LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO INDIAN UNREST By : VALENTINE CHIROL A Reprint, revised and enlarged, from " The Times," with an introduction by 5ir Alfred Lyall We have now, as it were, before us, in that vast congeries of peoples tve call India, a long, slow march in uneven stages through all the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth. VISCOUNT MORLEY. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'5 STRLLT, LONDON 1910 DEDICATED BY PERMISSION TO VISCOUNT MORLEY AS A TRIBUTE OF PRIVATE FRIENDSHIP AND 'PUBLIC RESPECT CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOB INTRODUCTION. BY SIR ALFRED C. LYALL . . VH I. A GENERAL SURVEY . . . . . . . . 1 II. SWARAJ ON THE PLATFORM AND IN THE PRESS 8 III. A HINDU REVIVAL . . . . . . 24 IV. BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION IN THE DECCAN . . . . . . . . 37 V. POONA AND KOLHAPUR . . . . . . . . 64 VI. BENGAL BEFORE THE PARTITION . . 72 VII. THE STORM IN BENGAL . . . . . . 81 VIII. THE PUNJAB AND THE ARYA SAMAJ . . . . 106 IX. THE POSITION OF THE MAHOMEDANS . . . . 118 X. SOUTHERN INDIA . . . . . . . . 136 XI. REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONS OUTSIDE INDIA . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 XH. THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS . . . . 154 XIII. CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS . . . . . . 162 XIV. THE DEPRESSED CASTES . vi CONTENTS CHAPTEB PAGhr XV. THE NATIVE STATES . . . . . . . . 185 XVI. CROSS CURRENTS . . . . . . . . 198 XVII. THE GROWTH OF WESTERN EDUCATION . . 207 XVIII. THE INDIAN STUDENT .. .. .. ..216 XIX. SOME MEASURES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM . . 229 XX. THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION . . 238 XXI. PRIMARY EDUCATION . . . . . . . . 246 XXII. SWADESHI AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS . . . . 254 XXIII. THE FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND GREAT BRITAIN . . 271 XXIV. THE POSITION OF INDIANS IN THE EMPIRE . . 280 XXV. SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS . . . . 288 XXVI. THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA . . . . . . 306 XX VII. CONCLUSIONS .. .. .. .. ..319 NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 INDEX ...... . 361 The numerals above the line in the body of the book refer to notes at the, end of the volume. INTRODUCTION. BY SIR ALFRED C. LYALL. The volume into which Mr.Valentine Chirol has collected and republished his valuable series of articles in The Times upon Indian unrest is an important and very instructive contribution to the study of what is probably the most arduous problem in the politics of our far-reaching Empire. His comprehensive survey of the whole situation, the arrangement of evidence and array of facts, are not unlike what might have been found in the Report of a Commission appointed to investigate the causes and the state of affairs to which the troubles that have arisen in India may be ascribed. At different times in the world's history the nations foremost in civilization have undertaken the enterprise of founding a great European dominion in Asia, and have accomplished it with signal success. The Macedonian Greeks led the way ; they were followed by the Romans ; and in both instances their military superiority and organizing genius enabled them to subdue and govern for centuries vast populations in Western Asia. European science and literature flourished in the great cities of the East, where the educated classes willingly accepted and supported foreign rulership as their barrier against a relapse into barbarism ; nor have we reason for believing vm INTRODUCTION that it excited unusual discontent or disaffection among the Asiatic peoples. But the Greek and Roman Empires in Asia have disappeared long ago, leaving very little beyond scattered ruins ; and in modern times it is the British dominion in India that has revived and is pursuing the enterprise of ruling and civilizing a great Asiatic population, of developing the political intelligence and transforming the ideas of an antique and, in some respects, a primitive society. That the task must be one of prodigious difficulty, not always free from danger, has been long known to those who watched the experiment with some accurate fore- sight of the conditions attending it. Yet the recent symptoms of virulent disease in some parts of the body politic, though confined to certain provinces of India, have taken the British nation by surprise. Mr. Chirol's book has now exhibited the present state and prospect of the adventure ; he has examined the causes and the conse- quences of the prevailing unrest ; he has collected ample evidence, and he has consulted all the best authorities, Indian and European, on the subject. His masterly analysis of all this material shows wide acquaintance with the facts, and rare insight into the character and motives, the aims and methods, of those who are engaged in stirring up the spirit of revolt against the British Government. He has pointed to instances where the best intentions of the administrators have led them wrong ; his whole narrative illustrates the perils that beset a Government necessarily pledged to moral and material reform, which finds its own principles perverted against its efforts, and its foremost opponents among the class that has been the first to profit by the benefits which that Government has conferred upon them. The nineteenth century had been pre-eminently an era of the development of rapid and easy communication between distant parts of the world, particularly between Europe and Asia. So long as these two continents remained far apart the condition of Asia was unchanged INTRODUCTION rs and stationary ; if there was any change it had been latterly retrogressive, for in India at any rate the eighteenth century was a period of abnormal and exten- sive political confusion. In Europe, on the other hand, national wealth, scientific discoveries, the arts of war and peace, had made extraordinary progress. Population had increased and multiplied ; and partly by territorial conquests, partly by pacific penetration, the Western nations overflowed politically into Asia during the nineteenth century. They brought with them larger knowledge, novel ideas and manners, which have opened the Asiatic mind to new influences and aspirations, to the sense of needs and grievances not previously felt or even imagined. The effect, as can now be clearly per- ceived, has been to produce an abrupt transition from old to new ways, from the antique order of society towards fresh models ; and to this may be ascribed the general unsettlement, the uneasy stir, that pervade Asia at the present moment. Its equilibrium has been disturbed by the high speed at which Europe has been pushing east- ward ; and the principal points of contact and penetra- tion are in India. Moreover, towards the latter end of the nineteenth century and in the first years of the present century came events which materially altered the attitude of Asiatic nations towards European predominance. The defeat of the Italians by the Abyssinians in 1896 may indeed be noted as the first decisive victory gained by troops that may be reckoned Oriental over a European army in the open field, for at least three centuries. The Japanese war, in which Russia lost battles not only by land, but also at sea, was even a more significant and striking warning that the era of facile victories in Asia had ended ; since never before in all history had an Asiatic navy won a great sea-fight against European fleets. That the unquiet spirit, which from these general causes has been spreading over the Eastern Continent, should be particularly manifest in countries x INTRODUCTION under European Governments is not unnatural ; it inevitably roused the latent dislike of foreign rule, with which a whole people is never entirely content. Pre- cisely similar symptoms are to be observed in the Asiatic possessions of France, and in Egypt ; nor is Algeria yet altogether reconciled to the regime of its conquerors. That in India the British Government has found the centres of active disaffection located in the Maratha country and in Lower Bengal, is a phenomenon which can be to a large extent accounted for by refer- ence to Anglo-Indian history. The fact that Poona is one focus of sedition has been attributed in this volume to the survival among the Maratha Brahmins of the recollection that " far into the eighteenth century Poona was the capital of a theocratic State in which behind the Throne of the Peshwas both spiritual and secular authority were concentrated in the hands of the Brahmins." The Peshwas, as their title implies, had been hereditary Ministers who governed in the name of the reigning dynasty founded by the famous Maratha leader Sivajee, whose successors they set aside. But before the end of the eighteenth century the secular authority of the Peshwas had become almost nominal, and the real power in the State had passed into the grasp of a confederation of chiefs of predatory armies, whose violence drove the last Peshwa, more than a century ago, to seek refuge in a British camp. The political sovereignty of the Brahmins had disappeared from the time when he placed himself under British protection ; and the Maratha chiefs (who were not Brahmins) only acknowledged our supremacy after some fiercely contested battles ; with the result that they were confined to and confirmed in the possession of the territories now governed by their descendants. But it is quit-- true that to the memory of a time when for once, and once only, in Indian history, their caste established a great secular dominion, mav be ascribed the tendency to dislo} T alty among the Maratha Brahmins. INTRODUCTION xi The case of Bengal is very different. Poona and Calcutta are separated geographically almost by the whole breadth of India between two seas ; yet the his- torical antecedents of the Bengalees and Marathas are even further apart. The Marathas were the leaders of revolt against the Moghal Empire ; they were formidable opponents to the rise of the British power ; their chiefs fought hard before yielding to British authority. On the other hand, Lower Bengal belonged to a province that had fallen away from the Moghal Empire, and which was transferred from its Mahomedan Governor to a British General by the result of a single battle at Plassey. The Bengalees took no part in the contest, and they had very good reason for willing acquiescence in the change of masters. In a comparison, therefore, of the Marathas with the people of Bengal, we have a remarkable instance of the production of similar effects from causes very distinct and dissimilar. In the former case their present unrest may be traced, in a large degree, to the memories of early rulership and to warlike traditions. In the latter case there can be no such recollections, military or political ; for the country has had no experience whatever of a state of war, since Lower Bengal is perhaps the only considerable province of India which has enjoyed profound peace during nearly 150 years. It is no paradox to suggest that this prolonged tranquillity has had some share in stimulating the audacity of Bengalee unrest, for the literary classes seem to have no clear notion that the real game of revolutionary politics is necessarily rough and dangerous certain, more- over, to fail whenever the British Government shah 1 have resolved that it is being carried too far, and must end. But it is beyond question that the promoters of disaffection on both sides of India have been making strenuous exertions to enlist in the movement the influence of Brahminism ; and upon this point the book rightly lays particular stress. The position and privileges of the Brahmins arc rightly xn INTRODUCTION compared to those of the Levites ; they are the deposi- tories of orthodox tradition ; they preside over and hold (not exclusively) a monopoty for the performance of the sacred rites and offices ; and ritual in Hinduism, as in most of the ancient religions, is the essential element ; it is closely connected with the rules of caste, which unite and divide innumerable groups within the pale of Hinduism. And in India the peculiar institution of caste, the strict regulation of social intercourse, particularly in regard to intermarriage and the sharing of food, prevails to an extent quite unknown elsewhere in the world. The divisions of caste have always operated to weaken the body politic in India, and thus to facilitate foreign con- quest ; but, on the other hand, they have opposed a stiff barrier to the invasion of foreign religions, to the fusion of alien races with the Hindu people, and to any success in what may be called national unification. One can easily understand the formidable power invested by this system in the Brahmins, and the enormous obstacles that it might raise against the introduction of Western ideas, manners, and education. Nevertheless we all know, and we have seen it with real satisfaction, that the Brahmins, very much to the credit of their intelligence and sagacity, have been forward in accepting the new learning, the expansion of general knowledge, offered to them by English schools and Universities ; they have acquired our language, they have studied our sciences ; they are prominent in the professions of law and medicine, which the English have created ; they enter our civil services, they even serve in the Indian Army. Yet their readiness to adopt secular culture does not seem to have abated their religious authority, or to have sensibly weakened their influenci over the people at large. And indeed the fact that the Brahmins, with others of the educated classes, should have been able, for their own purposes, to appeal simul- taneously to the darkest superstitions of Hinduism and to extreme ideas of Western democracy to disregard INTRODUCTION xra caste rules personally and to stir up caste prejudices among the masses will not greatly surprise those who have observed the extraordinary elasticity of practical Hinduism, the fictions and anomalies which can be invented or tolerated at need. But the beliefs and prac- tices of popular Hinduism are obviously irreconcilable with the principles of modern civilization ; and the various indications of a desire to reform and purify their ancient religion may be partly due to the perception among educated Hindus that so contradictory a position is ultimately untenable, that the incongruity between sacrifices to the goddess Kali and high University degrees- is too manifest. The course and consequences of the measures taken by the British Government to promote Western education in India has been attentively studied by the author of this volume. It is a story of grave political miscalculation, containing a lesson that has its significance for other nations which have undertaken a similar enterprise. Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils ; and it was natural that in the last century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be the certain cure for human delusions ; and that statesmen like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case it was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British rule. We have since discovered, by experience, that, although education is a sovereign remedy for many ills is indeed indispensable to- healthy progress yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expecta- tions of which the disappointment is bitterly resented. That these effects are well known even in Europe may xiv INTRODUCTION be read in a remarkable French novel published not long ago, " Les Deracines," which describes the road to ruin taken by poor collegians who had been uprooted from the soil of their humble village. And in Asia the disease is necessarily much more virulent, because the transition has been more sudden, and the contrast between old ideas of life and new aspirations is far sharper. From the report of an able French official upon the Indo-Chinese Colonies we may learn that the existing system of edu- cating the natives has proved to be mischievous, needing radical reform. Of the Levantine youths in the Syrian towns, the product of European schools, a French traveller writes (1909), "tJeet une tourbe de declasses " ; while in China some leaders of agitation for democratic changes in the oldest of all Empires are said to be those who have qualified by competitive examination for public employ, and have failed to obtain it. In every country the crowd of expectants far outnumbers the places available. If. indeed, the Government which introduced Western education into Bengal had been native instead of foreign, it would have found itself entangled in difficulties no less grave than those which now confront the British rulers ; and there can be little doubt that it would probably have broken down under them. The phases through which the State's educational policy hi India have passed during the last fifty years are explained at length in this volume. The Govern- ment was misled in the wrong direction by the reports of two Commissions between 1880 and 1890, whose mist kes were discerned at the time by those who had some tincture of political prudence. The problem is now to reconstruct on a better plan, to try diflerent lines of advance. But some of us have heard of an enterprising pioneer n a difficult country, who confidently urged travellers to take a new route by assuring them that it avoided the hills on the old road. Whether the hills were equally steep on his other road he did not say. And in the present instance it may not be easy to strike out a fresh path INTRODUCTION xv which may be clear from the complications that have been suffered to grow up round our system of Indian education ; while no one proposes to turn back. The truth is that in India the English have been throughout obliged to lay out their own roads, and to feel their way, without any precedents to guide them. No other Govern- ment, European or Asiatic, has yet essayed to administer a great Oriental population, alien in race and religion, by institutions of a representative type, reckoning upon free discussion and an unrestricted Press for reasonable con- sideration of its measures and fair play, relying upon secular education and absolute religious neutrality to control the unruly affections of sinful men. It is now seen that our Western ideas and inventions, moral and material, are being turned against us by some of those to whom we have imparted an elementary aptitude for using them. And thus we have the strange spectacle, in certain parts of India, of a party capable of resorting to methods that are both reactionary and revolutionary, of men who offer prayers and sacrifices to ferocious divinities and denounce the Government by seditious journalism, preaching primitive superstition in the very modern form of leading articles. The mixture of religion with politics has always produced a highly explosive compound, especially in Asia. These agitations are in fact the symptoms of what are said by Shakespeare to be the " cankers of a calm world " ; they are the natural outcome of artificial culture in an educational hothouse, among classes who have had for generations no real training in rough or hazardous politics. The outline of the present situation in India is that we have been disseminating ideas of abstract political right, and the germs of representative institutions, among a people that had for centuries been governed autocratically, and in a country where local liberties and habits of self-government had been long obliterated or had never existed. At the same time we have been spreading modern education broadcast throughout the land, where, xvi INTRODUCTION before English rule, learning had not advanced beyond the stage of Europe in the middle ages. These may be taken to be the primary causes of the existing Unrest ; and meanwhile the administrative machine has been so efficiently organized, it has run, hitherto, so easily and quietly, as to disguise from inexperienced bystanders the long discipline and training in affairs of State that are re- quired for its management. Nor is it clearly perceived that the real driving power lies in the forces held in reserve by the British nation and in the respect which British guardianship everywhere commands. That Indians should be liberally invited to share the responsi- bilities of high office is now a recognized principle of public policy. But the process of initiation must be gradual and tentative ; and vague notions of dissolving the British connexion only prove incompetence to realize the whole situation, external and internal, of the country. Across the frontiers of India are warlike nations, who are intent upon arming themselves after the latest modern pattern, though for the other benefits of Western science and learning they show, as yet, very little taste or in- clination. They would certainly be a serious menace to a weak Government in the Indian plains, while their sympathy with a literary class would be uncommonly slight. Against intruders of this sort the British hold securely the gates of India ; and it must be clear that the civilization and future prosperity of the whole country de- pend entirely upon their determination to maintain public tranquillity by strict enforcement of the laws ; combined with their policy of admitting the highest intellects and capacities to the Councils of the State, and of assigning reasonable administrative and legislative independence to the great provinces in accord with the unity of a powerful Empire. A. C. LYALL. CHAPTER I. A GENEBAL SURVEY. That there is a lull in the storm of unrest which has lately swept over India is happily beyond doubt. Does this lull indicate a gradual and steady return to more normal and peaceful conditions ? Or, as in other cyclonic disturbances in tropical climes, does it merely presage fiercer outbursts yet to come ? Has the blended policy of repression and concession adopted by Lord Morley and Lord Minto really cowed the forces of criminal disorder and rallied the representatives of moderate opinion to the cause of sober and Constitutional pro- gress ? Or has it come too late either permanently to arrest the former or to restore confidence and courage to the latter ? These are the two questions which the present situation in India most frequently and obviously suggests, but it may be doubted whether they by any means cover the whole field of potential developments. They are based apparently upon the assumption that Indian unrest, even in its most extreme forms, is merely the expression of certain political aspirations towards various degrees of emancipation from British tutelage, ranging from a larger share in the present system of administration to a complete revolution in the existing relations between 1 1 2 A GENERAL SURVEY [CHAP, i Great Britain and India, and that, the issues thus raised being essentially political, they can be met by compromise on purely political lines. This assumption ignores, I fear, certain factors of very great importance, social, religious, and economic, which profoundly affect, if they do not altogether overshadow, the political problem. The question to which I propose to address myself is whether Indian unrest represents merely, as we are prone to imagine, the human and not unnatural impatience of subject races fretting under an alien rule which, how- ever well intentioned, must often be irksome and must sometimes appear to be harsh and arbitrary ; or whether to-day, in its more extreme forms at any rate, it does not represent an irreconcilable reaction against all that not only British rule but Western civilization stands for. I will not stop at present to discuss how far the lament- able deficiencies of the system of education which we have ourselves introduced into India have contributed to the Indian unrest. That that system has been pro- ductive of much good few will deny, but few also can be so blind as to ignore the fact that it tends on the one hand to create a semi-educated proletariate, unem- ployed and largely unemployable, and on the other hand, even where failure is less complete, to produce dangerous hybrids, more or less superficially imbued with Western ideas, and at the same time more or less completely divorced from the realities of Indian life. Many other circumstances also which have helped the promoters of disaffection I must reserve for subsequent discussion. Some of them are economic, such as the remarkable rise in prices during the last decade. This has seriously enhanced the cost of living in India and has specially affected the very classes amongst whom disaffection is most widespread. The clerk, the teacher, the petty Government official, whose exiguous salaries have re- mained the same, find themselves to-day relatively, and in many cases actually, worse off than the artisan CHAP, i] CAUSES OF UNREST 3 or even the labourer, whose wages have in many cases risen in proportion to the increased cost of living. Plague, which in the course of the last 14 years has carried off over 6,000,000 people, and two terrible visitations of famine have caused in different parts of the country untold misery and consequent bitterness. On the other hand, the growth of commerce and industry and the growing interest taken by all classes in commercial and industrial questions have led to a corresponding resentment of the fiscal restraints placed upon India by the Imperial Government for the selfish benefit, as it is contended, of the British manufacturer and trader. Much bad blood has undoubtedly been created by the treatment of British Indians in South Africa and the attitude adopted in British Colonies generally towards Asiatic immigrants. The social relations be- tween the two races in India itself always a problem of infinite difficulty have certainly not been improved by the large influx of a lower class of Europeans which the development of railways and telegraphs and other industries requiring technical knowledge have brought in their train. Nor can it be denied that the growing pressure of office work as well as the increased facilities of home leave and frequent transfers from one post to another have inevitably to some extent lessened the contact between the Anglo-Indian official and the native population. Of more remote influences which have in- directly reacted upon the Indian mind it may suffice for the present to mention the South African War, which lowered the prestige of our arms, and the Russo-Japanese War, which was regarded as the first blow dealt to the ascendency of Europe over Asia, though it may be worth noting that in his novel, " The Prince of Destiny," Mr. Surat Kumar Ghosh lays repeated emphasis on the impression produced in India some years earlier by the defeat of the Italian forces in Abyssinia. Each of the above points has its own importance and deserves to be closely studied, for upon the way in which we shall in 12 4 A GENERAL SURVEY [CHAP. I the future handle some of the delicate questions which they raise will largely depend our failure or our success in coping with Indian unrest that is, in preventing its invasion of other classes than those to which it has been hitherto confined. But the clue to the real spirit which informs Indian unrest must be sought elsewhere. Two misconceptions appear to prevail very widely at home with regard to the nature of the unrest. The first is that disaffection of a virulent and articulate character is a new phenomenon in India ; the second is that the existing disaffection represents a genuine, if precocious and misdirected, response on the part of the Western educated classes to the democratic ideals of the modern Western world which our system of education has im- ported into India. It is easy to account for the preva- lence of both these misconceptions. We are a people of notoriously short memory, and when a series of sensa- tional and dastardly crimes, folio whig on a tumultuous agitation in Bengal and a campaign of incredible violence in the native Press, at last aroused and alarmed the British public, the vast majority of Englishmen were under the impression that since the black days of the Mutiny law and order had never been seriously assailed in India, and they therefore rushed to the conclusion that, if the pax Britannica had been so rudely and suddenly shaken, the only possible explanation lay in some novel wave of sentiment or some grievous administrative blunder which had abruptly disturbed the harmonious relations between the rulers and the ruled. People had forgotten that disaffection in varying forms and degrees of intensity has existed at all times amongst certain sections of the population, and under the conditions of our rule can hardly be expected to disappear altogether. Whether British statesmanship has always sufficiently reckoned with its existence is another question. More than 30 years ago, for instance, the Government of India had to pass a Bill dealing with the aggressive violence of the vernacular Press on precisely the same grounds CHAP, i] ANTAGONISM TO WESTERN INFLUENCES 5 that were alleged in support of thi? year's Press Bill, and with scarcely less justification, whilst just 13 years ago two British officials fell victims at Poona to a murderous conspiracy, prompted by a campaign of criminal virulence in the Press, closely resembling those which have more recently robbed India of many valuable lives. To imagine that Indian unrest has been a sudden growth because its outward manifestations have assumed new and startling forms of violence is a dangerous delu- sion ; and no less misleading is the assumption that it is merely the outcome of Western education or the echo of Western democratic aspirations, because it occasionally, and chiefly for purposes of political expediency, adopts the language of Western demagogues. Whatever its modes of expression, its mainspring is a deep-rooted antagonism to all the principles upon which Western society, especially in a democratic country like England, has been built up. It is in that antagonism hi the increasing violence of that antagonism which is a conspicuous feature of the unrest, that the gravest danger lies. But if in this respect the problems with which we are confronted appear to me more serious and complex than official optimism is sometimes disposed to admit, I have no hesitation is saying that there is no cause for despondency if we will only realize how strong our position in India still is, and use our strength wisely and sympathetically, but, at the same time, with firm- ness and consistency. It is important to note at the outset that the more dangerous forms of unrest are practically confined to the Hindus, and amongst them to a numerically small proportion of the vast Hindu community. Not a single Mahomedan has been impli- cated in, though some have fallen victims to, the criminal conspiracies of the last few years. Not a single Mahomedan of any account is to be found in the ranks of disaffected politicians. For reasons, in fact, which I shall set forth later on, it many be confidently asserted 6 A GENERAL SURVEY [CHAP, i that never before have the Mahomedans of India as a whole identified their interests and their aspirations so closely as at the present day with the consolidation and permanence of British rule. It is almost a misnomer to speak of Indian unrest. Hindu unrest would be a far more accurate term, connoting with far greater precision the forces underlying it, though to use it with- out reservation would be to do a grave injustice to the vast numbers of Hindus who are as yet untainted with disaffection. These include almost all the Hindu ruling chiefs and landed aristocracy, as well as the great mass of the agricultural classes which form in all parts of India the overwhelming majority of the popula- tion. Very large areas, moreover, are still entirely free from unrest, which, except for a few sporadic out- breaks in other districts, lias been hitherto mainly confined to three distinct areas the Mahratta Deccan, which comprises a great part of the Bombay Presidency and several districts of the Central Provinces, Bengal, with the new province of Eastern Bengal, and the Punjab. In those regions it is the large cities that have been the real hot-beds of unrest, and, great as is their influence, it must not be forgotten that in India scarcely one-tenth of the population lives in cities, or even in small town- ships with more than 5,000 inhabitants. Whereas in England one-third of the population is gathered to- gether in crowded cities of 100,000 inhabitants and over, there are but twenty-eight cities of that size in the whole of India, with an aggregate population of less than 7,000,000 out of a total of almost 300,000,000. That a movement confined to a mere fraction of the population of India has no title to be called a " national " movement would scarcely need to be argued, even if the variegated jumble of races and peoples, castes and creeds that make up the population of India were not in itself an antithesis to all th;.it the word " national " implies. Nevertheless it would be equally foolish to underrate the forces which underlie this movement, for CHAP, i] THE DOMINANT FORCES OF HINDUISM 7 they have one common nexus, and a very vital one. They are the dominant forces of Hinduism forces which go to the very root of a social and religious system than which none in the history of the human race has shown greater vitality and stability. Based upon caste, the most rigid of all social classifications, Hinduism has secured for some 3,000 years or more to the higher castes, and especially to the Brahmans, the highest of all castes, a social supremacy for which there is no parallel elsewhere. At the same time, inflexibly as they have dominated Hinduism, these higher castes have themselves preserved a flexibility of mind and temper which has enabled them to adapt themselves with singular success to the vicissitudes of changing times without any substantial sacrifice of their inherited traditions and aspirations. Thus it is amongst high- caste Hindus that for the last three-quarters of a century English education has chiefly spread, and, indeed, been most eagerly welcomed ; it is amongst them that British administration has recruited the great majority of its native servants in every branch of the public service ; it is amongst them also that are chiefly recruited the liberal professions, the Press, the schoolmasters in fact all those agencies through which public opinion and the mind of the rising generation are most easily moulded and directed. That it is amongst them also that the spirit of revolt against British ascendency is chiefly and almost exclusively rife constitutes the most ominous feature of Indian unrest. CHAPTER II. SWARAJ ON THE PLATFORM AND IN THE PRESS. Before proceeding to describe the methods by which Indian unrest has been fomented, and to study as far as possible its psychology, it may be well to set forth suc- cinctly the political purpose to which it is directed, as far as there is any unity of direction. One of the chief difficulties one encounters in attempting to define its aims is the vagueness that generally characterizes the pronouncements of Indian politicians. There is, indeed, one section that makes no disguise either of its aspira- tions or of the way in which it proposes to secure their fulfilment. Its doctrines are frankly revolutionary, and it openly preaches propaganda by deed i.e., by armed revolt, if and when it becomes practicable, and, in the meantime, by assassination, dynamite outrages, dacoities, and all the other methods of terrorism dear to anarchists all over the world. But that section is not very numerous, nor would it in itself be very dangerous, if it did not exercise so fatal a fascination upon the immature mind of 3*outh. The real difficulty begins when one comes to that much larger section of " advanced " politicians who are scarcely less bitterly opposed to the maintenance of British rule, but, either from prudential motives or lest they should prematurely alarm and alienate the s" CHAP, n] A COMMON DENOMINATOR 9 representatives of what is called " moderate " opinion, shrink from the violent assertion of India's claim to com- plete political independence and, whilst helping to create the atmosphere that breeds outrages, profess to depre- cate them. The difficulty is further enhanced by the reluctance of many of the " moderates " to break with their " ad- vanced " friends by proclaiming, once and for all, their own conviction that within no measurable time can India in her own interests afford to forgo the guarantees of internal peace and order and external security which the British Raj alone can afford. Hence the desire on both sides to find some common denominator in a nebulous formula which each can interpret as to time and manner according to its own desires and aims. That formula seems to have been discovered in the term Swaraj, or self-rule, which, when euphemistically trans- lated into Colonial self-government for India, offers the additional advantage of presenting the political aspira- tions of Indian " Nationalism " in the form least likely to alarm Englishmen, especially those who do not care or wish to look below the surface and whose sympathies are readily won by any catchword that appeals to sentimental Liberalism. Now if Swaraj, or Colonial self-government, re- presents the minimum that will satisfy Indian Nationalists, it is important to know exactly what in their view it reallv means. Fortunately on this point we have some data of indisputable authority. They are furnished in the speeches of an " advanced " leader, who does not rank amongst the revolutionary extremists, though his refusal to give evidence in the trial of a seditious newspaper with which he had been connected brought him in 1907 within the scope of the Indian Criminal Code. Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, a high-caste Hindu and a man of great intellectual force and high character, has not only received a Western education, but has travelled a great deal in Europe and in America, and is almost as much at home in London as in Calcutta. A little more than 10 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, n three years ago he delivered in Madras a series of lectures on the " New Spirit," which have been republished in many editions and may be regarded as the most authori- tative programme of " advanced " political thought in India. What adds greatly to the significance of those speeches is that Mr. Pal borrowed their keynote from the Presidential address delivered in the preceding year by the veteran leader of the " moderates," Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, at the annual Session of the Indian National Congress. The rights of India, Mr. Naoroji had said, " can be comprised in one word self-govern- ment or Swaraj, like that of the United Kingdom or the Colonies." It was reserved for Mr. Pal to define precisely how such Swaraj could be peacefully obtained and what it must ultimately lead to. He began by brushing away the notion that any political concessions com- patible with the present dependency of India upon Great Britain could help India to Swaraj. I will quote his own words, which already foreshadowed the con- temptuous reception given by " advanced " politicians to the reforms embodied in last year's Indian Councils Act: You may get a High Court judgeship here, membership of the Legislative Council there, possibly an Executive Membership of the Council. Or do you want an expansion of the Legislative Councils ? Do you want that a few Indians shall sit as your representatives in the House of Commons ? Do you want a large number of Indians in the Civil Service ? Let us see whether 50, 100, 200, or 300 civilians will make the Government our own. . . . The whole Civil Service might be Indian, but the Civil servants have to carry out orders they cannot direct, they cannot dictate the policy. One swallow does not make the summer. One civilian, 100 or 1,000 civilians in the service of the British Government will not make that Government Indian. There are traditions, there are laws, there are policies to which every civilian, be he black or brown or white, must submit, and as long as these traditions have not been altered, as long as these prin- ciples have not been amended, as long as that policy has not CHAP, n] PASSIVE RESISTANCE 11 been radically changed, the supplanting of European by- Indian agency will not make for self-government in this country. Nor is it from the British Government that Mr. Pal looks for, or would accept, Swaraj : If the Government were to come and tell me to-day " Take Sivaraj," I would say thank you for the gift, but I will not have that which I cannot acquire by my own hand. . . Our programme is that we shall so work in the country, so combine the resources of the people, so organize the forces of the nation, so develop the instincts of freedom in the com- munity, that by this means we shall shall in the imperative compel the submission to our will of any power that may set itself against us. Equally definite is Mr. Pal as to the methods by which Swaraj is to be made " imperative." They consist of Swadeshi in the economic domain, i.e., the encouragement of native industries reinforced by the boycott of imported goods which will kill British commerce and, in the political domain, passive resistance reinforced by the boycott of Government service. They say : Can you boycott all the Government offices ? Whoever said that we would ? Whoever said that there would not be found a single Indian to serve the Government or the European community here ? But what we can do is this. We can make the Government impossible without entirely making it impossible for them to find people to serve them. The administration may be made impossible in a variety of ways. It is not actually that every deputy magistrate should say : I won't serve in it. It is not that when one man resigns nobody will be found to take his place. But if you create this spirit in the country the Government service will gradually imbibe this spirit, and a whole office may go on strike. That does not put an end to the administration, but it creates endless complications in the work of admini- stration, and if these complications are created in every part of the country, the administration will have been brought to a deadlock and made none the less impossible, for the primary thing is the prestige of the Government and the boycott strikes at the root of that prestige. . . . We 12 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, ir can reduce every Indian in Government service to the position of a man who has fallen from the dignity of Indian citizenship. . . . No man shall receive social honours because he is a Hakim or a Munsiff or a Huzur Sheristadar. ... No law can compel one to give a chair to a man who comes to his house. He may give it to an ordinary shopkeeper ; he may refuse it to the Deputy Magistrate or the Subordinate Judge. He may give his daughter in marriage to a poor beggar, he may refuse her to the son of a Deputy Magistrate, because it is absolutely within his rights, absolutely within legal bounds. Passive resistance is recognized as legitimate in England. It is legitimate in theory even in India, and if it is made illegal by new legislation, these laws will infringe on the prim- ary rights of personal freedom and will tread on dangerous grounds. Therefore it seems to me that by means of the boy- cott we shall be able to do the negative work that will have to be done for the attainment of Swaraj. Positive work will have to be done. Without positive training no self- government will come to the boycotter. It will (come) through the organization of our village life ; of our talukas and districts. Let our programme include the setting up of machinery for popular administration, and running parallel to, but independent of, the existing administration of the Government. ... In the Provi- dence of God we shall then be made rulers over many things. This is our programme. But Mr. Pal himself admits that even if this programme can be fulfilled, this Swaraj, this absolute self-rule which he asks for, is fundamentally imcompatible with the maintenance of the British connexion. Is really self-government within the Empire a practicable ideal ? What would it mean ? It would mean either no real self-government for us or no real overlordship for England. Would we be satisfied with the shadow of self-government ? If not, would England be satisfied with the shadow of over- lordship ? In either case England would not be satisfied with a shadowy overlordship, and we refuse to be satisfied with a shadowy self-government. And therefore no com- promise is possible under such conditions between self-govern- ment in India and the overlordship of England. If self- government is conceded to us, what would be England's CHAP, n] SELF-GOVERNMENT AND SELF-TAXATION 13 position not only in India, but in the British Empire itself ? Self-government means the right of self-taxation ; it means the right of financial control ; it means the right of the people to impose protective and prohibitive tariffs on foreign imports. The moment we have the right of self -taxation, what shall we do ? We shall not try to be engaged in this uphill work of industrial boycott. But we shall do what every nation has done. Under the circumstances in which we live now, we shall impose a heavy prohibitive protective tariff upon every inch of textile fabric from Manchester, upon every blade of knife that comes from Leeds. We shall refuse to grant admittance to a British soul into our terri- tory. We would not allow British capital to be engaged in the development of Indian resources, as it is now engaged. We would not grant any right to British capitalists to dig up the mineral wealth of the land and carry it to their own isles. We shall want foreign capital. But we shall apply for foreign loans in the open market of the whole world, guaranteeing the credit of the Indian Government, the Indian nation, for the repayment of the loan, just as America has done and is doing, just as Russia is doing now, just as Japan has been doing of late. And England's commercial interests would not be furthered in the way these are being furthered now, under the conditions of popular self-govern- ment, though it might be within the Empire. But what would it mean within the Empire ? It would mean that England would have to enter into some arrangement with us for some preferential tariff. England would have to come to our markets on the conditions that we would impose upon her for the purpose, if she wanted an open door in India, and after a while, when we have developed our resources a little and organized our industrial life, we would want the open door not only to England, but to every part of the British Empire. And do you think it is possible for a small country like England with a handful of population, although she might be enormously wealthy, to compete on fair and equitable terms with a mighty continent like India, with immense natural resources, with her teeming populations, the soberest and most abstemious populations known to any part of the world ? If we have really self-government within the Empire, if we have the rights of freedom of the Empire as Australia has, as Canada has, as England has to-day, if we, 300 millions of people, have that freedom of the Empire, the Empire would cease to be British. It would be the Indian Empire, 14 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, n and the alliance between England and India would be abso- lutely an unequal alliance. That would be, if we had really self-government within the Empire, exactly the relation as co-partners in a co-British or anti-British Empire of the future ; and if the day comes when England will be reduced to the alternative of having us as an absolutely independent people or a co-partner with her in the Empire, she would prefer to have us, like the Japanese, as an ally and no longer a co-partner, because we are bound to be the predominant partner in this Imperial firm. Therefore no sane Englishman, politician or publicist can ever contemplate seriously the possibility of a self-governing India, like the self-governing colonies, forming a vital and organic part of the British Empire. Therefore it is that Lord Morley says that so long as India remains under the control of Great Britain the government of India must continue to be a personal and absolute one. Therefore it seems to me that this ideal, the practically attainable ideal of self-government within the Empire, when we analyse it with care, when we study it in the light of common human psychology, when we study it in the light of our past experience of the racial characteristics of the British people, when we study it in the light of past British history in India and other parts of the world, when we study and analyse this ideal of self-government within the Empire, we find it is a far more impracticable thing to attain than even our ideal Swaraj. I have quoted Mr. Pal's utterances at some length, because they are the fullest and the most frank exposi- tion available of what lies beneath the claim to Colonial self-government as it is understood by " advanced " politicians. No one can deny the merciless logic with which he analyses the inevitable results of Swaraj, and Englishmen may well be grateful to him for having dis- closed them so fearlessly. British sympathizers who are reluctant to look behind a formula which commends itself to their peculiar predilections, naturally dislike any reference to Mr. Pal's interpretation of Indian " self- government," and would even impugn his character in order the better to question his authority. But they cannot get over the fact that in India, very few " moderate " politicians have had the courage openly CHAP, n] " FROTH STAINED WITH BLOODSHED " 15 to repudiate his programme, though many of them realize its dangers, whilst the " extremists " want a much shorter cut to the same goal. It is only by pledging itself to Swaraj that the Indian National Congress has been able to maintain a semblance of unity. Moreover, if any doubt still lingers as to the inner mean- ing of Swaraj and Swadeshi, and other kindred war-cries of Indian Nationalism, the language of the Nationalist Press remains on record to complete our enlightenment. How- ever incompatible with the maintenance of British rulo may be the propositions set forth by Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, they contain no incitement to violence, no virulent diatribes against Englishmen. It is in the Press rather than on the platform that Indian politicians, whether " extreme " or merely " advanced," are apt to let themselves go. They write down to the level of their larger audiences. So little has hitherto been done to enlighten public opinion at home as to the gravity of the evil which the recent Indian Press law has at last, though very tardily, done something to repress that many Englishmen are still apparently disposed to regard that measure as an oppressive, or at least dubious, con- cession to bureaucratic impatience of criticism none the less healthy for being sometimes excessive 1 . The following quotations, taken from vernacular papers before the new Press law was enacted, will serve to show what Lord Morley meant when he said, " You may put picric acid in the ink and the pen just as much as in any steel bomb," and again, "It is said that these incendiary articles are ' mere froth.' Yes, they are froth, but froth stained with bloodshed." Even when they contain no definite incitement to murder, no direct exhortation to revolt, they will show how systematically, how per- sistently the wells of Indian public opinion have been poisoned for years past by those who claim to represent the intelligence and enlightenment of modern India. Only too graphically also do they illustrate one of 16 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, n the most unpleasantly characteristic features of the literature of Indian unrest namely, its insidious appeals to the Hindu Scriptures and the Hindu deities, and its deliberate vilification of everything English. Calumny and abuse, combined with a wealth of sacred imagery, supply the place of any serious process of reasoning such as is displayed in Mr. Pal's programme with all its uncompromising hostility. In the first place, a few specimens of the hatred which animates the champions of Swaraj of Indian independ- ence or, at least, of Colonial self-government. The Hind Swarajya is nothing if not plain-spoken : Englishmen ! Who are Englishmen ? They are the pre- sent rulers of this country. But how did they become our rulers ? By throwing the noose of dependence round our necks, by making us forget our old learning, by leading us along the path of sin, by keeping us ignorant of the use of arms. . . . Oh ! my simple countrymen ! By their teaching adultery has entered our homes, and women have begun to be led astray. . . . Alas ! Has India's golden land lost all her heroes ? Are all eunuchs, timid and afraid, forgetful of their duty, preferring to die a slow death of tor- ture, silent witnesses of the ruin of their country ? Oh ! Indians, descended from a race of heroes ! Why are you afraid of Englishmen ? They are not gods, but men like yourselves, or, rather, monsters who have ravished your Sita-like beauty [Sita, the spouse of Rama, was abducted by the demon Ravana, and recovered with the help of the Monkey God Hanuman and his army of monkeys]. If there be any Rama amongst you, let him go forth to bring back your Sita. Raise the banner of Swadesh, crying Victory to the Mother ! Rescue the truth and accomplish the good of India. The Calcutta Yugantar argues that " sedition has no meaning from the Indian standpoint." If the whole nation is inspired to throw off its yoke and become independent, then in the eye of God and the eye of Justice whose claim is more reasonable, the Indian's or the Englishman's ? The Indian has come to see that independ- ence is the panacea for all his evils. He will therefore even swim in a sea of blood to reach his goal. The British CHAP, ii] THE ENGLISH " DEMOXS " 17 dominion over India is a gross myth. It is because the Indian holds this myth in his bosom that his sufferings are so great to-day. Long ago the Indian Rishis [inspired sages J preached the destruction of falsehood and the triumph of truth. And this foreign rule based on injustice is a gross falsehood. It must be subverted and true Swadeshi rule established. May truth be victorious ! The Gujarat hails the Hindu New Year which is coming " to take away the curse of the foreigners " : Oh noble land of the Aryas, thou who wert so great art like a caged bird. Are thy powerful sons, Truth and Love, dead ? Has thy daughter Lakshmi plunged into the sea ? or art thou overwhelmed with grief because rogues and demons have plundered thee ? [" Demons " is the term usually affected by Nationalist journalists when they refer to Englishmen.] The Shakti declares that : By whatever names anarchists, extremists, or seditionists those may be called who are taking part in the movement for independence, whatever efforts may be made to humiliate and to crush them, however many patriots may be sent to jail, or into exile, yet the spirit pervading the whole atmosphere will never be checked, for the spirit is so strong and spon- taneous that it must clearly be directed by Divine Provi- dence. The following appears in the Kal (Poona) : We Aryans are no sheep. We have our own country, our religion, our heroes, our statesmen, our soldiers. We do not owe them to contact with the English. These things are not new to us. When the ancestors of those who boast to-day of their enterprise and their civilization were in a disgusting state of barbarism, or rather centuries before then, we were in full possession of all the ennobling qualities of head and heart. This holy and hoary land of ours will surely regain her position and be once more by her intrinsic lustre the home of wealth, arts, and peace. A holy inspiration is spreading, that people, must sacrifice their lives in the cause of what has once been determined to be their duty. Heroes are springing up in our midst, though brutal im- prisonment reduce them to skeletons. Let us devote our- gelves to the servige Q{ the Mother, A man maddened by 3 18 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, n devotion will do everything and anything to achieve his ideal. His strength will be adamantine. Just as a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, leb us die for the Mother. The Dharma (Calcutta) emphasizes specially the religious side of the movement : We are engaged in preaching religion and we are putting our energy into this agitation, looking on it as the principal part of our religion. . . . The present agitation, in its initial stages, had a strong leaven of the spirit of Western politics in it, but at present a clear consciousness of Aryan greatness and a strong love and reverential spirit towards the Motherland have transformed it into a shape in which the religious element predominates. Politics is part of reli- gion, but it has to be cultivated in an Aryan way, in accord- ance with the precepts of Aryan religion. Nowhere is the cult of the " terrible goddess," wor- shipped under many forms, but chiefly under those of Kali and Durga, more closely associated with Indian unrest than in Bengal. Hence the frequency of the appeals to her in the Bengal Press. The Dacca Gazette welcomes the festival of Durga with the following out- burst : Indian brothers ! There is no more time for lying asleep. Behold, the Mother is coming. Oh Mother, the giver of all good ! Turn your eyes upon your degraded children. Mother, they are now stricken with disease and sorrow. Oh Shyama, the reliever of the three kinds of human afflictions, relieve our sorrows. Come Mother, the destroyer of the demons, and appear at the gates of Bengal. The Barisal Hitaishi refers also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Shakti worship not infrequently play a conspicuous part : What have we learnt from the Shakti Puja ? Sooner or later this great Puja will yield the desired results. When the Hindus realize the true magnificence of the worship of the Mother, they will be roused from the slumber of ages, and CHAP, n] " LET A RIVER OF BLOOD FLOW " 19 the auspicious dawn of awakenment will light up the horizon. You must acquire great power from the worship of the Mother. Ganesh, the god who grants success, has his seat assigned to him on the left of the great Mother. Why should you despair of obtaining success ? Look at . Kartiki, the god who is the chief commander of the armies of the gods, who has stationed himself to the right of the Mother ; he is coming forward with his bow, to assist you against the demons of sin, who stand in the way of your accomplishing that great object, and as he is up in arms, who can resist ? The Khulnavasi breaks out into poetry : For what sins, O Mother Durga, are thy sons thus dis- pirited and their hearts crushed with injustice ? The demons are in the ascendant, and constantly triumphing over godli- ness. Awake, Oh Mother, who tramplest on the demons ! Thy helpless sons, lean for want of food, worn out in the struggle with the demons, are struck with terror at the way in which they are being ruled. Famine and plague and disease are rife, and unrighteousness triumphs. Awake, Oh Goddess Durga ! I see the lightning flashing from the point of thy bow, the world quaking at thy frowns, and creation trembling under thy tread. Let a river of blood flow, overwhelming the hearts of the demons. The Kalyani chides the Hindus for breaking their Swadeshi vows to Durga : You have made all sorts of vows to stick to Swadeshi, but you are still using hilati [foreign] salt, sugar, and cloths which are polluted with the blood and fat of animals. You swear by the Mother, and then you go and disobey her and defile her temples. Do you know that it is owing to your sins that Mother Durga has not come to accept your worship in Bengal this year ? In fact, she is heaving deep sighs of sorrow sighs which will bring a cataclysmic storm upon you. If you still care to save your country from utter ruin, mend your ways and keep your promises to the Mother. In other provinces where other deities are more popular it is they who are similarly called in aid. The Bedari of Lahore, for instance, reproduces from the Puranas the story of the tyrant Rajah Harnakath, who brought death on himself at the hands of Vishnu for attempting 2-2 20 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, n to kill his son Prahlad, whose offence was that he believed in God and championed the cause of justice, in order to liken British statesmen and Anglo-Indian officials to the wicked Rajah and the Indians to Prahlad. As most British statesmen and their representatives abroad are the enemies of liberty and justice and support slavery and oppression, the fall of Great Britain is near at hand, and India will then pass into the possession of her own sons. The Prem of Firozpur is inclined even to give Mr. Keir Hardie a niche in the Hindu Pantheon. Its editor dreamt he was at a meeting in a free and contented country. It was attended by some other Indians, and one of them recited verses bewailing the condition of India, which was once a heaven on earth and was now converted into a hell by its foreign rulers, &c. After prayers had been recited for India, some heavenly beings appeared, one of whom swore to do his best to relieve the sufferings of Indians. The editor learnt on inquiry that the dream country was England, the Indian speaker Bepin Chandra Pal, and the heavenly being Mr. Keir Hardie ! The Sahaik, of Lahore, furnishes an apt iUustration of the scurrilous abuse and calumny which constitute one of the favourite weapons of Hindu writers. Referring to the Malaria Conference held last year, it begins by remarking that when a famine occurs relief works are opened only when the sufferings of the famine- stricken become acute, and their supervision is entrusted to a fat-salaried Englishman who swallows up half the collec- tions, which amount could have fed hundreds of the poor people. Thus also with the forthcoming inquiries concerning malarial fever, which is spreading all over the country. Every Indian knows that, like the plague, this form of fever is due to the poverty and consequent physical weakness of the people. It is, however, to the mosquito that the authorities went for the causes of the disease, just as to the rats for the causes of plague. Different medicines and instruments were invented for extirpating the insect, CHAP, n] " THE LAND OF THE STAKVING " 21 doctors were also employed, and rewards paid for the writing of books. In this way crores of rupees went into the pockets of English shopkeepers and others. A trial is now being given to quinine, and lakhs-worth sold to Indians, English quinine manufacturers being thus enriched. Again a com- mission is about to sit on the heights of Simla. The commis- sioners will enjoy feasts and dances and drink brandy which will cost poor natives lakhs of rupees, and afterwards they will devise means to develop the trade in quinine or other drugs. The RanjpurFar/a&a/wi writes that in the local charitable dispensary a surgical operation was performed on a patient who died in two hours, and that a similar opera- tion on a pregnant woman resulted in her death. It adds, with delicate sarcasm, that " the Chief Medical Officer should get his salary increased." The idea that Englishmen deliberately want to depopulate India is one that is sedulously propagated. Thus the Jhang Sial jeers at British " generosity," which has " converted India, one of the richest countries in the world, into the land of the starving," and British " wisdom " for wishing to " starve out the natives and reign over empty brick and mortar buildings." The Akash (Delhi), referring to the pension granted to the widow of Sir W. Curzon Wyllie, asks whether " the English can hold up their heads after this. Even their widows are fed by India. A nation whose widows are fed by another should never boast that it is an Imperial and self-respecting nation." In the same spirit another Punjab paper argues ironi- cally from the speech of a Mahomedan member of the Punjab Legislative Council in condemnation of Dhingra that " all the white-skinned Europeans, including the English rulers of India, must be the lowest born people in the world, seeing that they are in the habit of killing natives every day." No public servants who venture to discharge their duty loyally fare worse at the hands of the Nationalist Press than Judges especially if they are Indians. Mr. Justice 22 SWARAJ ON PLATFORM AND IN PRESS [CHAP, n Davar was the Parsee Judge who sentenced Tilak. The Kesari declared that " he had already settled the sentence in his own mind after a careful consideration of external circumstances," and " had made himself the laughing- stock of the whole world, like the meddlesome monkey in the fable who came to grief in trying to pull out the peg from a half -sawed beam." Now the Kesari was Tilak's own paper, and he was convicted on two seditious articles that had appeared in its columns, but the Kal, another Poona sheet, also maintained that everything was done on a prearranged plan. " There is no sense in saying that Mr. Tilak was sentenced according to law. There was mockery of justice, not justice." It added that " if the Hindus are to suppose Mr. Tilak guilty because an English Court of Justice had condemned him, Christians will have to forswear Christ because He was crucified by a Roman Court." The Karnatak Vaibhav recalled the story of the notorious washerman who, by scandalizing Rama, had been immortalized in the Ramayana. In the same way the names of Strachey who sentenced Tilak at his first trial in 1897 and Davar would be remembered as long as history endured. Quotations could be multiplied ad infinitum and ad nauseam from the same papers I have given only one from each and from scores of others. These will suffice to show what the freedom of the Press stood for in India, hi a country where there is an almost superstitious reverence for, and faith in, the printed word, where the influence of the Press is in proportion to the ignorance of the vast majority of its readers, and where, unfortu- nately, the more violent and scurrilous a newspaper becomes, the more its popularity grows among the very classes that boast of their education. They are by no means obscure papers, and some of them, such as the Kal, ihe Hind Swarajya, and especially the Yugantar, which became at one time a real power in Bengal, achieved a circulation hitherto unknown to the Indian Press. Can any Englishman, however fervent his faith in liberty, CHAP, n] ANGLO-INDIAN NEWSPAPERS 23 regret that some at least of these papers have now dis- appeared either as the result of prosecutions under the Indian Criminal Code or from the operation of the new Press Law ? The mischief they have done still lives and will not be easily eradicated. It is the fashion in certain quarters to reply : "But look at the Anglo-Indian news- papers, at the aggressive and contemptuous tone they assume towards the natives of India, at the encourage- ment they constantly give to racial hatred." Though I am not concerned to deny that, in the columns of a few English organs, there may be occasional lapses from good taste and right feeling, such sweeping charges against the Anglo-Indian Press as a whole are absolutely grotesque, and its most malevolent critics would be at a loss to quote anything, however remotely, resembling the exhortations to hatred and violence which have been the stock-in-trade not only of the most popular newpapers in the vernaculars, but of some even of the leading newspapers published in English, but edited and owned by Indians. Even such extracts as I have given above from verna- cular newspapers do not by any means represent the lengths to which Indian " extremism " can go. They represent merely the literature of unrest which has been openly circulated in India. There is another and still more poisonous form which is smuggled into India from abroad and surreptitiously circulated. CHAPTER III. A HINDU REVIVAL. Thirty years ago, when I first visited India, the young Western-educated Hindu was apt to be, at least intel- lectually, plus royaliste que le roi. He plucked with both hands at the fruits of the tree of Western knowledge. Some were enthusiastic students of English literature, and especially of English poetry. They had. their Words- worth and their Browning Societies. Others steeped themselves in English history and loved to draw their political inspiration from Milton and Burke and John Stuart Mill. Others, again, were the humble disciples of Kant and Schlegel, of Herbert Spencer and Darwin. But whatever their special bent might be, the vast majority professed allegiance to Western ideals, and if they had not altogether and often far too hastily abjured, or learned secretly to despise, the beliefs and customs of their forefathers, they were at any rate anxious to modify and bring them into harmony with those of their Western teachers. They may often have disliked the Englishman, but they respected and admired him ; if they resented his frequent assumption of unqualified superiority, they were disposed to admit that it was not without justification. The enthusiasm kindled in the first half of the last century by the great missionaries, like Carey and Duff, who had 24 CHAP, ra] THE OLDER METHODS 25 made distinguished converts among the highest classes of Hindu society, had begun to wane ; but if educated Hindus had grown more reluctant to accept the dogmas of Christianity, they were still ready to acknowledge the superiority of Western ethics, and the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay, the Social Reform movement which found eloquent advocates all over India, and not least in Madras, and other agencies of a similar character for purging Hindu life of its more barbarous and superstitious associations, bore witness to the ascendency which Western standards of morality exercised over the Hindu mind. Keshub Chunder Sen was not perhaps cast in so fine a mould as Ram Mohan Roy or the more conservative Dr. Tagore, but his ideals were the same, and his life-dream was to find a common denominator for Hinduism and Christianity which should secure a thorough reform of Hindu society without denationalizing it. Nor were the milder forms of political activity pro- moted by the founders of the Indian National Congress inconsistent with the acceptance of British rule or with the recognition of the great benefits which it has con- ferred upon India, and least of all with a genuine admira- tion for Western civilization. For many of them at least the political boons which they craved from their rulers were merely the logical corollaries of the moral and intel- lectual as well as of the material boons which they had already received. The fierce political agitation of later years denies the benefits of British rule and even the superiority of the civilization for which it stands. It has invented the legend of a golden age, when all the virtues flourished and India was a land flowing with milk and honey until British lust of conquest brought it to ruin. No doubt even to-day there are many eminent Hindus who would still rely upon the older methods, and who have sufficiently assimilated the education they have received at the hands of Englishmen to share whole- heartedly the faith and pride of the latter in British ideals 28 A HINDU REVIVAL [CHAP, in of liberty and self-government, and to be honestly con- vinced that those ideals might be more fully realized in the government of their own country if British admini- strators would only repose greater confidence hi the natives of India and give them a larger share in the conduct of public affairs. But men of this type are now to be found chiefly amongst the older generation. No one who has studied, however scantily, the social and religious system which for the sake of convenience we call Hinduism will deny the loftiness of the philo- sophic conceptions which underlie even the extrava- gances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the com- plex fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many of its aspects an almost unthinkable combination of spiritualistic idealism and of gross materialism, of asceticism and of sensuousness, of over- weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the universal self and merges man hi the Divinity and the Divinity in man, and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches that life itself is but a painful illusion, and that the sovereign remedy and end of all evils is non-existence. Its mythology is often as revolting as the rigidity of its caste laws, which condemn millions of human beings to such social abasement that their very touch the very shadow thrown by their body is held to pollute the privileged mortals who are born into the higher castes. Nevertheless, Hinduism has for more than thirty centuries responded t" the social and religious aspirations of a con- siderable fraction of the human race. It represents a great and ancient civilization, and that the Hindus should cling to it is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that after the first attraction exerted by the impact of an alien civilization equipped with all the panoply of organized force and scientific achievements had worn off, a certain reaction should have ensued. In the same way it was inevitable that, after the novelty of British rule, of the law and order and security for life and property which it had established, had gradually worn away, those CHAP, in] REHABILITATION OF HINDU BELIEFS 27 who had never experienced the evils from which it had freed India should begin to chafe under the restraints which it imposed. What is disheartening and alarming are the lengths to which this reaction has been carried. For among the younger generation of Hindus there has unquestionably grown up a deep-seated and bitter hostility not only to British rule and to British methods of administration, but to all the influences of Western civilization, and the rehabilitation of Hindu customs and beliefs has proceeded pari passu with the growth of political disulTection. Practices \\hich an educated Hindu would have been at pains to explain away, if he had not frankly repudiated them thirty years ago, now find zealous apologists. Polytheism is not merely extolled as the poetic expression of eternal verities, but the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon are being invested with fresh sanctity. The Brahmo Samaj is still a great influence for good, but it appears to be gradually losing vitality, and though its literary output is still considerable, its membership is shrinking. The Prarthana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of the day is for religious " revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the sanguinary goddess of destruc- tion, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the Mahratta chief- tain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien con- querors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous part. The Arya-Samaj, which is spreading all over the Punjab and in the United Provinces, represents in one of its aspects a revolt against Hindu orthodoxy, but in another it represents equally a revolt against Western ideals, for in the teachings of its founder, Dayanand, it has found an aggressive gospel which bases the claims of Aryan, i.e., Hindu, supremacy on the Vedas as the one ultimate source of human and Divine wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been developed 28 . A HINDU REVIVAL [CHAP, ra along different and often conflicting lines of thought to suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya- Samaj has not been content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to pro- claim the immanent superiority of Aryan civili- zation it repudiates the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin over Western civilization, it claims to have discovered in the Vedas the germs of all the discoveries of modern science, even to wireless tele- graphy and aeroplanes. Just as the political agitation in India has derived invaluable encouragement from a handful of British members of Parliament and other sympathizers in Europe and America, so this Hindu revival has been largely stimulated and to some extent prompted by Europeans and Americans. Not only the writings of English and German scholars, like Max Muller and Deutsch, helped enormously to revive the interest of educated Hindus in their ancient literature and earlier forms of religion, but it was in the polemical tracts of European writers that the first protagonists of Hindu reaction against Christian influences found their readiest weapons of attack. The campaign was started in 1887 by the Hindu Tract Society of Madras, which set itself first to inflame popular fanaticism against the missionaries, who, especially in the south of India, had been the pioneers of Western education. Bradlaugh's text-books and the pamphlets of many lesser writers belonging to the same school of thought were eagerly translated into the verna- cular, and those that achieved the greatest popularity were books like " The Evil of Continence," in which not only Christian theology, but Christian morality was held up to scorn and ridicule. The advent of the theo- sophists, heralded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, gave a fresh impetus to the revival, and certainly no Hindu has done so much to organize and consoli- date the movement as Mrs. Annie Besant, who, in her Central Hindu College at Benares and her Theosophical CHAP, in] SECRET SOCIETIES AND SECRET RITES 29 Institution at Adyar, near Madras, has openly proclaimed her faith in the superiority of the whole Hindu system to the vaunted civilization of the West. Is it surprising that Hindus should turn their backs upon our civilization 2 when a European of highly-trained intellectual power and with an extraordinary gift of eloquence comes and tells them that it is they who possess and have from all times possessed the key to supreme wisdom ; that their gods, their philosophy, their morality are on a higher plane of thought than the West has ever reached ? Is it surprising that with such encouragement Hinduism should no longer remain on the defensive, but, discarding in this respect all its own traditions as a non-proselv- tizing creed, should send out missionaries to preach the message of Hindu enlightenment to those still groping in the darkness of the West ? The mission of Swami Vivekananda to the Chicago Congress of Religions is in itself one of the most striking incidents in the history of Hindu revivalism, but it is perhaps less wonderful than the triumph he achieved when he returned to India accompanied by a chosen band of eager disciples from the West. There are, indeed, endless forms to this revival of Hinduism as endless as to Hinduism itself but what it is perhaps most important for us to note is that, wherever political agitation assumes the most virulent character, there the Hindu revival also assumes the most extravagant shapes. Secret societies place their murderous activities under the special patronage of one or other of the chief popular deities. Their vows are taken " on the sacred water of the Ganges," or " holding the sacred Tulsi plant," or " in the presence of Mahadevi " the great goddess who delights in bloody sacrifices. Charms and amulets, incantations and imprecations, play an important part in the ceremonies of initiation. In some quarters there has been some recrudescence of the Shakti cultus, with its often obscene and horrible rites, and the unnatural depravity which was so marked 30 A HINDU REVIVAL [CHAP, m a feature in the case of the band of young Brahmans who conspired to murder Mr. Jackson at Nasik represents a form of erotomania which is certainly much more common amongst Hindu political fanatics than amongst Hindus in general. By no means all, however, are of this degenerate type, and the Bhagvat Gitahas been impressed into the service of sedition by men who would have been as incapable of dabbling in political as in any other form of crime, had they not been able to invest it with a religious sanc- tion. There is no more beautiful book in the sacred literature of the Hindus ; there is none in which the more enlightened find greater spiritual comfort ; yet it is in the Bhagvat Gita that, by a strange perversion, the Hindu conspirator has sought and claims to have found texts that justify murder as a divinely inspired deed when it is committed in the sacred cause of Hinduism. Nor is it only the extremists who appeal in this fashion to Hindu religious emotionalism. It is often just as diffi- cult to appraise the subtle differences which separate the " moderate " from the " advanced " politician and the " advanced " politician from the extremist as it is to dis- tinguish between the various forms and gradations of the Hindu revival in its religious and social aspects. But it was in the court-yard of the great temple of Kali at Calcutta in the presence of " the terrible goddess " that the " leaders of the Bengali nation," men who, like Mr. Surendranath Banerjee, have always professed to be " moderates," held their chief demonstrations against " partition " and administered the Swadeshi oath to their followers. Equally noteworthy is the part played by the revival of Ganpati celebrations in honour of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, perhaps the most popular of all Hindu deities, in stimulating political disaffection in the Deccan. Hand in hand with this campaign for the glorification of Hinduism at the expense of Western civilization there has been carried on another ana far more invidious CHAP, in] A GRAVE PHENOMENON 31 campaign for the vilification of everything British. The individual Englishman is denounced as a bloodsucker and a tyrant ; his personal integrity is impugned and derided ; his methods of administration are alleged to be wilfully directed to the impoverishment, and even to the depopulation, of India ; his social customs are traduced as depraved and corrupt ; even his women- folk are accused of common wantonness. This system- atized form of personal calumny is a scarcely less significant feature of the literature of Indian unrest than its appeals to the Hindu scriptures and to the Hindu deities and its exploitation of the religious sentiment for the pro- motion of racial hatred. Swadeshi and 8 war a j are the battle-cries of this new Hindu " nationalism," but they mean far more than a mere claim to fiscal or even political independence. They mean an organized uplifting of the old Hindu traditions, social and religious, intellectual and moral, against the imported ideals of an alien race and an alien civilization, and the sincerity of some, at least, of the apostles of this new creed cannot be ques- tioned. With Mr. Arabindo Ghose, they firmly believe that " the whole moral strength of the country is with us, justice is with us, nature is with us, and the law of God, which is higher than any human law, justifies our action." This is a grave phenomenon not to be contemptuously dismissed as the folly of ill-digested knowledge or summarily judged and condemned, in a spirit of self- righteousness, as an additional proof of the innate de- pravity and ingratitude of the East. It undoubtedly represents a deep stirring of the waters amongst a people endowed with no mean gifts of head and heart, and if it has thrown up much scum, it affords glimpses of nobler elements which time may purify and bring to the surface. Nor if our rule and our civilization are to prevail must we be unmindful of our own responsibility or forget that our presence and the influences we brought with us first stirred the waters. 32 A HINDU REVIVAL [CHAP, ra The part played by Brahmanism in Indian unrest is far more conspicuous in some parts of India than in others, and for reasons which are generally not far to seek. Wherever it has been most active, it con- notes perhaps more than anything else the reactionary side of that unrest. Though there have been and still are many enlightened Brahmans who have cordially re- sponded to the best influences of Western education, and have worked with admirable zeal and courage to bridge the gulf between Indian and European civilization, Brahmanism as a system represents the antipodes of all that British rule must stand for hi India, and Brahmanism has from times immemorial dominated Hindu society dominated it, according to the Hindu Nationalists, for its salvation. " If," writes one of them, " Mother India, though reduced to a mere skeleton by the op- pression of alien rulers during hundreds of years, still preserves her vitality, it is because the Brahmans have never relaxed in their devotion to her. She has witnessed political and social revolutions. Famines and pesti- lence have shorn her of her splendour. But the Brah- mans have stood by her through all the vicissitudes of fortune. It is they who raised her to the highest pinnacle of glory, and it is they whose ministrations still keep up the drooping spirits of her children." The Brahmans are the sacerdotal caste of India. They are at the same time the proudest and the closest aristo- cracy that the world has ever seen, for they form not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of divine origin. Of the Brahman it may be said as of no other privileged mortal except perhaps the Levite of the Old Testament : Nascitur non fit. No king, however powerful, can make or unmake a Brahman, no genius, however transcendent, no services, however conspicuous, no virtues, however pre-eminent, can avail to raise a Hindu from a lower caste to the Brahman's estate. In early times the caste laws must have been less rigid, for otherwise there would only be CHAP, in] THE SACERDOTAL CASTE 33 Aryan Brahmans, whereas in the South of India there are many Brahmans of obviously Dravidian stock. But to-day not even the Brahmans themselves can raise to their own equal one who is not born of their caste, though by the exercise of the castely authority they can in specific cases outcaste a fellow- Brahman who has offended against the immutable laws of caste, and, except for minor transgressions which allow of atonement and reinstate- ment, when once outcasted he and his descendants cease for ever to be Brahmans. The Brahmans might be at a loss to make good their claim that they date back to the remote ages of the Vedas. But a good deal more than two thousand years have passed since they constituted themselves the only authorized intermediaries between mankind and the gods. In them became vested the monopoly of the ancient language in which all religious rites are performed, and with a monopoly of the know- ledge of Sanskrit they retained a monopoly of learning long after Sanskrit itself had become a dead language. Like the priests who wielded a Latin pen in the Middle Ages in Europe, they sat as advisers and conscience- keepers in the councils of every Hindu ruler. To the present day they alone can expound the Hindu scrip- tures, they alone can approach the gods in their temples, they alone can minister to the spiritual needs of such of the lower castes as are credited with sufficient human dignity to be in any way worthy of their ministrations. In the course of ages differences and distinctions have gradually grown up amongst them, and they have split up into innumerable septs and sub-castes. As they- multiplied from generation to generation an increasing, proportion were compelled to supplement the avocations, originally sacred to their caste by other and lowlier means of livelihood. There are to-day over 14 million, Brahmans in India, and a very large majority of them have been compelled to adopt agricultural, military, and mercantile pursuits which, as we know from the Code of Manu, wer^e ajready regarded as, in certain circumstances, 34 A HINDU REVIVAL [CHAP, m legitimate or excusable for a Brahman even in the days of that ancient law-giver. In regard to all other castes, however, the Brahman, humble as his worldly status may be, retains an undisputed pre-eminence which he never forgets or allows to be forgotten, though it may only be a pale reflection of the prestige and authority of his more exalted caste-men a prestige and authority, be it added, which have often been justified by individual achieve- ments. How far the influence of Brahmanism as a system has been socially a good or an evil influence I am not concerned to discuss, but, however antagonistic it may be at the present moment to the influence of Western civilization, it would be unfair to deny that it has shown itself and still shows itself capable of producing a very high type both of intellect and of character. Nor could it otherwise have survived as it has the vicissitudes of centuries. Neither the triumph of Buddhism, which lasted for nearly 500 years, nor successive waves of Mahomedan conquest availed to destroy the power of Brahmanism, nor has it been broken by British supremacy. In- flexibly as he dominates a social system in all essentials more rigid than any other, the Brahman has not only recognized the need of a certain plasticity in its con- struction which allows for constant expansion, but he has himself shown unfailing adaptability in all non- essentials to varying circumstances. To the require- ments of their new Western masters the Brahmans adapted themselves from the first with admirable supple- ness, and when a Western system of education was in- troduced into India in the first half of the last century, they were quicker than any other class to realize how it could be used to fortify their own position. The main original object of the introduction of Western educa- tion into India was the training of a sufficient number of young Indians to fill the subordinate posts in the public offices with English-speaking natives. The Brahmans responded freely to the call, and they soon acquired CHAP. HI] BRAHMANISM IN WESTERN CONTACT 35 almost the same monopoly of the new Western learning as they had enjoyed of Hindu lore through the centuries. With the development of the great administrative ser- vices, with the substitution of English for the verna- cular tongues as the only official language, with the re- modelling of judicial administration and procedure on British lines, with the growth of the liberal professions and of the Press, their influence constantly found new fields of activity, whilst through the old traditional channels it continued to permeate those strata of Hindu society with which the West had established little or no contact. Nevertheless the spread of Western ideas and habits was bound to loosen to some extent the Brahmans' hold upon Hindu society, for that hold is chiefly rooted in the immemorial sanctity of custom, which new habits and methods imported from the West necessarily tended to undermine. Scrupulous and, according to many earnest Englishmen, over-scrupulous as we were to respect religious beliefs and prejudices, the influence of Western civilization could not fail to clash directly or indirectly with many of the ordinances of Hindu ortho- doxy. In non-essentials Brahmanism soon found it expedient to relax the rigour of caste obligations, as for instance to meet the hard case of young Hindus who could not travel across the " black water " to Europe for their studies without breaking caste, or indeed travel even in their own country in railways and river steamers without incurring the pollution of bodily contact with the " untouchable " castes. Penances were at first imposed which had gradually to be lightened until they came to be merely nominal. Graver issues were raised when such ancient customs as infant marriage and the degradation of child widows were challenged. The ferment of new ideas was spreading amongst the Brahmans themselves. Some had openly discarded their ancestral faith, and many more were moved to search their own scriptures for some interpretation of the law less 33 36 A HINDU REVIVAL [CHAP, in inconsistent with Western standards. It seemed at one moment as if, under the inspiration of men like Ranade in the Deocan and Tagore in Bengal, Brahmanism it- self was about to take the lead in purging Hinduism of its most baneful superstitions and bringing it into line with the philosophy and ethics of the West. But the liberal movement failed to prevail against the forces of popular superstition and orthodox bigotry, combined with the bitterness too frequently resulting from the failure of Western education to secure material success or even an adequate livelihood for those who had departed from the old ways. Though there have been and still are many admirable exceptions, Brahmanism remained the stronghold of reaction against the Western invasion. Of recent years, educated Brahmans have figured pro- minently in the social and religious revival of Hinduism, and they have figured no less prominently, whether in the ranks of the extremists or amongst the moderate and advanced politicians, in the political movement which has accompanied that revival. CHAPTER IV. BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION IN THE DECCAN. Fundamental as is the antagonism between the civi- lization represented by the British Raj and the essential spirit of Brahmanism, it is not, of course, always or every- where equally acute, for there is no more uniformity about Brahmanism than about any other Indian growth. But in the Deccan Brahmanism has remained more fiercely militant than in any other part of India, chiefly perhaps because nowhere had it wielded such absolute power within times which may still be called recent. Far into the eighteenth century Poona had been the capital of a theocratic State in which behind the throne of the Peshwas both spiritual and secular authority were con- centrated in the hands of the Brahmans. Such memories are slow to die and least of all in an ancient and con- servative country like India, and there was one sept of Brahmans, at any rate, who were determined not to let them die. The Chitpavan Brahmans are undoubtedly the most powerful and the most able of all the Brahmans of the Deccan. A curious legend ascribes their origin to the miraculous intervention of Parashurama, the sixth Avatar of the god Vishnu, who finding no Brahmans to release him by the accustomed ritual from the 37 38 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv defilement of his earthly labours, dragged on to shore the bodies of fourteen barbarians that he had found washed up from the ocean, burnt them on a funeral pyre and then breathed life and Brahmanhood into their ashes. On these new made Brahnians he conferred the name Chitpavan, which means " purified by fire," and all the land of the Konkan from which, by a bolt from his arrow, he caused the sea for ever to recede. Every Chitpavan to-day claims descent from one or other of the fourteen divinely Brah- manized barbarians, whom some believe to have been hardy Norsemen driven in their long ships on to the sandy shores of what is now the Bombay Presidency. At any rate, as has been well said of them, Western daring and Eastern craft look out alike from the alert features and clear parchment skin and through the strange stone- grey eyes of the Chitpavan. It was not, however, till about two centuries ago that the Chitpavan Brahmans began to play a conspicuous part in Indian history, when one of this sept, Balaji Vishvanath Rao, worked his way up at the Court of the Mahratta King Shaliu to the position of Peshwa, or Prime Minister, which he succeeded even in bequeathing to his son, the great Bajirao Balaji, who led the Mahratta armies right up to the walls of Delhi. Bajirao's son not only succeeded as Balaji II., but on the death of King Shahu disposed of his Royal master's family by a bold Palace conspiracy and openly assumed sovereign powers. The crushing defeat of Panipat brought him to his grave, and though the dynasty was still continued, and regained some of its lustre under Madhao Rao I., thePeshwas subsequently became little more than rois faineants in the hands of their Ministers, and especially in those of the great Regent Nana Phadnavis. He, too, was a Chitpavan Brahman, and it was under his reign that his fellow caste-men acquired so complete a monopoly of all the chief offices of State that the Mahratta Empire became essentially a Chitpavan Empire. The British arms ultimately defeated the dreams of universal dominion CHAP, iv] THE CHITPAVAN EMPIRE 39 which, in the then condition of India, the Chitpavans might well have hoped to establish on the ruins of the great Moghul Empire. But British rule did not destroy their power. They were quick to adapt themselves to new conditions and above all to avail themselves of the advantages of Western education. Their great administrative abilities compelled recognition, and Chitpavans swarm to-day in every Government office of the Deccan as they did in the days of Nana Phadnavis. They sit on the Bench, they dominate the Bar, they teach hi the schools, they control the vernacular Press, they have furnished almost all the most conspicuous names in the modern literature and drama of Western India as well as in politics. Of the higher appoint- ments held by natives in the Presidency of Bombay, the last census tells us that the Hindus held 266 against 86 held by Parsees and 23 held by Mahomedans, and that out of those held by the Hindus, more than 72 per cent, were held by Brahmans, though the Brahmans form less than one-fourteenth of the total Hindu population of the province. All Brahmans are not, of course, Chitpavans, but the Chitpavans supply an overwhelm- ing majority of these Government officials, and their ascendency over every other Brahman sept in Maharashtra is undisputed. From the Deccan, moreover, their influence has spread practically all over India and, especially, in the native States, which have recruited amongst the Chitpavans some of their ablest public servants. Amongst Chitpavans are to be found many of the most enlightened and progressive Indians of our times and many have served the British Raj with unquestioned loyalty and integrity. But amongst many others perhaps indeed amongst the great majority there has undoubtedly been preserved for the last hundred years from the time of the downfall of the Peshwa dominion to the present day, an unbroken tradition of hatred towards British rule, an undying hope that it might some day be subverted and their own ascendency restored. Not to go back to the 40 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv exploits of Nana Sahib, himself a Chitpavan, and his followers during the Mutiny, or to the Ramoshi rebellion round Poona in 1879, it was in Poona that the native Press, mainly conducted by Brahmans, first assumed that tone of virulent hostility towards British rule and British rulers which led to the Press Act of 1879, and some of the worst extracts quoted at that time by the Govern- ment of India in support of that measure were taken from Poona newspapers. It was in Poona that some years later the assassination of two English officials by a young Chitpavan Brahman was the first outcome of a fresh campaign, leading directly to political murder. It was by another Chitpavan Brahman that Mr. Jackson was murdered last December at Nasik ; his accomplices were with one exception Chitpavan Brahmans, and to the same sept of Brahmans belong nearly all the de- fendants in the great conspiracy trial now proceeding at Bombay. But if there were already, more than 20 years ago, wild and irreconcilable spirits bent on fomenting dis- affection, there were amongst the Deccanee Brahmans themselves a small intellectual elite who, though by no means servile apologists of British rule, fully realized that their primary duty was not to stir up popular passion against alien rulers, but to bring Hindu society into closer communion with the higher civilization which those rulers, whatever their shortcomings, undoubtedly represented. Conspicuous amongst such men was Ma- hadev Govind Ranade. Equally conspicuous in the opposite camp was a man of a very different stamp, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was destined to become one of the most dangerous pioneers of disaffection. It was a Hindu gentleman and a Brahman who told me that if I wanted to study the psychology of Indian unrest I should begin by studying Tilak's career. " Tilak's onslaught in Poona upon Ranade, his alliance with the bigots of orthodoxy, his appeals to popular superstition in the new Ganpati celebrations, to racial fanaticism in CHAP, iv] TILAK'S ENTRY INTO PUBLIC LIFE 41 the ' Anti-Cow-killing Movement,' to Mahratta sentiment in the cult which he introduced of Shivaji, his active propaganda amongst schoolboys and students, his gym- nastic societies, his preaching hi favour of physical training, and last but not least his control of the Press and the note of personal violence which he imparted to newspaper polemics, represent the progressive stages of a highly-organized campaign which has served as a model to the apostles of unrest all over India." This was a valuable piece of advice, for, if any one can claim to be truly the father of Indian unrest, it is Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The story of his initial campaign in the Deccan, though it dates back to the closing decades of the last century, is still well worth studying, and has, in fact, never received adequate attention, for on the one hand it pricks the shallow view that Indian unrest is merely an echo of the Japanese victories in Manchuria, and, on the other hand, it illustrates clearly the close connexion that exists between the forces of Indian political disaffection and those of social and religious reaction, whilst the methods which he employed and the results which attended his activity have been reproduced with singular fidelity in subsequent phases of the movement. When Tilak entered upon public life in the early eighties, the Brahmans of the Deccan were divided into two camps, one of which, headed at first by the late Mr. Justice Ranade, consisted of a small intellectual elite, who held, without forgoing their right to criticize British administrators or to promote political reforms by constitutional methods, that Indians of all creeds, including the Hindus, should begin by reforming their own social institutions, and bring them into greater harmony with Western standards. Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahman of considerable erudition, who had graduated with honours at Bombay, had, however, inherited his full share of Chitpavan hostility to British ascendency. He was also by temperament and ambition impatient of all restraint, and jealous of the commanding 42 BRAHMAN1SM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv authority which a man like Ranade owed quite as much to the nobility of his character as to his social position and force of intellect. In opposition to Ranade, with whom he had at first co-operated as an educationist, Tilak drifted rapidly into the reactionary camp. The battle was first engaged over the control of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Education Society, two progressive associations which, though mainly composed of Brahmans, included a sprinkling of Mahomedans and of non-Brahman Hindus. Tilak had thrown himself into journalism, and after the repeal of the Indian Press Law on the return of a Liberal Admini- stration to office at home in 1881, he had been amongst the first to revive the incendiary methods which it had temporarily and very successfully checked. His first onslaught upon Ranade's position, however, failed, and instead of supplanting him, it was he who was compelled in 1890 to sever his connexion with the Education Society. Tilak 's defeat was short lived. The introduction of the Age of Consent Bill, in 1890, to mitigate the evils of Hindu child -marriage, gave him a fresh opening. Ranade, discouraged and alarmed by the violence of the Tilak party, had by this time retired from the forefront of the fray, but in Dr. Bhandarkar, Mr. Justice Tilang, Mr. A. K. Nulkar, Mr. (now Sir N. G.) Chandavarkar, and other courageous Hindu reformers, with whom Mr. Gokhale was always ready to co-operate against the forces of religious superstition, he had left disciples ready to carry on the good fight. Tilak raised against them a storm of passion and prejudice. In the columns of the Kesari, of which he had become sole proprietor, he denounced every Hindu who supported the measure as a renegade and a traitor to the cause of Hinduism, and thus won the support of conservative orthodoxy, which had hitherto viewed with alarm some of his literary excursions into the field of Vedantic exegesis. With the help of the brothers Natu, who were the recognized leaders of Hindu ortho- doxy, he carried his propaganda into the schools and CHAP, iv.] THE ANTI-COW-KILLING SOCIETY 43 colleges in the teeth of the Moderate party, and, pro- claiming that unless they learnt to employ force the Hindus must expect to be impotent witnesses of the gradual downfall of all their ancient institutions, he pro- ceeded to organize gymnastic societies in which physical training and the use of more or less primitive weapons were taught in order to develop the martial instincts of the rising generation. If amongst many Brahmans of Maharashtra hatred of the British is the dominant passion, amongst the Mahratta population at large whatever there is of racial and religious jealousy is mainly directed against the Maho- metans. This is partly, no doubt, a legacy of the old days of Mahomed an supremacy. In 1893 some riots in Bombay of a more severe character than usual gave Tilak an opportunity of broadening the new movement by enlisting in its support the old anti-Mahomed an feeling of the people. He not only convoked popular meetings in which his fiery eloquence denounced the Mahomedans as the sworn foes of Hinduism, but he started an organiza- tion known as the " Ant i -Cow-Killing Society," which was intended and regarded as a direct provocation to the Mahomedans, who, like ourselves, think it no sacrilege to eat beef. In vain did liberal Hindus appeal to him to desist from these inflammatory methods. Their appeals had no effect upon him, and merely served his purpose by undermining the little authority they still possessed. Government had forbidden Hindu processions to play music Avhilst passing in front of Mahomed an mosques, as this was a fertile cause of riotous affrays. Tilak not only himself protested against this " inter- ference with the liberties of the people," but insisted that the Sarvajanik Sabha should identify itself with the " national " cause and memorialize Government for the removal of a prohibition so offensive to Hindu senti- ment. The Moderates hesitated, but were overawed by popular clamour and the threats of the Tilak Press. The Mahomedans and a few other members repudiated 44 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv the memorial and resigned. Tilak, though not yet in absolute control of the Sabha, became already practi- cally its master. No one knew better than he how to compel submission by packed meetings and organized rowdyism. Tilak's propaganda had at the same time steadily assumed a more and more anti-British character, and it was always as the allies and the tools of Government, in its machinations against Hinduism, that the Hindu reformers and the Mahomedans had in turn been de- nounced. In order to invest it with a more definitely religious sanction, Tilak placed it under the special patronage of the most popular deity in India. Though Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, is the god of learning whom Hindu writers delight to invoke on the title-page of their books, there is scarcely a village or a frequented roadside in India that does not show some rude pre- sentment of his familiar features, usually smeared over with red ochre. Tilak could not have devised a more popular move than when he set himself to organize annual festivals in honour of Ganesh, known as Ganpati celebrations, and to found in all the chief centres of the Deccan Ganpati societies, each with its mela or choir recruited among his youthful bands of gymnasts. These festivals gave occasion for theatrical performances 3 and religious songs in which the legends of Hindu