocks the only dangers of the Red Sea. One night

about nine o‘clock, when we were off the port of Mecca, I was sitting on

the fo‘castle, right forward, almost on the sprit, to catch what breeze

we made, when I saw two country boats about 150 yards on the starboard

bow. Our three lights were so bright that I thought we must be seen, but

as the boats came on across our bows, I gave a shout, which was

instantly followed by “hard a-port!” from the Chinaman on the bridge,

and by a hundred yells from the suddenly awakened boatmen. Our helm

luckily enough had no time to act upon the ship. I threw myself down

under a stancheon, and the sail and yard of the leading boat fell on

our deck close to my head, and the boats shot past us amid shouts of

“fire,” caused by the ringing of the alarm-bell. When we had stopped the

ship, the question came--had we sunk the boat? We at once piped away the

gig, with a Malay crew, and sent it off to look for the poor

wretches--but after half an hour, we found them ourselves, and found

them safe except for their loss of canvas and their terrible fright. Our

pilot questioned them in Arabic, and discovered that each boat had on

board 100 pilgrims; but they excused themselves for not having a watch

or light, by saying that they had not seen us! Between rocks and

pilgrim-boats, Red Sea navigation is hard enough for steamers, and it is

easy to see which way its difficulties will cause the scale to turn when

the question lies between Euphrates Railway and Suez Canal.

CHAPTER XXII.

FRANCE IN THE EAST.

It is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even Heliopolis in the

solitary and solemn fashion in which they should be approached. English

“going out” and “coming home” are there at all days and hours, and the

hundreds of Arabs selling German coins and mummies of English

manufacture are terribly out of place upon the desert. I went alone to

see the Sphinx, and, sitting down on the sand, tried my best to read the

riddle of the face, and to look through the rude carving into the inner

mystery; but it would not do, and I came away bitterly disappointed. In

this modern democratic railway-girt world of ours, the ancient has no

place; the huge Pyramids may remain forever, but we can no longer read

them. A few months may see a _café chantant_ at their base.

Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and degradation hangs

over the whole town, and clings to its people, from the donkey-boys and

comfit-sellers to the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who

squat behind their trays. The wretched fellaheen, or Egyptian peasantry,

are apparently the most miserable of human beings, and their slouching

shamble is a sad sight after the superb gait of the Hindoos. The

slave-market of Cairo has done its work; indeed, it is astonishing that

the English should content themselves with a treaty in which the

abolition of slavery in Egypt is decreed, and not take a single step to

secure its execution, while the slave-market in Cairo continues to be

all-but open to the passer. That the Egyptian government could put down

slavery if it had the will, cannot be doubted by those who have

witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in visiting doubtful

crimes upon the wrong men. During my week‘s stay in Alexandria, two such

cases came to my notice:--in the first, one of my fellow-passengers

unwittingly insulted two of the Albanian police, and was shot at by one

of them with a long pistol. A number of Englishmen, gathering from the

public gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, and beat off the

cavasses, and the next morning marched down to their Consulate and

demanded justice. Our acting Consul went straight to the head of the

police, laid the case before him, and procured the condemnation of the

man who shot to the galleys for ten years, while the policeman who had

looked on was immediately bastinadoed in the presence of the passenger.

The other case was one of robbery at a desert village, from the tent of

an English traveler. When he complained to the sheik, the order was

given to bastinado the head men and hold them responsible for the

amount. The head men in turn gave the stick to the householders, and

claimed the sum from them; while these bastinadoed the vagrants, and

actually obtained from them the money. Every male inhabitant having thus

received the stick, it is probable that the actual culprit was reached,

if, indeed, he lived within the village. “Stick-backsheesh” is a great

institution in Egypt, but the Turks are not far behind. When the British

Consulate at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some years ago, our Consul

telegraphed the fact to the Pacha of Bagdad. The answer came at

once:--“Bastinado forty men”--and bastinadoed they were, as soon as they

had been selected at random from the population.

