THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE ASIA AND EUROPE SOME PRESS NOTICES OF THE FIRST EDITION OF ASIA AND EUROPE By MEREDITH TOWNSEND. Being Studies presenting the conclusions formed by the Author in a long life devoted to the subject of the relations between Asia and Europe. " If I could only afford to buy one book this summer I should certainly choose Mr. Meredith Townsend's." British Weekly. "An extremely interesting book, full of knowledge and enthusiasm and imagination, written in a singularly clear and trenchant style, and with the method of a finished literary artist. . . . Its views are of the greatest possible interest to serious students of Politics. Its range is wide. It extends from general questions such as the influence of Europe on Asia and the mental exclusion of India, the progress of savage races, and the variety of Indian society to more detailed investigations, such as the life of Mohammed, the core of Hindooism, and the future of the negro." Pilot. "The public interested in that country (India) will do well to study the pages of this volume." Athenaum. " It would be difficult to exaggerate the interest of this remarkable book, in it Mr. Meredith Townsend deals with some of the most poignant problems that confront the British people as the ruler of the greatest and most Asiatic of the Empires of Asia. " Spectator. ASIA AND EUROPE STUDIES PRESENTING THE CONCLUSIONS FORMED BY THE AUTHOR IN A LONG LIFE DEVOTED TO THE SUBJECT OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN ASIA AND EUROPE BY MEREDITHv*V,v. TOWNSEND FOURTH EDITION NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 1911 Tt f CONTENTS PAGR PREFACE . . . . . u INTRODUCTION I THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA ... 19 ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA ... 43 Q WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA?. . . . .82 THE CHARM OF ASIA FOR ASIATICS . . . 120 ENGLISH AND ASIATIC FEELING CONTRASTED . 129 THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS . . 137 THE MENTAL SECLUSION OF INDIA . . ' . 146 THE GREAT ARABIAN ... . . . .155 CONTENTS PAGE RACE-HATRED IN ASIA 214 ARAB COURAGE 220 INDIAN ABSTEMIOUSNESS 227 THE ASIATIC NOTION OF JUSTICE . . . .235 THE "STANDARD OF COMFORT" IN INDIA . 244 THE CORE OF HINDOOISM 252 CRUELTY IN EUROPE AND ASIA . . . .261 THE VARIETY OF INDIAN SOCIETY . . .268 THE VASTNESS OF CALAMITIES IN ASIA . . 278 A TYPICAL ASIATIC 285 ALADDIN'S CAVE 293 THE ARABS OF THE DESERT 301 ASIATIC PATRIOTISM . 39 "FANATICISM" IN THE EAST 315 CONTENTS vii PAGE WILL CONQUEST VIVIFY ASIA? 323 WHY TURKEY LIVES . . . . . . . .330 TROPICAL COLONIZATION -337 HINDOO "BARBARISM" 345 THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO 354 THE NEGRO PROBLEM IN AMERICA . . 362 THE MINDS OF SAVAGES 370 THE PROGRESS OF SAVAGE RACES . . . .378 THE CONTEMPT OF ASIA FOR EUROPE. . . 385 INDEX 393 Preface to the Fourth Edition SINCE the publication of the second edition of this work an event has occurred which in the judgment of the author almost proves the correctness of its main thesis, namely that Asia, though it yields from time to time to sudden impact from Europe as water yields to a ship, always flows back after a ripple more or less long drawn out, without having been apparently affected. An Asiatic power, not of the Jirst-class either in area or population, has challenged and beaten by sea and land a Jirst-class European state. Europe had watched for some years with great intellectual interest the development of "Japan, an island kingdom with the area of Great Britain and a population estimated at forty-Jive millions. Travel- lers and merchants reported that the Japanese while possessing a separate and in its way admirable kind of art, bad assimilated many of the ideas and much of the mechanical skill of Europe, bad contrived to recon- cile the theocratic and therefore absolute authority of their sovereign with a kind of representative govern- ment and a large measure of personal freedom, and x PREFACE bad organized an army 'which those Englishmen who shared the dangers and exertions of the war with China in 1901 pronounced to be singularly efficient, and which the Sikh officers in the British service. **/ most unprejudiced and competent judges, admired as distinctly superior to both the Russian and French contingents in the strangely composite army which took Pekin. Little attention was, however, paid to these reports ; and when, in February, 1904., Japan, to the surprise of the Western world, declared war upon Russia, the general opinion was that she had pre- sumptuously undertaken a task beyond her strength. The conceit of Europe was destined, however, to receive the rudest shock that it has sustained for centuries. The Japanese fleet destroyed the best ships of the Russian squadron in Port Arthur, and so successfully blockaded the remainder that they were totally unable to arrest the descent of a large army upon the mainland of Manchuria, which, besides occupying Corea, defeated in re- peated engagements the Russian army, supposed to be 200,000 strong, under General Kuropatkin, and, after a victorious battle, which rivalled in slaughter any of the battles of Napoleon, compelled it to en- trench itself on the banks of the Shaho. There it has since remained, awaiting the heavy reinforcements PREFACE ari without 'which it has no hope of victory. Meanwhile, another army besieged Port Arthur, of which the Russian engineers had made a fortified position cer- tainly much stronger than Sevastopol, and believed by all Russians and most foreign experts in fortification to be impregnable except by famine. It was defended with heroic tenacity for seven months, but during that period the "Japanese, who showed themselves utterly reckless of life and who possessed an amazing store of the finest artillery, a store in great part manu- factured by themselves during ten years of careful preparation, carried by a series of assaults, which in their daring and their persistence bewildered the most experienced generals of "Europe, fort after fort, and at last, by the use of tunnels and dynamite compelled the stubborn general commanding the defence, whose hero- ism extorted admiration throughout Europe, and even in Tokio itself, to surrender not indeed at discretion, for the honours of war were conceded and the battle- ships in the harbour were blown up, but in a complete manner, 2^.,oooRussians being sent prisoners to "Japan. "Europe gasped. It had forgotten the history of the Arabs under the generals of the early Khalifate and of the Mongols under Jenghis Khan and was simply astounded to hear of Asiatic soldiers who died as recklessly as the best Russian or German troops, who, rii PREFACE to mention only one incident in a thousand, when four times repulsed received the fifth order to advance with shouts of delight^ and who maintained their energy and their discipline in night assaults as completely as in skirmishes by daylight. It was recognized at once that a new Great Power had been born and that the history of Asia had arrived at a turning point ; but some features of this great event have still been missed by Europe at large, though they begin to be perceived by a few of the great professionals. One , per 'baps the most striking of these features, is that the "Japanese have accom- plished their astonishing feats of war without any of those special sources of strength which have usually marked Asiatic successes. They have moved to battle, to use Macau/ay's well-known words, with the precision of machines and the enthusiasm of Crusaders, but they have not been animated as the Arabs were by any new creed, or led, as conquering armies have almost invari- ably been, by men of exceptional genius for war. Japan has produced no Alexander, no Jenghis Khan, no Napoleon ; her generals have been com- petent and marvellously persistent, but nothing more. They have applied the old principles of war in their fullest perfection, but they have evolved PREFACE xiii nothing new and have repeatedly displayed a cer- tain slowness^ as if when a battle was won they had to think out the next manoeuvres. The beaten army on the mainland repeatedly had time to re- form^ and though the expenditure of life in the different actions has been almost unprecedented^ the bur suit has almost always been feeble or ineffec- tual. This is probably due to a fact which differ- entiates the Japanese army from almost all great armies of Asiatics^ the absence in their forces of those masses of cavalry with which the Parthian or Arab or Mongol leaders practically destroyed the shattered regiments of their foes. It />, more- over^ to be noted that the Japanese have relied upon what Europeans call science to a degree un- precedented in Asiatic warfare. The letters of Russian officers from the fields of battle are full of complaints of the superiority of their artillery. They invented early in the campaign a new and more explosive powder for their shells. In the siege of Port Arthur they kept up sometimes for weeks such a continuous stream of fire that the Russian soldiery could not s/eefi, and one so well directed that during the last week of the siege a Russian staff officer declares with pardonable ex- aggeration that he could find no room for bis foot xiv PREFACE for the Japanese shells. Moreover, the Japanese have throughout shown most singular powers of self-restraint, and though the men are for the most part unfamiliar with war, and are in fact peasants and coolies trained only for a few months, there has been from first to last no rumour of disobedience or of retreat while the officers remained fighting. The telegrams from Tokio have been truthful ; the proclamations of the Mikado and the speeches of his ministers have been coldly reticent, and the news of victory, even the startling victory over Port Arthur, has been received without the smallest disturbance of social equanimity. There has, in fact, been something Roman, as Rome ap- peared to Livy, in the demeanour of the Japanese, a something evident also in the silent but irresistible action of their conscription, which, as in Arabia under the early Caliphs, or in Mongolia under the chiefs who followed Jenghis, is enforced both by opinion and the law. There is no resistance and no wish to resist, for in Japan it seems certain that the really governing philosophy is "Bushido" which may best be translated by knightliness of thought. It is clear that Japan is a great State, entitled to a place among the civilized communities which now claim the right to regulate the affairs of the world. PREFACE Xv There is no state which will make war on it 'without adequate provocation, or which, even if the provoca- tion is severe will not hesitate to incur the losses and the risks which any war with "Japan must involve to any power. Her force is acknowledged, and the only question for Europe now is what she will ultimately do with it. The German Emperor and a great many literary men have expressed a fear that she will dominate China, and with the endless resources of that over-numerous people repeat once again the victories of the Tartar horsemen. It is, however, most un- likely that the " Tel low Pen'/," if a peril is to develop, will take this form. An attack upon Europe, even if successful, would hardly benejit "Japan, and success in so vast an enterprise would be exceedingly improbable. Europe contains 200 millions of men, half of whom will perish rather than submit to an Asiatic domination. Her science has long since taken a military trend, and she cannot be deprived, if united for defence, of her command of the sea. The mere feeding of the masses of men who would be required to reach, say, Vienna, which the Mongols once threatened but never took, would strain all the resources of the Tellow Peoples, who, it must also be remarked, are no longer, as the early Mongols were, the riding tribes of the world. There is no doubt that Japan, if vie- xvi PREFACE torious, will gradually develop great ambitions, as all other victorious States have done, but much of her ambition will be sated by the Protectorate of China , which no one can keep from her, and by the conquest and settlement of the great system of islands which stretches down from Nagasaki to Australia. It has been repeatedly asserted that, seeing her absolute neces- sity for territorial expansion and the vastness and weakness of Australia, the statesmen of Japan will as time advances, make some great effort to conquer and occupy the island continent of the Southern Pacific. If Australia were left to itself, this, judg- ing by the usual course of historic events, would become the permanent policy of the new Power. It would pos- sibly also be a successful policy, for the Australians, with a want of prudence which is almost inexplicable, have discouraged JLuropean immigration ; they do not themselves multiply rapidly ; and they are scattered around the fringe of a vast continent full of harbours. They are, compared with the Japanese, a feeble folk, not one tenth their number. Although they are brave, they have not been trained to war, they have as yet organized no great armies, they object to waste money on the huge arsenals which could provide a whole nation with scientific weapons, and if attacked, as the Japanese would attack them, their States being invaded PREFACE xvii one by one, they would probably in three years be hope- lessly crushed and driven into the untenable interior. No such catastrophe is, however, within calculable distance, unless indeed Australia quarrels with Great Britain. The British fleet is still irresistible ; it would perish before Australia should be touched ; and neither "Japan nor China can hope to do what a coali- tion of the older maritime powers shrinks from doing. Japan, moreover, though naturally an expand- ing power, because its people are too numerous and because they are vain, has, like Great Britain, the commercial instinct. She will seek in the flrst place to obtain the control of the commerce of China, and will then Jill all the ports of Asia with her merchantmen and her traders. It is more than possible that her people, who are thoughtful and anxious for gain, will seek to benefit by their victories rather in commerce and manufactures than in terri- torial acquisitions. Nevertheless, it may be taken as certain that the victory of Japan will be pro- foundly felt by the majority of European States. With the exception of Austria, all European countries have implicated themselves in the great effort to conquer Asia, which has now been going on for two centuries, but which, as this author thinks, must now terminate. Japan cannot LIKE, even if PREFACE she imitates, the powers which, while professing friendship^ unanimously refuse to admit Japanese into their possessions, on the ground that they are an inferior ; or at all events an uncivilized people. In Australia and in all North America the Japanese are already unwelcome , and if they should try to populate the thinly peopled and rich regions of South America the haughty Spaniards would refuse them admittance and be backed in their refusal by the supporters of the Monroe doctrine. The disposition, therefore, to edge out intrusive Europeans from their Asiatic possessions is certain to exist even if it is not manifested in Tokio, and it may be fostered by a movement of which, as yet, but little has been said. No one who has ever studied the question doubts that as there is a comity of Europe \ so there is a comity of Asia ', a disposition to believe that Asia belongs of right to Asiatics, and that any event which brings that right nearer to realization is to all Asiatics a pleasurable one. Japanese victories will give new heart and energy to all the Asiatic nations and to tribes which now fret under European rule, will inspire in them a new confidence in their own power to resist, and will spread through them a strong impulse to avail themselves of Japanese instruction. It will take, of 'course, many years to bring this new force into play, PREFACE xix for no Asiatic people, except the Turks, possesses what Mr. Parnell called " the plant of an armed revolution " ; but time matters nothing to Asiatics, and they all possess that capacity for complete secrecy which the Japanese displayed for the ten years during which they were arming for their great struggle with Russia. If, therefore, it is one of the permanent conditions of history, as this writer believes, that Europe should not permanently occupy Asia or Asia conquer Europe, the rise of Japan into a great Power must by degrees increase the difficulty for Europe of remaining in profitable possession of great sections of Asia. Remember, Asia contains at least eighty millions of fighting men, of whom the immense majority believe their position after death - to be tolerably secure, and therefore regard death with a fearlessness which Europe has, in a measure, lost. The operation of the new tendency might be delayed for a century if Europe would gratify the pride of Japan by a complete and full admission into the European family ; but if history proves anything, it proves that the colour prejudice, whether well founded or not, is incurable, that even similarity of creed will not bind together races radically distinct in colour from each other ; and that the strange destiny which has Jilled the three ancient continents with men xx PREFACE of three separate colours has its root in some law of the mind which never changes, or some decision of Providence from which there can be no appeal. Asia, strengthened by the leadership of Japan, will, as I believe, recover the independence which she will in all human probability once more misuse. Preface to the First Edition / THINK it advisable to say that this volume, though it consists the Introduction excepted of reprints from the " Contemporary Review" the old " National Review" and the " Spectator" is not like many such reprints a bundle of disconnected thoughts. All the papers are directed to one end, a description of those inherent differences between Europe and Asia which forbid one continent perma- nently to conquer the other. The struggle between Europe and Asia is the binding thread of history ; the trade between Europe and Asia is the foundation of commerce ; the thought of Asia is the basis of all European religions : but the fusion of the Continents has never occurred, and in the Author s best judgement will never occur. It is rather a sad- dening refection that the thoughts of so many years are all summed up by a great poet 1 in four lines : The East bowed low before the blast y In patient deep disdain ; Sht let the Ugitns thunder past, Then plunged in thought again. 1 Matthew ArruU mo xxii PREFACE But the insight of the poet always goes deeper than the calculation of the thinker. I have added two papers on the negro, of whose destiny I am not hopeful. Crossed with Arab or Hindoo^ he may have a future, but uncrossed there is some source of failure in him probably a defect of power to accumulate thought which will leave him far behind \ as it has left him for three thousand years on the Congo. I must add that, as will be perceived, I have said nothing of the possible influence of America upon Asia first, because it does not enter into my subject ; and secondly, because I hardly care to speculate on a future as to which history can give no light. I may however just say here that although America must by and by greatly influence Asia, its influence will hardly be favour- able to conquest. It will more probably be one of the many which will make permanent conquest im- possible. When once the Nicaragua Canal has been cut the trade of the United States with Farther Asia will be one of the greatest the world has seen, and Asia will Jill a large space in American imaginations, always influenced by the spectacle of the gigantic. All manner of traders will seek her 1 Thit is happening in Natal and Uganda. PREFACE xxiii coasts, and all manner of concessionaires will rifle the riches of the interior. All manner of mission- aries will be attracted by her millions, and all manner of educating agencies will make Asia their field of operation. The suave and humorous American will possibly become the most popular of white men with Asiatics, and may be able to convey to them ideas more acceptably than any other. Nevertheless the American will not rule the Asiatic. The Jissure between the races is very wide, and as yet has proved impassable. The American can never like any one not of his own colour, he will never mix on a footing of equality with any other ; and the Chinaman in San Francisco no more becomes an American than the Chinaman in Calcutta becomes a Bengalee. Lastly, the American has no interest in conquering Asia. He does not wish for territory already occupied by masses of people be has ample room for settlement in his own hemisphere and he does not believe sovereignty absolutely essential to trade. It will be easier to acquire influence in Asia by protecting her from conquest than to begin conquering ; and this, I think, will in the end be the American line, as indeed in China it already is. For reasons of trade, for reasons of kindly regard and for reasons of xxiv PREFACE jealousy the attitude of America will, I imagine^ be one of rather contemptuous guardianship. I have to thank the Editors of the " Contemporary Review " and " Spectator " for their kindness in permitting reprint^ and I only wish I could thank the Editor of the old " National" R. H. Hutton, but alas ! he has passed to the majority. For forty years his strongest approval was given to the drift of these papers. MEREDITH TOWNSEND Introduction I AM emboldened to publish these Essays which have all the same object, namely to make Asia stand out clearer to English eyes, because it is evi- dent to me that the white races under the pressure of an entirely new impulse are about to renew their periodic attempt to conquer or at least to dominate that vast continent. Alexander of Macedon, the supreme genius for war produced by the ancient world, made the attempt in order to realize a vain- glorious dream. The rulers of the Roman Republic renewed it in pursuance of a steady policy of con- quering as much of the world as they could reach, and as might be expected to pay. The Crusaders essayed the task once more in order to rescue the birthland of Christianity from the infidel, and to found amidst the debris of the Eastern Empire kingdoms and principalities for highborn men, to whom Europe afforded little hope of aggrandize- ment or even maintenance. Then the idea slept for five hundred years, during which Europe almost forgot Asia, ceasing to record its history or even to explore its vast divisions. At length in the 1 B ASIA AND EUROPE seventeens and eigh teens Russia and England stirred, one seizing on the vast and secluded terri- tory which extends through Northern Asia in an unbroken block from the Ural to the North Pacific, the other the equally vast and secluded Peninsula which stretches southward from the Western Hima- laya far down into the waters of the Indian Ocean. Neither Russia nor England knew precisely what they were doing ; they did not formulate to them- selves any " grand plan," nor were they clearly conscious of any impulse, both going steadily on- ward, sometimes most reluctantly, as if driven for- ward by an invisible power toward some end which they did not pretend to see, but vaguely hoped would in some way be advantageous. Now, however, a greater movement is being commenced from a motive which is at once clear and conscious. The European peoples are tired of the poverty in which, despite their consider- able advance in civilization and their immense advance in applied science, their masses are still condemned to live. The white races, in obedience to some law of which they know nothing, increase with amazing rapidity, 1 and in Europe, which is 1 I call the rapidity "amazing" because we know nothing of its causes. The popular notion is that population increases with plenty, but it is unsupported by facts. A patriciat which eats and drinks as much as it will, works at its own discretion, and lives in healthy houses, almost invariably dies out the reason why there are now no pedigrees which cross the gulf between the new and the old civilizations. Our own people in Elizabeth's time were INTROD UCTION not a very fertile continent, there is not enough wealth to go round. There is uneasiness every- where, suffering in all cities, strange outbursts of envy and malice against the rich in all countries except Great Britain. The rulers reign in con- stant dread of explosions from below, the sub- jects are penetrated with the idea that agriculture is played out, and that the " money " which is the foundation of comfort can only come from a vast development of trade. Both are told by their experts that great markets can only be found in Asia, where the majority of the human race has elected to dwell, and where it has aggregated itself into masses so great, that commerce with them must always produce a maximum of profit It is better to sell at ten per cent, to Hindoos or Chinese than at forty per cent, to the people of Brazil. These trades again, the experts say, must be pro- tected by sovereign rights over the markets, for if not fairly fed but scarcely increased, while the Irish poor, when suffer- ing from terrible poverty, doubled their numbers. The natives of India who are as a mass so poor that two years' drought sweeps them off in myriads, and the people of Russia who live on the edge of misery, multiply like flies ; while the Jews who are every- where, and at least as prosperous as those around them, scarcely increase at all. R. L. Stevenson's marvellous picture of the decay of the Marquesans, suggests that the cause of increase or decay is in some way mental, and this view is strengthened by what we know of the blight which falls on some savage races from the mere presence of civilized man. But we know too little of mental pro- cesses to make this conjecture the basis of a conviction. All that is certain is that plenty or penury are not the main causes of increase or decay. ASIA AND EUROPE the energetic Anglo-Saxon, with his skill in making machines and his habitude of the ocean waters, will monopolize the whole. Russia therefore rushes on Manchuria, the splendid province which intervenes between herself and the Pacific, and lays trains for the conquest of Persia and Turkey. Germany tries to assert herself in Anatolia, and does assert herself in Shantung. Great Britain, already sovereign in India, claims the giant valley of the Yang-tse. France sighs to add Siam, Yunnan, Szechuen and Hainan, to Indo-China, already counted among her colonies. And America, taking the Philippines as a dockyard and watchtower, loudly proclaims that whoever is debarred from the profits of Asiatic trade she will never be. So grand is the prize that failures will not daunt the Europeans, still less alter their conviction. If these movements follow historic lines they will recur for a time upon a constantly ascending scale, each repulse eliciting a greater effort, until at last Asia like Africa is " partitioned," that is each section is left at the disposal of some white people. If Europe can avoid internal war, or war with a much aggrandized America, she will by A. D. 2,000 be mistress in Asia, and at liberty as her people think to enjoy. I am unable with such light as I have from his- tory to believe that this effort, the fourth within the historic period, will be permanently successful, the genius of the two continents being too distinct; but in this introduction I only wish to point out clearly INTR OD UCTION the amazing magnitude of the task which Europe, almost without reflection and entirely without study, is declaring itself in many ways and through a mul- titude of spokesmen willing to undertake. Asia is no vast plain misused by a few dark tribes, whose disappearance or whose misery will matter nothing to the progress of the world. Asia is the largest of the continents, forty- one times the size of France, and owing to its higher mountains and loftier plateaus, and immense expanses of river-made culturable swamp, is among them all the most difficult to traverse. Its plateaus are countries ; its deltas would hold, indeed have held, great kingdoms. Empires have risen, flourished, and died in comparatively small divisions of its mass. Persia is in it but a province it is possible to forget. Asiatic Turkey, the home alike of ancient and modern empires is but one fringe of the continent, the Chinese Empire is but another. The great Mogul ruled only one peninsula of its far South. Thibet, which is to most white men but a name, is larger than France a France hung in the sky at an average height of 11,000 feet above sea level. Afghanistan, which the English think of as a turbulent little kingdom on the skirt of their own dominion, is 40,000 square miles larger than France ; while Siam, of which they hardly think at all except as a steamy province for which French statesmen intrigue, exceeds all Ger- many in size by more than 100,000 square miles. It would take ten armies each of 100,000 men merely to ASIA AND EUROPE penetrate and in a military sense garrison Asia, which is for the most part a huge mass far from the sea, with few river inlets, and capable of subjugation only by land armies. Size, however, is not the most important ob- stacle to conquest, for after all South America is Spanish and Portuguese, but Asia holds at least four times the population of Europe, sometimes no doubt thinly scattered, but sometimes packed to a point of which the packing of Belgium or Lanca- shire gives but a faint idea. 1 We think of these masses of men as feeble folk, but one single section of them never seen outside their own peninsula, the warrior races of India, outnumber all who speak English ; while a single race of formidable fighters, capable of discipline, in a group of islands off the coast, the Japanese, are more numerous than the French. When the Mongol, or rather a small federation of tribes from among a division of the Mongols, first burst out of his steppe he reached France, and on the plain of Chalons nearly overthrew the Roman Empire. When the Arabs, never fourteen millions strong, debouched from their deserts, they defeated both Eastern Rome and Persia, extirpated the Van- 1 The total population of Asia is and must remain uncertain, but the best recent accounts bring it up to close on nine hundred millions. Of these the Mongols, including of course the Chinese, Indo-Chinese and Japanese, number more than five hundred millions. Lord Auckland used to say, as matter for strange thoughts, that the Emperor of China and himself governed half the human race, and still found time for breakfast. INTR OD UCTION dais of North Africa, conquered Spain, and after their first energy had decayed, drove the picked chivalry of Europe out of Palestine. When the third Asiatic explosion took place, the Mongol conquered China and India, which he kept, and Russia, which he only lost after two centuries, and made all Europe tremble lest by defeating Austria he should acquire dominance through the whole west. Intermediately, a little Asiatic tribe seated itself in Anatolia, warred down the Eastern Empire of Rome, threatened all Central Europe, and to this hour retains the glorious provinces which it oppresses only because, by the consent of all who have observed him, the Turk is the best individual soldier in the world. Three Asiatic soldiers, the Turk, the Sikh, and the Japanese, have adopted European arms and discipline, and no man can say if either of the three encountered Russian armies which would be the victor, yet Europe does not consider defeating Russians a light task. Taking the figures of the German conscription as our guide, there are in Asia eighty millions of potential soldiers, of whom cer- tainly one fifth know the use of weapons. But these masses of humanity, even if capable of battle, are, it is said, so incapable of the improve- ments which constitute civilization, that except as buyers of goods they hardly deserve respect from Europeans. Is that quite true? These Asiatics who are accounted so despicable have devised and kept up for ages, without exhausting the soil or i ASIA AND EUROPE porting food, a system of agriculture which sustains in health and even comfort a population often thicker than that of any European state. They understand agricultural hydraulics perfectly, and have executed hydraulic works, canals and tanks, which are the admiration of European engineers. They have covered entire provinces, Bengal for example, with fruit trees which Englishmen pronounce equal to their own. From the days of Babylon to the days of Bombay they have covered their continent with great cities, some of which contain marvels of archi- tecture, while all have been warehouses for immense trades, centres of great banking systems, or chosen seats of men who have conquered or legislated for or administered great empires. 1 Asiatics have selected all the sites of great cities in Asia save two, and while Damascus is older than Paris or London, Benares is as original as Venice, and Jeypore more picturesque than Nuremberg. In all those cities great populations, sometimes exceed- 1 There must be a great native banking system in China, or internal trade could not go on, and to the existence of one in India every Anglo-Indian can bear testimony. I myself received for ten years thousands of native hoondees or cheques every year, scraps of tissue paper covered with unknown characters. I never knew one dishonoured. I once asked the manager of the greatest European bank, who I knew was making great remittances in native cheques to Bombay, if he were not occasionally afraid of such paper. " No more," he said, " than I am afraid of Bank of England notes." I may add that Asiatic bankers seem to have defeated forgery, and that they have devised a system of insurance for river traffic, called in India " beema," which works excellently well. INTRO D UCTION ing that of any city in Europe up to 1800 have dwelt under it is true insanitary conditions nearly as bad as those of Naples fifty years ago but in peace and security without insurrections or any grave danger, save from their own rulers, to life and property. Asiatics built the Alhambra and the Taj, the temples above the ghauts of Benares, and the fan- tastic towers of Nankin. Asiatics unassisted by Europeans have carried all the arts, save sculpture and painting, to a high degree of perfection, so that learned men have written volumes to explain their architecture; and while no pottery can excel Chinese porcelain, no swordsmith a Damascus blade, no goldsmith will promise to improve on a Trichino- poly chain. No doubt they have halted everywhere in their march towards mastery of nature. Some strange fiat of arrest, probably due to mental exhaustion, has condemned the brown men and the yellow men to eternal reproduction of old ideas. They have treated earth as if they feared it. Dung is burnt for fuel above unused coal-bearing strata. Asiatics work in all metals, yet from end to end of Asia great stores of iron or platinum and tin, of copper, silver and gold lie untouched, waiting the touch of the European spoiler. All must have been found ages since, or whence the stores existing before trade with Europe began, and if the energy in digging which was there once had continued, even the riches of Asia would by this time have io ASIA AND EUROPE been exhausted. Notwithstanding this great defect the Asiatics have practised all necessary arts, and except in machinery can make and do all that Europeans can make and do. 1 They are in fact civilized peoples, though their civilization has been arrested, perhaps by the adoption of a belief not unknown in Europe, that perfection has been attained and that the path of wisdom for all, whether thinker or artist or artisan, is incessant repetition. That is the line of least resistance, and it has been followed so contentedly and so far that fashion, which in Europe is peremptory and end- lessly capricious, is in Asia peremptory but unchange- able. Europe condemns or despises, but the question, " If a thing is good and convenient why change it ? " is a rare conservator of energy. But after all, man lives by thought, and are not the thoughts of Asiatics feeble ? In one way, yes. The Asiatic is the slave of superstition ; he can believe in the teeth of evidence, 2 and he is possessed by the fatal idea that falsehood is an exercise of the intellect like another, to be judged of by its object and its success. These three defects weaken his 1 Medicine is another exception. Asiatics have done little even in surgery, though they have discovered some valuable drugs, opium for example. Their failure, says the European scientist, is the result of their incompetence. Is it ? or has it sprung from their indifference alike to life and comfort? 8 An Indian astronomer, noted for his calculation of eclipses, told me that at heart he believed a dog swallowed the moon v and should teach his children so- INTRODUCTION n mind in all its applications, but nevertheless he has great powers. He has organized great armies, and though fearfully wasteful of life, so that the wounded may be accounted dead, he has so furnished those armies that they can wage long and often victorious campaigns. The cavalry of Asia, for instance, is better in everything except the actual shock of battle than the same arm in Europe. He has again remarkable power of recognizing genius, whether for war, for instruction, or for liter- ature. The great soldier rises rapidly to the top, the great teacher is followed with blind devotion, the great litterateur is regarded with a respect hardly known in Europe. Hyder Ali or Runjeet Singh cannot among us mount a throne. No Europeans are capable of the devotion expressed by Mahommed's " companions," and no man's written " words of wisdom " have ever had the moulding effect of those of Confucius, who did not even pre- tend to be inspired. Asiatics have in fact an extra- ordinary faculty both of detecting and following a great man, sometimes under circumstances when differences of origin, creed, and even colour seem to make such recognition and obedience scarcely possible. Asiatics have bound together in intellectual chains of custom tribes sometimes unintelligible to each other, who nevertheless cohere for ages, and display under the influence of their chains a kind of identity of thought. They have ia ASIA AND EUROPE invented dozens of systems of land tenure, and the systems curiously varied suit the varied con- ditions of agriculture, and secure for those who follow them many of the great advantages of strict association. It is hardly a proof of mental feebleness to have so obviated or removed the per- ennial discontent of the agricultural mind, a dis- content which we all imagine inherent in those who are fighting nature, so fearfully strong in Asia, that great catastrophes like flood, or famine, or war, make no permanent impression at all, and that the moment the external pressure is removed the village life is resumed by a population which when not interfered with shows many signs of being dis- tinctly happy. The grand whip hunger renewed every twenty-four hours by which it has pleased Providence to impart energy to the human race, is borne in Asia contentedly, and produces instead of murmurs a ceaseless industry, monotonous indeed, but of which no one ever complains. If it be the end of systems of life to produce contented ac- quiescence the Asiatic systems must be held to have succeeded. Nor have they been wanting in the domain of thought. They have accomplished little in science except astronomy, being to a degree scarcely in- telligible until we remember that it marked our- selves for ages wanting in enlightened curiosity, and they have neglected history with a carelessness which, in view of their reverence for the past, it is INTRODUCTION 13 most difficult to explain. They do not as a rule travel, and are little interested in travellers' obser- vations, which indeed they usually disbelieve. But they have devoted such mental force to the con- sideration of the Whence and Whither, and the relation of the visible to the invisible, that all the creeds accepted by civilized and semi-civilized man- kind are of Asiatic origin. All humanity, except the negroes and the savage races of America and Polynesia, regulate their conduct and look for a future state as some Asiatic has taught them. Nor is the teaching always feeble. Europe having accepted with hearty confidence the views of Peter and Paul, both Asiatics, about the meaning of what their Divine Master said, re- gards all other systems of religious thought with contemptuous distaste, and sums them up in its heart as " heathen rubbish." Yet Confucius must have been a wise man, or his writings could not have moulded the Chinese mind ; while Mahom- medanism has a grip such as no other creed, not even Christianity, possesses except on a few in- dividuals. Brahminism and Buddhism alike rest upon deep and far reaching philosophies. The truth is, the contempt is chiefly born of neglect and ignorance. A Scotch Calvinist, who believes very nearly the same thing, is annoyed by belief in Kismet, though the greatest thinkers of all ages have failed to separate the foreknowledge of ab- solute power from absolute destiny. Englishmen 14 ASIA AND EUROPE cannot get rid of something to them ludicrous in the notion of reincarnation, or as they usually call it transmigration, and entirely fail to perceive that the reason it attracts the Asiatic is because it solves the endless puzzle which the European has given up in despair, viz. the apparently unjust government of the world by a just God. He says, " Nay, it is a just government. The bad man prospers because he is being rewarded here on earth in a temporary way for his good deeds in his last stage, while the good man who is unfortunate is being punished for the sins of a former existence. Both, when their record is perfectly clear, will be reabsorbed into the eternally happy All." There is not an atom of evi- dence for the doctrine which to be complete should fix for ever the numbers of mankind, but it does, if accepted, explain the visible phenomena, and there- fore is the refuge of millions from thoughts which might otherwise lead to atheism. In the same way the Mahommedan moollah, tormented by the same problem, explains it by his theory that God acts because He wills, and not because He is bound by His own nature. " These to hell and I care not, these to heaven and I reck not." It seems to the European an abominable explanation, but still, if accepted, it does explain, and the conversion of a Mahommedan is the missionary's despair. But, finally, the morality of Asia is said to be dis- tinctly inferior. Let us examine that assertion a little more closely. That the grand Christian rule, "Thou INTRO D UCTION 1 5 shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," is not observed in Asia is true, terribly and fatally true. It is of course open to any one to say that it is not observed in Europe either, but that is only an intellectual quip. The European does care for his neighbour to a certain extent, and does to a much greater extent think that he ought to care. The Asiatic does not. He cares for his family, his caste, his clan, and sometimes his profession, but of his neigh- bour he is little more regardful than one dog is of another. He is not affected by his misfortunes, and will help to inflict misfortunes on him with a serene callousness which in Europe is for the most part never found. The Asiatic who could not endure to be an executioner out of sympathy for the victims is probably non-existent. That want of the power of sympathy is the root of all evil in him, the ulti- mate cause of all the tyrannies, the massacres and the tortures which from the first have disgraced Asiatic life, and which, as we see alike in Turkey and in China, still continue. But we are bound to point out that sympathy is of late development even in Europe, that massacre has been frightfully common in Euro- pean history, that we used to persecute for the faith as Asiatics do now, that it is hardly a cen- tury since torture was disused, and not seventy years since all Europe gave up all who were called slaves to be treated as their owners would. Even now, outside Great Britain, any educated 1 6 ASIA AND EUROPE man may be shot or stabbed by any one who thinks himself insulted, and the murderer, even if punishable by law, is unpunished by opinion. It must however be allowed that the difference between Asia and Europe in respect of the controlling power of sympathy is enormous and entirely to the disad- vantage of the Asiatic continent. But for the rest, Asia and Europe are very much alike, both obeying in theory the six non-theological commandments. The fifth, for instance, is much better obeyed in Asia than in Europe, reverence for parents with its correlative regard for children exercising a binding force. The son simply cannot and does not insult his father, and the father almost invariably regards the son as David regarded Absalom. The sixth is held in Asia to be as binding as in Europe, and the murderer is as readily punished with death. The seventh is just as much reverenced in theory as in Europe. Polygamy is no doubt not considered adultery: the Mussulman formally sanctioning it, the Hindoo allowing it if children are not forthcoming, or as a special privilege to certain castes, and the Chinese tolerating it as an indulgence to the rich and powerful. But nevertheless chastity is the ideal, and is enforced everywhere by severe laws, and is probably as well observed as by the nations of Southern Europe. 1 The eighth is enforced with a 1 The reason why this is not believed by Englishmen is that Asiatics, while quite aware of the value of chastity, have never conceived fully the notion of purity. They think of that as a INTRODUCTION 17 terrible rigour which in Europe has died away. The ninth is regarded as just, though disobeyed univer- sally in practice; and for the tenth there is less necessity perhaps than in any part of the world, the fixed idea that Providence arranges society tending greatly to extinguish envy. Men desire their neigh- bour's property as elsewhere, but the haunting pain because others have and I have not is not in Asia a moving force. The continent Europe desires to conquer is not therefore a continent occupied by savages, but one full of great and small nations highly though imper- fectly civilized, proficient in all arts except sculpture and painting, with great cities, great laws, great literatures and a great amount of social happiness, perhaps greater than exists in Europe. I doubt if the attempt will succeed, and certainly it will not succeed without the infliction of a vast amount of human misery, for which government by Europe may or may not be a compensation. It certainly will not be unless the races draw nearer, the first conse- quence of which to both continents will be a decline fad. They have no idea of reticence in words and very little of pictorial decency. The Hindoos are probably the most decorous of all the peoples of Asia, and when in Lord Dalhousie's time a Bill was drawn for the prevention of overt obscenity, it was neces- sary to insert a clause that the Act should not apply to any temple or religious emblem. I fancy the real origin of the differ- ence is the survival throughout Asia ot an extremely old Nature worship, the mystical side of which will be found wonderfully well expressed in Sir Alfred Lyall's poem on Siva. C i8 ASIA AND EUJtOPE from their present tone. The Italianized English- man is bad enough, but the Asiaticized European is intolerable, and the Europeanized Asiatic is a Pasha. The Influence of Europe on Asia IT is the general opinion of the European " man in the street " that Europe will presently divide Asia as well as Africa, and will thencefor- ward tax, govern, and, above all, " influence " the peoples of that immense continent, which contains more than half the population of the world. After fifty years' study of the subject, I do not believe that, with the possible exception of a single move- ment, Europe has ever permanently influenced Asia, and I cannot help doubting whether in the future it ever will. The possible exception is this. Man really knows nothing of his earliest history, and unless assisted by beings older than himself, who must exist, though unrecognizable by him, he never will know anything of it. As all the families of mankind are capable of inter-breeding, and do actually interbreed, there is, from the analogy of the animal world, a violent probability that they all spring from one original stock, but of the circumstances under which that stock developed strong contrasts of colour, and, possibly from a repulsion produced by those contrasts, wandered 10 ASIA AND EUROPE to all parts of the earth, often, it seems clear, cross- ing by unknown means broad stretches of sea, we know absolutely nothing whatever. No one, for instance, out of hundreds of competent inquirers, has even a fixed hypothesis as to the peopling of America by a race which either carried there or developed there a shade of colour differing palpably, however slightly, from the colour of any other of the inhabitants of the globe. It is conceivable, there- fore, that the energetic white family, audax lapeti genus > as Horace says, may have developed itself originally in Europe, and, as it is probable that it wandered first of all into China, there imparting to a lower and darker aboriginal race some of its energy and power of accumulating knowledge, and certain that it so wandered into India, again raising the character of most of the races previously dwell- ing there, it is conceivable that Europe did once permanently influence Asia. For myself I believe the older theory that the white family came from Asia ; but, even accepting the rival opinion, the influence was soon lost, and the population which emerged possessed all the distinctive characteristics of the Asiatic. The white invaders were lost among the dark tribes as completely as the Normans were lost among the Irish. The permanent influence remained with Asia, not with Europe. At all events, from the beginning of authentic history, Europe has received from Asia far more than she has given. The people of the " setting sun " that THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 21 seems the most probable explanation of the word " Europe " derived from Asia their letters, their arithmetic, and their knowledge of the way to guide boats out of sight of land, a knowledge which, as we shall shortly see, they never used as Asiatics must have used it The expeditions in which early Asiatics must have reached the islands of the South Pacific and America, and by which early Hindoos conquered and civilized Java and Bali, and early Malays conquered and thenceforth governed Madagascar, and early Arabs reached China, would have seemed to both Greek and Roman absurd audacities. Europe, till the Greek power arose, came in contact with Asia only because the Semites were great traders, skilful organizers of Sepoy armies, adventurous navigators, and, as compared with Europeans, civilized men. When the Greek power arose, it seemed for a moment as if the process would be changed, and had Alexander not been stopped by a mutiny, the separateness of Asia might have ended ; for that marvellous man, whose imagination was like insight, if he had become master of India, would have pushed eastward, and need not have stopped until he reached the North Pacific. With him, however, the possibility ended; and though the generals who derived renown from him founded dynasty after dynasty within Asiatic limits, the Greeks left in the end scarcely an impression of themselves. Except on a thin fringe of the great continent no vestige of them 22 ASIA AND EUJtOPE remains. Their civilization took no final root, for though it lasted long it was not accepted, any more than their successive creeds and philosophies, by any Asiatic people. There is no people in the entire continent of whom you can say that they were fairly Grecized, even the Jews, who caught their ideas best, finally rejecting them. No one is so unlike a true Greek in mind as a true Asiatic. Then came the Roman, with advantages which no predecessor had ever possessed. Of him one would have thought that it might be truly said, " With bread and iron one can get to China." He knew how to conquer and to keep on conquering ; he intended, consciously intended, the conquest of the world, and he was to all appearance, as a soldier, the superior of any Asiatic. Yet he did not pene- trate even as far as Alexander did. A small Asiatic tribe on the eastern border of the Mediterranean raised the most difficult rebellion Rome ever had to subdue ; Persia beat back Rome as she had never beaten Alexander; and when in 125-30 Hadrian gave up the game, and pledged Rome to a defen- sive policy, she positively forgot Middle and Farther Asia as if they had never existed. There remained some small trade in luxuries, and the Myrrhine vases may have been of porcelain ; but Rome not only never interfered beyond the fringe of Asia which touches the Mediterranean, but she knew nothing about it. Not only did her fleets never THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 23 reach Southern and Eastern Asia, but she never sent explorers there. There is no Roman Hero- dotus. There was a lack of imagination in the Roman, great as he was, which is apparent, I think, in all his literature, and which acted as a limitation on his efforts. He became as content as a Chinese. Fancying he ruled the world, in which he ruled the shores of one great lake, he made no effort to con- quer further, or to explore, or to understand any- thing beyond. He had ships, wealth, brave men by the thousand, but he cared to utilize none of them any more than if he had been a Chinaman. We are accustomed to say and to think that he could not help himself; but what did he lack which the Hindoo possessed when he conquered Java, or the Malay when he conquered Madagascar, or the Ice- lander when he reached America and lost a " ship " there, or the Maori when from some far away island he took possession of New Zealand a wonderful adventure, which, in a people who could write, would have produced a crop of literature ? Having enough, the Roman was not, we are told, driven to any necessity for great adventures. That is true, but he was also a very limited person, and though he succeeded in Southern Europe he failed in Asia as completely as in Britain, where, after reigning for four hundred years, he stamped himself as little as we should be found to have stamped ourselves if we quitted India to-morrow. He made of the bold barbarians of Gaul, and of the more stubborn bar- *4 ASIA AND EUROPE barians of Iberia, Romanized peoples, but of Asia- tics he Romanized not one tribe. Something in them rejected him utterly, and survived him ; and at this moment, among the eight hundred millions of Asia, there are not twenty among whom can be traced by the most imaginative any lingering influ- ence of Rome. The " barbarians," as we call them, that is, the great white tribes, who, pressed, it seems probable, by an increase in their numbers inconsistent with their way of life and their imperfect agriculture, poured in successive swarms on the Roman Empire, and at last destroyed it, never appear to have con- templated conquests in Asia. They passed the Mediterranean under a leader with a genius for destruction, and stamped out Rome in Africa, but they were baffled over and over again by the Lower Empire which we so much despise, because, after a history of heroism, it did not succeed, and in Asia they made no serious attempt. Centuries after- wards, their descendants, under a religious impulse, did ; but Asia had then become too strong for them, and the whole of the series of mighty efforts, which we call the Crusades, were, so far as influence on Asia was concerned, uselessly thrown away. Inter- mediately, Asia had performed the feat which she alone of the continents performs periodically. She had produced a new creed ; and as unlike Budd- hism, Judaism, Confucianism, and Christianity the tenets of Mahommedanism were calculated to make THE INFLUENCE OF EVROPE ON ASIA 25 soldiers, she spewed Europe completely out of her mouth. From 700 to 1757, more than a thousand years, the ways of Asia remained exclusively Asiatic, only a minute corner being even raided by the Cru- saders. Not a province, not a tribe, I had almost said not an individual, had become permanently European ized. So far as one can see, not a Euro- pean idea, not a European habit, not a distinctively European branch of knowledge, ever penetrated into Asia. The Asiatics did not even learn our astronomy, which would have interested them, or our method of fighting, for the Janissaries were European followers of Mahommed. During that long space of time it three times seemed as if Europe might be subjugated by Asiatics, once by the Arabs, once by the Turks, and once by the Tartars ; but some impulse probably the exhaustion of energy, which seems always to befall brown men stopped the conquerors, who would, however, have mocked had they been told that the Asiatic was essentially and by incurable law feebler than the European. Then came the present movement against Asia, which in one way has been more successful than any which have preceded it. The north of the con- tinent, with its vast area and thin population, has fallen under the military control of the Slav people, the great Indian Peninsula has succumbed to Anglo- Saxon energy, and neither Greece nor Rome ever ruled a third of the number of Asiatics who now pay taxes to Great Britain and obey such laws as 26 ASIA AND EUROPE she chooses to impose. To the external world one half of Asia appears to have become European. In reality, however, neither Russia nor Great Britain has as yet exercised any " influence " upon the mil- lions she has conquered. In the north the tribes are only held down by Russia, would rebel in a moment if they dared, and show no sign of accepting either her civilization, her ideas, or her creed. In the south Great Britain has enforced a peace which has produced manifold blessings, but she has neither won nor converted any large section of her subject populations. There is no province, no tribe, no native organization in India upon which, in the event of disaster, she could rely for aid. After nearly a century of clement government there are not ten thousand natives in India who, unpaid and uncoerced, would die in defence of British sove- reignty. The moment it was known in 1857 that, owing to the shrinkage of the white garrison, the enterprise was possible, the most favoured class in the Peninsula, the Sepoys, sprang at their rulers' throats, and massacred all they could reach without either mercy or regret. The war lasted three years, and in spite of the splendid energy and courage of the whites, had the dark peoples produced one soldier of genius, a Jenghiz Khan, or even a Hyder AH, it could scarcely have terminated to European advantage. As it was, the British remain masters ; but beneath the small film of white men who make up the " Indian Empire " boils or sleeps away a sea of dark men, incurably hostile, who await with patience the day when the ice shall break and the ocean regain its power of restless movement under its own laws. As yet there is no sign that the British are accomplishing more than the Romans accomplished in Britain, that they will spread any permanently successful ideas, or that they will found anything whatever. It is still true that if they departed or were driven out they would leave behind them, as the Romans did in Britain, splendid roads, many useless buildings, an increased weakness in the subject people, and a memory which in a cen- tury of new events would be extinct. I say nothing of China, for as yet all that Europe has effected in China is to create an impression that the white peoples are intolerably fierce and cruel, that they understand nothing but making money, and that from them there is nothing intellectual or moral to be gained. Russia has acquired a " route " on which to build a railway to the Pacific. France holds a Chinese dependency where she expects re- bellion, and Europe holds Pekin in temporary mili- tary occupation ; but it is not even pretended that China has been conquered. What she has lost has been more than made up to Asia as a whole by the rise of Japan, where a branch of the yellow people, without in the least ceasing to be Asiatic, has developed an unexpected energy which, if it is ever directed to obtain leadership among the yellow peoples may prove a final obstacle to the ascendency a8 ASIA AND EUROPE of the whites. Europe, outside Russia at least, greatly admires that change, and forgets entirely that in its contest with Asia, which has lasted two thousand years, a new and heavy weight has been thrown within our own lifetimes on the defensive side. We are told every day how Europe has in- fluenced Japan, and forget that the change in those islands was entirely self- generated, that Europeans did not teach Japan, but that Japan of herself chose to learn from Europe methods of organization, civil and military, which have so far proved successful. She imported European mechanical science as the Turks years before imported European artillery. That is not exactly " influence," unless, indeed, England is " influenced " by purchasing tea of China. Where is the European apostle or philo- sopher or statesman or agitator who has re-made Japan ? So much for the past, now for the future. Europe assumes that it will be very different ; but let us look at the reasons for the assumption. I will speak of comparative force by and by ; but let us at first consider whether there is any evidence that the separateness of the Asiatic mind is in any way diminishing. I do not think that any one, whether he is thoughtful statesman like Sir Alfred Lyall, or poet like Rudyard Kipling, with insight into the East, or average administrator, English or Russian, will deny for a moment that the separateness exists, that East and West, brown man and white man, are THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 29 at present separated by a gulf of thoughts, aspira- tions and conclusions, and where is the evidence that the gulf is closing up ? What the secret of that separateness is has perplexed the thoughtful for ages, and will perplex them for ages more indeed it can never be clear until we know something definite of the primal history of man but it must ultimately have some relation to the grand fact that every creed accepted by the great races of mankind, every creed which has really helped to mould thought, has had its origin in Asia. The white man invented the steam engine, but no religion which has endured. The vague mythology once current in Southern Europe produced no dominant ideas it was a worship of beauty in Greece and of Rome in Rome and no code of laws, either ethical or social, and it died away utterly, there being on earth now not one man who believes in Jupiter. The truth is the European is essentially secular, that is, intent on securing objects he can see ; and the Asiatic essen- tially religious, that is, intent on obedience to powers which he cannot see but can imagine. We call these thoughts "superstitions," and no doubt many of them are silly as well as baseless, but still they are attempts to think about the unseen which the Euro- pean usually avoids. The European, therefore, judges a creed by its results, declaring that if these are foolish or evil or inconvenient the creed is false. The Asiatic does not consider results at all, but only the accuracy or beauty of the thoughts generated 30 ASIA AND EUROPE in his own mind. Macaulay's great argument that Roman Catholicism must be less true than Protes- tantism because Roman Catholic countries are less prosperous appears to the Asiatic to be a mere absurdity. "Is the end of religion," he asks, " to produce comfort here ? The Divine Law is to be obeyed even if it compels me to go without com- fort through all my life." He does not always or often obey it, the flesh being weak, but that is what he thinks. Even the Chinaman, the most secular of all Asiatics, obeys his Emperor because he repre- sents the Father, and rises into angry rebellion if he thinks the spirits of the air or of the earth have been affronted. If the Asiatic believed the rule of absti- nence from work on Sunday to be Divine, he would let his enemy kill him quietly, as the Jew, who was an Asiatic, did in the siege of Jerusalem, while the European would go on fighting, declaring that God could not intend him to be killed. If Asiatics held, like Roman Catholics, that Heaven had com- mitted the definition of faith and morals to a caste, they would obey that caste on every question of faith and morals, as the Hindoo for the same reason obeys a Brahmin decision, even if it makes of him an outcast. The European, even when Catholic, frets under the priestly domination, and passes laws like the law of divorce, which are direct denials of the claim of the caste to Divine authority. That habitual and willing submission to the supernatural, even when the decrees of the supernatural are not THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 31 utilitarian, which has always been the keynote of the Asiatic mind, seems to me one cause of the separate- ness of Asia, a separateness so complete that the single Asiatic tribe which does not live in Asia has borne for seventeen centuries, under horrible per- secution, often involving death by torture, the burden of an inconvenient and hampering law, because its members hold it to be divine. There is also in the Asiatic mind a special political and a special social idea. It is not by accident that the European desires self-government, and the Asiatic to be governed by an absolute will. The European holds government to be an earthly business which he may manage as well as another, if only he is competent, and accordingly he either governs himself directly, or he frames a series of laws which nobody, not even the King, is at liberty to break through. The German Emperor is pretty absolute, but he could no more will a man's death than the Lord Mayor could. Every indepen- dent Asiatic sovereign can so will, and be obeyed. The Asiatic, in fact, holds that power is Divine, and that a good king ought to be enabled to " crush the bad and nourish the good," to use the Brahmin formula, without check or hindrance. He is then himself relieved, like a good Catholic, from any personal responsibility, even the trouble of thinking. As a consequence, throughout history the Asiatic, though frequently exempted from military pressure, as for example the Chinese have been for ages, 33 ASIA AND EUROPE invariably sets up a despotism, and when, as rarely happens, the despot strikes him down, bows to the decree as we bow to the sentence of a surgeon who prescribes a painful operation. We do not quarrel with Providence because we are ill or liable to immediate death, nor does the Asiatic under oppression or unjust sentence quarrel with God's representative on earth. And lastly, the Asiatic, believing, as he invariably does, that his social system is Divine, is content with it, clings to it, and resents interference with it with a passion that leads to bloodshed wherever bloodshed is possible. (It is because the English interfere so little with the social life of their dark subjects that their reign over dark peoples often lasts so long.) He is aware, keenly aware, that white government, sooner or later, involves revolution in his social system, and he hates it with an undying hatred such as an Irish peasant feels for the " agent " who may some day evict him, and who meanwhile levies rent. Indeed, I often think that the feeling of the Keltic Irishman towards the Englishman, which appears to be unchangeable, is the nearest analogue to that of the Asiatic for the European. He regards him, if an oppressor, as a formidable brute to be resisted with any instrument at hand ; if a just man, as a dis- agreeable, slow-witted, uncomfortable outsider, who has no right to interfere with him, and who ought to be driven to a distance as speedily and finally as possible. And ft rmjst be remembered that the THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 33 European shares this feeling of separateness com- pletely. Whatever the cause, whether, as he him- self thinks, antagonism of colour, or, as I think, difference in permanent ideals, the effect is the same ; the European cannot merge himself in the Asiatic without a sense of degradation, which is almost invariably followed by its reality. He never willingly accepts any position but one, that of unquestioned ruler. It is not a question of creed, for the Roman had the feeling as strongly as the Englishman, and the Greek thought of " Medizing " as of the sum of all possible offences against his dignity and his nature. It is not a question of laws, for legal equality under laws which he him- self has made intensifies rather than diminishes English abhorrence of the process. When in 1857 the English in India, by all the rules of politics and warfare, were hopelessly lost, they exhibited before all the world the true European feeling. They asked no quarter, they suggested no compromise, they discussed no terms among themselves, they proposed no treaty, but fought on, clear only as to one point, that they would either continue to rule or they would go under and be forgotten. Asiatics, as I believe, perceive this European decision very clearly, and it is the ultimate cause of the massacres to which, when they rise in insurrection, they invari- ably resort. They know that their only chance of victory is to kill the white people out. The obnoxious race will never make terms, never merge D 34 ASIA AND EUROPE in the population, never be anything but rulers, and therefore if their rule is to terminate they must be exterminated. But I shall be told that the spread of Christianity, which is inevitable, will extinguish, probably very speedily, the separateness of Asia, and with it all its consequences. Will it ? Let us look at that belief a little closely and without preconceived ideas. I do not find in history that a common Christianity in any degree removes hatreds of race or nationality, or prevents continuous outbreaks of bitter hostility ; but we may let that pass. What is the real ground for believing that Asia will accept Christianity ? Certainly there is no historic ground. No Asiatic nation of any importance can be said to have accepted it in the last seventeen hundred years. The Asiatic race which knows the creed best, and has had the strongest reasons for accepting it, reasons which prevailed with the Germans and the Slavs when pagan, still rejects it with a certain silent but very perceptible scorn. What has changed in Asia that the future should be so unlike the past ? There are more teachers, no doubt, but there are not one-tenth or one-hundredth so many as have en- deavoured through the ages in vain to convert the Jews. It is said that Christ gave an order to His disciples to teach all nations ; that is true, and I for one believe the order to be binding, and that the Christian Church which sends out no missionaries is a dead Church ; but where in the record has Christ THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 35 promised to those missionaries universal success ? Is it not at least possible that the missionaries carry in their hands the offer of eternal life, which a few accept, while the rest " perish everlastingly," that is, die like the flowers or the dumb creatures of God ? This much, at least, is certain, that for eighteen hundred years it has been no part of the policy of Heaven I write with reverence though I use non-religious terminology to convert Asiatics en masse, and there is no proof that this absence of Divine assistance to the teachers may not continue for an equal period in the future. The truth is that the Asiatics, like the Jews, dislike Christianity, see in it an ideal they do not love, a promise they do not desire, and a pulverizing force which must shatter their civilizations. Eternal consciousness ! That to the majority of Asiatics is not a promise but a threat. The wish to be rid of consciousness, either by annihilation or by absorption in the Divine, is the strongest impulse they can feel. Though Asiatic in origin, Christianity is the least Asiatic of the creeds. Its acceptance would revo- lutionize the position of woman, which is the same throughout Asia, would profoundly modify all social life, and would place by the side of the spiritual dogma " thou shalt love the Lord thy God," which every Asiatic accepts in theory, the far-reaching ethical dogma, " and thy neighbour as thyself," which he regards as an intolerable burden. I doubt, too whether the beauty of the character of Christ. 