mythology were skilfully exploited to stir up hatred of the " foreigner " and mlenccha, the term employed for "foreigner," applied equally to Europeans and to Mahomedans as well as for tumultuous processions only too well calcu- lated to provoke affrays with the Mahomedans and with the police, which in turn led to judicial proceedings that served as a fresh excuse for noisy protests and inflammatory pleadings. With the Ganpati celebrations the area of Tilak's propaganda was widely increased. But the movement had yet to be given a form which should directly appeal to the fighting instincts of the Mahrattas and stimulate active disaffection by reviving CHAP, iv] THE CULT OF SHIVAJI 40 memories of olden times when under Shivaji's leader- ship they had rolled back the tide of Musulman conquest and cheated a Mahratta Empire of their own. The legends of Shivaji's prowess still lingered in Maharashtra, where the battlemented strongholds which he built crown many a precipitous crag of the Deccan highlands. In a valley below Pratabghar the spot is still shown where Shivaji induced the Mahomedan general, Afzul Khan, to meet him in peaceful conference half-way between the contending armies, and, as he bent down to greet his guest, plunged into his bowels the famous " tiger's claw," a hooked gauntlet of steel, while the Mahratta forces sprang out of ambush and cut the Mahomedan army to pieces. But if Shivaji's memory still lived, it belonged to a past which was practically dead and gone. Only a few years before an English- man who had visited Shivaji's tomb had written to a local newspaper calling attention to the ruinous con- dition into which the people of Maharashtra had allowed the last resting-place of their national hero to fall. Some say it was this letter which first inspired Tilak with the idea of reviving Shivaji's memory and converting it into a living force. Originally it was upon the great days of the Poona Peshwas that Tilak had laid the chief stress, and he may possibly have discovered that theirs were not after all names to conjure with amongst non- Brahman Mahrattas, who had suffered heavily enough at their hands. At any rate, Tilak brought Shivaji to the forefront and set in motion a great " national " propaganda which culminated in 1895 in the celebration at all the chief centres of Brahman activity in the Deccan of Shivaji's reputed birthday, the principal commemora- tion being held under Tilak's own presidency at Raighar, where the Mahratta chieftain had himself been crowned. What was the purpose and significance of this movement may be gathered from a Shlok or sacred poem improvised on this occasion by one of Tilak's disciples who was soon, to acquire sinister notoriety, 46 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv Let us be prompt like Shivaji to engage in dgsperate enter- prises. Take up your swords and shields and we shall cut off countless heads of enemies. Listen ' Though we shall have to risk our lives in a national war, we shall assuredly shed the life-blood of our enemies. It was on the occasion of the Shivaji " coronation festivities " that the right nay, the duty to commit murder for political purposes was first publicly expounded. With Tilak in the chair, a Brahman professor got up to vindicate Shivaji's bloody deed : Who dares to call that man a murderer who, when only nine years old, had received Divine inspiration not to bow down before a Mahomedan Emperor ? Who dares to con- demn Shivaji for disregarding a minor duty in the perform- ance of a major one ? Had Shivaji committed five or fifty crimes more terrible, I would have been equally ready to prostrate myself not once but one hundred times before the image of our lord Shivaji . . . Every Hindu, every Mahratta must rejoice at this spectacle, for we too are all striving to regain our lost independence, and it is only by combination that we can throw off the yoke. Tilak himself was even more outspoken : It is needless to make further researches as to the killing of Afzul Khan. Let us even assume that Shivaji deliberately planned and executed the murder. Was the act good or evil ? This question cannot be answered from the stand- point of the Penal Code or of the laws of Manu or according to the principles of morality laid down in the systems of the West or of the East. The laws which bind society are for common folk like you and me No one seeks to trace the genealogy of a Rishi or to fasten guilt upon a Maharaj . Great men are above the common principles of morality. Such principles .do not reach to the pedestal of a great man. Did Shivaji commit a sin in killing Afzul Khan ? The answer to this question can be found in the Mahabharata itself. The Divine Krishna teaching in the Gita tells us we may kill even our teachers and our kinsmen, and no blame attaches if we are not actuated by selfish desires. Shivaji did nothing from a desire to fill his own belly. It was in a praiseworthy object that he murdered Afzul Khan for the good of others. If thieves enter our house and we have not strength to drive them out, should we not without hesitation shut them in CHAP, iv] CLIMAX OF TILAK'S CAMPAIGN 47 and burn them alive ? God hfis conferred on the mlencchas (foreigners) no grant of Hindustan inscribed on imperishable brass. Shivaji strove to drive them forth out of the land of his birth, but he was guiltless of the sin of covetousness. Do not circumscribe your vision like frogs in a well. Rise above the Penal Code into the rarefied atmosphere of the sacred Bhaghavad Gita and consider the action of great men. In the reflected blaze of this apotheosis of Shivaji, Tilak stood forth as the appointed leader of the " nation." He was the triumphant champion of Hindu orthodoxy, the high-priest of Ganesh, the inspired prophet of a new " nationalism," which in the name of Shivaji would cast out the hated mlencchas and restore the glories of Mahratta history. The Government feared him, for people could put no other construction on the official confirmation of his election when he was returned in 1 895 as a member of the Bombay Legislative Council above all, when inside the Council-room he continued with the same audacity and the same impunity his cam- paign of calumny and insult. His activity was unceas- ing. He disdained none of the arts which make for popularity. His house was always open to those who sought in the right spirit for assistance or advice. He had absolute control of the Sabha and ruled the munici- pality of Poona. In private and in public, through his speeches and through his newspapers, he worked upon the prejudices and passions of both the educated and the uneducated, and especially upon the crude enthusiasm of the young. Towards the end of 1896 the Deccan was threatened with famine. Hungry stomachs are prompt to violence, and Tilak started a " no-rent " campaign. Like all Tilak's schemes in those days it was carefully designed to conceal as far as possible any direct incite- ment to the withholding of land revenue. His mission- aries went round with a story that Government had issued orders not to collect taxes where the crops had fallen below a certain yield. The rayats believed them, and when the tax-gatherer arrived they refused payment. 48 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv Trouble then arose. Outrages such as the mutilation of the Queen's statue at Bombay, the attempt to fire the Church Mission Hall, the assaults upon " moderate " Hindus who refused to toe the line, became ominously frequent. Worse was to follow when the plague appeared. The measures at first adopted by Government to check the spread of this new visitation doubtless offended in many ways against the customs and prejudices of the people, especially the searching and disinfection of houses, and the forcible removal of plague-patients even when they happened to be Brahmans. What Tilak could do by secret agitation and by a rabid campaign in the Press to raise popular resentment to a white heat he did. The Kesari published incitements to violence which were put into the mouth of Shivaji himself 4 . The inevitable con- sequences ensued. On June 27, 1897, on their way back from an official reception in celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Mr. Rand, an Indian civilian, who was President of the Poona Plague Committee, and Lieutenant Ayerst, of the Commissariat Department, were shot down by Damodhar Chapekur, a young Chitpavan Brahman, on the Ganeshkind road. No direct connexion has been established between that crime and Tilak. But, like the murderer of Mr. Jackson at Nasik last winter, the murderer of Rand and Ayerst the same young Brahman who had recited the Shlok, which I have quoted above, at the great Shivaji celebration declared that it was the doctrines expounded in Tilak 's newspapers that had driven him to the deed. The murderer who had merely given effect to the teachings of Tilak was sentenced to death, but Tilak himself, who was prosecuted for a seditious article published a few days before the murder, received only a short 1 term of imprisonment, and was released before the completion of his term under certain pledges of good behaviour which he broke as soon as it suited him to break them. Thus ended the first campaign of Indian unrest, which, in its details, has served, as a& incitem.en.1; and a. CHAP, iv] AFTER THE POONA MURDERS 49 model to all those who have conducted subsequent opera- tions in the same field. The Poona murders sent a thrill of horror throughout India and caused a momentary sensation even in England. But though Government was not wholly blind to the warning, it could not decide what ought to be done, and beyond tinkering at one or two sections of the Criminal Code bearing on Press offences, it did nothing until history had repeated itself on a much larger scale. Tilak was generously released from prison before the expiration of his sentence, and his release was construed in the Deccan as a fresh triumph. He was acclaimed by his followers as a " national " martyr and hero. After a short " rest-cure " in a sanatorium Tilak returned to the Kesari, which, in the hands of his co- adjutors, two other Chitpavan Brahmans, Mr. Kelkar and Mr. Khadilkar, had lost nothing of its vitriolic pungency in his absence. The celebration with renewed pomp in 1900 of Shivaji's " birthday " at Raighir marked the resumption of Tilak's operations. I need not stop to recount all the incidents of this second campaign in the Deccan, in which Ganpati celebrations, Shivaji festivals, gymnastic societies, &c., played exactly the same part as in the first campaign. For three or four years the Tai Maharaj case, in which, as executor of one of his friends, Shri Baba Maharaj, a Sirdar of Poona, Tilak was attacked by the widow and indicted on charges of forgery, perjury, and corruption, absorbed a great deal of his time, but, after long and wearisome proceedings, the earlier stages of the case ended in a judgment in his favour which was greeted as another triumph for him, and not unnaturally though, as recent developments have shown, quite pre- maturely, 5 won h'm much sympathy, even amongst those who were politically opposed to him. But throughout this ordeal Tilak never relaxed his political activity either in the Press or in the manifold organizations which he controlled. His influence, moreover, was rapidly extending far beyond Poona and the Deccan. He had at an early 4 50 BRAHMAN1SM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP. TV date associated himself with the Indian National Con- gress, and he was secretary of the Standing Committee for the Deccan. His Congress work had brought him into contact with the politicians of other provinces, and icpon none did his teachings and his example produce so deep an impression as upon the emotional Bengalees. He had not the gift of sonorous eloquence which they possess, and he never figured conspicuously as an orator at the annual sessions of Congress. But his calculating resourcefulness and his indomitable energy, even his masterfulness, im- pressed them all the more, and in the two memorable sessions held at Benares in 1905 and at Calcutta in 1906, when the agitation over the Partition of Bengal was at its height, his was the dominant personality, not at the tribune, but in the lobbies. He had been one of the first champions of Swadeshi as an economic weapon in the struggle against British rule, and he saw in the adoption of the boycott, with all the lawlessness which it involved, an unprecedented opportunity of stimulating the active forces of disaffection. As far as Bengal was concerned, an " advanced " Press which always took its cue from Tilak's Kesari had already done its work, and Tilak could rely upon the enthusiastic support of men like Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal and Mr. Arabindo Ghose, who were politi- cally his disciples, though their religious and social stand- points were in many respects different. Mr. Surendranath Banerjee, who subsequently fell out with Tilak, had at first modelled his propaganda very largely upon that of the Deccan leader. Not only had he tried to introduce into Bengal the singularly inappropriate cult of Shivaji, but he had been clearly inspired by Tilak's methods in placing the Swadeshi boycott in Bengal under the special patronage of so popular a deity as the " terrible goddess " Kali. Again, he had followed Tilak's example in brigading schoolboys and students into youthful gym- nastic societies for purposes of political agitation. Tilak's main object at the moment was to pledge the rest of India, as represented in the Congress, to CHAP, iv] TILAK AND THE NATIONAL CONGRESS 51 the violent course upon which Bengal was embark- ing. Amongst the " moderate " section outside Bengal there was a disposition to confine its action to platonic expressions of sympathy with the Bengalees and with the principle of Swadeshi in itself perfectly legitimate as a movement for the encouragement of native industries. At Benares in 1905 the Congress had adopted a resolution which only conditionally endorsed the boycott, and the increasing disorders which had subsequently accompanied its enforcement had tended to enhance rather than to diminish the reluctance of the Moderate party to see the Congress definitely pledged to it when it met at the end of 1906 in Calcutta. The " advanced " party led by Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal had put forward Tilak's candidature to the presidency, and a split which seemed imminent was only avoided by a compromise which saved appearances. Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, a leading Parsee of Bombay, who had been drawn into co-operation with the Congress under the influence of the political Liberalism which he had heard expounded in England by Gladstone and Bright, played at this critical period an important part which deserves recognition. He was as eloquent as any Bengalee, and he possessed in a high degree the art of managing men. In politics he was as stout an opponent of Tilak's violent methods as was Mr. Gokhale on social and religious questions, and he did perhaps more than any one else to prevent the complete triumph of Ti.lakism in the Congress right down to the Surat upheaval. Thanks largely to his efforts, the veteran Mr. Naoroji was elected to the chair at Calcutta. None could venture openly to oppose him, for he was almost the father of the Congress, which in its early days had owed so much to the small group of liberal Parsees whom he had gathered about him, and his high personal character and rectitude of purpose had earned for him universal respect. Nevertheless, a resolution as amended by Tilak was adopted which, without mentioning the word " boycott," pledged the Congress to encourage its practice. But there was con- 42 S5 BHAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CSAP, IV siderable heartburning, and the Moderates were suspected of contemplating some retrograde move at the following annual session. Tilak was determined to frustrate any such scheme, and before the Congress assembled at Surat he elaborated at a Nationalist conference, with Mr. Arabindo Ghose in the chair, a plan of campaign which was to defeat the " moderates " by demanding, before the election of the president, an undertaking that the resolu- tions of the Calcutta conference should be upheld. The plan, however, was only half successful. The first day's proceedings produced a violent scene in which the howling down of Mr. Surendranath Banerjee by the " advanced " wing revealed the personal jealousies that had grown up between the old Bengalee leader on the one hand and Tilak and his younger followers hi Bengal on the other. The second day's proceedings ended in still wilder con- fusion, and after something like a free fight the Congress broke up after an irreparable rupture, from which its prestige has never recovered. Tilak's own prestige, however, with the " advanced " party never stood higher, either in the Deccan or outside of it. In the Deccan he not only maintained all his old activities, but had extended their field. Besides the Kal, edited by another Chitpawan Brahman, and the RasMramat at Poona, which went to even greater lengths than Tilak's own Kesari, lesser papers obeying his inspira- tion had been established in many of the smaller centres. A movement had been set on foot for the creation of " national " schools, entirely independent of State support, and therefore of State supervision, in which disaffection could, without let or hindrance, be made part and parcel of the curriculum. Such were the schools closed down last year hi the Central Provinces and this year at Tele- gaon. The great development of the cotton industry during the last ten years, especially in Bombay itself which has led to vast agglomerations of labour under conditions unfamiliar in India had given Tilak an oppor- tunity of establishing contact with a class of the popula- CHAP, rv] PHILANTHROPY AND POLITICS 53 tion hitherto outside the purview of Indian politics. There are nearly 100 cotton spinning and weaving mills, employing over 100,000 operatives, congregated mostly in the northern suburbs of the city. Huddled together in huge tenements this compact population affords by its density, as well as by its ignorance, a peculiarly accessible field to the trained agitator. Tilak's emissaries, mostly Brahmans of the Deccan, brought, moreover, to their nefarious work the added prestige of a caste which seldom condescends to rub shoulders with those whose mere contact may involve " pollution." In this, as in many other cases, politics were closely mixed up with philan- thropy, for the conditions of labour in India are by no means wholly satisfactory, and it would be unfair to deny to many of Tilak's followers a genuine desire to mitigate the evils and hardships to which their humbler fellow-creatures were exposed. Prominent amongst such evils was the growth of drunkenness, and it would have been all to his honour that Tilak hastened to take up the cause of temperance, had he not perverted it, as he perverted everything else, to the promotion of race- hatred. His primary motives may have been excellent, but he subordinated all things to his ruling anti-British passion, whilst the fervour of his philanthropic professions won for him the sympathy and co-operation of many law- abiding citizens who would otherwise have turned a deaf ear to his political doctrines. He must have had a considerable command of funds for the purposes of his propaganda, and though he doubtless had not a few willing and generous supporters, many subscribed from fear of the lash which he knew how to apply through the Press to the tepid and the recalcitrant, just as his gymnastic societies sometimes resolved them- selves into juvenile bands of dacoities to swell the coffers of Swaraj. Not even Mr. Gokhale with all his moral and intellectual force could stem the flowing tide of Tilak's popularity in the Deccan ; and in order not to be swept under he was perhaps often compelled like many other 54 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv Moderates to go further than his own judgment can have approved. Tilak commanded the allegiance of barristers and pleaders, schoolmasters and professors, clerks in Government offices in fact, of the large majority of the so-called educated classes, largely recruited amongst his own and other Brahman castes ; and his propaganda had begun to filter down not only to the coolies in the cities, but even to the rayats, or at least the head-men in the villages. More than that. From the Deccan, as we have already seen in his relations with the Indian National Congress, his influence was projected far and wide. His house was a place of pilgrimage for the disaffected from all parts of India. His prestige as a Brahman of the Brahmans and a pillar of orthodoxy, in spite of the latitude of the views which he sometimes expressed in regard to the depressed castes, his reputation for profound learning in the philo- sophies both of the West and of the East, his trenchant style, his indefatigable activity, the glamour of his philanthropy, his accessibility to high and low, his many acts of genuine kindliness, the personal magnetism which, without any great physical advantages, he exerted upon most of those who came in contact with him, and especially upon the young, combined to equip him more fully than any other Indian politician for the leader- ship of a revolutionary movement. The appeal which Tilak made to the Hindus was twofold. He taught them, on the one hand, that India, and especially Maharashtra, the land of the Mahrattas, had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu raj than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien " demons " ; and that if the British raj had at one time served some useful purpose in in- troducing India to the scientific achievements of Western civilization, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and religious institutions it had under- mined , and on the other hand he held out to them the CHAP. TV] END OF TILAK'S SECOND CAMPAIGN 55 prospect that, if power were once restored to the Brahmans, who had already learnt all that there was of good to be learnt from the English, the golden age would return for gods and men. That Tilak himself hardly believed in the possibility of overthrowing British rule is more than probable, but what some Indians who knew him well tell me he did believe was that the British could be driven or wearied by a ceaseless and menacing agita- tion into gradually surrendering to the Brahmans the reality of power, as did the later Peshwas, and remaining content with the mere shadow of sovereignty. As one of his organs blurted it out : " If the British yield all power to us and retain only nominal control, we may yet be friends." Such was the position when, on June 24, 1908, Tilak was arrested in Bombay on charges connected with the publication hi the Kesari of articles containing inflam- matory comments on the Muzafferpur outrage, in which Mrs. and Miss Kennedy had been killed by a bomb the first of a long list of similar outrages in Bengal. Not in the moment of first excitement, but weeks after- wards, the Kesari had commented on this crime in terms which the Parsee Judge, Mr. Justice Davar, described in his summing up as follows : " They are seething with sedition ; they preach violence ; they speak of murders with approval ; and the cowardly and atrocious act of committing murders with bombs not only meets with your approval, but you hail the advent of the bomb into India as if something had come to India for its good. " The bomb was extolled in these articles as "a kind of witchcraft, a charm, an amulet," and the Kesari delighted in showing that neither the " supervision of the police " nor " swarms of detectives " could stop " these simple playful sports of science." Whilst professing to depie- cate such methods, it threw the responsibility upon Government, which allowed " keen disappointment to overtake thousands of intelligent persons who have been awakened to the necessity of securing the right* of 56 BRAHMANTSM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv Swaraj" Tilak spoke four whole days in his own defence 21 hours altogether but the jury returned a verdict of " Guilty," and he was sentenced to six years' transportation, afterwards commuted on account of his age arid health to simple imprisonment at Mandalay. The prosecution of a man of Tilak 's popularity and influence at a time when neither the Imperial Govern- ment nor the Government of India had realized the full danger of the situation was undoubtedly a grave measure of which a weaker Government than that of Bombay under Sir George Clarke might well have shirked the responsibility. There were serious riots after the trial. From the moment of his arrest Tilak's followers had put it about amongst the mill-hands that he was in prison because he was their friend and had sought to obtain better pay for them. Some of his supporters are said to have declared during the trial that there would be a day's bloodshed for every year to which he might be sentenced by the Court, and, as a matter of fact, he was sentenced to six years' imprisonment and the riots lasted six days. The rioting assumed at times a very threaten- ing character. The European police frequently had to use their revolvers, and the troops had several times to fire in self-defence. But rigorous orders had been issued by the authorities to avoid as far as possible the shedding of blood, and both the police and the military forces exercised such steady self-restraint that casualties were relatively few, and the violence of the mob never vented itself upon the European population of the city. The gravity of the disturbances, however, showed the extent and the lawless character of the influence which Tilak had already acquired over the lower classes in Bombay, and not merely over the turbulent mill-hands. In the heart of the city many Hindu shops were closed " out of sympathy with Tilak," and the most violent riot- ing ''on one day occurred amongst the Bhattias and Banias employed in the cloth market, who had hitherto been regarded as very orderly and rather timid folk. CHAP, iv] THE AFTERMATH 57 The trouble in Bombay was certainly not a sudden and spontaneous outburst of popular feeling. It bore throughout the impress of careful and deliberate organiza- tion. By a happy combination of sympathy and firmness Sir George Clarke had, however, won the respect of the vast majority of the community, and though he failed to secure the active support which he might have ex- pected from the " moderates," there were few of them who did not secretly approve and even welcome his action. Its effects were great and enduring, for Tilak's conviction was a heavy blow perhaps the heaviest which has been dealt to the forces of unrest, at least in the Deccan ; and some months later one of the organs of his party, the Eashtramat, reviewing the occurrences of the year, was fain to admit that " the sudden removal of Mr. Tilak's towering personality threw the whole province into dismay and unnerved the other leaders." The agitation in the Deccan did not die out with Tilak's disappearance, for he left his stamp upon a new generation, which he had educated and trained. More than a year after Tilak had been removed to Man- dalay, his doctrines bore fruit in the murder of Mr. Jackson, the Collector of Nasik a murder which, in the whole lamentable record of political crimes in India, stands out in many ways pre-eminently infamous and significant. The chief executive officer of a large district, " Pundit " Jackson, as he was familiarly called, was above all a scholar, devoted to Indian studies, and his sympathy with all forms of Indian thought was as genuine as his acquaintance with them was profound. His affection for the natives was such as, perhaps, to blind him to their faults, and like the earliest victims of the Indian Mutiny he entertained to the very last an almost childlike confidence in the loyalty of the whole people. Only a few days before his death he expressed his conviction that disaffection had died out in Nasik, and that he could go anywhere and at any hour without the slightest risk of danger. That he was very generally 58 BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION [CHAP, iv respected and even beloved by many there can be no doubt, and there is no reason to question the sincerity of the regrets which found expression on the announce- ment of his impending transfer to Bombay in a series of farewell entertainments, both public and private, by the inhabitants of the city. Only two days before the fatal 21st of December, an ode in Marathi addressed to him at a reception organized by the Municipal Council d>,velt specially upon his gentleness of soul and kindli- ness of manner. Yet this was the man whom the fanatical champions of Indian Nationalism in the Deccan singled out for assassination as a protest against British tyranny. The trial of the actual murderer and of those who aided and abetted him abundantly demonstrated the cold-blooded premeditation which characterized this crime. Numerous consultations had taken place ever since the previous September between the murderer and his accom- plices as to the manner and time of the deed. It was repeatedly postponed because the accomplices who belonged to Nasik were afraid of rendering active assist- ance which might compromise them, though they were ready enough to arm the hand of the wretched youth from Aurangabad who had volunteered to strike the blow. Ready as he was to kill any Englishman, he himself had some misgivings as to the expediency of selecting a victim whose personal qualities were so universally recognized, and these nrsgivings were only allayed by the assurance that all that v/as mere hypocrisy on poor Jackson's part. It was the news of Jackson's approaching departure for Bombay that, finally precipi- tated the catastrophe. The murderer practised carefully with the pistol given to him and other precautions were taken so that, even if the first attempt was foiled, Jackson should not escape alive from the theatre the native theatre which he had been asked to honour with his attendance. So the young Chitpavan Brahman, Ananta Luxman Kanhere, waylaid the Englishman as CHAP, iv] THE MURDER OF MR. JACKSON 59 he was entering, shot him first in the back, and then emptied the contents of his revolver upon him, as he turned round. Mr. Jackson fell dead in front of the friends who were accompanying him, two young English ladies and a young civilian of his staff, who had only joined a month before from England and faced without flinching this gruesome initiation into the service. It all happened in a moment, and the native Deputy Collector, Mr. Palshikar, who leapt forward to Mr. Jack- son's assistance, was only able to strike down the mur- derer and tear from him the second weapon with which he was armed. Thanks also to Mr. Palshikar's presence of mind, information was at once sent to the railway station and the escape of some of the accomplices pre- vented, whose confessions materially helped hi promoting the ends of justice. But besides the facts which were brought out hi evi- dence during the trial at Bombay, there are some features connected with the crime to which attention may be usefully directed, as they lie outside the province of the Law Courts. In the first place, it must be noted that not only the murderer but the majority of those implicated in the crime were Chitpavan Brahmans, and at the same time they were the strange products both of the Western education which we have imported into India and of the religious revivalism which underlies the present political agitation. They were certainly moral, if not physical, degenerates, and most of them notoriously depraved, none bearing in this respect a worse character than the actual murderer. I happened, when at Nasik, to see the latter whilst he was performing his ablutions in front of the Government building in which he was confined. Four policemen were in charge of him, but he seemed absolutely unconcerned, and after having washed himself leisurely, proceeded to discharge his devotions, looking around all the while with a certain self-satisfied composure, before returning to his f n. deraMe. The |r>\ ision of hostels. in which Lord Cur/on \\a.s deeply inter : made t-n-.-il progress, and our may hope that the conditions of student life described by Dr. Garfield Williams in Calcutta are typical of a state of things already doomed to disappear, though at the present rate of progress it can only disappear very slowly. In Madras there is a fine building for the Presidency College students and also for those of the Madras Christian College. In Bombay Government are giving money for the extension of the boarding aooom- modation of the three chief colleges In Allahal.ad. Agra, Lucknow, Meerut, Bareilly, Lahore, and many other centres old residential buildings are being extended or new ones erected. The new Dacca College, in the capital of Kastern Bengal, is one of the most conspicuous and noteworthy results of (lie Partition. In Calcutta itself little has been done except in the missionary insti- tutions ; and it is certainly very discouraging to note that an excellent and very urgent scheme for removing the Presidency College, the premier college of Bengal, from the slums in which it is at present in every way most injuriously confined, to a healthy suburban site has been shelved by the Bengal Government partly under financial pressure and partly because of the lukewarm- ness of native opinion. What is no doubt really wanted is the wholesale removal of all the Colleges connected with the Calcutta University altogether from their present surroundings, but to refuse to make a beginning with the Presidency College is merely to prove once more that te mieux eat i'ennemt du bien. In regard to the University Entrance Examinations, tlu latest Madias returns, \\hieh \\ere a! i . illiciently complete to illustrate the effect of the new regulations, showed that the increased stringency of the tests had resulted in a healthy decrease in the number of matri- 232 SOME EDUCATIONAL REFORMS [CHAP. XTX dilations, whilst the standard had been materially raised. In Calcutta the University inspection of schools and colleges and the exercise by the Universities of their discretionary powers in matters of affiliation have grown much more effective. That the powers of the University Senates have not been unduly curtailed is only too clearly shown on the other hand by the effective resist- ance hitherto offered at Bombay to the scheme of reforms proposed by Sir George Clarke. To the most important features of the scheme, which were the provision of a course of practical science for all first-year students, a systematic bifurcation of courses, the lightening of the number of subjects in order to secure somewhat more thoroughness, and compulsory teaching of Indian history and polity, no serious objection could be raised, but the politicians on the Senate effectively blocked dis- cussion. A great deal still remains to be done, and can be done, on the lines of the resolution of 1904. The speed at which it can be done must, no doubt, be governed in some direc- tions by financial considerations. The extension of the hostel system, for instance, which is indispensable to the removal of some of the worst moral and physical influences upon education, is largely a matter of money. So is too to some extent the strengthening of the educa- tional staff, European and native, which is also urgently needed. The best Indians cannot be attracted unless they are offered a living wage in some measure consonant with the dignity of so important a profession, and our schools and colleges will continue to be too often nursery grounds of sedition so long as we do not redress the legitimate grievances of teachers on starvation wages. But though improved prospects may attract better men in the future, the actual inefficiency of a huge army of native teachers, far too hastily recruited and imper- fectly trained, can at best be but slowly mended. We want more and better training colleges for native teachers, but that is not all. The great Mahomedan College at CHAP, xix] THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION 233 Aligarh, one of the best educational institutions in India, partly because it is wholly residential, has obtained excellent results by sending some of its students who intend to return as teachers to study Western educational methods in Europe, after they have completed their course in India. The same practice might be extended elsewhere. To raise the standard of the Europeans in the Educa- tional Service something more than a mere improve- ment of material conditions is required. Additions are being made to both the teaching and the in- specting staff. But what is above all needed is to get men to join who regard teaching not merely as a livelihood, but as a vocation, and to inform them with a better understanding both of the people whose children they have to train and of the character and methods of the Government they have to serve. This can hardly be done except by associating the Educational Service much more closely with what are now regarded as the higher branches of the public service in India. No Englishmen are in closer touch with the realities of Indian life than Indian civilians, and means must be found to break down the wall which now rigidly separates the Educational Service from the Civil Service. Opportuni- ties might usefully be given to young Englishmen when they first join the Educational Service in India to acquire a more intimate knowledge of Indian administrative work, as well as of the character and customs and language of the people amongst whom their lot is to be cast, by serving an apprenticeship with civilians in the mofussil. The appointment of such a very able civilian as Mr. Harcourt Butler to be the first Minister of Education in India may be taken as an indication that Lord Morley realizes the importance of rescuing the Educational Service from the watertight compartment in which it has hitherto been much too closely confined. We can hardly hope to restore English influence over education to the position which it originally occupied. 