Coming to Egypt from India, the Englishman is inclined to believe that,

while our Indian government is an averagely successful despotism, Egypt

is misgoverned in an extraordinary degree. As a matter of fact, however,

it is not fair to the King of Egypt that we should compare his rule with

ours in India, and it is probable that his government is not on the

whole worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up as a

“civilized ruler,” the King of Egypt performs the duties of his position

by buying guns which he uses in putting down insurrections which he has

fomented, and yachts for which he has no use; and he appears to think

that he has done all that Peter of Russia himself could have

accomplished, when he sends a young Egyptian to Manchester to learn the

cotton-trade, or to London to acquire the principles of foreign

commerce, and, on his return to Alexandria, sets him to manage the

soap-works or to conduct the viceregal band. The aping of the forms of

“Western civilization,” which in Egypt means French vice, makes the

Court of Alexandria look worse than it is:--we expect the slave-market

and the harem in the East, but the King of Egypt superadds the Trianon,

and a bad imitation of Mabile.

The Court influence shows itself in the action of the people, or rather

the influence at work upon the Court is pressing also upon the people.

For knavery, no place can touch the modern Alexandria. One word,

however, is far from describing all the infamies of the city. It

surpasses Cologne for smells, Benares for pests, Saratoga for gaming,

Paris itself for vice. There is a layer of French “civilization” of the

worst kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo; but still the town is

chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the other hand, is completely

Europeanized, and has a white population of seventy or eighty thousand.

The Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the fortifications, and

French is the only language spoken in the shops and hotels. Alexandria

is a French town.

It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has been from the

beginning a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, and that,

however interesting to the shareholders may be the question of its

physical or commercial success, the probabilities of failure have had

but little weight with the French government. The foundation of the

Messagerie Company with national capital, to carry imaginary mails,

secured the preponderance of French influence in the towns of Egypt, and

it is not certain that we should not look upon the occupation of Saigon

itself as a mere blind.

Of the temporary success of the French policy there can be no doubt;

the English railway-guards have lately been dismissed from the

government railway line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to

the new docks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one waves over the

hotel; the King of Egypt, glad to find a third Power which he can play

off, when necessary, against both England and Russia, takes shares in

the canal. It is when we ask, “What is the end that the French have in

view?” that we find it strangely small by the side of the means. The

French of the present day appear to have no foreign policy, unless it is

a sort of desire to extend the empire of their language, their

dance-tunes, and their fashions; and the natural wish of their ruler to

engage in no enterprise that will outlast his life prevents their having

any such permanent policy as that of Russia or the United States. An

Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly when he said, “There is

nothing permanent about France except Mabile.”

The Suez Canal is being pushed with vigor, although the labor of the

hundreds of Greek and Italian navvies is very different to that of the

tens of thousands of impressed fellaheen. The withdrawal from the

Company of the forced labor of the peasants has demonstrated that the

King is at heart not well disposed toward the scheme, for the

remonstrances of England have never prevented the employment of slave

labor upon works out of which there was money to be made for the

viceregal purse. The difficulty of clearing and keeping clear the

channel at Port Said, at the Mediterranean end, is well known to the

Pacha and his engineers:--it is not difficult, indeed, to cut through

the bar, nor impossible to keep the cutting open, but the effect of the

great piers will merely be to push the Nile silt farther seaward, and

again and again new bars will form in front of the canal. That the

canal is physically possible no one doubts, but it is hard to believe

that it can pay. Even if we suppose, moreover, that the canal will prove

a complete success, the French government will only find that it has

spent millions upon digging a canal for England‘s use.

The neutralization of Egypt has lately been proposed by writers of the

Comtist school, but to what end is far from clear. “The interests of

civilization” are the pretext, but, when summoned by a Comtist,

“civilization” and “humanity” generally appear in a French shape. Were

we to be attacked in India by the French or Russians, no neutralization

would prevent our sending our troops to India by the shortest road, and

fighting wherever we thought best. If we were not so attacked,

neutralization, as far as we are concerned, would be a useless ceremony.