36 ASIA AND EUROPE appeals to the brown races as it does to the white, whether they feel His self-suppression for others, as Clovis and his warriors felt it, as something alto- gether more beautiful and ideal than their own range of conception. However that may be, it is clear that while the Asiatic can be wooed to a change of creed, as witness the success of both Buddhism and Mahommedanism, whose teachings are radically opposed to each other, they have not been and are not equally moved to embrace Chris- tianity. If they ever take to it, it will be from some internal and self-generated movement of thought, and not from any influence of Europe. And lastly, as to the question of force. Europe assumes with a certain levity that if it were only united it could conquer Asia, and that for a time is possibly true. If such an event happened it would not affect my argument, for the huge mass of Asiatics would remain uninfluenced, as the masses of India have done, would " let the legions thunder past," and wait patiently for the hour when it would be possible to bid them depart again ; but even as to the possibility there is some ground for doubt. Can Europe unite in the work, or would Russia and the West quarrel over it, and so render it imprac- ticable ? That Europe is infinitely stronger for defence than Asia may be instantly acknowledged. As Sir Robert Giffen has pointed out, the white men have multiplied enormously, and European civilization has clothed itself in the enchanted armour THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 37 of science. All Asia, if furious with rage, could not cross the Dardanelles if Europe in earnest forbade the crossing. But for offensive transmarine war Europe is not so strong, is not three hundred millions, but rather at the utmost one million, which million she could not waste on peril of conscription breaking down, and which she could not transport, provide with horses, supply with food and munitions, and keep in movement over vast semi-tropical areas without an expenditure and a consequent taxation that her people would soon bitterly resent. The work before this million would be enormous. They would have to conquer five hundred millions of men, of whom at least thirty millions, the Ottomans and the tribesmen of the Northern desert and the Arabs, are born soldiers, and four hundred millions are semi-civilized Mongols, who once warned could make and use rifles and light artillery as well as the Europeans, and who would be guided and drilled by a section of their own people which has assimi- lated much of European science. Is there an army in Europe which would regard the invasion of Japan with a light heart, and what is there in the military system of Japan which the Ottomans, the Arabs, the Tartars and the Chinese, if pushed to extremity, or if determined on insurrection, could not repro- duce ? Grant victory to Europe at first, and think of the lingering war, of the endless insurrections, of the bitter quarrels among the Powers, of the huge garrisons which must be kept up, and of the steady 38 ASIA AND EUROPE systematized cruelty which would be needed if Asia adopted the perfectly simple expedient of refusing to work for Europeans, a refusal which in India, where all the preliminary conquering and garrison- ing and organizing for revenue purposes has been already done, would bring the Empire down in a month. And all this terrible outlay of energy and treasure and human life would be for what object ? Simply to provide opportunities of manufacturing prosperity for the European tribes, which oppor- tunities would disappear as they arose under the competition of the Asiatic factories which would arise the moment order was secured. The masses of Europe who rule in the last resort do not par- ticularly care to conquer Asia, and would not con- tinue for ages to pay taxes for that purpose. We are all devoted to the " Empire," of which India is the flower, but how long should we keep the Em- pire if it cost us a hundred millions a year ? I do not believe that Europe will make the effort now, or that if she makes it some years hence she will succeed as I write she is shrinking from it in China or that if she does succeed she will even in count- less ages seriously " influence," and thereby change the masses of Asiatics. At some period, probably not long distant, they will, as they always have done, throw out the white men, not because they are oppressors, not because they are inferiors, but because they are intruders whose ideas they neither accept nor can endure. THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON ASIA 39 What then, it will be asked, is to become of Asia, now for the most part, as Poushkine sang, " in dotage buried " ? The only possible reply is what God wills, and not what Europe wills. Heaven has tolerated the existence of that huge mass of men who guide their lives by untrue creeds for many thousands of years, and may continue to tolerate it for many thousands more. Who knows the purpose of the Ancient of Days, or what may be the use of the imperfect yet productive spiritu- ality of the Asiatic mind ? If I were to indulge in the futile work of dreaming, I should say that there were signs in China of latent but bitter dissatisfac- tion with its civilization, leading to Taeping move- ments, Reforming movements, anti-dynastic move- ments, even, on the Western border, to movements in favour of the creed Mahommed taught, and that, as Asiatics rarely move save under a religious im- pulse, the hour was approaching for the Mongolian masses to evolve some new faith, with a new ruler to enforce it. God grant, if that happens, that it be not the Mussulman faith, for in that event Europe will have an awful quarter of an hour. It is, how- ever, much more probable that Asia, arming itself with the rifle, re-learning the use of mounted infantry, which Jenghiz knew before the Boer did, and enforcing conscription laws, will stand on the defensive against Europe, and otherwise remain nearly unchanged, while Europe sees her own ascendency transferred to the Western Continent. 46 ASIA AND EUROPE This too, however, is a dream, for all we know for certain is that Asia has always remained indepen- dent of Europe, and now shows no desire for her guidance, rather a resolution not to accept it. The future will disclose itself by degrees, but if two hundred years hence it shows Europe ruling, tax- ing, and enlightening the great mass of Asiatics, then have I, as is quite probable, read history in vain. In the present state of opinion and current ol events, it may be advisable to end these few re- flections by saying that none of them apply to Africa or its black inhabitants. They are divided off from Asiatics by two well-marked distinctions and one more doubtful. In the first place they seem incapable of even limited progress. The dwellers by the Congo have all the advantages of the dwellers by the Nile, but have remained for thousands of years hopeless and by no means happy barbarians. They cease to be so hopeless when conquered by the white men, there being perceptible advance even when, as in the Southern States of the Union, the white men were by no means intent on turning them into civilized people. The Arabs have in many places taught them to build habitable cities, to cultivate the ground and to understand a rudimentary military discipline, and it seems more than probable that the white peoples can teach them even superior lessons at least that is the inference from the recent history of THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPE ON AStA 41 Uganda, and of Khama's country. In the second place the black peoples are nearly quite devoid of that mass of beliefs, thoughts and experiences which render Asiatics so incurably hostile to white influ- ence. The broad idea of the negro is that the white man is his superior, and when not intolerably oppressive he is willing to accept his guidance and his authority. The absence of great insur- rections among the blacks of the Southern States, the very faint resistance made by millions in Western and Central Africa, and the ascendency acquired by many Arabs all indicate a willingness to accept external leadership which is absent in the Asiatic. It seems as if the black leather bottle would hold new wine without exploding. And, lastly, there is no evident antipathy to Christianity, which is received with a certain readiness as also no doubt is Mahommedanism and which by the testimony of disinterested observers does effect a marked change in ideals and modes of life. No doubt Europe may be disappointed about all these things, for one of the forgotten facts of the situation is the shortness of the time, barely two centuries, during which the aggressive mind of Europe has been in direct contact with the black mind. The black man, even if Christianized, may retain im- pulses which render the contiguity of the white man intolerable to him as is suggested to be the case by most observers in Hayti. Still he may remain submissive for a long period, as the Indians 4* ASIA AND EUROPE of South America have done to the Spaniard, and may, like them, when emancipated, show in creed, thought, and capacity for political organiza- tion decided traces of the white influence. The problem is still unsolved, and may remain unsolved for many generations yet ; but still there is hope of a solution that will enable European and African to live together in amity, the former occupying a position akin to that of a good aristocracy, the position the European longs for in Asia, but alas ! does not attain. Islam and Christianity in India ONE-FIFTH of the human race dwells in India, and every fifth Indian at least is a Mahommedan, yet many people contend that Islam is not a creed which propagates itself vigorously in the great Peninsula. Where do they imagine that the fifty odd millions of Mussulmans in India came from ? Not ten per cent, of them even claim to be the descendants of immigrants, whether Arab, Persian, or Pathan, and of that ten per cent, probably half are descendants only by adoption, the warrior chiefs who followed successful invaders allowing their bravest adherents, if Mussulmans, to enrol them- selves in their own clans. Almost all, moreover, are half-breeds, the proportion of women who entered India with the invaders having been exceedingly small. The remainder that is, at least ninety per cent, of the whole body are Indians by blood, as much children of the soil as the Hindoos, retaining many of the old pagan superstitions, and only Mussulmans because their ancestors embraced the faith of the great Arabian. They embraced it too for the most part from conviction. There is a 44 ASIA AND EUROPE popular idea in this country that India was at some time or other invaded from the North by a mighty conqueror, who set up the throne of the Great Mogul, and compelled multitudes to accept Islam at the point of the sword ; but this is an illusion. Mahommed authorized conversion by force, and Islam owes its political importance to the sword, but its spread as a faith is not due mainly to com- pulsion. Mankind is not so debased as that theory would assume, and the Arab conquerors were in many countries resisted to the death. The pagan tribes of Arabia saw in Mahommed's victories proof that his creed was Divine, and embraced it with a startling ardour of conviction ; but outside Arabia the bulk of the common people who submitted to the Khalifs either retained their faith, as in Asia Minor, or were extirpated, as in Persia and on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The Arabs colonized on an enormous scale, and, being careless what women they took, mixed their blood freely, so that in Syria, Egypt, the Soudan, and the enormous territory stretching from Barca to Tangier the population is essentially Arab with more or less of crossing. The Tartars were persuaded, not conquered, and they and the Arabs are still the dominant races of the Mussulman world which has converted no European race except a few Albanians with all their intellectual superiority and their military successes, the Arabs never converted Spain and has gained its converts in China and ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 45 in Africa almost exclusively by preaching. It was the same in India. Here and there, as in Sind and Mysore, a small population may be found whose ancestors were converted by persecution, and doubt- less successful invaders occasionally terrified or bought with immunities large groups of Indians. But that the process was neither general nor steadily pursued is proved by two broad facts first, that India is not a Mahommedan country, but a Hindoo country in which Mahommedans are numerous ; and secondly, that in no part of the Peninsula can the distribution of faith be fairly considered territorial. Mussulman villages are everywhere found among Hindoo villages, and Mussulman families dwell among Hindoo families in a way which, if India had ever been "converted" systematically would have been impossible. The early mission- aries of Islam could not use force, and, as to the invaders who conquered and remained, they seldom or never wished to use it, for the sufficient reason that it was not their interest. They wanted to found principalities, or kingdoms, or an empire, not to wage an internecine war with their own tax- paying subjects, or to arouse against themselves the unconquerable hostility of the warrior races of the gigantic Peninsula, who were, and who remain, Hindoo. The truth is that Mahommedan prosely- tism by preaching began in India, then held to be far the richest of the great divisions of Asia, within three centuries from the Hegira, and has continued 46 ASIA AND EUROPE ever since that is, for a period of probably nine hundred years at least, during which the process, now vigorous, now slackening, has never been entirely intermitted. In other words, Islam, though often assisted by authority, has taken three times the time to convert a fifth of the people of India that Christianity, though constantly suffering persecution, took to convert the Roman Empire. Islam 'probably never advanced with the speed of Christianity when first contending with paganism, and certainly never with the speed with which the faith spread in the tenth century throughout Russia. Yet the missionaries of Islam from the first had many and great advantages. They were, if judged by our modern standards, exceedingly numer- ous. The more fervent Arabs, with their gift of eloquence and their habit of teaching, after the long battle with the outside world had ceased, took to the work of proselytism with an ardour never displayed by modern Christians, and as fast as they made converts they raised up new missionaries, often by villages at a time. Europeans habitually forget that every Mussulman is more or less of a mission- ary that is, he intensely desires to secure converts from non- Mussulman peoples. Such converts not only increase his own chance of heaven, but they swell his own faction, his own army, his own means of conquering, governing, and taxing the remainder of mankind. All the emotions which impel a Christian to proselytize are in a Mussulman ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 47 strengthened by all the motives which impel a political leader and all the motives which sway a recruiting sergeant, until proselytism has become a passion, which, whenever success seems practic- able, and especially success on a large scale, develops in the quietest Mussulman a fury of ardour which induces him to break down every obstacle, his own strongest prejudices included, rather than stand for an instant in a neophyte's way. He welcomes him as a son, and whatever his own lineage, and whether the convert be Negro or Chinaman or Indian or even European, he will without hesitation or scruple give him his own child in marriage, and admit him fully, frankly, and finally into the most exclusive circle in the world. The missionaries of such a faith are naturally numerous, and when they first assailed India they found, as they have done ever since, a large proportion of the population ready at least to listen to their words. India was occupied then, as it is occupied now, by a thick population of many races, many tongues, and many degrees of civilization, but all differentiated from the rest of mankind in this. Cultivated or uncultivated, they had all keen minds, and all their minds were oc- cupied by the old problem of the whence and whither. They were all religious in a way, and all afraid of something not material. Hindooism was then, as it is now, not so much a creed as a vast congeries of creeds, of modes of belief as to the right method of escaping an otherwise evil. 4estiny rendered ASIA AND EUROPE inevitable, not only by the sins of this life, but by the sins of a whole series of past and unremembered lives. It is the belief in transmigration which Europeans always forget, and which governs the inner souls of the Hindoo millions, who believe in their past existence as fervently as orthodox Chris- tians believe in a future one. The efforts to solve the problem and rescue themselves from destiny were endless, and affected millions. Some heresies involved whole peoples. One heresy, Buddhism, almost became the creed of the land. Great heretics made more converts than Luther. New cults rose with every generation into partial favour. New castes sprang up almost every year that is, new groups of persons separated themselves from the rest of mankind in order, through new rules of cere- monial purity, to ensure further their security against a pursuing fate. The process which now goes on endlessly then went on endlessly, till India was a sweltering mass of beliefs, ideas, religious customs, and rules of life all or nearly all instigated by fear, by an acute dread that somehow, after so much labour, so much self-denial, such hourly bondage to ceremonial precaution, the end might ultimately be missed. The essence of the life of Hindooism, if not of its creeds, is fear fear of the unknown result which may follow upon error either in conduct or in faith or in ceremonial. A single belief, the belief in his pre-existence, which is firmly accepted by every Hindoo, fills his mind with vague terrors ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 49 from which, while that conviction lasts, there cannot be by possibility any full relief. He is responsible for sins he knows nothing of, and who can say that any punishment for them would be unjust or exces- sive ? If misfortune comes to him, that is his due, and a Hindoo, once unlucky, often broods like a Calvinist who thinks he is not of the elect. The modes of obtaining safety are infinite, but are all burdensome, and all, by the confession of those who use them, are more or less uncertain. Amidst this chaos the missionaries of Islam preached the haughtiest, the most clear-cutting, and the least elevated form of monotheism ever taught in this world a monotheism which accounted for all things, ended discussion, and reconciled all per- plexities by affirming that there existed a Sultan in the sky, a God, sovereign in His right as Creator, unbound even by His own character, who out of pure will sent these to heaven and those to hell, who was Fate as well as God. This Being, lonely, omnipotent, and eternal, had revealed through Mahommed His will, that those who believed in Him should have eternal bliss in a heaven which was earth over again with its delights intensified and its restrictions removed, and that those who disbelieved should suffer torment for evermore. Could anything be more attractive to a Hindoo ? If he only accepted the great tenet, which, after all, he suspected to be true, for the notion of the Supreme lurks in Hindooisrn, and is always unconditioned, his B 5 o ASIA AND EUROPE doubts were all resolved, his fears were all removed, his ceremonial burdens were all lifted off him, and he stepped forward comparatively a free man. Year after year, century after century, thousands turned to this new faith as to a refuge, tempted, not by its other and baser attractions, to be discussed presently, but by what seemed to the converts the intellectual truth of this central tenet, by which the complexity of the world was ended, for all things were attributed to a sovereign Will, whose operation explained and justified the Destiny which is to a Hindoo the ever present problem of his life. Nothing goes as it should, yet all things must be going as they should ; what better or easier recon- ciliation of those facts than the existence of a Creator who, because He created, rules all as He will ? Monotheism explains the mystery of the universe, and to the Hindoo dissatisfied with Hindooism seemed perfect light. In teaching this faith the missionaries of Islam had some further advantages besides its simplicity, though they are not those usually ascribed to them. To begin with, whether Arabs or Pathans or Persians or Indian converts, they and their hearers were equally Asiatics, and had therefore a profound, though hardly conscious, sympathy. It may be hard to explain in what the comity of Asia consists, but of its existence there can be no reasonable doubt Something radical, some- thing unalterable and indestructible, divides the ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 51 Asiatic from the European. Stand in a great Asiatic bazaar, with men of twenty races and ten colours and fifty civilizations moving about it, and every one is bound to every other by a common distaste for the European, even if he is an ally. There is not a European in Europe or America who does not feel that between himself and the Jew there is some dividing line which is independent of creed or of culture or of personal respect. Of all Christians, again, the most determined and, politically, the most powerless is the Armenian, but he is a true Asiatic, and accordingly, in the deepest recesses of the Mussulman world, in Arabia or in Afghanistan, where any other Christian would be slain at sight, he passes along as safe, from all save contempt, as any follower of Islam. Those evidences seem unanswerable, but there is one stronger still. The faith of the Moslem makes him accept, and accept heartily, every convert, be he Chinese or Negro or Indian, as a brother ; but he regards one convert with a dull, inactive, but unsleeping suspicion, and that is the European renegade. The missionaries of Islam were personally acceptable in India because they were Asiatics, and because, though the creed they taught was universal, the rule of life by which it was accompanied was Asiatic too. I do not mean by this, as most writers do, that the laxity of the sexual ethics taught by Mahommed was especially attractive to the Hindoo. I doubt if ASIA AND EUROPE such laxity is attractive to any men seeking light, or has ever assisted greatly in the spread of any creed. The chastity of Christianity did not stop its spread in the dissolute society of the rotting Roman world. Of all the greater faiths Islam is the least elevated in this respect, for it allows not only polygamy, but free divorce at the man's will, and concubinage limited only by his power of purchasing slaves. It, in fact, consecrates the harem system, and, except as regards adultery or unnatural crime, legitimizes the fullest and most unscrupulous indulgence of lust Nevertheless, it has never attracted the more lustful nations of Europe, such as the French ; it is rejected by the least continent of mankind, the Chinese, and it has been accepted by millions of women, on whose behalf it relaxes nothing either in this world or the next. It is quite clear that polygamy is not the attraction of Islam for them, nor are they promised male houris in Paradise, even if they have any chance of attaining to Paradise at all. The truth is, that men desire in a creed an ideal higher than their practice. The most dissolute of European societies foisted upon Christianity a restriction, celibacy, stronger than any Christ had taught ; and even among male Asiatics it is doubtful if laxity is so attractive as is commonly supposed. Asiatics care, it is true, nothing about purity, which, among Christians, is as much valued as chastity, and more safeguarded by opinion, the Asiatics holding that lust, like ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 53 hunger, is neither evil nor good, but a mere appetite, the gratification of which under regula- tion is entirely legitimate. They are, therefore, tolerant of lustful suggestions even in their religious books, care nothing about keeping them out of literature or art, and do not understand, still less appreciate, the rigid system of obscurantism by which the European avoids the intrusion into ordinary life of anything that may even accidentally provoke sexual desire. But as regards the actual intercourse of the sexes Asiatics are not lax. The incontinence of the young is prevented by a careful system of betrothals and early marriages ; even Mahommedanism punishes adultery with death ; Buddhism is in theory nearly as clean as Chris- tianity; and the Hindoo, besides being mono- gamous, regards divorce as at once monstrous and impossible. It is probable that the laxity of Islam in its sexual ethics repelled rather than attracted Hindoo men, while to Hindoo women it must have been as disgusting as to Christians. The strongest proof of the grip that Islam takes, when it takes hold at all, is that in India women have been converted as numerously as men, though the Hindoo woman in accepting Islam loses her hope of heaven and the security of her position on earth both together. This repulsion, however, did not prevent con- version. The Hindoo never regards the sexual question as of high spiritual importance, and his philosophy trains him to believe that all ethics 54 ASIA AND EUJtOPE are personal that that which is forbidden to one man may not only be allowed to another, but enjoined upon him. It may be, for instance, imperative on an ordinary Brahmin to restrict himself to one wife, yet it may be perfectly right for a Koolin Brahmin to marry sixty ; and though infanticide is to Hindoos, as to Christians, merely murder, there are tribes, often of the strictest purity of the faith, in which the practice is considered blameless. It is very doubtful if a Hindoo would altogether condemn a Thug, quite certain that he tolerates in certain castes practices he considers infamous in certain others. The Hindoo convert to Islam therefore accepted polygamy as allowed by God, who alone could allow or disallow it, and for the rest he found in the sacred Law or Mahommedan rule of life nothing that was repellent. That law, to begin with, allowed him to live the caste life to be, that is, a member of an exclusive society maintaining equality within its own confines, but shut off from the rest of mankind by an invisible but impassable barrier or custom rigid as law. Such a caste the Indian, always timid, always conscious of being a mere grain in a sand-heap, and always liable to oppression, holds to be essential to his safety, secular and spiritual, and he gives it up with a wrench which is to a European inconceivable. Once out of caste he is no longer a member of a strongly knit, if limited, society, which will protect him against the external world, give him countenance ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 55 under all difficulties, and assure him all the pleasant relations of life, but is a waif, all alone, with every man's hand against him, and with every kind of oppression more than possible. Where is he to seek a surety, and where a wife for his son ? The missionaries of Islam did not, and do not, ask him to abandon caste, but only to exchange his caste for theirs, the largest, the most strictly bound, and the proudest of all, a caste which claims not only a special relation to God, but the right of ruling absolutely all the remainder of mankind. Once in this caste the Hindoo convert would be the brother of all within it, hailed as an equal, and treated as an equal, even upon that point on which European theories of equality always break down, the right of intermarriage. John Brown, who died gladly for the Negro slave, would have killed his daughter rather than see her marry a Negro, but the Mussulman will accept the Negro as son-in-law, as friend, or as king to whom his loyalty is due. The Negro blood in the veins of the present Sultan affects no Mussulman's loyalty, and " Hubshees," who looked, though they were not, Negroes, have in India carved out thrones. The Mussulman caste, as a caste, attracts the Hindoo strongly, and so does the family life of Islam, which leaves him just the seclusion, just the household peace, and just the sovereignty within his own doors which are dear to his soul. He craves for a place where he may be in society, and yet out of society ; not alone, and yet free for a time from the 56 ASIA AND EUROPE pressure and even from the observation of the outer world, which beyond the confines of his own caste is, if not directly hostile, at the best impure; and in Mahommedanism he finds his secluded home untouched. Islam leaves him his old sacred authority over his sons, an authority never ques- tioned, far less resisted, and, what he values still more, authority to dispose of his daughters in marriage at any age he himself deems fitting. This privilege is to him of inestimable value is, indeed, the very key-note of any honourable and therefore happy condition of life. It is necessary upon this matter to be a little plain. Nothing can be finer than the relation of an Indian father to his children, except perhaps their relation to him. His solicitude and their obedience know no end, and there is as a rule extraordinarily little tyranny displayed in the management of the young. The tendency indeed is to spoil them, but there is one grand exception to this habit of tender- ness. The highest spirited European noble is not more sensitive about the chastity of his daughters than the Indian of any class, but the ideas of the two men as to the effectual method of securing it are widely apart The European trusts to his daughter's principles, to an invisible but unbreak- able wall of stringent etiquettes, to an ignorance fostered by a mother's care, and to the compara- tively late age at which for physiological reasons the passions wake in Europe. The Indian knows ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 57 that every girl born in his climate may be a mother at eleven, while she is still a baby in intel- lect and in self control, knows that while still a child her passions wake, knows that he cannot keep her ignorant, and knows that he can no more at that age trust her principles than he could trust her not to play with toys or eat the sweetmeats before her lips. The choice before him is early betrothal at his discretion, not hers, for she is incompetent to choose ; or the seclusion in a nunnery, which, if early marriage is ever abolished in India, will be the inevitable alternative, as it is now among the better classes in France. He has decided for the former course, and the new creed which approves and ratifies that decision is to him therefore an acceptable one. His notion of honourable life is not upset by the notion of his teachers, who upon all such points sympathize with him to the full. As to the ceremonial restrictions involved in Mahom- medanism, they are most of them his own restric- tions, much liberalized in theory ; and one of them receives his conscientious and most cordial approval. Here again it is necessary to be plain. In the present excited condition of English and American opinion upon the subject of alcohol, it is vain to hope that the unvarnished truth will be listened to without contempt, but still it ought to be told. There are temptations which tell differently on different men, and which, innocent for one set, are debasing that is, utterly evil for another. There 58 ASIA AND EUROPE are two moralities about drink, just as, if the effect of opium were different on different varieties of mankind, there would be two moralities about opium. The white races do not suffer, except as individuals, from alcohol. They do not as races crave it in excess, and except in excess it harms them only by causing an enormous and in great part useless waste of their labour. The white races which drink wine do not appear to have suffered at all, and even the white races which drink spirits have suffered very little. It is mere nonsense to talk of either the French or the Scotch as inferior peoples, and the Teutons in all their branches have done in all departments of life all that men may do. Individuals of all these races have suffered from drink in such numbers as to produce an unnatural average of crime, but the races have neither perished nor grown weak, nor shown any tendency to deterioration in intellectual power or in morale. The Scotch are better than they were three centuries ago ; and the Jews, who drink everywhere, remain everywhere the same. It is different with the dark races and the red races. Owing probably to some hitherto untraced peculiarity of either their physical or more probably their mental constitutions, alcohol in any quantity seems to set most Asiatics the Jews are an exception on fire, to produce an irresistible craving for more, and to compel them to go on drink- ing until they are sunk in a stupor of intoxication. They appear to delight but little in the exhilaration ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 59 produced by partial inebriety, and to seek always a total release from consciousness and its oppressions. The condition of " dead drunkness," which few even of drinking Northerners enjoy, is to them delightful. " I not drinkee for drinkee," said the Madras man ; " I drinkee for drunkee." Alcohol is therefore to such races an intolerable evil, and its consumption by them is in the eyes of all strict moralists an immorality. It is the doing of a thing known to be for that man evil. This desire to drink for drinking's sake probably became stronger when the Aryans descended from the land of the grape to regions where it cannot be obtained, yet where arrack can be made in every village ; and their early legislators therefore prohibited the use of alcohol with an abso- lute rigour which produced in the course of ages an instinctive abhorrence. No respectable Hindoo will touch alcohol in any form ; and the Mahomme- dan restriction, which it is said cost Islam the adherence of the Russian people, seems to Hindoos a supplementary evidence of the Divine origin of the creed. With their path thus cleared, with their great numbers and with their persistent zeal, the mission- aries of Islam ought long ere this to have converted the whole population of India to their faith ; and it is a little difficult to account for the slowness of their progress. The best explanation probably is to be found in the dogged resistance of the priesthood, whose hold over the people is riveted by the superi- 60 ASIA AND EUROPE ority of their blood and of their natural intelligence, the Brahmin boy, for example, beating every other boy in every college in the country ; in the conser- vatism of the masses, which rejects innovation as impiety ; and in the saturation of the Hindoo mind with the pantheistic idea, which is utterly opposed to Mahommedanism and to the whole series of assumptions upon which that creed rests. It is probable too that patriotism, or rather pride, has had its weight; and that the Hindoos, vain of their antiquity, of their intellectual acuteness, and of their powers of resistance, have refused to break with the past, which to them is always present, by accepting an alien, though attractive, faith. Whatever the cause, the fact is certain, Islam has advanced and is advancing but slowly towards the destined end. Even if there has been no natural increase of popu- lation, the conversions cannot have exceeded 50,000 a year upon an average since proselytism first began a small number when the original successes of the faith in Arabia are considered. It is prob- able, however, that the conversions have been far below that figure, and that even now, when prose- lytizing energy has been revived by a sort of Protestant revival in Arabia, they hardly reach throughout the continent more than 50,000 a year. Still they go on. Mahommedanism benefits by the shaking of all Hindoo beliefs, which is the marked fact of the day ; and it is nearly certain that, should on new spiritual agency intervene, the Indian peoples, who are already betraying a tendency to fuse themselves into one whole, will at last become Mahommedan. None who profess that faith ever quit it ; the tendency towards physical decay visible in so many Mussulman countries is not perceptible in India, and in the later stages conversion will probably be accelerated by a decided use of force. Whether a Mahommedan is a better man than a Hindoo it is impossible to decide ; for though Islam is the higher creed, it is far more inimical to progress is indeed a mental cul de sac, allowing of no advance but that its disciples are higher in the political scale and will ultimately hold the reins is a truth almost self evident. They are only one fifth of the population. They would have little external aid except from a few Pathans and possibly Soudanese, and they do not include the bulk of the fighting races the Sikhs, Rajpoots, Hindostanees, Beharees and Mahrattas but nevertheless few ob- servers doubt that, if the English army departed, the Mahommedans, after one desperate struggle with the Sikhs, would remain supreme in the Peninsula. They are all potential soldiers ; they are all capable of self-sacrifice for the faith ; and they are all willing to cohere and to acknowledge one common and central authority. They know how to make themselves obeyed, and, though cruel, they do not excite the kind of hate which drives subjects to despair. They have impressed them- selves upon India as the ruling caste. Hindoos 6a ASIA AND EUROPE superior to themselves in martial qualities will yet serve under them; and when, in 1857, Northern India tried in one great heave to throw off the European yoke, it was to Delhi and the effete house of Timour that Hindoos as well as Mussulmans turned for guidance and a centre. Brahmin Sepoys murdered Christian officers in the name of a Mahommedan Prince. In the light of that most significant of facts it is difficult to doubt that, though the process may be slow, India, unless all is changed by the intervention of some new force, must in no long period of time, as time is counted in Asia, become a Mahommedan country, the richest, the most populous, possibly the most civi- lized, possibly also the most anarchical of them all. Mahommedanism has never made a nation great, nor have its civilizations endured long, and the history of the Mogul Empire is not of good omen. It produced some striking characters, many great deeds, and a few magnificent buildings, one of which, the Taj at Agra, is peerless throughout the world ; but it rotted very early, and it showed from first to last no tendency to breed a great people. The corruption was greater under Aurungzebe than under Baber, and the ease with which the British conquest was effected can only be explained by a thorough exhaustion of Mussulman morale. They were the ruling class, they held all the springs of power, they had every motive for fighting hard, they were certainly 20,000,000 strong ; yet all our great wars ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 63 were waged, not with Mussulmans, but with Hin- doos, Mahrattas, Pindarees, Sikhs, and our own Sepoys. Had they possessed in 1756-1800 one- half the energy of the Khalsa or fighting section of the Sikhs, the British would have been driven out of India, or out of all India except Bengal, by sheer exhaustion on the battlefield. Still if India becomes Mahommedan, it may develop (as every other Mussulman country has done) an energy which, though temporary, may last for centuries ; and if its dynasts are Arabs or native Mussulmans instead of Tartars, it may rise to great heights of a certain kind of Oriental civilization. The intervening spiritual force which ought to prevent this conversion of an empire to a false and entirely non-progressive creed is of course Christi- anity, and, now that the facts are better known, a cry of alarm has risen from the Reformed Churches at the slow progress of Christian proselytism in India. Surely, it is argued, there must be some defect in the system of bringing our faith before this people, or there would be greater results from efforts in themselves great, and supported by the entire Christian world in Europe and America. Why are the Christians so few, and why is there no sign that any nation in India is embracing Christianity, or that any indigenous Christian Church is attracting, as Buddhism once did, millions of followers ? Many writers, provoked by this cry, have endeavoured to show that it is ill founded, and have published 64 ASIA AND EUROPE quantities of statistics intended to prove that Christi- anity does advance more rapidly than any creed, but no one who knows India will deny that the com- plaint is essentially true. The number of Christians in all India is larger than is commonly supposed. There are 660,000 belonging to the Reformed Churches, and the conversions, if we include the aboriginal tribes, are becoming more numerous in proportion than those of Mahommedanism ; but Christianity has taken but a poor grip on Hindoo India. The creed has, except in Tinnevelly, no perceptible place in any one province. Its votaries are nowhere really visible among the population. Its thoughts do not affect the life, or perplex the orthodoxy, of other creeds. No Indian Christian is a leader or even a quasi-leader among the Indian peoples, and a traveller living in India for two years, and knowing the country well, might leave it without full consciousness that any work of active proselytism was going on at all. Christianity has not failed in India as some allege, but it has failed as compared with reasonable expectation and with the energy expended in diffusing it, and it is worth while to examine quietly and without prejudice the probable reasons why. To do this more easily, it is well to sweep away in the beginning one or two popular fallacies. One of these is, that white Christians in India are the conquering race, and that Christianity is therefore detested as their creed. That is not true. That the English in India are ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 65 regarded by large sections of the people as " un- accountable, uncomfortable works of God " may be true enough, but they are not despised, are not held to be bad, and do not, in the majority of cases, in any way disgrace their creed. To the bulk of the native population they are little known, because they are not visible, their numbers, except in the seaports and a few garrison towns, being inappreciable, but those who know them know and admit them to be a competent people, brave in war and capable in peace, always just, usually benevolent, though never agreeable, and living for the most part steadily up to such light as they have. Even if they were worse it would make little difference, the Hindoo being quite capable of distinguishing between a creed and its professors, and seeing that his own people also as well as the Mahommedans constantly fall in practice behind the teaching of their own faith. As for the position of the white Christians as a dominant caste, that is in favour of their religion, for it shows either that a great God is on their side, or that they enjoy, in an unusual degree, the favour of Destiny. The fact which is a fact, and a very curious one that the white Christians, for the most part, do not wish the Indians to be converted, has no doubt an influ- ence, of which we will speak by and by, but in general estimation among Indians this prejudice is not counted to their discredit, but is rather held to be a reason for trusting in their unsympathetic impar- tiality. The Hindoo, too, though he has neither F 66 ASIA AND EUROPE reverence nor liking for the social system of his conquerors, which is far too much based on indi- vidualism for his taste, has a great respect for their material successes and for their powers of thought, which in many directions, especially in governing and making laws, he is disposed to pre- fer greatly to his own. Taking it broadly, it may be affirmed that the fact that Christianity is the conquerors' creed makes no substantial difference one way or the other. It is again affirmed that Christianity is too difficult and complex a creed, that it demands too much belief, and that its teachers insist too much upon the acceptance by the neophyte of its complexities and difficulties. I see no found- ation whatever for that statement. The difficulties of Christianity to Christians are not difficulties to the Hindoo. He is perfectly familiar with the idea that God can be triune ; that God may reveal Himself to man in human form ; that a being may be at once man and God, and both completely ; that the Divine man may be the true exemplar, though separated from man by His whole Divinity ; and that sin may be wiped off by a supreme sacrifice. Those are the ideas the missionaries teach, and the majority of Hindoos would affirm that they were perfectly reasonable and in accordance with the general and Divinely originated scheme of things. There is nothing in Christian dogma which to the Hindoo seems either ridiculous or impossible, while no miracle whatever, however stupendous, in the ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 67 least overstrains the capacity of his faith. There never was a creed whose dogmas were in them- selves so little offensive to a heathen people as the greater dogmas of Christianity are to the Hindoo, who, moreover, while hinting that the second commandment involved an impossibility in terms, a material representation of the universal Spirit being inconceivable, would allow that the ten constituted a very fair rule of life. The road is smooth instead of hard for the Christian theologian, and it is the perfect comprehensibility of its dogmas which makes the Hindoo's unwillingness to believe harder to understand. The real difficulties in the way of the expansion of Christianity in India are, I conceive, of three kinds : one due to the creed itself, one to the social disruption which its acceptance involves, and one to the imperfect, it may even be said the slightly absurd, method hitherto adopted of making pro- selytes. i. It is most difficult to make the theological impediments to the spread of Christianity in India clear to the English mind without being accused either of irreverence or of presumption. Every missionary has his own ideas of those difficulties often ideas he does not express, derived from great experience and he naturally thinks any other ex- planation either insufficient or erroneous. The attempt, however, must be made, the writer premis- ing that his belief is based on conversations with 68 ASIA AND EUROPE Brahmins of great acuteness, continued through a period of many years, but with Brahmins exclusively. No man not a Christian becomes a Christian to his own earthly hurt except for one of two reasons. Either he is intellectually convinced that Christianity is true a conviction quite compatible with great distaste for the faith itself or he is attracted by the person of Christ, feels, as the theologians put it, the love of Christ in him. The former change happens in India as often as elsewhere whenever the Christian mind and the Hindoo mind fairly meet each other, but it does not produce the usual result. The Hindoo mind is so constituted that it can believe, and does believe, in mutually destruc- tive facts at one and the same time. An astronomer who predicts eclipses ten years ahead without a blunder believes all the while, sincerely believes, that the eclipse is caused by some supernatural dog swallowing the moon, and will beat a drum to make the dog give up the prize. A Hindoo will state with perfect honesty that Christianity is true, that Mahommedanism is true, and that his own special variety of Brahminism is true, and that he believes them all three implicitly. The relation between what Dr. Newman calls "assent" and what we call "faith" is imperfect with Hindoos, and con- version may be intellectually complete, yet be for all purposes of action valueless. Missionaries are con- stantly ridiculed in India for saying that they have hearers who are converts but not Christians, the ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 69 idea being that they are either deluding themselves or dishonestly yielding to the English passion for tangible results. They are in reality stating a simple truth, which embarrasses and checks and, sooth to say, sometimes irritates them beyond all measure. What are you to do with a man whom you have laboured with your whole soul to convince, who is convinced, and who remains just as unconvinced for any practical purpose as he was before ? The Hindoo, be it understood, is not skulking or shrink- ing from social martyrdom, or telling lies ; he really is intellectually a Hindoo as well as a Christian. Some of us have seen, it may be, the same position of mind in the case of a few Roman Catholic agnostics, but in Europe it is rare. In India it is nearly universal, and the extent of its effect as a resisting force to Christianity is almost inconceivable to a European. The missionary makes no headway. He is baffled at the moment of success by what seems to him an absurdity, almost a lunacy, which he yet cannot remove. The other obstacle is, how- ever, yet more serious. The character of Christ is not, I am convinced, as acceptable to Indians as it is to the Northern races. It is not so completely their ideal, because it is not so visibly supernatural, so completely beyond any point which they can, unassisted by Divine grace, hope to attain. The qualities which seemed to the warriors of Clovis so magnificently Divine, the self-sacrifice, the self-denial, the resignation, the sweet humility, are 70 ASIA AND EUROPE precisely the qualities the germs of which exist in the Hindoo. He seeks, like every other man, the complement of himself, and not himself again, and stands before Christ at first comparatively unat- tracted. The ideal in his mind is as separate as was the ideal in the Jews' mind of their expected Messiah, and though the ideals of Jew and Hindoo are different, the effect is in both cases the same a passive dull repulsion, scarcely to be overcome save by the special grace of God. I never talked frankly with a Hindoo in whom I did not detect this feeling to be one inner cause of his rejection of Christi- anity. He did not want that particular sublimity of character, but another, something more of the sovereign and legislator. It may be said that this is only a description of the "carnal man," and so it is, but the carnal man in each race differs, and in the Hindoo it gives him a repugnance, not to the morality of Christianity, which he entirely acknowledges to be good, though incomplete as not demanding enough ceremonial purity,, but to the central idea of all. This is, when all is said, and there is much to say, the master difficulty of Chris- tianity in India, and the one which will delay conversion on a large scale. There is no Christ in Mahommedanism. It will be overcome one day when Christ is preached by Christians unsaturated with European ideas, but till then it will be the least removable of impediments, though it produces this result also, that when it is removed the true ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 71 convert will display, does even now in rare cases display, an approximation to the European ideal of Christ such as in Europe is scarcely found, or found only in a few men whom all the sects join to confess as saintly Christians. 2. What may be called the social difficulty in the way of Christianity is very great, and is exasperated by the medium through which it is propagated. The convert is practically required to renounce one civilization and to accept another not in his eyes higher than his own. He is compelled first of all to " break his caste," that is, to give up irrecoverably for there is no re-entry into Hindooism his per- sonal sanctity, which depends on caste, and his fixed position in the world, and his kinsfolk and his friends, and to throw himself all bare and raw into a world in which he instinctively believes nine- tenths of mankind to be, for him, impure. He must eat and drink with men of other castes, must hold all men equal in his sight, must rely on friendship and not on an association, must be for the rest of his life an individual, and not one of a mighty company. There is no such suffering unless it be that of a Catholic nun flung into the world by a revolutionary movement to earn her bread, and to feel as if the very breeze were impiously familiar. Be it remembered, a low-caste man feels the protection of caste as strongly as a high-caste man, and the convert to Christianity does not, like the convert to Mahommedanism, merely change his caste ; he loses it altogether. 72 ASJA AND EUROP& There is in India no Christian caste, and there never will be. Not to mention that the idea is in itself opposed to Christianity, there can be no such organization unless the Europeans will admit equality between themselves and the natives, and they will not. Something stronger than themselves forbids it. They may be wrong or right, but their wills are powerless to conquer a feeling they often sorrow for, and the very missionary who dies a martyr to his efforts to convert the Indians would die unhappy if his daughter married the best convert among them. In presence of that feeling a Christian caste is impossible, for the Hindoo, a true Asiatic, will not admit that with equality in caste inequality in race can co-exist. It has often been suggested that this obstacle to the spread of Christianity is wilful, and that the converts might keep their caste, but the plan has never been worked, and never can be. I firmly believe caste to be a marvellous discovery, a form of socialism which through ages has protected Hindoo society from anarchy and from the worst evils of industrial and competitive life it is an automatic poor-law to begin with, and the strongest form known of trades union but Christianity demands its sacrifices like every other creed, and caste in the Indian sense and Christianity cannot co-exist. With caste the convert gives up much of his domestic law, the harem-like seclusion of his home, much of his autho- rity over wife and children, his right of compelling 73 his daughter to marry early, which, as explained above, he holds part of his honour, most of his daily habits, and even, in theory at all events, his method of eating his meals. A Christian cannot condemn his wife to eat alone because of her inferiority. Every- thing is changed for him, and changed for the un- accustomed, in order that he may confess his faith. One can hardly wonder that many, otherwise ready, shrink from such a baptism by fire, or that the second generation of native Christians often show signs of missing ancient buttresses of conduct. They are the true anxieties of the missionaries, and it is from them in nine cases out of ten that the ill-repute of Indian Christians is derived ; but European opinion about them is most unfair. They are not converts, but born Christians, like any of our own artisans ; they have not gone through a mental martyrdom, and they have to be bred up without strong convictions, except that Christianity is doubt- less true, without the defences which native opinion has organized for ages, and in the midst of a heathen society in which the white Christians declare their children shall not live. One such man I knew well, who showed much of the quality of the European, a big, bold man, though a Bengalee by birth, utterly intolerable to his kinsfolk, and an outcast from all native society. He fought his battle for a good while hard, but he grew bitter and savage, became, among other changes, a deadly enemy of the British Government, and at last solved all the questions 74 which pressed on him so fiercely by turning Mahom- medan. A native Christian village in Canara some years since followed the same course, and it may hereafter be a frequent one. 3. The greatest obstacle, however, to the rapid diffusion of Christianity in India is the method adopted to secure proselytes. The Reformed Churches of Europe and America have devoted themselves to the old object with some zeal l and commendable perseverance, but they have entirely failed to secure volunteers for the work. Owing to causes very difficult to understand, missionary work in India scarcely ever attracts Europeans possessed of even a small independence, and the number of those who maintain themselves and work for the cause, seeking no pecuniary aid from the Churches, may be counted on the fingers of one hand. The 1 Some zeal. It is not very much. If we had the means of deducting the contributions of about 2,000 families who are the mainstay of all missionary bodies and of all charities, the amount raised by the Churches would not appear large, and it is raised with extreme difficulty. The Churches, pressed by home wants and conscious of great ignorance, will, as a rule, give nothing unless stimulated by special addresses, and the expense of that stimulation takes a quite unreasonable percentage from mission funds. The individual contributions so raised are exceedingly small, and the demands of the contributors for immediate results are ludicrously unreasonable. They will not wait for the oak to grow, and a good many of them are as bad as the Scotch mer- chant who at last rejected a request to support the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. He paid once ; he paid twice ; but on the third application he said, " D it, are thae Jews no' a' convertit yet 1 " ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 75 Churches, therefore, acting for the most part indepen- dently, but still acknowledging a federal tie of good- will which induces them to avoid interfering with one another, have organized what is practically a proselytizing "service" for India, consisting now of about seven hundred men, differing, of course, greatly among each other, but most of them as well educated as average English or Scotch clergymen, most of them married, and all of them honestly devoted to their work. The charges sometimes brought against them in England, but never in India, are not only unfounded, but nonsensical. Now and again a missionary, tempted by the high rewards offered for his special knowledge, or detect- ing in himself some want of true vocation, embraces a secular career, and is thenceforward regarded by his brethren as a backslider. Now and again a mis- sionary, disenchanted or conquered by that disgust of India which with some Europeans becomes a mental disease, returns to the West to commence the ordi- nary life of an Established or Dissenting clergyman. Now and again, but very rarely, a missionary falls a prey to some temptation of drink, or desire, or gain, and is cast out, his comrades " inquiring " in such cases with all the severity and more than the care of any judicial court. But the Churches are, for the most part, admirably served. The mis- sionaries lead excellent and hard-working lives, are implicitly trusted by the whole community, Euro- pean and native, and rarely resign until warned by 76 ASIA AND EUROPE severe illness that the period of their usefulness is overpast Many of them become men of singular learning; many more show themselves adminis- trators of high merit ; and all display on occasion that reserve of energy and devotion which more than any other thing marks that the heart of a service is sound. Most pathetic stories are told of their behaviour in the great Mutiny, but I prefer to tell a little anecdote which is known to me to be true, and is most characteristic. The Rev. John Robinson was, in 1850 or 1851, an unpaid missionary, recognized as such by the Baptist Church, but maintaining himself as a translator. He was suddenly summoned one day to the Leper Asylum to baptize a dying convert. The message was intended for his father, but the father was sick, and my friend went instead, in fear and trembling, baptized the dying man, consoled him, and then was seized with a throe of mental agony. It is the custom of many missionaries on receiving a neophyte, especially if sick, to give him the kiss of peace. Mr. Robinson thought this his bounden duty, but he was terribly afraid of the possible contagion. He hesitated, walked to the door, and returned to kiss the leper on the lips, and then to lie for days in his own house, prostrated with an uncontrollable and, as experience has often proved, not unreason- able nervous terror. A superstitious fool the doctor thought him when he had wormed the truth out of him during his fit of nervous horror. ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 77 True soldier of Christ, say I, who, when his duty called him, faced something far worse than shot. The body of the missionaries have that quality in them, and those who depreciate or deride them do not know the facts. But excellent as they are, it is not for the work of proselytism that they are adapted. In the first place, they are too few. Every missionary has a wife, a house, a conveyance, children who must be sent home ; and must, being so situated, live the usual and respectable European life. That costs on the average ^"500 a year per house j 1 and the Churches, which, if they are really to reach all India, need at least 5,000 agents, cannot, or at all events will not, provide for more than 700. In the second place, the missionaries are Europeans, divided from the people by a barrier as strong as that which separates a China- man from a Londoner, by race, by colour, by dress, by incurable differences of thought, of habit, of taste, and of language. The last named the missionary sometimes, though by no means always, overcomes, but the remaining barriers he cannot 1 I defy living man, not being secretary to a mission, to state accurately what a missionary costs. His salary can be easily ascertained, but in addition to this he receives an allowance for his house, for his conveyance, and for passage money when sick. Add the cost of his share of general expenses, the charitable allowance for his widow, and the grant-in-aid to the school for his children, and the total will, I feel assured, not be less than the sum I have mentioned. 78 ASIA AND EUROPE overcome, for they are rooted in his very nature, and he does not try. He never becomes an Indian, or anything which an Indian could mistake for himself: the influence of civilization is too strong for him. He cannot help desiring that his flock should become " civilized " as well as Christian ; he understands no civilization not European, and by unwearied admonition, by governing, by teach- ing, by setting up all manner of useful industries, he tries to bring them up to his narrow ideal. That is, he becomes a pastor on the best English model : part preacher, part schoolmaster, part ruler ; always doing his best, always more or less success- ful, but always with an eye to a false end the Europeanization of the Asiatic and always acting through the false method of developing the desire of imitation. There is the curse of the whole system, whether of missionary work or of education in India. The missionary, like the educationist, cannot resist the desire to make his pupils English, to teach them English literature, English science, English knowledge ; often as in the case of the vast Scotch missionary colleges, establishments as large as universities, and as successful in teaching through the medium of English alone. He wants to saturate Easterns with the West. The result is that the missionary becomes an excellent pastor or an efficient schoolmaster instead of a proselytizer, and that his converts or their children or the thousands of pagan lads he teaches become ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 79 in exact proportion to his success a hybrid caste, not quite European, not quite Indian, with the originality killed out of them, with self-reliance weakened, with all mental aspirations wrenched violently in a direction which is not their own. It is as if Englishmen were trained by Chinamen to become not only Buddhists, but Chinese. The first and most visible result is a multiplication of Indians who know English, but are not English, either in intellectual ways or in morale ; and the second is that, after eighty years of effort, no great native missionary has arisen, that no great Indian Church has developed itself on lines of its own and with unmistakable self-dependent vitality, and that the ablest missionaries say sorrowfully that white supervision is still needed, and that if they all retired the work might even now be undone, as it was in Japan. Where 3,000 preaching friars are required, most or all of them Asiatics, living among the people, thinking like them as regards all but creed, sympathizing with them even in their superstitions, we have 700 excellent but foreign schoolmasters or pastors or ruling elders. What is wanted in India for the work of proselytizing is not a Free Church College, an improved Edin- burgh High School, teaching thousands of Brahmins English, but an El Azhar for training native missionaries through their own tongue, and in their own ways of thought exclusively a college which should produce, not baboos competent; to answer 8o ASIA AND EUROPE examination papers from Cambridge, but Christian fanatics learned in the Christianized learning of Asia, and ready to wander forth to preach, and teach, and argue, and above all to command as the missionaries of Islam do. Let every native Church once founded be left to itself, or be helped only by letters of advice, as the Churches of Asia were, to seek for itself the rule of life which best suits Christianity in India, to press that part of Christianity most welcome to the people, to urge those dogmatic truths which most attract and hold them. We in England have almost forgotten those discussions on the nature of God which divided the Eastern Empire of Rome, and which among Christian Indians would probably revive in their fullest force. It is the very test of Christianity that it can adapt itself to all civilizations and improve all, and the true native Churches of India will no more be like the Reformed Churches of Europe than the Churches of Yorkshire are like the Churches of Asia Minor. Strange beliefs, strange organizations, many of them spiritual despotisms of a lofty type, like that of Keshub Chunder Sen, the most original of all modern Indians, wild aberrations from the truth, it may be even monstrous heresies, will appear among them, but there will be life, conflict, energy, and the faith will spread, not as it does now like a fire in a middle-class stove, but like a fire in the forest. There is far too much fear of imperfect ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA 81 Christianity in the whole missionary organization. Christianity is always imperfect in its beginnings. The majority of Christians in Constantine's time would have seemed to modern missionaries mere worldlings ; the converted Saxons were for centuries violent brutes ; and the mass of Christians through- out the world are even now no better than indif- ferents. None the less is it true that the race which embraces Christianity, even nominally, rises with a bound out of its former position, and contains in itself thenceforward the seed of a nobler and more lasting life. Christianity in a new people must develop civilization for itself, not be smothered by it, still less be exhausted in the impossible effort to accrete to itself a civilization from the outside. Natives of India when they are Christians will be and ought to be Asiatics still that is, as unlike English rectors or English Dissenting ministers as it is possible for men of the same creed to be, and the effort to squeeze them into those moulds not only wastes power, but destroys the vitality of the original material. Mahommedan proselytism succeeds in India because it leaves its converts Asiatics still ; Christian proselytism fails in India because it strives to make of its converts English middle-class men. That is the truth in a nutshell, whether we choose to accept it or not. Will England Retain India? THE English think they will rule India for many centuries or for ever. I do not think so, holding rather the older belief that the Empire which came in a day will disappear in a night ; and it may interest some to consider for a moment the pessimist view as stated by one who heartily believes that the British dominion over the great peninsula of Asia is a benefit to mankind. It is customary with Englishmen, and especially with Englishmen who have seen India, to speak of the British domination there as "a miracle," but they seldom realize fully the import of their words. The Indian Empire is not a miracle in the rhetori- cian's sense, but in the theologian's sense. It is a thing which exists and is alive, but cannot be accounted for by any process of reasoning founded on experience. It is a miracle as a floating island of granite would be a miracle, or a bird of brass which flew and sung and lived on in mid-air. It is a structure built on nothing, without foundations, without buttresses, held in its place by some force the origin of which is undiscoverable and the nature 82 WILL ENGLAND DETAIN INDIA f 83 of which has never been explained. For eighty years at least writers by the score have endeavoured to bring home to Englishmen the vastness of India, but, so far as can be perceived, they have all failed. The Briton reads what they say, learns up their figures, tries to understand their descriptions, but fails, for all his labour, to realize what India is a continent large as Europe west of the Vistula, and with 30,000,000 more people, fuller of ancient nations, of great cities, of varieties of civilization, of armies, nobilities, priesthoods, organizations for every conceivable purpose from the spreading of great religions down to systematic murder. There are twice as many Bengalees as there are French- men ; the Hindostanees properly so called outnum- ber the whites in the United States ; the Mahrattas would fill Spain, the people of the Punjab with Scinde are double the population of Turkey, and I have named but four of the more salient divisions. Everything is on the same bewildering scale. The fighting peoples of India, whose males are as big as ourselves, as brave as ourselves, and more regard- less of death than ourselves, number at least a hundred and twenty millions, equal to Gibbon's calculation of the population of the Roman Empire. There are four hundred thousand trained brown soldiers in native service, of whom we hear perhaps once in ten years, and at least two millions of men who think their proper profession is arms, who would live by arms if they could, and of whom we 84 ASIA AND EUROPE in England never hear a word. If the Prussian conscription were applied in India, we should, with- out counting reserves or Landwehr or any force not summoned in time of peace, have two and a half millions of soldiers actually in barracks, with 800,000 recruits coming up every year a force with which, not only Asia, but the world, might be subdued. There are tens of millions of prosperous peasants whose hoardings make of India the grand absorbent of the precious metals ; tens of millions of peasants beside whose poverty Fellahs or Sicilians or Con- naught men are rich ; millions of artisans, ranging from the men who build palaces to the men who, nearly naked and almost without tools, do the humblest work of the potter. Every occupation which exists in Europe exists also in India. The industry of the vast continent never ceases, for India, with all her teeming multitudes, with a popu- lation in places packed beyond European precedent, imports nothing either to eat or drink, and, but for the Europeans, would import nothing whatever. She is sufficient to herself for everything save silver. Amidst these varied masses, these two hundred and fifty millions, whose mere descriptions would fill volumes, the tide of life flows as vigorously as in Europe. There is as much labour, as much con- tention, as much ambition, as much crime, as much variety of careers, hopes, fears, and hatreds. It is still possible to a moneyless Indian to become Vizier of a dynasty older than history, or Finance Minister WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA ! 