234 SOME EDUCATIONAL REFORMS [CHAP, xix There are 1,200 high schools for boys in India to-day, of which only 220 are under public management, and, even for the latter, it would be difficult to provide an English headmaster apiece. What we can do is to follow up the policy which has been lately resumed of increasing the number of high schools under Government control, until we have at least one in every district, and in every large centre one with an English headmaster which should be the model school for the division. A much vexed question is whether it is impossible to raise the fees charged for higher education with a view to checking the wastage which results from the introduc- tion into our schools and colleges of so much unsuitable raw material. The fees now charged for the University course are admittedly very low, even for Indian standards. The total cost of maintaining an Indian student throughout his four years' college course ranges from a minimum of 40 to a maximum of 110 i.e., from 10 to 27 10s. per annum. The actual fees for tuition vary from three to twelve rupees (4s. to 16s.) a month hi different colleges. Very large contributions, amounting roughly to double the total aggregate of fees, have therefore to be made from public funds towards the cost of collegiate education. Is it fair to throw so heavy a burden on the Indian tax- payer for the benefit of a very small section of the popula- tion amongst whom, moreover, many must be able to afford the whole, or at least a larger proportion, of the cost of their children's education ? Is it wise by making higher instruction so cheap to tempt parents to educate children often of poor or mediocre abilities out of their own plane of life ? Would it not be better at any rate to raise the fees generally and to devote the sums yielded by such increase to exhibitions and scholarships for the benefit of the few amongst the humbler classes who show exceptional promise ? Against this it is urged that it would be entirely at variance with Indian traditions to associate standards of knowledge with standards of wealth, and, in practice, CHAP, xix] LOW FEES 235 education has, I understand, been found to be worst where the fees bear the greatest proportion to the total expenditure. The same arguments equally apply for and against raising the fees in secondary schools. In regard to the latter, however, the opponents of any general increase of fees make, nevertheless, a suggestion which deserves consideration. In many schools the fees begin at a very low figure eight annas (8d.) a month hi the lowest forms and rise to three, four, and even five rupees (4s., 5s. 4d., and 6s. 8d.) a month in the highest forms. It is this initial cheapness which induces so many thoughtless parents to send their boys to secondary schools without having considered whether they can afford to keep them through the whole course, whilst it fosters the notion that badly paid and badly qualified teachers are good enough for the early, which are often the most important, stages of a boy's education. To obviate these evils it is suggested that the fees for all forms should be equalized. I shall have occasion later on to point out the immense importance of giving greater encouragement to scientific and technical education. Government service and the liberal professions are already overstocked, and it is absolutely necessary to check the tendency of young Indians to go in for a merely literary education for which, even if it were more thorough than it can be under exist- ing conditions, there is no longer any sufficient outlet. The demand which is arising all over India for com- mercial and industrial development should afford an unrivalled opportunity of deflecting education into more useful and practical channels. Some better machinery than exists at present seems also to be required to bring the Educational Service into touch with parents. Education can nowhere be a question of mere pedagogics, and least of all in India. Yet there is evidently a strong tendency to treat it as such. To take only one instance, the tasks imposed upon schoolboys and students by the exigencies of an 236 SOME EDUCATIONAL REFORMS [CHAP, xrx elaborate curriculum are often excessive, and there have been cases when the intervention of other authori- ties has been necessary to bring the education officers to listen to the reasonable grievances of parents. If in these and other matters parents were more freely consulted, they would probably be more disposed to give education officers the support of their parental authority. There are many points upon which native opinion would not be so easily misled by irreconcilable politicians if greater trouble were taken to explain the questions at issue. What is evidently much wanted 's greater elasticity. In a country like India, which is an aggregation of many widely different countries, the needs and the wishes of the people must differ very widely and cannot be met by cast-iron regulations, however admirable in theory. It is earnestly to be hoped that the creation of a separate portfolio in the Government of India will not involve the strengthening of the centralizing tendencies which have been the bane of Indian education since the days of Macaulay, himself one of the greatest theorists that ever lived. We cannot afford to relax the very little control we exercise over education, but education is just one of the matters in which Provincial Governments should be trusted to ascertain, and to give effect to, the local requirements of the people. In another direction, however, the creation of a Ministry for Education should be all to the good. If any real and comprehensive im- provements are to be carried out they will cost a great deal of money, and in the ordinary sense of the term it will not be reproductive expenditure, though no expenditure, if wisely applied, can yield more valuable results. As a member of Council i.e., as a member of the Government of India Mr. Butler must carry much greater weight in recommending the necessary expenditure than a Director-General of Public Education or than a Provincial Governor, especially as the expendi- ture will probably have to be defrayed largely out of CHAP, xix] FINANCIAL NEEDS 237 Imperial and not merely out of Provincial funds. If the educational problem is the most vital and the most urgent one of all at the present hour in India, it stands to reason that no more disastrous blunder could be made than to stint the new department created for its solution. CHAPTER XX. THE QUESTION or RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. There remains one vital aspect of the educational problem which was left untouched by the Educational Resolution of 1904, and has been left untouched ever since we entered three-quarters of a century ago on an educational experiment unparalleled in the world's history a more arduous experiment even than that of governing the 300 millions of India with a handful of Englishmen. Many nations have conquered remote dependencies inhabited by alien races, imposed their laws upon them, and held them hi peaceful subjection, though even this has never been done on the same scale of magnitude as by the British rulers of India. We alone have attempted to educate them in our own literature and science and to make them by education the intel- lectual partners of the civilization that subdued them. Of the two tasks, that of government and that of educa- tion, the latter is not by any means the easier. For good government involves as little interference as possible with the beliefs and customs and traditions of the people, whereas good education means the substitution for them 238 CHAP, xx] RELIGION IN HINDU LIFE 239 of the intellectual and moral conceptions of what we regard as our higher civilization. Good government represents to that extent a process of conservation ; good education must be partially a destructive, almost a revolutionary, process. Yet upon the more difficult and delicate problems of education we have hitherto, it is to be feared, bestowed less thought and less vigilance than upon administrative problems in India. The purpose we have had in view is presumably that which Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee admirably defined in his last address to the University of Calcutta as " the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State." But is it a purpose which those responsible for our Indian system of education have kept steadily before them ? Is it a purpose that could possibly be achieved by the laisser faire policy of the State in regard to the moral and religious side of education ? If so, how is it that we have had of late such alarming evidence of our frequent failure to achieve it ? The divorce of education from religion is still on its trial in Western countries, which rely upon a highly- developed code of ethics and an inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of religious sanctions. In India, as almost everywhere hi the East, religion in some form or another, from the fetish worship of the primitive hill tribes to the Pantheistic philosophy of the most cultured Brahman or the stern Monotheism of the orthodox Moslem, is the dominant force in the life both of every individual and of every separate community to which the individual belongs. Religion is, in fact, the basic element of Indian life, and morality apart from religion is an almost impossible conception for all but an infinitesimal fraction of Western-educated Indians. Hence, even if the attempt had been or were in the future made to instil ethical notions into the minds of the Indian youth independently of all religious teaching, it could only result in failure. For the Hindu, perhaps more than for any other, religion governs life from the hour 240 BELIGIOUS EDUCATION [CHAP, xx of his birth to that of his death. His birth and his death are in fact only links in a long chain of existences inexor- ably governed by religion. His religion may seem to us to consist chiefly of ritual and ceremonial observances which sterilize any higher spiritual life. But even if such an impression is not due mainly to our own want of understanding, the very fact that every common act of his daily life is a religious observance, just as the caste into which he is born has been determined by the degree in which he has fulfilled similar religious observances in a former cycle of lives, shows how completely his religion permeates his existence. The whole world in which he lives and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the sublime. Yet in a country where religion is the sovereign influ- ence we have, from the beginning, absolutely ignored it in education. It is no doubt quite impossible for the State in a country like India with so many creeds and sects, whose tenets are often repugnant to all our own conceptions not only of religion but of morality, to take any direct part in providing the religious instruction which would be acceptable to Indian parents. But was it necessary altogether to exclude such instruction from our schools and colleges ? Has not its exclusion tended to create in the minds of many Indians the belief that our professions of religious neutrality are a pretence, and that, however rigorously the State may abstain from all attempts to use education as a medium for Christian propaganda, it nevertheless uses it to under- mine .the faith of the rising generations in their own ancestral creeds ? Even if they acquit us of any deli- berate purpose, are they not at any rate entitled to say that such have been too often the results ? Did not the incipient revolt against all the traditions of Hinduism that followed the introduction of Western education CHAP, xx] THE PARENTS' COMPLAINTS 241 help to engender the wholesale reaction against Western influences which underlies the present unrest ? Few problems illustrate more strikingly the tre- mendous difficulties that beset a Government such as ours in India. On the one hand, Indian religious con- ceptions are in many ways so diametrically opposed to all that British rule stands for that the State cannot actively lend itself to maintain or promote them. On the other hand, they provide the ties which hold the whole fabric of Indian society together, and which cannot be hastily loosened without serious injury and even danger to the State. This has been made patent to the most careless observer by the events of the last few years that have revealed, as with a lurid flash of lightning, the extent to which the demoralization of our schools and colleges had proceeded. If any Englishman has doubts as to the connexion hi this matter of cause and effect, let him ask respectable Indian parents who hold aloof from politics. They have long complained that the spirit of reverence and the respect for parental authority are being killed by an educational system which may train the intellect and impart useful worldly knowledge, but withdraws their youths from the actual supervision and control of the parents or of the guru, who for spiritual guidance stood in loco parentis under the old Hindu system of education, and estranges them from all the ideas of their own Hindu world 20 . That parents often genuinely resent the banishment of all religious influence from our schools and colleges appears from the fact that many of them prefer to Government institu- tions those conducted by missionaries in which, though no attempt is made to proselytize, a religious, albeit a Christian, atmosphere is to some extent maintained. It is on similar grounds also that the promoters of the new movement in favour of " National Schools " advo- cate the maintenance of schools which purchase com- plete immunity from Government control by renouncing all the advantages of grants-in-aid and of University 16 242 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION [CHAP, xx affiliation. They have been started mainly under the patronage of " advanced " politicians, and have too often turned out to be mere hot-beds of sedition, but their raison d'etre is alleged to be the right of Hindu parents to bring up Hindu children in a Hindu atmosphere. From the opposite pole hi politics, most of the ruling chiefs in their replies to Lord Minto's request for their opinions on the growth of disaffection call attention to this aspect of education, and the Hindu princes especially lay great stress on the neglect of religious and moral instruction. I will quote only the Maharajah of Jaipur, a Hindu ruler universally revered for his high character and great experience : My next point has reference to the neglect there seems to be of religious education, a point to which I drew your Excellency's attention at the State banquet at Jaipur on the 29th October, 1909. I must say I have great faith in a system of education in which secular and religious instruction are harmoniously combined, as the formation of character entirely depends upon a basework of religion, and the noble ideals which our sacred books put before the younger genera- tion will, I fervently hope, make them loyal and dutiful citizens of the Empire. Such ideals must inevitably have their effect on impressionable young men, and it is perhaps due to such ideals that sedition and anarchy have obtained so small a footing in the Native States as a whole. In the Chiefs' College Conference, held at the Mayo College in 1904, I impressed upon my colleagues the necessity of religious education for the sons of the chiefs and nobles of Rajputana, and it should be one of the principal objects in all schools for the Pandits and the Moulvies to instil in the minds of their pupils correct notions as to the duty they owe to the com- munity they belong to and to their Sovereign. In this respect the ruling chiefs unquestionably reflect the views which prevail amongst the better-class Indians in British India as well as in the Native States. The Government of India cannot afford to disregard them. The Resolution of 1904, it is true, laid it down again definitely that " in Government institutions, the instruc- tion is and must continue to be exclusively secular." But CHAP, xx] OPTIONAL FACILITIES 243 much has happened since 1904 to reveal the evils which our educational system has engendered and to lend weight to the representations made by responsible exponents of sober Indian opinion in favour of one of the remedies which it is clearly within our power to apply. Nor need we really depart from our time-honoured prin- ciple of neutrality in religious matters. All we have to do is to set apart, in the curriculum of our schools and colleges, certain hours during which they will be open, on specified conditions, for religious instruction in the creed in which the parents desire their children to be brought up. There is no call for compulsion. This is just one of the questions in which the greatest latitude should be left to local Governments, who are more closely in touch than the Central Government with the sentiment and wishes of the different communities. I am assured that there would be little difficulty in forming local committees to settle whether there was a sufficiently strong feeling amongst parents in favour of a course of religious in- struction and to determine the lines upon which it should be given. Some supervision would have to be exercised by the State, but in the Educational Service there are, it is to be hoped, enough capable and enlightened repre- sentatives of the different creeds to exercise the necessary amount of supervision in a spirit both of sympathy for the spiritual needs of their people and of loyalty to the Government they serve. It may be objected that there are so many jarring sects, so many divisions of caste, that it would be impossible ever to secure an agree- ment as to the form to be imparted to religious instruc- tion. Let us recognize but not overrate the difficulty. In each of the principal religions of India a sub- stantial basis can be found to serve as a com- mon denominator between different groups, as, for instance, in the Koran for all Mahomedans and in the Shastras for the great majority of high-caste Hindus. At any rate, if the effort is made and fails through no fault of ours, but through the inability of 162 244 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION [CHAP, xx Indian parents to reconcile their religious differences, the responsibility to them will no longer lie with us. Another objection will probably be raised by earnest Christians who would hold themselves bound in con- science to protest against any facilities being given by a Christian State for instruction in religious beliefs which they reprobate. Some of these austere religionists may even go so far as to contend that, rather than tolerate the teaching of " false doctrines," it is better to deprive Indian children of all religious teaching. To censure of this sort, however, the State already lays itself open in India. There are educational institutions and some of the best, like the Mahomed an College at Aligurh main- tained by denominational communities on purpose to secure religious education. Yet the State withdraws from them neither recognition nor assistance because pupils are taught to be good Mahomed ans or good Hindus. Why should it be wrong to make religious instruction per- missive in other Indian schools which are not wholly or mainly supported by private endeavour ? Is not the " harmonious combination of secular and religious in- struction " for which the Maharajah of Jaipur pleads better calculated than our present policy of laisser faire to refine and purify Indian religious conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the present revolt against Western ascendency ? Here is surely a question bound up with all the main- springs of Indian life in which we may be rightly asked " to govern according to Indian ideas." Can we expect that the youth of India will grow up to be law-abiding citizens if we deprive them of what their parents hold to be " the keystone to the formation of character " ? Can we close our eyes to what so many responsible Indians regard as one of the chief causes of the demorali- zation which has crept into our schools and colleges ? The State can, doubtless, exact in many ways more loyal co-operation from Indian teachers in safeguarding their CHAP, xx] THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION 245 pupils from the virus of disaffection. It can, for instance, mtimate that it will cease to recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long as we take no steps to refute a charge which, hi view of recent evidence, can no longer be dismissed as wholly unfounded, can we expect education to fulfil the purpose rightty assigned to it by Dr. Mookerjee " the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State ? " CHAPTER XXI. PRIMARY EDUCATION. It is too late in the day now to discuss whether it was wise to begin our educational policy as we did from the top and to devote so much of our energies and resources to secondary at the expense of primary education. The result has certainly been to widen the gulf which divides the different classes of Indian society and to give to those who have acquired some veneer, however super- ficial, of Western education the only articulate voice, often quite out of proportion to their importance, as the interpreters of Indian interests and desires. One million is a liberal estimate of the number of Indians who have acquired and retained some knowledge of English ; whilst at the last census, out of a total population of 294 millions, less than sixteen millions could read and write in any language not fifteen millions out of the whole male population and not one million out of the whole female population and this modest amount of literacy is mainly confined to a few privileged castes. With the growth of a school of Indian politicians bent upon undermining British rule, the almost inconceivable ignorance in which the masses are still plunged has become a real danger to the State, for it has proved an all too receptive soil for the calumnies and lies of the political agitator, who, too well educated himself to believe what he retails to others, knows exactly the form of calumny 246 CHAP, xxi] THE DANGERS OF IGNORANCE 247 and lie most likely to appeal to the credulity of his un- informed fellow-countrymen. I refer especially to such very widespread and widely believed stories as that Government disseminates plague by poisoning the wells and that it introduces into the plague inoculation serum drugs which destroy virility in order to keep down the birth-rate. No one has put this point more strongly than Lord Curzon : What is the greatest danger in India ? What is the source of suspicion, superstition, outbreaks, crime yes, and also of much of the agrarian discontent and suffering amongst the masses ? It is ignorance. And what is the only anti- dote to ignorance ? Knowledge. Curiously enough, it was one of Lord Curzon's bitterest opponents who corroborated him on this point by relating in the course of a recent debate how, when the Chinsurah Bridge was built some years ago over the Hughli, " the people believed that hundreds and thousands of men were being sacrificed and their heads cut off and carried to the river to be put under the piers to give the bridge stability, so that the goddess might appreciate the gift and let the piers remain." And he added : " I know that ignorant people were afraid to go out at nights, lest they might be seized and their heads cut off and thrown under the piers of the Hughli Bridge." It was, however, on more general considerations, as is his wont, that Mr. Gokhale moved his resolution in the first Session of the Imperial Council at Calcutta last whiter for making elementary education free and compulsory, and for the early appointment of a com- mittee to frame definite proposals. Three movements [he claimed] have combined to give to mass education the place which it occupies at present amongst the duties of the State the humanitarian move- ment which reformed prisons and liberated the slave, the democratic movement which admitted large masses of men to a participation in Government, and the industrial move- ment which brought home to nations the recognition that 248 PRIMARY EDUCATION [CHAP, xxi the general spread of education in a country, even when it did not proceed beyond the elementary stage, meant the increased efficiency of the worker. The last of these three considerations is, perhaps, that which just now carries the most weight with moderate men in India, where the general demand for industrial and commercial development is growing loud and in- sistent, and Mr. Gokhale's resolution met with very general support from his Mahomedan, as well as from his Hindu, colleagues. But, in the minds of disaffected politicians, another consideration is, it must be feared, also present, to which utterance is not openly given. It is the hope that the extension of primary schools may serve, as has that of secondary schools, to promote the dissemination of seditious doctrines, especially amongst the " depressed castes " to which the political agitator has so far but rarely secured access. Whatever danger may lie in that direction, it cannot be allowed to affect the policy of Government, who gave to Mr. Gokhale's resolution a sufficiently sympathetic reception to induce him to withdraw it for the present. To the principle of extending primary education the Government of India have indeed long been committed, and increased efforts were recommended, both in the Educational Despatch of 1854 and by the Education Commission of 1883. Stress was equally laid upon it b}- the Resolution of 1904 under Lord Curzon, who already, in 1902, had caused additional grants, amounting to more than a quarter of a million sterling, to be given to pro- vincial Governments for the purpose. Under Lord Minto's administration Government seemed at one moment to have gone very much further and to have accepted at any rate the principle of free education, for in 1907 the Finance Member conveyed in Council an assurance from the Secretary of State that " notwith- standing the absence of Budget provision, if a suitable scheme should be prepared and sanctioned by him, he will be ready to allow it to be carried into effect in the CHAP, xxi] THE FINANCIAL DIFFICULTY 249 course of the year, provided that the financial position permits." It was rather unfortunate that hopes should be so prematurely raised, and it would surely have been wiser to consult the local Governments before than after such a pronouncement. For when they were consulted their replies, especially as to the abolition of fees, were mostly unfavourable, and this year also Government, whilst expressing its good will, felt bound to defer any decision until the question had been more fully studied and the financial situation had improved. The present situation is certainly* unsatisfactory. In 1882 there were 85,000 primary school&n Jndia recognized by the Educational Department whi^g, gave elementary education to about 2,000,000 pupils. In '^07, according to the last quinquennial report, the total attendance had increased to 3,631,000 ; but though the increase appears very considerable, the Director-General of Education had to admit that, assuming progress to be maintained at the present rate, " several generations would still elapse before all the boys of school age were in school." And Mr. Gokhale's resolution applies, at least ultimately, to girls as well as to boys ! Now in British India i.e., without counting the Native States the total number of boys of school-going age on the basis of the four years' course proposed for India would be nearly 12 millions, and there must be about an equal number of girls. The total cost to the State according to the estimates of local Govern- ments would be no less than 15,000,000 per annum,whilst non-recurring expenditure would amount to 18,000,000. The fees at present paid by parents for primary education, which is already free in some parts of India and in certain circumstances, make up only about 210,000 per annum. The whole of the enormous difference would, therefore, be thrown upon the Indian taxpayers, who now have to find for primary education less than 650,000 per annum. Even Mr. Gokhale does not, of course, propose that this educational and financial revolution should be effected by a stroke of the pen, and one of his 250 PRIMARY EDUCATION [CHAP, xxi Hindu colleagues held that it would be contrary to all Hindu traditions for parents to avail themselves of free education if they could afford to pay a reasonable sum for it. But even if the state of Indian finances were likely within any appreciable time to warrant an approximate approach to such vast expenditure, or if Government could entertain the suggestions made by Mr. Gokhale for meeting it, partly by raising the import duties from 5 to 7 1 per cent, and imposing other taxes, and partly by wholesale retrenchment in other departments, the financial difficulty is not the only one to be overcome. Model schoolhouses could no doubt be built all over India, if the money were forthcoming, instead of the wretched accommodation which exists now, and is so inadequate that in the Bombay Presidency alone there are said to be 100,000 boys for whom parents want, but cannot obtain, primary education. But what of the teachers ? These cannot be improvised, however many millions Government may be prepared to spend. There is an even greater deficiency of good teachers than of good schoolhouses, and, in some respects, the value of primary education still more than that of secondary education depends upon good teachers teachers who are capable of explaining what they teach and not merely of reeling off by rote, and imperfectly, to their pupils lessons which they themselves imperfectly understand. The total number of teachers engaged in primary educa- tion exceeds 100,000, but their salaries barely average Rs.8 (10s. 8d.) a month. So miserable a pittance abundantly explains their inefficiency. But there it is, and a new army of teachers nearly half a milhon altogether would have to be trained before primary education, whether free and compulsory, as Mr. Gokhale would have it, or optional and for payment, as others propose, could be usefully placed within the reach of the millions of Indian children of a school-going age. In this as in all other matters, the Government of CHAP, xxi] VARIETY OF OPINIONS 251 India cannot afford to stand still, and will have to take Indian opinion more and more into account. But whilst there is a very general consensus that more should be done by the State for primary education, there is no unanimity as to its being made free and compulsory. Various Indian members of Council have expressed them- selves against it on different grounds. Some contend that many parents cannot afford, as bread-winners, to be deprived of the help of their children. According to others, there is already much complaint amongst parents that school-going boys do not make good agriculturists and affect to consider work in the fields as beneath their dignity. Others, again, ask, and with some reason, who is going to care for boys of that age who may have to leave their homes and be removed from parental control in order to attend school. There is, doubtless, something in all these objections. Assuming that Government can do more than it has hitherto done to further primary education, the wisest course would be to improve the quality rather than the quantity, and, most of all, the quality of the teachers. Here, again, uniformity should be avoided rather than ensued. No primary curriculum can be evolved which will meet the needs alike of the rural population and of the townsfolk, or of the different parts of India with their varying conditions of climate and temperament. Even more than with regard to secondary schools, the needs of parents must be consulted, and the greatest latitude given to provincial Governments to vary the system in a practical spirit and in accordance with local requirements. Nor can the opinion, strongly held by many parents, be overlooked that religious instruction cannot be safely excluded from the training of such young children. Some of the objects to be kept specially in view have been well stated by Mr. Orange, the Director-General of Public Education : We desire to see, if not in every village, within reach of every village, a school, not an exotic, but a village school, in which the village itself can take pride, and of which the 252 PRIMARY EDUCATION [CHAP, xxi first purpose will be to train up good men and women and good citizens ; and the second, to impart useful knowledge, not forgetting while doing so to train the eye and the hand so that the children when they leave school, whether for the field or the workshop, will have begun to learn the value of accurate observation and to feel the joy of intelligent and exact manual work. This is undoubtedly the goal towards which primary education should be directed, but it can only be reached by steady and continuous effort spread over a long term of years. Otherwise we shall discover, again too late, that, as in the case of secondary education, most haste is worst speed. I shall not attempt to deal with the question of female education, either primary or secondary, for it is so intimately bound up with the peculiarities of Indian, and especially Hindu, society, that it would be difficult for the State to take any vigorous initiative without running a great risk of alarming and alienating native opinion 21 . Owing to Indian social customs and to the practice of early marriage, or at least of early seclusion, for girls, their education presents immense practical difficulties which do not exist in the case of boys. Hence the slow progress it has made. At the last census only eight per thousand women could read and write ; and in the whole of India only about half a million girls, or four out of every 100 of a school-going age, even on the basis of a four years' course, are receiving any kind of educa- tion. Of such as do go to school nine out of ten only go to primary schools. Mr. Gokhale himself has abandoned the idea