If France goes beyond her customary meddlesomeness and settles down in

Egypt, we shall evidently have to dislodge her, but to neutralize the

country would be to settle her there ourselves. It would be idle to deny

that the position of France in the East is connected with the claim put

forth by her to the moral leadership of the world. The “chief power of

Europe” and “leader of Christendom” must needs be impatient of the

dominance of America in the Pacific and of Britain in the East, and

seeks by successes on the side of India to bury the memories of Mexico.

One of the hundred “missions of France,” one of the thousand “Imperial

ideas,” is the “regeneration of the East.” Treacherous England is to be

confined to her single island, and barbarous Russia to be shut up in the

Siberian snows. England may be left to answer for herself, but before we

surrender even Russia to the Comtist priests, we should remember that,

just as the Russian despotism is dangerous to the world from the

stupidity of its barbarism, so the French democracy is dangerous through

its feverish sympathies, blundering “humanity,” and unlimited ambition.

The present reaction against exaggerated nationalism is in itself a sign

that our national mind is in a healthy state; but, while we distrust

nationalism because it is illogical and narrow, we must remember that

“cosmopolitanism” has been made the excuse for childish absurdities, and

a cloak for desperate schemes. Love of race, among the English, rests

upon a firmer base than either love of mankind or love of Britain, for

it reposes upon a subsoil of things known: the ascertained virtues and

powers of the English people. For nations such as France and Spain, with

few cares outside their European territories, national fields for action

are, perhaps, too narrow, and the interests of even the vast territories

inhabited by the English race may, in a less degree, be too small for

English thought; but there is India,--and the responsibility of the

absolute government of a quarter of the human race is no small thing. If

we strive to advance ourselves in the love of truth, to act justly

towards Ireland, and to govern India aright, we shall have enough of

work to occupy us for many years to come, and shall leave a greater name

in history than if we concerned ourselves with settling the affairs of

Poland. If we need a wider range for our sympathies than that which even

India will supply, we may find it in our friendships with the other

sections of the race; and if, unhappily, one result of the present

awakening of England to free life should be a return of the desire to

meddle in the affairs of other folk, we shall find a better outlet for

our energy in aiding our Teutonic brethren in their struggle for unity

than in assisting Imperial France to spread Benôitonisme through the

world.

We cannot, if we would, be indifferent spectators of the extravagances

of France: if she is at present weak in the East, she is strong at home.

At this moment, we are spending ten or fifteen millions a year in order

that we may be equal with her in military force, and we hang upon the

words of her ruler to know whether we are to have peace or war. Although

it may not be wise for us to declare that this humiliating spectacle

shall shortly have an end, it is at least advisable that we should

refrain from aiding the French in their professed endeavors to obtain

for other peoples liberties which they are incapable of preserving for

themselves.

If the English race has a “mission” in the world, it is the making it

impossible that the peace of mankind on earth should depend upon the

will of a single man.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE ENGLISH.

In America we have seen the struggle of the dear races against the

cheap--the endeavors of the English to hold their own against the Irish

and Chinese. In New Zealand, we found the stronger and more energetic

race pushing from the earth the shrewd and laborious descendants of the

Asian Malays; in Australia, the English triumphant, and the cheaper

races excluded from the soil not by distance merely, but by arbitrary

legislation; in India, we saw the solution of the problem of the

officering of the cheaper by the dearer race. Everywhere we have found

that the difficulties which impede the progress to universal dominion

of the English people lie in the conflict with the cheaper races. The

result of our survey is such as to give us reason for the belief that

race distinctions will long continue, that miscegenation will go but

little way toward blending races; that the dearer are, on the whole,

likely to destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxondom will rise

triumphant from the doubtful struggle.

The countries ruled by a race whose very scum and outcasts have founded

empires in every portion of the globe, even now consist of 9½ millions

of square miles, and contain a population of 300 millions of people.