85 of a new prince whose personal fortune in hard cash is double that of the late Emperor William, or abbot of a monastery richer than Glastonbury ever was, owner of an estate that covers a county, head of a firm whose transactions may vie with those of the Barings or Bleichroders. One man, Jutee Pershad by name, fed and transported the army which con- quered the Punjab. I have failed like the rest, I see. Well, see for a moment in imagination a Europe even fuller of people, but full only of brown men, and then see also this. Above this inconceivable mass of human- ity, governing all, protecting all, taxing all, rises t what we call here " the Empire," a corporation of less than fifteen hundred men, part chosen by examination, part by co-optation, who are set to govern, and who protect themselves in governing by finding pay for a minute white garrison of 65,000 men, one- fifth of the Roman legions though the masses to be controlled are double the subjects of Rome less than the army of Sweden, or Belgium, or Holland. That corporation and that garrison constitute the " Indian Empire." There is nothing else. Banish those fifteen hundred men in black, defeat that slender garrison in red, and the Empire has ended, the structure disappears, and brown India emerges unchanged and unchangeable. To support the official world and its garrison both, recollect, smaller than those of Belgium there is, except Indian opinion, absolutely nothing. Not only 86 ASIA AND EUROPE is there no white race in India, not only is there no white colony, but there is no white man who pur- poses to remain. Lord Dufferin, whom in 1888 we scarcely thought of as middle-aged, was possibly the oldest, certainly among the oldest, of white men in India. No ruler stays there to help, or criticize, or moderate his successor. No successful white soldier founds a family. No white man who makes a fortune builds a house or buys an estate for his descendants. The very planter, the very engine- driver, the very foreman of works, departs before he is sixty, leaving no child, or house, or trace of himself behind. No white man takes root in India, and the number even of sojourners is among those masses imperceptible. The whites in our own three capitals could hardly garrison them, and out- side those capitals there are, except in Government employ, only a few planters, traders, and profes- sional men, far fewer than the black men in London. In a city like Benares, a stone city whose buildings rival those of Venice, a city of temples and palaces beautiful enough and original enough to be a world's wonder, yet in which no white man's brain or hand has designed or executed anything, a traveller might live a year talking only with the learned or the rich, and, unless he had official business to do, might never see a white face. And away from the " stations " planted outside the native cities it is so everywhere. There are no white servants, not even grooms, no white policemen, no white postmen, no WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA 1 87 white anything. If the brown men struck for a week, the " Empire " would collapse like a house of cards, and every ruling man would be a starving prisoner in his own house. He could not move 01 feed himself or get water. I shall not soon forget the observation of one of the keenest and most experienced of all observers who arrived in India during the Mutiny. He had just landed, and had consented to drive with me to a house sixteen miles out of Calcutta. On the road, as usual, he noted everything, but at last turned to me with the ques- tion, "Where, then, are the white men?" "No- where," was the only possible reply ; and it is true of the entire continent. This absence of white men is said to be due to climate, but even in " the Hills " no one settles. Englishmen live on the sultry plains of New South Wales ; Americans, who are only Englishmen a little desiccated, are filling up the steamy plains of Florida ; Spaniards have settled as a governing caste throughout the tropical sections of the two Americas ; Dutchmen dwell on in Java; but the English, whatever the temptation, will not stay in India. No matter what the sacri- fice, whether in money or dignity or pleasant occu- pation, an uncontrollable disgust, an overpowering sense of being aliens inexorably divided from the people of the land, comes upon them, and they glide silently away. It follows that even in the minute official world and the minute garrison nothing is permanent. The Viceroy rules for five years, and 88 ASIA AND EUROPE departs. The Councillor advises for five years, and departs. The General commands for five years, and departs. The Official serves thirty years, probably in ten separate counties, and departs. There is not in India one ruling man whom two generations of Indians have known as ruling man. Of all that in Europe comes of continuousness, heredity, accumulated personal experience, or the wisdom of old age, there is in India not one trace, nor can there ever be. Imagine if in Europe no Sovereign or Premier or Commander-in- Chief ever lived six years ! Yet these men, thus shifting, thus changing, do the whole work of legislating, govern- ing, and administering, all that is done in the whole of Europe by all the sovereigns, all the statesmen, all the Parliaments, all the judges, revenue boards, prefects, magistrates, tax gatherers and police officers. They are " the Empire," and there is no other. Nor is this the whole truth. The Imperial Service I use the expression recommended by the Civil Service Commissioners, because it covers both the civilians and the administering soldiers have displayed for a century a rigid respect for promises and perfect pecuniary honour. Consequently, aided by the rooted Indian idea, that, power being of God, any one, however hostile, may honourably serve a de facto ruler, they have always been able to hire Indian agents of all kinds soldiers, policemen, and minor officials in any numbers required. That power, however, gives them no foothold. As 1857 WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA I 89 showed, they have not secured even the loyalty of the Indian soldiers bound to them by oath and while actually in the service, and outside the ranks of their paid servants they have nothing to depend on. There is no nation or tribe or caste in India which is certain in the hour of trial to stand by the white man's side ; which has, so to speak, elected him as ruler ; which, were the garrison defeated or withdrawn, could be trusted to die rather than the Empire should fall. There is no native army that the Imperial Service which is, I repeat, the Empire could summon with confidence; no tribe whom they could arm en masse ; no native city whose inhabitants would risk a storm to protect them from being slain. A strange offer which as I believe was once made to Lord Canning by the Sikhs to become on certain conditions the Janissaries of the Empire was rejected ; a constantly repeated proposal to import a Negro army which would be in as much danger from insurrection as we are, has been very rightly, for moral reasons put aside ; the device, in which Sir Henry Maine said he believed, of creating a caste whose single caste rule should be obedience to the Queen has never been tried ; and the Empire hangs in air, supported by nothing but the minute white garrison and the unproved assump- tion that the people of India desire it to continue to exist. The remainder of this article will be devoted to the question whether that assumption has any foundation in fact. 90 ASIA AND EUROPE It is certainly not in accordance with d priori pro- babilities. It may be said broadly that no people, Asiatic or European, which recognizes its own separateness is ever content to be governed by foreigners even if they are of its race, creed, and kind of civilization. The Italians could not endure the Austrians, the Poles cannot tolerate the Russians, the very Alsatians cannot bear the rule of their German brothers. The feeling may be supposed to be born of the love of freedom which is the speciality of white men, but I know of no Asiatic people except the Bengalee which has ever sub- mitted to the stranger without a strenuous resist- ance. The Chinese fought the Tartars, the Persians struggled to the death with the Arabs, the Indians fought, and in many cases defeated, the Mongol invaders. Yet in these cases conquerors and con- quered were all alike Asiatics, and Asiatics have a comity of their own, and comprehend one another. Englishmen and Indians are divided by a far deeper chasm, by all that vast body of inherited proclivities, ideas of life, and social habits which we are accus- tomed to sum up in the one word " colour." For more than a century past two powerful influ- ences have been at work with Englishmen com- pelling them to make little of the distinctions included in this word. After seventeen centuries of comparative neglect, the humanitarian side of Christianity has come with a sort of rush to the front, and divines have felt impelled to preach, not WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA t 91 that Christianity is intended for all, but that in Christianity all are equal, that men are brothers, that it is almost sinful to speak of any distinctions except those of faith and morals. " There is no colour," is the universal doctrine, " before the Lord," and from this it is deduced that there is no colour at all that the differences included in the word are mere charges brought by the prejudiced and the proud to cover profitable injustice. Democracy has taken the same turn. It has based itself, not upon common citizenship, or contract, or the right of free men to govern themselves, but upon some ante- cedent claim inherent in humanity, and its teachers are therefore bound to say that colour is meaning- less, that all would be alike but for oppression, and that all have equally the capacities necessary for self-government. The effect of the twofold pressure exercised for many years, and now pervading all teaching and all literature, has been to make English- men forget some of the plainest facts of history. What colour may be I do not pretend to know, and neither physicists nor theologians will tell us ; * but 1 The physicists tell us little worth knowing about colour. They talk about pigments, but do not say whence they come, or why the Australasian of Tasmania, living in a climate like that of England, was black, while the Spaniard living on the Equator has for three centuries remained white. What, too, is the law of the transmission of colour ? People fancy that the child of one white and one dark parent is less white than the one and less dark than the other, but it is not always so. Most of the half- caste descendants of Portuguese in India are black, not brown, and so, I am told, are the descendants of Spaniards by women of 92 ASIA AND EUROPE it is past question that it is an indication of differ- ences physical, intellectual, and moral of the most radical and imperishable kind. Throughout the history of mankind, black men, brown men, and white men have been divided from each other by lines which have never been passed, and by dif- ferences apparently wholly independent of their own volition. None of the black races, for instance, whether Negro or Australasian, have shown within the historic time the capacity to develop civilization. They have never passed the boundaries of their own habitats as conquerors, and never exercised the smallest influences over peoples not black. They have never founded a stone city, have never built a ship, have never produced a literature, have never suggested a creed. If they all perished to-morrow the world would be the richer by the whole resources of Africa probably the richest division of the globe which would then for the first time be utilized. They have been the most sell-governed of man- kind ; they hold some of the world's most fertile lands ; they sit on some of its most magnificent rivers everything the Egyptians on the Nile had, the Negro on the Quorra or the Congo also had and they have never advanced out of the foulest savagery. There is no evidence whatever that if the Philippine Islands. How does that happen? The subject deserves investigation, for, if a white race intermixing with a brown race can produce a black one, many theories of the descent of man may require modification. WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA ? 93 Africa were left to itself for ten thousand years it would progress in the smallest degree ; and this evidence against it, that, when liberated from the pressure of the white man's brain, the Negro, as in Hayti and, I fear, Liberia, rapidly recedes. Black- ness of skin may not be indeed, cannot be the cause of this stagnation or imbecility for it is imbecility ; but blackness of skin is the most visible evidence of the aggregate of incapacities manifested throughout the history of the black race. The white man, therefore, though he has no right to say that the black man cannot be saved, God caring as much for the worm as for the fly, has a right to say that the black man will never civilize himself. So also he has a right to say certain things, though very different things, about the brown man. The brown man of every shade l who now monopolizes 1 The Jews are the nearest white of any Asiatics, but no ex- perienced eye can look closely at them without perceiving that, like all other Arabs, they have suffered at some period a cross of dark blood. They have, however, had an experience which differentiates them mentally and physically from all other Asiatics. They have given up polygamy and slavery for centuries, and in their persecution of seventeen hundred years they have been condemned to live in quarters so unhealthy or in climates so unsuited to them imagine a Jew in Russia ! that the weak and incompetent have been persistently killed out. The life of the Jew is now as long as that of the European, and, though he rarely takes to what we call " exercise," he is probably of all the world the man least liable to any of the forms of miasmatic disease. He is, too, as a rule, remarkably free from the habit of over-drinking, which, though it does not seem to have affected either Scandi- navians, or Romans, or Teutons, acts like a poison upon Asiatics. 94 ASIA AND EUROPE Asia that is, a third of the total area of habitable land upon the planet is probably a half-caste, the result of a long series of early crossings between the dark and unimprovable aborigines, of whom a few relics still survive, and the white man. We know this to have been the case in India, and further research will, I believe, prove it to have been the case throughout Asia, even with the Mongolian tribes, the crossed races everywhere deriving from their trace of white blood the special faculty of the white man that of accumulating experience to practical purpose. 1 The brown races obtain this faculty in part only, but in such a degree that they for a time advance, and have done some very great things. The brown man has founded and held together the largest and most permanent of human societies. He has built splendid and original cities Benares, for example, Damascus, and old Granada without the white man's help. He has perfected a system of agriculture which, though Europe may think it barbarous, maintains in plenty, acre for acre, more people than any European system, and which survives in its integrity close intercourse with the agriculture of Europe. He invented letters, arith- metic, and chess. He has carried many arts architecture, for example, pottery in all its branches, weaving, and working in metals to a high degree 1 This was written before I had seen the work of the French ethnologist, the Comte de Gobineau, who has explained and justified the view in detail. WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA 1 95 of perfection. He has solved the problem of recon- ciling the mass of mankind to their hard destiny, so that in Asia it is rarely the millions who rebel, and that famine, flood, and hurricane produce no political discontent. He has produced great conquerors though exclusively by land great lawgivers, and great poets. Above all, he has meditated so stren- uously and so well on the eternal problem of the whence and whither that every creed as yet accepted by man, except possibly fetishism, is Asiatic, and has been preached first of all by a brown man. On the other hand, with these great gifts the brown man has also great incapacities. The power of accumulating thought, which he derives from his trace of white blood, is easily and early exhausted, and when it is exhausted his progress is finally arrested ; he stereotypes his society, and his brain seems paralysed by self-conceit. For three thousand years he has made no new conquest over Nature, carried science no higher, developed no new and fructifying social idea, invented no new scheme of life. The Arab, the Indian, the Chinese, is pre- cisely what he was when the white man first became conscious of his existence. He has never risen above polygamy as an ideal, never, even in countries partly monogamous, forbidding, or trying to forbid, the harem as a luxury to the rich and powerful. In other words, he has never conceived of woman except as the pleasantest and most necessary of slaves. He has never either developed the idea of pity. He 96 ASIA AND EUROPE is not, I think, cruel as his cousin the red man of America is that is, he takes no pleasure in inflict- ing pain, but he is utterly callous to its infliction. It does not move him that another suffers extremi- ties of torture, and, if a point is to be gained, he will make him suffer them without sympathy or remorse. Whether, as in China, he cuts a prisoner into snippets, or, as in Persia, he bricks up a footpad in a wall, leaving the head uncovered and living for days, or, as in India, burns delicate ladies alive on their husbands' pyres, he is equally unaffected. Of the death of the suttee the Indian thought, perhaps, something, for he has a reverence, in theory, for life, but of her agony he never thought at all. He would not burn a city to warm his hands, but he would not in the least hate the man who did. The substantial difference, said a great pundit once to me, " between the English and us is not intellectual at all. We are the brighter, if anything ; but you have pity \_doya~], and we have not ! " Above all, he has never developed the idea which lies at the basis of freedom the idea of right inherent in the quality of human being. He has everywhere framed his social system on the theory that power cannot be limited or restrained except by religion. Not only has he never thought of representative government, which even with the white man was a late discovery, and, so to speak, a scientific one, but he has never thought of government at all except as an imitation of govern- ment by Heaven or by the Destinies* He has from WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA I 97 the days of Saul, and earlier, preferred that his ruler should be absolute, and there is not, and never has been, a brown community in which the ruler had not the right to inflict death on a private person at his discretion. This has not been a result of accident or of race oppression. Many of the brown races have been self-governed for ages, and all have enjoyed periods in which they could have set up any government they would. The Emperor of Delhi had only Indian agents; the Shah of Persia is surrounded only by Persians ; the Emperor of China does not call in Tartar troops to defend his throne. Either of them, if they gave offence to certain pre- judices, would be overthrown, but they are not over- thrown for despotism, and the reason is that their subjects like it, that it strikes and soothes their imaginations, that they think autocracy, wielded by an individual who can fit his decision to each indi- vidual case, the perfection of beneficial energy and a reflex of the government of the Most High. Un- less the law is Divine they dislike law as an instru- ment of government, and prefer a flexible and movable human will, which can be turned by prayers, threats, or conciliations in money. The chasm between the brown man and the white is unfathomable, has existed in all ages, and exists still everywhere. No white man marries a brown wife, no brown man marries a white wife, without an inner sense of having been false to some unin- telligible but irresistible command. There is no H 98 ASIA AND E UR OPE corner of Asia where the life of a white man, if unprotected by force, either actual or potential, is safe for an hour; nor is there an Asiatic State which, if it were prudent, would not expel him at once and for ever. There is therefore no a priori reason for thinking that the myriads of brown men in India, most of them very intelligent and brave, would of themselves prefer to be governed by white men. If they do it is an anomaly, a break in a universal experience, only to be accounted for by the fact that the white man in that particular corner of the world gives something so pleasant to the brown man that it overcomes his instinctive anti- pathy and love of his own ways. Now, does the white man give anything to India which can be credited with producing this extraordinary effect ? The Englishman says he does, and he has at first sight some imposing evidence to produce. The Imperial Service which, I repeat once more, is the Empire enforces, in the first place, the Pax Bri- tannica, the universal peace, beneath which India sleeps, and the benefit of which, from the European point of view, it is impossible to exaggerate. Not only does it prevent invasion, but private war and armed violence of every kind. On this point there is in the mind of the Imperial Service no doubt, no halfness, no hesitation. The prince shall not invade his neighbour, under penalty of instant dethrone- ment. The baron shall not attack his brother baron, under penalty of lifelong imprisonment The WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA t 99 Thug, the dacoit, the burglar, the highwayman, if they take life, shall die, or, if they just stop short of murder, shall labour for long periods in chains. This is not merely a theory ; it is carried out in daily life. The humblest man in India has, if his relative is killed, the full aid of the Imperial Service, which would wage ten wars rather than suffer a murderer to escape. The proudest noble knows that, if his retainers kill by his order, he is as liable to trial as the meanest felon. The strongest prince, if he moves a regiment outside his own boundary, is certain that within six weeks he will be either a prisoner or a fugitive. A war waged for two gene- rations with the murderous organizations, of which there were once nearly thirty the Thugs being only the best known has nearly extirpated them, and dacoity, as a system, has receded into the past. Murders occur, and highway robberies, and of course all varieties of crime commissible by indi- viduals, but, speaking broadly, life and property are as safe among that vast concourse of men as in Europe a change as great as if in the Middle Ages the Truce of God had suddenly been made uni- versal, permanent and effective. The gain in the reduction of human misery from this one fact is almost inconceivable. Moreover, civil justice, which can hardly be said to have existed under the Mogul domination, is secured in a certain way to all men. It is very expensive, rather uncertain, and madden- ingly slow, owing to a system of appeals intended ioo ASIA AND EUROPE to make its administration more perfect ; but still it is offered to the meanest equally with the highest, and through courts in which wilful injustice or bribe- taking may fairly be said to be unknown. Lastly, fiscal injustice, the original source of almost all oppression in Asia, has been swept away. The taxes may be too heavy their weight varies in reality in every province or they may be badly chosen, but the Treasury claims and takes nothing but its legal due ; no tax is farmed out, and, if a subordinate collector takes too much, the white collector knows no higher pleasure than to make of him a speedy and severe example. These are all, as Europe thinks, grand gifts, and the Imperial Service has given them that is, has performed a task which, the area being considered, is equal to any ever performed by Rome without the smallest infringement of individual liberty. There are abso- lutely no regulations of preventive police in India except one, a statute authorizing the detention of highly dangerous persons as State prisoners, a statute of which ninety per cent, even of the upper classes, have no knowledge. Every Indian is at liberty, within the law, to say or do what he pleases, to form any associations he likes, to rise to any position not connected with the Government, to accumulate any fortune, and to live any life, holy or vicious, that to him seems best. Religious liberty is even more perfect than in England or Switzer- land, for the great European restriction, that a WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIAN 101 religion must not sap morals, does not exist, and the foulest sects are left to the punishment of opinion. So jealous is the Service of any interfer- ence with religion that, when Lord Dalhousie passed an Act intended to repress obscenity, a special clause in it exempted all temples and religious emblems from its operation. Personal liberty, religious liberty, equal justice, perfect security these things the Empire gives ; but, then, are these so valued as to overcome the inherent and incurable dull distaste felt by the brown men to the white men who give them ? I doubt it greatly. The immense mass of the peasantry, who benefit most directly by the British ways of ruling, are, it must be remembered, an inert mass. They are the stakes in the game, not the players. It is for the right of taxing them that all Indian revolu- tions, wars, invasions, movements of all kinds, have occurred. Lost in the peaceful monotony of their village life, which, unless all evidence from history is worthless, they must heartily love, they hardly notice dynastic changes, and will accept any ruler if only he leaves their customs alone, and takes no more of their produce than they have been accus- tomed from time immemorial to pay as tribute to the strong. Even, therefore, if they approved the British Government, their approval would be of little political value ; but there is no evidence that they do approve it. If they are transferred to a native ruler, as happened in Mysore and many a smaller 102 ASIA AND EUROPE district, they make no remonstrance. The Sepoys, who in 1857 sprang so eagerly at our throats, were all peasants, and so were most of the men who made up Tantia Topee's recruits. They are known to dislike exceedingly the inexorableness of our sys- tem, its want of elasticity, its readiness to allow of the one oppression eviction which they consider intolerable, and hold to be more than an equivalent to their exemption from sudden demands for money. We may, however, leave them for the moment out of the question. It is the active classes who have to be considered, and to them our rule is not, and cannot be, a rule without prodigious drawbacks. One of these, of which they are fully conscious, is the gradual decay of much of which they were proud, the slow death, which even the Europeans perceive, of Indian art, Indian culture, Indian mili- tary spirit. Architecture, engineering, literary skill, are all perishing out, so perishing that Anglo- Indians doubt whether Indians have the capacity to be architects, though they built Benares ; or engineers, though they dug the artificial lakes of Tanjore ; or poets, though the people sit for hours or days listening to the rhapsodists as they recite poems, which move them as Tennyson certainly does not move our common people. Another is, that the price of what they think imperfect justice is that they shall never right themselves, never enjoy the luxury of vengeance, never even protect their personal dignity and honour, about which they 103 are as sensitive as Prussian officers. They may not even kill their wives for going astray. And the last and greatest one of all is the total loss of the interestingness of life. It would be hard to explain to the average Englishman how interesting Indian life must have been before our advent ; how completely open was every career to the bold, the enterprising, or the ambitious. The whole continent was open as a prize to the strong. Nothing was settled in fact or in opinion except that the descendants of Timour the Lame were entitled to any kind of ascendency they could get and keep. No one not of the great Tartar's blood pretended to the universal throne, but with that exception every prize was open to any man who had in himself the needful force. Scores of sub- thrones were, so to speak, in the market. A brigand, for Sivajee was no better, became a mighty sovereign. A herdsman built a monarchy in Baroda A body-servant founded the dynasty of Scindiah. A corporal cut his way to the independent crown of Mysore. The first Nizam was only an officer of the Emperor. Runjeet Singh's father was what Europeans would call a prefect. There were liter- ally hundreds who founded principalities, thousands of their potential rivals, thousands more who suc- ceeded a little less grandly, conquered estates, or became high officers under the new princes. Each of these men had his own character and his own renown among his countrymen, and each enjoyed a id4 ASIA AND EUROPE position such as is now unattainable in Europe, in which he was released from laws, could indulge his own fancies, bad or good, and was fed every day and all day with the special flattery of Asia that willing submissiveness to mere volition which is so like adoration, and which is to its recipients the most intoxicating of delights. Each, too, had his court of followers, and every courtier shared in the power, the luxury, and the adulation accruing to his lord. The power was that of life and death ; the luxury included possession of every woman he desired ; the adulation was, as I have said, almost religious worship. Life was full of dramatic changes. The aspirant who pleased a great man rose to fortune at a bound. The adventurer whose band performed an act of daring was on his road to be a satrap. Any one who could do anything for " the State " that is, for any ruler build a temple, or furnish an army with supplies, or dig a tank, or lend gold to the Court, became at once a great man, honoured of all classes, practically exempt from law, and able to influence the great current of affairs. Even the timid had their chance, and, as Finance Ministers, farmers of taxes, controllers of religious establishments, found for themselves great places in the land. For all this which we have extinguished we offer nothing in return, nor can we offer any- thing. We can give place, and, for reasons stated elsewhere, it will be greedily accepted, but place is not power under our system, nor can we give what WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA t 105 an Asiatic considers power the right to make volition executive ; the right to crush an enemy and reward a friend ; the right, above all, to be free from that burden of external laws, moral duties, and responsibilities to others with which Europeans have loaded life. We cannot even let a Viceroy be the ultimate appellate court, and right any legal wrong by supreme fiat a failure which seems to Indians, who think the Sovereign should represent God, to impair even our moral claim to rule. This interest- ingness of life was no doubt purchased at the price of much danger and suffering. The Sovereign, the favourite, or the noble could cast down as easily as they raised up, and intrigue against the successful never ended. The land was full of violence. Private war was universal. The great protected themselves against assassination as vigilantly as the Russian Emperor does. The danger from invasion, insurrection, and, above all, mutiny never ended. I question, however, if these circumstances were even considered drawbacks. They were not so con- sidered by the upper classes of Europe in the Middle Ages, and those upper classes were not tranquillized, like their rivals in India, by a sincere belief in fate. I do not find that Texans hate the wild life of Texas, or that Spanish- speaking Ameri- cans think the personal security which the domin- ance of the English-speaking Americans would assure to them is any compensation for loss of independence. I firmly believe that to the immense 106 ASIA AND EUROPE majority of the active classes of India the old time was a happy time ; that they dislike our rule as much for the leaden order it produces as for its foreign character ; and that they would welcome a return of the old disorders if they brought back with them the old vividness and, so to speak, romance of life. All this no doubt is a priori evidence. Now let us look at something a little more positive. Of all the active classes of India, the one which the English treated best were the Sepoys, the Hindo- stanee and Beharee peasants who for a hundred years had followed the British standard in a career of victory broken only once. Alone among the soldiers of the world these men not only entered the service of their own free-will, but were author- ized to quit it at their own discretion. They could not be sent abroad without their own consent a consent not infrequently refused. Their discipline was so mild that it rather resembled that of police- men than that of soldiers, and was in particular wholly devoid of that element of worry which is the true grievance of English soldiers when not in the field. They were paid wages just double those obtainable in civil life, 1 had many prizes in the shape of promotion, and received their pensions as regu- larly as dividends on State bonds. Their farms, even in Native States, were specially protected, and 1 This is not true now. Wages have risen much more than Sepoys' pay. WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA ? 10? the magistrates made it their duty to see that a complainant who had been a Sepoy received a speedy and, if possible, a favourable award. Even the customary hauteur of the European disappeared in favour of the Sepoys. Their officers liked and petted them, and so resented any aspersion on them as to impair, sometimes seriously, the necessary freedom of inspecting generals. The Sepoys never pretended to have grievances, for the greased- cartridge story was an invention, dropped when the Mutiny exploded, and the intercepted letters spoke only of the fewness of the whites. Yet these men not only mutinied, but slaughtered our officers, whom individually they liked, and even in many instances massacred our women and children, and fought us for two years with a fury of hate which made compromise impossible. Why ? Because they were Asiatics, filled with the dull, unconquerable, unmitigable distaste of Asiatics for white men, and thought they saw a chance of getting rid of them. The white grains, they said, were few, and the black grains many, and they shook the sieve that the white grains might dis- appear. The great Mutiny was not a mutiny, but a revolt, in which the armed class, as was natural, took the leading share. The proclamation of the effete dynasty at Delhi a proclamation accepted by Hindoos as well as Mussulmans showed its true object, which was to restore the India which had been before the arrival of Europeans. In every io8 ASIA AND EUROPE emancipated province the old authority was replaced, and it is the specialty of the Mutiny among revolts that no new Sovereign, or Commander- in- Chief, or general leader was so much as named. The history of the Mutiny, carefully studied, is to my mind irre- sistible evidence of Indian dislike for white rule ; yet it is hardly stronger than many other incidents. During the contest over the Ilbert Bill, Lord Ripon, the reigning Viceroy, was understood to be to a de- cided extent upon the native side. The belief was exaggerated by the bitterness of Anglo- Indian feel- ing, Lord Ripon caring little about the Bill, though he thought it just in principle ; but it was accepted throughout the brown worlds of India as indubitably true, and when Lord Ripon resigned, after he had ceased to be able to promote or punish any man, all Northern and Western India, including the pick of the fighting races, prostrated itself at his feet His journey from Simla to Bombay was a triumphal march, such as India had never witnessed a long procession, in which seventy millions of people sang hosanna to their friend. Lord Ripon had done nothing, had taken off no tax, had removed no burden, had not altered the mode of government one hair's breadth. He was only supposed to be for the Indians and against the Europeans, and that sufficed to bring every Indian in a fervour of friend- ship to his side. Then take the native Press. There are now hundreds of native newspapers in India, most of them conducted by educated men, WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA 1 109 and all of them marked by a certain rhetorical ability. Their circulation is seldom large, but their conductors are content with little money ; they seek and find audiences far wider than their lists of sub- scribers ; and what is their almost invariable tone ? Deadly dislike for the European regime, shown now in rhetorical attacks, now in exaggerations of griev- ances, again in misrepresentation of facts, most frequently of all in savage criticisms on the agents of authority precisely the methods which at the present moment find favour in Ireland. Are we to imagine that the Indian Press alone in the world represents precisely the ideas which its constituency disapproves, or that Asiatic editors, unlike all other Asiatics, quarrel with the powerful for the pleasure of expressing a non-existent dislike ? And, finally, regard the cleavage existing in India between Indian and European ; is that reassuring ? We have been in India as rulers for a hundred and thirty years, and by the testimony of all competent observers the chasm between the colours is deeper than ever. The objection to intermarriage is stronger than of old, the intercourse of the races is more reserved and more strictly confined to business, and both sides are more conscious of the depth of an inner dislike. Read the letters of Europeans to friends at home, and you will be struck with their absolute ignorance of all native life and interests, their profound, almost unconscious, indifference to the masses among whom their lives are passed. Read, on the other hand no ASIA AND EUROPE the letters of natives who profess to support the Government, and they always end with a complaint of the disagreeableness of the agents of authority, their distance, their brusquerie, their inaccessibility to Indian feeling. The cleavage has deepened, and it will, as consciousness awakes more fully, deepen farther yet. Every effort is made, on the European side at least, to fill up the chasm, but without avail, the truth, after all the talk, remaining true that the Europeanized Indian ceases, for all good purposes, to be an Indian at all, and that the Indianized European is a lost man. The space between the races is not made by any social habit, but by an inherent antipathy, which is not hatred, but can at any moment blaze up into it If I have succeeded at all in my intention, my readers will perceive that the British Empire in India depends upon a non-existent loyalty, and will ask me how, as I conceive, the catastrophe which I foresee to be inevitable will arrive? That is a question to which, as it demands in answer a prophecy, no man possessed of just distrust in him- self will give a direct reply ; but it is possible, nevertheless, to make some kind of answer. If we are to take the history of Asia for our guide, the British dominion in India should be overthrown by external violence exerted by some Asiatic people ; just as the Alexandrine Empire was overthrown by the " Parthian " and the Roman by the Arab and the Turk. But it is probable that precedent will, WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA! in in this instance, be departed from. There is no Asiatic Power remaining, except China, which can attack India with any chance of success ; and China has Russia to drive out of Northern Asia. The statesmen of Pekin will no doubt watch diligently for the first sign of weakness in Russia, and, prob- ably during the throes of some revolution in her system of government and society, will push masses of riflemen, followed as usual by millions of culti- vators, almost to the Caspian ; but they are unlikely to threaten India. The possession of provinces not Chinese and already full of cultivators is contrary to their policy, and would involve the formation of a great standing army. Persia, on the other hand, the ancient foe of India, may be pronounced for the present dead. Asiatic self-government has in Persia nearly completed its perfect work, and the very people, the cultivating and working population, has almost ceased to exist. It is probable that there are fewer people left in Persia, which should have the population of France, than in Belgium, and no force which they could produce would make any impression upon India. The Arabs cannot cross the sea in the presence of the British fleet, and the only remaining Asiatic force, a Tartar tribe strong enough for invasion, is not clearly proved to exist. Mr. T. Prinsep, who had studied the subject, left behind him a kind of prophecy that a Tartar tribe, or coalition of tribes, descending through the eastern Himalaya, might set up a throne on the in ASIA AND EUROPE ruins of British power, but his vision remains as yet unsupported by any evidence whatever. There may be a tribe, or league of tribes, with 100,000 lives to waste, and no doubt such a tribe might, if it would die in heaps in an engagement or two, conquer India, and, being accepted by the Indians, found a splendid empire ; but I question its existence, and hold this danger, though conceivable, to be outside the range of calculation. No ; the catastrophe in India will arrive either in some totally unforeseen manner, or through a general insurrection aided by a voluntary transfer of power from European to Asiatic hands. The insurrection will occur within a month of our sustaining any defeat whatever severe enough to be recognized as a defeat in the Indian bazaars. Whether the enemy is an internal one, as, for example, a Mussulman leader in the Deccan ; or an external one, such as a Russian army or even an Afghan army, a defeat within our own territory or on our border would break the spell of our invincibility, and would be followed by a spon- taneous and universal insurrection led by the Sepoys and armed police, directed, not to the support of a new European conquest, but to the throwing off of English dominion and the restoration of the older and Asiatic method of Indian life. The white garrison defeated, there is nothing with which to continue the contest even for a day. A hundred principalities would be created in a moment, with Sovereigns in ea^ch and armies ; life would recom- WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA 1 113 mence under its old conditions, and we should have the work of the century to do over again. If the British were favourably situated at home, if no European Power raised troubles, and if popular feeling was favourable to the effort, the Peninsula might be re- conquered, and though the task of governing it would be much more difficult both on account of the treasure wasted and of the new hopes begotten in every Indian breast, still an uneasy tranquillity might continue for a generation, to be broken again after thirty or forty years by a third uprising. We shall not put down more than one or two, and each time the work will be more difficult, and will seem to opinion at home more profitless and disagreeable. The British people have no longer either the energy or the unscrupulousness to maintain government by slaughter, and the sup- pression of a general revolt in India would involve slaughter on the Asiatic scale, and would of neces- sity be followed by a different scheme of govern- ment one much harder, more suspicious, and less merciful. The disposition to re-conquer would, moreover be greatly diminished by the previous disappearance of any great object for such an effort. All who have watched the progress of affairs for the last quarter of a century, are aware that the previously formless discontent of India is gradually finding voice in a single cry that office in India should be reserved to Indians ; and that this cry is, though slowly, I ii4 ASIA AND EUROPE still decidedly, being obeyed. The cry itself is a very natural one. The Indians are not aware of their own inferiority in morale, or disregard it, and they are aware of their own equality in intelligence. They can, they say, and say truly, pass any exam- ination whatever that the Government or the universities like to frame pass it so well that, if competitive examination is made the passport to office, they will within fifty years hold ninety per cent at least of all the highest posts. They can, they say, and say truly, as far as intelligence goes, govern provinces they do it in Native States can make excellent civil judges, can enforce a revenue system, can occupy every office in the police or any other administrative department. Having the capability, they contend, with a vehem- ence growing ever louder, that it is monstrous to refuse them permission to display it, and the Europeans find it every year more and more difficult to refuse. They have themselves asserted that all men are equal, thus barring themselves from plead- ing any right as conquerors. They have them- selves, by accepting, even in home affairs, the principle of competitive examination, made of intelli- gence the sole test of fitness for office. They have themselves in all the colonies and in Ireland laid it down as a dogma that those born on any particular soil have a preferential claim to office paid for by the produce of that soil, and have given up the effort to provide a special and impartial ruling WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA! TIS caste. They have left themselves no arguments to adduce, and it is questionable whether in a few years they will have the inclination to produce any. For, whether for good or evil, a great change is passing over Englishmen. They have become uncertain of themselves, afraid of their old opinions, doubtful of the true teaching of their own con- sciences. They doubt if they have any longer any moral right to rule any one, themselves almost in- cluded. An old mental disease, the love of appro- bation, has suddenly risen among them to the height of a passion. Instead of being content to rule well, to do justice and to love mercy, they are trying themselves by a new standard, and desire to rule so that the governed may applaud, or, as they phrase it with a certain unconscious unctuousness, may " love " them. That is the real root of the great change which has passed over the management of children, of the whole difficulty in Ireland, of the reluctance to conquer, and of the whole of the new philanthropic social legislation. Now, it is certain that if the active classes of India are to be induced to applaud or love the British dominion, they must be regularly and speedily invested with all the offices for which they show adequate intelligence that is, in practice, with all offices whatever. They are qualified for them all in everything but their morale, which is and will remain Asiatic. This is their own desire, and it is not, from their point of view, an unnatural one. It is easy for Englishmen n6 ASIA AND EUROPE to ridicule the passion for place, but it governs Frenchmen, Germans, and Irishmen quite as much as Indians, and for the same reason. Everywhere in the world except in England place gives dignity as well as money, brings its owner within the great corporation which is not harassed by policemen, or overlooked by rulers, or treated with contumely by the masses of mankind. Thirst of money alone is not the motive, for Frenchmen and Germans will accept starvation wages from the State; it is the hunger for distinction. This hunger is intensified in the Indian by his desire to rise to an equality with the white man, and in his eagerness to gratify it he will push aside every obstacle, and never rest until every office is at his disposal. With their eagerness, their early developed brains, and above all their numbers, the Indians will, in the present state of English opinion, prove irresistible, and will, I venture to predict, constitute within fifty years the whole Imperial Service which, I for the last time repeat, is the Indian Empire. The process has begun already. It is just possible that English feeling may change, for no other democracy enter- tains it, Americans and Frenchmen, for instance, entirely believing in their right to govern ; but it is more probable that it will continue, and, if it does, logic will prove irresistible. If the Englishman by virtue of the superior morale of his race has not a moral right to govern and administer India irre- spective of the opinion of her peoples, then he has WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA* 117 no right to remain there when she bids him go, no right of any kind to office if an Indian can beat him at the tests set up. The compromises suggested by Service Commissions and the like are ridiculous as well as unfair. If, as the last one suggested, Indians ought to have one- sixth of all civil offices, they ought to have all if they can win them, and all military appointments too. Race being nothing, morale nothing, and intelligence all in all, there is no escape from the conclusion, and no hope that, in their new conception of their duty, Englishmen will resist it. In other words, Asia will shortly regain her own, and the work of governing India will be transferred from European and Christian to Asiatic and Mussulman or pagan hands. The whole work of the conquest will be undone, and the coldly im- partial caste who now rule so disagreeably and so thoroughly well will be superseded by men who have every temptation to be, and will be, Indian Pashas. They will seek, as every race naturally does, to enjoy and to exercise power according to their own ideas, and not according to ours, and, being their own superiors, their own judges, and their own public opinion, they will succeed. How their new position will transmute itself into formal independence I am careless to inquire, but in all probability the abler and nobler among them will insist that to refuse military careers to the people of a whole continent is most unjust which, if all men are equal and morale does not signify, is true and n8 ASIA AND EUROPE will replace the British soldiers by native armies, or, as they already suggest, by millions of volunteers. Then the end will have arrived ; there will be nothing left to fight for when the great Insurrec- tion occurs and we are asked to go ; and India will re -emerge as she was, shortly to be reduced to the condition in which we found her. There will not have been time to complete the one grand work of civilization which the Imperial Service has begun the substitution of the idea of government by law for the idea of government by human volition. It will take three centuries more at least the space of time between Elizabeth and Victoria for that idea to filter in its full strength down to the Indian masses, to wake them out of their torpor, and induce them to compel their rulers to suppress their passion for doing as they please. India, therefore, will fly in pieces ; the ancient hostilities of race, and creed, and history, none of which have we had time to extinguish, will revive at once ; and life will again be made interesting as of old by incessant wars, inva- sions, and struggles for personal ascendency. The railways, the only things we have built, will be torn up, the universities will be scouted by military rulers, the population will begin to decline, and, in short, for one word expresses it all, India will once more be Asiatic. Within five years of our departure we shall recognize fully that the greatest experiment ever made by Europe in Asia was but an experi- ment after all ; that the ineffaceable distinctions WILL ENGLAND RETAIN INDIA 1 H0 of race were all against it from the first ; and that the idea of the European tranquilly guiding, con- trolling, and perfecting the Asiatic until the worse qualities of his organization had gone out of him, though the noblest dream ever dreamed by man, was but a dream after all. Asia, which survived the Greek, and the Roman, and the Crusader, will survive also the Teuton and the Slav. The Charm of Asia for Asiatics ENGLISHMEN are often surprised at the pre- ference which many Orientals display, and which most, we think, feel at heart, for their own life over the life of Europe. The latter seems to them so much more varied, so much more interest- ing, so much fuller both of change and of incident, that they can hardly understand how a man who has tasted both can deliberately prefer the former. They think that to bring Orientals to Europe is to make them European, to convince them that " civil- ization " is a pleasing ideal, to plant in their minds discontent with their own inferior method of life. They expect Asiatics, even if not converted by Europe, to enjoy its life as Americans do, or rather, to absorb its ideas as Greeks who always seem slightly Asiatic to Englishmen, but who are au fond intensely European, though not Teutonic usually do. The fact that there are Orientals who, having tried both, prefer their own method of life, with all its uncertainties and fears and defects of " civiliza- tion," puzzles them beyond measure, and is usually set down to the influence of polygamy, which exists, THE CHARM Of ASIA FOR ASIATICS 121 no doubt, but not to the degree commonly sup- posed. There is another influence which has, we believe, much more effect on Orientals in good position and few others try Europe and that is the absence of a certain form of social pressure necessitating an endless taking of trouble. Not only the mental atmosphere, but the social life of Europe are based upon the idea that a man who wishes for a pleasant life will show energy in its pursuit, will take endless small trouble, will not feel an exertion of mind or will any more than the piston of a steam-engine feels rising or falling. That, however, is not the basis of society in Asia, where the root idea is that those who have not to live by labour are to enjoy a certain exemption from worry, to do as they please, and not as other folks please, and while respecting certain immutable, but few and definite laws, such as that which from the Balkan to Pekin enforces, though in degrees of wide divergence, the seclusion of women, are to be released in great measure from the atmospheric pressure of opinion. The Oriental is, whatever his grade, to be in a way independent, released from small obligations, left " free " in a sense explained below. This idea, carried out as it is in daily life, produces many of the least intelligible phenomena of Asiatic society, the democratic equality of all men, which is so singularly combined with readiness to endure and to inflict oppression ; the absence of mauvaise honte, which is the secret of the much 122 ASIA AND EUKOPE admired " manner " of most Asiatics, and which is found too, for the same reason, in some classes of Americans ; and the sense of ease always percep- tible in a better class Oriental at home, and always puzzling to the European, who thinks he knows facts which should make his interlocutor uneasy. In the new and very charming book in which Mrs. Simpson has collected her father's conversa- tions with great Frenchmen, there occurs a very striking and in its way attractive statement of the difference, so far as it affects the mere details of daily life. Mr. Senior, who, though at home regarded as a rather hard official he was hard, too, intellectually, the quality peeping out perpetually in these conversations was in society, and especially in foreign society, the most sympathetic of men, and could by some rare talent coax the most different of mankind into revealing their real opinions, had, in 1860, a long talk with Vefyk Pasha, then Minister at Paris, recently, we believe, the man who presided over the Ottoman Assembly. He said of Paris What I complain of is the mode of life. I am oppressed not by the official duties they are easy, Turkey has few affairs but by the social ones. I have had to write fifteen notes this morn- ing, all about trifles. In Turkey life is sans gfac ; if a man calls on you he does not leave a card ; if he sends you a nosegay he does not expect a letter of thanks ; if he invites you he does not require an answer. There are no engagements to be remembered and fulfilled a fortnight afterwards. When you wish to see a friend, you know that he dines at sunset ; you get into your caique, and row down to him through the finest scenery in the THE CHARM OF ASIA FOR ASIATICS 123 world. You find him in his garden, smoke a chibouque, talk or remain silent as you like ; dine, and return. If you wish to see a Minister you go to his office; you are not interfered with, or even announced ; you lift the curtain of his audience room, sit by him on his divan, smoke your pipe, tell your story, get his answer, and have finished your business in the time which it takes here to make an appointment in half the time that you waste here in an antechamber. There is no dressing for dinners or for evening parties; evening parties, indeed, do not exist. There are no letters to receive or to answer. There is no post hour to be remembered and waited for, for there is no post Life glides away without trouble. Here everything is troublesome. All enjoyment is destroyed by the forms and ceremonies and elabo- rate regulations which are intended, I suppose, to increase it or to protect it My Liberal friends here complain of the want of political liberty. What I complain of is the want of social liberty; it is far the more important. Few people suffer from the despo- tism of a Government, and those suffer only occasionally. But this social despotism, this despotism of salons, this code of arbi- trary little rtglements, observances, prohibitions, and exigencies, affects everybody, and every day, and every hour. Mark the idea which underlies that complaint, and remember that it extends to every department of life, and you catch, as no book can teach you, one of the secrets of the Asiatic mode of living, and its charm for Asiatics. You are in slippers, not in shoes; in a dressing-gown, not in a dress-coat. The ways which we think duties they think worries, at once evidences of unrest, and needless obliga- tions imposed on life to make it tiresome. When observances are imposed by religion, that is another matter ; but except by religion or superior power, the will ought to be unrestrained. They feel that life under a routine of duties, obligations, observ- ASIA AND EUROPE ances, is life only to be endured under coercion, is life needlessly made miserable. Or rather, to use an illustration many of our readers will understand better, they feel the European scheme of life as men who are by nature idle, or who have always been masters of their own time, feel monotonous daily work, as if that alone by itself took the sweet- ness out of life. They do not, for example, want servants, as Englishmen do, invisibly working the household machine, and keeping everything to-day as it was yesterday, but want personal attendants, always visible, always at hand, always saving them from minute trouble and effort The feeling is not exactly indolence, though it looks so like it, and though it has, in the course of ages passed in climates where exertion is also effort, become mixed up with it ; but rather, as Vefyk Pasha says, a form of the liking for liberty, or the desire for the gratifi- cation in details of the strong self-will which gives to all Asiatics without exception some character- istics of spoiled children. They do not want to dine out when they are asked, but to dine out when they wish, and the mere notion that if they dine out and have the whim to be silent they may not be silent, is fatiguing. Life, to be delightful, must be always afternoon, and afternoon in holiday. Unfortunately for themselves, Asiatics carry this spirit, which, if confined to social arrangements, might produce nothing worse than simplicity, into serious life, and apart altogether from bad morale, THE CHARM OF ASIA FOR ASIATICS 125 which we are not now discussing, allow a defect of temperament to ruin administration. They will not, under any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained habit of taking trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave like Prussian officials. They issue orders, and punish terribly if they are not obeyed, but that is their only notion of securing obedience. As to " hunting the order down " to its execution, they would not accept life at the price of such a duty. Nothing can be funnier than a contrast which happens to be drawn in this book between Thiers' idea on this matter and Vefyk Pasha's. We have given the Turk's, here is the Frenchman's I used constantly to find my orders forgotten, or neglected, or misinterpreted. As I have often said to you, men are naturally idle, false, and timid ; menfeurs, Idches, parcsseux. Whenever I found that an employe* supposed that because an order had been given, it had been executed, or that because he had been told a thing it was true, I gave him up as an imbecile. Bonaparte nearly lost the battle of Marengo by supposing that the Austrians had no bridge over the Bormida. Three generals assured him that they had carefully examined the river, and that there was none. It turned out that there were two, and our army was sur- prised. When I was preparing for war in 1840, I sat every day for eight hours with the Ministers of War, of Marine, and of the Interior. I always began by ascertaining the state of execution of our previous determinations. I never trusted to any assurances, if better evidence could be produced. If I was told that letters had been despatched, I required a certificate from the clerk who had posted them or delivered them to the courier. If answers had been received, I required their production. I punished in- exorably every negligence, and even every delay. I kept my colleagues and my bureaux at work all day, and almost all night 126 ASIA AND EUROPE We were all of us half killed. Such a tension of mind wearies more than the hardest bodily work. At night my servants un- dressed me, took me by the feet and shoulders and placed me in my bed, and I lay there like a corpse till the morning. Even my dreams, when I dreamt, were administrative. No Asiatic not an exceptional man will do that, yet in Asia it is five times as necessary as in Europe, because the subordinates, besides the regular desire not to work over-much, of which Thiers complained, feel the overwhelming desire for that which Vefyk Pasha called " liberty," a life not burdened with peremptory but " trifling " duties. They want to be " gentlemen," as the poor often understand the word that is, men released from imperative neces- sities. One-half the weakness of every Oriental government we do not mean one-half the oppres- sion, that has a different origin arises from the impossibility of finding men who will act as Thiers did, or of supplying the absence of the lacking spirit either by regulations or by punishments. An Oriental household can be well ordered in its way, but as to making it a machine as perfect as a regiment, and self-acting as many European house- holds are, it cannot be done. No punishment and no reward will make a race in which this spirit is inborn, or into which it has entered, exact, punctual, or prompt. The southern slave-holders tried it with negroes under the most favourable circum- stances, and failed ; and no European that we can recollect has ever thoroughly succeeded. That THE CHARM OF ASIA FOR ASIATICS 127 which can be neglected is neglected, not from a wish that it should not be done, but from a detesta- tion of the fatigue of doing it at an inopportune moment that is, at any moment when doing it would break up the sense of the pleasant ease of afternoon, which, in the Asiatic ideal, should con- stitute the whole of life. Of course, with that temper come its correlatives, indifference about right and wrong for if you are not indifferent, the afternoon is always being broken and a callous- ness as to what happens to anybody, if the restful ease do but remain undisturbed. Charles II., as described by Macaulay, had the temperament to per- fection, would, in fact, have been the most perfect specimen of the Oriental, but that having a trace of Scotland in his blood, he was liable to the curse from which the Asiatic is usually free the mental low fever for which we have adopted the word ennui. We dare say we have failed in making this temperament and its tendencies as visible to our readers as it is to ourselves, but it is the peculiarity which makes those Englishmen who best like the East despair most of administrative reform. They know that a certain rigour will produce honesty, that oppression can be checked by giving certain power of resistance, and that Asiatics who wish well can be discovered, but they know also that all this will not produce an effective governing machine without the Western power of taking 128 ASIA AND EUXOPE trouble perpetually. That is what first of all makes them cry out for " European assistance " in every department, and praise Asiatic rulers in pro- portion to their readiness to take European advice. They know Sir Henry Layard, for instance, knows that besides the readiness to take bribes, and the religious arrogance, and the sensuality, the reformers have to contend with the desire for the " afternoon life," which, in the ruler, produces cruelty, because only cruelty can get him his way without endless trouble, and, in his subordinate, neglect. They know that an Oriental regiment will uninspected go to pieces, because the officers want to avoid the harass of details ; that a depart- ment will get to a dead-lock, because nobody will worry like Thiers ; that a province will grow dis- contented, because nobody will search into haras- sing, trivial complaints. They know, in fact, that civilization cannot be kept up if life all the while is to be always afternoon ; and that an Asiatic is like an average aristocrat, and regards that after- noon as the summum bonum, to which all else may expediently be sacrificed, and those who interfere with it as " unaccountable, uncomfortable works of God." The European is in Asia the man who will insist on his neighbour doing business just after dinner, and being exact when he is half asleep, and being " prompt " just when he wants to enjoy, and he rules in Asia and i& loved in Asia accordingly. English and Asiatic Feeling Contrasted [This was published in 1874] ALL Englishmen interested in the government of India should read a private letter from Lieutenant E. C. Yate, 1 which has been communi- cated to the Times and was published in its outside sheet on i4th Nov., 1874. Lieutenant Yate was then Assistant Political Agent, or, as English officials would put it, Secretary of Legation, at Oodeypore, the modern capital of the leading State in Raj- pootana ; and he writes, apparently to some relative, a full account of the scenes which followed the recent death of the Maharana. The word " Ma- harana " is an older form of Maharajah, and its feminine is " Maharanee," still the only word em- ployed as the equivalent for " Queen." The letter will well repay perusal for itself, being a most truthful and picturesque account of a very excep- tional scene ; and if the reader will only study it carefully, and then glance at Colonel Tod's " Rajas- than " and that great Indian's account of Oodeypore and its Sovereigns, he will perhaps comprehend why the English officer in India, though trusted and 1 Experience has taught Lieut. Yate, who is now Colonel Yate, a distinguished " Political " with many decorations. 130 ASIA AND EUROPE respected, is also hated with a vehemence which, to the well informed Englishman who is aware that the Government of India is perhaps the most upright in the world, seems almost unintelligible. Lieutenant Yate, to judge from his letter the only source of knowledge which we possess about him is a very good fellow, brave, calm and intelligent, though unimaginative, standing right at the centre of affairs in Oodeypore, and bound by his official position not only to record, but also to understand the scene before his eyes. He records it very well indeed, as well as a Times reporter would have done, or better, because in a more simple way, but he understands it much as a Shah of Persia would understand a great debate in the English House of Commons. It is not too much to say that he is an Englishman of so typical a kind that he is incapable of understanding it as completely barred out from any true comprehension of its meaning as an English squire is barred out from understanding the ideas of the few thinkers like Delescluze, who supported the Paris Commune. He is present at a scene which to every Hindoo in India, and to a few Englishmen, would have seemed one of the strangest and most pathetic conceivable ; he watches it in all its details most carefully and composedly, and the only distinct impression made on his mind is that it is very " funny " ; not, that is, very comic, but slightly bewildering and unintelligible. His imagination is not excited and therefore he remains impenetrable ENGLISH AND ASIATIC FEELING 131 to the meaning of half he sees, quite tolerant, fairly just, but hopelessly unsympathetic and obtuse. The Rana of Oodeypore bears to the vast organ- ization which we call " Hindooism " a relation abso- lutely unique, a relation for which there is no equivalent whatever either in European or Asiatic politics. He is not a Pope, for though he is the highest Hindoo, and his fiat is necessary to the consecration of any Hindoo sovereign not to his enthronement, mind, but only to his consecration he claims and exercises no religious power whatever, except, we believe, in rare cases that of quashing a Brahminical excommunication. That he exer- cises this is certain, as Ranas of Oodeypore have repeatedly removed by decree the degradation and loss of caste suffered by Hindoo princes from com- pulsory marriages with the daughters of Emperors of Delhi ; and we think, under correction always from Hindoo antiquarians, that he also claims it. Still he is not a Pope, nor, though the origin of his power is the same, does he hold the position of the Mikado in Japan. The latter is the descendant of the gods, and still the most trustworthy exponent of their will ; while the former, though the repre- sentative of Rama, and therefore, as Hindoos think, the descendant of a king in whom Vishnu was incar- nate and whose memory is so sacred that the mere repetition of his name, whether by yourself or by a parrot for you, is an act at once of merit and of purification, derives from his divine ancestry only 132 ASIA AND EUROPE a modified sanctity, more like the sanctity of the Comte de Chambord in the eyes of an ultra- Legiti- mist than the sanctity of the Mikado. The relation, however, unique as it is, is close and real, so real that an insult to the Rana would be a personal shock to every Hindoo ; much more real than the almost equally strange relation which the ruler of Nepal, Jung Bahadoor's nominal master, as the last undefiled Hindoo king, the single one left who has never submitted to the barbarian, bears to Hindoo- ism, and the extinction of the race would be felt as deeply by all Hindoos as the extinction of the House of Othman would be by all Turks. The line of the Ranas of Oodeypore has been broken by adoption, though we see no certain proof that they ever adopted outside the solar race, and though the deceased Rana risked his safety in the next world rather than adopt a son to the detriment of his family; but in Hindoo estimation, and as a histori- cal fact, the succession has remained unbroken from Rama downwards, a period which writers like Mr. Marshman, who is utterly and perhaps unduly sceptical of Hindoo chronology, fix about 1200 B.C., more than 3,000 years ago, and which no one except Lieutenant Yate brings down far below 600 B.C. later, that is, than the expulsion of the kings from Rome. The Popes are parvenus beside the Ranas of Oodeypore, and the Bourbons compared with them are adventurers of yesterday. The late Maharana ruled only a small territory 1 1,000 square miles, or ENGLISH AND ASIATIC FEELING 133 less than two Yorkshires, and barely a million and a quarter of people, half of them aborigines outside Hindooism but he and his have ruled his tribe first at Lahore and then in Oodeypore from the time when the world was young and when the solar race was possibly pure white the Brahmins are our kinsmen, though they crossed their blood early ; have survived Alexander, in whose time they were probably as " old " as the Cecils are now ; have defied the Mussulman Emperors, with whose daughters, as they boast, they never contracted a contaminating alliance ; have outlived the Mah- rattas ; and will, in their own belief and that of all Hindoos, outlast the intrusive Mlechas (Barbarians), who, " for some mysterious purpose of the All wise, are permitted to make penknives and sell piece goods and conquer the world," and to interfere, with their pother of civilization, with the Divinely ordered scheme of Hindoo society. The death of a ruler of this race is to all Hindoos an event ; to his imme- diate subjects a catastrophe to be bewailed, as men inside Europe wail only for their children and their wives. He is so great in their eyes that, as in Europe in the middle ages, his subjects scarcely believe he has died naturally, and the first emotion excited by his danger is the suspicion that witch- craft has been at work. A whole community gives itself up to the wildest emotion ; great nobles, scarcely seen except in chain-armour, stand by the palace gates beating their breasts ; the populace cry 134 ASIA AND EUROPE aloud with one voice ; the priests flock in from all Rajpootana ; the women of the household, frenzied with excitement, assert their right to share the funeral pyre, and would execute themselves but for the interference of the British ; and strangest and most pathetic signal of all, a whole population among whom an insult to the beard is the signal for instant and murderous vengeance submit, in sign of their despair, to the last earthly humiliation, and shave their faces clean. Lieutenant Yate, in whose letter there is no trace of an unkindly disposition, sees it all, records it all, and judges it all as if it were all acted at the Alhambra, as if it were all spectacular tragedy, without depth or reality of feeling. He says all the men in the palace " were howling and beating their breasts"; implies that the women were merely acting their frenzy, and would have jumped from their windows if only anybody had held up awnings to jump into ; remarks that the shaven population had " the funniest appear- ance " ; describes " the emblem of royalty, the Hindoo Suruj, or Sun " (it is the emblem of the race, not of royalty ; the White Lily, not the Crown of France) and the red umbrella as " paraphernalia " we wonder he did not write " properties," in true theatrical phrase and acknowledges, with the true na/ivett of an Englishman, that he has forgotten the exact date of the reign of Rama, but it is " 1,500 years or so ago " a date which, considering that the writer's ancestors were then tattooed savages ENGLISH AND ASIATIC FEELING 135 with a penchant for human sacrifice, were, in fact, about on a level with Maoris, naturally appears to him one of immeasurable antiquity. There is nothing for him of the pathetic in the scene, nothing suggestive though, be it observed, he notes and records with appreciation the loveliness of a view across the neighbouring lake no electric influence from the grief of one of the most ancient communi- ties in the world, nothing but a crowd of persons intent, for some reason of their own, on unusual and somewhat preposterous, though striking ceremonials. The one thing that strikes him as wonderful is that the two claimants for the throne, each with his troop of armed followers, should obey the unaccom- panied Political Agent, Colonel Wright, and await passively the award of the far distant barbarian Viceroy. That he evidently thinks marvellous, and he returns again and again to the evidences of Colonel Wright's authority, never dreaming that these Hindoo nobles, who to him are so "funny" with their shaven faces, have a political instinct equal to his own, and know as well as he does that Colonel Wright represents a force before which Oodeypore could not stand up for an hour. Be- sides, why should they resist ? The succession is not contested by any but the Children of the Sun, and the Viceroy will not impeach their claim ; and what else signifies, except to the individual claimants of the throne ? If, indeed, there were a chance of a departure from the line, if the race of Rama were 136 ASIA AND EUROPE about to be dethroned, then, indeed well, then London would have missed, for one thing, a very picturesque account of a scene in an unknown world, and Lieutenant Yate's family, among a thousand others, would have mourned a kinsman. The Reflex Effect of Asiatic Ideas IT is a quarter of a century ago since the present writer observed in the Spectator, when com- menting on some fresh triumph of the mail service, that the increase of communication between Europe and Asia might produce unexpected results. We all think of it as increasing the intellectual grip of Europe on Asia, but it must also facilitate the reflex action of Asiatic ideas on Europe. They poured back on us in a flood during the Crusades ; and why should they not pour again, to affect us once more, either, as Christianity did, by conver- sion, or, as Mahommedanism did, by recoil ? The prophecy has not hitherto been accomplished. The dividing barrier between the thoughts of the East and the West has proved tenacious, and though, to the surprise of mankind, Oriental art has made a capture of the European mind, so that Asiatic colouring and Asiatic decoration have permanently affected all Western eyes, the special thoughts of the East have made little visible impression. We fancy, however, that the barrier is cracking. By far the most startling fact in the biography of 187 138 ASIA AND EUROPE Laurence Oliphant was the proof it afforded that Western minds for Oliphant was not alone could accept and act on a leading Asiatic idea, that if a man could utterly dominate self, and make the body a completely passive agent of the will, he would wrest from Heaven, or Fate, or the Universum, whichever it was, powers transcending those known from experience to be possessed by human beings. The possessor of those powers could convert the world without the slow methods of persuasion, perhaps enter into relation with beings before whose wisdom that of men is ignor- ant foolishness. That was the governing hope which impelled Laurence Oliphant to his strange life, with its victory, as he thought, over the flesh ; and it will, by-and-by, probably impel much stronger natures than his. The prize is so enormous, so entirely transcending any usual reward for effort, that the minds which can accept its possibility will be strongly moved to the attempt, and will waste years in an experiment which, though so often made, and sometimes made successfully for there are faqueers and sunyasees and Buddhist devotees who have conquered the body has never yet produced a spark of result in supernormal power. Fortunately, those who try it will be few, for the Western mind, unlike the Eastern, can never be quite dominated by an idea, and always applies to it some test which, in the case of a theory like self-suppression, is sure, sooner or later, THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS 139 to be fatal. We shall see, however, a few trials, witness the rise of some strange sects, and prob- ably see a large diffusion of that Eastern idea, the presence of the all-pervading universal spirit in all things, good, evil, and indifferent, which, if Mr. J. A. Symonds is a sound critic, is the govern- ing thought, indeed the sole thought, of Walt Whitman, and which his critic also believes to be of the essence of democracy. It will liquefy morals if it comes, and drive back civilization, so far as civilization is dependent on a discipline of restraints; but come it will in places, with its correlative, that all material things, bad, good, and indifferent, if placed in an intense light, are essentially evil. You see both ideas filling Russian literature even now, and the thought of the Slav, which differs from all other thought in Europe by