have no system of book-keeping; no responsibility; and everything goes
to confusion and ruin because there is such a Government, or no
Government, and the English House of Commons has not taken the pains to
reform these things. The Secretary of State to-night points to the
increase in the English trade. In that trade I am myself interested, and
I am delighted to see that increase; but it should be borne in mind that
just now it is not a natural increase, and therefore not certain to be
permanent. If you are spending so many millions in railroads and in
carrying on war--that is, 22,000,000_l_. for your armaments in
India instead of 12,000,000_l_.--is not that likely to make a great
difference in your power to import more largely from this country? Do
not we know that when the Government of the day was pouring English
treasure into the Crimea the trade with the Levant was most materially
increased? And, therefore, I say it will be a delusion for the right
hon. Gentleman to expect that the extraordinary increase which has taken
place within the last three years will go on in future in the same
proportion.
Now, the point which I wish to bring before the Committee and the
Government is this, because it is on this that I rely mainly--I think I
may say almost entirely--for any improvement in the future of India. It
would be impertinent to take up the time of the Committee by merely
cavilling at what other people have said, and pointing out their errors
and blunders, if I had no hope of being able to suggest any improvement
in the existing state of things. I believe a great improvement may be
made, and by a gradual progress that will dislocate nothing. I dare say
it may disappoint some individuals, but where it will disappoint one man
in India it will please a thousand. What you want is to de-centralize
your Government. I hold it to be manifestly impossible to govern
150,000,000 of persons, composing twenty different nations, speaking as
many different languages, by a man who knows nothing of India, assisted
by half-a-dozen councillors belonging to a privileged order, many of
whom have had very little experience in India, except within narrow
limits, and whose experience never involved the consideration and
settlement of great questions of statesman ship. If you could have an
independent Government in India for every 30,000,000 of its people, I do
not hesitate to say, though we are so many thousand miles away, that
there are Englishmen who, settling down among those 20,000,000 of
people, would be able to conduct the Government of that particular
province on conditions wholly different and immeasurably better than
anything in the way of administration which we have ever seen in India.
If I were Secretary of State for India,--but as I am not, I will
recommend the right hon. Gentleman to do that which I would do myself,
or I would not hold his office for one month; because, to hold office
and come before the House Session after Session with a gloomy statement,
and with no kind of case to show that you are doing anything for India,
or that you are justified in holding possession of it at all, is nothing
but to receive a salary and to hold a dignity without any adequate
notion of the high responsibility attaching to them. I am not blaming
the right hon. Gentleman in particular; he is only doing what all his
predecessors before him have done. There has been no real improvement
since I have sat in Parliament in the government of India, and I believe
the Bill of last year is not one whit better for purposes of
administration than any that has gone before. But I would suggest to the
right hon. Gentleman, whether it would not be a good thing to bring in a
Bill to extend and define the powers of the Governors of the various
Presidencies in India? I do not ask the right hon. Gentleman to turn out
the fifteen gentlemen who assist him in Leadenhall-street to vegetate on
their pensions, but I ask him to go to India and to take the Presidency
of Madras for an instance. Let arrangements be made by which that
Presidency shall be in a position to correspond directly with him in
this country, and let every one connected with that Government of Madras
feel that, with regard to the interests and the people of that
Presidency, they will be responsible for their protection. At present
there is no sort of tie between the governors and the governed. Why is
it that we should not do for Madras what has been done for the Island of
Ceylon? I am not about to set up the Council of Ceylon as a model
institution--it is far from that; but I will tell you what it is, and
you will see that it would not be a difficult thing to make the change I
propose. The other day I asked a gentleman holding an office in the
Government, and who had lived some years in Ceylon, what was the state
of the Council? He said it was composed of sixteen members, of whom six
were non-official and independent, and the Governor had always a
majority. He added that at the present moment in that Council there was
one gentleman, a pure Cingalese by birth and blood, another a Brahmin,
another a half-caste, whose father was a Dutchman and whose mother was a
Native, and three others who were either English merchants or planters.
The Council has not much _prestige_, and therefore it is not easy
to induce merchants in the interior to be members and to undertake its
moderate duties; but the result is that this Cingalese, this Brahmin,
this half-caste, and these three Englishmen, although they cannot out-
vote Sir H. Ward, the Governor, are able to discuss questions of public
interest in the eye and the ear of the public, and to tell what the
independent population want, and so to form a representation of public
opinion in the Council, which I will undertake to say, although so
inefficient, is yet of high importance in the satisfactory government of
that island. Why is it that we can have nothing like this in the
Councils of Madras or Bombay? It would be an easy thing to do, and I
believe that an Act of Parliament which would do it would lay the
foundation of the greatest reform that has yet taken place in India. At
present all the Governors are in fetters; and I see that blame has been
imputed to Sir Charles Trevelyan for endeavouring to break through those
fetters. No doubt an attempt will be made to have him recalled, but I
hope that the right hon. Gentleman, while he moderates the ardour of the
Governor so far as to prevent a rebellion among the civilians, will
support him honestly and faithfully in all those changes which the right
hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do are essential to the improvement of
the government of that country.