of making primary education com- pulsory for girls as well as for boys. Female education is just one of the questions upon which Indian opinion must be left to ripen, Government giving, in proportion as it ripens, such assistance as can be legitimately expected. It has long engaged the attention of enlightened Indians, and in some communities, especially amongst the Aryas of the Punjab, some headway is being made. The Parsees, CHAP, xxi] FEMALE EDUCATION 253 of course, as in all educational and philanthropic develop- ments, have always been in the van. With the growth of Western education the Indian woman of the higher classes cannot indefinitely lag behind, and, if only to make their daughters more eligible for marriage, the most conservative Indian parents will be compelled to educate them, as some have already done, so that they shall not be separated from their male partners by an unfathom- able gulf of intellectual inferiority. In Calcutta, in Bombay, hi Madras, and indeed in all the principal cities of India, one may already meet native ladies, both Hindu and Mahomedan, of education and refinement, who, however few their numbers, are shining examples of what Indian womanhood can rise to when once it is emancipated from the trammels of antiquated custom. CHAPTER XXII. SWADESHI AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS. Was it not Talleyrand who said that speech had been given to man in order to enable him to disguise his thoughts ? Indian politicians are no Talleyrands, but they sometimes seem to have framed their vocabulary on purpose to disguise political conceptions which most of them for various reasons shrink from defining at present with decision. We have already seen how elastic is the word Swaraj, self-government, or rather self-rule. In the mouth of the " moderates " of the Indian National Congress it means, we are assured, only a pious aspira- tion towards the same position which our self-governing Colonies enjoy within the Empire. For the " advanced " politician Swaraj means a transition stage which he hopes and believes must infallibly lead to a complete severance of the ties that unite India to the Empire. For the " extremists " it means the immediate and violent emancipation of India from British rule, and absolute independence. So it is with the term Swadeshi, which means anything from the perfectly legitimate and com- mendable encouragement of Indian trade and industry to the complete exclusion of foreign, and especially of British, goods by a " national " and often forcible " boycott " as part of a political campaign against British rule. Political Swadeshi bases itself upon a Nationalist legend that a " golden age " prevailed in India before we CHAP, xxn] THE "DRAIN" 255 appeared on the scene, and that British rule has delibe- rately drained India of her wealth. Even if we have to admit that Indian home industries have suffered heavily from the old commercial policy of the East India Com- pany and from the formidable competition of the organized and scientific processes of British industry, this legend hardly deserves to be treated seriously. The reductio ad absurdum of the argument has certainly been reached when Mr. Keir Hardie alleges that Indian loans raised in England constitute " a regular soaking drain upon India because the interest is paid to bondholders in this country [England], and is not therefore benefiting the people from whom it is taken." I can only com- mend this sapient contention to our self-governing Colonies, who have all had recourse in turn to British capital for the development of their resources, and paid interest on their loans to British bondholders without being apparently conscious of any " soaking drain." The supposed " drain " is estimated in various ways, but a common method adopted is to lay stress upon the excess of exports over imports 22 . Lord Curzon has rightly pointed out that economically this test is quite fallacious ; and that in the richest country in the world, America, the value of the exports exceeds the imports by over 100,000,000 per annum. Home charges repre- sent three-fourths of the " drain," and these may be calculated at about 18,000,000 annually. Of this sum, 6,750,000 is paid in interest on railway capital ; but the railways are a source of profit, and the payment comes from the railway passenger. Moreover, in course of time, the Indian railways will become, and are becoming, a property of enormous value to the State. The interest on India's public debt is 3,000,000, but it has to be remembered how much India has benefited by expendi- ture which has proved reproductive. Sir Bampfylde Fuller has stated that the lowest estimate of the increase in produce obtained through irrigation works alone is estimated at 30,000,000 annually. In the last 50 years 256 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxn the total volume of Indian trade, imports and exports, has increased from 40,000,000 to 200,000,000. The remaining items are roughly, home military charges, 2,000,000 ; India Office, &c., 250,000 ; leave allowances, 750,000 ; pensions, 4,000,000. A considerable part of these pensions represent merely deferred pay. More- over, unlike some other countries, e.g., the United States, where 32,000,000 are spent on pensions, mostly unearned, India has had good value, brimming over, for her pensions. The private remittances to England, which must be added to these sums, are not treated hi any other country as an economic loss. No American economist would so regard the enormous annual sums remitted by immigrants to Ireland, Italy, and other European countries, or the vast annual expenditure of American tourists in Europe. Indian immigrants remit 400,000 annually to India from the Straits Settlements and Malay States alone, and considerable sums must be sent from East and South Africa and Ceylon, as well as smaller sums from Mauritius and the West Indies. Yet these colonies do not apparently complain about a " drain " to India. What India is entitled to ask is whether Indian loans have been expended for the benefit of the Indian people, and the answer is conclusive. India possesses to-day assets in the shape of railways, irrigation canals, and other public works which, as marketable properties, represent more than her total indebtedness, without even taking into account the enormous value of the " unearned increment " they have produced for the benefit of the people of India. If, therefore, we look at the Govern- ment of India for a moment as merely a board of directors conducting a great development business on behalf of the Indian people, they can certainly show an excellent balance-sheet. Let us admit that some of the " home charges " may be open to discussion, and I shall have a word or two or say about them later on. But taken altogether they may fairly be regarded as the not unreason- CHAP, xxn] MR. RANADE'S VIEW 257 able cost of administering a concern which, if we wished to liquidate it and to retire from business to-morrow, would leave a handsome surplus to India after paying off the whole debt contracted in her name. The case was stated very fairly by the late Mr. Ranade, whose teachings all but the most " advanced " politicians still profess to reverence, when he delivered the inaugural address at the first Industrial Conference held just 20 years ago at Poona : There are some people who think that as long as we have a heavy tribute to pay to England which takes away nearly 20 crores of our surplus exports, we are doomed, and can do nothing to help ourselves. This is, however, hardly a fair or manly position to take up. A por-tion of the burden represents interest on moneys advanced to, or invested in, our country, and so far from complaining, we have reason to be thankful that we have a creditor who supplies our needs at such a low rate of interest. Another portion represents the value of stores supplied to us, the like of which we cannot produce here. The remainder is alleged to be more or less necessary for the purpose of administration, defence, and payment of pensions, and, though there is good cause for complaint that it is not all necessary, we should not forget the fact that we are enabled by reason of this British connexion to levy an equivalent tribute from China by our opium monopoly. If India must now forgo this tribute from China, it is not at any rate the fault of the Government of India that the whole cost of the awakening -of the national conscience in England to the iniquity of the opium traffic is being thrown upon India. The question is not whether we have done well, but whether we might not have done better, and whether the economic development of India, industrial, commer- cial, and agricultural, has kept pace with that of the rest of the world. If the answer in this case is more doubtful, we have to bear in mind the idiosyncrasies of the Indian people and especially of the educated classes.' Indians have been as a rule disinclined to invest their money 17 258 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxn in commerce or industry or in scientific forms of agri- culture. It is estimated that the hoarded wealth of India amounts, at a conservative calculation, to 300,000,000, and this probably represents gold alone. The annual absorption of gold by India is very great. Lord Rothschild remarked to the Currency Commission that none of the smooth gold bars sent to India ever came back. There is, in addition, an enormous sum hoarded in silver rupees and silver ornaments. It is no uncommon sight, in the cities of Upper India, to see a child wearing only one ragged, dirty garment, but loaded with massive silver ornaments. Indians who have money and do not merely hoard it prefer to lend it out, often at usurious rates of interest, to their needy or thriftless fellow-countrymen. Until quite recently the educated classes have held almost entirely aloof from any but the liberal professions. Science in any form has been rarely taken up by University students, and for every B.Sc. the honours lists have shown probably a hundred B.A.'s. The Indian National Congress itself, as it represented mainly those classes, naturally displayed the same tendencies, and for a long time it devoted its energies to so-called political problems rather than to practical economic questions. Hence the almost complete failure of the Western-educated Indian to achieve any marked success in commercial and industrial undertakings, and nowhere has that failure been more complete than in Bengal, where it would be difficult to quote more than one really brilliant excep- tion. Hence also no doubt some of the political bitterness which those classes display. Within the last few years, however, the politician has realized that, whilst commercial and industrial development was steadily expanding and the demand for it was increasing on all sides, he was left standing on a barren shore. He has done his best, or rather his worst, to convert Swadeshi into a political weapon. Hia efforts have only been temporarily and partially CHAP, xxn] AGRICULTURE 259 successful. But we may rest assured that long after this spurious political Swadeshi has disappeared, the legitimate form of Swadeshi will endure the Swadeshi that does not boycott imported goods merely because they come from England, but is bent on stimulating the production in India of articles of the same or of better quality which can be sold cheaper, and can, there- fore, beat the imported goods in the Indian markets. To this form of Swadeshi it is undoubtedly the duty and the interest of the Government of India to respond. We are bound as trustees for the people of India to pro- mote Indian trade and industry by all the means in our power, and we are equally bound to help to open up new fields of activity for the young Indians whom our educational system has diverted from the old paths, and who no longer find for their rapidly increasing numbers any sufficient outlet hi the public services and liberal professions which originally absorbed them. No reforms hi our educational system can be permanently effective unless we check the growth of the intellectual proletariat, which plays so large a part in Indian unrest, by diverting the energies of young India into new and healthier channels. At the same time there can be no better material antidote to the spread of disaffection than the prosperity which would attend the expansion of trade and industry and give to increasing numbers amongst the Western-educated classes a direct interest in the maintenance of law and order. There are amongst those classes too many who, having little or nothing to lose, are naturally prone to fish in the troubled waters of sedition. In regard to agriculture,which is, and is bound to remain, the greatest of all Indian industries, for it supports 70, and perhaps 80, per cent, of the whole population, the Government of India have no reason to be ashamed of their record. Famines can never be banished from a country where vast tracts are entirely dependent upon an extremely uncertain rainfall, and the population 17 a 260 ECONOMIC PROGBESS [CHAP, xxn is equally dependent upon the fruits of the soil. But besides the scientific organization of famine relief, the public works policy of Government has been steadily and chiefly directed to the reduction of famine areas. Not only has the construction of a great system of rail- ways facilitated the introduction of foodstuffs into remote famine-stricken districts, but irrigation works, devised on a scale and with a skill which have made India the premier school of irrigation for the rest of the world, have added enormously both to the area of cultivation and to that where cultivation is secured against failure of the rainfall. The arid valley of the Indus has been converted into a perennial granary, and in the Punjab alone irrigation canals have already added 8,000,000 acres of unusual fertility to the land under tillage, and have given to 5,000,000 acres more the protection against drought in years of deficient rainfall which they formerly lacked. Plantations of tea, coffee, cinchona, &c., and the cultivation of jute have added within the last 25 years some 30,000,000 a year to the value of Indian exports. Jute alone covers the whole of the so-called " drain." The fact, nevertheless, cannot be denied, though it is an unpleasant admission, that a large proportion of the immense agricultural population of India have remained miserably pqpr. Indian politicians ascribe this poverty to the crushing burden of the land revenue collected by Government a burden which has been shown to work out only to about Is. 8d. per acre of crop and is being steadily reduced in relation to the gross revenue of the country but they say nothing about the exactions of the native landlord, who has, for instance in Bengal, monopolized at the expense of the peasantry almost the whole benefit of the Permanent Settlement. Some very significant facts with regard to rayativari landlords were brought out in a debate this year in the Legislative Council of Madras, when Mr. Atkinson, in rep'y to one of his Hindu colleagues who had been CHAP, xxii] PEASANT INDEBTEDNESS 261 denouncing the Government assessments m certain villages, produced an overwhelming array of figures to show that in those very villages the rents exacted by native landlords varied between eight and eleven times the amount which they paid to Government. Nor do Indian politicians say much about the native money- lender, who is far more responsible than the tax-gatherer for the poverty of the peasant. Still less do they say about the extravagance of native customs, partly religious and partly social, which makes the peasant an easy prey to the money-lender, to whom he is too often driven when he has a child to marry or a parent to bury or a Brahman to entertain. Indebtedness is the great curse of Indian Jagriculture, and the peasant's chief necessity is cheap (Sredit obtained on a system that will not cause him to sink deeper into the mire. Here again it is not Indian politicians, but the British rulers of India who have found a solution, and it is of such importance and promise that it deserves more than mere passing mention. It has been found in the adaptation to Indian require- ments of the well-known Raffeisen system. Sir William Wedderburn was, I believe, actually the earliest advocate of this movement, but the first practical experiments were made in Madras as a result of exhaustive investigation by SIT Frederick Nicholson and in the United Provinces when Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell was Lieutenant- Govern or. and one of the many measures passed by Lord Curzon for the benefit of the humbler classes in India, with little or no support from the politicians and often in despite of their vehement opposition, whilst Nationalist newspapers jeered at " a scheme for extracting money from wealthy natives in order that Government might make a show of benevolence at other people's expense," was an Act giving legal sanction to the operations of a system of co-operaive banks and credit societies. It found a healthy basis ready made in the Indian village system, and though it would never have 262 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxii succeeded without the informing energy and integrity of " sun-dried bureaucrats " and the countenance given to it by Government, it has had the cordial support of many capable native gentlemen. It is now only eight years old, but it has begun to spread with amazing rapidity. The report of the Calcutta Conference of Registrars last winter showed that the number of societies of all kinds had risen from 1,357 in the preceding year to 2,008, and their aggregate working capital from 44 lakhs to nearly 81 (one lakh or Rs.lOO,000 = 6,666). The new movement is, of course, still only in its infancy, but it is full of promise. The money-lender, who was at first bitterly hostile, is beginning to realize that by providing capital for the co-operative banks 1* can get, on the whole, an adequate return with much better security for his money than in the old days of great gains and, also, great losses. One of the healthiest features is that, notwithstanding the great expansion of the system during the last twelvemonth, the additional working capital required was mainly provided by private individuals and only a very small amount by Government. Another hope- ful feature is that the money saved to the peasant by the lower interest he has to pay on his debts pending repay- ment is now going into modern machinery and improved methods of agriculture. The new system appeals most strongly to poor and heavily indebted villages, and in the Punjab, where the results are really remarkable, especially in some of the backward Mahomedan districts, it is hoped that within a few years nearly half the peasant indebted- ness, estimated at 25 to 30 minions sterling, will have been wiped off. Practical education is, however, as urgently needed for Indian agriculture as for any other form of Indian industry. The selection of land and of seeds, the use of suitable manures, an intelligent rotation of crops, the adoption of better methods and less antiquated imple- ments can only be brought about by practical education, and the demand for it is one that Government will hear . xxii] THE RESOLUTION OF 1904 263 put forward with growing insistency by the new Councils on which Indian landowners have been wisely granted the special representation that the agricultural interests of India so abundantly deserve. It was the " sun-dried bureaucrat " again who in regard to Indian industries as well as to Indian agri- culture preached and practised sound Swadeshi before the word had ever been brought into vogue by the Indian politician. The veteran Sir George Birdwood, Sir George Watt, Sir Edward Buck, and many others have stood forth for years as the champions of Indian art and Indian home industries. As far back as 1883, a Resolution was passed by Government expressing its desire " to give the utmost encouragement to every effort to substitute for articles now obtained from Europe articles of bona fide local manufacture or indigenous origin." In 1886, a special Economic Department was created to keep up the elaborate survey of the economic products of India which Sir George Watt had just com- pleted under State direction. But the most important administrative measure was the creation under Lord Curzon of a separate portfolio of Commerce and Industry in the Government of India, to which a civilian, Sir John Hewett, was appointed with very conspicuous success. It was also under Lord Curzon that the most vigorous impu'se was given to technical education of which the claims had already been advocated by many dis- tinguished Anglo-Indian officials, such as Sir Antony MacDonnell and Sir Auckland Colvin. The results of an exhaustive inquiry conducted throughout India by a Committee of carefully selected officers were embodied in the Educational Resolution of 1904. Particular stress was laid upon the importance of industrial, com- mercial, and art and craft schools as the preparatory stages of technical education, for which, in its higher forms, provision had already been made in such institu- tions as the engineering colleges at Sibpur. Rurki. Jubbul- pore, and Madras, the College of Science at Poona. and 264 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxii the Technical Institute of Bombay. Until then the record of technical schools had too often resembled the description which Mr. Butler, the new Minister of Education, tersely gave of that of the Lucknow In- dustrial School " a record of inconstant purpose with breaks of unconcern." Not only did the question of technical education receive more systematic treatment, but a special assignment of Rs. 244,000 a year was made in 1905 by the Government of India in aid of the pro- vincial revenues for its improvement and extension. It was not, however, until the liberality of the late Mr. J. N. Tata and his sons, one of the best-known Parsee families of Bombay, recently placed a considerable income for the purpose at the disposal of Government that steps have been taken to establish an " Indian Institute of Science " worthy of the name, to which the Mysore Government, who have given a site for it in Bangalore, as well as the Government of India, have promised handsome financial assistance. Whilst the encouragement given to Indian technical education has until quite lately proceeded far more from the British rulers of India than from any native quarter, it has been also until quite lately British capita] and British enterprise that have contributed mostly to the development of Indian industry and commerce. The amount of British capital invested in India for its commercial and industrial development has been esti- mated at 350,000,000, and this capital incidentally furnishes employment for large numbers of Indians. Half a million are employed on the railways alone. Another half million work on the tea estates. The Bombay and Ahmedabad cotton mills represent at the present day the only important and successful application of Indian capital and Indian enterprise to industrial development. The woollen, cotton, and leather industries of Cawn- pore, which has become one of the chief manufactur- ing centres of India, and the great jute industry of Bengal were promoted almost exclusively by B itish, CHAP, xxn] THE NEED OF CAPITAL 265 and not by indigenous effort. Real Swadeshi, stimulated by British teaching and by British enterpri e, was thus already in full swing when the Indian politician took up the cry and too often perverted it to criminal pur- poses, and, though he may have helped to rouse his sluggish fellow-countrymen to healthy as well as to mischievous activity, it may be doubted whether any good he has done has not been more than counterbalanced by the injurious effect upon capital of a violent and often openly seditious agitation. Mr. Gokhale himself seems to have awakened to this danger, when in an eloquent speech delivered by him at Lucknow, in support of Swadeshi in 1907, he protested, rather late in the day, against the " narrow, exclusive, and intolerant spirit " in which some advocates of the cause were seeking to promote it, and laid stress upon the importance of capital as well as of enterprise and skill as an indis- pensable factor of success. British investments are large, but not so large as they might and should be, and the reluctance to invest in India grows with the uneasiness caused by political unrest. That an immense field lies open in India for industrial development need scarcely be argued. It has been ex- plored with great knowledge and ability in a very instruc- tive article contributed last January to the Asiatic Quarterly Review by Mr. A. C. Chatterjee, an Indian member of the Civil Service. Amongst the many in- stances he gives of industries clamouring for the benefits of applied science, I will quote only the treatment of oil seeds, the manufacture of paper from wood pulp and wood meal, the development of leather factories and tanneries, as well as of both vegetable and chemical dyes, the sugar industry, and metal work all of which, if properly instructed and directed, would enable India to convert her own raw materials with profit into finished products either for home consumption or for exporta- tion abroad. It is at least equally important for India to save her home industries, and especially her hand- 266 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxn weaving industry, the wholesale destruction of which under the pressure of the Lancashire power loom has thrown so many poor people on to the already over- crowded land. Here, as Mr. Chatterjee wisely remarks, combination and organization are badly needed, for " the hand industry has the greatest chances of survival when it adopts the methods of the power industry without actual resort to power machinery." The articles on the Indian industrial problem in Science Progress for April and July, by Mr. Alfred Chatterton, Director of Indus- tries, Madras, are also worth careful attention. He remarks quite truly that her inexhaustible supplies of cheap labour are " India's greatest asset " ; but he too wisely holds that the factory system of the West should only be guardedly extended and under careful precau- tions. The Government of India have at present under consideration important legislative measures for pre- venting the undue exploitation of both child and adult labour measures which are already being denounced by the native Press as " restrictive " legislation devised by the " English cotton kings " in order to " stifle the indigenous industries of India in their infancy " ! What Government can do for the pioneering of new industries is shown by the success of the State dairies in Northern India and of Mr. Chatterton's experiments in the manufacturing of aluminium in Madras. There is an urgent demand at present for industrial research laboratories and experimental work all over India, and above all for better and more practical education. But it would seem that, in this direction, the impetus given by Lord Curzon has somewhat slackened under Lord Minto's administration, owing, doubtless, to the absorb- ing claims of the political situation and of political reforms. In speaking in the Calcutta Council on a resolution for the establishment of a great Polytechnic College, the Home Member was able to point to a fairly long list of measures taken at no small cost by the State to promote CHAP, xxn] TECHNICAL EDUCATION 267 technical education in all parts of India, and he rightly urged that there would be little use in creating a sort of technical University until a larger proportion of students had qualified for it by taking advantage of the more elementary courses already provided for them. His answer would, however, have been more convincing could he have shown that existing institutions are always adequately equipped and that considered schemes which have the support of the best Indian as well as of the best official opinion are not subjected to merely dilatory objections at headquarters. Three years ago, after the Naini Tal Industrial Conference, the most representative ever perhaps held hi India, Sir John Hewett, who had been made Lieutenant-Go vernor oc the United Provinces after having been the first to hold the new portfolio of Commerce and Industry, developed a scheme for the creation of a Technological College at Cawnpore, which met with unanimous approval. Nothing has yet been done to give effect to it, and it was not only the Indian but many of the European members, official as well as unofficial, of the Viceroy's Legislative Council who sympathized with Mr. Mudholkar's protest when he asked with some bitterness what must be the impression produced in India by the shelving of a scheme that was supported by men of local experience, by the head of the Provincial Government, and by the Government of India, because people living 6,000 miles away did not consider it to be absolutely flawless. In one direction at any rate, India can rightly demand that Government should be left an entirely free hand namely, in regard to the very large orders which have to be placed every year by the great spending depart- ments. It has now been laid down by the Secretary of State that Indian industry should supply the needs of Government in respect of all articles that are, in whole or in part, locally manufactured. But Indian industry would be able to supply much more if the Government of India were in a position to give it more assured support. 268 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxn The case of the Bengal Iron and Steel Company has been quoted to me, which was compelled to close down its steel works and to reduce the number of its iron furnaces in blast from four to two because the promises of support received from Government when the company took over the works proved to be "argely and quite inexcusably illusory. For works of this kind cannot be run at present in Ind'a unless they can depend upon the hearty support of Government, which, through the Railways and Public Works Department, is the main, and, indeed, the only, consumer on a large scale. At the present moment, Messrs. Tata are making a truly gigantic endeavour to acclimatize the iron and steel industry in India by the erection of immense works at Sakti in Bengal, where they have within easy reach a practically unlimited supply of the four necessary raw materials iron ore, coking coal, flux, and manganese ore. To utilize these, plant is being set up of a yearly capacity of 120,000 tons of foundry iron, rails, shapes, and merchant bars, and plans have been drawn out for an industrial city of 20,000 inhabitants. The enter- prise is entirely in Indian hands with an initial share capital of 1,545,000 admin'stered by an Indian board of directors, who have engaged American experts to organize the works. Government has granted various railway facilities to the company and has placed with them an order for 200,000 tons of rails for periodical delivery. Upon the future of these works will probably depend for many years to come the success of the metal- lurgical and other kindred industries of India, and it is to be hoped that Government will be allowed to give them all reasonable assistance without interference from home. Another purely Indian enterprise also under the auspices of Messrs. Tata is a great scheme for catching the rainfall of the Western Ghats and creating a hydro-electric supply of power which will, amongst other uses, drive most of the Bombay mills. In regard to minor Indian industries, hints have, CHAP, xxii] PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT 269 I am assured, too frequently been sent out from England that the claims of British industry to Government support must not be forgotten. Even now no change has been made in the regulations which compel the Government of India to purchase all articles not wholly or partly manufactured in India through the Stores Department of the India Office. The delay thus caused in itself represents a serious loss, for it appears to take an average of nine months for any order through that Department to be carried out, and further delays arise whenever some modification in the original indent is required. Nowadays merchants in India keep for ordinary purposes of trade such large collections of samples that in nine cases out of ten Government Departments could settle at once upon what they want and their orders would be carried out both more quickly and more cheaply. The main- tenance of these antiquated regulations, which are very injurious to Indian trade, is attributed by Indians mainly to the influence of powerful vested interests in England. The time would also seem to have arrived when, with the development of Indian trade and industry, private contracts might with advantage be substituted for the more expensive and slower activities of the Public Works Department. Work done by that Depart- ment is bound to be more expensive, for its enormous establishment has to be maintained on the same footing whether financial conditions allow or do not allow Government to embark on large public works expenditure, and when they do not, the proportion of establishment charges to the actual cost of works is ruinous. When the Calcutta Port Trust and other institutions of the same character put out to contract immense works running every year into millions, why, it is asked, should not Government do the same ? Some works like irriga- tion works may properly be reserved for the Public Works Department, but to mobilize the Department 270 ECONOMIC PROGRESS [CHAP, xxn whenever a bungalow has to be built or a road made by Government, is surely ridiculous. Indian opinion is at present just in the mood when reasonable concessions of this kind would make an excellent impression ; and, if they are not made spon- taneously, the enlarged Indian Councils will soon exert pressure to obtain them. CHAPTER XXIIL THE FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND GREAT BRITAIN. When Lord Morley introduced his Indian reforms scheme, a section at least of the party to which he belongs supported it not only on general grounds, but more especially in the belief that it would strengthen the hands of the Imperial Government hi dealing with the hide-bound officialism of which the Government of India is in the eyes of some British Radicals the visible embodiment. None of them, probably, anticipated that the boot would be on the other leg. If the Govern- ment of India have sometimes sacrificed Indian interests to British interests, it has been almost exclusively in connexion with the financial and fiscal relations between the two countries, and often against the better judgment and sense of justice of Anglo-Indian officials. In this respect the enlarged Indian Councils will lend far greater weight than in the past to any representations which the Government of India may make at Whitehall. Even in the course of its first session at Calcutta the Imperial Council has given abundant indications of its attitude. In the Budget debate, Sir Vithaldas Thackersey, one of the Indian elected members from 271 272 FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxni Bombay, remarked very pointedly that " there is an impression abroad that, in deciding most important questions of economic and financial policy, the Government are obliged to be guided by political exigencies." Official secrets have a way of leaking out in India, and Sir Vithaldas knew what he was talking about when he added with regard to the Budget under discussion " It is generally believed that, if the Government of India had had a freer hand, they would have preferred the raising of the general tariff or a duty on sugar, which would have been less objectionable than the levying of the proposed enhanced duties in the teeth of the practically unanimous opposition of the non-official members of this Council and of the public generally." It is certainly unfortunate that on the first occasion on which the Government of India had to lay a financial statement before the enlarged Council, Indian members should have come to the conclusion that the unpopular Budget