instantly producing act, as thought does in children, has a great part yet to play in moulding the West. So has Buddhist thought. All that stuff about Mahatmas is rubbish, unsupported by a trace of evidence, a merely stupid expression of the desire of so many minds for guidance either incapable of error, or less capable than the guidance of ordinary beings ; but the Mahatma notion is a mere excrescence on a creed which has a big thought embedded in it. We were surprised to perceive that both the French Buddhists, and the English as represented by Mrs. Besant, avowed a belief in the doctrine of transmigration, or, as the latter ASIA AND EUROPE prefers to call it, of reincarnations. To most Englishmen, that idea, which in one way or another dominates the whole of non-Mussulman Asia, even that comparatively small section of the Chinese which is capable of rising above pure secularism, has a slightly comic effect, derived, we fancy, chiefly from an impression that to become an animal which could only be a result of continuous degradation would be an absurdity. The doctrine, however, as really held in Asia, has an astonishing charm for some subtle minds, and especially for those which are never content to await future solutions to the great perplexities of the world. It does explain the inexplicable, and reconcile man, not indeed to his destiny, but to his position in the world. The whole notion of an injustice inherent in the scheme of the universe, disappears at once, and all that endless problem why some, perhaps innocent, suffer, and some, perhaps guilty, enjoy. There is no injustice if this life is but a link in a long chain of past as well as future lives, and the millionaire is being rewarded for his past careers, and the pauper punished for his. Suffer- ing, under that theory, is but expiation for your own forgotten crimes, and will be fully repaid by the cleanliness in which you will enter on the next stage ; while enjoyment is but reward, moderated by its concomitant, the temptation to let the flesh win again, and so recommence the round. Nor is equality possible, or inequality unjust, when THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS 141 grade is a sign of the favour won from the All, and the prince is reaping reward, and the night- soilman paying the penalty for the deeds of previous existence. There is not a particle of evidence for the hypothesis, which has against it, in a philosophic sense, the want of purpose in the total of existence ; but it does explain the visible phenomena, and that in so modern a way that nothing would surprise us less than to see it adopted by great crowds who, in their passion of pity, accuse God of op- pression because He suffers unearned pain to exist among mankind. Why should a child which has done nothing have epilepsy ? That is the perpetual half-formulated query of modern philanthropy ; and Buddhism, which leaves the greatest problems unsolved for instance, the use of the universe, which under its theory, is an ever-revolving circle of inutilities springing from the All and reabsorbed into it does resolve the problem which for a moment, when the imagination of men has, as it were, become raw, presses sharply upon the excoriation. The theory rebuilds content with the universe, and gets rid of puzzledom ; and but for something in the average white mind which rejects it, because, we fancy, it suggests such inconceivable waste, a whole universe gyrating like a dancing dervish to no end, it might become one of the prevalent creeds of Europe. It is consistent with the effort to be good, yet explains suffering and imposes perfect resignation, a great comfort to the 142 ASIA AND EUROPE majority who suffer. It will have its career, too, if faith in a personal God dies out, for humanity will always explore the whence and whither ; and if the ultimate cause is either universal and eternal matter, or intangible and undesigning spirit, the central thought of Buddhism is as good an explana- tion as man is likely to forge. There will come a time, too, when the great experiment of demo- cracy has failed, as it probably will fail with unex- pected rapidity ; when men will ask the reason of the failure, and many of them will find it in the contradiction between the idea of equality and the instinctive sense of justice which at least assigns a superior reward to the good. Buddhism does do that. We wonder if the worst idea of Asia, that morality has no immutable basis, but is a fluctuat- ing law dependent upon some inexplicable relation between the individual and the Creator, or the individual and the All, will ever come over here. The Indian holds that a line of conduct may be right for one man, or indeed imperative, but wrong for another, or indeed insufferable ; that a world- wide law is unthinkable ; and that each man will be judged because of his obedience to some law external to himself, yet peculiar to his own per- sonality. The king's obligation to the Divine is not the peasant's ; the ordinary Brahmin must be monogamous, while the Koolin Brahmin may have sixty wives ; the trader may cheat where the carrier THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS 143 must keep contract ; the usual Hindoo must spare life, while the Thug may take it and yet remain sinless. That opinion subverts the very founda- tions of morality and conduct ; yet there are subtle minds that hold it, and Europe once showed a curious tendency in the same direction. Different moral laws were held to bind different classes, a notion still surviving and active whenever the conduct of clergymen is called in question. We have never been able to trace the genesis of that notion, which has been, as it were, intercalated into Hindooism, and suspect it of not being a religious idea at all, but one born of convenience and allowed a religious sanction, because a non-religious idea, an idea which is useful and received, yet excepted from Divine sanction, is impossible to the Hindoo mind. Nothing can be tolerable and yet outside that system. We have little fear of the idea in Europe, which recoils from it more and more, tending always towards equality, at least in fetters, be they for good or evil ; but we have some appre- hension of the last Asiatic idea, which we shall mention as likely to be imported. This is the notion of man's irresponsibility for anything but his individual conduct, for the general system of things as it exists around him. That, says and thinks the Asiatic, is the work of superior powers, and no more to be modified than the procession of the seasons ; and but that human nature is weak, he would no more resist it than a true Mussulman 144 ASIA AND EUROPE would effect an insurance on his ship. The sub- missiveness of Asia to evils that could be remedied springs ultimately from that, and is because of that nearly incurable. The genuine Asiatic, uncorrupted by white teaching, considers that which is as the will of God, and leaves it to Him to alter. Why put a lightning-conductor by the Mosque ? God, if He pleases, can take care of His own ; and if He does not please, of what use to try and thwart His will ? The Mussulman avowedly holds that theory, but there is not an Asiatic free of it, even the strong-willed Chinaman yielding to it almost, though not quite entirely. The combative energy of the European, who when roused to consciousness will put up with nothing, and who has the stimulus of living on a continent in which the powers of Nature are comparatively feeble, has kept him from this soporific belief; but take away from him a little hope and the resistless strength of democracy may take some away, as it is doing from Americans or increase by a little his impression that " God has no need of human aid " an impression of all the more rigid Calvinists and Quakers and he would sink back, reluctantly but certainly, to the submissiveness of Asia, amid which it is felt to be wrong even to lament the flood when superior forces made the waters swell. We shall not see it in our time, for the energy of the white races, whose reign is comparatively new, is still unex- hausted, and they have the spirit of the Titans, THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS 145 who thought even Olympus might be stormed ; but there are times when ideas which soothe are readily received, and ideas which are readily received are terribly strong. The dream of the right of all men to everything they want, which is a mere thought unsupported by evidence, or rather, denied by the ever-present evidence that the earth yields food only in return for human sweat, and that every human being lives under sentence of capital punish- ment, is already shaking the very foundations of European society. Thought is stronger than armies, even when it is as baseless as the main thought of the Buddhist creed. The Mental Seclusion of India THE Times, in a leader upon that wonder- ful record the new " Census of India," the details of which have just come home, calls atten- tion once more to one of the greatest puzzles presented to observers by this perplexing world. The English have held the first position in India for 124 years, taking Plassey as our date, and have governed it for seventy-eight years, taking Assaye as the commencement of recognized ascend- ency. Never 100,000 in number, including soldiers, the Anglo-Indians now tax, guide, and govern 250,000,000 of human beings, a fifth of the population of the world, so quietly that the most trumpery riot sets all India in commotion, and that a habit has grown up of recording border forays by telegraph, as if they were important, or were even heard of in the endless Indian world. The Anglo- Indians dwell among these people, they talk their tongues, they do all manner of business with them, they govern them in all external relations of life, they fill their houses with them, they live by giving them advice and orders, and yet they know next to 146 THE MENTAL SECLUSION OF INDIA 147 nothing about them. In the whole century of intercourse no Anglo-Indian, whether official or adventurer, has ever written a book which in the least degree revealed to his countrymen the inner character, or wishes, or motives of any considerable section, or any great single class, of this immensely numerous people. Nobody has explained their special ideas of justice, or of property, or of a pleasant social life, or described what they expect or what they deprecate, or even what they think about the people which rules them, in its ignorance, with such apparent ease and acquiescence. That Europeans are, with personal exceptions, by nature and the will of God, stupid, is the single broad idea which has ever clearly emerged from the sea of the native mind. It is as certain as any fact of the kind can be, that any Anglo-Indian who wrote a book perceived to be a " revealing " book about Indians, or any section of them, would, as his reward, receive fortune, reputation among his contemporaries, fame with posterity ; and yet no Anglo-Indian has ever done it, or, so far as appears, ever will do it Considering the temptation, and the number and variety of Englishmen in India, and the extraordinary success of many of them in work apparently requiring as its necessary datum a comprehension of the people, the only possible explanation of that reticence is that the Anglo- Indians do not understand, and know that they do not understand, the people whom, nevertheless, they 148 ASIA AND EUROPE govern successfully. And what is the solution of that mystery? That it exists is past all question and also that it exists in the same degree in India alone. The Chinese are not so hidden from us as are the Indians of Asia ; while the Indians of Spanish America, though hidden from us, are not hidden from the Spaniards, who live among them. We have no full answer to give, for the problem, after thirty years of thought about it, remains to us as impenetrable as ever ; but we can, we think, contribute some facts, or ideas about facts, which may make its existence a little less wonderful and bewildering. In the first place, the suggestion that because the Anglo-Indian governs successfully, therefore he understands the people he governs, is, we believe, fundamentally erroneous. The British Empire in India is not a marvellous example of the possibility of one race fitting its ideas to those of another race, adapting means to ends, or making laws specially suited to those who obey them, at all, but something widely different. It is the most marvellous example the world has ever seen of the possibility of governing human beings through abstract principles, when those principles include impartial justice, perfect tolerance, and the most absolute respect, not only for personal freedom, but for personal idiosyncrasy. The great Civilian who suddenly, and by a sort of magic, pacifies a newly- acquired province, till three millions of swordsmen not only obey him, but honour and in a way love THE MENTAL SECLUSION OF INDIA 149 him, very often does not understand the hearts of the men he governs in the least degree, and will admit to intimate friends that he does not under- stand them. They will, he believes, do so and so ; but " there is an element of the unknown or the capricious, if you like, in all native minds, never to be quite left out of the account. " What he does under- stand thoroughly are justice, tolerance, mercy, and the use of firmness ; and he applies those principles steadily, fearlessly, and with a certain respect for logic seldom displayed by his own caste in Europe. Every Indian is guaranteed his life, his liberty, his property, and his honour ; every man who breaks the law is hunted down, every man who observes the law is let alone, let him do or say or believe whatsoever he may. As the native universally approves those principles when applied, he desists from dangerous opposition and becomes, so rapidly that the change is almost scenic, a quiet citizen ; and the intellectual qualities of the Civilian who has tamed him are extolled to the skies. They have done very little for him, nevertheless. It is the moral qualities which have prevailed, and which gave as quick a result to Clive, who could speak no word of any native tongue, as to the last competi- tion-wallah who boasts, perhaps with truth, that he could play at a native gaming-table and never be known for a white man. The problem is, therefore, reduced by this, that the Anglo-Indian ruler does not show at one and the same time knowledge and 150 ASIA AND EUROPE ignorance, that he rules successfully by knowing other things than the inner minds of the population, which he is confessedly so unable to interpret. He is simply ignorant, and not a thoroughly instructed man who is also an ignoramus. This truth, however, though it renders the problem far less unique, and, as it were, mysterious, still does not reduce its size. The Anglo-Indian ruler lives among the people longer than Mr. Hamerton lived among Frenchmen, or Mr. Ford among Spaniards, or Mr. F inlay among Greeks, lives often thirty years, knows the language, passes six hours a day in conversation with natives, resides among them, in fact, and still does not understand them. How is that ? The true answer is that all this does not happen in the sense the words suggest, that the Civilian or adventurer does not reside among the Indian people at all, but only on the spot where the Indian people also abide, a very different thing. There is he, and there are they, but they are fenced off from each other by an invisible, impalpable, but impassable wall, as rigid and as inexplicable as that which divides the master from his dog, the worshipping coach-dog from the wor- shipped horse, the friendly spaniel from the acquies- cent cat. The wall is not, as we believe, difference of manners, or of habits, or of modes of association, for those difficulties have all been conquered by officials, travellers, missionaries, and others, in places like China, where the external difference is THE MENTAL SECLUSION OF INDIA 151 so much greater. They have, indeed, been con- quered by individuals even in India itself, where many men especially missionaries, who are not feared do live in as friendly and frequent inter- course with Indians, as they would with their own people at home. The wall is less material than that, and is raised mainly by the Indian himself who, whatever his profession, or grade, or occupa- tion, deliberately secludes his mind from the European, with a jealous, minute, and persistent care, of which probably no man not gifted with an insight like that of Thackeray could succeed in giving even a remote idea. He will talk easily, familiarly, and if he likes his interlocutor, most pleasantly, showing constantly a disposition towards humour, playfulness, and even rough jocularity, which, somehow, travellers never suspect, and, as far as we know, have never described in natives of India. A woman now and then has perceived it among women, and has mentioned it : but, so far as we know, no man has recorded this, the pleasantest of all the many specialities in the native mind, an inexhaustible amount of grave, sweet, easily- moved humorousness. But in his most facile moments the Indian never unlocks his mind, never puts it to yours, never reveals his real thought, never stands with his real and whole character confessed, like the Western European. You may know a bit of it, the dominant passion, the ruling temper, even the reigning prejudice, but never the i $2 ASIA AND EUROPJB. whole of it. After the intercourse of years, your Indian friend knows you better, perhaps, than you know yourself, especially on your weaker side ; but you only know him as you know a character in a second-rate novel, that is, know as much as the author has been able to reveal, but never quite the whole. In exceptional cases, quite exceptional, you may know as much as you know of Hamlet, know so much, that is, that you could write a book of reflections upon the character ; but you will still be aware of the supreme puzzle, that you know all of Hamlet but Hamlet. This seclusion of the mind is universal, runs through every grade, exists under any intimacy, and is acknowledged by every thoughtful European in India about those natives upon whom he relies, often justifiably, with a confidence as profound as his reliance upon the most trustworthy of his English friends ; and we believe, on the testimony of one of the few cultivated Europeans who ever lived happily with a native wife, that it extends to both sexes. The why of this mental seclusion, the cause which induces a native of India, intelligent, inquisitive, and hungry for knowledge, not only able to converse, but eager to converse, to keep his mind in a casket, is the single puzzle of the situation which so perplexes the Times, and every one of the very few Europeans who has so far overcome the sense of despair and bewilder- ment always excited by the immensity of the native problem, as to look the perplexity fairly in the face. THE MENTAL SECLUSION OF INDIA 153 We certainly cannot solve it, though we are going to state in all humility a theory in which we believe, which, if correct, partly explains it, and which will, at least, interest the dreamier minds among our readers. We doubt if any Euro- pean ever fully realizes how great the mental effect of the segregativeness, the separation into atoms, of Indian society, continued, as it has been, for three thousand unbroken years, has actually been. We speak of that society as " divided into castes," but it is, and has always been, divided into far more minute divisions or crystals, each in a way complete, but each absolutely separated from its neighbour by rules, laws, prejudices, traditions, and principles of ceremonial purity, which, in the aggregate, form impassable lines of demarcation. It is not the European to whom the Indian will not reveal him- self, but mankind, outside a circle usually wonder- fully small, and often a single family, from whom he mentally retreats. His first preoccupation in life is to keep his " caste," his separateness, his ceremonial purity, from any contact with any other equally separate crystal ; and in that preoccupation, per- manent and all-absorbing for thousands of years, he has learnt to shroud his inner mind, till in revealing it he feels as if he were revealing some shrine which it is blasphemy to open, as if he had earned from Heaven the misfortune he thinks sure to follow. It is not " timidity," as the Times suggests, which impels him, but an instinct of segregation, 154 ASIA AND EUROPE created partly by timidity, partly by superstition, and partly by a kind of mental shrinking, the result of ages, during which he has been taught, and has fully believed, that only in segregation can cere- monial purity, and, therefore, the favour of the Superior Powers, and, therefore, Heaven, be secured. The words involve a contradiction in terms, but if we could imagine a Catholic priesthood hereditary for two thousand years, yet always trained as priests are in a good seminary, we should, we fancy, find men with instinctive mental reserves, reticences, concealments, silences, such as Europeans note in natives of India, and such as so often render even a native opinion on a native character or career quite nugatory. The crystal can touch the crystal, but neither can get rid of the facets which so abso- lutely prohibit junction. That is true, no doubt, of all minds. The loneliness of each mind is one of the burdens humanity must bear with resignation ; but that loneliness has been increased in the Indian by the discipline of ages, until it is not an incident, but the first essential of his character. The Great Arabian The Life of Mahommed. By W. Muir, B.C.S. London : Smith, Elder & Co. WITH these two volumes Mr. Muir has worthily completed a great task. In a review of the former half of the work we com- mented slightly on its obvious defects, an occasional indifference to sound canons of evidence, and a tendency to overrate the undoubted value of unbroken tradition. But, reading his work as a whole, we are half disposed to retract even those gentle animadversions in our keen appreciation of the duty he has so successfully performed. His book is a distinct addition, if not to human at least to English learning ; and the books of which that can be said are so few, that the inclination to criticize, however just, is almost forgotten in the rich pleasure of new and perfected knowledge. Our business just now is not with Mr. Muir, but with the great Arabian whose life he has undertaken to narrate, and we may therefore state at once in what we conceive the special merit of this biography to consist. It is not a history of Ma- hommedanism, or a diatribe against Mahommed, or 166 156 ASIA AND EUROPE even an analysis of the special influence Mahommed's opinions have exercised on the world. There are books of that sort enough and to spare, and the effect of them all has been to shroud the life of their hero in that dim cathedral gloom which covers as with a mist the lives of all great religious teachers, and through which their forms and acts are only fitfully apparent. The real life of the man, the successive steps by which he attained power, the influences which produced his opinions, and the circumstances which, if they did not pro- duce him, at least allowed full scope for his grand and consecutive action, are lost in a cloud of opinions till the bewildered Englishman falls back on Gibbon's imperfect but lucid narrative as a relief from the deluge of mere commentary. It is as difficult to extract any notion of Mahommed's actual life from the majority of books about him, as to compile a life of Kant from the libraries written on the Kantian philosophy. Mr. Muir has avoided that gross mistake. His work is a real life, a life as minute, as reasonable, and, with an exception here and there, as impartial, as if Mahommed had been only a king, a great politician, or a successful leader of revolution. The development of the man is shown as much as his full maturity. The slow and painful efforts by which he rose to power in Medina, the almost as slow operations by which he first subdued and then amalgamated the clans of the desert into one mighty and aggressive THE GREAT ARABIAN 157 dominion, are set forth with a patient accuracy, which rather increases than weakens their native dramatic force. The reader sees clearly, without being directly taught, how far Mahommed was indebted to existing circumstances, and how far to his own genius, and discerns for the first time the true influence of that strange personnel, slaves and chiefs of clans, relatives and hereditary foes, among whom the prophet had to pass his daily and outer life. He comes to regard Mahommed at last in his true light, as a great man, instead of a mere abstraction, to predict his action in his own mind as a new obstacle reveals itself, to feel some- thing of that glow of personal interest with which a clever boy traces the conquests of Alexander, or exults and desponds with the alternating fortunes of Cortez or Christopher Columbus. To create such an impression about any man is no mean triumph ; but to elicit it of Mahommed is a positive gain to the generation among whom it is produced. In the whole compass of knowledge, looking down all that stately line of figures whose mere names serve as the best landmarks of human history, there is not one whose life better deserves to be known, to become, as some of Shakespeare's characters have become, an integral part of thought rather than a subject for thought, than that of the great Arabian. That a man's opinions should circulate widely, survive himself, and help to modify human action for ages after he is forgotten, is, 158 ASIA AND EUROPE though a wonderful, not an infrequent, phenomenon. That a man, obscure in all but birth, brought up among an unlettered race, with no learning and no material resources, should by sheer force of genius extinguish idolatry through a hundred tribes, unite them into one vast aggressive movement, and, dying, leave to men who were not his children the mastery of the Oriental world, even this career, however wondrous, is not absolutely unique. But that a man of this kind, living humbly among his equals, should stamp on their minds the conviction that he whom they saw eat, and drink, and sleep, and commit blunders, was the vicegerent of the Almighty ; that his system should survive himself for twelve centuries as a living missionary force ; l that it should not merely influence but utterly remould one-fourth of the human race, and that fourth the unchangeable one ; that it should after twelve centuries still be so vital that an Asiatic, base to a degree no European can comprehend, should still, if appealed to in the name of Mahommed, start up a hero, fling away life with a glad laugh of exultation, or risk a throne to defend a guest ; that after that long period, when its stateliest empires have passed away, and its greatest achievements 1 Mahommedanism is still widely propagated in India and Africa. In Africa it is marching south, and in India its gains are supposed to counterbalance its losses everywhere else. In Bengal alone the converts number thousands yearly, and one of the most serious dangers of the Government arises from the frantic zeal of the new converts made by the Ferazee Mussulmans. THE GREAT ARABIAN 159 have been forgotten, it should still be the only force able to hurl Western Asia on the iron civiliza- tion of Europe ; this indeed is a phenomenon men of every creed and generation will at least be wise to consider. What this Mahommed was, and what he did, is a question the masters of the second Mahommedan kingdom may well think as important as Pompey's intrigues or Diocletian's policy, and it is this which Mr. Muir has enabled them for the first, time fully to comprehend. There is much to be told besides, and libraries will yet be exhausted in the description of all the effects which this man's life produced on the world ; but of the life itself, of the manner of man Mahommed was, of the deeds he really did, and of the things he can be proved to have said, no man who can read Mr. Muir's book need henceforward remain ignorant. We shall, we believe, best serve our readers if we reduce for them, into a few pages, some idea of the life of the great man who is here presented. Our object in so doing, like Mr. Muir's, will not be to analyse opinions, except so far as they are indispensable to a true comprehension of his acts, but to give succinctly an accurate account of his career, passing somewhat lightly over the history already well known to Europeans, and depicting more in detail those facts which intervened between his assumption of supernatural knowledge and the complete success of his mission an interval of which the popular histories make one unintelligible jumble. 160 ASIA AND EUROPE Throughout, it is as the great Arabian the character in which he is not known, and not as the prophet, the character in which he is known that we intend to consider him. Mahommed was born at Mecca in the autumn ol the year 570 A.D. ; the posthumous son of Abdallah. a younger son of the hereditary chief of the Koreish clan, and therefore of the highest and purest blood possible in Arabia, of the only blood, in fact, in which resided any claim, however slight, to supe- riority throughout the entire peninsula. English- men, deceived by the epithet " camel- driver," so often applied to Mahommed, are accustomed to con- sider him low-born, and, indeed, so greatly underrate both his own position and that of his country, that it is necessary to expend a few words in showing to what he really was born. Arabia, then, is not what Englishmen habitually conceive it to be, a mere sandy desert, flat as sands generally are, traversed by bands of half-starved horsemen, with two little but sacred cities, and a port which an English frigate can reduce to reason by a bombardment. It is a vast, though secluded, peninsula, with an area 100,000 square miles greater than that of Europe west of the Vistula greater, that is, than the terri- tories of four of the five Powers, with Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia, Poland, and Italy added thereto. This enormous region, so far from being a mere sandy plain, is traversed by high ranges of mountains, filled with broad plateaus, THE GREAT ARABIAN 161 many of them as wide as European kingdoms, and full of magnificent, though dreary and awe-inspiring, scenery. The highest Arab tribes and the point is one too often forgotten are mountaineers ; share in the fervid imagination, the brooding and melan- choly thought, which have in all ages distinguished men bred on the higher regions of the earth. Even the aridity of the soil of Arabia, though great, is, as a political fact, seriously exaggerated, partly because the districts nearest to civilization are the worst, partly because travellers select the winter for explorations a time when even the fertile plains of Upper India look hideously desolate ; but chiefly because the European mind has a difficulty in realizing territorial vastness, or comprehending how enormous may be the aggregate of patches of cultivation spread over a peninsula like Arabia. When, some few years ago, the Governor of Aden was permitted to visit Lahej, he, filled like all other Englishmen with the "idea" of Arabia, was startled to find himself, only a few miles from his own crackling cinders, amidst pleasant corn-lands and smiling villages, in which dwelt a population showing every sign of prosperity and content. There are thousands of such spots in Arabia, to which the eternal boundary of the desert blinds all but the keenest observers. In such oases, scattered over the broad plateaus and down the arid slopes, and amidst the half-watered valleys, dwelt, in the time of Mahommed, a series of clans, divided politically as much as the modern nations of Europe. M 1 62 ASIA AND EUROPE What the aggregate of their numbers may have been is a point which for ages to come must remain uncertain. Orientals object to counting, and similes derived from the stars and the sands by the sea-shore satisfy only the imagination. Burckhardt believed them to be fourteen millions, and, tried by the only test observers can apply, that number is within the truth. It is nearly certain, that at one time during the second great outflow to conquer the world, Arabia had more than a million and a hah of her children scattered over Western Asia and the shores of the Mediterranean. They colonized wherever they conquered ; and from Syria to Tetuan, through a belt of country a thousand miles in depth, the basis of the population is still Arabian. It may be affirmed safely that no race that ever existed ever sent ten per cent, of its resident popula- tion to battle at once. The convention, when France was in its death-grapple with all Europe, never mus- tered, on paper, more than a million of men round her standards, or four per cent, of her population. Allowing for the impulse of poverty as stronger in Arabia than in France, we cannot set the population of the peninsula at less than fifteen millions, while it is more than probable that it greatly exceeded that number. This population dwelt, when it could, in fenced cities and strong defensible villages, a section only living in tents and the desert. The clans fought, and negotiated for plunder or territory ; but their wars, though constant and bloody, were not THE GREAT ARABIAN 163 internecine, and it was an understood rule that conquerors should not injure property more than they could help, fill wells, or cut down palm-trees. They had, moreover, some strong bonds of national cohesion. The tribes all spoke one tongue. The great majority either were, or fancied themselves to be, of one blood. They had one form of worship a cult, not a creed which compelled them to regard Mecca as sacred, and the Koreish, as the guardians of the sacred territory, as the highest among mankind. Above all, they had but one character and one social system. They were not divided by the democratic idea and the aristocratic idea, by religious feeling or sceptical feeling, by an antagonism of races or a conflict of classes. Every Arab was, in essentials, like every other : full of poetry and sentiment, with the greediness which, among poverty-stricken races, is a passion ; with a knowledge of traditionary history, and consequently an ingrained reverence for pedigree ; brave, accus- tomed to arms, and carrying the point of honour revenge for insult or injury to the clan almost to ferocity. All united, too, in the moral necessity of maintaining the neutrality of Mecca, and in respect- ing the blood of Maadd, the chieftain who, just one thousand years before, had rebuilt the power of a house which stretched back straight to Ishmael, and dying, left Mecca to the descendants whom the Arabs call the Koreish. Mahommed, therefore, as the son of Abdallah son 1 64 ASIA AND EUROPE of Abdul Mutalik, chief of the clan Koreish, was simply a cadet of the highest aristocracy in a land of aristocrats, a man of the only tribe from which princes could be expected to come ; a man at least as well born as the descendants of any house in Europe not actually on a throne. Poverty, it must be remembered, does not in Asia affect pedigree. A Brahmin begging is greater than a Sudra reigning ; and, though born poor himself, Mahommed stood from his birth armoured in wealthy relatives and highly placed kinsmen. The child was born after his father's death, and, according to a custom still pre- valent in Arabia among the population of the cities, was sent at once into the desert to breathe a freer air, and lived for five years with a wandering tribe called by the Arabs the Sons of Saad. In the fifth year, Halima, his foster-mother, though fond of the child, was frightened by some symptoms of epilepsy, and restored him to his mother Amina ; but Ma- hommed never forgot the kindness he had received. Thirty years afterwards, when he had become com- paratively wealthy, he raised Halima from her poverty, and, after the lapse of half a century, the appeal of his foster-father instantly sufficed to release his clan, while his adopted relatives were offered wealth and position at their will. The only recorded incident of his childhood, apart from legends, was a visit to Medina with his mother; a visit which stamped itself so strongly on his memory, that at fifty he remembered every detail. On her return she THE GREAT ARABIAN 165 died, leaving Mahommed, still a child, to the care of his grandfather, Abdul Mutalik. The latter speedily followed, and all power in Mecca passed to another branch of the Koreish, and away from his own imme- diate connexions. A wealthy and powerful uncle, however, Abu Talib, took charge of the boy, and became so attached to him that, after a life passed in struggles on his behalf, his last words were a prayer to his kinsmen to protect his nephew. With this uncle he made a journey into Syria, then a nominally Christian country, and took some part in a feud called the Sacrilegious War, because it began in the holy month, and violated, in the end, the sacred territory. Every year, too, he was present at the annual fair attended by Christians from Syria, Jews from the neighbourhood, and representatives of all the tribes of Arabia ; and listened, as he tells us in the Koran, to the eloquent preaching of the Syrian Bishop Koss, and to the orators of the tribes as they contended with each other for the palm of eloquence. He was present also at a scene which, if he had not himself proscribed all art, his followers in after ages would have loved to paint. Owing to the absence of any central authority, Mecca was full of disorder, and the heads of four sub-clans of the Koreish, tired of the misery before them, met to- gether at night, with Mahommed in their midst, and swore "by the avenging Deity to take the part of the oppressed, and see his claim fulfilled so long as a drop of water remained in the ocean, or to satisfy 1 66 ASIA AND EUROPE the claim from their own resources." Mahommed in after life declared that he would not lose the recol- lection of having been present when that oath was taken for the choicest camel in all Arabia. Though thus admitted to council in right of his birth, his daily work was that of a shepherd, an office then deemed honourable, and, by his own account, he was singularly free from vice of every kind. The silent, lonely life must have done much to strengthen a mind naturally tender, and increase that habit of brooding thought to which he was addicted through life, and for which he had presently an ampler opportunity. Mahommed was twenty-five years old before any change took place in his career ; and there is no reason to believe that his opinions were in the smallest degree in advance of those entertained by the same class of his countrymen. He was then asked by his uncle to take charge of a caravan, which Khadijah, a wealthy widow of their house, was about to despatch to Syria. He accepted the office, and travelled to Bostra, a place about sixty miles beyond the Jordan, whence he returned with- out adventure, and with a fair but moderate profit of cent, per cent, on the caravan. None of this profit was for himself; but during the journey he had gained something more valuable than his salary. That royal sweetness of nature which from boyhood distinguished Mahommed had so impressed a slave attached to the caravan, that, on his return, he THE GREAT ARABIAN 167 besought his leader to present himself to the widow, with the tidings of his successful merchandise. The slave himself never tired of sounding the praises of the handsome agent, and Khadijah, a comely widow, fell deeply in love with him. She is said by Arabs to have been forty ; but as she subsequently bore him six children, her age has been probably exag- gerated. She gained her father's consent while he was tipsy, and offered Mahommed marriage, and his instant acceptance raised him at once to a place among the wealthy men of the city. The union was a happy one for thirty years. Khadijah left him entirely to his meditations, relieving him of all cares of business ; and Mahommed, giving full swing to his natural temperament, wandered incessantly among the mountains which overlook Mecca, feeding his heart with reverie. None but those who have lived long among Asiatics can understand how an Oriental mind can brood over an idea. It is perhaps the most marked distinction between him and the Western man : the European thinks, the Oriental only reflects, and if left to himself the idea, turned over and over endlessly in his mind, hardens into the consistency of steel. Thenceforward it is part of the fibre of his mind, something on which argu- ment is lost, on which he at all times, and in all circumstances, bases immediate action. Mahommed had not, as the popular histories aver, given himself up to inquiries into Christianity and Judaism, nor is there any evidence that he ever talked with a t68 ASIA AND EUROP2 Christian monk named Sergius or Nestorius, nor had he ever been taught by a follower of the Jewish Scripture ; but he had from his earliest days been surrounded by the Jewish tribes settled in Arabia, and had learnt vaguely and imperfectly their more imaginative traditions, derived, it would seem, from the source whence Josephus derived his antiquities. We conjecture this from the frequent recurrence of names which exist in Josephus's account, and not in the Law he professed to follow. He had also talked with Christian slaves, particularly an acute Greek, who became a disciple ; and his mind brooded over the possibility of reconciling these creeds with the pagan cult of Arabia. Gradually, perhaps very early, a horror of idol-worship arose in his mind, a belief in one true, impersonal, and absolute Deity, so strong and vivid as to colour his entire future life. How long his faith was in development, he has not informed us ; but, once developed, it took entire possession of his mind. Brooding for months in solitude on the tops of the Hira range, he gradu- ally obtained that ecstatic conviction, which in better creeds their followers term conversion, and with that conviction came the impression that it had been given for a purpose ; that he had been selected to become the Messenger of the Most High, to preach the unity of the Godhead unto all mankind. Thenceforward he esteemed himself a specially chosen instrument, one whose reveries were revela- tions ; and throughout his further life, under the THE GREAT ARABIAN 169 most extreme temptation, and in the darkest adver- sity, Mahommed never for a moment swerved from his central belief : " God is the God : I am the Sent of God." When, years after, he lay hidden in a cave, with the footsteps of his pursuers sounding overhead, and Abu Bekr his only companion, he cheered his friend with the calm assurance that though they were but two, God was the third. When a great tribe offered to follow him, and give him the sway of a third of Arabia if he would leave to its chief some section of authority, he calmly answered, " Not one green date." How could authority be shared with the Messenger of the Most High ? This, and not the doctrine of conversion by the sword, was what he announced to his house- hold ; and it is perhaps the most marvellous fact in his history, that the three nearest to him, nearer than any valet ever was to his master, accepted his assurance of Divine commission. Khadijah his wife, Ali his nephew, and Zeid his freedman, believed in his mission, treasured up the bursts of mystic poetry in which his first convictions were expressed, and after twenty years of suffering, pro- tracted through every conceivable variety of disaster, remained steadfast in the faith that this man was verily sent of God. It was in the forty- fourth year of his age (A.D. 614) that Mahommed first announced to the sneering Meccans that God had elected him Prophet of a Faith, which as its first step involved their secular 1 76 ASIA AND EUROPE ruin. Their importance depended on their char- acter as hereditary guardians of Ozza and Lat, the two idols of the sacred shrine. If idolatry were a crime their office ended, and with it their rank in Arabia, the rich tribute of the tribes, the gains of the central mart, and the incalculable advantage of the one city which no Arab dared attack. In exchange for this they were offered an idea ; for the elevation of Mecca was not Mahommed's original intention he rather leaned to Jerusalem. They sneered carelessly, for Mahommed was too strongly protected to be attacked, but they rejected him without any very great excitement or attention. Some few, however, chiefly among his own con- nexions, confided in him, ignorant that many, in accepting his statements, accepted also thrones and places in the front rank of human history. Abu Bekr, a chief of the Beni Saym, a sub-clan of the Koreish, listened to the new revelation gladly, and lived and died refugee, soldier, vizier, and caliph always the bosom friend and believing disciple of his kinsman. Saad, the next disciple, was a nephew of Mahommed's mother, Amina ; Zoheir, the next, a nephew of Khadijah ; Othman, the next, a grandson of Abdul Mutalik, Mahommed's grandfather; and Abdul Ruhaman, the fifth, was of the Beni Zohra, Amina's clan. Numerous slaves also announced their adhesion to the new opinions. Abu Bekr exhausted great wealth for an Arab in purchasing slaves who had been persecuted for their admira- THE GREAT ARABIAtf 171 tion of Mahommed, and from that day to this Islam has been distinguished by its adherence to one high principle. The slave who embraces Islam is free ; not simply a freed man, but a free citizen, the equal of all save the Sultan, competent de facto as well as de jure to all and every office in the state. The total number was few, not five score ; but after four years of preaching it had become sufficient to arouse discontent and enmity. The Koreish dared not attack Mahommed himself, for he was protected by his relatives ; but they jeered at him, and threatened the disciples, who one by one dropped into the little house where he preached, still called the House of Islam, and took the oath of allegiance to the one God and his Messenger. So fierce became the persecution, that Mahommed sent some of his followers to Abyssinia, and even tried by a momentary concession to idolatry to gain them pro- tection from assault. The Meccans heard with delight that he had named Ozza and Lat, the two great idols, as intercessors before the Throne ; but the weakness lasted only a few days, and the storm, intensified by disappointment, raged more violently than ever. His uncle, Abu Talib, was compelled to threaten all who should attack him with death ; and when, in the sixth year of his preaching, two power- ful citizens, Omar and Hamza, professed themselves disciples, even his influence could not restrain the Koreish from proceeding to extremities. They solemnly placed all the descendants of Hashim, 17* ASIA AND EUROPE Mahommed's great-grandfather, under the ban, re- fused to intermarry with them, or trade with them, or supply them with food, and drove then en masse into the quartier occupied by the relatives and descendants of Abu Talib. There they were cut off from the city, none venturing to sell them anything except by stealth, and none of them daring to go out except during the holy month, when Mecca was a sanctuary to all Arabs. In this imprisonment the Prophet and his followers remained three years, until his enemies, wearied out, accepted the accidental destruction of the paper on which the ban was written as a sign that God willed the interdict to be lifted. The release, however, was followed by the deaths of Khadijah and Abu Talib, and at the end of the tenth year of his ministry Mahommed found himself with his means diminished, his band of followers not increased, his protector dead, and the Koreish at last apparently at liberty to extirpate his disciples. In this extremity he resolved on an enterprise which, we agree with Mr. Muir, would alone suffice to prove his own belief in his mission. Followed only by Zeid, he set out for Tayif, a city sixty or seventy miles from Mecca, inhabited by pagans of a peculiarly bigoted character, and boldly appealed to its people for aid, protection, and belief. They stoned him out of the city, and he returned to Mecca wounded and defeated, calmly repeating to himself, " Thy anger, O Lord, alone I dread." The Koreish were exulting in the certainty of THE GREAT ARABIAN 173 victory, when aid suddenly appeared in another quarter. In the season of pilgrimage, A.D. 620, Mahommed, who always preached to the crowds which at that season gathered from all parts to Mecca, had attracted the regard of a few pilgrims from the rival though inferior city of Medina. The Jews were powerful in Medina, and the idolaters there had gathered from them a vague idea that a mighty prophet was at hand, whom it was advisable for the idolaters speedily to conciliate. Five or six of them took Mahommed to be the prophet expected, and they promised on the next pilgrimage to bring him more of their brethren. Time is nothing in the East, where nothing ever occurs ; but that year must have been a weary one to the Prophet and his followers. It passed away, however, and at the next pilgrimage the number of the Medinese was doubled, and twelve converts took the oath of allegiance to Mahommed. Again they were sent home, and again Mahommed, with the stolid patience which in Europe belongs only to the greatest, and in Asia to everybody, waited through the year in peace. He even inter- mitted preaching, keeping his followers in heart by occasional revelations, and confirming his own authority by the distinct announcement, " Whoso obeyeth not God and His Prophet, verily to him shall be the fire of hell," a declaration almost superb in its pride when the circumstances are considered. The men who were to obey it were his own kins- 174 ASIA AND EUROPE men, men who had known him from his youth up, who lived with him almost in imprisonment in Abu Talib's quartier, among whom he ate and slept, and had begun to marry wives, to whom his demeanour in every hour of the day was thoroughly known. Twelve years of Mahommed's preaching, eight of their fidelity, had brought them nothing except injury to their substance, and the hatred of their relatives ; they had no conceivable chance of earthly power, and most of them little chance of escaping the Koreish. Yet here, in the midst of their tribu- lation, while still sick with longing for aid from a dis- tant and inferior city, Mahommed asserted authority without limit or bound, and was cheerfully, even eagerly, obeyed The year passed at last, and this time a numerous band, seventy-three men in all, met him from Medina, and in the dead of night, in the stony valley of Akaba, swore to obey Mahommed, and protect him with their lives. Great precautions had been taken to insure secrecy ; but the Koreish heard of the meeting, and pursued the retiring Medinese. They returned, however, from a fruitless expedition, and in a few days Mahommed gave the command, " Depart unto Medina." Secretly, by twos and threes, his disciples left the city ; and as house after house was deserted, and quartier after quartier became vacant, the Koreish looked on with amaze. Themselves an aristocracy, they could not comprehend the faith which induced wealthy men of high blood to go forth penniless THE GREAT ARABIAN 175 to a distant and usually hostile city, 250 miles away, at the bidding of one no greater than themselves. Mahommed stayed to the last ; and it was not till a rumour reached him that the Koreish had resolved on his death, that he and his faithful Abu Bekr fled from Mecca. Fearful of pursuit, they ascended the mountain Thaur, and there lived three days, hunted by the Koreish, who at one time passed over the cave in which they lay concealed, and fed by a shepherd formerly in Abu Bekr's employ. On the third night, June 23, 622, the Prophet commenced his ride, and reached Medina in safety with his friend. His family, and that of Abu Bekr, remained in Mecca, protected by the strong clans to which they belonged, until they also set out for Medina, and the Hegira the Flight, from which one-sixth of the population of earth compute time was at last complete. Eight years of public preaching and teaching the unity of God had ended in this, the flight of the Prophet from the city in which his ancestors reigned, with the loss of his patrimony and that of his scanty following. The points on which this narrative differs from those commonly circulated will be at once perceived. The legendary element is in the first place entirely struck out. The miraculous light which shone from Amina, the long conversations with Nestorius, the spider's web woven across the entrance of the cave on Mount Thaur, and a hundred stories of like character, which only distract attention from the 176 ASIA AND EUROPE true facts of his career, are entirely omitted. On the other hand, the element of time, which figures so strongly in real life, and has so little influence on fiction, is once more restored to its legitimate place. Mahommed was for three years assured of his own mission before he ventured to preach, and four before he had made a convert beyond Khadijah, Ali and Zeid. He was six years striving in vain to convince the citizens of Mecca before he made any offer to the men of Medina, and then he waited two more to organize their assistance, and fled at last rather for the sake of his followers and his faith than for his own. His own life was probably in no especial danger. Had he been put to death, all the sons of Abdul Mutalik, and all the descendants of Hashim, all the relations of Khadijah, and all the kinsmen of Abu Bekr, four strong houses out of the ruling clan, would have pursued the murderers to the destruction of themselves and their kinsmen. A sense of this danger was never wholly absent from the minds of the Koreish, who, moreover, always received the slightest concession from Ma- hommed with undisguised exultation. The real marvel is not in his safety, which was protected by the social system of Mecca, but in the amazing con- stancy which induced him year after year through the whole maturity of manhood to struggle on, pro- claiming his Divine mission, preaching the unity of God, and demanding obedience to His prophets, confirming the faith of his followers, strengthening THE GREAT ARABIAN 177 the weak, speaking kindly to the few backsliders, every day building up a dominion over their hearts which, in all the changes of his career, never grew feeble, which induced them, as we shall see, to pour out their lives like water, and, most wonderful of all, compelled them after his death to sacrifice them- selves in defence of the truth of his pretensions. To suppose that such influence was ever wielded by a man who did not believe in himself, is to us an absurd stretch of credulity, and his personal power indicates at once the character Mahommed must have borne. Authority of that kind is given only to one class of men, the leader in whom immu- table will makes the manner gentle and the speech kindly, while it confers also that grave dignity and that consistent habit of thought before which the mass of men bend as easily as clay to the potter. And this we find to have been the character univer- sally ascribed to Mahommed. Mr. Muir, who is no apologist, speaks repeatedly of the gentle stateliness which was his first obvious attribute, as it is that of all men whom God intends for princes A remarkable feature was the urbanity and consideration with which Mahommed treated even the most insignificant of his fol- lowers. Modesty and kindness, patience, self-denial and gene- rosity, pervaded his conduct, and riveted the affections of all around him. He disliked to say No ; if unable to reply to a petitioner in the affirmative, he preferred to remain silent. . . . He possessed the rare faculty of making each individual in a company think that he was the most favoured guest. When he met any one rejoicing, he would seize him eagerly and cordially N 178 ASIA AND EUROPE by the hand. With the bereaved and afflicted he sympathized tenderly. Gentle and unbending towards little children, he would not disdain to accost a group of them at play with the salutation of peace. He shared his food, even in times of scarcity, with others ; and was sedulously solicitous for the personal comfort of every one about him. A kindly and benevolent disposition pervades all these illustrations of his character. Ten years of command and self-restraint do not diminish dignity ; and Mahommed rode into Medina, in all things fulfilling the highest Oriental ideal of the true king. Tall and spare, and of amazing strength, with his cheek still ruddy, and his beard falling in black waves just streaked with silver to his waist, his manner soft to feminine grace, his eye black, restless, and slightly bloodshot, and his gait that of one who ascends a hill, i.e. firm but spring- ing, he must have looked as fit to be a leader of men as any the Arabs had ever seen. Add to these advantages, birth derived from the sacred race, the unhesitating devotion of a small but long-tried band, a widespread fame throughout Arabia, some political popularity in Medina, and a claim to authority men could not even examine, much less question, and we have some idea of the true position of Mahommed as the so-called " powerless fugitive " rode into the city, which had turned out its population in mingled curiosity and awe. The first half of the life of Mahommed was com- pleted, and also the first half of his religion. Up to this time he preached only a faith, but henceforward he was to pile upon this a cult, a series of observ- THE GREAT ARABIAN 179 ances, and many laws which had no necessary bear- ing upon religion at all. He merged the prophet in the legislator, and it is as the legislator that in Europe he has been most harshly judged. His creed, as evolved at Mecca, had a majestic sim- plicity, lost to Europeans in their unconscious con- fusion between creed and laws. It may be summed up in a dozen lines. Mahommedanism, stripped of its accessories, is pure theism, enjoining justice, brother- hood among the faithful, abstinence from breaches of the universal moral law, the sexual law partially excepted, and persistent and regular public prayer. That is the substance of Islam, the only creed essential to Mussulman salvation, the only law binding upon the soul. An active Moslem ought also to perform his social duties, to obey the Caliph, to defend the faith by arms, to bind himself under some few ceremonial laws. But all the doctors agree that he who observes only the precepts just quoted, as, for example, a cripple, will still be saved; that the remainder are the ornaments of Islam rather than its foundation. The notion of an inevitable fate, of a power before which human effort is power- less, and which is now universal in the Mahommedan world, was no idea of the prophet. He doubtless caused it by the excessive rigour with which he pressed upon his followers the notion of the immediate and incessant application of the Divine power to earthly affairs, a notion which makes the strong Puritan doubly energetic, but inclines the i8o ASIA AND EUROPE weaker Asiatic to indolent acquiescence, but it was no theory of the Koran. Europeans will readily perceive wherein this scheme falls short of perfect religious harmony. As a religion for the soul, Mahommedanism is too negative, fails to meet the inherent sense of sin, and entirely omits the great correlative of benevo- lence, love to God, as a motive to action. By Asiatics, however, who consider that love and obedience are not so much cause and effect as absolutely synonymous, this deficiency is rarely felt ; and in all other respects Islam, as a creed, is an enormous advance, not only on all idolatries, but on all systems of purely human origin. It utterly roots out idolatry, and restores the one ever- living God to His true place, if not in the heart at least in the imagination and reverence of mankind. It establishes the principle, not indeed of benevo- lence towards all God's creatures, but of benevolence towards all who have deserved it by expressing their faith in the one true Deity. It prohibits all the universally recognized crimes save one, makes temperance a religious obligation, and finally re- leases its followers at once and for ever from the burden of a cult, of a law which made ceremonial observance a source or condition of salvation. Prayer does not become a ceremony because it is fixed for stated times, and the Koran never intended it should degenerate into a form. Other ceremony in Islam there was none, circumcision being nowhere THE GREAT ARABIAN 181 ordained, and only retained by the Moslem in imi- tation of their pagan ancestors. It is doubtful whether Mahommed was circumcised himself; and the learned reasons assigned by commentators for Mahommed's adoption of this rite are just so many exercises of mistaken ingenuity. There remains one other point which in Europe is considered, justly enough, a dogma of Islam, the duty of extending the faith by force. This, however, formed no part of the doctrine as preached at Mecca. It is very doubtful whether Mahommed had ever thought out his terrible sentence, the sword is the key of heaven and hell ; the dogma which, chiming in as it does with the fierce courage of the bravest Asiatic races, and adding to " the triumph and the vanity, the rapture of the strife," the grandeur of moral well-doing, has proved the political safeguard of the Mussulman tribes, urging them onwards perpetually to broader dominion, and enabling them, when defeated, to die fighting in the assured hope of a sensual immor- tality. It is quite certain that at Mecca Mahommed never issued the command in any distinct form, and that he hoped against hope, for twelve long years, to succeed by the simple massiveness of his doctrine and the eloquence of his own tongue. It was in all probability not till the resort of the Koreish to force made him doubt whether argument would hence- forward be even accessible to them, that the thought of compulsion, of arguments addressed to the fears 1 82 ASIA AND EUROPE instead of the reason, flashed across his mind. The idea, however, was developed fullgrown, for the Sura which recommended the first war with Mecca promised also paradise to him who fell in arms; and of all the revelations this was the one most eagerly believed. It is to this day the last which a sceptical Mahommedan doubts, and it exercises a power over inferior races almost as extraordinary as the sway Christian truth can sometimes obtain. It is related of Tippoo's Hindoo converts, 70,000 of whom were made Mussulmans by force in a single day, that this was the doctrine they accepted with their hearts ; and at the siege of Seringapatam they courted death in scores : men utterly lost to every call of honour, or patriotism, or family affection, whose only occu- pation is eating, and whose only recreation is woman, still thrill with excitement at the summons for the faith, and meet death with a contempt the Red Indian could only envy. In the recent war in Upper India even the Highlanders wavered as the Ghazees flung themselves on their bayonets ; and the Moplahs have been known to yell with exulta- tion as the bayonets passed through them far enough to allow their short knives to stab deep. The promulgation of this order marked the com- pletion of a political rather than a religious position. Mahommed could add nothing to his power as prince : no compact with his people, no conceivable subtilty of legislation, no fanaticism of loyalty, could invest him with anything but a faint shadow of the THE GREAT ARABIAN 183 despotic power which must appertain to a recognized vicegerent of God. But the additional belief that death in war is an instant passport to heaven turned all his followers into willing conscripts, and war into the most solemn and most sacred of ordinary duties. Imagine the Puritan soldiers convinced, not only that their cause was favoured of God, but that Cromwell was His vicegerent, and that the Day of Judgement could never arrive for the soldier slain in battle, and we gain some idea of the spirit in which the first followers of Mahommed advanced to the conflict with the infidels. Mahommed arrived in the outskirts of Medina on June 28, A.D. 622, and after a halt of a few days to ascertain the state of opinion in the town, he entered the city on a Friday a day thenceforward set apart for public worship throughout the Moslem world ; and throwing the reins on the neck of his camel, Al Caswa, bade her seek her resting-place through the rejoicing crowds. Al Caswa halted in an open courtyard, and Mahommed descended and marked out the site for his first house, and the mosque in which pilgrims to Medina still recall his flight. He did not, of course, though it is often asserted, assume any power over Medina. The dislocated social condition universal throughout Arabia enabled him to exercise the direct and sole sovereignty over his own followers ; and their attachment, his own popularity, and the mysterious awe with which he began to be regarded, gave him vast influence over 1 84 ASIA AND EUROPE the inhabitants ; but of direct authority he had scarcely any. Each tribe governed itself. The two strongest, the Beni Khazraj and the Beni Aws, were passively favourable, but he had frequently to conciliate them, and Abdallah, the chieftain of the first-named clan, regarded him with strong jealousy and disfavour. He would have been prince of Medina but for Mahommed's arrival, and though he remained through life an ally, he pressed his influ- ence arrogantly, and has the honour of being the only man who ever turned Mahommed from a declared purpose. The remaining tribes seem to have been friendly, with the exception of the Jews, who were numerous and powerful, and who gradually became objects of intense dislike to Mahommed. He had once entertained the idea of taking them into his religious system, and he made on his arrival a covenant with one tribe, granting them privileges very similar to those enjoyed in aftertimes by the Jews of Cordova. He soon, however, when in actual contact with them, discovered what so many princes had discovered before, that Judaism cannot by its very nature coalesce with any other creed, and the revelations gradually became hostile to their claims. The Jews fell back entirely ; and as Ma- hommed had not discovered the second truth, that force applied to Jews is waste of power, he assumed a position of open hostility to the tribes. This, however, is an anticipation. For the first six months after his arrival he busied himself with THE GREAT ARABIAN 185 the organization of his faith. The practice of lus- tration was regularly introduced. The daily prayers were reduced to five. The first Kebleh Jerusalem was exchanged for Mecca, thus linking Islam with the ancient pagan cult instead of Judaism, and the month Ramadhan was selected as the period of annual fasting. The day of fast-breaking was also appointed, and finally Mahommed, in obedience to a dream related by a disciple, bade a Negro slave ascend to the top of a lofty house, and there cry aloud at the appointed times, " Prayer is better than sleep ; prayer is better than sleep." Even Alex- ander the Great is in Asia an unknown personage by the side of the slave Billal, whose cry to this day summons at the same hours a sixth of the human race to the same devotions. As soon as the mosque was completed Mahommed recommenced his personal teaching, preaching from the top of the steps of a high pulpit, in the modern Protestant style. The religious life of Islam was then complete, and to the day of his death the Prophet added only to what may be called the dogmas of jurisprudence. For nearly two years he continued this course of life, slowly the while building up his personal authority. Abdallah, chief of the Beni Khazraj, was trouble- some, and the Jews very sarcastic; but day by day the number of his followers increased. The people came over to his side. Each man as he joined him gave up his ties of tribe and kinsmanship, and bound himself a subject to Mahommed alone. He began, i86 ASIA AND EUROPE also, to use his followers to arms, organizing small expeditions against the Koreish caravans ; and although these were at first unsuccessful, they accustomed the faithful to the idea of hostilities with the sacred clan, and to habits of military obedience. In three of these forays he commanded in person, and in three the command passed with the Prophet's white banner to his nominee. This was at first always a Medinese chief, and it was not till the third expedition that he ventured to select a com- mander solely for devotion to himself, and intrust the white banner to the faithful Zeid. The uniform escape of the Koreish induced Mahommed at length to suspect treachery ; and on the seventh expedi- tion, in November, 623, he sent a Meccan named Abdallah in command, with sealed instructions. This expedition succeeded, but the success was gained in the holy month, and Mahommed for some days had the booty laid aside. At last he relented, his delay having fully established the principle that the disposal of booty rested with him ; and reserv- ing one fifth for his own use, or rather that of the State, he divided the spoil. It was shortly after this success that the series of revelations commenced, declaring war against the infidel a main duty of the faithful ; and the rich spoil and the splendid future proved too much for the men of Medina. Thence- forward open opposition within the city disappeared ; and when, in January, 624, Mahommed once more raised his standard, he was followed by the Medi- THE GREAT ARABIAN 187 nese as readily as by his own people. He nomi- nated a governor during his absence, as if the city belonged to himself alone ; and mustering his force outside the walls, found that it had increased from the eighty refugees to three hundred and five. His object was to intercept the caravan which, with Abu Sofian, chief of the Koreish, at its head, was crawling from Syria down the coast of the Red Sea on its way to Mecca. With this view he marched rapidly to Badr, where the Meccan road strikes the great Syrian route ; but he had, as usual, been betrayed by some secret friend of the Koreish among the Medinese. Abu Sofian hurried on a swift messenger to Mecca imploring aid, while he himself, leaving the coast-route, struck with his caravan direct for the city, which he reached in safety. The Koreish, however, were weary of Ma- hommed's audacity, and though still divided among themselves as to his claim of kindred, pushed their army of relief forward to Badr, determined to make a signal example. Mahommed was equally eager, and his followers, when consulted, pledged themselves to follow him to the world's end. Fanaticism had destroyed their remembrance of the ties of kindred, and they prayed openly for the destruction of their relatives. They arrived first upon the field, a sandy valley traversed by a small spring which feeds a series of small cisterns. Mahommed filled them all except the one nearest to the enemy, and bade his followers stand on the defensive, and regard that 1 88 ASIA AND EUROPE cistern as their citadel. The Koreish crossed the low hills in front of this position on January 13, 624, and began the action in the true Arabian and Homeric style. Three warriors stepping forward challenged the whole of the faithful, and Mahommed, accepting the challenge, ordered three of his rela- tives, Ali, Hamza, and Obeida, to stand forward. The combat ended in their favour, and the Mahom- medans, maddened with excitement, and favoured by the wind, which blew a storm of dust in the faces of the Koreish, charged upon a force three times the number of their own with irresistible effect. The Koreish maintained their reputation ; but the Moslem craved death as much as victory, and acts such as are ordinarily only dictated by despair signalized their hope of heaven. Omeir, a lad of sixteen, flung away the dates he was eating with a vow to eat the next in paradise ; and Muadz ibn Amr, with his arm cut through at the shoulder, tore off the limb as it hung by the skin, bound the wound, and fought on unmindful. Against men of this temper ordinary courage was unavailing, and the Koreish, abandoning forty-nine bodies and the same number of prisoners, all their animals and all their baggage, fled precipitately on the road to Mecca. Six of the prisoners were executed as avowed enemies of Mahommed or his creed, but the remainder were treated with a kindness they pub- licly acknowledged, and most of them embraced the faith. Every man in the army had at least two THE GREAT ARABIAN 189 camels out of the spoil, and Mahommed averred boldly that Badr was the visible seal of Islam, a battle won by the immediate interposition of the Almighty on behalf of his Prophet. On his return he assumed the full authority of a prince over the city : ordered Asma, a Jewess who had published satirical verses against him, to be put to death, slew a Jew guilty of the same offence, and besieged the Beni Cainucaa, a Jewish tribe of Medina, in their own faubourg. The Jews, after a siege of fifteen days, submitted at discretion ; and Mahommed, who held them to be rebels and infidels, at once ordered them to execu- tion. He was compelled, however, to yield to the remonstrance of Abdallah, the chief of the Beni Khazraj, and patronus of the Jewish clans, and still too powerful to be safely or irremediably offended. Expedition now followed on expedition. The Beni Suleim and the Beni Ghatafan were successively attacked and plundered ; a roving band of the Koreish, headed by their leader, Abu Sofian, were repulsed ; and at last the annual Meccan caravan, laden with bars of silver for the purchase of goods in Syria, was captured, yielding to every man in the army 800 dirhems, a fortune in a country where a dirhem a day was considered fair pay for the gover- nor of a great city. Every expedition increased the confidence of Mahommed's followers, and developed the habit of obedience, until at length the Prophet's whisper was sufficient sentence of death, and the Moslem exulted in their willingness to slay their 190 ASIA AND EUROPE own brothers at his command. A central authority thus obeyed doubled the active force of Medina. There alone in Arabia a single man of commanding ability could plan without counsellors, and command without explaining his objects. There too alone in Arabia was at work the strangely vivifying principle which, for want of a better term, we must style equality. The operation of this principle as one of the many causes which favoured the development of Islam has been too frequently overlooked. Despotisms very often, though not always, produce an imperfect equality. In Russia, for example, though the favour of the Czar can raise a serf into a prince, still the prince has under all other circumstances the advan- tage over the serf. Under Mahommed, however, there sprang up ex necessitate rei a form of demo- cratic equality more absolute than the world has elsewhere seen. Claims of birth and wealth could be of no value in the presence of a master whose favour implied the favour of the Deity. The proudest Arab could not murmur if God chose a slave like Zeid to be leader of armies, and visibly confirmed His choice with the seal of victory. It was a principle also of the new sect that Islam extin- guished all relations. The slave, once a Moslem, was free ; the foe, once a Moslem, was dearer than any kinsman ; the pagan, once a Moslem, might preach, if the Prophet bade, to attentive listeners. Mahommed was