There is yet another question, and that is, what is to be done with
regard to the people of India on the subject of education, and
especially with reference to the matter of religious instruction? I beg
the right hon. Gentleman to be cautious how he takes the advice of any
gentleman in this country, who may ask him to make changes in the
established order of things there by appearing in the slightest degree
to attempt to overthrow the caste and religion of the Natives of India.
I have here an extract from a letter written by a gentleman who was
present at one of the ceremonies of reading the Queen's Proclamation in
November last. He says:--
'Not less than 7,000 Natives of all ranks and conditions and
religions flocked to the esplanade at Tellicherry, where there
was no show but the parading of a company of Sepoys, who fired a
_feu de joie_ very badly, to hear the Queen's Proclamation
read. All who heard, all who heard not, manifested the deepest
interest in it. The pledged inviolability of their religion and
their lands spread like wildfire through the crowd, and was soon
in every man's mouth. Their satisfaction was unbounded.... I
mentioned that I went to Tellicherry to hear the Queen's
Proclamation read. We have since had it read here (Anjarakandy).
You will see an account of what took place on the occasion in the
accompanying copy of an official report I addressed to the
assistant-magistrate. What I have described understates the
feeling manifested by the people. They were all eyes and ears,
listening breathlessly to what was being read. You will observe
that convening them for any public purpose whatever, except here,
was a thing unknown, and would have been a thing scouted under
the Company's Government. Here I always assemble them,
communicate everything they ought to know and hear, and talk it
over with them. But a Queen's Proclamation is not an every-day
affair, so they came in crowds, and I will venture to say that
there is not another place in the Queen's India where it was so
clearly explained to them or so thoroughly understood. But the
impartial toleration of their religion and caste was the be-all
and end-all of their comments, praise, and individual
satisfaction. One Mafitta said, "They had had scores of
proclamations upon every conceivable subject, but never one so
wise and sensible as this."
The East India Company was a wonderful Company for writing despatches.
There was nothing so Christian as their doctrine, nothing so unchristian
as their conduct. That Proclamation has in it the basis of all you
should aim at in future in India--a regard to the sacredness of their
property, and the sacredness of their religion, and an extension to them
of as regular and full justice as is shown to your own countrymen.
Depend upon it these Natives of India can comprehend this as well as we
comprehend it; and, if you treat them as we are treated, and as they
ought to be treated, you will not require 400,000 men to help you to
govern a people who are notoriously among the most industrious and most
peaceable to be found on the face of the earth. There has lately been an
act done by the noble Lord (Lord Stanley) to which I must allude. Why he
did it I do not know. I am sure the noble Lord did not mean to do an act
of injustice--though very great injustice has been done. A question was
put the other night about a Native of India who had come to this country
to qualify himself for entering into competition for employment in the
Civil Service of his country. I have seen that young gentleman, and
conversed with him; and when I state his case, it will be seen whether
he has been treated well or wisely, though the regulation under which he
has suffered may have been made without any reference to him
individually. He arrived in this country in June, 1856, and remained
preparing himself for competition for two years and a-half till
December, 1858, when a new regulation came out, which made twenty-two
instead of twenty-three years of age the period for entering the Civil
Service. He might have been ready for competition in July, 1860, but he
could not be ready in July, 1859. Under these circumstances he would be
past the age of twenty-two before he could be able to present himself
for examination. The consequence is, that he has been obliged to turn
himself to another channel for employment. His father is an assistant-
builder in the Government dockyard of Bombay, and has been in England.
There was great interest excited among the Natives when the young man
left India to come to England, and there is great disappointment among
his friends at the result. He has been laughed at for trusting the
Government, and it is said that while Government go on changing their
regulations in this way no faith can be put in them. Now this is the
first case of this kind that has happened. This young gentleman (or his
father) has expended 1,500_l_. in coming here and in endeavouring
to get the best education, solely with a view to be suited for the Civil
Service. If he had entered into that Civil Service a great thing would
have been accomplished. The result would have been that the House and
the Secretary for India would have seen that it was very unjust, while
the son of any one here could pursue his studies at home and enter into
competition for the Civil Service, that the sons of the Natives of India
who wish to enter into the service of their own country must come
thousands of miles at great expense, and live apart from their families
for years, before they are able to accomplish their object, and the
result must have been that you would have established in some city in
India the same mode of examination that you have established here. You
must have been led to do that which would have enabled young men in
India to offer themselves for the Civil Service of their country on as
favourable terms as could be done in England. I am sure the noble Lord
never had the slightest idea of the regulation having reference to this
young man, or of injuring him; yet it has been done, and what has
occurred leads to the conclusion that either somebody very deep in these
matters has been at the bottom of this change, or that some combination
of unfortunate circumstances has been at work, by which that which we
have all so much at heart has been retarded. If the noble Lord had
struck out this regulation, or made a new one, by which this young man
could have had a chance of going home as a servant of the Civil Service,
the fact would have been worth many regiments of soldiers in India.