Their surface is five times as great as that of the empire of Darius,

and four and a half times as large as the Roman Empire at its greatest

extent. It is no exaggeration to say that in power the English countries

would be more than a match for the remaining nations of the world, whom

in the intelligence of their people and the extent and wealth of their

dominions they already considerably surpass. Russia gains ground

steadily, we are told, but so do we. If we take maps of the

English-governed countries and of the Russian countries of fifty years

ago, and compare them with the English and Russian countries of to-day,

we find that the Saxon has outstripped the Muscovite in conquest and in

colonization. The extensions of the United States alone are equal to all

those of Russia. Chili, La Plata, and Peru must eventually become

English; the Red Indian race that now occupies those countries cannot

stand against our colonists; and the future of the table-lands of Africa

and that of Japan and of China is as clear. Even in the tropical plains,

the negroes alone seem able to withstand us. No possible series of

events can prevent the English race itself in 1970 numbering 300

millions of beings--of one national character and one tongue. Italy,

Spain, France, Russia become pigmies by the side of such a people.

Many who are well aware of the power of the English nations are

nevertheless disposed to believe that our own is morally, as well as

physically, the least powerful of the sections of the race, or, in other

words, that we are overshadowed by America and Australia. The rise to

power of our southern colonies is, however, distant, and an alliance

between ourselves and America is still one to be made on equal terms.

Although we are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our

manufacturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in America and dearer in

Old England, we have nevertheless as much to bestow on America as she

has to confer on us. The possession of India offers to ourselves that

element of vastness of dominion which, in this age, is needed to secure

width of thought and nobility of purpose; but to the English race our

possession of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports of China

offers the possibility of planting free institutions among the

dark-skinned races of the world.

The ultimate future of any one section of our race, however, is of

little moment by the side of its triumph as a whole, but the power of

English laws and English principles of government is not merely an

English question--its continuance is essential to the freedom of

mankind.

* * * * *

Steaming up from Alexandria along the coasts of Crete and Arcadia, and

through the Ionian Archipelago, I reached Brindisi, and thence passed on

through Milan toward home. This is the route that our Indian mails

should take until the Euphrates road is made.

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Cameos from English History. From Rollo to Edward II. By MISS C. M.

YONGE, author of “The Heir of Redclyffe,” etc. 12mo. Tinted paper. Plain

cloth, $1.25. Fine cloth, $1.75.

“Miss Yonge‘s power of clear and picturesque narration is displayed

throughout the volume, and the incidents she reproduces are much more

interesting than those which are usually found in fictions.”--_Boston

Transcript._

“An excellent design happily executed.”--_New York Times._

“History is presented in a very attractive and interesting form for

young folks in this work.”--_Pittsburg Gazette._

THE FOUR GOSPELS.

The Unconscious Truth of the Four Gospels. By REV. W. H. FURNESS,

D.D. 12mo. Tinted paper. Fine cloth. $1.25.

TALKS WITH A CHILD ON THE BEATITUDES.

16mo. Fine cloth. $1.00.

“A volume written in a sweet, devout, simple, and tender spirit, and

calculated to edify the old as well as the young.”--_Boston. Ev.

Transcript._

_For sale by Booksellers generally, or will be sent by mail, postage

free, on receipt of price by the Publishers._

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the the rate equal=> the rate equal {pg vi 19}

plan of paralled lines=> plan of parallel lines {pg vi 84}

live too see=> live to see {pg vi 199}

individual sefishness=> individual selfishness {pg vi 246}

Maroi language=> Maori language {pg vi 309}

Australian villagers have still stranger names=> Australian villages

have still stranger names {pg vii 35}

was anticipated three several times=> was anticipated there several

times {pg vii 94}

Australias should also contribute=> Australians should also contribute

{pg vii 132}

Mussoorie? or shall=> Mussoorie? Or shall {pg vii 215}

at a gift=> as a gift {pg vii 326}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=> {pg}

=>

End of Project Gutenberg's Greater Britain, by Charles Wentworth Dilke