enabled, therefore, at all times to THE GREAT ARABIAN 191 command the absolute aid of every man of capacity within his ranks. No officers of his threw up their commissions because they were superseded. If he selected a child, what then ? could not God give victory to a child ? Moreover, all the latent forces which social order restrains were instantly at his disposal. Every strong man, kept down by cir- cumstances, had an instinctive desire to believe in the faith which removed at a stroke every obstacle to a career. To this hour this principle is still of vital importance in all Mahommedan countries. A dozen times has a Sultan utterly ruined stooped among his people, found, in a water-carrier, a tobac- conist, a slave, or a renegade, the required man, raised him in a day to power, and supported him to save the empire. If the snuff-dealer can rule Egypt, why should he not rule Egypt ? He is as near to God as any other Mussulman, save only the heir of the Caliphate ; and accordingly Mehemet AH finds birth, trade, and want of education no obstacles in his path. The pariah who in Madras turns Christian is a pariah still ; but if he turns Mussul- man, the proudest Mussulman noble will, if he rises, give him his daughter, or serve him as a sovereign, without a thought of his descent. Mahommed, like all real kings, knew men when he saw them ; gave power to Omar, the man of the blue blood, or Zeid, the slave, indifferently, and found therefore invari- ably that the special talent he wanted was at his command. ASIA AND EUROPE These immense advantages could not, however, preserve Mahommed invariably from disaster. In the middle of January, 625, years after he had reached Medina, the Koreish determined once for all to end the quarrel with their dangerous adversary. Sum- moning all their allies, and devoting all the treasure saved in Abu Sofian's caravan to military purposes, they raised what was then, in Arabia, a formidable force. Neither then nor at any other time were the Arabs exclusively or mainly cavalry. They admired and cherished horses, and most men could ride ; but the possession of a horse was a sign of wealth, and among the mountaineers and citizens by no means a common one. The army, therefore, though 3,000 in number, comprised only 200 horse, and its prin- cipal reliance was on 700 footmen equipped in mail, and in the archers, who did duty, as in feudal Europe, for light troops. Mahommed, though at first inclined to stand on the defensive, yielded to the ardour of his younger followers, and marched out of Medina with a force which victory, conversions, and new hope had swelled from the 300 of Badr to 1,000 strong. Of this force, however, 300, com- manded by Abdallah, chief of the Beni Khazraj, indignant at Mahommed's hostility to the Jews, deserted and returned to Mecca ; the remainder, though not a fourth of their enemies in number, determined to give them battle, and accordingly took up their position on a small stony plain, above which rose arid and red the frowning rocks of the THE GREAT ARABIAN 193 mountain Ohod. The battle began, as usual, in a series of single combats, in which, of course, those who believed death only an entrance to paradise had signally the advantage. Excited by perpetual small successes, and perhaps rendered imprudent by their confident hope of Divine aid, the Mussul- mans pressed on too rapidly, pierced the enemy's line, and began plundering the baggage. The rear- guard joined in this exciting game, and the Koreish horse, seeing their opportunity, swept down on the Moslem from behind. There was a panic, a mad flight, and a rally round the person of the Prophet. Mahommed was felled to the ground, and for a few minutes the course of history was doubtful ; but his personal friends protected his body, raised him, and with the broken army made for the rocks and defiles of Ohod. The victors approached, and taunted their defeated enemies ; but a charge up the rocks, in the teeth of Moslem soldiers, was beyond their courage, and they retired slowly to their own city. The Moslem also returned to Medina, to find every element of disaffection at full work. Seventy-four of the army had fallen, and every man was in an Arab tribe known and classed like an English noble. The charm of invincibility which attached to the Prophet was shattered, the Jews were sarcastic, and the Medinese openly murmured that if Badr were the seal of Islam, Ohod showed the visible wrath of the Almighty. The refugees, however, had seen worse days than these. The Prophet stood, as o 194 ASIA AND EUROPE usual in disaster, firm and gentle. He passed over Abdallah's desertion, ordered a mock pursuit of the Koreish, which gave the talkers something to dis- cuss, and, in a thundering Sura, comforted the faithful, and threatened the wrath of God on the disaffected. " Who am I," he said, " that I should not be defeated ? " "'Mahommed is no more than an Apostle, as other Apostles that have gone before him. What ! if he were to die or be killed, must ye needs turn back upon your heels ? He that turneth back upon his heels injureth not God in the least degree ; but God will reward the thankful. ' Furthermore, no soul dieth but by the permission of God, as it is written and predestined. . . . ' How many prophets have fought against those that had multi- tudes on their side. And they were not cast down at that which befell them fighting in the way of God, neither did they become weak, nor make themselves abject ; and God loveth the perse- vering.' " The magic eloquence of the leader completed the work ; and never was Mahommed stronger with his followers than a month after the defeat of Ohod. The remainder of the year (625) passed in expe- ditions of various issue. The Beni Asad, a power- ful clan who were connected with the Koreish, and raised the standard against Medina, were plundered and dispersed ; but on the other hand, seventy Moslem were decoyed by the Beni Amar into their hands, under pretext of desiring teachers for the faith, and treacherously put to death. The Beni Nadhir, a Jewish tribe, were driven from their pos- sessions, and their estates divided among the refu- THE GREAT ARABIAN 195 gees, who thus rose into instant affluence. With 1,500 men Mahommed maintained his camp for eight days at Badr, waiting attack from the Arab world ; and next year he advanced by a march of more than a month along the border of Syria. The Beni Mustalick had, it would seem, menaced him ; but the tribe was surrounded, and the prisoners, after a short hesitation, embraced the creed of Medina. These petty expeditions were, however, only the preparations for a new danger. The Koreish could neither forgive Mahommed, nor escape the idea that he was to them an imminent and ever-pressing peril. They resolved on an effort which gives a high idea at once of their strength and weakness. Summoning all their allies, they advanced, in February, 627, on Medina, and besieged it with an army of 10,000 men. Such a force menaced the city with destruction, but its hour had not arrived. Mahommed had in his ranks a man who knew something of Roman fortification, and when the Meccans arrived under the walls they found themselves confronted by a deep ditch. They exclaimed loudly against the cowardice of the device, but they could not pass the ditch, and fell back on stratagem. They made an agreement with the strongest Jewish tribe left in the city, the Koreitza, to attack Mahommed from behind, while they them- selves essayed to pass the trench. Mahommed, how- ever, discovered the plot, and by a clever device which Mr. Muir must pardon us for saying is quite 196 ASIA AND EUROPE within allowable military expedients, and was imi- tated by Major Edwardes with effect at the siege of Mooltan he contrived to make each party think the other was watching to betray them. The grand attack therefore failed ignominiously ; a few Koreish only leaping the trench, to be speared without mercy. An Arab army had no commissariat. Provisions ran short, the weather was wretched, and at last, after fifteen days of the siege, Abu Sofian, irritated to madness by personal discomfort, leaped on his horse, and rode away to Mecca. The great army melted away, and Mahommed turned on his domestic foes. He besieged the Koreitza in their faubourg, and after a brief resistance they surrendered at dis- cretion. The Beni Aws begged hard for their lives as old allies, and Mahommed promised the doom of the Jews should be fixed by a man of the allied clan. He selected Sad ibn Muadz, who accepted the office, and took an oath from the people to stand by his decision. To the dismay of his kinsmen, rearing his mighty figure above the crowd, he pro- nounced the awful sentence the men to death, the women to slavery ; and the doom was accepted by Mahommed. The Koreitza, eight hundred in number, were slain in batches, and the bodies buried, while the women were carried away. " Islam has cut all ties," was the stern comment of the allies of the murdered tribe. This was the worst deed ever sanctioned by Mahommed, but there is a word to be said in his defence. He undoubtedly regarded these THE GREAT ARABIAN 197 men as traitors as well as rebels, and there is not the slightest evidence that the Koreitza, even by European codes, had not deserved their doom. They had plotted against their own allies on the battlefield, and there is no European general who would not have pronounced them worthy of death, however strongly the modern respect for life might have modified his actual sentence. In this affair, as in the execution of one or two private individuals, Mahommed acted simply as an Oriental prince, neither better nor worse ; and we shall presently see how little personal enmity ever influenced his decisions. The fifth year of the Hegira, A.D. 627, passed away in comparative tranquillity. Mahommed still seemed far from his aim the mastery of Arabia ; but his expeditions continued, and every foray brought him wealth, disciples, and increase of repu- tation. In one of these raids his men punished some prisoners guilty of treachery in a manner so barbarous, that Mahommed published a revelation making death by the sword, cord, or crucifixion, the only capital punishments a Moslem could lawfully inflict. The mutilation of the hand was alone retained for larceny, a punishment certainly cruel ; but not so especially cruel in relation to the crime as Europeans will be apt to believe. All Asiatics hold larceny a crime only second to murder. English- men of the educated class, rich in all necessaries, and habitually careless, cannot even conceive the irritation the practice of small theft creates in a 198 ASIA AND EUROPE poverty-stricken community, to whom everything is valuable, and by whom everything is remembered. They will not endure it ; and to this day the first charge of a native of India against the British Government is its leniency to larceny, and the second most frequent cause of murder is the determination of the people to punish theft with corporal chastise- ment carried to an extreme. Mr. Muir rightly con- demns mutilation ; but when he styles the law one which reflects discredit on Mahommed, he should remember that it is not sixty years since English bankers clamoured for the retention of death as the only true punishment for forgery. In the sixth year of the flight, A.D. 628, Mahommed determined to bring himself once more in contact with the representatives of all Arabia, by attending the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. He started with a powerful force, hoping, apparently, that the Meccans would be too jealous for the prerogative of their city to refuse entrance even to him. He was disappointed, and in his anxiety to be once more enabled to visit the city he so greatly loved, he signed a treaty of amity with his determined foes. Under its provisions, which were to be valid for ten years, all Arabs who chose were to join him without opposition from the Koreish, and all Moslems who chose were to abandon him without punishment. The Meccans, moreover, were to give the shrine up to his followers for three days in every year. En- trance for that year was, however, refused, and THE GREAT ARABIAN 199 Mahommed returned to send ambassadors abroad to four of the sovereigns whose reputation had reached Arabia. Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium, then in the full tide of victory over Chosroes, received the summons to embrace Islam and obey the Pro- phet in a plainly worded letter, which, of course, he laid aside ; Siroes, King of Persia, tore up his mis- sive, provoking from Mahommed the exclamation, that his kingdom should be similarly torn in pieces ; Mukoukas, the Roman, or rather Greek, Governor of Egypt, had a nearer view of the power of his strange correspondent He answered kindly, and sent to Mahommed a present of two Coptic slave- girls, one of whom, Mary, is the heroine of many a Mussulman legend, and would, had her son Ibrahim lived, have been in all probability regarded to this day as the sainted mother of dynasties. The Prince of Abyssinia alone, it is said, obeyed the missive, and even that solitary concession rests upon no evidence but Mahommedan tradition, and Abyssinia remains Christian to this day. The embassies are curious proofs of Mahommed's absolute confidence in his own empire, and as the only positive indications of that vast ambition which the achievements of his successors reflected back upon his character. Every creed claims to be universal ; but that Mahommed ever contemplated distinctly the conquest of the world is to our minds more than doubtful. He hoped, perhaps, for Syria, but his distinct policy was limited to Syria, and the first mighty outflow of *oo ASIA AND EUROPE Arabia upon civilization was caused by the necessity of finding occupation for the tribes who groaned and fretted under the yoke of his successor. We must pass more briefly over one or two years studded with incident and adventure, to arrive at the crowning achievement of Mahommed's life. In the same year, A.D. 628, he conquered Kheibar, one of the richest valleys in Arabia, occupied by Jews, and divided the lands among his followers. It was a woman of this tribe who, by giving him a poisoned shoulder of mutton, laid, in Mussulman ideas, the foundation of the disease which afterwards proved mortal. Mahommed, however, was now sixty years old, and it seems clear that he never swallowed any of the poison, which was probably the well-known datura, or juice of the hemlock. In the following year he completed his pledge of visiting Mecca, and the Koreish, tired with contest, adhered to their agreement. For three days he was placed in pos- session of the shrine, and there for the first time he fulfilled all the rites of Islam in the appointed centre of the faith. He retired on the expiration of the three days ; but the appointed hour was drawing near when the labour of a life was to be crowned with the full measure of success. The Prophet was growing old, and had as yet done little which could survive his death. He was master of Medina, it is true, general of a powerful army, suzerain of nume- rous tribes, and with a reputation which extended wherever the Arab orators contended for eloquence ; THE GREAT ARABtAti 201 but he was still only a local notability. The Arabs still looked to Mecca as the pivot on which the politics of the peninsula ought to turn ; till Mecca was gained, Arabia as a whole was unsubdued, and the conquest of the sacred city became an object of intense burning desire. He resolved to make a final effort to secure it, and the Koreish gave him a fair opportunity. They allowed an allied sept to harry a small Meccan clan because they adhered to Mahommed, and thus, whether wilfully or otherwise, broke the treaty of amity. The injured family, the Beni Khozaa, applied to Mahommed for redress, which he promised with a solemn asseveration. He at once raised his standard, and summoning his allies found himself at the head of eight thousand men. With this army he marched suddenly on Mecca, where a great change had apparently occurred. Abu Sofian had either been wearied out, or was aware that resistance was hopeless, while the Koreish may be presumed to have become doubtful of the wisdom of further war. They made no pre- parations for resistance, and Abu Sofian, who had gone out to reconnoitre, was taken, apparently a willing prisoner, to Mahommed. The scene which followed is probably as true as most historical anec- dotes, and is exquisitely illustrative at once of Arab manners and Mahommedan legendary style. " ' Out upon f/iee, Abu Sofian I ' cried Mahommed, as the Kore- ishite chief drew near. ' Hast thou not yet discovered that there is no God but the Lord alone ? ' ' Noble and generous sire ! Had ASIA AND EUKOPE there been any God beside, verily he had been of some avail to me.' ' And dost thou not acknowledge that I am the Prophet of the Lord V continued Mahommed. ' Noble sire ! As to this thing there is yet in my heart some hesitancy.' c Woe is thee ! ' ex- claimed Abbas ; ' it is no time for hesitancy, this. Believe and testify at once the creed of Islam, or else thy head shall be severed from thy body ! ' It was, indeed, no time for idle pride or scruple ; and so Abu Sofian, seeing no alternative left to him, repeated the formula of belief in God and in His Prophet. What a moment of exultation it must have been for Mahommed when he saw the great leader of the Koreish a suppliant believer at his feet ! ' Haste thee to Mecca ! ' he said ; for he knew well when to show forbearance and generosity. ' Haste thee to the city : no one that taketh refuge in the house of Abu Sofian shall be harmed. And hearken ! speak unto the people, that whoever closeth the door of his house, the inmates thereof shall escape.' Abu Sofian hastened to retire. But before he could quit the camp, the forces were already under arms, and were being marshalled in their re- spective columns. Standing by Abbas, he watched in amazement the various tribes, each defiling, with the banner given to it by Mahommed, into its proper place. One by one the different clans were pointed out by name, and recognized. ' And what is that black mass,' asked Abu Sofian, ' with dark mail and shining lances ? ' ' It is the flower of the chivalry of Mecca and Medina,' replied Abbas ; ' the favoured band that guards the person of the Prophet.' ' Truly,' exclaimed the astonished chief, ' this kingdom of thy uncle's is a mighty kingdom.' 'Nay, Abu Sofian, he is more than a king he is a mighty Prophet ! ' ' Yes ; thou sayest truly. Now let me go.' ' Away ! ' said Abbas. ' Speed thee to thy people ! ' " On the following morning the army divided into four columns, and entered the city on all sides, unopposed except by a few fanatics, who endeavoured on one side to keep up a running and ineffectual fight ; and Mahommed stood at last lord of the city from which eight years before he had fled a hunted GREAT A&ABIAtf fugitive. It was still filled with enemies, but the magnitude of his triumph had softened his heart, and he spared all save four, the exceptions being men who had injured or insulted him or his family, and a woman who had circulated satirical verses an offence Mahommed never forgave. The effect of this generous conduct was instantly apparent. The Meccans gave in their adhesion in a body, and Mussulman writers record with admiration that among them, when they did at last give way, there were no disaffected. The strength thus added to Mahommed was important, but before using it Mecca was to be cleared of idolatry. The pictures of angels within the shrine had been removed on his first entry, and now Mahommed ordered the idols to be hewn down : Ozza and Lat fell with a terrible crash, and Mahommed, as he stood gazing on the destruction, an old man, with the work of twenty years at last accomplished, must have felt that he had not lived in vain. With Ozza and Lat, though he knew it not, crashed down the whole fabric of Arabian idolatry ; and the land, though for twelve hundred years rent with strife, though the tribes whom he bound together ha\e fallen asunder, and all other traditions have revived, has never gone back never showed the desire to go back to pagan worship. That one work, small or great, terminated then ; but to Mahommed it seemed as if too much was still left to do. Scarcely had Mecca been purified when the Pro- ASIA AND Et7ROP phet summoned its subject clans, and with an army swelled to 12,000 men set out to subjugate Tayif, the city which had stoned him when, alone and unarmed, he visited it to demand obedience in the name of the Most High to a banished and powerless member of the Koreish. On his road he was met by the Beni Hawazin, the powerful tribe settled round Tayif, and narrowly escaped defeat. The Hawazin charged down a defile, and the army of Islam, taken by surprise, fell into a panic, and commenced a precipitate retreat. Mahommed, how- ever, knew that no army existed in Arabia compe- tent to face his own, and standing firm, he ordered a follower of stentorian lungs to summon the Medi- nese to his standard. They rallied round him in- stantly, and the dismayed Mahommedans, re-forming behind them, charged upon the Beni Hawazin. The victory was complete, and the Prophet passed on unmolested to Tayif. He failed, however, before the city, chiefly from the Arab impossibility of keeping an army together without commissariat, and he returned to Mecca. The property of the Hawa- zin was, however, divided, and Mahommed exhausted his personal wealth in enriching his new allies. So lavish were his gifts, indeed, that the Medinese murmured, and Mahommed had, for the fiftieth time, to appeal to his rare gift of eloquence to allay their discontent Readers of Parliamentary debates will perhaps catch in this scene a glimpse of the true orator. THE GREAT ARABIAN 205 " He then addressed them in these words : ' Ye men of Medina, it hath been reported to me that ye are disconcerted, because I have given unto these chiefs largesses, and have given nothing unto you. Now speak unto me. Did I not come unto you whilst ye were wandering, and the Lord gave you the right Direction? needy, and He enriched you? at enmity amongst yourselves, and He hath filled your hearts with love and unity ? ' He paused for a reply. ' Indeed, it is even as thou sayest,' they answered ; ' to the Lord and to His Prophet belong benevolence and grace.' ' Nay, by the Lord ! ' continued Mahommed, ' but ye might have answered (and answered truly, for I would have veri- fied it myself), Thou earnest to Medina rejected as an impostor, and we bore witness to thy veracity ; thou earnest a helpless fugitive, and we assisted thee ; an outcast, and we gave thee an asylum ; desti- tute, and we solaced thee. Why are ye disturbed in mind because of the things of this life, wherewith I have sought to incline the hearts of these men unto Islam, whereas ye are already steadfast in your faith ? Are ye not satisfied that others should obtain the flocks and the camels, while ye carry back the Prophet of the Lord unto your homes ? No, I will not leave you for ever. If all mankind went one way, and the men of Medina another way, verily I would go the way of the men of Medina. The Lord be favourable unto them, and bless them, and their sons, and their sons' sons for ever ! ' At these words all wept till the tears ran down upon their beards ; and they called out with one voice ' Yea, we are well satisfied, O Prophet, with our lot ! ' " Tayif did not escape. A converted chief agreed to keep the inhabitants within their walls ; and tired out by a blockade which seemed endless, the citizens gave way. They asked privilege after privilege exemption from obedience, exemption from prayer, the safety of their idols ; but Mahommed could not yield ; and stipulating only for the safety of a hunting-forest, they surrendered themselves into his hands. He was by this time at home in Medina, ao6 ASIA AND EUROPE whence he sent forth his collectors throughout the tribes which acknowledged his rule to collect the tithes. A new income-tax of ten per cent, would be felt as onerous even in England ; but the collectors were only once resisted, and usually welcomed with acclamation. He, moreover, either from policy or really alarmed, as he alleged, at a rumour that the Greek emperor was about to march on him, ordered a general levy of his followers. His power was not consolidated even in the Hejaz, and many of the Arabs refused to obey. The Medinese, weary with exertion, stayed at home ; but still the gathering proved that the fugitive had become a mighty prince. An army such as had never been seen in Arabia, an army of 20,000 foot and 10,000 cavalry, followed him to the Syrian border, and subdued for him the whole of the Christian or demi-Christian tribes in the North. The Prophet felt that the time was come. All Arabs, save of the faith, were solemnly interdicted from Mecca, and a new revelation declared that the object of Islam was the extirpation of idolatry. Conversions now flowed in fast, and the tenth year of the Hegira was a year of embassies. The " king " of Oman surrendered all authority to Mahommed's lieutenant, Amru. The princes of Yemen, the Himyarte dynasty (the foundations of whose palaces Captain Playfair has just turned up at Aden), accepted the new faith. The Hadhramaut followed the example ; and as each tribe gave way, assessors, armed with the new THE GREAT ARABIAN 207 code, entered their territory, terminated mildly all existing authorities, and bound the district fast to Islam and Mahommed. The great tribe of the Beni Aamir was almost the last to yield ; but it yielded, and in 630 the Prophet, master of Arabia, uttered his final address to the representatives of the penin- sula, assembled on pilgrimage at Mecca. Mahommed had lived for twenty years a life which would have hardened the heart and ulcerated the temper of almost any man now living a life such as that which in seven years made Frederick of Prussia a malicious despot. But there are natures which trouble does not sear ; and Mahommed, in this his last address, solemnly proclaimed throughout Arabia a law of universal brotherhood. Though inartistic in form, we do not know in literature a nobler effort of the highest kind of oratory, of the rhetoric which con- veys at once guidance and command. " ' YE PEOPLE ! Hearken to my words ; for I know not whether, after this year, I shall ever be amongst you here agaia ' Your Lives and Property are sacred and inviolable amongst one another until the end of time. 'The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of His inheritance : a Testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs. ' The child belongeth to the Parent : and the violator of Wed- lock shall be stoned. 1 Whoever claimeth falsely another for his father, or another for his master, the curse of God and the Angels, and of all Mankind, shall rest upon him. ' Ye People ! Ye have rights demandable of your Wives, and they have rights demandable of you. Upon them it is incumbent not to violate their conjugal faith nor commit any act of open impropriety ; which things if they do, ye have authority to shut zo8 ASIA AND EUROPE them up in separate apartments and to beat them with stripes, yet not severely. But if they refrain therefrom, clothe them and feed them suitably. And treat your Women well : for they are with you as captives and prisoners ; they have not power over anything as regards themselves. And ye have verily taken them on the security of God : and have made their persons lawful unto you by the words of God. ' And your slaves ! See that ye feed them with such food as ye eat yourselves ; and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a fault which ye are not inclined to forgive, then sell them, for they are the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented. ' Ye People ! hearken to my speech and comprehend the same. Know that every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem. All of you are on the same equality ' (and as he pronounced these words, he raised his arms aloft and placed the forefinger of one hand on the forefinger of the other). ' Ye are one brother- hood. ' Know ye what month this is ? What territory is this ? What day ? ' To each question the People gave the appropriate answer, viz. ' The Sacred Month, the Sacred Territory, the great day of Pilgrimage.' After every one of these replies, Mahommed added : ' Even thus sacred and inviolable hath God made the Life and the Property of each of you unto the other^ until ye meet your Lord. ' Let him that is present, tell it unto him that is absent. Haply, he that shall be told, may remember better than he whc hath heard it.' " This was the last public appearance of Mahommed. In the eleventh year of the Flight, while still only sixty-three, he issued orders for a levy to subjugate the Syrian desert, and invested Osma, a lad, but the son of Zeid, with the supreme command ; but his hour had arrived. In the beginning of Safar a deadly fever came upon him, and he announced 20Q to the weeping congregation assembled in the mosque at Medina his own approaching decease. The exertion increased the disease, and after four days of suffering, during which the burden of his speech was always of suffering as an expiation for sin, he gradually sank, retaining, however, to the last somewhat of the ancient fire. With a quaint touch of satiric humour, he punished all his wives for giving him physic by making them take it too, and on Monday he even joined in the prayers for his own recovery in the mosque. This, however, was his last effort ; and on the 8th June, 632, exclaiming at intervals, " The Lord grant me pardon," " Pardon," " The blessed companionship on high," he stretched himself gently, and was dead. The events which followed his death the election of Omar, the revolt and subjugation of the Arabs, the pouring out of the tribes to the conquest of the world, the long and marvellous story of the Caliphs are better known than those of his own life. Our only remaining duty is to sum up his character, and record his special influence as a legislator. Upon his character as a prince, a leader of men, there will, we imagine, be little controversy. No man in history ever rose to dominion with fewer heavy stains upon his character ; none ever exhibited more constancy, or a more serene, unwavering wisdom. In the first test of greatness, wealth of loving friends, none ever approached Mahommed. Alex- p 210 ASIA AND EUROPE ander had friends of a sort, but Hephaestion was not of the stamp of Abu Bekr, and the majority of heroes have been lonely men. It is as a Prophet only that he will be seriously condemned, and doubtless his prophetical pretensions coloured his whole life. We can but state a strong conviction when we affirm that a series of minute facts leave no doubt on our mind that Mahommed was from first to last absolutely sincere. He really believed that any strong conviction, even any strong wish, that he entertained was borne in upon him by a power external to himself; and as the first and most memorable of these convictions was faith in God, he believed that power to be God, and himself its Messenger. The mode of expressing his convic- tions was undoubtedly an invention ; but that the basis of his faith in himself was sincere, admits, to our mind, of little question. This strength of conviction extended even to his legislative acts, and we cannot better conclude this brief notice of his career than by a glance at his true position as a legislator. Politically, it is easy to understand his position. Believing himself the Messenger of the Almighty, no position save that of despot was possible to him, and he made on this point no provision for the future. The Mahommedans deduce from his opinions the idea that the Caliph is vice- gerent of God, and of course absolute ; but no such theory is laid down in the Koran, and the Waha- bees, the strictest of Mussulman sects, acknowledge THE GREAT ARABIAN an no such dogma. Its adoption was the accidental result of the movement which followed his death, and which compelled the Arabs to entrust despotic authority to their chief. Mahommed settled nothing as to his successors, and it is therefore only in social questions that his legislation is still operative. And even here we are almost without the means of knowing what were the principles he intended to lay down. The living law of Mahommedanism is not to be found in the Koran, but in the commentators a set of the most vicious scoundrels who ever disgraced humanity, whose first object seems to have been to relax the plain meaning of the original edicts as far as practicable. The original code is on most points just enough. The law as regards pro- perty differs nothing in essentials from that which prevails in Europe. Property is sacred, and is pretty fairly divided among relatives. Life is held in reverence, and theft is prohibited, even with cruelty. Truth is strongly inculcated, and adherence to treaties declared an obligation binding on the conscience. Adultery is punished with death, though that provision is hampered by a curious law of evidence ; and reverence for parents is sedulously inculcated. The law, in fact, except on one point, differs little from that of the Twelve Tables ; but that one has modified all Asiatic society for evil. We must give a few words to an unpleasant topic. It will be observed that we have said nothing of Mahommed's private life, of which all biographers 212 ASIA AND EUROPE descant so much of his eleven wives and two slave girls, of the strangely relaxed law of the sexes which he established, and of his own departures even from that loose code. The omission was intended, for we conceive too much has always been made of that point in Mahommed's career. In early life, temperate to a marvel for Arabia, he was undoubtedly in his later years a man loving women. We do not say " licentious " advisedly, for though all things good and bad are recorded of Mahommed, we hear of no seduction, no adultery, 1 no interfer- ence with the families of his followers. He was simply a man loving women, and heaping up wives, as if he had been exempted from the law he himself laid down. He probably thought he was, as his followers undoubtedly did, and personally he was no worse than thousands whom modern Europe prac- tically condones. He was no better, but it is mere folly to say that his legislation was exceptionally licentious. What he did as regards his followers was simply this : he left the question exactly as he found it did not rise one hairbreadth above the general level of Oriental opinion. That opinion is doubtless an evil one. The true law of chastity, the adherence of one man to one woman as long as they both live, is written in a revelation older than any book in the great law which makes the numbers of the sexes equal. That law, however, has never yet reached the Oriental mind. It is the 1 Zeinab was given to him, not taken. THE GREAT ARABIAN 213 fixed opinion of Asiatics that the relation of the sexes is a purely physical one, and not subject to any inherent law at all ; modifiable, it is true, by external legislation, but not in itself a subject of necessary and inevitable moral restraint. Ma- hommed made no attempt to alter that opinion. He fixed a limit to the number of wives, but it was not intended as a moral protection, for he formally assigned all female slaves to the mercy of their masters. He left a monstrous evil without a remedy, and for so doing he is doubtless to be condemned. But that he introduced a new evil is untrue ; and badly as the system he sanctioned works, it is rather among the rich and the powerful than among the mass of his followers that it produces utter corruption. Race-hatred in Asia THE question of race-hatred in India, which has again been opened by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, is, politically, not so important as it seems to him and to most Englishmen to be. It is a little like the question of Socialism in a country like France or the United States, where the immense majority of the potential wielders of bayonets own property that is, it is a question of high intellectual and social interest, but not exactly a " burning" one. The Government of India rests primarily on its ability to crush instantly and infallibly any move- ment taking the form of armed insurrection, even if it be a movement among its native soldiery ; and, secondly, on the acquiescence of enormous numbers, almost inconceivable numbers, of industrious and peaceable peasants holding their own land at a quit- rent. These peasants feel no race-hatred that is, though they may hate the Government, and in certain districts and at certain times do hate it, they do not hate it because its agents are white, or Christian, or bad-mannered. The majority of them hardly see Europeans during their whole lives, any 214 RACE-HATRED IN ASIA 215 more than English labourers see dukes, never come into contact with them socially, and are aware of them only in those capacities, viz. as magistrates, judges, and revenue collectors, in which they are least obnoxious. The peasants are not idiots, and are quite aware, as they showed repeatedly in the Mutiny, that the white men's laws are just and justly administered. Race-hatred, so far as it exists, is confined to the great towns, which have not in India the weight they have in Europe, and to the minute class educated in European learning, which, as yet at least, does not seriously influence the country. Still, even within those limits an increase of race-hatred is to be regretted ; and we wish those who lament it would give the English people a little more light as to their idea of the practical way of preventing it. They have given us none yet, if, as they say, race-hatred increases amidst all the changes of late years ; and we confess we doubt seriously the value of the main theory upon which they found their arguments. They all, though using different modes of expression, assert that the remedy is ultimately to be found in more and freer intercourse. Mr. Blunt deplores the absence of social intimacies, and the reluctance of the two races to visit each other's houses, even regretting, as we understand him, the disappearance of the old native mistresses, who, though they taught their lovers the language, so poisoned the fount of justice that Lord Dalhousie, when organizing the Punjab and Burmah, 2x6 ASIA AND EUROPE took a kind of pledge from officers he selected not to fall into the old rut. Other observers propose united Athenaeums, others make a practice of hold- ing mixed receptions, and others, again, start clubs in London where the cultivated of both races may learn to understand one another. The remedy suggested is, in fact, more association ; and we are not certain that it is not altogether the wrong one, and whether more seclusion from each other would not be more profitable advice. It is very difficult, of course, for an Englishman, conscious of his own rectitude of purpose and benevolence of feeling, to believe that he will not be more liked when he is better known ; but a good many facts seem to show that it is so. He is not seen and talked to anywhere by men of a different race so much as he is in Ireland, and he is not hated quite so much anywhere else. He is decidedly much more disliked in Egypt since he appeared there in such numbers. He is more hated in the sea-coast towns of India, where he is prominent, busy, and constantly talked to, than he is in the interior where he is rarely seen ; much more de- tested in the planter districts than in the districts where he is only a rare visitor. If there is con- tempt for him anywhere in India, it is in the great towns, not in the rural stations where he is so nearly invisible ; and contempt is of all forms of race-hatred the most dangerous. It may be said that the Englishman in great cities is often a low RACE-HATRED IN ASIA 217 fellow, but that is not a sufficient explanation. The officers of the old Army were not low fellows. The broadest of all facts bearing on this suggestion of more intercourse is the fate of that Army. No class of natives knew the Europeans so well as the Sepoys knew their officers, and among no class was that knowledge in itself so little irritating. They were notoriously better treated than the men of any army, the etiquette was always to listen to their complaints, there was a feeling in many regiments that the relation between men and officers should be filial and paternal, and everywhere the officers had been true leaders in battle yet the Sepoys slaugh- tered the officers out, killing also their wives and children. Association had in that case only deep- ened race-hatred. It certainly does not extinguish it in the Southern States of America, the Nor- therners who do not live with the Blacks, being far more disposed to do them justice, though, when they emigrate southwards, they often display a harder and more bitter contempt. The Indian who, of all the heroes of the Mutiny, showed the most bitter enmity to the British race as distinguished from the British Government, was Azimoollah Khan, who had lived years among them, and knew English perfectly ; while no white dwellers in the tropics are quite so just and benevolent towards dark races as English Members of Parliament, who never saw them. The two hundred years during which Span- iards and Indians have dwelt together in South ASIA AND EUROPE America have not softened their mutual antipathy ; and the Arab who has lived in Paris is, when he returns to his tribe, the one foe to be dreaded in Algeria. In truth, if we are to take facts as evi- dence, it might fairly be said that the less the white and the coloured races come into contact with each other the less is the development of race-hatred, which only tends to become dangerous when they are interspersed, and mutually comprehend one another's strength and weakness. We suspect that it is in reserve rather than association that protection against race-hatred should be sought, and would, if it were of the slightest use to write on such a subject, impress upon all Europeans in Egypt, as well as in India, in every place indeed where they are brought in contact with the dark races, a change, not of habits, but of manners. It ought to be an inexorable etiquette for every European to treat every native acquaintance or interlocutor we are not speaking of friends with a grave and kindly but distant courtesy, not unlike that of the native himself in his best mood. The European's familiarity is sure to be offensive, his proclivity to " chaff " is disgusting, and his habitual impatience a foible of which most Englishmen are scarcely conscious is always mis- taken for anger. Silence, not speech, is in Asia the mark of breeding, and a laugh the one indulgence into which the superior is never, except among his closest intimates, betrayed. All Asiatics attribute RACE-HATRED IN ASIA 219 to almost all Englishmen atrocious manners, chiefly because Englishmen are so impatient of loss of time ; and we are all more irritated by habitual ill-manners, and especially ill-manners indicating contempt, than by any ordinary oppression. Nine-tenths of the feeling Mr. Blunt deplores, and wisely deplores, proceeds from the unintentional ill-manners of the ruling caste, which can only be modified, if at all, by the adoption of an inexorable etiquette, any breach of which Society should punish. There is, we fear, little hope of the adoption of such a rule, the Englishman being unable to rid himself of the feeling that among all other people he has a right to be unbuttoned, or to be, at all events, himself; but it is in this direction, and this only, that a genuine advance towards friendly relations is to be made. No native of India who comes in contact with Lord Dufferin will feel race-hatred towards him, or would, even if the result of the interview were an order for his execution. Arab Courage WHAT a flood of light these skirmishes on the Red Sea throw upon Mahommedan history, and especially upon those two most obscure series of events, the early conquests of the Arabian Caliphs, and the successive failures of the Crusading armies to turn Palestine into a European province ! Writer after writer has attempted to account for the defeat of the Roman armies, still the best disciplined in the world, by Arabs less numerous and less dis- ciplined than themselves, and has failed ; and, conscious of failure, has consoled himself either by depreciating the Roman troops as effete and enfeebled by luxury, or by raising " fanaticism " into a military quality of almost supernatural force. Even Sir William Muir is forced to explain the marvellous battle of Yakusa the battle which prostrated Heraclius and deprived the Eastern Empire of Syria by hinting that, what with their new creed and their hunger for booty, and their desire for the female captives, who were after each victory distributed among them, Khalid's soldiers had become, as it were, transformed into the ARAB COURAGE 221 greatest warriors of the age. It was, no doubt, a marvellous battle. Heraclius, at last alarmed for the Roman dominion which, we must remember, seemed to him, and to all of his generation, a part of the divinely imposed order of mankind had despatched a great army of 90,000 Regulars, assisted by clouds of auxiliaries, chiefly Bedouins, exceeding 150,000 in number, to make a final end of the new and threatening power. They encamped on the bank of the Yermuk, in Syria, under the command of the Emperor's brother Theodoric, and his cele- brated General Bahan, the Armenian, and so alarmed the Moslem Sheikhs, who controlled only 40,000 men, that at first they avoided battle. They counted their enemies, and would not attack. Khalid, however, made a forced march across the Desert his picked men living for five days on water extracted from slaughtered camels induced the Sheikhs to entrust to him the supreme com- mand, and in one tremendous day in September, A.D. 634, utterly destroyed the Roman hosts. After a skirmish, in which four hundred Arabs taken by surprise vowed to die, and died sword in hand, Khalid ordered a general advance : The Romans too advanced, and the charge was met on both sides with the sword. All day the battle raged. Fortune varied ; and the carnage amongst the Moslems, as well as the Romans, was great. Ikrima's gallant company, holding their ground firm as a rock in front of Khalid's tent, bore the brunt of the day ; they were slain or disabled almost to a man. So fierce were the Arabs, that even the women joined their husbands and brothers 222 ASIA AND EUKOPE in the field ; and Huweiria, daughter of Abu SofiSn, inheriting the spirit of her mother Hind, was severely wounded in an en- counter with the enemy. Towards evening the Romans began to falter. Khalid, quickly perceiving that their horse were declining from the infantry, launched his centre as a wedge between the two. The cavalry, with nothing behind them but the precipice, made a fierce charge for their lives ; the Moslem troops opened to let them pass, and so they gained the open country and never again appeared. The Moslems then turned right and left upon the remaining force cooped up between the ravine and the chasm ; and, as they drove all before them, the Romans on both hands "were toppled over the bank even as a wall is toppled over." The battle drew on into the night, but opposition was now in vain. Those that escaped the sword were hurled in a moving mass over the edge into the yawning gulf. " One struggling would draw ten others with him, the free as well as chained." And so, in dire confusion and dismay, the whole multitude perished. The fatal chasm Yacusa engulfed, we are told, 100,000 men. Ficir, the Roman General, and his fellow-captains, unable to bear the sight, sat down, drew their togas around them, and, hiding their faces in despair and shame, awaited thus their fate. The " chained " men were picked soldiers, who chained themselves together to make charges in mass. Sir Gerald Graham would, we think, under- stand that story, and account for the Moslem victory by military reasons, the simple explanation being that the Arabs fought then, as they fight now, with a fury, a perseverance, and a contempt of death which hardly any troops in the world have ever surpassed. They were personally the Romans' superiors in battle ; and they killed them out, retreat being impossible, by sheer bravery and hard fighting. Without entering into the difficult ques- tion whether the Roman soldier had degenerated ARAB COURAGE 223 at all a question on which the evidence is most conflicting it may be taken as certain that the Englishman of to-day is a better man, and as nearly certain that, but for the Gardners and the rifles that is, but for the terrible armour that is forged for us by science the Arab, with his superior numbers, would wipe him out on the shores of the Red Sea as completely as Khalid's tribesmen did the Roman. Khalid's men poured on Bahan's regulars exactly as Osman Digna's men poured on the Berkshires and Marines the very incident of the women charging being repeated and but for the rifles Osman's might have been as successful. Every correspondent, at all events, thinks and says so. Why ? Sir W. Muir speaks of fanaticism, and greed, and lust all conspiring together to make heroes ; but as a matter of fact, these motive-powers did not operate until Khalid joined the troops, and, splendid strategist though he was, trusted the battle to the magnificent daring of his Desert soldiery. That this courage was inflamed by "fanaticism" that is, by a sure and certain hope of reaching heaven if they died in battle is true enough ; but even that faith would not have so operated except upon men of excep- tional personal daring. It does not so operate upon millions of convinced Mahommedans. The simple truth is that the Arab of the Desert, whether of the pure blood of Ishmael or of that blood crossed with the negro, was then, and is now, by nature one 224 ASIA AND EUROPE of the warrior- races, the superior of the Roman, even when Roman battalions were " stiffened " with barbarians, and the equal, as he showed subse- quently in the Crusades and in Spain, of any Northerner whatever Saxon, or Frank, or Teuton, or Visigoth a man who can fight-on when beaten, and die hard even when left alone. When he first came out of the Desert, he dared face the Roman ; five hundred years later, he faced the mail-clad soldiers of Europe, and he is facing English soldiers to-day, and always in the same manner, with the most reckless personal valour and a contempt for death which scarcely any Europeans possess. Our soldiers call him a brute because, when wounded, he courts death by slashing at his captors ; but if Tommy Atkins knew he must die in agony there are no doctors or ambulances with Osman Digna and believed that if he could only get killed he would go straight to Heaven, he would in all probability do precisely the same thing. We press this point of the personal valour of Arabs over and over again, not because anybody is just now doubting it, but because the successes of Europe for the last century tend to make Englishmen mistaken in their views of history. So many large Asiatic armies have been overthrown by small European armies, that we have come to doubt whether any Asiatics are brave, whether the Turks, whose courage is undeniable, have not acquired it in European air, and whether Europe ARAB COURAGE 225 could not, if it pleased, rule all Asia with a very small exertion of its military strength. We have come to doubt whether the Roman and the Byzan- tine, and the Barbarian and the Southern European, all of whom the Arab mastered, can have been much of a fighter after all, and to question whether the comparatively small Greek garrison which de- fended Constantinople against Asia for two cen- turies so heroically must not have been " effete." We suspect that although luxury set in, and the numbers of ruling races, like the Italian and the Greek, greatly diminished, the extension of slavery eating-out free men, much of the success of the Arab was due to personal superiority in battle, akin in degree, though not in kind, to that of the modern European. The Crusader certainly thought him the fiercest of infidels, and so did all Europeans of the Mediterranean down to the time when Admiral Pellew blew away with his cannon-balls the charm which for centuries had hung around the Moorish name. The difficulty is to understand why the Arab ever lost his control of the Mussul- man world ; but we believe it was mainly because, moved by the dislike of the later Caliphs, who could not endure his simple and, indeed, democratic ways, and by his own instinct for independence, he returned to his deserts, there to live his own life until the opportunity should once more offer for a charge upon the Asiatic world. He does not fear the Turk even now. The Desert, as Mr. Disraeli Q 226 ASIA AND EUROPE detected, preserves the Arab. We will not say that the life of cities and of agriculture kills-out his higher qualities, for the evidence is imperfect ; but it is probable that this is occasionally the case. While the Arab of Algiers remained deep into this century a formidable soldier because he lived the independent life of his desert, the settled Arab of Egypt has lost his fighting qualities, which also must have declined in the Arab of Southern Spain before he was finally driven out. No doubt the Spaniards multiplied, and the Arabs did not ; but in the later battles, before the fall of Granada, the Christians displayed the higher fighting-power. At all events, the Arabs of the Desert remain among the bravest of mankind, facing battle, in which, if wounded, they must die of torture or starvation, with a fierce delight not wholly explicable by a revival in them of the faith which the Indian Mussulman also holds, but does not die for. Men who talk glibly of ruling the Soudan should read a little of Arab history, and consider for five minutes how many soldiers it would take to keep, say, only two millions of Khalid's men in permanent and orderly subjection. They will find that, in fighting- fury at all events, there has been little change in the Arab. Indian Abstemiousness ONE of the graver newspapers we think it was the St. James s Gazette has made the paradoxical remark that a main difficulty in the way of improving the condition of workwomen in the East End of London arose from one of their virtues. They are so steadily and rigidly abstemious, that they can live by wages upon which men, or less abstemious women, would ac- tually starve. Many of the class of sempstresses, for example, contrive to reduce their weekly outlay to the absolutely lowest point consistent with living at all, by dispensing with all luxuries whatever, and with many of what are considered by the more fortunate simple necessaries. They touch no alcohol, they dress in rags, they buy only the food which is the cheapest. They live, in fact, on bread, a little fat, and water, or, when hot water is procurable, a little, a very little, tea. This ab- stemiousness, said the St. James s Gazette, injured them greatly, for it was only in consequence of it that the " sweaters " were able to apply the competition screw in its full force. If the women had more m ASIA AND EUROPE wants, they would, in the end, have more money. The remark struck us as most subtle, and recurred to our memories with a new significance on reading Sir John Gorst's Indian Budget The main reason why Indian finance is so difficult, and new taxation in India so impossible, or so full of risk, is that the Indian peoples have acquired, or have developed in abnormal proportions, two virtues which European moralists are never tired of praising. There is no abstemiousness in the world, and no thrift, like the thrift and abstemious- ness of the average native of India. Almost alone among the working men of the world, he has raised himself nearly above wants, has stripped himself of all the impedimenta of luxury. Millions of men in India, especially on the richer soils and in the river deltas, live, marry, and rear apparently healthy children, upon an income which, even when the wife works, is rarely above two shillings a week, and frequently sinks to eighteenpence. The Indian is enabled to do this not so much by the cheapness of food for though it is cheap, a European who ate the same food would want five times the money merely to feed himself as by a habit of living which makes him independent of the ordinary cares of mankind. He goes nearly without clothes, gives his children none, and dresses his wife in a long piece of the most wretched muslin. Neither he nor his wife pay tailor or milliner one shilling during their entire lives, nor INDIAN ABSTEMIOUSNESS 229 do they ever purchase needles or thread, which, indeed, it is contrary to a semi-religious etiquette ever to use. The poorer peasant inhabits a hut containing a single covered room of the smallest size, with an earthen platform or two outside it; and as he constructs and repairs his own dwelling, he virtually pays no rent, except for the culturable land. He never touches alcohol, or any substitute for it There is an idea in England that he eats opium or hemp ; but he, as a rule, swallows neither, firstly, because he regards them with as much moral antipathy as any English gentleman ; and secondly, because he could not by any possibility pay for articles which in India, as everywhere else, are exceedingly expensive. He eats absolutely no meat, nor any animal fat, nor any expensive grain like good wheat ; but lives on millet or small rice, a little milk, with the butter from the milk, and the vegetables he grows. Even of these he eats more sparingly than the poorest Tuscan. Once a quarter, perhaps, he will eat enough, during some festival ; but as a rule, he knows accurately what will sustain him, and would be enraged with the wife who cooks for him if she prepared more. He is assisted in this economy by a religious rule which we have never seen a Hindoo break, and which is undoubtedly, like the rule against killing oxen, a survival from a military law or custom of the most remote antiquity. The leaders of the people, when Indians were nomads or invaders, ASIA AND EUROPE made it a grand crime to kill the only beasts available for transport or for agriculture, and re- fused permission to cook more than once a day. The Hindoo, therefore, must wait till nightfall for his second meal, and has contracted a fixed habit of not eating, except occasionally fruit, more than twice in the twenty-four hours. Even this does not exhaust his capacity of abstemiousness. It is impossible to say what proportion of the Indian people eat only once in a full day, but in some districts it is a perceptible one, and even on the most fertile lands of Bengal the present writer has occasionally come across evidence which has shown him that most respectable men, quite on a level, except as to knowledge, with our Northern unskilled labourers, were living, and had lived for years, on one meal a day. Such men, even when they eat twice, are beyond " wants," and are the despair of the Chancellors of the Exchequer. You cannot tax men's skins. They consume nothing and seek nothing which can be taxed except salt, and, ac- cordingly, that has been taxed probably from the days of Porus, certainly from days long antecedent to the Mussulman conquest of the Peninsula. There is absolutely nothing else except the food itself, and to tax that would involve the extinction of the people. We shall be told that we have drawn a painful picture of poverty, but that it indicates no virtue. Well, we do not know. It is a little difficult to INDIAN ABSTEMIOUSNESS 231 make the ideas of one race clear to men of another ; but we believe few of the Settlement officers, who of all men best know the real people of India, would deny that their abstemiousness was in part a virtue. The mental habit which enables Indians to abstain from pleasant things may have been generated in them by ages of continuous want ; but that there is a mental habit which makes abstemiousness easier to them is certain. They are like English women, who like nice things occasion- ally, but who do not give to eating and drinking and comfort generally the prodigious place in life which English men, and especially English work- men and philanthropists, now do. Millions of natives, helped no doubt by the ascetic teaching of their creed, do not care much about comfort for their bodies, and would rather have comfort in other directions, say, through leisure or accu- mulation. They will not be worked to death for their stomach's sake. They will accumulate if they see a chance, however their insides may clamour to be comforted. There is no thrift like native thrift, and abstemiousness is its root. Peasants who have begun to save constantly continue the way of living we have described for years on end, and not unfrequently adhere to it after they have grown positively rich. They always, when in misfortune, meet it by complete personal self-denial. They waste on marriages and festivals, and on expenses, often legal, which they deem essential ASIA AND EUROPE to honour, or which satisfy their pride ; but they do not waste on themselves, even in copper coins, though they have at least one taste, that for sweetmeats, which is nearly as strong as that of the Briton for beer, or that of the Frenchman for a satisfying meal. It seems to us that self-restraint influences the abstemious native, as well as his poverty ; and that self-restraint of this daily and persistent kind, often involving great resistance to temptation, and always involving slight but con- tinuous suffering, must be at least of the nature of virtue. It is so all the more because the native neither parades his economy, nor sulks under it, nor hates the man who has no necessity to practise it. He regards it, as he does darkness or death, as part of a Divinely appointed life, thinks about other things, and though very rarely a joyous man, is frequently an exceedingly humorous, and con- stantly a placid one. If it is admitted, as we should certainly admit, that abstemiousness is a virtue in the Indian, it is a little melancholy to think that, as in the working woman of the East End, it produces so little result of any beneficial kind. Character does not seem to be strengthened by it. The imbecile weakness of these very men, when custom, or the priests, or family pride demand mad waste, has been re- marked ever since we entered the country, and is a perpetual theme of objurgation to native social reformers. They pay, too, unjust demands from INDIAN ABSTEMIOUSNESS 233 tax-gatherers, from money-lenders, from powerful enemies, in as weak a way as the self-indulgent do, never resisting extortions which would drive Englishmen of the same type half- frantic. Nor do they make their country wealthy. It is a curious problem for the teetotallers and vegetarians and lecturers on thrift, that the Indians, who do not drink, who avoid meat, and who save cash with persistent care, have not made India, which is in the main a fertile continent, very rich, nor raised the average of wages very high, nor developed the wants which generate what we call comfort. To all appearance, the grand results of their splendid abstemiousness are that the minimum rate of wages is the lowest, prices being considered, in the world, and that the continent contains perhaps a hundred millions more people than is quite good for it It looks, as it looks also in the case of the working women of the East End, as if there were resultless virtues, or even virtues with an evil result, as if profusion developed energy, and as if energy pro- duced more positive good than mere abstinence. It is conceivable not only that part of the wealth of Britain is due to a base desire for beef and porter, but that some of the spirit of enterprise in the people, some of the readiness to spend them- selves in furious working, is due to it too. We will not say that abstemiousness in a whole popu- lation produces as much harm as good, for we do not know enough to venture such an opinion ; but 234 ASIA AND EUROPE we will say that fanatics and faddists may study Indian virtues and their results with a good deal of instruction. A little badness might be good for them. There are signs, for instance, we are told, as yet faint, that native abstemiousness and thrift may yield to one strong temptation now pressing very closely upon them. They all like tea, and may by degrees, like English sempstresses, like it enough to crave it, though its consumption now confined to medicine would greatly disturb the economy of their households. If that ever happened, Indian Chancellors of the Exchequer would jump for joy, and we feel by no means sure that the wealth of the people would not be greater. Tea is as much pure waste, except in the pleasure it gives, as alcohol, perhaps it is even more so ; but then, the desire for tea produces the energy necessary to obtain it, and so far as appears, the countervailing consequence of abstemiousness is deficient energy. The Asiatic Notion of Justice opposition offered by Riza Pasha and A others of the higher officials to judicial reform in Egypt is usually set down in this country to corrupt motives. They want bribes, it is said, for protecting unworthy suitors, or they desire the opportunity of oppressing their enemies, or their dependents' enemies, through the agency of the police. The charge is probably true in part, most Orientals desiring irregular rewards, just as Bacon did, and thirsting for irregular power and the abject deference and sense of authority which irregular power speedily produces ; but they could, if they were perfectly articulate, make a better defence for themselves than Englishmen imagine, a defence, too, in which the suitors before them would cordi- ally concur. There are just Asiatics as well as unjust, though they are usually few, and Asiatics, too, whom no man could bribe ; and as they and their suppliants would resist Mr. Scott's reforms as stiffly as their corrupt compatriots, it may be of some interest to a few observers of human nature to state the reasons why. The popular notion that 836 236 ASIA AND EUROPE Asiatics do not care for justice, or even positively dislike it, is, of course, entirely without foundation. The approval of justice is almost as instinctive as the idea of difference between right and wrong, and an Asiatic submits more humbly to a just sentence than a European. The agent of God, he thinks, has found him out, which it was his especial busi- ness in this world to do, and which is evidence, among other things, of the reality of his commission, and vindictiveness on that account would be only a new crime, an idea asserted by English gaol- keepers to be also entertained by the convicts in their charge. The idea that an Asiatic does not desire a just decision on the merits of the case as between plaintiff and defendant, or accuser and accused, is utterly without foundation. The only differences in that respect between the races are that the Asiatic is not convinced of the inherent equality of men, holding that the great and those invested with sanctity ought to have some favour shown them, and that as regards fitting punish- ments, he belongs to the fifteenth century, and would have no kind of feeling about torture, muti- lation, or breaking on the wheel. The highest Egyptian expositor of the law did, indeed, in this very discussion, lay it down as a cardinal dogma that a brigand should suffer the amputation of his hands, a penalty which no European Government dare attempt to enforce for any offence whatever. It is not as regards justice in itself, but as regards THE ASIATIC NOTION OF JUSTICE 237 the method of distributing it, that the Asiatic parts company from the European. The latter in all countries insists on a specially qualified Judge, definite rules of evidence which often exclude evidence, and a mode of procedure as well known and as rigid as the law itself. He always employs expert intermediaries to attack or to defend, and he has usually an inexplicable desire that the place for doing justice should, so to speak, be consecrated to that business only, a sentence delivered out of Court striking him as something abnormal, suspicious, and, in some way not defined, irreverent. The result of these feelings is, that the Englishman, American, or German secures justice, but only after an expensive and tedious process, excessive interruption to ordinary business, and, in civil cases, great differ- ences between the amount of his just claim and the amount which, after the lawyers are paid, actually comes into his hands. All that is to the Asiatic utterly detestable. He thinks that when he is wronged, it is the business of the ruler, or his executive delegate, to right him at once, without delay, without expense, fully and finally. He appeals to him loudly in the market-place, in the road, or in his hall of audience, indifferently, and expects justice either there and then, or if wit- nesses must be summoned from a distance, at a fixed time, not to be altered without the gravest cause. The decision thus given is to be just, inexorably just, but is to be reached irrespective 238 ASIA AND EUROPE of any rules of evidence, any customs, or any laws not directly religious ; and even that last qualifica- tion is only for the sake of form. So intense is this feeling, that the gravest charge an Asiatic can bring against his ruler is that, though outside his palace, he refused to hear him, or that, having given a decision, he failed to make it instantly executive. Moreover, the ruler is entirely of his subjects' opinion in the matter. There never has been an Asiatic Sovereign, however bad, or however accus- tomed to profound seclusion, who would not have admitted that this was his duty, which he sinned in neglecting, or who, if caught unawares, say on a hunting party, would not have fulfilled it to the best of his ability. Aurungzebe, the great Emperor of Delhi, who assumed the manner rather of a deity than a monarch, and used to receive his Court seated on crossed stone girders in the roof of his audience- hall, twenty feet above all heads, would hear the raggedest wretch in his dominions, and give a decision, often strangely astute, there and then ; and woe to the courtier, however powerful, who barred the execution of a decree so pro- nounced. The Oriental, in fact, desires suddenness, inexpensiveness, and finality in the distribution of justice, and therefore looks for it as that unhappy Sikh is doing who was always getting imprisoned because he wanted to ask the Queen in person to restore his land, forfeited by some Court's wrongful decision only from the executive power. No THE ASIATIC NOTION OF JUSTICE 239 other can be so quick, or so final, or so cheap, and the notion of depriving it of its first function is, in the eyes of subject and ruler alike, positively immoral. The Khedive has just given away this right, and but that he is supposed to be in durance to the infidel, and no longer possessed of free-will, he would be held by every subject to have given away also his moral right to reign. Of course, as a matter of fact, the system works horribly ill, worse, perhaps, than any system what- ever, except that of Spain, where you institute the suit and your grandson gets the decree. The ruler gets bored with the work, and delegates his power, which is again sub-delegated, until there is at last an ignorant and corrupt official, intent on money- making, who can give an absolute order, and enforce it with the whole power of the State, and who, being the Sovereign's representative, is independent of evidence, laws, and every other restraint, except the one remote chance that if a suitor, palpably oppressed beyond bearing, can reach his Sovereign's ear and convince him, an order may come for that oppressor's head. So strong is tradition, that we think even the Sultan under those circumstances would give that kind of redress ; but except in extraordinary cases when the ruler will work like Frederick the Great, or in the more frequent cases when the dread of him is so acute that the oppressor is paralysed by the threat of personal appeal to the Throne this is actually the. case in Afghanistan at 240 ASIA AND EUROPE this moment the reserved power of the Sovereign is no protection, and justice suffers such deprava- tion, that but for two checks very curious in their operation, society would go to pieces. Most suits and plaints are between equals, or persons nearly equal, and bribery in such cases ameliorates tyranny, the wronged man being willing to make the larger pecuniary sacrifice. And there is a point of injustice hard to ascertain, but indubitably existing, beyond which an official Asiatic, when sitting in judgement, must not go. If he does, the universal conscience revolts ; he is boycotted in a style that even he feels, and the atmosphere of respect for power which in the East clothes and protects the power- ful, ceases to guard his life. As for the police, under this system they degenerate into fiends. They cannot prevent access to the official's pre- sence ; but they collect the evidence, they arrest the accused and keep him just as long as they like and they carry out or do not carry out the ultimate decree ; and every one of these operations is an excuse for a fresh bribe. The official cannot punish them, and except under superior order never does, for either he shares the bribes, or he is depen- dent on them for the collection of taxes, the one duty he dare not fail in, or he is positively afraid of them, the latter a case constantly occurring in Egypt, and, it is said, in the interior of China. The oppression of the police throughout Asia, outside India, is something quite awful, and almost THE ASIATIC NOTION OF JUSTICE 241 as great a cause of human misery as even slavery. Indeed, it would desolate whole States, but that at a certain point of endurance the populace takes arms, the police are killed everywhere at sight, and society, which as a rule detests breaking up, re-forms itself again under the protection of Vigilance Com- mittees. The Asiatic knows how to organize them well enough, but never will do it in good time or persistently, and when he has done it, usually falls under the temptation to use his new power in brigandage. Nevertheless, for all its bad results, there is something lofty in the Asiatic notion of the proper distribution of justice, and it does sometimes, under very favourable circumstances, as in one or two of the smaller States of India, produce an extra- ordinary harmony between ruler and ruled, the former appearing every day as a beneficent person who redresses wrong as a deity would, at once and by a fiat which executes itself; but there is, even under such circumstances, a drawback to it too seldom noticed. It checks prosperity too much. Anglo-Indians often lament that the Asiatic system is not tried in India, where we could secure just satraps ; but just satraps are of little use as Judges except in a simple state of society. The moment commerce comes in with its complexities, the just satrap is an injurious nuisance. Solomon was a great Judge, no doubt, though a very cruel one, cruel as the first Shah of the Kajar family, who 242 ASIA AND EUROPE ripped open a soldier to see if he had stolen some milk ; but if Solomon had one day decided contracts according to the English rule, that the buyer must take care of himself, and the next day according to the Mussulman rule, that there is always an implied warranty, commerce would have become impossible. To make a country prosperous, civil suits must be decided not only with justice, but with justice according to a rule which never