In speaking on this subject I have nothing new to offer to the attention
of the House. I have propounded the very same theories and remedies
years ago. They are not my remedies and theories. I am not the inventor
of local government for India; but the more I have considered the
subject--the more I have discussed it with the Members of this House and
with gentlemen connected with India--the more I am convinced that you
will not make a single step towards the improvement of India unless you
change your whole system of government--unless you give to each
Presidency a government with more independent powers than are now
possessed by it. What would be thought if the whole of Europe was under
one governor, who knew only the language of the Feejee Islands, and that
his subordinates were like himself, only more intelligent than the
inhabitants of the Feejee Islands are supposed to be? You set a governor
over 150,000,000 of human beings, in a climate where the European cannot
do the work he has to do so well as here, where neither the moral nor
physical strength of the individual is equal to what it is at home,--and
you do not even always furnish the most powerful men for the office;--
you seem to think that the atmosphere will be always calm and the sea
always smooth. And so the government of India goes on; there are
promises without number of beneficial changes, but we never heard that
India is much better or worse than before. Now, that is not the way to
do justice to a great empire like India. If there had been a better
government in India, the late disturbances among your own troops would
not have happened; and I own I tremble when I reflect that every post
may bring us, in the present temper of the European troops in India,
some dire intelligence of acts which they may have committed, because
they may think that this is a convenient opportunity for pressing some
great claim of their own.
I beg the Committee to consider this matter, notwithstanding that the
right hon. Gentleman is not disposed to take a gloomy view of the state
of India. Look at your responsibilities. India is ruled by Englishmen,
but remember that in that unfortunate country you have destroyed every
form of government but your own; that you have cast the thrones of the
Natives to the ground. Princely families, once the rulers of India, are
now either houseless wanderers in the land they once called their own,
or are pensioners on the bounty of those strangers by whom their
fortunes have been overthrown. They who were noble and gentle for ages
are now merged in the common mass of the people. All over those vast
regions there are countless millions, helpless and defenceless, deprived
of their natural leaders and their ancient chiefs, looking with only
some small ray of hope to that omnipresent and irresistible Power by
which they have been subjected. I appeal to you on behalf of that
people. I have besought your mercy and your justice for many a year
past; and if I speak to you earnestly now, it is because the object for
which I plead is dear to my heart. Is it not possible to touch a chord
in the hearts of Englishmen, to raise them to a sense of the miseries
inflicted on that unhappy country by the crimes and the blunders of our
rulers here? If you have steeled your hearts against the Natives, if
nothing can stir you to sympathy with their miseries, at least have pity
upon your own countrymen. Rely upon it the state of things which now
exists in India must, before long, become most serious. I hope that you
will not show to the world that, although your fathers conquered the
country, you have not the ability to govern it.
You had better disencumber yourselves of the fatal gift of empire than
that the present generation should be punished for the sins of the past.
I speak in condemnatory language, because I believe it to be deserved. I
hope that no future historian will have to say that the arms of England
in India were irresistible, and that an ancient empire fell before their
victorious progress,--yet that finally India was avenged, because the
power of her conqueror was broken by the intolerable burdens and evils
which she cast upon her victim, and that this wrong was accomplished by
a waste of human life and a waste of wealth which England, with all her
power, was unable to bear.
* * * * *
INDIA.
V.
HOUSE OF COMMONS, MARCH 19, 1861.
_From Hansard_.
[Mr. Dunlop brought forward a motion to inquire into the discrepancies
between certain sets of documents, relating to the Afghan war of 1837-8.
It appeared that some passages in the despatches of Sir Alexander Burnes
had been mutilated, in order to make it appear that he advised a policy
which he really condemned. Mr. Dunlop moved for a Committee to inquire
into this alleged mutilation of despatches presented to the House. The
motion was negatived.]
When the noble Lord rose, I observed, from his countenance and from his
language, that he seemed to be suffering from the passion of anger.