submitted to them was not the one originally proposed by the Indian Finance Department, but that it had been imposed upon that Department by the Secretary of State in deference to the exigencies of British party politics. Equally unfortunate is it that the financial difficulties which this Budget had to meet were mainly due to the loss of revenue on opium in consequence of the arrangements made by Great Britain with China, in which Indian interests had received very scant consideration. Not only had Sir Edward Baker, when he was Finance Minister three years ago, given an assurance that the new opium policy would be carried out without any resort to extra taxation, but there is a strong feeling in India that the praiseworthy motives which have induced the Imperial Government to come to terms with China on the subject of the opium trade would be still more creditable to the British people had not the Indian taxpayer been left, with his fellow- sufferers in Hong-kong and Singapore, to bear the whole cost of British mo al rectitude. The Imperial Council CHAP, xxm] MILITARY CHARGES 273 did not confine itself, either, to criticism of what had happened. Sir Vithaldas Thackersey had probably every Indian and many official members with him when he made the following very clear intimation as to the future : " We are prepared to bear our burdens, and all that we ask is that the country should be allowed greater freedom in choosing the methods of raising revenue. I am unable to see how it will be injurious to the interests of Government if this Council is allowed a more real share as regards what articles shall be taxed and what duties shall be paid." It is upon such questions as these that the voice of the enlarged Councils will in future cause much more frequent embarrassment to the Imperial Government than to the Government of India, and I shall be much surprised if they have not to listen to it in regard to various " home charges " with which the Government of India have from time to time very reluctantly agreed to burden Indian finance at the bidding of Whitehall. The Indian Nationalist Press has not been alone in describing the recent imposition on the Indian taxpayer of a capitation allowance amounting to 300,000 a year to meet the increased cost of the British soldier as " the renewed attempt of a rapacious War Office to raid the helpless Indian Treasury," and even the increase in the pay of the native soldier, which Lord Kitchener obtained for him, does not prevent him and his friends from draw- ing their own comparison between the squalor of the quarters in which he is still housed and the relatively luxurious barracks built for Tommy Atkins under Lord Kitchener's administration at the expense of the Indian taxpayer. It is no secret that the Government of India have also frequently remonstrated in vain when India has been charged full measure and overflowing in respect of military operations in which the part borne by her has been governed less by her own direct interests than by the necessity of making up with the help of Indian contingents the deficiencies of our military organization IS 274 FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxui at home. It was no Indian politician but the Govern- ment of India who expressed the opinion that : The Imperial Government keeps in India and quarters upon the revenues of that country as large a portion of its army as it thinks can possibly be required to maintain its dominion there ; that it habitually treats that army as a reserve force available for Imperial purposes ; that it has uniformly detached European regiments from the garrison of India to take part in Imperial wars whenever it has been found necessary or convenient to do so ; and, more than this, that it has drawn not less freely upon the native army of India, towards the maintenance of which it contributes no tiling, to aid in contests outside of India with which the Indian Government has had little or no concern. All these are, however, but secondary issues to the much larger one which the creation of the new Councils must tend to bring to the front with all the force of the increased weight given to them by the recent reforms. For that issue will raise the whole principle of our fiscal relations with India, if it results in a demand for the protection of Indian industries against the competition of imported manufactures by an autonomous tariff. It must be remembered that the desire for Protection is no new thing in India. Whether we like it or not, whether we be Free Traders or Tariff Reformers, we have to reckon with the fact that almost every Indian is a Protectionist at heart, whatever he may be in theory. The Indian National Congress has hitherto fought shy of making Protection a prominent plank of its platform, lest it should offend its political friends in England. Yet as far back as 1902 a politician as careful as Mr. Surendranath Banerjee to avoid in his public utterances anything that might alienate British Radicalism, declared in his inaugural address at the 18th session of the Congress that " if we had a potential voice in the government of our own country there would be no question as to what policy we should follow. We would unhesitatingly adopt a policy of Protection." This note has been accentuated since the political campaign in favour of CHAP, xxni] A FRANK AVOWAL 275 militant Swadeshism, and when English Radicals sym- pathize with the Swadeshi boycott as a protest against the Partition of Bengal, they would do well to recollect that, before Indian audiences, the most violent forms of Swadeshi are constantly defended on the ground that British industrial greed, of which Free Trade is alleged to be the highest expression, has left no other weapons to India for the defence of her material interests. Mr. Lala Lajpat Rai, who has the merit of often speaking with great frankness, addressed himself once in the following terms to " those estimable gentlemen in India who believe in the righteousness of the British nation as represented by the electors of Great Britain and Ireland, and who are afraid of offending them by the boycott of English-made goods " : If there are any two classes into which the British nation can roughly be divided they are either manufacturers or the working men. Both are interested in keeping the Indian market open for the sale and consumption of their manu- factures. They are said to be the only friends to whom we can appeal against the injustice of the Anglo-Indian bureau- cracy. Offend them, we are told, and you are undone. You lose the good will of the only classes who can help you and who are prepared to listen to your grievances. But, boycott or no boycott, any movement calculated to increase the manu- facturing power of India is likely to incur the displeasure of the British elector. He is a very well-educated animal, a keen man of business, who can at once see through things likely to affect his pocket, however cleverly they may be put or arranged by those who hold an interest which is really adverse to his. He is not likely to be hoodwinked by the cry of Swadeshi minus the boycott, because, really speaking, if effectively worked and organized, both are one and the same thing. That Swadeshi as understood by educated Indians of all classes and of all political complexions means in some form or other Protection was made clear even in the Imperial Council. The Finance Member, Sir Fleetwood Wilson, was himself fain to pay homage to it, but his sympathy did not disarm Mr. Chitnavis, an Indian 182 276 FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxin member whose speech deserves to be recorded, as it embodied the opinions entertained by 99 out of every 100 Indians who are interested in eccvomic questions and by a very large number of Anglo-Indians, both official and non- official : The country must be grateful to him [the Finance Member] for his sympathetic attitude towards Indian industries- " I think Swadeshi is good, and if the outcome of the changes I have laid before the Council result in some encouragement of Indian industries, I for one shall not regret it." For a Finance Minister to say even so much is not a small thing in the present state of India's dependence upon the most pronounced and determined Free Trade country in the world. ... At the same time we regret the absence of fiscal autonomy for India and the limitations under which this Government has to frame its industrial policy. We regret that Government cannot give the country a protective tariff forthwith. However excellent Free Trade may be for a country in an advanced stage of industrial development, it must be conceded that Protection is necessary for the success and development of infant industries. Even pro- nounced protagonists of Free Trade do not view this idea with disfavour. That Indian manufacturing industry is in its infancy does not admit of controversy. Why should not India, then, claim special protection for her undeveloped industry ? Even countries remarkable for their industrial enterprise and excellence protect their industries. The United States and Germany are decidedly Protectionist. The British Colonies have protective tariffs. . . protective in purpose, scope, and effect. They are not, like the Indian import duties, levied for revenue purposes. The Indian appeal for Protection cannot in the circumstances be un- reasonable. The development of the industries is a matter of great moment to the Empire, and the popular leanings towards Protectionism ought to engage the sympathy of Government. The imposition of import duties for revenue purposes is sanctioned by precedent and principle alike. . . . And yet for a small import duty of 3 per cent, upon cotton goods a countervailing Excise duty upon home manufactures is imposed in disregard of Indian public opinion, and the latest pronouncement of the Secretary of State has dispelled all expectations of the righting of this wrong. $0 measure has done greater injury to th cau,se of CHAP. XXHI] THE COTTON DUTIES 277 Free Trade in India or more permanent discredit to British rule than this Excise duty on Indian manu- factured cotton, for none has done more to undermine Indian faith hi the principles of justice upon which British rule claims, and, on the whole, most legitimately claims, to be based. In obedience to British Free Trade principles, all import duties were finally abolished in India at the beginning of the eighties, except on liquors and on salt, which were subject to an internal Excise duty. In 1894, however, the Government of India were compelled by financial stress to revive the greater part of the old 5 per cent, tariff on imports, excluding cottons, until the end of the year when cottons were included and under pressure from England Lord Elgin's Government had to agree to levy a countervail- ing Excise duty of 5 per cent, on cotton fabrics manu- factured in Indian power mills. After a good deal of heated correspondence the Government of India were induced in February, 1896, to reduce the duty on cotton manufactured goods imported from abroad to 3| per cent., with the same reduction of the Indian Excise duty, whilst cotton yarns were altogether freed from duty. This arrangement is still in force. Rightly or wrongly, every Indian believes that the Excise duty was imposed upon India for the selfish benefit of the British cotton manufacturer and under the pressure of British party politics. He believes, as was once sarcastically remarked by an Indian member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council, that, so long as Lancashire sends 60 members to Westminster, the British Government will always have 60 reasons for maintaining the Excise duty. To the English argument that the duty is " only a small one " the Indian reply is that, according to the results of an elaborate statistical inquiry conducted at the instance of the late Mr. Jamsetjee N. Tata, a 3| per cent. Excise duty on cotton cloth is equiva- lent to a 7 per cent, duty on capital invested in weaving under Indian conditions. The profits are very fluctuat- 278 FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS [CHAP, ram ing and the depreciation of plant is considerable. Equally fallacious is another argument that the duty is in reality paid by Englishmen. The capital engaged in the Indian cotton industry is, it is contended, not British, but almost exclusively Indian, and a large proportion is held by not over-affluent Indian shareholders. There is nothing to choose between the records of the two great political parties at home in their treatment of England's financial and fiscal relations with India, and English Tariff Reformers have as a rule shown little more disposition than English Free Traders to study Indian interests. In fact, until Mr. M. de P. Webb, a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, published under the title of " India and the Empire " an able exposition of the Tariff problem in relation to India, very few Tariff Reformers seemed even to take India into account in their schemes of Imperial preference. I hope, therefore, to be absolved from all suspicion of party bias in drawing attention to a question which is, I believe, destined to play in the near future a most important perhaps even a determining part in the relations of India to the British Empire. One of the first things that struck me on my return to India this year and struck me most forcibly was the universality and vehemence of the demand for a new economic policy directed with energy and system to the expansion of Indian trade and industry. It is a demand with which the great majority of Anglo- Indian officials are in full sympathy, and it is hi fact largely the outcome of their own efforts to stimulate Indian interest in the question. There is very little doubt that the Government of India would be disposed to respond to it speedily and heartily on the lines I have already briefly indicated. Will the Imperial Govern- ment and the British democracy lend them a helping hand or even leave a free hand to them ? If not, we shall assuredly find ourselves confronted with an equally universal and vehement demand for Protection pure and CHAP, xxm] FISCAL AUTONOMY 279 simple by the erection of an Indian Tariff wall against the competition of imported manufactures. I need hardly point out how the rejection of such a demand would be exploited by the political agitator or how it would rally to the side of active disaffection some of the most conservative and influential classes in India. For if, as those Englishmen who claim a monopoly of sym- pathy with the people of India are continually preaching, we must be prepared to sacrifice administrative efficiency to sympathy, how could we shelter ourselves on an economic issue behind theories of the greater economic efficiency of Free Trade ? If we are to try " to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas " a principle with which I humbly but fully agree how could we justify the refusal to India of the fiscal autonomy for which there is a far more widespread and genuine demand than for political autonomy ? CHAPTER XXIV. THE POSITION OF INDIANS IN THE EMPIRE. The problems of Indian administration are in themselves difficult enough to solve, but even more difficult are some of the problems connected with the relations of India and her peoples to the rest of the Empire. One of these has assumed during the last few years a character of extreme gravity, which neither the Imperial Govern- ment nor the British public seems to have at all ade- quately grasped. " I think," said Mr. Gokhale in moving his resolution for the prohibition of Indian indentured labour for Natal, " I am stating the plain truth w r hen I say that no single question of our time has evoked more bitter feelings throughout India feelings in the presence of which the best friends of British rule have had to remain help- less than the continued ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa," Every Indian member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council who spoke during that debate, whatever race or creed or caste he represented, endorsed the truth of Mr. Gokhale's statement, and had a vote been taken on the resolution it would have had what no other resolu- tion moved during the whole session would have secured the unanimous support of the whole body of Indian 280 CHAP, xxiv] A CONSENSUS OF OPINION 281 members and the sympathy of every English member, official as well as unofficial. The Government of India wisely averted a division by accepting the resolution. Not a single attempt was made either by the Viceroy in the chair or by other representatives of Government to controvert either Mr. Gokhale's statement or the over- whelming array of facts showing the nature and extent of the ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa, which was presented by the mover of the resolution and by every Indian speaker who followed him. The whole tone of the debate was extremely dignified and self -restrained, but no Englishman can have listened to it without a deep sense of humiliation. For the first time in history the Government of India had to sit dumb whilst judg- ment was pronounced in default against the Imperial Government upon a question which has stirred the re- sentment of every single community of our Indian Empire. It was the one question which called forth very deep feeling in the Indian National Congress at Lahore last December, where subscriptions and dona- tions flowed in freely to defray the expenses of a cam- paign throughout India, and it figured just as promi- nently in the proceedings of the All-India Moslem League, which held its annual meeting there in the following month. In fact, Mahomedans have the additional grievance that the laws of the Transvaal discriminate by name against those of their faith. There is scarcely a city of any importance in India in which public meetings have not testified to the interest and indignation which the subject arouses in every class of Indian audience. This is a very grave fact. I need not enter into the details of the question. They are well known. There may be some exaggerations, Indian immigrants may not always be drawn from desirable classes, there may be differences of opinion as to the wisdom of the attitude taken up by some of the Indians in South Africa, and Englishmen may sympathize with the desire of British and Dutch colonists to check the growth of another 282 INDIANS IN THE COLONIES [CHAP, xxrv alien population in their midst. But that the Indian has not received there the just treatment to which he is entitled as a subject of the British Crown, and that disabilities and indignities are heaped upon him because he is an Indian, are broad facts that are not and cannot be disputed. The resolution adopted by the Imperial Council, with the sanction of the Government of India, was formally directed against Natal because it is only in regard to Natal that India possesses an effective weapon of retaliation in withholding the supply of indentured labour which is indispensable to the prosperity of that colony. But the Indian grievance is not confined to Natal ; it is even greater in the Transvaal. Still less is it confined to the particular class of Indians who emigrate as indentured labourers to South Africa. What Indians feel most bitterly is that however well educated, however respectable and even distinguished may be an Indian who goes to or resides in South Africa, and especially hi the Transvaal, he is treated as an outcast and is at the mercy of harsh laws and regulations framed for his oppression and often interpreted with extra harshness by the officials who are left to apply them. This bitterness is intensified by the recollection that, before the South African War, the wrongs of British Indians in the Transvaal figured prominently in the catalogue of charges brought by the Imperial Government against the Kruger regime and contributed not a little to precipitate its downfall. In prosecuting the South African War Great Britain drew freely upon India for assistance of every kind except actual Indian combatants. Not only was it the loyalty of India that enabled the British troops who saved Natal to be embarked hurriedly at Bombay, but it was the constant supply from India of stores of all kinds, of transport columns, of hospital bearers, &c., which, to a great extent, made up throughout the war for the defici- encies of the British War Office. There are monuments erected in South Africa which testify to the devotion of CHAP, xxiv] A SIGNIFICANT WARNING 283 British Indians who, though non-combatants, laid down their lives in the cause of the Empire. Yet, as far as the British Indians are concerned, the end of it all has been that their lot in the Transvaal since it became a British Colony is harder than it was in the old Kruger days, and the British colonists in the Transvaal, who were ready enough to use Indian grievances as a stick with which to beat Krugerism, have now joined hands with the Dutch in refusing to redress them. The Government of India have repeatedly urged upon the Imperial Govern- ment the gravity of this question, and Lord Curzon especially pressed upon his friends, when they were in office, the vital importance of effecting some acceptable settlement whilst the Transvaal was still a Crown Colony, and, therefore, more amenable to the influence of the Mother Country than it would be likely to prove when once endowed with self-government. Yet the Imperial Government after a succession of half-hearted and in- effective protests have now finally acquiesced in the per- petuation and even the aggravation of wrongs which some ten years ago they solemnly declared to be intolerable. Apart from the sense of justice upon which Englishmen pride themselves, it is impossible to overlook the disastrous consequences of this gran rifiuto for the prestige of British rule in India. One of the Indian Members of Council, Mr. Dadabhoy, indicated them in terms as moderate as they were significant : In 1899 Lord Lansdowne feared the moral consequences in India of a conviction of the powerlessness of the British Raj to save the Indian settlers in the Transvaal from oppression and harsh treatment. That was when there was peace all over this country, when sedition, much more anarchism, was an unheard-of evil. If the situation was disquieting then, what is it now when the urgent problem of the moment is how to put down and prevent the growth of unrest in the land ? The masses (Jo not understand the niceties of the relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies ; they do not comprehend the legal technicalities. The British Raj has so far revealed itself to them as a power whose influence is irresistible, and when they find that, with all its traditional 284 INDIANS IN THE COLONIES [CHAP, xxiv omnipotence, it has not succeeded in securing to their country- men admittedly a peaceable and decent body of settlers who rendered valuable services during the war equal treatment at the hands of a small Dependency, they become disheartened and attribute the failure to the European colonist's influence over the Home Government. That is an impression which is fraught with incalculable potentialities of mischief and which British statesmanship should do everything in its power to dispel. The present political situation in India adds special urgency to the case. No comments of mine could add to the significance of this warning. The measure eontemplated by Mr. Gokhale's resolution may have some direct effect upon Natal, whose leading statesmen have repeatedly acknowledged the immense value of Indian indentured labour to the Colony, and may indirectly affect public opinion in the Transvaal. But behind the immediate question of the worse or better treatment of Indians in South Africa stand much larger questions, which Mr. Gokhale did not hesitate to state with equal frankness : Behind all the grievances of which I have spoken to-day three questions of vital importance emerge to view. First, what is the statics of us Indians in this Empire ? Secondly, what is the extent of the responsibility which lies on the Imperial Government to ensure to us just and humane and, gradually, even equal treatment in this Empire ? And, thirdly, how far are the self-governing members of this Empire bound by its cardinal principles, or are they to share in its privileges only and not to bear their share of the dis- advantages ? These issues have been raised in their most acute form in South Africa, but they exist also in Australia, and even in Canada, where many Indians suffered heavily from the outburst of anti-Asiatic feeling which swept along the Pacific Coast a couple of years ago. They involve the position of Asiatic subjects of the Crown in all the self-governing Dominions and indirectly in many of the Crown Colonies, for they affect the relations of the white and coloured races throughout the Empire. CHAP, xxiv] THE COLOUR BAB 285 Here, however, I must confine myself to the Indian aspects. I have discussed them with a good many Indians, and they are quite alive to the difficulties of the situation. Though they resent the colour bar, they realize the strength of the feeling there is in the Colonies in favour of preserving the white race from intermixture with non-white races. It is, in fact, a feeling they them- selves in some ways share, for, in India, the unfortunate Eurasian meets with even less sympathy from Indians than from Europeans. Indian susceptibilities may even find some consolation in the fact that Colonial dislike of the Indian immigrant is to a great extent due to his best qualities. " Indians," said Mr. Mudholkar, appealing to Lord Minto, " are hated, as your Lordship's predecessor pointed out, on account of their very virtues. It is because they are sober, thrifty, industrious, more atten- tive to their business than the white men that their presence in the Colonies is considered intolerable." Educated Indians know how little hold the Mother Country has over her Colonies in these matters. They know that both British and Anglo-Indian statesmen have recognized their grievances without being able to secure their redress, and it is interesting to note how warm were the tributes paid in the Imperial Council to the energy with which Lord Curzon had upheld their cause, by some of those who were most bitterly opposed to him when he was in India. They know, on the other hand, that though the British Labour Party can afford to profess great sympathy for Indian political aspirations in India, it has never tried or, if it has tried, it has signally failed to exercise the slightest influence in favour of Indian claims to fair treatment with its allies in the Colonies, where the Labour Party is always the most uncompromising advocate of a policy of exclusion and oppression, and they know the power which the Labour Party wields in all our Colonies. They are, therefore, I believe, ready to reckon with the realities gf ifre situation, and to. agreg 286 INDIANS IN THE COLONIES [CHAP, xxiv with Lord Curzon that " the common rights of British citizenship cannot be held to override the rights of self- protection conceded to self-governing Colonies " rights which, moreover, are often exercised to the detriment of immigrants from the Mother Country itself. They will, on the other hand, urge the withholding of Indian labour if the Colonies are unwilling to treat it with fair- ness and humanity, and they argu<> rightly enough, that India, to whom the emigration of tens of thousands of her people is not an unmixed advantage, will lose far less than Colonies whose development will be starved by the loss of labour they cannot themselves supply. An influential Indian Member stated in Council that they have accepted the view that complete freedom of immigra- tion is beyond the pale of practical politics, and is not to be pressed as things stand. All that they ask, he added, in the Transvaal is for the old Indian residents to be allowed to live peaceably, as in Cape Colony for instance, without being treated like habitual criminals, and for men of education and position to be allowed to come in, so that they may have teachers, ministers of religion, and doctors for themselves and their people. In Natal they ask for the maintenance of the rights and privileges they have had for years and years. On such lines a practical working arrangement with the Colonies should not be beyond the bounds of possibility. But what Indians also demand is that laws and regulations of an exceptional character which may be accepted in regard to immigration shall not be applicable to Indians who merely wish to travel hi the Colonies. An Indian of very high position whom every one from the King downwards welcomes when he comes to England, wished a few years ago to visit Australia, but before doing so he wrote to a friend there to inquire whether he would be subjected to any unpleasant formalities. The answer he received discouraged him. These are the sort of difficulties which Indians claim should be removed, and one practical sug- gestion I have heard put forward is that, on certain CHAP, xxiv] URGENCY OF A SETTLEMENT 287 principles to be laid down by mutual agreement between the Imperial Government, the Governments of the Dominions, and the Government of India, the latter should have power to issue passports to Indian subjects which would be recognized and would exempt them from all vexatious formalities throughout the Empire. The whole question is one that cannot be allowed to drag on indefinitely without grave danger to the Empire. It evidently cannot be solved without the co-operation of the Colonies. Next year the Imperial Conference meets again in the capital of the Empire. If, in the meantime, the Imperial Government were to enter into communication with the Government of India and with the Crown Colonies, so many of whom are closely inter- ested in Indian labour, they should be in a position to lay before the representatives of the Dominions assembled in London next March considered proposals which would afford a basis for discussion and, one may hope, for a definite agreement. A recognition of the right of Colonial Governments to regulate the conditions on which British Indians may be allowed admission as indentured labourers or for permanent residence ought to secure guarantees for the equitable and humane treatment of those who have been already admitted, or shall hereafter be admitted, and also an undertaking that Indians of good position armed with specified credentials from the Government of India, travelling either for pleasure or for purposes of scientific study or on business or with other legitimate motives, would be allowed to enter and travel about for a reasonable period without let or hindrance of any sort. That is the minimum which would, I believe, satisfy the best Indian opinion, and it is incon- ceivable that if the situation were freely and frankly explained to our Colonial kinsmen they would reject a settlement so essential to the interests and to the credit of the whole Empire in relation to India. CHAPTER XXV. SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS. On few subjects are more ignorant or malevolent state- ments made than on the attitude of Englishmen in India towards the natives of the country. That social rela- tions between Englishmen and Indians seldom grow intimate is true enough, but not that the fault lies mainly with Englishmen. At the risk of being trite, I must recall a few elementary considerations. The bedrock difficulty is that Indian customs prevent any kind of intimacy between English and Indian families. Even hi England the relations between men who are excluded from acquaintance with each other's families can rarely be called intimate, and except in the very few cases of Indian families that are altogether Westernized, Indian habits rigidly exclude Englishmen from admission into the homes of Indian gentlemen, whether Hindu or Mahomed an. Intercourse between Indian and English ladies is in the same way almost entirely confined to formal visits paid by the latter to the zenana and the harem, and to so-called Purdah parties, given in English houses, in which Indian ladies are entertained as far as possible under the same conditions that prevail in their own homes i.e., to the total exclusion of all males. So long as Indian ladies are condemned to a. life of complete 288 CHAP, xxv] THE DIFFICULTIES OF FUSION 289 seclusion the interests they have in common with their English visitors must necessarily be very few. On the other hand, it is not surprising that Englishmen, know- ing the views that many Indian men entertain with regard to the position of women, do not care to encourage them to visit their own houses on a footing of intimacy that would necessarily bring them into more or less familiar contact with their English wives and sisters and daughters. There is very much to admire in the family relations, and especially in the filial relations, that exist hi an Indian home, whether Hindu or Mahomedan, but it is idle to pretend that Indian ideas with regard to the relations between the sexes are the same as ours. In these circumstances any social fusion between even the better classes of the two races seems to be for the present out of the question. Very sincere and creditable efforts are now, it is true, being made on both sides to diminish the gulf that divides English and Indian society, and I have been at various gatherings which were attended by Englishmen and Englishwomen and by Indians, among whom there was sometimes even a sprinkling of Indian ladies. But the English host and hostess invariably found it difficult to prevent their Indian guests forming groups of their own, and each group seemed to be as reluctant to mingle with other Indian groups of a different class or caste as with their English fellow-guests. Indian society has been for centuries split up by race and caste and creed distinctions into so many watertight compartments that it does not care for the Western forms of social intercourse, which tend to ignore those distinctions. It is Indians themselves who regard us, much more than we regard ourselves, as a separate caste. More- over, for the ordinary and somewhat desultory con- versation which plays so large a part in Western sociability the Indian has very little understanding. He always imagines that conversation must have some definite purpose, and though he. has, far more than most English- W 290 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv men, the gift of ready and courteous speech, and often will talk for a long time both discursively and pleasantly, it is almost always as a preliminary to the introduction of some particular topic in which his personal interests are more or less directly involved. A question which causes a good deal of soreness is the rigid exclusion of Indians from many Anglo-Indian clubs. But though a little more elasticity as to the entertainment of Indian " guests " might reasonably be conceded to Indian susceptibilities, a club is after all just as much as his house an Englishman's castle, and it is only hi India that any one would venture to suggest that a club should not settle its rules of membership as it thinks fit. In the large cities at least there should, however, be room for clubs which, like the Calcutta Club at Calcutta, serve the very useful purpose of bringing together by mutual consent the higher classes of Indians and Englishmen, official and non-official. Yet even there the exigencies of caste observances, especially in the case of Hindus, militate against the more convivial forms of intercourse which the Englishman particularly affects. There are not a few Hindu members who will talk or play bridge with their English fellow-members into the small hours of the morning, but who consider themselves bound in con- science not to sit down to dinner with them ; whilst some will doubtless feel obliged to perform ceremonial ablu- tions when they go home. Others again, for similar reasons, would decline to join any European club. They are no more to be blamed than Englishmen who prefer to reserve membership of their clubs to Europeans, but the fact remains and has to be reckoned with. The best and most satisfactory