swerves, is never forgotten, and is always known beforehand, that is, in practice, they must be decided by experts in accordance with written law. It seems a clumsy system, because of the expense and delay it neces- sarily involves ; but it is the only one which will work when affairs have grown in the least degree complex or many-sided. The will of the just man armed with all power seems a grand instrument ; but it is of no use whatever in deciding whether unbleached shirtings are up to sample, or whether such-and-such documents establish agency or not. You must have written law, and there is no written law in Asia except the religious ones ; and among the religious ones, not one pays the smallest attention very properly to such questions as arise in com- merce. There must not only be law, but positive law, case law, and therefore experts to advise, and there- fore trained tribunals, and therefore that separation of law from the executive which the Asiatic mind detests. The process is inexorable, and produces exactly the same conclusion as the degradation of 243 justice which follows, slowly but inevitably, on per- fect despotism, viz., that if a country wants civiliza- tion, or prosperity, or unbroken order, it must put up with Courts. The " Standard of Comfort " in India SIR AUCKLAND COLVIN, the Lieutenant- Governor of the North-West Provinces the great region between Bengal and the Punjab made a speech at Lucknow which, if its teaching were only accepted by the people, would work a social revolution. As most of our readers know, though few of them probably quite realize, the "stand- ard of comfort " among the masses of India is almost the lowest, or perhaps is even the very lowest, among the semi-civilized peoples of the world, distinctly lower, for instance, than that of the Chinese. A fairly contented Indian peasant or artisan usually seems to Western eyes to possess no comforts at all. His cottage, or rather hut, consists practically of a single room, often built of dried mud instead of brick, with no floor, no attempt at a chimney, the fuel used being charcoal, and no furniture except sometimes a "charpoy" or two i.e. the simplest form of trestle-bed two or three brass lotahs, and some unglazed earthen cooking-pots. There are no chairs, no carpets, no tables for eating, no bedding in the English sense, nothing, indeed, whatever on THE "STANDARD OF COMFORT" IN INDIA 245 which a British pawnbroker would, in an hour of expansiveness, advance 3$. The owner's clothing may be worth 51. if he has a winter garment, and his wife's perhaps IQS. more, her festival robe, usually diaphanous, though sometimes as thick as an ordinary English shirt, having a distinct value. The children wear nothing at all. The man never sees or thinks about meat of any kind. He never dreams of buying alcohol in any shape. The food of the household costs about 6s. a month, and consists of roasted rice or unleavened cakes, fish if procurable, vegetables, milk, and a little clarified butter, the whole being made tasteful with cheap country spices ; and his only luxury is sugar made up, sometimes cleverly, sometimes horridly, accord- ing to the "way" of each district, into sweetmeats. He has practically no medical aid, though his wife is helped in her confinements by a midwife nearly as ignorant as herself, and never dreams of the purchase of anything of any sort with an exception to be mentioned by-and-by which can by any stretch of imagination be described as portable property. He could fly into the jungle with his whole possessions, his farm or hut of course excepted, at five minutes' notice, and carry them all himself. This method of life, with insignificant variations, consisting chiefly in an additional number of rooms, extends from the bottom of society up through the whole body of the poorer peasantry and the artisans, until you reach a grade which in Europe 246 ASIA AND EUROPE would be certainly ranked with the middle class, the absence of comfort existing as a permanent fact in at least twenty millions of households, or a popula- tion of a hundred millions. (We should ourselves put the figures much higher, but we do not want a statistical dispute.) Sir Auckland Colvin, like most Europeans, considers this state of affairs detestable ; he calls on the people to want more comforts, and he holds it one of the duties of the English in India to break down the Indian indifference to personal comfort in all matters of daily life. He wants the Indians, in fact, to house themselves better, to clothe themselves more fully, to buy more furniture, and generally to desire more strongly those necessary articles which, like shoes and stockings in London, are classed by many reasoners as among the neces- sary conditions and most palpable evidences of true civilization. Is he right or wrong ? Be it remembered he is not, as so many kindly men who do not know India will immediately assert, talking optimist nonsense, or suggesting changes hopelessly impossible on account of the poverty of the people. There is a poor class of workers in India as everywhere else, and in a land where everything is on the Asiatic scale that is, immoder- ately large that class is numerous enough to make a people ; but a majority of the masses whose living we have described, and about whom the Lieutenant- Governor was talking, could live otherwise if they chose. The man in a waist cloth and nothing else THE "STANDARD OF COMFORT" IN INDIA 247 has always a hoard of some kind, often a hoard so large that its multiplication by millions nearly explains that drain of silver to India which has worried economists ever since our reign began, and which remains one of the most inexplicable facts in commercial history, the silver disappearing as if it fell through into a hidden reservoir. The woman with a thin sheet for her only covering tinkles at every step she takes, her ankles and arms being loaded with silver bangles, which are not unfrequently supplemented with a waist belt of valuable coins, English sovereigns sometimes in the north, when the harvest has been immense, or prices in Europe tempt speculators to ship wheat in such quantities that the very rivers are overweighted with traffic. The child who runs about without a rag on is burdened with silver anklets, and on festival days tempts every scoundrel to murder her merely for the value of her heavy ornaments. The " poor " men of India possess a mass of jewels which, if applied to that purpose, would in a few years house them comfortably that is, solidly while the sums they waste on festivals and the marriage ceremonies of children would provide more furniture than the parents could ever use. It is not poverty which prevents the growth of the thirst for comfort in India, but luxury, if hoarding and jewel-buying be luxuries, thrift carried unhesitatingly to its logical consequence, that money shall not go out of the house, and the " indifference " of which Sir Auckland ASIA AND EUROPE Colvin speaks in terms of reprobation, and would use the influence of the dominant race finally to dispel. We ask again, is he right in his wish ? Most Europeans, full of their inbred conviction that comfort and civilization are identical, will answer at once, " Certainly he is ; " but we are not quite so sure. There is a civilization which is independent of furniture, and even of clothes, not to speak of many- roomed houses ; and the Indian very often indeed possesses that. It is not, of course, a Christian civilization, nor has it reached the level of civiliza- tion attained by the freemen in the old pagan countries on the shores of the Mediterranean ; but still, it is a very different thing from savagery or Socialism. His self-respect is not in the smallest degree wounded by his want of " comforts," nor is he conscious why, standing there in his loin cloth he should not take pride in himself, his wife, his home, or any of his belongings. As a rule, he is a respectable man even according to English ideas of respectability, that is to say, he commits no crimes, is faithful to his wife, pays all he owes, is the best of fathers, performs all small civic duties that fall to his lot with growling accuracy, and so long as expenditure is not asked of him, is an unusually helpful and steadfast friend. He usually knows who his great-grandfather was, which the European of his class does not, and often is as full of the pride of race, and that in its better form, as ever was THE "STANDARD OF COMFORT" IN INDIA 249 Sir Francis Doyle's drunken private of the Buffs who died rather than surrender his pride of caste. He is one of the most industrious of mankind ; he will no more steal than an English maid servant will ; and he is, for all his ignorance, which no doubt is fathomless, as sensitive about what he considers his honour as any old English squire. He is not a bad fellow at all in ordinary times, though there is a bad drop in his pagan heart which shows itself on provocation ; and he derives much of his good qualities from his sense of a personal dignity independ- ent of material circumstances. A life long struggle for nice furniture would demoralize rather than raise his character, as would also waiting for mar- riage until he possessed a carpet, or working for pay amidst an impure crowd in order to enrich his mess of food. He is an aristocrat of a sort, and in urging him into the race for physical comfort, which at present he does not regard at all, you are at least running the risk, or, as we should say, incurring the certainty, of breaking down the aristocratic or haughtily independent side of his character, which is its strongest buttress. He would descend from the yeoman or self- managing artisan who lives in his own house, and can make marvels almost with- out tools, into a member of an over- numerous pro- letariat, all struggling with each other, and gradually placing comfort before dignity, independence, or any other ideal of civilized life. It would be wise, the economists say, to spend his hoard on furniture, but 250 ASIA AND EUROPE then his sense of security would be gone ; and wise to melt his wife's jewels, but then where would be her social pride? no mean preservative, be it re- membered, in a non- Christian land. We are no pas- sionate admirers of Thoreau as he was, or even of the man Thoreau wished to seem to be ; but an unconscious Thoreau, wholly unaware of effort, and respecting the bareness of his hut because it was bare too in his forefathers' time, seems to us nearly the equal in character of the smug Englishman who, owing all the civilization he has to Christianity, often glibly dismisses the teachings of that creed as " talk good enough for parsons." In inspiring the Indian with the thirst for comfort, we may do his character much disservice ; while as to his happi- ness, we question if any comfort except one, medical attendance, would add to it one jot, the best proof perhaps, being that many of his countrymen, when they have attained to position, and even large wealth, live precisely as he does, buying, no doubt, good houses, and occasionally English furniture, but living, in their own offices and their women's rooms, as simply as peasants or artisans. The Indian poor man is not harassed by the climate of Europe ; he has plenty of easy society, he has no employer to fear, and as he sits on the estrade of baked earth round his house, drinking the soft, sweet air, and watching his children, he is as full of humour, often of the gayest and most satirical kind, as any Parisian artisan. To exchange his religion, with its endless THE "STANDARD OF COMFORT" IN INDIA 251 terrors about the past and for the future, for the light of Christianity ; to alter his moral code till he becomes pitiful and forgiving ; to enlarge his mind till intellectual interests fill some space in his life, and his talk is not eternally of pence and trifles, these seem to us great objects ; but to " raise his standard of comfort," and so fill all India with discontent, in order that furniture dealers and clothiers and con- fectioners may make great businesses, we confess that this effort to revolutionize the habits of a con- tinent seems to us hardly worth while. Our success in such a task would be good for the Indian revenue, no doubt, and therefore for the useful machinery of administration ; but it would not be equally good for the people, who are at present, amid much suffering from ignorance, at least free of that burden of endless wants and strugglings which make up so much of the system we vaunt as Western civilization. The Core of Hindooism AMONG the great creeds which have influenced masses of mankind, there is none the inner strength of which it is so difficult to discern, as Hindooism. Its governing tenets are so overlaid with superstitions, its central thoughts so obscured by a meanly gorgeous ritual, its essentials so smoth- ered in what to its teachers seem non-important details, that many observers doubt if it has any inner life at all. Ninety in a hundred of the Europeans in India, including, unfortunately, many Mission- aries, regard it as a mass of absurdities, foisted by cunning priests upon an ignorant population, and intended first of all to secure the ascendency and the easy living of a single hieratic corporation, recruited by hereditary descent, and trained in col- leges which are in fact schools for the cultivation of ceremonial laws. A few Europeans of course have discerned that no faith of which this could be justly said, could have maintained its dominion over millions of intelligent men for tens of centuries, and have endeavoured from time to time to inform Europe of the ideas which, under an almost crushing THE CORE OF HINDOOISM 253 weight of overgrowth, have kept Hindooism alive, which have given its general principles victory in a hundred revolts, and which to this day enchain some of the subtlest and most disinterested thinkers that the world has produced. As a rule, however, these European exponents of Hindooism have found but thin audiences. They have either been distrusted as controversialists sworn to a particular view, or have been overweighted with repellent learning, or have lost all clearness of utterance in the effort to reconcile the practice of Hindooism with the inner faith of its devotees. The Hindoos themselves have helped them very little. Asia is not given to explanations such as Europeans understand ; and so far as we know, there is no apology for Hindooism written in a European tongue by a Hindoo, to which any attention has been paid. It is therefore with some surprise, as well as much interest, that we have read a pamphlet written in English by a Madras Brahmin named Swami Viv6kananda, and published at three-farthings a copy, which is intended to supply this great deficiency. It was read, we believe, originally before the " Parliament of Re- ligions " held at Chicago, and is certainly a remark- able performance. The writer is far too brief ; he omits altogether to give us the Hindoo view of the relation of religion to morality, and he is obscure probably with intention as to the Hindoo concep- tion of what he calls " God " ; and though he knows English as well as we do, he cannot entirely rid 254 ASIA AND EUROPE himself of the Asiatic tendency to an interjectional style, with all its assumptions and inflations. Still, his little pamphlet has merits not to be denied. He really understands at least part of what is wanted of him, and succeeds in telling any Englishman who will read him patiently, what the essential thought of Hindooism is. There are, we believe, more than fifty accepted external forms of Hindooism, ranging from a wor- ship which is hardly higher than fetishism indeed, Swami Viv6kanaada gives it that opprobrious appel- lation up to the worship of the highest Sunyasees, which is free from any formulas or any kind of ritual, whether low or high, is indeed a service of pure thought or rapt contemplation of the Infinite ; but every Hindoo, whatever his intellectual grade, is aware of and accepts certain philosophic dogmas. One of these is that spirit exists as well as matter, and is of necessity, under laws which to Hindoos seem self-evident, inherently above matter. As a fact, for which no one can account, spirits are im- prisoned in bodies, but spirit is nevertheless above matter, is deathless, as most European thinkers also believe, but, as none of them believe, is also without origin. The spirit, say the Hindoos, or " soul," to use our Western terminology, can by no conceivable possibility have been created, for if created it would be liable to die, and that which dies cannot be a spirit. Swami Vivdkdnanda puts this dogma for- ward in the simplest language, not as a matter of THE CORE OF HINDOOISM 255 argument, but as a fact which, to all who reason, must be self-evident. He says : " Here I stand, and if I shut my eyes and try to conceive my exist- ence, 'I/ 'I,' 'I,' what is the idea before me ? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combi- nation of matter and material substances ? The Vedas declare, ' No.' I am a spirit living in a body. 1 am not the body. The body will die, but I will not die. Here am I in this body, and when it will fall still will I go on living. Also I had a past. The soul was not created from nothing, for creation means a combination, and that means a certain future dissolution. If, then, the soul was created, it must die. Therefore, it was not created." The soul being uncreated must be an emanation from some- thing self-existent, and that can only be God or the self-existent spirit which is in all things and contains all things, being in truth the only reality of which everything else is a phenomenal manifestation. Being an emanation, the soul is always struggling to get back to its source, to liberate itself from the fetters of matter, and in regaining unity with the Infinite to regain at one and the same moment free- dom and " bliss." The freedom from matter is self-evident, and so, asserts Swami Vive"kananda, is the bliss. He knows quite well that to the highly individualized Western this notion of absorption being bliss, seems almost absurd, or at least an asser- tion that torpor is bliss, and he meets that difficulty with almost child- like directness : " We have often 256 ASIA AND EUROPE and often read about this being called the losing of individuality as in becoming a stock or a stone. I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be more happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, or three, four, or five and the ultimate of happiness would be reached when this sense of enjoyment would become a universal consciousness." As the spirit or soul is uncreated and cannot die, and struggles always to regain its habitat, and as clearly a great many men are not fit to regain it at once, it follows almost as a matter of course that the soul lives repeatedly in a conscious being, that is, is " transmigrated," a fact of which the memory of most men gives them no consciousness any more, says the Madrassee Brahmin smilingly, than a Madrassee's memory gives him his English be- fore he wants it and compels it to come to his mind but which is nevertheless a fact proved by two arguments. If we have no past, our misfortunes are injustices, and God is a cruel tyrant, which is impossible ; and moreover certain " Rishis " " saints " will do as a translation have positively remembered many lives, or even all their lives, a huge conception, which the Swami nevertheless asserts may be true of all men : " This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by our Rishis. We have discovered the secrets by which the very depths of the ocean THE CORE OF HINDOOISM 257 of memory can be stirred up follow them and you will get a complete reminiscence of your past life." " Freedom " then being the end, how is freedom to be obtained ? It may be obtained, says the Hindoo, by all men, by the Christian no less than by himself, if only he will become " pure " ; and it is in this effort after "purity" that Hindooism as we see it arises. Each sect, each caste, each subdi- vision of a caste, strives for it in its own way, and so long as the way tends to subordinate matter to spirit, no way is wrong. Swami Vive*kdnandd rejects utterly, as we understand him, the idea that any worship can be sinful, and regards all as strugglers, some, like children, requiring images and ritual to wake the consciousness of spirit in them ; but all pressing forward, though with many fallings back, to a goal that must ultimately be attained. " Ye are the children of God," he says, " the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye, divinities on earth, sinners ? It is a sin to call a man so. It is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions ! and shake off the delusion that you are sheep you are souls immortal, spirits free and blest and eternal, ye are not matter, ye are not bodies. Matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter. ... If a man can realize his divine nature most easily with the help of an image, would it be right to call it a sin ? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindoo, man is not travelling from error to s 258 ASIA AND EUROPE truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association ; and each of these religions, therefore, marks a stage of progress, and every soul is a child-eagle soaring higher and higher, gather- ing more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun." This, then, is the inner Hindooism, the belief which every Hindoo accepts, and which sanctifies to him every act which he thinks or fancies or dreams may be worship. The lowest forms of idolatry, the most prejudicial rules of caste, the most cruel acts of self-maceration all help him on, as he believes, towards that " liberation " from the chain of matter which is to him the ideal and the perfect condition. No Hindoo, however low, is wholly without this belief, and, as we suspect, no Hindoo, even if he becomes a Christian, shakes himself in one genera- tion wholly free from its influence. It is not our business, of course, to reply to Hindoo advocates, to point out that their theory presupposes an end- less cycle organized rather by Fate than God ; that the impossibility of the creation of a spirit is a denial of omnipotence ; that there is no particle of evidence for transmigration ; or that their heaven, when attained, is only sleep, however blissful, even if it be not, as regards individual existence, simple anni- THE CORE OF HINDOOISM 259 hilation. All we wish to point out to-day is that the Hindoos have behind their apparent creed another, which cannot fairly be denounced as either savage or ignoble, and that this creed is in its essence more hostile to Christianity than even sincere Chris- tians are apt to believe. It rests on a totally different conception of the nature of the Supreme Being, who, says Swami Vivekananda, with all thinking Hindoos, cannot be an individual, or possess " qualities " ; on a radically separate concep- tion of the soul, which in Hindooism is practically self- existent, and on a method of struggling towards heaven which may be in the highest minds a lofty dominance of matter by spirit, but may also be in average men nothing but a low formalism adopted, no doubt, with an idea of rising, but no more calcu- lated to make a man rise than any form of the fetishism to which our Brahmin compares it. His tolerance, of which he is so proud, is hardly distin- guishable from indifference to truth, and we wish he would tell us in a pamphlet as brief as this one, what his ideas as to the final division between right and wrong really are, and how far Hindooism actually asserts what it always seems to assert, that that may be right in one man, one caste, or one nation which is hopelessly wrong in another. As we read his present pamphlet we understand him to say that anything done with the idea of getting higher is a virtuous act. Does he, in so teaching, recognize the existence of a sovereign and universal consci- z6o ASIA AND EUROPE ence, be it instinctive or be it revealed, or not ? We have tried for years, as patiently as a European may, to decide what Hindoos like the Swami think on that point, and we remain in a fog still. We cannot, that is, perceive how great Hindoo doctors permit polygamy in one caste not to mention much worse things and denounce it in another, yet keep up any unalterable distinctions based on the teach- ing of the inner light. And without that light how does a Hindoo know what will raise him higher ? Cruelty in Europe and Asia IN considering the differences, radical or acci- dental, which divide, and, as we believe, always will divide, Asiatics from Europeans, one of the most perplexing is the different estimates they apparently form of cruelty. The horror naturalis for that form of criminality which un- doubtedly marks Englishmen, and in a less degree all European peoples, seems not to extend to Asiatics at all. The Chinese officials constantly sentence political offenders to the most awful tor- tures, to be killed, for example, by a slow chopping into little bits. The King who ruled in Burmah in 1850 habitually sentenced the women of any family whose head was convicted or suspected of treason, to be ripped up the great American missionary, Dr. Kincaid, saw it done, and risked his own life by felling the executioner and their children to be pounded up in the mortars used for pounding grain. The wife of Theebau, the King whom we dethroned, is said to have delivered fearful sentences, which we do not recount because the evidence is still so imperfect and so impaired by the wish to attribute 861 262 ASIA AND EUROPE extra cruelty to a dethroned House. The charge against the late Guicowar of having offenders stamped to death by elephants, appears however to be true ; while every traveller in Persia relates horrible stories of brigands and others being built alive into stone walls, the head alone protruding. Jung Bahadoor, we all know, shot with his own hands a large company of his opponents beguiled into a royal hall ; and a few years ago telegrams were received asserting that a Khan of Khelat had slain three thousand of his subjects not in battle and had " murdered " sixty-five persons of distinction, including five of his own wives, and had in consequence been deposed by the Government of India. There are scores of such stories, most of them true ; and the point we wish to discuss is why punishment so seldom fol- lows from within ? Why do not the people depose these bloodthirsty rulers for themselves ? It is certainly not because they are afraid. Nobody is, or can be, braver than a Mahratta or a Persian. They insurrect, if they are moved to insurrect, when- ever they choose, often, as in the Bab insurrection, when they have no chance at all ; and must be aware that they are giving their lives for a cause lost beyond redemption. Nor is it because insurrection is hopeless. In most of the countries specified, and, indeed, in all countries throughout Asia except Turkey and, of late years, China, the armed people, if in earnest, could master their rulers speedily CRUELTY IN EUROPE AND ASIA 263 enough ; while, in all, if the army rebelled, the Sovereigns would have no alternatives but submis- sion, flight, or suicide. Yet popular insurrection against cruelty is an unheard-of event. The truth is, the people do not care ; and the point we want to arrive at is the ultimate reason why. Is it that they feel some singular indifference to the murder of others, or that they are inherently callous, or that cruelty in some inexplicable way rather con- tents than horrifies them ? All these explanations so constantly put forward are in a measure true, but behind them all is another probably more potent than them all put together. That Asiatics regard life differently from Europeans is, of course, a patent fact. If it were not, all Asiatics could not have adopted creeds in which contempt for life, amount- ing often to a distaste for separate consciousness, is a cardinal dogma. The Buddhist and the Hindoo alike base their creeds upon the latter feeling ; while the Mahommedans, without exception, hold death for the faith the one direct passport to immortal bliss. It is also true that Asiatics are callous, lack- ing that side of the imagination which we call sym- pathy, and which has become so dominant among ourselves, that we are apt to forget how compara- tively recent its development has been. It is not two hundred years since Englishmen allowed untried prisoners to die of typhoidal disease, produced by starvation and neglect ; not fifty years since Eng- lishmen across the water maintained the Black 264 ASIA AND EUROPE Code ; and not two months or two days since the same people in the Western States defended and practised burning alive as the fitting penalty for strongly suspected rape. Sympathy is still imper- fect even among white men ; and in Asia, with individual exceptions of the most extraordinary kind inexplicable, indeed, if there be no such thing as prevenient grace sympathy has yet to be born. Nor should we deny that among Asiatics cruelty, and especially cruelty in putting to death, does excite a certain kind of admiration as a conspicuous and unmistakable exhibition of energy. Mr. Morier, who probably understood Persians as no other European ever understood them, takes great pains in all his books to assert and reassert this trait in Persian character ; and it comes out strongly in the Sikh admiration for Runjeet Singh, and the Afghan reverence for Abdurrahman Khan. Still, after making these admissions, there remains something else ; which is this. The Asiatic substitute for law is the will of the ruler, a will which, believing that power comes from God, he reverences even in his thoughts. We are apt to think that he only sub- mits to a tyranny which he cannot help ; but, as a matter of fact, when he can help it, he does not do it There have been more revolutions in Asia than in Europe ; but there has never been a case in which the brown man or the yellow man has deprived his new ruler of the power of inflicting death by fiat. He regards his will as law in its CRUELTY IN EUROPE AND ASIA 265 true sense, and is no more offended when he orders executions than the Frenchman was offended when traitors were broken on the wheel, than the Spaniard was offended when relapsed heretics were burned, or than Englishmen were offended when criminals were hanged for larceny or breaches of the revenue law. The law, as the Asiatic understands it, has sentenced those whom the Sovereign dooms, and he is satisfied, even though the law, in its severity or capriciousness, should threaten himself. So may the lightning or the smallpox ; yet both of them are the manifestations of a will that cannot err, resist- ance to which is futile and, in some sense, impious. It is not that he approves murder, or does not fear murder. He sets up governments, and pays taxes first of all to be protected against murder ; but when the murderer is the ruler he submits, as we submit to law. We are not sure whether the same senti- ment, though it sprang from a different origin, did not once prevail in Europe, whether, that is, the Roman did not hold the murderous fury of an Emperor like Nero or Valentinian to be a legal fury, something which, proceeding from the rightful possessor of the dictatorship, became from that fact alone legally right and incontestable. We do not find that Romans bore wrongs from each other, much less murders, without complaint, nor were they always cowed by the Praetorians. Why the brown man and the yellow man thus exalts the ruler's will is, we confess, still to us a 266 ASIA AND EUROPE nearly unsolved mystery. It is not altogether because he is Asiatic, for the average Russian who is as purely white as we are, that talk of his Tartar origin having no historic basis did it too, and regarded Ivan the Terrible as a Monarch of singular force of character and ability. Nor is it from any deficiency of intelligence. The Asiatic restrains the Monarch completely upon the points he chooses religion, for instance, and general taxa- tion and he not only comprehends a regime of written law, but he is of all men the most ready to take advantage of it. Only he never likes it ; and from the days of Saul to the days of Rajah Brooke, whenever he has accepted a King, he has wished his authority to be unrestrained. He will change the ruler if he is intolerable, but he never chains him, though he could chain him easily enough, ordering him to respect his subjects' lives as he respects their religious ceremonials. The Asiatic says himself or at least we have heard a great Asiatic thinker say so a hundred times that a regime of law is a regime of injustice, that no law can meet individual cases ; and that, in particular, no law can be constructed so as to reward the good, which is half the work to be accomplished. But we are not sure that this is his real belief. The religious law is open to precisely the same objec- tions ; yet he reverences that and reduces it to writing, and in most countries invents a " case book " for its further application and explanation. 267 We suspect he is much more influenced in his strange practice, from which in three thousand years he has never deviated, by a wish to make the State as like the universe as he can the uni- verse which is controlled by some irresponsible, self- depending deity or spirit or fate, whose will, as seen in action, it is often impossible to explain. The bolt strikes the tiger or the lamb ; and as is the bolt, so is the will of the ruler strong enough to keep his throne. The fact that the lamb is dead is no argument against the system of the universe ; it is only an argument that we do not understand it. We all acknowledge that in theory ; but with the Asiatic his theory is a practical guide in life, and he no more considers his ruler's cruelty immoral, unless indeed specially directed against himself, than he considers the earthquake or the flood. The Variety of Indian Society TH E grand difficulty, as any experienced Anglo- Indian will tell you, of talking to an English- man about India, is that he always forms a picture of the place in his mind. It may be accurate or inaccurate, but it is always a picture. He thinks of it either as a green delta, or a series of sun-baked plains, or a wild region with jungle and river and farms all intermixed ; or a vast park stretched out by Nature for sportsmen, and sloping somehow at the edges towards highly cultivated plains. It never occurs to him that as regards external aspect, there is no India ; that the peninsula so called is as large as Europe west of the Vistula, and presents as many variations of scenery. East Anglia is not so differ- ent from Italy as the North- West Provinces from Bengal, nor are the Landes so unlike Normandy as the Punjab is unlike the hunting districts of Madras. There is every scene in India from the eternal snow of the Himalayas, as much above Mont Blanc as Mont Blanc is above Geneva, to the rice swamps of Bengal all buried in fruit trees ; from the wonder- ful valleys of the Vindhya, where beauty and THE VARIETY OF INDIAN SOCIETY 269 fertility seem to struggle consciously for the favour of man, to the God-forgotten salt marshes by the Runn of Cutch. It is the same with indigenous Indian society. The Englishman thinks of it as an innumerable crowd of timid peasants, easily taxed and governed by a few officials, or as a population full of luxurious princes, with difficulty restrained by scientific force and careful division from eating up each other. In reality, Indian society is more complex and varied than that of Europe, comprising it is true, a huge mass of peasant-proprietors, but yet full of Princes who are potentates and Princes who are survivals, of landlords who are in all respects great nobles, and landlords who are only squireens, of great ecclesiastics and hungry curates, of merchants like the Barings and merchants who keep shops, of professors and professionals, of adventurers and criminals, of cities full of artificers, and of savages far below the dark citizens of Hawaii. Let any one who thinks Indian society a plain, study for an hour Sir Roper Lethbridge's Golden Book of India, just issued by Messrs. Macmillan, and he will give up that absurdity at least It is not a perfect book by any means, as its editor him- self perceives, but rather the foundation of a book to be improved into completeness ; but at least it will teach any reader that Indian society is not a democracy, that amidst all these peasants and offi- cials stand hundreds, or rather thousands, of families as distinct from the masses as the Percys from 270 ASIA AND EUJtOPE English labourers, three hundred of them ruling States large or small one is bigger than the British Isles ; one only two miles square three thousand of them perhaps who on the Continent would be accounted nobles, some with pedigrees like those of the Massimi or the Zichys, some only of yesterday ; but all as utterly separated from the people as a hill from the river at its base. And behind them stand other thousands of squires, each with his own family traditions, each with hereditary tenantry, each with some position and character and specialty which, within fifty miles of his home, are as well known as those of the Egertons in Cheshire, or the Luttrells in West Somerset. And behind them again are X millions literally millions of families, country and urban, with modest means, and little wish for advance- ment, yet freeholders to a man, with histories often which trace back farther than those of the Lords, with a pride of their own which is immovable, and with characters that for five miles are known and reckoned on, and, so to speak, expected, as regu- larly and as accurately as if they were Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg. Ask the Settlement officers who alone among Indian officials, except sometimes the highest, really know the people and they will tell you that, above the very lowest, no two Indian families are alike in rank or character or reputa- tion, or even, though that seems so impossible, in means. India is socially the very land of variety, tor in THE VARIETY OF INDIAN SOCIETY 271 addition to all that divides men in Europe, there are three sources of reverence which in Europe are dying away the reverence felt for power, power in its direct sense, the power to order you to be beaten, the reverence felt for pedigree, and the reverence felt for that which is, as certain to have been decreed either by God, or by that unintelligible and immu- table Fate which even He may not resist. The reverence for all is absolutely genuine that is, is without the alloy of European scepticism and dislike of the great ; and all three reverences are mingled in a way which we despair of conveying to the Western mind. There are three hundred Native rulers in India, possessed, in theory at all events, of the power of life and death ; certain that, if they give the order, its object will fall headless before them, or be spirited away to a dungeon, there to remain till the lord's humour changes. Every one of those men is believed by his people, be they many or few, to have a right to that power, and to be entitled to use it at his own discretion. For his own sake he should use it wisely, lest he should find the next world disagreeable, or, lest his subjects should rebel ; but the right is never denied even in the heart The British Government controls it, sometimes, though not so often as Englishmen think ; but the subjects never, except by rebellion, which is not a declaration that the power is bad, but the user of the power. The late Gaekwar was not unpopular, though he is said to have made his 272 ASIA AND EUROPE elephants tread out men's bowels, often for inade- quate offence. Power is of God, and to have such power the ruler must, in a former life, have heaped up virtues ; and the little Mahrattas, brave as steel, bowed their heads in genuine loyalty and devotion. And this, though the Gaekwar bears a name, " the Herdsman," which, a hundred and fifty years ago, was, we would deferentially suggest to Sir Roper Lethbridge, neither more nor less than the nickname of the leader of a troop of patriot brigands such as followed the founder of the House of Anjou. This reverence for power is the true root of the astound- ing variety of names which the Princes have gradu- ally adopted. " Nizam " is only " Administrator," but it suffices to the most powerful King in India. " Dewan " is only " Finance Minister," but it is the title of several rulers. " Gaekwar," as we have said, is only " Herdsman," but the reigning Prince of Baroda is as willing to be called that as Maharaja. The power being clear, nothing else matters, save only birth, and on this the Indian holds, and holds hard, by both theories. Want of pedigree does not interfere with the position of the Gaekwar, or Sindia, or Holkar, as it did not interfere with the reverence felt for Hyder Ali, a corporal's son, or for Runjeet Singh, a village officer ; and yet, if pedigree be not the main factor in Indian life, all observers alike are at fault. The Maharana of Udaipur (Oodeypore) is first among Hindoos, because, whether he descends from Rama or not, it is eighteen hundred years or THE VARIETY OF INDIAN SOCIETY 273 more since he, even then head of a family which had resisted Alexander, settled down in Rajpootana to reign till the Black Era should disappear in the endless progress of time. The Maharaja of Travancore certainly reigned, as even Sir Roper Lethbridge allows and he is careful to understate legendary pedigrees in 352 A.D., and we see no reason for doubting the local belief, which asserts that even then he sprang of the Emperors of Mala- bar, a family lost in the night of time, and because of that descent he is in his own dominions almost divine. The Maharaja of Calicut, whom the Natives and English alike used to call the " Zamorin," that is, " the Admiral," because he reigned, like the Deys of Algiers, over a pirate fleet, is nearly or quite as old ; and so is another Prince, eighty-eighth sove- reign of his comparatively obscure dynasty. But why should we multiply instances when caste itself hangs on pedigree, and when in 1857 every mutinous Brahmin Sepoy who sprung to arms pro- claimed the Emperor of Delhi, a powerless Mahom- medan voluptuary, the birth-lord, and therefore rightful lord, of India from Herat to Adam's Bridge ? As to the third source of reverence, how are we to describe it, unless we quote the Highland story of the woman, whose husband falling under feudal dis- pleasure, said to him, with an embrace and a sigh, " Gang up and be hangit, Donald, and dinna anger the laird." There spoke the true Indian when face to face with the irresistible ; and in that tran- T 274 ASIA AND EUROPE quillity under suffering, if only it is customary, and therefore ordained, is a source of distinctions of grade such as Europe can hardly conceive. A man may rise in India, by the sword or by favouritism or by chicane, even more rapidly than in Europe ; but if he does not rise, he accepts the effect of a violent difference of grade as English labourers accept the seasons. Who is he, to resist what Nature has decreed ? And finally, right across these distinctions come the ecclesiastical ones, cutting them, as it were, into bits, yet leaving them entire. No power, no character, no pedigree, can make the Hindoo Prince the equal of any Brahmin in his dominion. The Maharaja of Nepal, absolute as deity, or the Maharaja of Travancore, with his matchless pedigree, or the last Sindia, with the floors of his harem apartments bursting with their treasures in metal, is alike a mere dog by the side of the Brahmin whom he could order to be tortured for an impertinent word. There is not, that we see, the faintest chance that this extreme variety in the conditions and rank of Indians will ever fade away. The English have tried hard for a hundred years to drag the steam- roller of their doctrine of equal rights over the sur- face of Indian society, but their success has been very slight. They have smitten down the Emperor of Delhi and a few Princes, but three hundred men remain beyond the law ; and they have crippled the nobles without effacing them, have, indeed, as Sir THE VARIETY OF INDIAN SOCIETY 275 Roper Lethbridge points out, added to their number. If they remain, they will be afraid, indeed, they are already afraid, to level the whole of Native society, lest the whirlwind should some day upheave the grains of sand, and leave them for ever buried in the dunes. They will maintain rank, if not privilege, as long as they can ; and as for the Natives, differ- ences of rank are to them almost sacred. They will die for precedence, slaughter for position, and wage war for generation after generation for recognized power among their fellows. Why not? Where God is believed to have made caste, equality is nonsense, as much nonsense as election must be where power is held to spring from God alone. The All may speak, no doubt, through the shout of a mob ; but he may also speak through the sword, or descent, or ecclesiastical fiat ; and, in either case, he who is chosen is, while he retains the Divine protec- tion as evidenced by his keeping his throne, absolute and irresponsible save to the All alone. It is not that the idea of equality has not penetrated into India, as so many say, for every idea has penetrated there, and rank is even now independent of occupa- tion the Raja, as we have seen with our eyes, sweeping the dust from the Koolin clerk's feet with his own forehead but that it has penetrated and has been deliberately rejected as inconsistent with the whole scheme of the universe. How can there be equality when one man may have lived fifty lives of virtue, and another fifty of vice, and the one be 276 ASIA AND EUROPE justly rewarded by being the slave or prisoner of the other ? There never will be equality in India, even in the desire of the people, unless the Mussul- mans restore their Empire ; and even the Mussul- mans have been deeply touched by the Hindoo genius, and allow to antiquity and pedigree and position claims utterly inconsistent with the social teaching of the Prophet, who made a black slave Commander-in-Chief of a great army. We have hardly left ourselves space to discuss the question whether the English have acted wisely in introducing into India their own ideas of rank. Sir Roper Lethbridge, who has had much informa- tion given him from the Indian Foreign Office, seems to think they have. We always bow before real experts, but our own impressions tend to a con- trary conclusion. The Star should, we think, have been reserved for Europeans who comprehend the meaning of such a decoration ; and the Government should have used, as, indeed, it does use, the system of native rank lying ready to its hand. It should, that is to say, when it wished to reward a man, have conferred on him a native title, whether personal, hereditary, or an innovation we strongly advise continuative, that is, heritable while any descendant of the new noble, who was alive at the time of his creation, shall survive. The title should usually be Raja, or Nuwab, not Maharaja, which implies terri- tory but the Foreign Office should take some trouble to grant the precise title the recipient most THE VARIETY OP INDIAN SOCIETY 277 desires. Even in France a "Vidame" does not want to be called Marquis, and so lose half his history ; and in India the name bestowed by the masses is often the most acceptable title that can be found. The matter is not of much importance, perhaps, but it is desirable to keep up grade in a land where grades are universally considered right, and we might, we think, do it without inflicting on those we honour, barbarous names which the body of the people to be impressed can neither pronounce nor understand. They desire, as we believe, pre- cedence among each other, not precedence among the white intruders into the secluded land. The Prince who sat on his star gave vulgar expression to a feeling which can hardly be absent from a Native mind : " Who are these barbarians of yester- day that they should think us honoured with the decorations of their chilly island ? " The Vastness of Calamities in Asia EVEN in Asia, where everything is immoderate, where a forest covers kingdoms, a river deposits a county in a decade, and man grows feeble from an abiding sense that Nature is too strong for him, there has been no calamity in our time at once so terrible and so dramatic as the bursting of the Yellow River on September 27, 1887. It exceeds in its extent, if not in the separateness of its horror, the submerging of the island of Deccan Shahbaz- pore in 1876, when a storm-wave in two hours swept off three hundred thousand human beings. The Yellow River, larger and swifter than the Ganges, and containing more water perhaps than five Danubes, bears to the immense province called Honan, which is ten thousand square miles larger than England and Wales, much the relation borne by the Po towards the Lombard Plain, at once a blessing and a scourge. Its waters originally created the lowlands of the province by depositing silt through ages, and they are now their torment. The alluvial land, once above the water, is rich with a richness of which Englishmen have no experience, being covered with a thick pad of yellow mould a 878 THE VASTNESS OF CALAMITIES IN ASIA 279 hundred feet or more deep, on which everything will grow, from the teak tree to the pineapple, yielding, when planted with rice, one hundred and sixty fold, and in places producing, almost without manure and with light ploughing, two full crops a year. No people living by agriculture can resist the temptation of such a soil, and for ages the Chinese of all races in the world the most instinctively agricultural have swarmed to these lowlands, to find that, in spite of all their profits, they must embank the river or perish. The surplus water of autumn, probably, like that of the Ganges, nine times the regular out- flow, rushing down in huge masses from the hills at a speed of twelve miles an hour, pours its overspill over whole counties, drowning everything not ten feet above the river-level, and when it retires, leaves, besides a deposit fatal to one year's crop, an unen- durable variety of fever. Down go whole popu- lations at once, not dead, but paralysed for work and with their constitutions ruined. The Chinese, who in their courage for labour are a grand people, fought the river, embanked it, and for two thousand years at least reaped enormous harvests from the pro- tected soil. Every two centuries or so, however, the river, rising in its strength like a malignant genius, swept every barrier away, cut for itself a new bed nine such beds are known and ruined a province ; but the people swarm in again, the new work is easier at first, and the land is again recovered from the vast lagoons. The last outburst occurred 280 ASIA AND EUROPE twenty-five years ago ; but the Chinese still perse- vered, immense dykes were completed, and the province once more became a garden. There is, however, a difficulty in embanking any river carrying huge deposits. The Times corres- pondent blunders about this. He talks of it as a specialty of the Yellow River, but every river carry- ing much pulverized soil from the mountains pre- sents the same perplexity to engineers. The water not only deposits silt where it debouches, but all along its course ; and if it is shut in by embank- ments, the bed of the river incessantly rises higher, until at last it is far above the plain. The bed of the Po, for example, is in places forty feet above the rice- lands, and some of the dykes of the Mississippi are like artificial hills. The Yellow River, from the enormous rapidity of its volume when swollen by melted snow, is the worst of offenders in this respect ; its new bed, even in twenty-five years, has risen far above the plain, and as the dykes grow from hillocks into hills, from mere walls into ranges of earth- works like fortress-sides, hundreds of miles long, the effort overtaxes the skill of the engineers, and the perseverance even of Chinese labourers. The ablest engineers in India were beaten by the Damoodah, though it is, compared with the Hoang- Ho, like a trumpery European stream, and though the labour available could hardly be exhausted. The truth of the matter is that, in all such cases, the upper sections of the dykes cost too much for THE VASTNESS OF CALAMITIES IN ASIA 281 complete repair, and tend to be inadequate ; and when the Yellow River, gorged with water from the mountains till it forms in reality a gigantic reservoir, averaging a mile broad, from three to five hundred miles long, and seventy feet deep, all suspended in air by artificial supports, comes rushing down in autumn, the slightest weakness in those supports is fatal. On September 27 the river was at its fullest, its speed was at its highest, there was almost cer- tainly a driving wind from the West, a bit of dyke gave way, the rent spread for 1,200 yards, and our readers remember, for Charles Reade described it, the rush into Sheffield of the Holmfirth reservoir. Multiply that, if you can, by two thousand, add exhaustless renewals of the water from behind five Danubes pouring from a height for two months on end and instead of a long valley with high sides which can be reached, think of a vast, open plain, flat as Salisbury Plain, but studded with three thousand villages, all swarming as English villages never swarm : and you may gain a conception of a scene hardly rivalled since the Deluge. The torrent, it is known, in its first and grandest rush, though throwing out rivers every moment at every incline of the land, had for its centre a stream thirty miles wide and ten feet deep, travelling probably at twenty miles an hour a force as irresistible as that of lava. No tree could last ten minutes, no house five, the very soil would be carried away as by a supernatural ploughshare ; and as for man, an ant in a broken 282 ASIA AND EUROPE stop-cock in a London street would be more power- ful than he. Swim ? As well wrestle with the Holy head express. Fly ? It takes hours in such a plain to reach a hillock three feet high, the water the while pouring on faster than a hunter's gallop. There is no more escape from such a flood than there is escape from the will of God, and those Chinese who refused even to struggle were the happiest of all, because the quickest dead. Over a territory of ten thousand square miles, or two York- shires at least (for the Missionaries report a wider area), over thousands of villages three thousand certainly, even if the capital is not gone, as is believed the soft water passed, silently strangling every living thing, the cows and the sheep as well as their owners ; and for ourselves, who have seen the scene only on a petty scale, we doubt whether the " best-informed European in Pekin " is not right when he calculates the destruction of life at seven millions, and whether the Times' reporter is not too fearful of being taken for a romancer when he re- duces it to one or two. These great villages are crammed with population, and alive with children ; the whole water of the Hoang-Ho has been pouring on them for two months, none reaching the sea ; and even by the highest estimate the dead are fewer than those who died of starvation a few years ago in the famine of the two Shans. In Asia, kingdoms and capitals have perished of pestilence, as Cam- bodia probably, and Gour certainly did ; and there is THE VASTNESS OF CALAMITIES IN ASIA 283 no reason, the physical conditions being favourable, why equal multitudes should not perish in a flood. What is the remedy ? What is the remedy for an earthquake ? There is no remedy. In that division of Honan, a generation has been swept away by a fiat stronger than man's, which has concentrated into two months the natural and inevitable slaughter of fifty years. The Chinese Government, which can be stirred by some things, and which, when stirred, has an elephantine energy, has given .500,000 from the central treasury to repair the dykes, and, as we read the orders, the whole revenue of Honan till the work is completed; has stopped 3 2, 000,000 Ib. of rice on its way to the capital and given it to the survivors, and has ordered all who are ruined, but not dead, to work at once on the dykes under mili- tary discipline. The labourers will not be paid, but they will be fed ; the Chinese engineers understand hydraulics fairly well ; the channel being new, the embankments need not be cyclopean at first though, be it remembered, the river of itself rises certainly twenty feet in autumn ; and at the cost of about as many lives as were sacrificed on the Suez Canal, and which will fall victims to the malaria developed as the waters retire, the Yellow River will for another generation be chained up once more. The old attraction will then prove irresistible ; all husbandmen without land for three hundred miles on each side of the river will silently steal in to settle on the alluvium, fruit trees will be planted, 284 ASIA AND EUROPE rice will be sown, and in five years life in Honan will be proceeding exactly as before, as it does on the slopes of Vesuvius after an eruption. For the past, therefore, there is no remedy, and for the future little hope. Nothing, if the river is simply dyked, can prevent its destroying the dykes when they reach a certain height ; for the work, increasing every year, must at some point overpower the resources of any State. If the Chinese Government could cut a broad and deep canal for three hundred miles to the ocean, or build, amid the hills from which the water flows, a reservoir vast as an inland sea, or construct a second line of dykes on each side five hundred yards from the water, the overspill of the Yellow River might be drained away in sufficient time to arrest grand catastrophes ; but that Government is at once too fatalistic and too weak for such gigantic efforts, and will be content if it can only secure safety for its own generation, leaving the next to suffer or escape, as may please the unknown powers. It is useless for Europeans to advise, or even to mourn, for they can do nothing, except, indeed, reflect that for the safety of their own civilizations, perhaps for part of the greatness of their own minds, they are indebted to the pettiness of scale on which their temperate dwelling-place has been constructed. We owe everything to the comparative insignificance of the works of Nature in Europe. One can dyke the Thames, but not the Yellow River ; tunnel the Alps, but not the Himalayas. A Typical Asiatic FEW careers have ever been more instructive to those who can see than that of the Maharaja Dhuleep Singh, who died in Paris in 1893 of apoplexy. He finished life a despised exile, but no man of modern days ever had such chances, or had seen them snatched, partly by fate, partly by fault, so completely from his lips. But for an accident, if there is such a thing as accident, he would have been the Hindoo Emperor of India. His father, Runjeet Singh, that strange combination of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, had formed and knew how to control an army which would have struck down all the Native powers of India much more easily than did any of the Tartar conquerors. Without its master at its head, that army defeated the British, and but for a magnificent bribe paid to its general (vide Cunningham's History of the Sikhs) would have driven the English from India and placed the child Dhuleep Singh upon the throne of the Peninsula, to be supported there by Sikh and Rajpoot, Mahratta and Beharee. Apart from the English there was nothing to resist them ; and they a86 ASIA AND EUROPE were guided by a woman, the Ranee Chunda Kour, who of all modern women was most like Mary of Scots as her enemies have painted her, and of whom, after her fall, Lord Dalhousie said that her capture would be worth the sacrifice of a brigade. How Dhuleep Singh would have reigned had Runjeet Singh's destiny completed itself is another matter probably like a Hindoo Humayoon for even if not the son of Runjeet Singh, who, be it remembered, acknowledged him, he inherited ability from his mother ; he was a bold man, and he was, as his career showed, capable of wild and daring adventure. He fell, however, from his throne under the shock of the second Sikh war, and began a new and, to all appearance, most promising career. Lord Dalhousie had a pity for the boy, and the English Court we never quite understood why an unusually kindly feeling. A fortune of .40,000 a year was settled on him, he was sent to England, and he was granted rank hardly less than that of a Prince of the Blood. He turned Christian apparently from conviction, though subsequent events throw doubt on that a tutor, who was quite competent, devoted himself to his education, and from the time he became of age he was regarded as in all respects a great English noble. He knew, too, how to sustain that character, made no social blunders, became a great sportsman, and succeeded in maintaining for years the sustained stateliness of life which in England is held to confer social dig- A TYPICAL ASIATIC 287 nity. Confidence was first shaken by his marriage, which, though it did not turn out unsuccessfully, and though the lady was in after-life greatly liked and respected, was a whim, his bride being a half Coptic, half English girl whom he saw in an Egyptian schoolroom, and who, by all English as well as Indian ideas of rank, was an unfitting bride. Then he began over-spending, without the slightest necessity, for his great income was unburdened by a vast estate ; and at last reduced his finances to such a condition that the India Office, which had made him advance after advance, closed its treasury and left him, as he thought, face to face with ruin. Then the fierce Asiatic blood in him came out. He declared himself wronged, perhaps believed himself oppressed, dropped the whole varnish of civilization from him, and resolved to make an effort for the vengeance over which he had prob- ably brooded for years. He publicly repudiated Christianity, and went through a ceremony intended to readmit him within the pale of the Sikh variety of the Hindoo faith. Whether it did readmit him, greater doctors than we must decide. That an ordinary Hindoo who has eaten beef cannot be readmitted to his own caste, even if the eating is involuntary, is certain, as witness the tradition of the Tagore family ; but the rights of the Royal are, even in Hindooism, extraordinarily wide, and we fancy that, had Dhuleep Singh succeeded in his enterprise, Sikh doctors of theology would have 288 ASIA AND EUROPE declared his readmission legal. He did not, how- ever, succeed. He set out for the Punjab intending, it can hardly be doubted, if the Sikhs acknowledged him, to make a stroke for the throne, if not of India, at least of Runjeet Singh ; but he was arrested at Aden, and after months of fierce dis- pute, let go, on condition that he should not return to India. He sought protection in Russia, which he did not obtain, and at last gave up the struggle, made his peace with the India Office, took his pension again, and lived, chiefly in Paris, the life of a disappointed but wealthy idler. There was some spirit in his adventure, though it was unwisely carried out. The English generally thought it a bit of foolhardiness, or a dodge to extract a loan from the India Office ; but those who were respon- sible held a different opinion, and would have gone nearly any length to prevent his reaching the Punjab. They were probably wise. The heir of Runjeet might have been ridiculed by the Sikhs as a Christian, but he might also have been accepted as a reconverted man ; and one successful skirmish in a district might have called to arms all the " children of the sugar and the sword," and set all India on fire. The Sikhs are our very good friends, and stood by us against any revival of the Empire of Delhi, their sworn hereditary foe ; but they have not forgotten Runjeet Singh, and a chance of the Empire for themselves might have turned many of their heads. A TYPICAL ASIATIC 289 Dhuleep Singh, though treated fairly enough by the Court and by the India Office, received too hard a measure from English opinion ; our country- men judged him as if he had been an English noble, and forgot that an Asiatic has in his blood hereditary qualities which education cannot destroy, and which differentiate him materially from the European. The first of these qualities is the power of his will in proportion to his mind. The will of an Asiatic, once fairly roused, closes on its purpose with a grip to which nothing in the mind of a European can compare, though Miss Wilkins declares that the same peculiarity exists in New England, a grip which seems too strong for the conscience, the judgement, and even the heart. The man is like one possessed, and cannot, if he would, change his own self-appointed course. If his will is for a small thing, we call it a " whim," and wonder that a man so keen should be so childish. If it is to beat down resistance by cruelty, he becomes a tyrant capable of acts such as are attributed, perhaps falsely, to Wellington's Maharaja of Coorg. He is utterly mastered by something within himself, and will do acts which seem to Europeans evidences of insanity. A quiet Hindoo trader, as respectable and ordinary as any man in Fleet Street, being moved thereto by an internal impulse, will resolve to go to Benares, and there sit a naked Sunyasee, living on alms, and will carry out that resolve for twenty years, unflinchingly, uncomplainingly, till 290 ASIA AND EUROPE death releases him from his sufferings. He may half disbelieve all the while ; but his will has closed, and, happen what may, earthquake included, there he will sit, unmoved, until his resolve has been fulfilled. It is this potency of the will which is the first secret of all the strange penances of India, of suttee, of sitting in dhurna, as well as of half the " wild " acts which stud the history of the native dynasties, and sometimes for Europeans take all interest out of those marvellous romances, their heroes appearing to the better balanced minds of the West beings too unaccountable to be interest- ing, a whole series, as it were, of Charles the Twelfths, who was just one of their kind. The man, for instance, who moves a capital suddenly from one spot to another by bare fiat, because it is his will to move it, though the moving ruins a whole population, is inconceivable to Europe ; and the notion that when his will has not closed he may be a cool and successful statesman is rejected as absurd ; yet that has occurred in India over and over again. A similar " possession " is seen con- stantly in private families ; producing the strangest dramas of love, vengeance, adventure, and, though that may seem bathos, sometimes of cupidity, as witness the history of the Koh-i-noor. Nothing would stop an Indian whose will had closed on obtaining possession of a jewel from obtaining it, except sheer physical impossibility. The late Maharaja, as we believe, felt just this impulse, A TYPICAL ASTATIC 391 modified probably in strength by his knowledge of its hopelessness, but irresistible nevertheless, and the pardon which was ultimately accorded him was, morally, only just. It is this which constitutes the inner perplexity of the education of the Princes of India. We may teach them as lads all we like, send them to Europe, give them European habits as second natures, turn them out apparently fit to be English nobles ; and then the tutor who has devoted his life to them will shake his head and acknowledge the presence, perhaps in his most promising pupil, of something he knows nothing about, which is stronger than all his teaching, and which will always to the end of life render the results of his devotion absolutely uncertain. The lad who seems so like an Etonian may turn out a saint or a Nana. What is certain is, that if his will closes, he will obey the dictate of that will, be it what it may, and be the consequences as the Destinies shall choose. It is as if each man had, like Socrates, his daimon outside himself, whom he was bound, by something stronger than himself, to obey. Had Dhuleep Singh reigned in the Punjab, he would have burst out some day just as he did here, and have been declared a hero or a madman by sober Europeans, according to his success. That is no reason why we should cease from educating we speak, of course, without reference to methods of doing it for we can but go on according to our 292 ASIA AND EUROPE best lights ; but it is a reason why we should not hope for too much, and why we should not be surprised when we fail. The essential difference between a Maharaja Dhuleep Singh and a Duke of Norfolk is deeper than we dream, and is not curable except in ages by any discipline. Nor is the differ- ence altogether to be scouted as an evil fact. The English think of the Maharaja's great escapade as if it were a mere relapse into savagery, indeed, one of the evening papers says so, comparing him to Mr. Grant Allen's Fantee clergyman but sup- pose he had succeeded, and then imagine, if that be possible, how a Sikh historian would have, written of his mind and his career ! Aladdin's Cave IF Mr. J. C. Robinson's account of the Sultan's Treasury is correct, the world must, we fear, surrender any lingering hope of finding any unknown collection of ancient art treasures any- where in the world. There is no place remaining in which to look. The great collections in Windsor Castle, the Winter Palace at St Petersburg, the Green Vault at Dresden, and the Vatican, are all well known ; as are the collections in the great museums, in the houses of wealthy nobles, and in the various residences of the Rothschild family, who have, however, rather skimmed the known collections offered for sale than made any original collection of their own. The latter operation requires time, and the Rothschilds are not old. There must be a glorious collection of treasures of a kind in the Imperial Palace at Pekin, for the curiosities and valuables of the Further East have flowed in there for centuries, and have not been sold out ; but those would hardly be art treasures. There may be, prob- ably are, splendid stones, especially stones of unusual size, like the sapphire taken from the Summer 898 294 ASIA AND EUROPE Palace by General Montauban, [by-the-way, what became of that stone ? when we saw it, it was larger than a man's thumb, of a gloriously deep blue, and the " asking price " was ,30,000] magnificent specimens of jade, crystal, and aqua marina, and vases of old Chinese china, such as even now, when the mania has declined, would set all the millionaires of two Continents agog to purchase. Nothing European, however, would be carried to China, and Chinese connoisseurs have never shown any desire for art-work not produced by their own people, or stamped with the peculiar impress of Turanian taste. We are not quite certain, again, that the treasures of Samarcand are dispersed. The plunder of a world was collected there once ; and though it is improbable, the Khans of Bokhara may still possess articles forwarded by Jenghiz and his sons' couriers to that strange capital at the back of the world on which every road in Asia is said to have once converged. Orientals will keep together a treasure of the kind for a long time, holding it dishonourable to sell ; but Russians have keen eyes for valuable things, and we fear Mr. J. C. Robinson, if he could get into the Bokhara palace would not find much to repay his pains. There would be fine old armour, stolen originally from Saracens, but probably little else. In Bankok there can be little except glorious china, some first-rate gold work, and a few rubies ; and we question if General Prender^ gast will discover a great deal in Mandelay. There ALADDIN'S CAV& 295 ought to be a priceless collection of rubies and sapphires in the Palace, for Burmah is their native land, and the dynasty has monopolized all fine stones for a hundred years. They may, however, have been sold gradually ; though Theebau's queer little whine, that he hoped the English people would allow him to keep the ruby on his finger and the diamonds on his sister-wife's neck, would sug- gest to any one acquainted with the ways of Asiatics, that he was exulting to himself over far larger possessions, and had either concealed, or was then carrying about, some immense store of gems. There is nothing artistic, however, in Mandelay. We know what exists in Teheran. The Kajar dynasty has plundered Persia pretty closely ; and Mr. Murray, the British Ambassador, when he received permission to enter the Treasury, plunged his arm into " buckets " of rubies, emeralds, pearls, and diamonds. The Shahs, however, sell their jewels on emergencies ; the late Shah, for ex- ample, having paid for his grand tour in that way, and the Kajars have had no time. They are quite a new dynasty, even according to the calculations of Europe, where parvenus like the Bourbon and Hapsburg families, with scarcely ten centuries behind them, are accounted old, and they have never conquered the countries where art trea- sures could be obtained. There is, we believe, no great family left in Asia Minor of wealth unbroken from antiquity, and we see no evidence for those 296 ASIA AND EUROPE legends of art treasures in the Lebanon which so moved the imagination of Mr. Disraeli. The wealth of Antioch, once the queen city of art and pleasure for the whole south of the Mediterranean, may have gone up there, and Rustem Pasha, or a man in the like position, might have ascertained the truth ; but it is more probable that all have perished, though we confess we should like to see some millionaire say an energetic member of the Rothschild family spend a few thousands in a good dig into the sands of the Orontes and under the crypts upon which the Temple of Delphi stood. He could spare the money, and if he hired Schliemann, or some obstinate treasure-seeker of that calibre, he might be richly rewarded. By far the best chance, however, was the Treasury of the Seraglio. The House of Othman pillaged Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, and, Con- stantinople itself, while they were still full of the work of that elder world which feudal Europe in its madness suffered them mere barbarians out of Central Asia to conquer and to keep. Constanti- nople, in particular, when it fell, was a museum choked with the art treasures accumulated for nine hundred years by three civilizations that of Greece, that of Rome, and that of Western Asia. Nothing like the Palace of the Palaeologi can ever have existed, and one would have thought that the Sul- tans, swordsmen as they were, would have taken care of their own. They were of the temper to decapi- ALADDIN'S CAVM 297 tate any one who touched property of theirs ; they are an unbroken though an enfeebled race ; and they have had, from first to last, men around them who would slay or die if they but received the order. We doubt if they have lost much by theft. Thieves do not succeed, even in Europe, in entering palaces, and they dread the summary justice which in the East overtakes those who rob Princes, and who can be slain without troubling either juries or men of law. The Seraglio Treasury, we take it, is intact ; but then, if Mr. Robinson is well informed, there is comparatively nothing in it. There are valuables, of course, in plenty, gold thrones bestudded with jewels and inlaid with mother-of- pearl, and vases of jade and onyx, and marvel- lous jewelled robes the authenticity of which Mr. Robinson doubts and gold tankards, of which one is crusted