[Viscount Palmerston: 'Not much.'] 'Not much,' the noble Lord says. I
admit that in the course of his speech he calmed down; but he was so far
led from what I think was a fair course as to charge the hon. and
learned Gentleman who introduced this Motion with making a violent and
vituperative speech, and he spoke of 'that vocabulary of abuse of which
the hon. Gentleman appeared to be master.' Now, I will undertake to say
that I am only speaking the opinion of every Gentleman in the House who
heard the speech which introduced this question, when I say that there
has rarely been delivered here on any subject a speech more strictly
logical, more judicially calm, and more admirable than that which we
have heard to-night from the hon. and learned Member for Greenock. But
the fact is the noble Lord felt himself hit.
The noble Lord is on his trial in this case; and on that account I
expect that at the conclusion of the debate he will not feel himself at
liberty to object to the appointment of this Committee. After a few
sentences the noble Lord touched upon the case of Sir Alexander Burnes,
and he made a very faint denial of the misrepresentations which are
charged against the Government of that day in the case of that
gentleman. But he went on to say that, after all, these things were of
no importance; that what was in, or what was left out, was unimportant.
But I should like to ask the noble Lord what was the object of the
minute and ingenious, and I will say unmatched care which was taken in
mutilating the despatches of a gentleman whose opinions were of no
importance and whose writings could not make the slightest difference
either to the question or to the opinions of any person concerned? The
noble Lord, too, has stooped to conduct which, if I were not in this
House, I might describe in language which I could not possibly use here
without being told that I was transgressing the line usually observed in
discussions in this assembly. The noble Lord has stooped so low as to
heap insult, throughout the whole of his speech, upon the memory of a
man who died in the execution of what he believed to be his public duty--
a duty which was thrust upon him by the mad and obstinate policy of the
noble Lord; and whilst his blood cries to Heaven against that policy,
the noble Lord, during a three-quarters of an hour's speech in this
House, has scarcely ceased to heap insult on his memory.
What the noble Lord told us throughout his speech was that Sir Alexander
Burnes was a man of the greatest simplicity of character. I could not,
however complimentary I were disposed to be, retort that upon the noble
Lord. He says that Sir Alexander Burnes--of whom he spoke throughout in
the most contemptuous manner--an eminent political agent at the Court of
Dost Mahommed, was beguiled by the treachery of that Asiatic ruler; that
he took everything for truth which he heard, and that, in point of fact,
he was utterly unfit for the position which he held at Cabul. But
although the noble Lord had these despatches before him, and knew all
the feelings of Sir Alexander Burnes, he still continued Sir Alexander
Burnes there. He was there two years after these despatches were
written, in that most perilous year when not only himself but the whole
army--subjects of the Queen--fell victims to the policy of the noble
Lord. Now, I must tell the noble Lord what my hon. and learned Friend,
the Member for Greenock, did not discuss, and what the Committee is not
to do--because every Member who heard the speech of the hon. and learned
Member for Greenock, and those who listened to the speech of the noble
Lord, must have seen that from the first the noble Lord evaded the whole
question. He endeavoured to lead the House to believe that my hon. and
learned Friend was going into some antiquarian researches about the
policy of the English or the Indian Government twenty years ago, and
that it was proposed to have a Committee to dig up all the particulars
of our supposed peril from the designs of Russia at that time. But the
fact is that my hon. and learned Friend had no such intention; and there
was no man in the House more cognizant of that fact than the noble Lord
when he ingeniously endeavoured to convey a contrary impression to the
House.
It is not proposed to go into the policy of the war. And there is
another question that it is not proposed to go into. It is not proposed
to inquire whether Sir Alexander Burnes or Lord Auckland was Governor-
General. We know that Lord Auckland was Governor-General; but we know
that a Governor-General who may be many hundreds, or in India, perhaps,
2,000 miles away from the place where particular events are transpiring,
must rely to a considerable extent on the information he receives from
the political agent who is on the spot. If this be so, clearly what Sir
Alexander Burnes thought, and what he said, and what he wrote, is of
some importance. At least, if the House of Commons has any evidence
placed before it, the noble Lord will agree that in a great question
like this--I am not speaking of the present time, but of the time when
these events happened--it is of first-rate importance that the House
should have evidence not on one side only, but on both sides. There is
another thing we do not propose to inquire into, and that is the policy
of Russia at that time. I cannot very well understand the course which
the noble Lord has taken on this point; for I find that about twelve
months after the writing of these very despatches, the mutilation of
which is now complained of, the noble Lord made a reply to the Russian
Minister who had declared that there was nothing whatever hostile to
England in the instructions which were furnished to Vicovich. He says--
'There has not existed the smallest design hostile to the English
Government, nor the smallest idea of endangering the tranquillity
of the British possessions in India.'
The noble Lord, in reply to that, on the 20th December, 1838, just a
year after the writing of these despatches by Sir Alexander Burnes,
said:--
'Her Majesty's Government accept as entirely satisfactory the
declaration of the Russian Government that it does not harbour
any designs hostile to the interests of Great Britain in India.'