with some two thousand large diamonds set flat, and vases full of coins seldom gold, says cynical Mr. Robinson and pearls, and uncut stones not equal to the old gems on the thrones and swords and porcelain bowls, and inlaid armour of all ages and all varieties of beauty. There may be, say, half a million's worth of jewels and bric-a-brac ; but of the things a historian would expect to find, the statues, and the pictures, and the mosaics, and the tables, and the vases of an older world, which possessed higher ideas about art than that of sticking diamonds into tankards like bits of glass into a brick wall, there are no traces. There are not even, moans Mr. Robinson, specimens of old European bijouterie, though the Sultans must for hundreds of years have been receiving presents from European Courts. We do not care for old bijouterie, but we do care for any specimens that the rulers of Byzantium once, be it remembered, autocrats of the whole Roman world may have saved from the far past, and there are none. The barbarians who entered Constantinople with the destructive instincts of children, and the art know- ledge of ourang-outangs, did their work too well. All that was beautiful was useless or unholy ; the Asiatic troops were mad with slaughter and the lust of destruction, and everything, except the great church and a column or two, perished for ever. " Where the Turk's foot is planted, grass never grows again," or civilization either ; and the most precious relics of antiquity perished at the bidding of men who would have pronounced a Venus by Praxiteles either a useless or an unholy image, and have lighted cooking-fires above a mosaic a thou- sand years old and worth their evil lives a million times over. Some few things may have been saved from the wreck. The crypts of St. Sophia have never been searched by civilized men, and it is quite possible that the thirty guardians of the Treasury showed the inquisitive infidel, whom they would have liked to cut down, only the less filled rooms of the great storehouse, and kept the most valuable articles unpolluted by his gaze. There ALADDIN'S CAY must be a secret treasure-house as well as the more open one, and in it may be things worth seeing, the plunder of Armenia, for instance ; but it is more probable that it contains only a treasure in metals and stones, and nothing which the world would value. There has been in the world's history no besom of destruction for all that is noble in man or splendid in art like a Turkish conquest, which effaces all things save the lowest taxpayer, and makes of him a slave. We should like to know why Mr. Robinson, who entered the Sultan's library of manuscripts, and saw them all ranged three thousand of them in leather cases upon the wall, thinks they have been examined. There is no record of such examination, and no d priori reason to believe that Turks could either have performed the work or would allow it to be performed. Why should they learn infidel learning, or what can there be in a book, unless it is a French novel, which is not in the Koran ? The Sultan's Library should be searched through as the first condition of the next loan made to Turkey if there ever is another and permission demanded to hunt for that older and more valuable store of manuscripts believed or known to be stored in the crypt of St. Sophia, and protected by the one useful superstition of the Turk, his reluctance to destroy writing, lest perchance it should contain the name of God. That is the last place left where we shall be likely to make a great literary find ; and it 300 ASIA AND EUROPE should be searched before the great day when the destiny of the Ottomans is completed, and Con- stantinople once more sinks down, a mass of blood- stained ruins, fired by its possessors before they commence their final retreat to the desert from which, in the mysterious providence of God, they were suffered to emerge, in order to destroy the Eastern half of the civilized world. The only other chance is in the Shereefal Palace at Morocco, and it is uncertain if a library exists there. Sir John Hay Drummond says it does not ; and although he would be easily deceived on such a point, and though the Cordovan manuscripts ought to be there, and though Mahommedans never destroy writing, still it is possible that for once he has been told the truth. The Arabs of the Desert GLANCING through a new volume of poems which the author rather absurdly calls The Love Sonnets of Proteus, we came upon this very fine and suggestive address to the Bedouins Children of Shera ! Firstborn of Noah's race, But still forever children; at the door Of Eden found, unconscious of disgrace, And loitering on while all are gone before ; Too proud to dig ; too careless to be poor ; Taking the gifts of God in thanklessness, Not rendering aught, nor supplicating more, Nor arguing with Him when He hides His face. Yours is the rain and sunshine, and the way Of an old wisdom by our world forgot, The courage of a day which knew not death. Well may we sons of Japhet in dismay Pause in our vain mad fight for life and breath, Beholding you. I bow and reason not. The " many-charactered " poet bears one character among others, we believe, which specially entitles him to judge of Arabs, and certainly in this sonnet he has touched with a ringing spear the central peculiarity of the Bedouin position. There is no puzzle in the world, either to the ethnologist or the am 302 ASIA AND EUROPE psychologist, quite equal to the Arab, whether he dwells in a tent, half-nomad, half-robber, or abides in a city of Nejd or South Arabia, the oldest, most tranquil and proudest of republicans. Why is he, of all men in the world, the one who changes so little, that the person who, of all mankind, most resembles Sheikh Abraham in ways and habits and bearing, and, as the best observers say, in habit of thought, is his collateral kinsman, ninety genera- tions removed, a Sheikh of Syria or Nejd ? What induces the Arab to seclude himself in a dreary peninsula, in poverty such as no European con- ceives, and there live the life of a remote antiquity ; a life without object, or hope, or fear ; a life so persistent that a thousand years hence, if Europe does not conquer him, the Arab will be as to-day ? It is not his race, for the Jew is as purely Arab as himself, sprung from the same ancestor as him- self, and, like himself, has never mixed his blood. And yet the Jew has changed. The least receptive of mankind has become the most receptive so receptive, that he is more German, more French, more Italian than Italian, German, or Frenchman ; the most isolated seeks cities by choice, preferring Brighton infinitely to the desert ; the purely agricul- tural people have grown into money-changers, and the most religious even of Asiatics have become, with magnificent individual exceptions, utterly earthy. The Arab who wanders has changed altogether, while the Arab who remains is as he THE ARABS OF THE DESERT 303 was in the days of Jethro, even his new creed for Mahommedanism is parvenu before the Arab being rather an expression of himself than an influence modifying his mind. Christianity changed the Norseman, but the Arab was Mahommedan before Mahommed. What has made the latter so unchangeable ? It is not any defect of intellect, or want of force of character. All who have studied the Arabs in their tents or their secluded cities attribute to them the old qualities the instinct for poetry and romance, and, so to speak, literature ; a command of their magnificent tongue, such as no uncultivated Euro- pean has of his own language ; a separate energy ; a special capacity for comprehending argument, and even for managing affairs. As soldier, the Arab is first in Asia, though, from his excessive individu- ality, he is beaten in the aggregate by an inferior people like the Turks " mud bricks," as he himself says, " being better for building than diamonds." The Arab who wanders forth as soldier, as states- man, as trader, or, curiously enough, as sailor, almost invariably succeeds ; and if the English quitted India, it is a question whether a Sikh, a Mahratta, or an Arab would rebuild the throne of the Great Mogul. It is not energy that is wanting to him. His forefathers conquered the world, and, unarmoured, defeated even the armoured Barbarians who lived only for battle, founded three empires at least, and did not retreat after centuries oi contest 304 ASIA AND EUROPE before the Crusaders, the picked warrior emigrants of a dozen Christian lands. All the men of iron ol Europe failed to tear Jerusalem from the Arab. To this day the Arab intriguer rises most swiftly at Constantinople, the Arab trader penetrates furthest into Africa, the Arab missionary in Bengal, in Central Asia, in the furthest recesses of Central and Western Africa, makes the most numerous and the most faithful converts. The enervated Hindoo of Dacca, the dissolute pagan of the Gold Coast, becomes, when under the Arab spell, the dangerous Ferazee or the warlike Houssa. No one who knows the Arab doubts his enterprise, and yet he lives on in the Syrian desert, or in his vast, secluded peninsula Arabia is as large as India, or Europe west of the Vistula unchanged, seeking no advance, complaining of no suffering, living his life, such as it is, straight on, and accepting death as a destiny neither to be sought nor feared. As it was, is now, and ever shall be, world without end that is his conception of human life. Time is nothing to the Arab ; progress has no attraction for his mind ; wealth, though when abroad he seeks it zealously, has no charm to tempt him thither. Poverty is nothing to him, for the man who is contented with his skin can never be poor. Buckle might say it was his geographical position, but that did not prevent him from conquering half the Roman world. It is his creed ? In what does his creed differ from that of the Jew, except in certain precepts which THE ARABS OF THE DESERT 305 should send the Arab forth to conquer, not seclude him in the islands of the desert ? It is his poverty ? About all other men we say, and say truly, that poverty is a stimulus to advance, that clans of brave men able to fight will not remain poor. It is his individualism ? That is but pushing the question a step backwards, for what is it that makes the Arab, who abroad founded Bagdad and Granada, and whc at home constructs petty States as truly Republican as Uri, unable to found a kingdom or a society which shall advance men to the " civilized " Oriental level ? What gives the Arab alone, even among Asiatics, that perfection of mental content which asks nothing even from God, and is so full, as " Proteus " says, of " the courage of a day which knew not death " ? We suppose the secret must lie, like the secret of the Irish peasant's homesickness, in some charm which the life he leads, with its exemption from wants, and from changes, and from uncertainties, has for him ; but that is certainly a strange lesson for the breathless race of Japhet. The most quali- fied of the races of Asia, having conquered a world and its wealth, and built cities and devised creeds, and composed a literature, shrinks back contentedly to live a changeless life of dreary poverty, in the one section of the world which to the European is utterly repellant. The Arabs do not believe one word of all that Mr. Bright gives to the world as solidly sensible advice, and they are content, and x 306 ASIA AND EUROPE among their rivals noble. They despise industry, put wealth by as meaningless, keep the tradition of the past as a possession, and, without decay as with- out progress, live on for ever, as they were in ages of which history tells us nothing. What explanation of them has the Comtist, with his dream of perfected humanity, to offer ? or where is his proof that the Parisian, with all his modern vigour and activity of brain, and mastery over all the secrets of Nature which conduce to comfort or to the diffusion of intelligence, will survive the Arab, who was before the Pharaohs in all essentials what he is now ? Durability, at all events, is not lacking to the race which, of all others, is furthest from the modern ideal. May it not just be possible that the races which halt and wait, as calmly indifferent to the strife outside as if their habitats were planets, may conserve energy more than the races which advance, and in advancing must expend force of some kind ? That it is force perpetually renewed by the expendi- ture may be true ; but also it may not, for the Greek has not reproduced Phidias, or ^ischylus, or Archi- medes, nor do we find in Scandinavia the energy which once threatened and repeopled so much of the world. Suppose Shem lasts and not Japhet, that Mecca survives Manchester, that when Europe is a continent of ruins, the Arab shall still dwell in the desert, " too proud to dig, too careless to be poor," " not rendering aught or supplicating more," but living on like the Pyramids, whose foundations THE ARABS OF THE DESERT 307 he saw laid. It seems impossible to Mr. G. O. A. Head, with his bottled electric force, carried about in a valise, but the Arab stood at the gates of On and saw the " magicians " and their feats, and stood below the walls of Constantinople and saw the Byzantine pour out his liquid fire, and despised both Egypt and Rome, and went back to the herbless land ; and he lives on still, not advanced, not degenerate, the ablest though the most useless of his kind. Birmingham is great, but it has not yet discovered every truth about the destiny of Man ; and there are fractions of humankind whose govern- ing impulses Western Europe as little comprehends as it foresees the future. Imagine a clan which prefers sand to mould, poverty to labour, solitary reflection to the busy hubbub of the mart, which will not earn enough to clothe itself, never invented so much as a lucifer match, and would consider newspaper-reading a disgraceful waste of time. Is it not horrible, that such a race should be ? more horrible, that it should survive all others ? most horrible of all, that it should produce, among other trifles, the Psalms and the Gospels, the Koran and the epic of Antar ? Asiatic Patriotism WE know of no subject upon which the opinion of experts in Asiatic affairs is so hopelessly divided as that of Oriental Patriotism. A great number of the keenest of them, and especially of the men whose experience is entitled to respect, say that such a feeling as patriotism does not exist in any Asiatic. He can and will die for his creed, or for his tribe, or caste, or for his dynasty ; but of patriotism he has no conception. He very rarely or never has a word in his language to express the virtue, his public opinion does not require it as a condition of political life, and under temptation he never finds in it any source of strength. An Asiatic, such observers say, can be very loyal to a ruler, or to an ally, or to an idea, but his loyalty to what we term his " country " is of the feeblest character. He may speak of patriotism in words, especially when talking to Europeans ; but his impelling motive is always either ambition, or pride, or fana- ticism, and not, especially under temptation, love of country. He will sell his country in order to rule it, and sometimes for mere lucre, especially when he is 308 ASIATIC PATRIOTISM 309 out of spirits, and thinks Destiny has declared against the Virtues. Those observers who think thus believe in their own view very firmly, point to the case of Tej Singh, who sold victory, as General Cunningham reports, for .220,000, and ridicule the notion that a man like Arabi Pasha can be governed by anything like " Nationalist " feeling. He may be, they admit a Mussulman fanatic, or a devotee of the Khalifate which is not quite the same thing or even an " Asiatic," that is, a man who loathes Euro- pean ascendency ; but he cannot care enough for Egypt to make Egyptian interest, as he conceives it, the guiding- star of his policy, cannot, in fact, be in any sense a patriot. We should say that, on the whole, this was the more general opinion, especially among those experts who have come much in contact with prominent Asiatic statesmen, the men, that is, who are not Sovereigns, but have risen either by serving or by opposing Sovereigns. At the same time, a minority of observers, equally experienced, and we think, as a rule, possessed of more sympathy and insight, though not of greater force, utterly reject this view. They say that Asiatics not only can feel, but do feel the sentiment of patriotism as strongly as Euro- peans ; that the want of a word to express the idea is an accident, which, curiously enough, is repro- duced in England, where, though every one understands " love of country," the only single word which expresses that sentiment is borrowed 3io ASIA AND EUROPE from the French ; and that an Arab, a native of India, or a Chinaman, when a good man, is as. strongly moved by the idea of " country," and all which it implies, as an Englishman or an Ameri- can. He is more likely to be deficient in that virtue than a European, as he is more likely to be deficient in any other of the active virtues, his whole nature being feebler, and, so to speak, more feminine ; yet he not only recognizes, but, unless overpowered by strong temptation, acts on it. He very often, for example, submits to invasion when a European would resist, but he never submits willingly, still less permanently. He never adopts the invader, never forgets that his own country is separate, and never ceases to hope that in God's good time the invader will be compelled to depart, or, if such extreme good-fortune may be, will be slaughtered out. As to self-sacrifice for his country, he fills up the national army readily enough, and this in coun- tries like Afghanistan, which have no conscription ; he serves as a soldier, say, in Turkey, with wonder- full self-suppression ; and he will, and does constantly, risk his fortune, rather than give an advantage to the national enemy. No foreign Government in an Asiatic State is ever able quite to trust the people, while it is a universal experience that if a rising occurs, the people enter into a silent conspiracy to give it aid. They may not rise, but the foreigner hears nothing of the plot till it explodes, finds no one to betray the leaders, and is conscious of living ASIATIC PATRIOTISM in an atmosphere of deadly hostility. In the excep- tional case of small States separated by any cause from their neighbours, like that of the Afghans, the Burmese, or the Druses, patriotism is a burning passion, to be as fully relied on as the same passion in any European country. Men who think thus declare that Arabi Pasha, though governed by mixed motives, still does feel the Nationalist feel- ing ; that his followers, though moved by many emotions, still do seek the independence of Egypt ; and that a good many of those whom we consider dangerous fools, actuated by bloodthirsty race hatred, honestly believe that in rioting they are risking life in order to be rid of enemies to their country. We confess we agree with the second party, though it is needful to make a reserve. We do not believe that, as a rule, patriotism is as strong in Asia as in Europe. Its influence there has been surperseded in part by other ideas ; by the claims of religion fervent Ultramontanes are, even in Europe, seldom patriots before all things by the feeling of race, which is as strong almost everywhere in Asia as in Ireland ; and by the passion of " loyalty " in the technical sense, which constantly leads Asiatics to postpone everything, even independence, to the interests of a dynasty ; but it exists almost pre- cisely in the degree and form in which it existed among Europeans in the Middle Ages. The people of an Asiatic State like their country, and are proud 312 ASIA AND EUROPE of it ; are prepared to do something, though not very much, in its defence ; and are passively, but implac- ably and permanently, hostile to the foreigner who invades it. They are not, outside some portions of Arabia, Democrats in any sense, but they are universally " nationalists," and prefer, distinctly prefer, bad government by themselves and through themselves, to good government by the foreigner. They may prefer one foreigner to another, as the Bengalees undoubtedly prefer Englishmen to Sikhs, and the Peguans prefer them to Burmese ; but if they had the choice they would prefer each other to anybody else. Nobody, we suppose, doubts this about Armenians, who, though white, are recognized throughout the continent, from Shanghai to the Bosphorus, as true Asiatics, and can go in safety where no European would be spared; or about Arabs, Afghans, or about Chinese ; and it is true of far feebler races. There is not a Bengalee who is not proud of the old glories of Gour, or gratified when a European acknowledges the intellectual capacity of his countrymen, or sad when he admits that his desk i.e. patria, as well as land has constantly been conquered. There was not an Indian on the vast continent who did not consider the Sepoys Nationalists, and did not, even if he dreaded their success, feel proud of their few victories. An old Hindoo scholar, definitely and openly on the English side, actually cried with rage and pain, in the writer's presence, over a report that Delhi was to be razed. ASIATIC PATRIOTISM 313 He had never seen Delhi, but to him it was " our beautiful city, such a possession for our country." The Egyptians are not a strong people, but it is quite useless to tell an Egyptian that the Europeans bring him prosperity and light taxes, as useless as to tell a true Irish Nationalist the same thing about the English. He does not trouble himself to deny the facts, nay, very often believes them ; but, all the same, he wants the intruders gone, if wealth and comfort go with them. It is true the feeling is not acute, and does not take the European form. The Asiatic's mind is full of bewildering cross-lights, of feelings about his creed, and his history, and his hates, and his personal interests, which, if they con- flict with patriotism, often prove the stronger; but to say that is to say he is morally weak or intellectu- ally crotchetty, not to say he is unpatriotic. He knows what he is selling when he sells his country well enough, and if anybody else sells it will pour mental vitriol on his head. A " traitor," in the English sense, has not in Asia a pleasant time of it with posterity. Patriotism with him is not an over- mastering idea. He has too many notions about destiny, and about the sanctity of power as granted by God, and about the necessity of obedience when extorted by adequate force, to be a Washington, or anything like a Washington ; but his country has his sympathies, nevertheless, which, whenever there is a chance for their display, have to be reckoned with by politicians. The Egyptians have always obeyed ASIA AND EUROPE foreigners, and, if the English conquered them, would be very fair subjects ; but we have no doubt that the majority of them, though quiescent, would much rather that Egyptians succeeded in this struggle than that Europe did, and a little rather that Egyptians conquered than that Turks did. The Turk is a foreigner, but he is a Mussulman and an Asiatic. It may be said that the emotion is only one of hate, and, indeed, this is almost always said by the makers of telegrams, but it is not strictly true. The hatred exists, like the hatred for England in Ireland, but it is in great part the result of a feeling indistinguishable, at all events, from patriotism, a feeling compounded of national pride, national exclusiveness, and desire for national independence. If the Egyptian were a fighting man, like the Afghan, we should all understand him, but the possi- bility of sentiments or virtues in a passive state is always more or less incredible to the Englishman. Such sentiments exist, nevertheless, as the English- man would remember, if he ever bethought himself that he himself holds it part of his duty to turn his cheek to the smiter honestly and sincerely holds it though, when the hour comes, he turns his fist, instead. " Fanaticism " in the East THE English middle-class of to-day is singu- larly free from Fanaticism. It has its little enthusiasms, no doubt, and can grow eager for or against a cause ; but of true fanaticism, of a liability to religious emotion such as carries its subjects completely out of themselves, away from facts, and beyond laws, it seldom displays a sign. The mind of the class is marked by steady and rather cold, though often very ignorant, judgement, and a certain repugnance for religious emotions strong enough to lead to immediate action. It is for this reason, we suppose, that English people just now are so inclined to regard fanaticism outside England, and especially in the East, as so great and pervad- ing a force, as the explanation of every unaccount- able action, and the motive of every unusual display of activity. It is an impulse they do not feel themselves, and which rather puzzles them, and they, therefore, set down to its influence every phenomenon they do not quite comprehend or very greatly dislike. They find that slatternly mode of thinking so convenient that they are gradually making of fanaticism the motive-power of the East, 316 316 ASIA AND EUROPE and using it as if one word could bear half-a-dozen separate meanings. Sometimes fanaticism is the equivalent of religious enthusiasm, sometimes of mere fury, sometimes of hatred, very often of lunacy, now and again of mere Orientalism, and constantly of physical courage. All Mussulmans in particular are assumed to have fanaticism, as if it were some separate mental peculiarity belonging to the Mahommedan faith, which accounted for everything, and especially for any very marked impulse. When Californians attack Chinamen, or English labourers pommel Irishmen, or Marseillais artisans wound Italians, Englishmen explain their conduct by race hatred, or trade jealousy, or political feeling ; but when Arabs in Alexandria kill Euro- peans, they attribute the outburst to " fanaticism." The Turks are said to be fanatics if they evince any sympathy with Arabi, or any wish that their own fellow-subjects should defeat intrusive strangers from the West. When any of Arabi's soldiers show decent courage, they are described as "fanatics," and the Times positively asserts that Arabi's suc- cess or defeat depends upon that unknown quantity, the fanaticism he inspires among his soldiers. Scores of correspondents assert every day that Europe is in danger, because Asia has once more grown " fanatic " ; and France in particular is bidden to beware of that burst of fanaticism which may within the next few months deprive her of her ascendency in North Africa. "FANATICISM" IN THE EAST 317 Well, there is fanaticism in the East, more especially among Mussulmans. Every Eastern creed, Christianity included, with the solitary excep- tion of Confucianism, puts the interest of the next world above the interest of this, and calls upon its devotees to obey the Divine law, even when such obedience is unsafe, or contrary to the dictates of common-sense. Among so many scores of millions who are thus exhorted, it would be strange if there were not a few who obeyed ; and, as a matter of fact, a great many are fairly obedient. Christians who are so are said to be " pious," or devoted, or at least persons of right mind ; and so whenever, by a rare chance, they happen to be noticed, Hindoos and Buddhists also are. The virtues of those three creeds tend to self-abnegation, and therefore, except under most unusual circumstances, as when Sepoys in the Red Sea, in their zeal for ceremonial purity, throw away a bucket of water because an officer has drunk a spoonful of it, they excite no hostility. The virtues of Mahommedans are, however, of a different kind. Every Mussul- man is taught, directly or implicitly, that he ought to fight for his faith, that he should assert himself as one of a favoured people, and that it is wrong for him to endure, if he can help it, a direct and visible assertion of Infidel superiority. Of the millions so taught, a proportion believe the teach- ing, and a few believe it so strongly that they will rather die than allow the Infidel to get above them 318 ASIA AND EUROPE in any visible way. There is, therefore, in Mussul- man countries religious enthusiasm, sometimes rising to fanaticism, that is, breaking loose from the con- trol of the judgement ; and, of course, when dogma is very much preached or events bring the obliga- tions of their creed clearly home to the children of Islam, there is a good deal of it But there is much less in quantity, and what there is, is much less energetic in kind, than Europeans seem at this anxious moment inclined to believe. The majority of Orientals are no more religious than the majority of Europeans. They believe the teaching of the Koran as Neapolitans believe the teaching of their priests, or as Londoners believe the precepts of the Bible, but they do not act on it. All Mussulmans accept the idea that if they perish in battle with the Infidel, they go to heaven, just as all Christians accept the idea that they ought to forgive their enemies, and love those who despitefully use them ; but very few act on their belief, in either case. We question if the proportion of true fanatics among Mahommedans that is, of men who die fighting a hopeless battle for the faith is much greater than that of true upholders of the doctrine of non-resist- ance among ourselves. If it were if, that is, the majority of Mussulmans were ready to die on the field as the readiest path to heaven we should never beat a Mussulman army without destroying it. We do beat Mussulman armies, and we do not destroy them, or any appreciable proportion of "FANATICISM" IN THE EAST 319 them. They never die in masses voluntarily, even when, as in the first war in Malacca, the Jehad or religious war has been properly proclaimed. In every Mussulman army there are a few men of convinced minds, " who think through Unbelievers' blood lies the directest path ; " a few more who are exceptionally brave, and profess readiness to die for the faith as an honourable way of parading that fact ; and a few more who are aware that hemp, eaten at the proper time, will give them all the advantages of courage. These men are very for- midable for a few minutes in a charge, for they will go on, and men who will go on with a rush are difficult to kill out ; but still, they are not more dangerous than any other soldiers who can be urged forward against odds. What is to make them so ? Fanaticism is not a rabies, so that the bite of fanatics should be poisonous. As for the majority, they believe it right to fight, and salvation to be killed in fighting ; but the belief is not held in a way which elevates them above either selfishness or fear, or even indisposition for severe exertion. It is held as Englishmen hold that doctrine about turning the other cheek. If Mussulmans do not see the road to victory, they " run away," or "retreat," or "retire fighting," like other soldiers, according to their courage or discipline, or their confidence in their commanders. Their fanaticism, such as it is, is not an overmastering impulse, but only a passive belief, and but little helpful when the 320 ASIA AND EUROPE hour of danger arrives. Nor, on the other hand, does it lead them, as so many Europeans believe, to massacre. Mahommedanism does not order, or indeed justify massacre, unless the Infidels resist. Even at Delhi, the Mahommedan Doctors warned the Emperor in 1857 that in sanctioning the mas- sacre of the helpless, he was breaking the law and bringing down the vengeance of Heaven ; and the Alexandria case was infinitely worse than that, was, in fact, a massacre of guests. Massacre in the East does not proceed from fanaticism, but from the cause which recently induced French artisans to attack Italian artisans, a boiling dislike of strangers who speak another tongue, act on other rules, and are horribly in the way. Of course, the hatred of the Asiatic for the European is much more bitter than anything we find in Europe, though the Russian hatred for the Jew is akin to it ; because the European in Asia, unlike any other stranger in the world, takes the top place, and tries to drive the majority his way. Let groups of Chinamen come here, and take all good appointments, and tax us, and tell us that we are barbarians, and try to compel us to wear pigtails and eat puppies, and we venture to say their paganism will not have much to do with the treatment they will receive. If the creed had anything to do with the matter, Arabi's followers would kill out both Armenians and Copts ; whereas the former are only killed casually, when wearing too European a dress, and the latter are not killed at all. "FANATICISM" IN THE EAST 321 There are plenty of motives for murder in the East, without imagining a non-existent fanaticism ; which, again, is not the irrestrainable and, as it were, explosive quality it is popularly believed to be. It yields readily to law. The Russians have had little trouble with their Mussulman subjects, nor have we. A report arrives now and then that a Mussulman " fanatic " on the Indian frontier has murdered an officer, but it will generally be found either that he belonged to a tribe that had been punished, or that he found himself refused justice in some suit ; that, in short, he is very like an Irish agrarian assassin, only not so cruel. Up to 1852, there used to be a fanatic outbreak every year in Lucknow, in the great street, the two sects of Mahommedans killing and wounding one another freely. It was supposed impossible to stop this, but in that year, Captain Hayes, the Acting Resi- dent, thought the slaughter had better end, and obtained permission to plant two pieces of cannon at the end of the street, and to proclaim that, if a sword were drawn, he should open fire. Every- body knew he would do it, the street was crammed, and the quiet harmony of the two sects was heavenly. Fanaticism, the dreaded spiritual power, yielded instantly to the fear of death, just as it does upon the battle-field. We have often been asked how far Mussulman " fanatics," or indeed any pious Mussulmans, expect victory from the interposition of Heaven, as Crom- Y ASIA AND EUROPE well's Ironsides, for example, expected it. We cannot answer the question, and never met any one who could. It is almost inconceivable that good Mussulmans should not expect Divine help, and equally inconceivable that if they did expect it, they should not advance to battle with more confi- dence, and should not persist in fighting a little longer. They certainly expect the ultimate ascend- ency, though not, we see reason to think, the universal acceptance of Mahommedanism, and they must see in each battle a step to that ascendency. They do not, however, if they have any such expec- tation, feel it strongly ; they never fight, if they can help it, without advantage in numbers, and their Doctors maintain that to declare war without reasonable hope of success is positively irreligious. There is not much " fanaticism " in that view, nor in any other which the majority of Mussulmans take of events around them. We should say that while Mussulman fanatics undoubtedly exist, fana- ticism was as little a motive force in the East as it is in most Christian countries, and distinctly less so than it is among the peasantry of Russia. Will Conquest Vivify Asia ? OPEECHES delivered in India are rarely re- O ported here, and still more rarely reported well ; but we have before us the textual version of one of rather unusual interest. It is an address to the University of Madras, and contains the opinions which the Governor, Mr. Grant Duff, 1 now near the end of his term of office, has formed of the position of the higher, or, rather, the better educated, classes in Southern India. Local opinion differs a little as to Mr. Grant Duffs success as a Governor, one side pointing to his promptitude in executive work, especially in organizing the expedition to Mandelay, and another side hinting that he reflects too much, and allows questions of importance to stand over far too long. That practice, however, is traditional in Madras, where the Government has been distinguished for a century by a patience worthy of the Roman Curia, and by a certain inability to believe in forcing progress which drives the more sanguine rulers of Bengal half-crazy with impatience. Be that as it may, Mr. 1 Now Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff M 324 ASIA AND EUROPE Grant Duffs power of reflection, and of almost judicial comment on affairs, are well known to us all, and his summary of one side of the situation is most serious. He finds that the higher education which is imparted and tested in the Madras Uni- versity remains in a singular degree sterile. The graduates, of many of whom he speaks with all respect, do nothing with their acquirements ; or, rather, they do only two things, they talk Radical politics, and they seek Government appointments, which accordingly they eagerly desire both to multiply and to throw open to themselves. That is a futile ambition for an entire class to entertain, for, as the Governor tells them, if every remaining appointment were placed in their hands they are very few, and " a few must belong to Europeans, not in virtue of their being the descendants of conquerors, but in virtue of that education of ages which has made the Aryan of the West what he is " it would be nothing among so many ; but, as yet, it is their only one. The beautiful Presidency, which in scenery is to Northern India what Switzer- land is to Prussia, one- third larger than Italy, with its 90,000 artificial lakes, called locally by the name of " tanks," a word productive of endless misappre- hension, is languishing for engineers, and especially hydraulic engineers ; but the graduates do not become engineers, though the whole history of Southern India shows that they possess not only engineering capacity, but distinct originality for WILL CONQUEST VIVIFY ASIA } 325 such undertakings. The population gives an eager welcome to doctors ; but though hundreds are needed, especially of the class we used to call apothecaries, only three graduates in all Southern India have adopted that profession. Agriculture promises any reward to native agriculturists of skill; but with an exception here and there, no educated man devotes himself to improving the productive- ness of the soil. The want of Madras is wealth, there is plenty of room for manufacturers, and the openings for internal commerce are endless ; but it is not to commerce or to manufactures that the educated betake themselves. While Bengal and Bombay are alive with plantations and factories, Madras remains the poorest Presidency. Nor do they devote themselves to social development, for which South India offers an unequalled field, her social systems being far less stereotyped than those of the North, and her great Turanian population nearly half the whole offering entirely new problems for solution ; nor to philosophy, though the Eastern Aryans at least, if not the Turanians also, are born philosophers ; nor to studies like philology, nor to art, though there are arts, like architecture, for which their genius is undoubted ; nor to research, though such a field for research as Southern India, more especially in the anti- quarian direction, scarcely exists in the world. If the British rulers wish to decipher old inscriptions in Madras, they are compelled to " send thousands 326 ASIA AND EUROPE and thousands of miles away and hunt up some scholar in the valley of the Danube." The edu- cated, in fact, seek neither material wealth nor the improvement of their knowledge, nor philosophical culture, but only status and pay in the service of the State. All the work which a people beginning to be cultivated would naturally do, and which in some half-civilzied countries is done with passionate zeal, is in Southern India left undone, and this both by its Aryan population and its Dravidian or Turanian, to whom the Governor, with perfect historical accuracy, but somewhat grotesque effect, addresses this singular argument : " The constant putting forward of Sanskrit literature, as if it were pre-eminently Indian, should stir the national pride of some of you Tamil, Telugu, Canarese. You have less to do with Sanskrit than we English have. Ruffianly Europeans have sometimes been known to speak of natives of India as ' niggers/ but they did not, like the proud speakers, or writers, of Sanskrit, speak of the people of the South as legions of monkeys. It was these Sanskrit speakers, not Europeans, who lumped-up the Southern races as Rakshasas demons. It was they who deli- berately grounded all social distinctions upon Varna, colour." This picture, that of a population of thirty-one millions in which the class most eager to be in- structed, is when instructed sterile, is a painful one, and will be held by many minds to justify WILL CONQUEST VIVIFY ASIA t 327 those, of whom the present writer was one, who, a generation ago, bestirred themselves to resist the idea of Macaulay, that culture should be diffused in India through English studies. They maintained that true instruction would never be gained by an Oriental people through a Western language, that education in English would be productive of nothing but a caste, who, like the " scholars " of the Middle Ages, would be content with their own superiority, and would be more separated from the people than if they had been left uneducated ; that, in short, English education, however far it might be pushed, would remain sterile. They pressed for the encouragement and development of the indi- genous culture, and would have had High Schools and Universities, in which men should have studied, first of all, to perfect the languages, and literature, and knowledge of their own land. They fought hard, but they failed utterly, and we have the Baboo, instead of the thoroughly instructed Pundit. They probably did not allow enough for the in- fluence of time, and they certainly did not admire enough the few remarkable men whom the system has produced; but so far, they have been right, and they may be right throughout. English educa- tion in India may remain sterile for all national purposes. It is not a pleasant thought, but it is an unavoidable one, that the conquest of the East Aryans by the West Aryans, though it has brought such marvellous blessings in the way of peace and 328 ASIA AND EUROPE order and material prosperity, though it has given to millions, as Mr. Grant Duff says, all the results of political evolution without the wearying struggle for them, may have brought also evils which over- balance, or almost overbalance, all its gifts. Not much is gained to the world because under the shadow of the Empire Bengalees increase like flies on a windless day. It is no time yet for con- clusions, for the work of conquest has but just ended, and that of sowing seed has but just begun ; but that decay of varieties of energy, that torpor of the higher intellectual life, that pause in the application of art knowledge, from architecture down to metal work and pottery, which have been synchronous with our rule in India, these are to the philosophic observer melancholy symptoms. Why is not the world yet richer for an Indian brain ? There was a Roman peace once round the Mediterranean, under which originality so died away that it is doubtful whether, but for the barbarian invasion, society would not have stereo- typed itself, and even Christianity have grown fossil ; and our rule, much nobler though its motive and its methods be, may be accompanied by the same decay. In the two hundred years during which Spaniards have ruled in the New World, but one Indian name has reached Europe, and Juarez was only a politician. We have only to hope and to persevere ; but it is impossible, when the results are from time to time summed up by WILL CONQUEST VIVIFY ASIA) 329 cool observers like the Governor of Madras, not to feel a chilling doubt. We think little of the political childishness of educated natives on which Mr. Grant Duff is so serenely sarcastic, for that is a mere symptom of unrest, possibly healthy unrest; and we utterly disagree with him in his assertion that only a wealthy community can be well governed, holding Switzerland to be better governed than France ; but the want of spontaneous effort in all directions, the limitation of ambition to a salary from the State, seem to us symptoms either of intellectual torpor or intellectual despair. We know quite well the tendency of Asia to stereo- type herself, but we had hoped that British dominion would revivify her; and as yet except possibly in the important domain of law, a reverence for which is slowly filtering down the signs are very few. The Codes will, as Mr. Grant Duff believes, materially influence Indian thought ; but then, the Codes were the work not of Eastern Aryans, but of those who conquered them. We want original Indian work ; and as yet we have only men who will take any post, provided that its salary is guaranteed by the State and its work ordered and controlled regularly from above. Why Turkey Lives THE meeting of the German Kaiser and the Sultan in Constantinople on November 2, 1889, was from any point of view a most picturesque event, but to us, we must confess, the more interest- ing figure in the unprecedented interview is the Asiatic one. The greatness of the European monarch is too intelligible. William II. of Germany is the armed man of modern civilization, strong in the possession of knowledge, of scientific appliances, of an army organized till it will move on any enemy at the word of command like an intelligent machine. The guest is the concrete outcome of his century, and that he should be great is no wonder ; what is wonderful is that his host should be great too, that in this age the head of a Tartar clan which is still only encamped in its dominions, himself a man as ignorant as a child, and as nervously appre- hensive as a hysterical woman, should still be a great potentate, a Sovereign in three continents, absolute lord in the best situated city of the world and in some of the richest provinces of the globe, more potent, in fact, through richer and wider lands SSO WHY TURKEY LIVES 331 than the mighty Emperor who gazed with such astonishment on the scene. We know why the German Empire exists, but it takes thought to comprehend why the " Turkish Empire " still endures. The dominion of the Ottoman clan, which should have been a mere passing pheno- menon, like the similar dominion of another Tartar clan in Russia, owes its continuance, as we read its history, to three causes, two of them intellectual. The first is the extraordinary, indeed the abso- lutely unrivalled force displayed through ages by the descendants of Othman, the Tartar chief from Khorassan. The old line, " An Amurath, an Amurath succeeds," has been substantially true. Sprung originally from a stock welded into iron by the endless strife of the great Asiatic desert, mating always with women picked for some separate charm either of beauty or captivation, the Sultans, with the rarest exceptions, have been personages, great soldiers, great statesmen, or great tyrants. Mahmoud the destroyer of the Janissaries, who only died in 1839 that is, while men still middle- aged were alive was the equal in all but success of Amurath I., who organized, though he did not invent, that terrible institution ; and even the pre- sent Sultan, in many ways so feeble, is no Romulus Augustulus, no connoisseur in poultry, but a timid Louis XI., who overmatches Russians and Greeks in craft, who terrifies men like his Ottoman Pashas, and who is obeyed with trembling by the most 332 ASIA AND EUROPE distant servant of his throne. The terrible Emir of Afghanistan, whose satraps, while ruling pro- vinces and armies, open his letters "white in the lips with fear," is not regarded with more slavish awe than Abdul Hamid, the recluse who watches always in his palace against assassination or mutiny. We have only to remember what the Hohenzollerns have been to Prussia, to understand what the family of Othman, defended as they have been against revolution by the Mussulman belief that " when Othman falls Islam falls," has been to a fight- ing clan. The second cause of the continuance of the Ottoman dominion has been less accidental. Like the early Caliphs, and indeed all able Mussulman dynasties except the Persian, the ruling house of Turkey has for all these centuries maintained unbroken the principle that apart from creed, ability is the only qualification for the highest service. Outside the Navy, a Turkish grandee must be a Mussulman ; but that granted, there is no obstacle of birth, or cultivation, or position stand- ing in any man's path. Even slavery is no barrier. Over and over again, a Sultan apparently at the end of his resources has stooped among the crowd, clutched a soldier, a slipper-bearer, a tobacconist, a renegade, given him his own limitless power, and asking of him nothing but success, has secured it in full measure. Equality within the faith, which is a dogma of Islam, and next to its belief in a " Sultan WHY TURKEY LIVES 333 of the sky," its grand attraction to inferior races, has in Turkey been a reality as it has been in no other Empire on earth, and has provided its Sovereigns who, be it remembered, fear no rival unless he be a kinsman, an Arab, or a " Prophet " with an endless supply of the kind of ability they need. The history of the Grand Viziers of Turkey, were it ever written, would be the history of men who have risen by sheer force of ability, that is, by success in war or by statesmanship, or, in fewer instances, by that art of mastering an Asiatic Sovereign and his seraglio in which fools do not succeed. The Sultans have rarely promoted, rarely even used, men of their own house, which is the Persian dynastic policy, have hated, and at last destroyed, the few nobles of their Empire ; and capricious and cruel as they have been, have often shown a power of steadily upholding a great ser- vant such as we all attribute to the founder of the new German Empire. This equality, this chance of a career of great opportunities, great renown, and great luxury, brings to Constantinople a crowd of intriguers, some of them matchless villains ; but it also brings a great crowd of able and unscrupulous men, who understand how to " govern " in the Turkish sense, and who have constantly succeeded in restoring a dominion which seemed hopelessly broken up. Every Pasha is a despot, an able despot is soon felt, and he has in carrying out the method of Turkish government, which is simply the 334 ASIA AND EUROPE old Tartar method of stamping out resistance, an advantage over Europeans which is the third cause of the continuance of the Ottoman Empire. He is tormented with no hesitations in applying force as a cure for all things. The man who resists is to die, or purchase life by submission. A European of our day, however determined, can hardly carry out that policy consistently. His intellect and his conscience alike revolt. He hates the necessary destruction, destruction, if a province or an island revolts, like Titus' destruction of Judea ; he cannot bear his own doubts as to his own righteousness in so slaughtering. The Ottoman has no such enfee- bling hesitations. To destroy all non-Mussulmans who resist is precisely what the Prophet ordered ; and to destroy Mussulmans who rebel is in accord- ance with the Prophet's practice, and every tradition of his faith. He has, therefore, no hesitation, no halfness, no repinings, but uses force when required ia its extreme form, the form in which, if it be but sufficient, it always succeeds in procuring submis- sion. The true Turkish sentence is death, and death poured out in buckets bewilders an Opposi- tion. There is but one case in Europe in which force is thus habitually employed, force, that is, implying capital punishment, by men who have no doubts or compunctions or remorse in applying it and that is the maintenance of discipline in a con- script army. The officers are few, and the men many, but a mutiny in a conscript army is as yet WHY TURKEY LIVES 335 an unknown event. There is probably in all the Sultan's dominion not one man, not an Ottoman or an Albanian, who would not give five years of his life that that dominion should be overthrown; but there is no mutiny without foreign assistance, the dread of force, unhesitatingly applied by men who have no doubts, over- mastering hate, just as it does with the fiercest conscripts in all the armies of the Continent. Even now, when we all talk of the Turkish Empire as moribund, it is doubtful if it will perish under any decay from within. The subject races do not grow stronger, as witness recent scenes in Armenia, where a single tribe, with only tolerance from the Sultan, keeps a whole people in agonies of fear. The Arabs, full-blooded and half-caste, who might succeed in insurrection, find the strength of civilized Europe right across their path, and are precipitating themselves, in a fury of fanaticism and greed, upon the powerless States of the interior of Africa. The European subjects of the Sultan are cowed, and without foreign assistance will not risk a repetition of Batouk. The army for internal pur- poses is far stronger than ever, the men being the old Ottoman soldiers, brave as Englishmen, abste- mious as Spaniards, to whom the Germans have lent their discipline and their drill. No force within the Empire outside Arabia could resist the reorganized troops who defiled on Sunday before the Emperor, or hope to reach, as no doubt the first 336 ASIA AND EUROPE Mahdi if left alone might have reached, Constanti- nople itself. The financial difficulties of the Trea- sury are great, but the Sultans have recently risked and have survived complete repudiation, and the revenue is enough, and will remain enough, to keep the Army together and supply the luxury of the Palace. There is one weak place in the interior of the Empire, the slowly decaying force of the House of Othman, which now has a deep taint in its veins unknown to the earlier Sultans ; and this may bring the dynasty to an end. The Mussulman system of succession is, however, the strongest yet devised by man, prohibiting as it does the accession of a woman or a child, and an adequate successor may still follow Abdul Hamid. Failing that continuous decay, the Empire will last, and probably remain great, until it goes down before outside force, which again, in the endless jealousies of the Powers, may not be applied in its full weight for many years to come. The land attack on Constantinople is more difficult, whether to Slav or Austrian, than ever ; and the maritime Powers cannot settle, cannot even, to all appearance, think, who shall be reversionary heir to the gateway of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. We may hope for better things ; but there is no visible ground for certainty that if the German Kaiser's grandson visits Constantinople, he will witness, as Frederic Barbarossa did, high mass repeated by Christian priests in the restored Cathedral of St. Sophia. Tropical Colonization WE wish we could heartily agree in the views of Mr. Frederick Boyle, but history, we fear, forbids. That gentleman, who has much and varied experience of tropical lands, argued, in the New Review, that the English belief as to the impossibility of Europeans colonizing tropical countries was a baseless, as well as an embarrassing, prejudice. We shall have to do it, he says, for the temperate regions are either getting full, or being closed to immigrants by the jealousy of their occupants ; and we may therefore as well reconsider the objections to settling in the tropical or, to be more exact for the description which includes Northern India in the tropics is a little vague in the hotter regions of the globe. Mr. Boyle finds most of them unreal. That man as a being does not degenerate physically in the hot countries seems to him certain, and we should admit that the evidence is for the most part wholly on his side. The Bengalees may be allowed to be "a feeble folk " though there is great exaggeration even about this but the Arabs, the Soudanese, the Southern Chinese, and almost all J7 z 338 ASIA AND EUROPE negroes are remarkable for muscular strength, power of enduring fatigue, and physical energy in general. They have less perhaps of the habit of living than Northern Europeans though half the centenarians of the world are negroes but that probably results from special circumstances, the English from the twelfth to the eighteenth century having died at least as fast as any dark tribe. If they had not, they would have increased in numbers at a much quicker rate. The dark peoples are, in fact, as " strong " as Europeans ; while as to courage, the Soudanese broke a British square, the West Indian negro soldiers can be trusted anywhere, and if the daring of the South Chinaman is doubtful except when he is a pirate, no one has ever ques- tioned that of the Malay, either in battle or in the wild adventures which led him to Madagascar and the islands of the Pacific. Nor is there much evidence of intellectual decay, for if the world owes nothing to the negro, she takes all her creeds from the men of the hotter lands, and the clearest-sighted professor in Europe is not superior in power of subtle thought to the Brahmin of Madras. If, then, man as a genus does not necessarily degenerate in the tropics, why should the white man, his most energetic species, degenerate either ? As a matter of fact, there are families of Jews which, without mixing their blood, have retained all energies, in Persia, Bombay, and even Bengal, for centuries ; while the people of Costa Rica, who are " nearly TROPICAL COLONIZATION 339 white," are a singularly hardy peasantry, and we may add the Copts, who, if not white, are as nearly white as the Jews, are still the most competent race in the valley of the Nile. Neither the Ptolemies nor their soldiers degenerated in Egypt, and there are Spanish families in Mexico as strong and as able as ever their progenitors were in Old Spain. Why then, asks Mr. Boyle, should not some State try the experiment of a tropical colony, which, if it succeeded, would open such vast regions to Euro- pean immigration, nay, might even produce a race greater than any now existing, for Mr. Boyle sympathizes a little with the naturalist, Mr. Bates, who, after years spent in the forests of Brazil, chiefly in the valley of the Amazon, found himself so fascinated by the vigour of Nature in the tropics that he wrote : " The well-balanced forces of nature maintain here a land surface and a climate that seem to be typical of mundane order and beauty. . . . I hold to the opinion that, though humanity can reach an advanced degree of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it is under the equator alone that the race of the future will attain to complete fruition of man's beautiful heritage, the earth." It is a splendid dream, because it opens up new and almost infinite possibilities for the white race now dominating, though it does not colonize, all the continents ; but we fear a dream only. History is opposed to Mr. Boyle. To begin with, that must 340 ASIA AND EUROPE have been a powerful instinct or a most operative law which originally divided mankind, so that the white race was confined to Europe, that the black race populated Africa, and that the huge bulk of Asia, the most fertile and tempting of all the continents, was filled with yellow and brown men. A scientific theorist would certainly say that some immutable law of convenience alone could have produced that result, which, amidst all the endless mutations of history, has remained substantially unchanged. Europe and Asia have fought for ever, but the bulk of the populations have remained European and Asiatic, while the great Roman invasion of Northern Africa and the Vandal invasion which followed it, alike ended in the triumph, more or less complete, of the brown races. Historians suggest no expla- nation of this cardinal fact, nor is any we think possible, except that, whatever the meaning of the mysterious law of race and science in no way accounts even for colour the white peoples flourish best within strictly temperate regions. They can flourish in the highlands of the tropics, but they do not reach their highest level, and tend, when attacked for ages by autochthons, to recede, as they have done in Egypt, and are doing in many parts of Spanish America. It is probably true that they can labour in the tropics, for the white mechanics of the Southern States of the Union live and work there, and possible that, as governing castes, they would in the tropics develop marvellous energy ; but TROPICAL COLONIZATION 341 they at most certainly would not advance as rapidly as in Europe. Englishmen are, we think, for some unknown reason, habitually unfair to Spanish Americans, who, whether pure or crossed, have produced men of singular daring, energy, and power of endurance ; who have built great cities and reclaimed great regions of the earth ; and who have besides a power of absorption and attraction acknow- ledged by all who settle in Spanish America, Italians more especially ; but it would be foolish to say that the owners of Brazil or Central America or Mexico show any symptoms of developing into the superior race of mankind. Pure or crossed, an optimist would hardly say of them that they were better than their ancestors in Old Spain or Portugal. A " Southern gentleman " of English blood is often a very fine man ; but he is not so much nobler than an English gentleman that he can be quoted to prove the truth of Mr. Bates' dream. That the hot lands are not fatal to energy may be true ; but certainly they do not, with all their natural advan- tages, ever tend to produce it. If they did, the most glorious of all tropical countries, Ceylon, would have produced a grand race ; and it has not done it. There, with land of all altitudes, and all kinds of powers of production, amidst perpetual summer and scenes which, if the theorists are right, should have bred in them an abnormal sense of beauty, dwells a race which we have no wish to decry, but which is certainly not more distinguished than, say, the 342 ASIA AND EC/ROPE Belgian or the Swede for any high qualities what- soever. Whether an admixture of white blood would have altered the result, as we understand Mr, Boyle to half believe at least if he does not believe it, we do not quite comprehend the drift of his remarks on the cross-breeds is still an unsettled question ; but it is clear that in the Southern States of the Union, in Spanish America, and in India, such admixture has not developed any markedly superior race. Mr. Bates' hope is a dream. We should say, on a review of the whole evidence, that it pointed to this result. It is probably much more possible for white men to colonize a tropical country than is imagined, especially if the colony was so organized that sanitary laws could be en- forced from the very first ; but the first generation would suffer terribly from unaccustomed diseases low fever, for example from the depressing effect of a change of climate, and from the shock involved in a violent change of daily habitudes as to diet, hours of labour, and general social life. This suffer- ing, involving much mortality, would discourage the average colonist to such a degree that he would not remain for the time which even Mr. Boyle admits to be necessary to secure complete acclimatization. No generation of men will devote itself in this way for the benefit of its successors, and every experi- ment will therefore end either in failure, or in the importation of races able to relieve the colonists 343 of all severe or exhausting toil. The second alter- native may succeed has, for example, succeeded in Louisiana ; but that is not colonization by white men. It is " settlement " a very different matter, and one which cannot be said to have been as yet fairly tried. We can quite conceive of both the world and the whites being benefited by the settle- ment of a tropical region, in which dark men shall labour, and white men, few comparatively in number, shall guide their labour, and, while reaping a profit out of their exertions, shall deliberately endeavour to keep up among them a high and improving standard of civilization. A body of white colonists working as a hieratic caste, and governing in the interest of the labourers as well as their own, might produce, under favouring circumstances, such results as the world has never seen, a civilization in which poverty, disease, and crime were almost entirely absent, and the whole community exulted in strug- gling forward to some lofty ideal. The experiment, however, has never been made, except by the Jesuits in Paraguay, and it is difficult to imagine how it could succeed. The guides become arbitrary or the guided rebellious, or in the end some adroit man avails himself of human foibles to seize the reins of power, and we have, as under Dr. Francia and his heir, a pure despotism which advances nothing, because in the interest of the despotism individuality must be put down. We rather wonder, however, that the experiment has never 344 ASIA AND EUROPE been tried by laymen, who, with a healthy African district before them, and two regiments of black freedmen from America, might achieve, for a time at least, a considerable result, and would certainly add considerably to the knowledge of mankind. A good many phalanstires have been started from time to time, and a philanthropic Baron Hirsch might try that one with some faint hope of success. It would, however, be a faint hope, the law of ages being clearly that Europeans and Asiatics and Africans will not, unless coerced by irresistible circumstances, work in continuous harmony together. Hindoo " Barbarism " AN educated Hindoo, who signs himself "A Member of the Brahmo - Somaj," and is therefore no Hindoo by creed, but a Theist, writes to the Times to complain that Indian pomp should be described by the word " barbaric." He evidently confuses the word with " barbarous," and goes on to a general defence of the civilization of India as compared with that of England, which is out of place, as he might have met the attack in a much more direct fashion. It is very doubtful whether the Indian pomp, of which we hear so much during the Prince's visit that Englishmen will fancy Indian life all reception, procession and elephant can fairly be described as " barbaric," even in the limited sense in which the Times declares that it has used the word, as expressing only splendour without taste. The native of India is by no means specially addicted to that particular fault. He is, as a rule, rigidly simple in dress, habitually using white for his costume, and when he departs from it, choos- ing colours with an eye for restrained effect, that secures results which are admired by Europeans in 345 346 ASIA AND EUROPE exact proportion to their artistic knowledge. And it is natural that it should be so. Living in a country where the air is filled with a painful wealth of penetrating life, such as men bred in our climate can scarcely realize, he loves shade and dusk and quiet colours, builds halls of reception in which a perpetual twilight reigns, plants his house in a grove of broad leaved trees in order to enjoy the shade, and dresses himself by preference in white the white, be it observed, being not the glaring white of this paper, but white toned by the dusky skin just seen beneath the muslin, till it has something of the cream-like effect which is the distinction of Satsuma ware. Even when he desires splendour and employs bright colours, their garishness, made so obvious by the lighted atmosphere, pains and annoys him, till he has learnt, by the observation of centuries, to combine them into a flat brilliancy which is the despair of European artists. It is the positive pain received by the eye in that climate from garishness which has taught the native to combine insufferably gaudy colours into the Cashmere shawl, the Mirza- pore carpet, the marble work of his floorings, and the broad-brimmed, coloured turban of full dress, often a marvellous specimen of art, and always, unless injured by some caste rule or family tradition, producing an effect of subdued splendour as little barbaric as the newest French ribbon in teints degrades. The dress of a great native magnate, the account of which reads so " splendiferous," is HINDOO "BARBARISM" 347 usually a marvel of restrained effect, and no more barbaric that is, no more wanting in essential harmony with its end than that of the great Parisi- enne, who, like the native noble, employs gems to set off her raiment and show her wealth. If, indeed, " gold and pearl " be in themselves " barbaric," as Milton said he only meant " foreign," as the Greeks did when they used the word then the Times is right, but that is surely not true taste. It is bright- ness out of place which is barbaric, not brightness itself. Who doubts the artistic accuracy of the most blazing of all jewels a lady's collar of tiger-claws set in gold and rubies ? It is true, a native noble prefers his gems uncut, but that arises from reasons which are not barbaric, and will appeal to many connoisseurs. You cannot imitate the uncut stone, with its strange, momentary revealings of colours, and that sort of mystery of light hidden in it which touches a native imagination, and is the secret of his delight in the half-translucent gems, in the opal, in the cat's- eye which is worth in India many times its value in Europe, and is invested with all manner of weird attributes and in the unrevealing depth of the larger carbuncles, which seem to emit instead of receiving light, till the native asserts that they actually do it. In his management of a cere- monial or a procession, the Hindoo, who holds the ceremonial in a hall filled with one broad shadow, and begins his procession in half-light, is not seeking garishness, or an exhibition of mere wealth, but an 348 ASIA AND EUROPE effect which in Europe, in theatres and opera-houses, we all profess to enjoy, an effect of splendour with which reality has nothing to do. The truth about him on this side of his head is not that he is barbaric, but that he is histrionic to excess, and when the mood is on him he will seek his theatrical result by means which, to Europeans, who assume the necessity of tinsel on the stage, but forget it in India, seems grotesque or barbarous. The painting of animals' heads, the adornment of elephants with gold bracelets, and all the like exhibitions, are not efforts at display, as the Times fancies, but efforts to realize a picture existing in the native's mind, as it exists in that of the scene-painter, and we may add, is very often realized. The gold and the paint, we say, are out of place, but they are no more so in intention than the blacklead with which we darken the coats of funeral- horses, or the spangles with which a dancer tries to give her dress a coruscating effect. The evil is not want of true taste, which in such matters a Hindoo has, but a histrionic disregard for reality when in search of impressions. " A Member of the Brahmo-Somaj " is right enough when he points to the English lady's chignon as more barbaric than his pomp, for the wearer of the chignon does not when wearing it postulate in her mind a stage-effect, as the Hindoo does. "A Member of the Brahmo-Somaj " might have made a better case for his countrymen's pomps, and when he passes to the general question of compara- HINDOO "BARBARISM" 349 tive civilizations, he makes a muddle between civilization and morality, and to be even intelligible should have added definitions. What does he understand by civilization ? We understand by it that state of society in which the will, the interests, and the passions of the individual are restrained by irresistible law for the protection of the whole community, or it may be, for its advancement towards an end deemed by that community in its wisest moments permanently desirable. There can be no doubt that, so defined, civilization exists in Western Europe; and as little that, so defined, it exists in part in India. A native is bound in every action of his life by codes and laws, and customs having the force of law, which he never violates, and the majority of which are intended either to benefit the community, or to advance towards an ideal, or to maintain intact the Divinely-appointed order of society. Nevertheless, civilization in the East and West is not the same thing. The differ- ence, the radical difference, is not only, as the Times says, that the Western civilization is progressive and the Eastern stationary for any civilization, however lofty, with which its subjects were thor- oughly content would be stationary, and we have no proof that progress is to last for ever but that in India breaks are allowed in the grand chain which often render it feeble, or seem to destroy it alto- gether. Three doors always stand open in India for the reintrusion of barbaric individualism. Any 35 ASIA AND EUROPE man who professes that his religion justifies or enjoins a particular act is thereby exempt from " civilization," that is, from the general polity made in the interest of all. The Hindoo moral code is, in substance, the same as our own ; but if a sept declares that its creed or its caste-rule enjoins infanticide, as among Rajpoots ; or unlimited poly- gamy, as among Koolin Brahmins ; or abnormal sexual laws, as among some sections of the Sivaites ; or murder, as among the followers of Bhowani ; or defiance of all rules of decency, as among the Jains, J ogees, and some other sects, authority drops its sword, and even opinion ceases to act. The absolute right of the individual, as against civiliza- tion, is restored, and however abhorred or however noxious he is not effectively condemned. If a Government alien from the people chooses to sup- press abnormal religious practices, the people neither resent nor resist ; but the Indian civilization of itself by the law of its being, cannot suppress suttee, female infanticide, Thuggeeism though self-defence may order the killing of the individual Thug- phallic worship, or the unrestricted wandering of naked devotees of both sexes in front of palaces tenanted by all-powerful persons, who, whether moral or immoral themselves, hold on all these subjects the same ideas of civilization as Europeans. The chain of civilization breaks before the claim of religious freedom, and admits a rush of barbarism which affects all external as well as all internal life HINDOO "BARBARISM" 351 in India, every caste professing some tenet or main- taining some privilege intended to operate for its own advantage against the general good of the community. Another break, and quite as potent a one, is the liberty allowed to the ruler. His duty, on the Hindoo theory, is precisely his duty on the English theory ; but he is unbound by law, and consequently, if he is bad, civilization ends. The will of the ruler, or of those he appoints, is not subordinated to the interest of the community, but is allowed to act against it without punishment, and except in very extreme cases, without serious reproach. All Hindoo thought condemned a life like that of the late ruler of Baroda, but it is nearly certain he would not have been upset, and quite probable that he was popular. The power of the ruler being great, his individualism, thus left free, may and frequently does break up civilization, makes commerce, for instance, impossible, or throws counties out of cultivation, or arrests the whole course of education for a gener- ation. Those evils do not happen in Western Europe, even when what is here called absolutism has been vested in the ruler. His will is not really released even if, like the Kings of Denmark, he is declared by the Constitution " absolute throughout his dominions." And finally, there is a third break in the chain, in the one-sidedness with which the doctrine that the individual is to give way to the community is applied. The doctrine allowing for 352 ASIA AND EUROPE the two great exemptions we have mentioned is held in theory as a prohibitory law as strongly as in Europe, but as a stimulating law it is not held at all. No Hindoo holds himself at liberty to hurt the community, but no Hindoo holds himself bound to benefit it to his own effacement. For instance, any Hindoo would deny that he had a right to rob the village Treasury, and if a decent man he would not do it, any more than an English clergyman would steal his sacramental plate. But no Hindoo who could avoid the tax paid to that Treasury would think himself morally wrong in avoiding it. The man who would not murder for the world is not bound in his own mind to warn the traveller of the approaching Thug. The man who would not steal for the world and there are millions of Hindoos just as likely to steal as the Archbishop of Canterbury does not feel obliged to prevent a theft. Individualism is rampant on this side, the right to tolerate anything, until India has been conquered by successive hosts of foreigners. It is alleged that Hindoos have no patriotism, and many Europeans will assert that no such idea as that of " country " even has ever entered their minds. We utterly disbelieve it, believe, on the contrary, that Hindoos have a patriotism of a sensitive kind, a profound belief that India is, and ought to be, and ultimately will be, for them ; that invasion is unjust, and that the invader ought to depart. But that he who thinks so individually ought to risk life, property, or freedom HINDOO "BARBARISM" 353 in making the intruder depart, he does not think ; and so, unless he can gain by the effort, he leaves him to conquer at his will. India is, in fact, a civilized country, in which the community is above the individual, except when the latter pleads religion, when the latter is a ruler, and when the duty to be observed is positive, and not negative ; and those three exceptions make its civilization so imperfect, that careless observers are almost justified in calling it " barbaric." AA The Future of the Negro IT is difficult for men who study history to read the discussion now raging on the progress of Islam in Africa without recurring to the old ques- tion which so greatly interested the last generation, and is now so seldom started the question of what the Negro is really like. There are not many left among us, we imagine, though there are some here and there, who doubt whether he is a man at all ; but the conflict of opinion about him is of the most extreme kind, so extreme as to be almost unintel- ligible. One set of observers, with whom Captain Burton, as we understand his writings, agrees in the main, hold that he is a nearly irreclaimable savage, a being who cannot be ruled except by terror, and who is by nature incapable of rising to the level attained by the white, and even in many respects by the yellow and the brownish man. They think his savagery instinctive, his laziness incurable, and his sensuality far in excess of any- thing observable in Europe. They declare Africa an accursed continent chiefly because of the Negro, and welcome frightful narratives, like Mr. St. John's THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO 355 account of Hayti, as demonstrating past all question the accuracy of their theory. Other observers, again, including many missionaries and some ex- plorers, are friendly to the Negro, think that the repulsion caused by his external aspect makes or- dinary men unjust to him, and declare that he is, when not oppressed, essentially a docile creature indisposed to vindictiveness, and though not clever, fairly ready to receive instruction, which, they further add, may occasionally be carried up to any point attainable by the white man. Such observers, among whom we should class keen-eyed Mrs. Trollope, who had rare opportunities of studying the race, and keener-eyed Mrs. Stowe, think the Uncle-Tom kind of Negro not rare, and evidently hold that when bad, he is vicious as a European may be, rather than innately savage. A third class maintain that the Negro, if carefully observed, is found to be exactly like everybody else, with the same passions, the same aspirations, and the same powers, with one most remarkable exception. He cannot rise in the scale beyond a certain point. The originating power of the European and the imitating power of the modern Asiatic are not in him, or not in the same degree; and he remains under all circumstances more or less of a child, bad or good like other children, but never quite a man. It is added by this class, and in part by the one mentioned before it, that the Negro woman is, on the whole, better than the Negro man, with more 356 AST A AND EUROPE industry, more fidelity, and decidedly more capacity for the gentler virtues. The third opinion is, so far as we know, that of the majority of missionaries, of most residents in the West Indies not being employers of labour, and of all Americans, and they have been many, to whom we have opened the subject. Americans seem to us, as a rule, to think most kindly of the Negro, to be entirely free from fear of him, to be annoyed with oppression practised on him, but to be quite hopeless about his future. He will not advance, they think, and would recede but for the white man. History certainly bears these Americans out. Throughout its whole course, in the old world as in the modern one, under the most extreme variety of circumstances, no Negro of the full blood has ever risen to first-class eminence among mankind. Not only has there been no Negro philosopher, or inventor, or artist, or builder; but there has been no Negro conqueror, nor, unless we class Said, Mahommed's slave, as one, and Toussaint 1'Ouver- ture as another, any Negro general above the rank of a guerilla chief. There seems to be no reason for this except race. People talk of the seclusion of the Negro ; but he has always been in contact on the Nile with the Egyptian, or the Greek, or the Roman, in South America with the Spaniard, and in North America with the English-speaking Teuton, and he has learned very little. It is objected that he has been always a slave ; but so was everybody 357 else in the Roman period, most modern Italians, for example, being the descendants of the white slaves of the Roman gentry. Moreover, why does the Negro put up with that position, when the China- man, and the Red Indian, and even the native of India will not ? It is said that he has been buried in the most " massive " of the four continents, and has been, so to speak, lost to humanity ; but he was always on the Nile, the immediate road to the Mediterranean, and in West and East Africa he was on the sea. Africa is probably more fertile, and almost certainly richer than Asia, and is pierced by rivers as mighty, and some of them at least as navigable. What could a singularly healthy race, armed with a constitution which resists the sun and defies malaria, wish for better than to be seated on the Nile, or the Congo, or the Niger, in numbers amply sufficient to execute any needed work, from the cutting of forests and the making of roads up to the building of cities ? How was the Negro more secluded than the Peruvian ; or why was he " shut up " worse than the Tartar of Samarcand, who one day shook himself, gave up all tribal feuds, and, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic, and southwards to the Ner- budda, mastered the world ? One Tartar family was reigning at one time over China, Tartary, India and Russia. Why has the Negro, who is brave as man may be, alone of mankind never emerged from his jungles and subdued neighbouring races ? Why 358 ASIA AND EUROPE has he never invented a creed of the slightest spiritual or moral merit, never, in fact, risen above fetishism? Above all, why has he remained in Africa for three thousand years at least, without forming empires or building stone cities, or employ- ing a common medium of intercommunication ? Mr. Blyden says he has formed cities full of busy life and commerce ; but have they ever been better than encampments, and why have they not lasted ? We who write certainly do not believe in the incur- able incapacity of the race, for we know of Bishop Crowther and Mr. Blyden, and have talked with Negroes apparently as thoughtful and as well in- structed as any Europeans ; but we confess that the history of the race remains to us an insoluble puzzle, except upon the theory that there are breeds of mankind in whom that strangest of all pheno- mena, the arrestment of development, occurs at a very early stage. The Negro went by himself far beyond the Australian savage. He learned the uses of fire, the fact that sown grain will grow, the value of shelter, the use of the bow and the canoe, and the good of clothes ; but there to all appearance he stopped, unable, until stimulated by another race like the Arab, to advance a step. He did not die, like the Australian. He did not sink, like one or two varieties of the Red Indian, and of the abori- gines of South Africa, into a puny being hardly like a man ; but he stopped at a point as if arrested by a divine will. There is not a shadow of proof that THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO 359 the Negro described by Werne differs in any way from the Negro of the time of Sesostris. It is not quite certain even that the race, when started again, would, as a race, go on improving. The Haytians, who are Christians, who are free, and who are in the fullest contact with great white races, are believed to be retrograding ; and only the hopeful would believe in the future of American slaves, if they were to be expelled, as De Tocqueville thought they would ultimately be, to the islands, or, as is infinitely more probable should the war of races ever break out, to Central America. As far as we see, nothing really improves the Negro except one of two causes cross-breeding, and catching hold of some foreign but superior creed. The cross-breeds of the Soudan and of South Africa seem to have some fine qualities matchless courage, for example and under a strict but vivifying white rule might, we fancy, be brought in a century or two up to the Asiatic level. They produce generals, at all events, and chiefs with some tincture of statesmanship, and have poetry and a folk-lore of their own. Those Negroes, again, who have embraced Islam do show a certain manli- ness, a capacity for aggregation, and a tendency, at all events, to form kingdoms, and organize armies, and obey laws, which are the first steps towards a higher civilization. It is not a high civilization, for when all is said, a Mahommedan Negro is not an ideal of humanity towards which Europeans can 3 6o ASIA AND EUROPE look with any feeling of enthusiasm ; but still, it is higher, far higher, than the condition of the African pagan. The Negro who embraces Christianity, again, while he remains in contact with the white man, distinctly advances. " Uncle Tom " is an abnormal specimen, it may be, and we are not inclined to place the moral condition of the Negroes of the Southern States very high ; but still, they have displayed a perfectly wonderful absence of vindictiveness towards the former slave-owners, obey the ordinary laws with fair regularity, and keep themselves above starvation by the labour of their own hands. The best of them, moreover, rise far beyond this point, the South containing both doctors and lawyers who, by the admission of the whites, are thoroughly competent men ; and it may be said of the whole body that, though not equal to any European community of the same extent, they are far superior to any four millions of pagan Negroes who could be selected in Africa. As they cannot owe this rise in the scale to slavery, which at the best could only drill the Negroes to industry, and at the worst must beget a permanent distaste for labour, the change must be owing to Christianity, plus the operation of laws based upon that faith. It follows that the largest group of Negroes under civilized observation, the descend- ants, as is believed, of four widely distinguished tribes, have been raised in the scale of humanity by embracing a rude form of the Christian faith. THE FUTURE Of THE NEGRO 361 The total conclusion, therefore, as yet justified by evidence, is that intermarriage, especially with the Arab, improves the Negro tribes, that they gain in manliness by embracing Islam, and that they gain in the social virtues by embracing Christianity, the latter to a degree measured by the depth and earnestness of their faith. At home, when uncon- quered and unconverted, they do not advance, and the point still doubtful is whether, when left to themselves, they will not, even when converted, again recede or stop. The Abyssinians, who are Semites, have been Christians for ages. The con- clusion is not very satisfactory ; but it is certain that races of imperfect powers exist e.g., the Aus- tralian aborigines and that Providence does, for unknown purposes, occasionally waste even fine races e.g., the Maoris, who will, to all appearance, die out, having fulfilled no function at all, not even that of preparing the way for the ultimate occupants of their country. The Negro Problem in America TO those who interest themselves in the condi- tion of the dark races, there is no problem at once so attractive and so insoluble as the future of the negroes in the United States. It is not only that they are already seven millions, and will before the end of the century be twenty millions a great nation camped, as it were, on the territory of a still greater nation which dislikes and despises them ; but that they have all the advantages the possession of which would, in the opinion of most philanthropists, redeem any black race from its age-long position of degradation among mankind. Some of the ablest among us are never tired of proclaiming that if all Africans could be released from oppression, if they all became Christians, if they all possessed the means of education, and if they were all drilled by a steady habit of labour out of their habits of indolence, they would at once advance, if not to the level of the highest Europeans, at least to that of the Russian moujiks, or of the better Asiatics. Those ideals have in the case of the American negroes all been realized. THE NEGRO PROBLEM IN AMERICA 363 They are all not only free from servitude, but possessed of the same voting powers as the whites around, able as their rivals wherever they can obtain a majority to legislate, to impose or remit State taxes, to elect their own rulers, and to exercise all those functions of government and they are very large functions reserved by the Constitu- tion to individual States. There is nothing what- ever in the laws of the Union to prevent a negro from becoming President, as a full-blooded Indian became the legal as well as effective President of Mexico. They are all nominally or really Chris- tians, and if the Christianity is not of a lofty kind, and is shot with many degrading or puerile super- stitions, the same reservations must be made as regards most of the Christian peoples which are white. They have all the means of education, and some of them have become really educated men, able to pass any examinations or practise any of the learned professions. Finally they have, as a race, endured for more than a century that is, for genera- tion after generation the severest drilling in industry ever borne by any dark race, or, indeed, with the possible exception of the Jews, by any race whatever. They have all, for at least four generations, been compelled to work, and to work steadily, from boyhood to late old age, as hard as any workmen anywhere. Yet no one, whether visionary or man of experi- ence or statesman, professes to be satisfied with the 364 ASIA AND EUROPE result, alleges that the mass of American negroes are the equals of any equal mass of white men, or even of Asiatics, or asserts that the races are now living together on satisfactory conditions. Rather the cleavage between them grows deeper instead of more shallow. The whites dislike and despise the negroes more than ever they did. They cannot endure to see them vote, and practically prevent them voting by an unhesitating use of force. They will not bear negroes as officials if their terms of office enable them to rule white men. They defend themselves against their claim to equality by a wall of etiquettes, and defend that wall when it is threatened by an immediate and often cruel use of lead and steel. They hate, and, when they can, prohibit legal marriage between the races. They are ready to burn alive, and, as a matter of fact, they often do burn alive, any black man who ravishes any white woman. They will not sit at table with them, or travel in the same cars, or, except in the rarest instances, receive the Sacrament before the same altar. The idea of a negro pastor to a white church is to them unthinkable. They, in fact, even when they will not fully admit it, regard the negroes as men who may be men, and as such may be entitled to certain rights, but who may, nevertheless, be regarded even by the good with something of instinctive disgust. The negroes, on the other hand, regard the whites with a mingling of dislike and fear. They resent their own treatment THE NEGRO PROBLEM IN AMERICA 365 as unfair, and when they dare, avenge themselves by what are really small insurrections or assassinations, both of which are put down, not by appeals to the law, or even by the use of troops, but by fierce risings of armed mobs with which the officials are either unwilling or unable to deal. There is, in fact, in all the Southern States of the Union a fire of race hatred always smouldering which might on any sudden provocation if an invader, for instance, appealed successfully to the negroes for aid break into a devastating flame. The whites in the case supposed a most improbable case, of course would not hesitate at extirpation. The flame rarely breaks out now, first because the whites are really the superior race, combine more readily and have far abler leaders ; and secondly, because superior force is so evidently on the white side. The North would not tolerate a negro victory even in one State, and hopelessness of ultimate success helps to restrain the black men, even where they possess a majority, from putting out their full strength or attempting to renew the experiment which has so grievously failed in Haiti. With every million added to the negro crowd, how- ever, the negro fear of the whites will tend to dimin- ish, and it is not surprising that cool observers, in the States and outside, regard the situation with alarm, and discuss with interest every proposition which appears to contain a remedy. Yet what is that re- medy to be ? Some observers rely on the influence 366 ASIA AND EUROPE of time, saying, the races being both free will grow accustomed to each other ; but all history denies the truth of that pleasing impression. Real differences of race never lose their separating force. The Jews of Russia and Roumania have probably been there for fifteen hundred years, have certainly been there for three hundred, and but for official intervention the scenes of Kishineff would be repeated all over Russia. Except under the influence of some new re- ligious emotion, about which it is vain to utter fore- casts, the whites will not change their mental atti- tude, nor the blacks, who are among the vainest of mankind, cease to feel that this attitude is for them at once a menace and an insult. A whole- sale elevation of the blacks in the scale of humanity might do much for them, but it would probably deepen the white distaste for any resulting equality, and is in itself exceedingly improbable. Even in Europe a real elevation of the proletariat is a slow process consuming centuries ; and while in Europe aristocrat and workman are essentially of the same breed, the black in America has to shake himself free of tendencies inherited from the earliest time, to- wards which as he has shown in Haiti he has an inexplicable tendency to revert. The tendency is not universal, for the American negroes are not all of one race, but are descended from many tribes, one or two of which were probably of far better morale and intellectual capacity than the others. That is, we believe, the true ultimate explanation THE NEGRO PROBLEM IN AMERICA 367 both of " Uncle Tom " and of Mr. Washington Booker ; but the masses when segregated from the whites do not advance at all, and on many points, especially obedience to sexual restrictions, remain African rather than American. There seems to be little hope in cross-breeding. Shortly after the great Civil War the word " misce- genation " was in all men's mouths ; but the races mix less than they did in the slave-holding period, and the dislike felt for the hybrid is stronger in the white than his dislike for the negro. (That this feeling is not so acute with the Southern European as with the Anglo-Saxon is true, but is probably the result of Roman Catholicism rather than of any difference in instincts.) The more desperate remedies may, we think, be put quietly aside as practically out of the question. M. de Tocqueville evidently thought the extirpation of the negro quite possible ; but he expected it as the result of a Haytian rising, and gained his expe- rience when the negroes were slaves and less than three millions in number. The extirpation of seven millions of free men, still more of twenty millions, is only a dream, and one which, even if a servile war broke out, Americans would refuse to realize. They would not attempt it, whatever the consequences. Expulsion is a gentler method ; but it is very doubt- ful if the negroes would consent to be expelled, and perfectly certain that such a movement, executed as an act of violence, would be beyond the power of 368 ASIA AND EUROPE any nation. The shattering of all labour relations would of itself involve ruin too complete for the generation which had to bear it. Besides, where are the negroes to go? "The islands," perhaps, might hold them ; but the larger islands, Cuba only partially excepted, do not belong to the Union ; and for Americans to waste a generation in forcibly ex- porting 250,000 negroes a year, and providing for them when exported till they could settle as peasants, is inconceivable. Mexico will not take them, and a proposal to give them four or five of the Southern States, and so purify the remainder, would probably provoke another civil war, besides leaving the prob- lem only half solved. No one can predict the future, but our own im- pression as historians is very strong that no com- plete solution of the negro question is to be expected. It will remain unsolved, like the Irish question, and the Polish question, and the Socialist question, and many another, for generations never quite unman- ageable, but always a source of trouble to the nation and a source of vexation to those who believe, in the teeth of experience, that for every evil there is a remedy. The negroes will throw up from time to time persons so exceptionally intelligent that hope among all who watch them will revive ; but the ma- jority even with a tincture of education will remain, as the French peasantry remained for centuries, hewers of wood and drawers of water an inferior proletariat, usually quiescent, and always productive THE NEGRO PROBLEM IN AMERICA 369 of other men's wealth, but liable at times to burst out in jacqueries and to swell the undying yet seldom successful army of the discontented. The greater numbers will probably become peasants, slowly acquiring the land and living on it in a poor but continuous way, making customs for themselves which, as in Asia, will have the force of laws, as all the dark races hitherto have done, whether governed by soldiers or by an irresistible white caste. It is not a glowing prospect, but then glowing prospects are usually imaginary; and Americans, irresistible as their strength may become and mighty as their collective prosperity will undoubtedly be, cannot hope to escape the internal troubles which have hampered, and to a certain degree trained, every other people. Long habit will teach them what to do and what to avoid, but it will not alter the con- ditions, the first of which as regards the negroes is that a few among them have in them the power to become the equals of any men ; but that to raise the mass, say, to the mental position of the races of Upper India, will take many centuries of patience and exertion. Nothing that man can do will acce- lerate the process, and to the Providence of God, time, as men count time, is clearly nothing. Con- fucius died more than two thousand years ago and we have still only the Chinese. The Minds of Savages WE do not yet know all there is to be known about the earliest savage life of which we have any proof. We can trace with some approach to accuracy the mode of life in the Bronze Age, and even in the Stone Age ; but we know but little of the minds of the men who lived then, of the extent or limits of their knowledge, or of the powers of thought which they possessed. It is quite possible that, as regards the latter, we habitu- ally underrate them. No less than three distinct and perceptible influences tend to make modern observers sceptical, or even contemptuous, as to the intellectual powers of savages. Civilization, to begin with, of itself produces scorn, often an overweening scorn, for barbarism, and especially barbarism of the rougher, or, to speak more de- finitely, the hunting type. It seems to the dweller in Paris or London, himself cultivated till he hardly knows what in him is natural and what acquired, as if the savage who faces the weather naked, who lives in a cave on the side of a hill, and who grows nothing, could hardly have a mind at all. 870 THE MINDS OF SAVAGES 371 If he had one, why did he not make himself comfortable, build a hut, grow corn, and, above all, put on clothes ? Then there is just now an uncon- scious wish among most scientific men to prove the truth of evolution by showing that man was once mentally of a very low type, and thus to diminish the gulf, otherwise so impassable, which separates him from the animal world. If they could only prove that he was once incapable not only ot expressing, but of forming an abstract idea, they would secretly be all delighted. And, thirdly, a system has grown up of interpreting one race of savages by another which directly tends to lower our judgement of the powers of all. The philo- sophers know with a certain intimacy one class of savages, the Negroids of the Australasian Pacific, in whom mental power is extraordinarily small ; and because they live much as European savages lived, they assume that both must have reached about the same mental standard. Yet in a thou- sand years, the relics remaining of the fishermen of Devon and those remaining of the clam-eaters of the Australian coast will be almost indistinguish- able. It is at least equally possible that the differences produced by what we call race were as pronounced in the Stone Age as they are now, that the minds of whole tribes may have been as separate as the minds of nations now are, and that mental capacity may in some races and under some circumstances have reached a higher level than we 372 ASIA AND EUROPE fancy, before man devoted his powers to becoming comfortable at all. A naked troglodyte Newton may be unthinkable, because the word " Newton " embodies certain moral qualities ; but a naked troglodyte philosopher or student of physics is not unthinkable at all. Diogenes, according to the legend, nearly was one ; and a Jain teacher pro- bably exists who would puzzle most undergraduates, and who lives naked in a mat hut. While caves were warm and easily made, there was in Europe little reason to build huts ; the notion of growing cereals probably came late, for no beast plants them, and the idea that a seed will grow if you bury it, must without experience have seemed hope- lessly wild ; and as to clothes, whole races still think them an almost unendurable restraint and burthen. A negro, or an Australian, or a Kaffir of Dr. Moffatt's country, even when semi-civilized, is conscious of an almost irresistible impulse to throw his clothes away, and restore himself to his original liberty of motion. If mind in the Stone Age of Europe had not advanced beyond its pre- sent level among Melanesians, how are we to account for facts such as those detailed by Mr. Horsley at the Royal Institution in a lecture ? The ignorance of the darker savages of to-day of almost all operations of surgery, is absolutely marvellous ; yet Mr. Horsley showed on conclusive evidence that in France, savages who used only stone, dwelt in caves, and probably had no idea THE MINDS OF SAVAGES 373 of clothes, constantly performed the delicate opera- tion on the skull called trephining, or, as it used to be called by the unlearned, trepanning. They cut and raised the fractured bone of the skull successfully. No less than sixty skulls and frag- ments of skulls upon which this operation has been performed exist in the museums of France, and it is clear that it was one of the best known and most frequently practised. Mr. Horsley, finding that the fracture was almost always on the vertex of the skull, suggests that it produced epilepsy, and that trephining was performed to prevent this result, as well as to alleviate frightful headaches ; but there is another possible explanation. The regular tribal or household punishment may have been a downright blow on the skull with a thick club, a punishment selected because it precludes resistance to the decree on the part of the victim. It is still regularly inflicted among Australians, the victim being stunned by a cracking blow down- wards on the skull with the short club known as the " waddy." As the strikers did not intend death, and as it was inconvenient that a mere secondary punishment should produce either death or idiotcy, a practice of cutting and raising the fractured bones grew up and gradually became a known art, probably practised by the medicine-men, or priests, or other officials of the tribe. Whatever the motive, the fact is certain, and indicates that the savages who learned such an art were men 374 ASIA AND EUROPE who could pity for no man can trephine his own skull who could understand cause and effect, and who could learn from repeated experience almost as well as we can. A mental chasm, the bridge over which is nearly inconceivable, separated them from the animals. It is quite possible, of course, that the knowledge of this art of trephining, and of many others, was confined to a very few. In spite of much that we see around us every day kill out a picked ten per cent, of Englishmen, and where would English civilization be ? we all are accustomed to doubt, or perhaps forget, how easily a comparatively cultured clan may arise amidst a nearly complete savagery around. We know this to have been the case in civilizations like the Egyptian and the Mexican, and it is the only presumption which reconciles the otherwise conflicting facts of the earlier history of Ireland and Western Scotland, where great ecclesiastics and scholars went out from the midst of kerns as savage as the Maories of to-day. It is at least as possible that a caste knew the mystery of trephining as that a tribe did. That is a point which will probably never be determined, for it is one where we encounter the grand diffi- culty of early history, the imperfection of its means of record. Until writing was invented, the record of an idea was almost a physical impossi- bility, except so far as subsequent observers may deduce it from a fact. If, for instance, we find THE MINDS Of SAVAGES 375 sacrificial stones, knives, and relics of victims, we may safely infer that those who built the altars, made the knives, and slew the victims, believed in invisible beings or forces who would be either reverenced or propitiated by offerings. But that deduction gives us scarcely a clue to the idea entertained by that tribe of what we call religion. Its God may have been Jehovah, as he appeared to Abraham, or Huitzilopochtli, as he appeared to Mexicans ; and they may have believed in a future state, as all Red Indians do, or have disbelieved in it, as up to the Captivity all but the higher Israelitish minds probably did. Or the sacrifices may have had nothing to do with the people at all, but have belonged exclusively to a minute caste, embedded among them as Englishmen are embedded among Indians. All deductions as to the religion of Calcutta from Calcutta Cathedral made two thousand years hence would be essenti- ally wrong. Of laws or civil polity it is nearly impossible that any trace should survive, or of any knowledge not requiring imperishable instruments. We may deduce a knowledge of commerce from certain things discovered, for instance, we know from coins found in tombs that very early Norsemen traded with Rome ; but without writing, we could not have a record of the knowledge of medicine as distinguished from surgery. There is evidence of a sort that the early Scandinavian fighters understood the brain-maddening power of hemp, AStA AND and used it before going into battle ; but they may have known fifty other potent drugs, and their knowledge could not be recorded. The Stone Age savages may have observed astronomical facts as closely as the Chaldaeans ; but all record of their knowledge, if they possessed any, has passed away as completely as all knowledge of the Chaldaean processes, or of the extraordinary accident, or series of accidents, or induction which led to the discovery by the lowest of savages of the most scientific and unexpected of all weapons, the Australian boome- rang. As Mr. Horsley says, we know that the savages of France possessed caves, because there they are ; but if they had possessed also perishable houses, they would have passed away. Extinguish writing, and if the English quitted India, there would in five thousand years be no evidence what- ever that they were ever there, except, indeed, imperishable fragments of broken beer-bottles. Nothing that they have built would resist natural forces for a century ; and how would their dis- tinctive ideas of justice, mercy, and the supremacy of law, be made visible to their successors ? The truth is, evidence as to a long-past cycle must, in the absence of writing, be hopelessly imperfect ; and we may, as regards any particular tribe, unfairly depreciate its mental standpoint through our own ignorance. If we examined the " traces " of the monks of the Thebaid as we examine those of savages, what should we deduce ? That certain THE MINDS OF SAVAGES 377 persons, sex unknown, probably pagans, and certainly uncivilized, constructed certain cells, and probably lived in them. The theory that they were fishers in the river, about as high in the mental scale as Aleutians, would explain the visible facts just as completely as the truth. The Progress of Savage Races WE wish Sir John Lubbock, or some other man with the necessary knowledge and lucidity of expression, would deliver a special lecture on the rate of savage progress. He might be able in the course of it to resolve one or two problems pre- sented by savage life which are, to us at least, grave perplexities, weakening the hold on us of the general theory of progress. Sir John holds, as we under- stand his writings and his abominably reported lec- ture on the subject at Toynbee Hall, not only that some savages have progressed, which is past ques- tion, many people, now civilized being the descend- ants of true savages, but that all savages, like the rest of mankind, tend to progress. Now, is that quite true, or being true, is the rate of progress such that man has any right to hope that savages will, during any period about which it is profitable to speculate, become civilized human beings ? Sir John Lubbock tells us that modern savages are not like primitive savages, modern savages having placed themselves in many cases under the yoke of elaborate and complex customs which are signs in 378 THE PROGRESS OF SAVAGE RACES 379 their way of progress. We suppose the deduction is true, for though civilized man shows a tendency to abandon custom, or to hold it lightly, semi- civilized man clings to it as his sheet-anchor, the Chinese, for instance, obeying certain rules with a rigidity equal to that of the modern savage. If, therefore, the Chinese were ever savages, which on the theory is certain, their devotion to rigid custom is either a sign of progress or a corollary of it It is not a sign of rapid progress, devotion to custom being merely a rude way of preserving the accu- mulated result of experience or the ideas held to be true ; but still, it is a sign of advance beyond the true childlike stage. The Chinese certainly have progressed, and as certainly are custom-worshippers. But why is Sir John Lubbock so sure of his datum that primitive savages were less under the yoke of custom than modern savages are ? How do we know what savages were like in those early times, when observers could distinguish nothing except the broadest facts, and travellers described a savage tribe much as English sailors would now ? May not an aboriginal race of B.C. 2000 have been governed by a clan system as elaborate as that of Australia, no trace of which has come down to us ? It is not likely ; but the wisest know nothing about it, and in building a theory on primitive absence of restraint, we are building in reality on a plausible assumption. Then is it clear that the progress, if there is progress, goes on at a rate which affords any 380 ASIA AND EUROPE hope of great advance during the lifetime of man upon the planet ? Take Sir John's Australians, for example. He knows better than we do the nearly irresistible evidence which exists and was published some six years ago for the antiquity of the Austra- lian aborigines. Either the mounds of clam shells on his coast were put there by some tricksy spirit intent on deceiving savants, or the native must have lived where the mounds are, fishing and eating, breeding and dying, for some thousands of years. If that savage has progressed, why has his progress been so purposeless, or his rate of progress differed so much from the rate recorded in European and Asiatic annals ? To all appearance, he would not become civilized at that rate in scores of thousands of years, and why should he become civilized at all ? Because there is a law of progress ? Well, grant it as regards certain races, where is the positive evidence of it as regards others ? May not the Veddahs be old ? It is difficult to argue without going behind history ; but does Sir John Lubbock see proof, unquestioned proof we mean, that the black races of Africa have progressed except, of course, under conquest throughout the history of man ? As it seems to us, there are grounds for the belief that they have not, that the law of progress as regards the Negro is either non-existent or dependent upon this, that he shall come in contact with some more progressive and more vigorous of the tribes of men. The Arab, who gives him Mahommed- THE PROGRESS OF SAVAGE RACES 381 anism, improves him, and so does the Anglo- Saxon, who gives him Christianity ; but left to himself, the Negro, to the human eye, remains where he was, or, as in Hayti, retrogrades. It is distinct retrogression, and not mere pause, for a race which had abandoned cannibalism to go back to it ; and Vaudooism is at least as low as fetishism. We do not see in the Negro the operation of any self-generated law of progress, or in the Red Indian. It may be there ; but where is the proof of it so strong that we should build on it a theory of the world ? We wish to believe in permanent progress and self-generated progress, for that would make many theological difficulties much less ; but as yet the facts seem to show that two or three families of men, notably the Aryan, Arab, and Mongol, have advanced up to a point a point in the Aryan's case still susceptible of further progress and have compelled or persuaded other families to advance with them ; but that these others, if left alone, either do not advance, or advance by gradations so like those of glaciers that the historian cannot follow them, and that the observer has little right to be certain that they occur at all. There are black tribes in the Upper Valley of the Nile, described by the surgeon Werne, who certainly are no advance on the blameless Ethiopians of whom the Greeks knew, or thought they knew. It may be that con- ditions have been unfavourable ; but then, that answer is an answer also to the general theory of 382 ASIA AND EUROPE progress, which ought to be possible under any conditions not fatal to human life. Besides, what are the conditions which make Tasmania, with its English climate, so unfavourable to progress, that while the Pict developed into a civilized man, the Tasmanian did not develop at all, but remained always a little higher than the monkey, till God in His mercy ended the effort and his race ? It seems to us that modern cheeriness has slightly infected scientific men, and that in their eager hope to show that natural science presages a great future for man, they leave out of view some unpleasant facts which militate against their theory. They take time into their account at one point, and not at another. They will assert that the development of man from a monkey, or a reptile, or whatever is the latest theory about his ancestor, must have occu- pied cycles of centuries, and that cycles more passed before man could use tools or make fire ; and then they expect, or write as if they expected, another enormous advance within some trumpery period marked in recorded history, for example, some two or three thousand years. Why ? Where is the evidence that the man of the Niger would not take a million or so of years before he, unassisted, attained to civilization, especially if he passed through that period of " arrestment " which has certainly struck some races, and the duration of which is as uncertain as the duration of the world ? Scientific men are conscious of the greatest of the THE PROGRESS OF SAVAGE RACES 383 marvels of the universe, the astounding way in which productive or creative energy is wasted, generations of creatures perishing uselessly before the creature to survive is born, and forests decaying that a few trees may live ; but they seem unwilling to expect such waste of men. Why not ? Is it because of the value of sentient beings in the economy of the universe ? If humanity all perished to-morrow through some vast calamity, say, by the emission from all volcanic regions of some poisonous vapour a thing believed to have occurred on a minute scale the loss would be far less than the loss of babies which has occurred since the begin- ning of the world, and would be less, indeed, than the loss of stillborn children only. If Nature, or Law, or Providence can afford to waste human beings, even Aryan beings, at that prodigious rate, why should it not waste whole races of savages ? It has wasted two within quite a short period, the Caribs of Cuba and the Tasmanians ; and it is wasting two more quite visibly, the Australians of the mainland and the Maories. Why should it not waste the remainder, leaving the world altogether to men of some higher type, or other type, as has happened with some animals ? We do not see, we confess, though we wish to see, why, on the scien- tific theory of the universe, we should expect so much progress in savages, or why a Digger Indian, say, should gradually advance until he can count up to the numbers which astronomers are accus- 384 ASIA AND EUROPE tomed to use. Why should he not perish, or, if his vitality is strong, as is the case with some Negro tribes, why should he not survive as a kind of half- developed man ? He has done so for ages in Aus- tralia, and why should the ages end ? We can see a hope for him in the Christian theory, which assigns to the Negro, as to Newton, two lives ; but on the scientific one, we see nothing for him, if he remains unconquered and of unmixed blood, except a doubtful probability of advance at a rate which the human mind can scarcely discern, and which, as a factor in history, it is useless even to consider. Judged by Christianity, the savage has a future ; but judged by history and science, the best thing that could happen to him would be to disappear as rapidly as possible, and make room for the useful peoples, who two centuries hence will have scarcely room to breathe. The Contempt of Asia for Europe THE contempt of Asiatics for Europeans is a little difficult to understand and most difficult to explain. Their hatred is natural enough, for the European is usually a conqueror, and always an intruder who threatens to disturb the mode of life which they think at once obligatory and delightful ; but their contempt seems unreasonable or even absurd. It does not spring from want of respect as we commonly understand that word. The Asiatic usually acknowledges the European to be his superior, and this not only in physical power, but in many departments of life which require thought. He does not question, for instance, that the white man is his superior in science, or in the military art, or in medicine, or in those branches of know- ledge which require, like astronomy for example, careful observation. He never dreams of rivalling him as a mechanician, and has doubts, only doubts, of his own comparative capacity as an engineer. He will even allow that he is a thinker of a sort, and has virtues of a kind, and can rule in a way, especially as regards taxation, to which he himself cc 385 386 ASIA AND EUROPE makes no pretension. Nevertheless, he regards the European as a barbarian, wanting in the essentials of civilization, and inferior to himself from sheer deficiency of brain-power. This feeling is the more remarkable because it is not based, like the scorn of the Greek for the Roman, which in some degree resembled it, upon any actual superi- ority. In all but the capacity of ruling of course, a magnificent exception in thought, in poetry, in art, in all the faculties which might ultimately have developed scientific attainment, the Roman was the inferior of the Greek, and knew it so well that the more cultivated he grew the more he became " Grecised," until in the Western Empire he merged his own civilization in that of his subject, and became in all essentials a Greek. It is probable, too, that the surrender improved him, and that during the first six centuries of its existence Constantinople was more civilized, in the modern sense, than old Rome ever became. The Asiatic has not that justification for his scorn, yet no one who has penetrated even a little into the true life of the East doubts that he feels it, and this so strongly as to make of his own submissiveness a source of self-contempt which gives energy and edge to his vengeance when he has once risen in revolt. He holds his master, in fact, to be a dense person who, as a rule, cannot be resisted, but who can always be outwitted, deceived, guided into a path on which he does not wish to tread. Why is that ? Why, THE CONTEMPT OF ASIA FOR EUROPE 387 for instance, does the Hindoo or the Chinaman, or in a lesser degree the Turk, always fancy that he can lie to the European without detection and with- out consequences, that if force is eliminated from the struggle he will not only win, but win with a certain ease and absence of exertion ? We believe that the serious answer to the ques- tion is the one which the European, judging as he always does by the concrete results, never will accept. The Asiatic has of the two the brighter intelligence. He is the more quickwitted, especially in reading character ; he anticipates his interlocutor's thought more rapidly, he invents with far more ingenuity, and he is more capable of purely abstract reasoning. He, not the white man, thought out and founded all the successful creeds. When he condescends to discuss, or dares discuss frankly, which is very seldom, he is the philosopher talking with the average and slightly stupid man. He perceives this himself, all the more keenly because the perception is of little use to him, and he has usually to give way. He is like a clever woman talking to an ordinary man, arriving at conclusions by intuition rather than thought, seeing before the man has begun to open his eyes, and as a result in- dulging in a thin scorn which does not produce resistance, but does produce a bitterness, gentle enough in the woman if she is womanly, but not gentle in the Asiatic. This is the main cause of the contempt, the underlying root from which it 388 ASIA AND EUROPE springs, but there are other subsidiary causes of much efficacy. One is that the manners of the European always strike the Asiatic as plebeian. He expects in an equal or superior a kind of smooth- ness which few Europeans possess, and which they never display in their intercourse with the coloured races, whose want of frankness, and tendency to be deferential, and general failure to secure the results which Europe desires, slightly irritate them. The Asiatic thinks that want of frankness essential to politeness, is always reserved unless he intends to be insolent, and looks upon familiarity, especially if there is any difference of grade, as offensive, pre- suming, and, in a word, rude. Very few Europeans appear to him to be gentlemen, and those few only when they are not familiar. The European's laugh, in especial, is to him as disagreeable as the laugh of the uncultivated is to the refined European, and European " chaff," persiflage, humour, is to him absolutely unendurable. It is, he thinks, the very quintessence of vulgarity, and reminds him perpetu- ally that he is being civil or submissive to one who is essentially, when the mask is off, a barbarian. This feeling, which is universal and incurable, greatly increases his sense of his opponent's stupidity, which again is deepened by his percep- tion that the opponent is fettered in using his intellect by all manner of non-intellectual restrictions, is apt, for example, to resent a cruel or immoral suggestion, does not employ falsehood when false- THE CONTEMPT OF ASIA FOR EUROPE 389 hood clearly would be convenient, and does not detect falsehood if it is plausible as a quick-witted man should. Long observation has convinced us that the Asiatic who lies to the European despises the European so much for accepting the falsehood that he often out of sheer contempt makes his falsehood less artistic than he could. Anything, he thinks, will do for a mind so dense as that. He is vexed, too, when his lie is too roughly exposed, vexed not, as an ordinary European is, because he has been detected, but as a diplomatist is vexed when his smooth arguments are not put aside as smoothly. He ought not to be told that he is lying, but only to be shown as lightly as may be that the falsehood has not succeeded. Any other conduct he classes as the result of ill-mannered, not to say brutal, stupidity, and despises in his heart as the gentleman despises the scolding of the rough. So likewise he despises the European's liability to " lose his temper " without getting into a rage. The Asiatic can feel rage, and display it too, but " bad temper," which is much commoner among Europeans than they think, disgusts and offends him as a mark of barbarian want of self-control. If the bad temper lasts, and induces the European, as it often does, to take the bit in his teeth and act in defiance of remonstrance, the Asiatic "bows low before the blast," but it is verily " in patient, deep disdain," as of a diplomatist who is dealing with some half-savage whom he cannot for the moment 390 ASIA AND EUROPE control. Talleyrand always regarded Napoleon in that light. Behind all these feelings there remains the mutual unintelligibility, which produces contempt in the Asiatic as it produces it also in the European. We are all apt to despise what we do not understand, and some invisible but impassable barrier arrests perfect comprehension between the East and West. The European familiar with the East always recog- nizes this source of error in himself, and sometimes tries to overcome it, declaring with a sigh that the Eastern is always a sealed book, but he seldom recognizes also that for the same reason the Asiatic despises him. His innate pride, and that supreme self-confidence which Asia has lost in the ages, but which modern Europe is still too young to lose we were tattooed savages when the East was just beginning to decay from age prevents the thought from growing into a conviction, but nevertheless it is well founded. The Asiatic often watches the " antics " of the European as we watch those of animals, with a sense of amusement which has no other explanation than that he does not understand. How can he, when to each other the two are so nearly dumb ? The clearness of the European's brain never tells him when the revolt of the Asiatic is near at hand, and all the subtlety of the Asiatic never tells him when a threat will make the European halt, and when it will pass him like the idle wind. Nothing, to use the best known illustra- tion, will ever convince the average European that the religion of the Asiatic, which governs the habits of his life, though not his whole conduct, is anything but tomfoolery ; and nothing will convince the average Asiatic that a European has any religion at all worthy of the name. The one despises the other as a fool, the other despises the one as a bar- barian too dense to believe a creed. The difference is that the European perceives his own contempt, but never dreams of attributing it to his rival, while the rival, fully aware of his own feeling, is only too con- scious that it is reciprocated to the full. " What a fool he really is ! " says the European of the Asiatic ; and " How can God have created a thing like that ? " says the Asiatic of the European. As the European has never to obey, his contempt is often kindly ; as the Asiatic has always to yield, his contempt is often vitriolic. INDEX Abdallah, Chief of Beni Khazraj, 184, 189, 192 Abdallah, Mahommed's father, 1 60, 163 Abdul Hamid, 331, 336 Abdul Mutalik, Mahommed's grandfather, 164, 165, 176 Abdul Ruhaman, disciple of Mahommed, 170 Abdurrahman Khan, Afghan reverence for, 264 Abu Bekr, 169, 170, 175, 176 Abu Sofian, leader of caravan, 187, 1 89, 192, 196 Taken prisoner, 201 Abu Talib, Mahommed's uncle, 165, 171, 172 Abyssinia, 171 Prince of, 199 Abyssinians, 361 .iEschylus, 306 Afghanistan, 310 Appeal to throne in, 239 Size of, 5 Afghans, 311, 314 Africans, distinctions between Asiatics and, 40 Akaba valley, 174 Aladdin's cave, essay on Seraglio Treasury, 293 seqq. Albanians, 335 Alcohol and Hindoos, 57 Aleutians, 377 Alexander of Macedon, 157 Attempts to conquer Asia, I, 21 Alexandrian massacre, 320 Alexandrine empire overthrown by " Parthians," no Alhambra, 9 Ali, Mahommed's nephew, 169 Alsatians' attitude towards Ger- mans, 90 America, peopling of, 20 America takes Philippines, 4 Amina, Mahommed's mother, 164, 170, 175 [206 Amru, Mahommed's lieutenant, Amurath I., 331 Anatolia, 7 Anglo- Indian government, 146 An tar, epic of, 307 Antioch, wealth of, 296 Arabs : Character, 163 Content, 205 Courage, 220 seqq. Defeat Romans, 220 M Fanaticism," 316 In Algeria, 218 In China, 21 Make no progress, 95 Mountaineers, 161 Negro and, 40 Of Algiers, 226 Of Desert, 223, 226, 301 seqq. Of S. Spain, 226 Soldiers, 222 Victories, 6 394 Arabi Pasha, 309, 311 Soldiers of, 316, 320 Arabia, account of, 160 Oases, 161 Population, 162 [163 Bonds of national cohesion, Tribal government, 184 Arabian Caliphs, early conquests of, 220 Archimedes, 306 Armenia, 335 Plunder of, 299 Armenians, 320 Mussulmans and, 51 True Asiatics, 312 Asia Barbarians and, 24 Cruelty in, 261 seqq. Effect of increase of com- munication with Europe, 137 European in, 320 European influence on, 19 seqq. Greek power and, 21 Law in, 242 Oppression of police, 240 Population, 6 and note Race-hatred in, 214 Romans and, 22 Separateness of, 21, 28, 34, 90 Size, 5 Vastness of calamities in, 278 Will conquest vivify ? 323 seqq. (See also Asiatics, Hindoo, and India) Asiatic Turkey, 5 Asiatics A typical, 285 seqq. Achievements, 8, 9 "Afternoon life," 127, 128 Basis of society, 121 Cavalry, n Characteristics, 10 seqq., 29, 31, 124, 143, 15, 263 Christianity and Mahommedan- ism, 34 Asiatics (continued} Comity, 50 Contempt for life, 263 Creeds, 13, 24, 35, 95. (See also Mahommedanism and Hin- dooism) Distinctions between Africans and, 40 Distinctions between Euro- peans and, 167, 261 English feeling contrasted with, 129 seqq. " Fanaticism," 315 Hatred for Europeans, 320 Ideas : reflex effect of, 137 seqq. Limitations, 9, 10 and note "Loyalty," 311 Morality, 14, 142 Muscular strength, 337 "Nationalists," 312 Notion of justice, 235 seqq. Patriotism, 308 Preference for oriental life, 120 seqq. Soldiers, 7 Systems of land tenure, 12 "Traitor," 313 Vigilance committees, 241. (See also Hindoo, Chinese, Arabs) Asma, 189 Assaye, 146 Aurungzebe, Emperor of Delhi, 62, 238 Australia, clan system, 379 Australians, trephining, 373 Azimoollah Khan, enmity to British, 217 B Bab insurrection, 262 Baber, 62 Baboo, 327 Badr, 187 Mahommed's camp at, 195 Bagdad, 305 MDEX 395 Bahan, Armenian general, 221 Balin conquered by Hindoos, 21 Bankok treasures, 294 " Barbarians " and Asia, 24 " Barbarism," Hindoo, 345 Baroda, monarchy in, 103 Bates, in forests of Brazil, 339 Batouk, 335 Bedouin auxiliaries, 221 Bedouins, address to, 301 Beharees, 61 Benares, 86, 94, 102 Site of, 8 Bengal, plantations and factories, 325 Bengalees, 83, 90 " A feeble folk," 337 Increase of, 328 Prefer Englishmen to Sikhs, 312 Proud of Gour, 312 Beni Aamir, 207 Beni Amar, 194 Beni Asad, 194 Beni Aws, 184, 196 Beni Cainucaa besieged, 189 Beni Ghatafan, 189 Beni Hawazin, 204 Beni Khazraj, 184 Beni Khozaa, 201 Beni Mustalick, 195 Beni Nadhir, 194 Beni Saym, 170 Beni Suleim, 189 Beni Zohra, 170 Besant, Mrs., and transmigration, 139 Billal, Mahommed's slave, 185 Black races and civilization, 92 Blunt, Wilfrid, on race-hatred in India, 214 Blyden on negro, 358 Bokhara palace, 294 Bombay, plantations and factories, 325 Bostra 166 Boyle, Frederick, 337 Brahminism, 13 Brahmin : Attitude towards Christianity, 68 Begging, 164 Of Madras, 338 Sanctity of, 274 Brahmo-Somaj, 345 Brazil, forests of, 339 Bright, John, 305 Bronze Age, mode of life in, 370 Brown races in Asia, 93 Capabilities, 94 Incapacities, 95 Buddhism, 13, 36, 48 [141 Leaves great problems unsolved, Buddhist. 317 Devotees, 138 Thought, 139, 142, 145 Burckhardt, on population- of Arabia, 162 Burmese, 311 Burton, Captain, on negroes, 354 Calamities in Asia, vastness of, 278 seqq. Californians and Chinamen, 316 Caliphs, story of, 209. Cambodia, 282 Canara, native Christian village in, 74 Canning, Lord, Sikhs offer to, 89 Caribs of Cuba, 375 Cashmere shawl, colours in, 346 Chaldseans, 376 Chalons, battle of, 6 Charles II., his temperament, 127 Chignon, 348 China, 5 Arabs in, 21 Difference between European and natives, 150 Europeans in, 27 Russia and, 1 1 1 39$ INDEX Chinese, 357 Banking system, 8 note Make no progress, 95 Porcelain, 9 Savages and, 379 Struggle with Tartars, 90 Work on Yellow river, 279, 283 Christianity and Asia, 34 Christianity in India. (See under India) Civilization in East and West, 349 Clive, principles of government, 149 Clovis, 36, 69 " Colour," 90, 91 and note> 326 Columbus, Christopher, 157 Colvin, Sir Auckland, speech at Lucknow, 244, 246 Comtist-dreams, 306 Confucius, ii, 13 Conquerors and conquered, 90 Constantinople, land attack on, 336 Constantinople, treasures in, 296 Copts, 320 Cortez, 157 Costa Ricans, 338 Creeds of Asiatic origin, 13, 24, 35> 95- ($ ee a ^ so Hindooism, Mahommedanism) Cromwell's Ironsides, 322 Cross-breeds of Soudan and S. Africa, 359 Crowther, Bishop, 358 Cruelty in Europe and Asia, 261 seqq. Crusades, 137 Crusaders and Asia, 24 Cunningham, General, 309 D Dacoity, 99 Dalhousie, Lord Act to repress obscenity, 101 On Ranee Chunda Kour, 286 Dalhousie, Lord (continued) Organizes Punjab and Burmah, 215 Damascus, 94 Site of, 8 Sword blades, 9 Damoodah river, 280 De Tocqueville, 359 Deccan Shahbazpore island sub- merged, 278 Delescluze, 130 Delhi, 313 Delhi massacre, 320 Dewan, meaning of, 272 Dhuleep Singh. (See Maharaja Dhuleep Singh) Digger Indian, 383 Diocletian's policy, 159 Diogenes, 372 Drummond, Sir John Hay, 300 Druses, 31: DufFerin, Marquis of, 86 Manner to natives, 219 E Edwardes, Major, 196 Egyptian civilization, 374 Egyptians, 313 Emir of Afghanistan, 332 Emperor of Delhi, 273, 274 Emperors of Malabar, 273 England Claims Valley of Yang-tse, 4 Territory in Asia, 2, 26 English And Asiatic feeling contrasted, 129 seqq And Indians, chasm bet ween, 90 Manner to natives, 218 Rule in India, 82 seqq., 146 Ethiopians, 381 Europe Attempts to conquer Asia, I, 17 Cruelty in, 261 seqq. INDEX 397 Europe (continued} Effect of increase of communi- cation with Asia, 137 Increase of population, 2 and note Influence on Asia, 19 seqq. Prospects of war in Asia, 37 European And Asiatic morality, 14 Characteristics, 29 In Asia, 320 Society, basis of, 121 " Fanaticism" in East, 315 Faqueers, 138 Ferazee, 304 Ficar, Roman general, 222 Finlay, life among Greeks, 150 Florida, Americans in, 87 Ford, life among Spaniards, 1 50 France covets possessions in Asia, 4 Francia, Dr., 343 Frederick the Great, 139 French Buddhists, 139 French savages had caves, 376 Gaekwar, meaning of, 272 German Kaiser and Sultan meet, 330 Germany in Anatolia and Shan- tung, 4 Ghazees as soldiers, 182 Gibbon's narrative of Mahommed, 156 Giffen, Sir Robert, 36 Gobineau, Comte de, work on ethnology, 94 note Gorst, Sir John, Indian budget, 228 Gospels, 307 Gour, 282, 312 Graham, Sir Gerald, 222 Granada (Old), 94, 305 Fall of, 226 Grant Duff, Sir Mount-Stewart, 328 Address at Madras, 323 Greek power and Asia, 21 Green vault, Dresden, 293 H Hadhramaut, 206 Hadrian's defensive policy, 22 Halima, Mahommed's foster- mother, 164 Hamerton, life in France, 150 Hamza, 171, 188 Hashim, Mahommed's great grandfather, 171, 176 Hayes, Captain, and fanaticism at Lucknow, 321 Hayti, 41, 355, 381 Negroes in, 93 Haytians, 359 Head, G. O. A., 307 Hegira, 175 Hemp used by Scandinavians, 375 Hephaestion, 210 Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium, 199 Defeated by Arabs, 220 Himyarte dynasty, 206 Hindooism : A congeries of creeds, 47 And Rana of Oodeypore, 131 Core of, 252, seqq. Dogmas of, 254 Essence of, 48 External forms of, 254 " Freedom," 257 Hindoos, 317 And alcohol, 57 Attitude towards Christianity, 68 M Barbarism," 345 Early conquests, 21, 23 398 INDEX Hindoos (continued} Moral code, 350, 352 Of Dacca, 304 Suruj or Sun, 134 Hindostanees, 61, 83 Hira mountains, 168 Hirsch, Baron, 344 Hoang-Ho river, 280, 282 Honan province, 278, 283 Horace quoted on white family, 20 Horsley, on savages, 372, 376 Houssa, 304 Huitzilopochtli appears to Mexi- cans, 375 Haweiria, 222 Hyder Ali, 11, 272 I Ilbert Bill, 108 Imperial palace, Pekin, treasures >n, 293 India Abstemiousness of natives, 227 seqq. Agriculture, 325 As Mahommedan country, 59, 62 Careers formerly open to na- tives, 103. Caste life, 54, 71, 153, 275 Catastrophe probable, no, 118 ' Census of India," 146 Characteristics of natives, 151 Chasm between Englishmen and natives, 90, 97, 109, 137, 150, 261. Christian proselytism in, 63 seqq. Difficulties in way of expan- sion, 67, 71, 74 Reason of failure, 8 1 Christianity and Mahommedan- ism in, 43 seqq. Civil justice in, 99 India (continued} Codes, 329 " Colour," 90, 91 and note, 326 Decay of Indian art, culture and military spirit, 102 Drawbacks to English rule, 102, 106 Early marriages, 57 Education in, 326 Education of princes, 291 English rule in, 82 seqq. Principles of, 148 Eviction, 102 Imperial service, 88, 98 Industries, 84 Interestingness of life, 103 Liberty under English rule, 100 Life and property safe under English rule, 99 Mental seclusion of, 146 seqq. Missionaries and natives, 151 Missionaries in, 74 seqq. Native banking system, 8 note Character, 249 Desire for tea, 234 Difference between English and, 96 Dislikes Englishman, 216 Engineers needed, 324 Jewels, 247 Makes no progress, 95 Morale^ 114 Passion for place, 113, 116 Press, 1 08 Respect for pedigree, 272 Soldiers, 83, 89 Sources of reverence, 271 Struggle with Mongols, 90 Thrift, 231 Need for mission training col- leges, 79 Negro army proposed for, 89 No white men settle in, 86 Peasantry, 101 Peasants' clothing, 245 INDEX 399 India (continued} Peasant's hut, 244 Population, 83 Race-hatred in, 214 Salt tax, 230 Sepoys, 106 Service commissions, 117 " Standard of comfort" in, 244 seqq. Star of, 276 " Tanks," 324 Taxes, 100 " The Empire," 85, 88, 98 Foundations of, 89, 1 10, 214 Variety of scenery, 268 Variety of society, 268 seqq. Vastness, 83 Warrior races of, 6. (See also S. India, Hindoos, Asia and Asiatics) Indian abstemiousness, 227 seqq, Indian Mutiny, 26, 33, 62, 102 Anecdote of missionary in, 76 Object of, 107 Indian society, variety of, 268 seqq. Indians of S. America and Span- iards, 42 Indians of Spanish America, 148 Irish Nationalists, 313 Irish peasant's homesickness, 305 Islam. (See Mahommedanism) Italian attitude towards Austrians, 90 Ivan the Terrible, 266 J Jain teacher, 372 Janissaries, 25 Japan, rise of, 27 Japanese military system, 37 Japanese soldier, 7 Java conquered by Hindoos, 21, 23 Java, Dutchmen in, 87 Jehad (religious war), 319 Jehovah appears to Abraham, 375 Jenghiz Khan, knowledge of mounted infantry, 39 Jerusalem, 170 Jesuits in Paraguay, 343 Jewish ideal of Messiah, 70 Jews, 93 note, 302, 338 Mahommed and, 184 Jeypore, site of, 8 Josephus, source of antiquities, 168 Juarez, 328 Judea destroyed, 334 Jung Bahadoor, 262 Jutee Pershad, 85 K Kantian philosophy, books on, 156 Keshub (Thunder Sen, 80 Khadijah, Mahommed's wife, 166, 167, 169, 176 Death, 172 Khalid defeats Romans, 221 Khama's country, 41 Kheibar conquered, 200 Kincaid, Dr., in Burmah, 261 Kings of Denmark, " absolute," 351 Kipling, Rudyard, 28 Koh-i-noor, 290 Koolin Brahmin, 142, 350 Koran, 180, 210, 307 Commentators, 211 Teaching of, 318 Koreish, 163 Attitude towards Mahommed, 171, 172, 174, 176, 181, 192, 195, 200 Koreish caravans, Mahommed's expeditions against, 186 Koreitza tribe, 195 Besieged and slain, 196 Koso, Syrian bishop, 16$ 4oo INDEX Lahej, Governor of Aden visits, 161 Lat, fall of, 203 Guardians of, 170, 171 Layard, Sir Henry, 128 Lethbridge, Sir Roper, 273, 275, 276 Golden Book of India, 269 Liberia, negro in, 93 Life of Mahommed, by Sir W. Muir, review of, 155 segq. London sempstresses, abstemious- ness of, 227 Londoner, 370 Louisiana, colonization in, 343 Love Sonnets of Proteus quoted, 301 Lubbock, Sir John, lecture on savages, 378 Lucknow, fanatic outbreaks in, 321 Lyall, Sir Alfred, 1 7 note> 28 M Maadd, chieftain, 163 Macaulay, Lord, on English Studies in India, 327 Roman Catholics, 30 Madagascar conquered by Malays, 21, 23 Madras University, Sir Mount- Stewart Grant Duffs address to, 323 Madras, want of wealth, 325 Maharaja Dhuleep Singh, sketch of, 285 seqq. Maharaja of Calicut, 273 Maharaja of Coorg, 289 Maharaja of Nepal, 274 Maharaja of Travancore, 273, 274 Maharana" of Oodeypore, ac- count of scenes on his death, 129 seqq. Mahatmas, 139 Mahmoud destroys Janissaries, 331 Mahommed, Sir W. Muir's Life of, reviewed, 155 seqq. Address to men of Medina quoted, 205 Aims at conquering Arabia, 197 Anecdote quoted illustrative of Arab manners, 201 Arrives at Medina, 183 As legislator, 179 As prophet, 169, 179 Attends pilgrimage to Mecca 198 Besieges Koreitza, 196 Character, 177 Collects tithes, 206 Conquers Kheibar, 200 Death, 209 Descent, 163 Development, 156, 168 Disciples, 170, 174 Embassies, 199, 206 Expedition to Tayif, 173 Hegira, 175 Hostilities, 186 Jews and, 184 Marches on Mecca, 201 Marches on Tayif, 204 Organizes faith, 185 Personal appearance, 178 Private life, 211 Proclamation of universal broth- erhood quoted, 207 Relations of sexes and, 212 Repulsed by Koreish, 193 Sketch of career, 160 seqq. Visits Mecca, 200 Mahommedanism, 13, 36, 137 Capital punishments, 197 Converts, 158 and note Dogmas, 179, 181, 183, 185 Equality, 190 In India, 43 seqq. Inimical to progress, 61 INDEX 401 Mahommedanism (continued) Living law of, 211 Monotheism of, 49 Object of, 206 Rise of, 24 Slaves and, 171, 191 ' Sexual ethics, 52 Social teaching of, 276. (See also Mussulman) Mahrattas, 61, 63, 83, 272 Maine, Sir Henry, device for caste, 89 Malacca, first war in, 319 Malays conquer Madagascar, 21, 23 Manchester, 306 Manchuria, 4 Mandelay expedition, 323 Mandelay palace, 295 Maoris, 135, 361, 374, 383 Take possession of New Zea- land, 23 Marshman, on Hindoo chrono- logy, 132 Massacre in East, 320 Mecca, 163, 170, 200, 306 A sanctuary, 172 Pilgrimages to, 173 Taken by Mahommed, 202 Medina, 156 Besieged by Koreish, 195 Converts from, 173 Mahommed visits, 164, 183 Mehemet Ali, 191 Melanesians, 372 Mexican civilization, 374 Mikado, position of, 131 Milton : use of " barbaric," 347 Minds of savages, 370 Mirzapore carpet, colours in, 346 Missionaries in India, 74 seqq. Mississippi dykes, 280 Moffatt, Dr., 372 Mogul empire, history of, 62 Mongol victories, 6, 7 Montauban, General, takes sap- phire from Summer Palace, 294 Mooltan, siege of, 196 Moplahs as soldiers, 182 Morier, on Persian character, 264 Mount Thaur, cave on, 175 Muadz ibn Amr, 188 Muir, Sir W. Life of Mahommed reviewed, 155 seqq. On Arab soldiers, 223 Mukoukas, Governor of Egypt, 199 Mussulman Caste, 55 Characteristics, 61 Converts, 182 Equality, 332 Fanaticism, 316 In India, 43 seqq. Missionaries, 46, 49, 50 Reason of success, 81 Slow progress, 59 Negro, 359 Myrrhine vases, 22 Mysore, 101 Crown of, 103 N Nankin, towers of, 9 Negro, 380 And Arabs, 40 And civilization, 92 Condition of, in United States, 362 Future of, 354 seqq. 369 In Hayti, 93 Mussulman, 359 None of first class eminence, 356 Problem in America, 362 Race Hatred, 365 Remarkable for muscular strength, 338 402 INDEX Negroids of Australasian Pacific, 37i Nepal, ruler of, 132 Nestorius or Sergius, 168, 175 New Review : Frederick Boyle's article in, 337 New South Wales, Englishmen in, 87 Nizam, meaning of, 272 Norsemen trade with Rome, 375 Northern Africa, Roman and Vandal invasions of, 340 O Obeida, 188 Ohod, Mahommed defeated at, 193 Oliphant, Laurence, leading idea of, 138 Omar, 171, 191 Election of, 209 Oodeypore, 129 Rana of, 131 seqq. Osma invested with supreme com- mand, 208 Osman Digna, 223 Othman, disciple of Mahommed, 170 Descendants of, 331 Othman, house of, 296 Decaying, 336 Ottoman empire : causes of its endurance, 331, 332 334 Ottoman soldiers, 335 Ozza, fall of, 203 Guardians of, 170, 171 Paraguay, Jesuits in, 343 Parisian, 370 " Parliament of Religions," 253 Pashas, despots, 333 Pax Britannica, 98 Peguans prefer Englishmen to Burmese, 312 Pellew, Admiral, 225 Persia, 5 Beats back Rome, 22 State of, in Struggle with Arabs, 90 Phidias, 306 Pindarees, 63 Plassey, battle of, 146 Playfair, Captain, 206 Po and Lombard plain, 278 Bed of, 280 Poles' attitude towards Russians, 90 Polygamy, 52 Pompey's intrigues, 159 Poushkine quoted, 39 Prendergast, General, in Mande- lay, 294 Prinsep, T., prophecy on Tartar tribe, ill Psalms, 307 Pundit, 327 R Race-hatred in Asia 214 Rajpoots, 61, 350 Ramadhan, annual fast, 185 Rana of Oodeypore, relation to "Hindooism," 131 Scenes on his death, 130, 133 Ranee Chunda Kour, 286 Red Indian, 357, 358 Belief in future state, 375 Reincarnations. (See Transmigra- tion) Ripon, Lord, and Ilbert Bill, 108 Riza Pasha opposes judicial re- form, 235 Robinson, J. C., account of Sul- tan's treasury, 293 Robinson, Rev. John, anecdote of, 76 Roman empire overthrown by Arabs and Turks, no Roman lack of imagination, 23 Romans and Asia, 22 INDEX 403 Runjeet Singh, n, 285 Father a prefect, 103 Sikh admiration for, 264 Runn of Cutch, salt marshes, 269 Russia Hatred for Jew, 320 In N. Asia, 2, 26, m Railway to Pacific, 27 Seizes Manchuria, 4 Russian literature, 139 Rustem Pasha, 296 Saad, Mahommed's disciple, 170 Sad ibn Muadz, 196 Said, Mahommed's slave, 356 St. John, account of Hayti, 354 St. Sophia, cathedral of, 336 Crypts of, 298 Samarcand treasures, 294 Sanskrit literature, 326 Satsuma ware, 346 Savage races, progress of, 378 Savages, minds of, 370 Scandinavians knew power ot hemp, 375 Scindiah dynasty, 103 Senior, Mr., 122 Sepoys, 106 And officers, 217 In Red sea, 317 "Nationalists," 312 Seraglio Treasury, 296, 297 Sergius or Nestorius, 168, 175 Seringapatam, siege of, 182 Settlement officers, 231, 270 Shah of Persia, 295 Shereefal palace, Morocco, 300 Siam, size of, 5 Sikh As soldier, 7, 61, 63 Offer to Lord Canning, 89 War (second), 286 Simpson, Mrs., 122 Sirves, King of Persia, 199 Sivaites, 350 Sivajee, 103 Slaves and Mahommedanism, 171, 191 Socialism in France, 214 Sons of Saad, 164 Soudanese courage, 338 South India Need for engineers, 324 Social systems, 325 Southern States of Union, white mechanics of, 340 Spaniards and Indians of S. America, 42, 217 Spaniards in N. and S. America, 87 Spaniards of Mexico, 339 Stone Age, mode of life in, 368, 370, 372, 376 Stowe, Mrs., on negro, 355 Sudra, 164 Suez canal, 283 Sultan and German Kaiser meet, 330 Sultan's library, 299 Sunyasees, 138 Sura, 182 ; quoted, 194 Swami Vivekanandi, pamphlet 253 seqq. Symonds, J. A., criticisms of Walt Whitman, 139 Syria, 199 Mahommed visits, 165 Tagore family tradition, 287 Taj at Agra, 9, 62 Tanjore, artificial lakes of, 102 Tantia Topee's recruits, 102 Tartar of Samarcand, 357 Tasmanian, 382, 383 Tayif, 172 Blockaded, 205 Teheran treasures, 295 Tej Singh, 309 Texas, wild life of, 105 INDEX Thebaid, monks of, 376 Theebau, King, 261 Theodoric, 221 Thibet, 5 Thiers, quoted on administrative work, 125 Thoreau, 250 Thuggeeism, 350 Thugs, 99, 143 Times Letter from "A Member of Brahmo-Somaj " in, 345 Letter of Lieut. E. C. Yate in, 129 seqq. On " Census of India," 146 Timour the Lame, descendants of, 103 Tinnevelly, Christian converts in, 64 Tippoo's Hindoo converts, 182 Titus' destruction of Judea, 334 Tod, Colonel, " Rajasthan," 129 Toussaint 1'Ouverture, 356 Transmigration, 139 Belief in, 14, 48 Trephining, 373 Trichinopoly goldsmiths, 9 Trollope, Mrs., on negro, 355 Tropical colonization, 337 Truce of God, 99 Turanians, 325 Turk, a Mussulman and an Asiatic, 3H As soldier, 7 Turkey- Financial difficulties, 336 History of grand viziers, 333 Why she lives, 330 seqq. Turkish social life, 122 U Uganda, 41 Upper India, plains of, 161 Upper valley of Nile, black tribes in, 381 Vatican collections, 293 Vaudooism, 381 Veddahs, 380 Vefyk Pasha, 124, 125 On "Liberty," 126 On life in Paris and Turkey, 122 Vesuvius, 284 Vindhya valleys, 268 W Wahabees, strictest Mussulman sect, 210 Werne, description of negro, 359, 38i White colonists in Tropics, 342 White races, special faculty of, 94 Whitman, Walt, 139 Wilkins, Mary, on " grip," 289 Windsor castle, 293 Winter palace, St. Petersburg, 293 Wright, Colonel, 135 Writing, invention of, 374 Yakusa, battle of, 220, 222 Yate, Lieut. E. C., letter in Times, 129 seqq. Yellow river, inundation, 278 seqq. Yemen, princes of, 206 Yermak river, 221 Zeid, Mahommed's freedman, 169, 172, 186, 190, 191 Zoheir, disciple of Mahommed, 1 70 Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and Londotv. Date Due 000 659 594 6 Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137