relations are those maintained between Englishmen and Indians who under- stand and respect each other's peculiarities. No class of Englishman in India fulfils those conditions more fully than the Indian Civil Service. It is, I know, the bete noire of the Indian politician, and even Englishmen who ought to know better seem to think that, once they CHAP, xxv] THE INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE 291 have labelled it a " bureaucracy," that barbarous name is enough to hang it or enough, at least, to lend plausi- bility to the charge that Anglo-Indian administrators are arrogant and harsh in their personal dealings with Indians and ignorant and unsympathetic in their methods of government. That the English civilian goes out to India with a tolerably high intellectual and moral equipment can hardly be disputed, for he represents the pick of the young men who qualify for our Civil Service at home as well as abroad, and in respect of character, integrity, and intelligence the British Civil Service can challenge comparison with that of any other country in the world. Why should he suddenly change into a narrow-minded, petty tyrant as soon as he sets foot in India ? A great part at least of his career is spent in the very closest contact with the people, for he often lives for years together in remote districts where he has practically no other society than that of natives. He generally knows and speaks fluently more than one vernacular, though, owing to the multiplicity of Indian languages there are five, for instance, in the Bombay Presidency alone he may find himself suddenly transferred to a district in which the vernaculars he has learnt are of no use to him. Part of his time is always spent " in camp " i.e., moving about from village to village, receiving petitions, investigating cases, listening to complaints. Perhaps none of the ordinary duties of administration bring him so closely into touch with the people as the collection of land revenue, for it is there that his sense of fairness comes most conspicuously into play and wins recognition. Hence, for instance, in Bengal one of the bad results of the " Permanent Settlement " of the land revenue, which leaves no room for the Collector's ordinary work, has been that the people and the civilian know generally less about each other than in other parts of India. Few Indians venture to impugn the English- man's integrity and impartiality in adjudging cases in 192 292 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv which material interests are concerned, or in settling differences between natives ; and nowhere are those qualities more valuable and more highly appreciated than in a country accustomed for centuries to every form of oppression and of social pressure for which the multitudinous claims of caste and family open up endless opportunities. As he has no permanent ties of his own in India, it does not matter to him personally whether the individual case he has to settle goes in favour of A or of B, or whether the native official, whom he appoints or promotes, belongs to this or to that caste. The people know this, and because they have learned to trust the Englishman's sense of fair play, they appeal, whenever they get the chance, to the European official rather than to one of their own race. But it is especially in times of stress, in the evil days of famine or of plague, that they turn to him for help. Nowhere is the " sun-dried bureaucrat " seen to better advantage than in the famine or plague camp, where the " bureaucrat " would come hopelessly to grief, but where the English civilian, not being a " bureaucrat," triumphs over difficulties by sheer force of character and power of initiative. It is just in such emergencies, for which the most elaborate " regulations " cannot wholly provide, that the superiority of the European over the native official is most con- spicuous. If " Padgett, M.P.", would go out to India in the hot rather than in the cold weather, and instead of either merely enjoying the splendid hospitality of the chief centres of Anglo-Indian society, or borrowing his views of British administration from the Indian politic ans of the large cities, would spend some of his time with a civilian in an up-country station and follow his daily round of work amidst the real people of India, he would probably come home with very different and much more accurate ideas of what India is and of what the relations are between the Anglo-Indian official and the natives of the country. Far from having flooded India, as is often alleged, CHAP, xxv] THE EMPLOYMENT OF INDIANS 293 with a horde of overpaid officials, we may justly claim that no Western nation has ever attempted to govern an alien dependency with a smaller staff of its own race, or has admitted the subject races to so large a participa- tion in its public services. The whole vast machinery of executive and judicial administration in British India employs over 1,250,000 Indians, and only a little more than 5,000 Englishmen altogether, of whom about one- sixth constitute what is called par excellence the Civil Service of India. Not the least remarkable achievement of British rule has been the building up of a great body of Indian public servants capable of rising to offices of great trust. Not only, for instance, do Indian Judges sit on the Bench in the High Courts on terms of complete equality with their European colleagues, but magisterial work all over India is done chiefly by Indians. The same holds good of the Revenue Department and of the much, and often very unjustly, abused Department of Police ; and, in fact, as Anglo-Indian officials are the first to acknow- ledge, there is not a department which could be carried on to-day without the loyal and intelligent co-operation of the Indian public servant. There is room for improving the position of Indians, not only, as I have already pointed out, in the Educational Department, but probably in every branch of the " Provincial " service, which corre- sponds roughly with what was formerly called the " Un- covenanted " service. As far back as 1879 Lord Lytton laid down rules which gave to natives of India one-sixth of the appointments until then reserved for the " Cove- nanted " service, and we have certainly not yet reached the limit of the number of Indians who may ultimately with advantage be employed in the different branches of the public service ; but few who know the defects as well as the good qualities of the native will deny that to reduce hastily the European leaven in any depart- ment would be to jeopardize its moral as well as its administrative efficiency. The condition of the police, for instance, is a case in point, for any survival of the bad 294 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv old native traditions is due very largely to the insuffi- ciency of European control. Mr. Gokhale has himself admitted as one of the reasons for founding his society of " Servants of India " the necessity of " building up a higher type of character and capacity than is generally available in the country." For the same reason we must move slowly and cautiously in substituting Indians for Europeans in the very small number of posts which the latter still occupy. That the highest offices of executive control must be very largely held by Englishmen so long as we continue to be responsible for the government of India is admitted by all but the most " advanced " Indian politicians, and it is to qualifjr for and to hold such positions that the Indian Civil Service formerly the " Covenanted " service is maintained. It consists of a small elite of barely 1,200 men, mostly, but not ex- clusively, Englishmen, for it includes nearly 100 Indians. It is recruited by competitive examinations held in England, and this is one of the chief grievances of Indians. But in order to preserve the very high standard it has hitherto maintained, it seems essential that Indians who wish to enter it should have had not only the Western education which Indian Universities might be expected to provide, but the thoroughly English training which India certainly does not as yet supply. In the eyes of the disaffected Indian politician the really unpardonable sin of the Civil Service is that it constitutes the bulwark of British rule, the one perma- nent link between the Government of India and the manifold millions entrusted to their care. I have already had occasion to show, incidentally, how unfounded is the charge that, through ignorance and want of sym- pathy, the British civilian is callous to the real interests and sentiments of the people in dealing with the larger problems of Indian statesmanship. The contrary is the case, for to him belongs the credit of almost every measure passed during the last 50 years for the benefit of the Indian masses, and passed frequently in the teeth CHAP, xxv] " CAPTURING THE MASSES " 295 of vehement opposition from the Indian politician. Nor is it surprising that it should be so. For the Indian politician generally a townsman is, as a rule, drawn from and represents classes that have very little in common with the great bulk of the people, who are agri- culturists. The British civilian, on the other hand, often spends the best years of his life in rural districts, seldom even visited by the politician, and therefore knows much more about the needs and the feelings of the people among whom he lives and moves. In the best sense of the word he is in fact the one real democrat in India. The very fact that he is a bird of passage in the country makes him absolutely independent of the class interests and personal bias to which the politician is almost always liable. Moreover, the chief, and perfectly legitimate, object to which the Anglo-Indian administrator is bound to address himself is, as Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal once can- didly admitted, to capture " the heart, the mind of the people ... to secure, if not the allegiance, at least the passive, the generous acquiescence of the general mass of the population." To make his meaning per- fectly clear, Mr. Pal instanced the rural reforms, the agricultural banks and other things which had been done in Lord Curzon's time, " to captivate the mind of the teeming masses," and he added that "he is a foolish politician in India who allows the Government to capture the mind of the masses to the exclusion of his own in- fluence and his own countrymen." Mr. Pal is from his point of view perfectly logical, and so were the writers in the Yugantar, who, when they elaborated their scheme of revolutionary propaganda, declared that the first step must be to undermine the confidence of the people in their rulers and to destroy the spirit of contentedness under an alien yoke. But could there be a more striking tribute to the intelligent and sympathetic treatment of the interests of the Indian masses by their British rulers than such admissions on the part of the enemies of British rule ? 296 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv From this point of view nothing but good should result from the larger opportunities given by the recent reforms for the discussion of Indian questions in the enlarged Councils, so long as the Indian representatives in these Councils are drawn, as far as possible, from the different classes which, to some extent, reflect the different interests of the multitudinous communities that make up the people of India. The British civilian will have a much better chance than he has hitherto had of meeting his detractors in the open, and, if one may judge by the proceedings last winter, when the Councils met for the first time under the new conditions, there is little reason to fear, as many did at first, that he will be taken at a disadvantage in debate owing to the greater fluency and rhetorical resourcefulness of the Indian politician. It was not only in the Imperial Council in Calcutta that the official members, having the better case and stating it quite simply, proved more than a match for the more exuberant eloquence of their opponents. On the contrary, the personal contact established in the enlarged Councils between the Anglo-Indian official and the better class of Indian politician may well serve to diminish the prejudices which exist on both sides. It is, I believe, quite a mistake to suppose that the British civilian generally resents the recent reforms, though he may very well resent the spirit of hostility and suspicion in which they were advocated and wel- comed in some quarters, as if they were specially directed against the European element in the Civil Service. A practical difficulty is the heavy call which attendance in Council will make upon Civil servants who have to represent Government in these assemblies. Already for many years past the amount of work, and especially of office work, has steadily increased and without any corresponding increase of the establishment. Hence the civilian has less time to receive Indian visitors, and he is often obliged to curtail the period he spends during the year in camp. Hence also the growing frequency CHAP, xxv] MODERN CONDITIONS 297 of transfers and of officiating or temporary appointments. There are, in fact, to-day barely enough men to go round, and, obviously, the more frequently a man is moved, the less chance he has of getting thoroughly acquainted with the people among whom he has to work in a country such as India, where within the limits of the same province you may find half a dozen widely different communities speaking different languages and having different creeds and customs. Perhaps, too, for the same reasons, there is a tendency towards over-centralization in the " Secre- tariats " or permanent departments at the seat of government, whether in Simla or in the provincial capitals, and the less favoured civilian who bears the heat and burden of the day in the mojussil is both more dependent upon them and more jealous of the many advantages they naturally enjoy. Posts and telegraphs and the multiplying of " regulations " everywhere tend to weaken personal initiative. Nor can it be denied that with the increased facilities of travel to and from Europe civilians no longer look upon India quite so much as their home. The local liaisons, not uncommon in pre-Mutiny days, are now things of the past, and the married man of to-day who has to send his children home for their education, and often his wife too, either on account of the climate or to look after the children, is naturally more disposed to count up his years of service and to retire on his pension at the earliest opportunity. The increased cost of living in India and the depreciation of the rupee have also made the service less attractive from the purely pecuniary point of view, whilst in other ways it must suffer indirectly from such changes as the reduction of the European staff in the Indian Medical Department. The substitu- tion of Indian for European doctors in outlying stations where there are no European practitioners is a distinct hardship for married officials, as there is a good deal more than mere prejudice to explain the reluctance of English- women to be treated by native medical advisers. Nor is it possible to disguise the soreness caused throughout the 298 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv Indian Civil Service by the recent appointment of a young member of the English Civil Service to one of the very highest posts in India. No one questions Mr. Clark's ability, but is he really more able than every one of the many men who passed with him, and for many years before him, through the same door into the public service and elected to work in India rather than at home ? No Minister would have thought of promoting him now to an Under-Secretaryship of State in England, and apart from the grave reflection upon the Indian Civil Service and the belief generally entertained amongst Indians that it was meant to be a reflection upon the Indian Civil Service his appointment to a far higher Indian office implies a grave misconception of the proper functions of a Council which constitutes the Govern- ment of India. None of these minor considerations, however, will substantially affect the future of the Indian Civil Service if only it continues to receive from public opinion at home, and from the Imperial Government as well as from the Government of India, the loyal support and encouragement which the admirable work it performs, often under very trying conditions, deserves. An un- fortunate impression has undoubtedly been created during the last few years in the Indian Civil Service that there is no longer the same assurance of such support and encouragement either from Whitehall or from Simla, whilst the attacks of irresponsible partisans have re- doubled in intensity and virulence, and have found a louder and louder echo both on the platform and in the Press at home. The loss of contact between the Govern- ment of India and Anglo-Indian administrators has been as painfully felt as the frigid t< ;ne of many official utter- ances in Parliament, which have seemed inspired by a desire more often to avoid party embarrassments at West- minster than to protect public servants, who have no means of defending themselves, against even the grossest forms of misrepresentation and calumny, leading straight CHAP, xxv] THE CIVILIAN'S TASK 299 to the revolver and the bomb of the political assassin. The British civilian is not going to be frightened by one more risk added to the vicissitudes of an Indian career, but can you expect him to be proof against discourage- ment when many of his fellow-countrymen exhaust their ingenuity in extenuating or in casting upon him the primary responsibility for the new Indian gospel of murder which is being preached against him ? Mr. Montagu was well inspired in protesting against such " hostile, unsympathetic, and cowardly criticism " as was conveyed in Mr. Mackarness's pamphlet ; but this pamphlet was mere sour milk compared with the vitriol which the native Press had been allowed to pour forth day after day on the British official in India before any action was taken by Government to defend him. The new Viceroy, who himself belongs to one of the most important branches of the British Civil Service, may be trusted to display in his handling of the British civilian the tact and sympathy required to sustain him in the performance of arduous duties which are bound to become more complex and exacting as our system of government departs further from the old patriarchal type. Our task in India must grow more and more difficult, and will demand more than ever the best men that we can give to its accomplishment. The material prizes which an Indian career has to offer may be fewer and less valuable, whilst the pressure of work, the penalties of exile, the hardship of frequent separation from kith and kin, the drawbacks of an always trying and often treacherous climate, will for the most part not diminish. But the many-sided interests and the real magnitude and loftiness of the work to be done in India will continue to attract the best Englishmen so long as they can rely upon fair treatment at the hands of the Mother Country. If that failed them there would speedily be an end not only to the Indian Civil Service, but to British rule itself. For the sword cannot govern. It can only maintain government, and can maintain it 300 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, only as long as government itself retains the respect and acquiescence of the great masses of the Indian peoples which have been won, not by generals or by Secretaries of State, or even by Viceroys, but by the patient and often obscure spadework of the Indian Civil Service by its integrity, its courage, its knowledge, its efficiency, and its unfailing sense of justice. Complaints of the aloofness of the British civilian very seldom proceed either from Indians of the upper classes or from the humbler folk. They generally proceed from the new, more or less Western-educated middle class whose attitude towards British officials is seldom calculated to promote cordial relations ; and they are also sometimes inspired by another class of Indian who, one may hope, will before long have vanished, but whom of all others the civilian is bound to keep at arm's length. There are men who would get a hold upon him, if he is a young man, by luring him into intrigues with native women, or by inveigling him into the meshes of the native moneylender, or who, by less reprehensible means, strive to establish themselves on a footing of intimacy with him merely in order to sell to other Indians the influence which they acquire or pretend to have acquired over him. Cases of this kind are no doubt rare, and growing more and more rare, as social conditions are passing away which in earlier days favoured them. Less objectionable, but nevertheless to be kept also at arm's length, is the far more numerous class of natives known in India as umedwars, who are always anxious to seize on to the coat-tails of the Anglo-Indian official in order to heighten their own social status, and, if possible, to wheedle out of Government some of those minor titles or honorific distinctions to which Indian society attaches so much importance. In other branches of the public service selection has not always operated as successfully as the competitive system for the Civil Service, Men are too often sent out as lawyers or as doctors, or even, as I have already pointed CHAP, xxv] UNPLEASANT INCIDENTS 301 out, to join the Education Department, with inadequate qualifications, and they are allowed to enter upon their work without any knowledge of the language and customs of the people. Such cases are generally the result of carelessness or ignorance at home, but some of them, I fear, can only be described as " jobs " and there is no room in India for jobs. The untravelled Indian is also brought into contact to-day with an entirely different class of Englishman. The globe-trotter, who is often an American, though the native cannot be expected to distinguish between him and the Englishman, constantly sins from sheer ignorance against the customs of the country. Then, again, with railways and telegraphs and the growth of commerce and industry a type of Englishman has been imported to fill subordinate positions in which some technical knowledge is required, who, whatever his good qualities, is much rougher and generally much more strongly imbued with, or more prone to display, a sense of racial superiority. Nor is he kept under the same discipline as Tommy Atkins, who is generally an easy-going fellow, and looks upon the native with good-natured, if somewhat contemptuous, amuse- ment, though he, too, is sometimes a rough customer when he gets " above himself," or when his temper is ruffled by prickly heat, that most common but irritating of hot- weather ailments. In this connexion the remarkable growth of temperance among British soldiers in India is doubly satisfactory. On the whole, the relations between the lower classes of Europeans and natives in the large cities, where they practically alone come into contact, seldom give rise to serious trouble ; and it is between Europeans and natives of the higher classes that, unfortunately, personal disputes from time to time occur, which unquestionably produce a great deal of bad blood disputes in which Englishmen have forgotten not only the most elementary rules of decent behaviour, but the self-respect which our position in India makes, it doubly obligatory on every 302 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv Englishman to observe in his dealings with Indians. Some of these incidents have been wilfully exaggerated, others have been wantonly invented. Most of them have taken place in the course of railway journeys, and without wishing to palliate them, one may reasonably point out that, even in Europe, people, when travelling, will often behave with a rudeness which they would be ashamed to display in other circumstances, and that long railway journeys in the stifling heat of India some- times subject the temper to a strain unknown in more temperate climates. In some cases, too, it is our ignor- ance of native customs which causes the trouble, and the habits of even high-class Indians are now and then un- pleasant. A few months ago, I shared a railway com- partment one night with an Indian gentleman of good position and pleasant address, belonging to a sect which carries to the most extreme lengths the respect for all forms of life, however repulsive. Had I been a stranger to India and ignorant of these conscientious eccentricities, I might well have objected very strongly to some of the proceedings of my companion, who spent a good deal of his time in searching his person and his garments for certain forms of animal life, which he carefully deposited in a little silver box carried for this special purpose. Nevertheless it must be admitted that there have been from time to time cases of brutality towards natives sufficiently gross and inexcusable to create a very deplor- able impression. I have met educated Indians who, though they have had no unpleasant experiences of the kind themselves, prefer to avoid entering a railway carriage occupied by Europeans lest they should expose them- selves even to the chance of insulting treatment. On the other hand, speaking from personal experience as well as from what I have heard on unimpeachable authority, I have no hesitation in saying that there are evil-disposed Indians, especially of late years, who deliberately seek to provoke disagreeable incidents by their own mis- behaviour, either in the hope of levying blackmail or in CHAP, xxv] A LAMENTABLE FACT 303 order to make political capital by posing as the victims of English brutality. But even when Englishmen put themselves entirely in the wrong, there is perhaps a ten- dency amongst Anglo-Indians chiefly amongst the non- official community to treat such cases with undue leniency, and it is one of the curious ironies of fate that Lord Curzon, whom the Nationalist Press has singled out for constant abuse and denunciation as the prototype of official tyranny, was the one Viceroy who more than any other jeopardized his popularity with his fellow- countrymen in India by insisting upon rigorous justice being done where Indians had, in his opinion, suffered wrongs of this kind at the hands of Europeans. It is a lamentable fact that, amongst Indians, the greatest bitterness with regard to the social relations between the two races often proceeds from those who have been educated in England. There is, first of all, the young Indian who, having mixed freely with the best type of Englishmen and Englishwomen, finds himself on his return to India quite out of touch with his own people, and yet has to live their life. Cases of this kind are especially pathetic, when, having imbibed European ideals of womanhood, he is obliged to marry some girl chosen by his parents, with whom, however estimable she may be, he has nothing in common. Such is the contrariety of human nature that he usually visits his unhappiness, not on the social system which has re- sumed its hold upon him, but on the civilization which has killed his belief in it. Then there is the very mis- chievous type of young Indian who, having been left to his own devices in England, and without any good introductions, brings back to India and retails there impressions of English society, male and female, gathered from the very undesirable surroundings into which he has drifted in London and other large cities. It is he who is often responsible for one of the most deplorable features in the propaganda of the seditious Press namely, the scandalous libels upon the character Q{ 304 SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS [CHAP, xxv English domestic life, and especially upon the morality of English womanhood by which it is sought to undermine popular respect for and confidence in the Englishman. But our own responsibility must also be very great, so long as we allow the young Indian who comes to England to drift hopelessly, without help or guidance, among the rocks and shoals of English life. Men of our own race, and carefully picked men, come from our oversea Dominions to study in our colleges, and we have a special organization to look after their moral and material welfare. For years past we have allowed young Indians to come and go, and no responsible hand has been stretched out to save them from the manifold temptations of an entirely alien society in which isolation is almost bound to spell degradation and bitterness. Considering, however, the many inevitable causes of friction and the inherent imperfections of human nature, whether white or coloured, one may safely say that between Englishmen of all conditions and Indians of all conditions there often and, indeed, generally exist pleasanter relations than are to be found elsewhere between people of any two races so widely removed. They are never closer than when special circumstances help to break down the barriers. The common instincts and the common dangers of their profession create often singularly strong ties of regard and affection between the sepoy of all ranks and his British officers especially on campaign. In domestic tribulations, as well as in public calamities, Indians, at least of the lower classes, will often turn more readily and confidently for help to the Englishman who lives amongst them than to their own people. I need not quote instances of the extraordinary influence which many European mission- aries have acquired by their devoted labours amongst the poor, the sick, and the suffering, and in former times, perhaps more than in recent times, even with Indians of the higher classes. In ordinary circumstances we have to recognize the e^istenqe on, bQth sides, of obstacles to CHAP, xxv] ANGLO-INDIAN SOCIETY 305 anything like intimacy. Many Indian ideas and habits are repugnant to us, but so also are many of ours to them. Indians have their own conceptions of dignity and pro- priety which our social customs frequently offend. If Englishmen and Englishwomen in high places in India would exert their influence to invest the social life of Europeans in the chief resorts of Anglo-Indian society with a little more decorum and seriousness, they would probably be doing better service to a good understanding between the two races in social matters than by trying to break down by sheer insistence, however well meant, the barriers which diametrically opposite forms of civili- zation have placed between them. 20 CHAPTER XXVI. THE GOVERNMENT or INDIA. In the very able speech in which, on July 27, Mr. Montagu, the new Under-Secretary of State for India, introduced the Indian Budget in the House of Commons, one passage referred to the relations between the Secre- tary of State and the Viceroy in terms which have deservedly attracted very great attention 23 . Differences of opinion, sometimes of an acute character, have at intervals occurred between Secretaries of State and Viceroys as to their relative attributions. Mr. Montagu's language, however, would seem to constitute an assertion of the powers of the Secretary of State far in excess not only of past practice but of any reasonable interpreta- tion of legislative enactments on the subject. After congratulating Lord Minto on the completion of a " diffi- cult reign," Mr. Montagu said : The relations of a Viceroy to the Secretary of State are intimate and responsible. The Act of Parliament says " That the Secretary of State in Council shall superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns which in any way relate to or concern the government or revenues of India, and all grants of salaries, gratuities, and allowances, and all other payments and charges whatever out of or on the revenues of India." It will be seen how wide, how far- reaching, and how complete these powers are. Lord Motley and his Council, working through the agency of Lord Minto, 306 CHAP, xxvi] AN INACCURATE QUOTATION 307 have accomplished much. ... I believe that men of all parties will be grateful that Lord Morley remains to carry out the policy he has initiated. It is to be regretted in the first place that Mr. Montagu should not have been more careful to make his quotation accurate. For, as quoted by him, the Act would make it obligatory upon the Secretary of State to supervise practically every act of the Government of India, whereas the powers of the Secretary of State, who has succeeded to the powers of the old Board of Control of the East India Company, are discretionary powers. The statute from which the Secretary of State actually derives his powers is the Government of India Act, 1858, wh ch under section 3 declares that the Secretary of State " shall have and perform all such or the like powers and duties in any wise relating to the government or revenues of India and all such or the like powers over all officers appointed or continued under this Act as might or should have been exercised or performed " by the Company and Board of Control, and those powers and duties are defined in the following terms in the Act of 1833 (3 and 4 William IV., c. 85, sec. 25), which Mr. Montagu would seem to have had in his mind, though he quoted it imperfectly : " The said Board [of Control] shall have and be invested with full power and authority to superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns, &c." The difference, as has been very properly pointed out in the Manchester Guardian, no un- friendly critic of the present Administration, is " between exercising control and the power to exercise control, between ' shall ' and ' may.' If these words of the Act were to be abbreviated, the right abbreviation would have been ' may.' This is the word used by Sir Courtenay Ilbert in his summary of the Secretary of State's powers (The Government of India, p. 145) : '. . . the Secretary of State may, subject to the provisions embodied in this digest, superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns, &c.' 202 308 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA [CHAP, xxvi This difference between ' shall ' and ' may ' is, of course, vital. ' Shall ' implies that the Secretary of State is standing over the Viceroy in everything he does ; ' may ' simply reserves to him the right of control where he disapproves. ' Shall ' imparts an agency of an inferior order ; ' may ' safeguards the rights of the Crown and Parliament without impairing the dignity of the Vice- regal office." Of greater importance, however, is the construction which Mr. Montagu places on these statutes. There are three fundamental objections to the doctrine of " agency " which he propounds in regard to the functions of the Viceroy. In the first place, it ignores one of the most important features of his office one, indeed, to which supreme importance attaches in a country such as India, where the sentiment of reverence for the Sovereign is rooted in the most ancient traditions of all races and creeds. The Viceroy is the direct and personal repre- sentative of the King-Emperor, and in that capacity, at any rate, it would certainly be improper to describe him as the " agent " of the Secretary of State. From this point of view, any attempt to lower his office would tend dangerously to weaken the prestige of the Crown, which, to put it on the lowest grounds, is one of the greatest assets of the British Raj. In the second place, Mr. Montagu ignores equally another distinctive feature of the Viceroy's office, especially important in regard to his relations with the Secretary of State namely, that, in his executive as well as in his legislative capacity, the Viceroy is not a mere individual, but the Governor- General in Council. Mr. Montagu omitted to quote the important section of the Act of 1833, confirmed in subsequent enactments, which declared that : The superintendence, direction, and control of the whole civil and military government of all the said territories and revenues in India shall be and is hereby vested in a Governor- General and Councillors to be styled " the Governor-General of India in Council." CHAP, xxvi] THE ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY 309 The only title recognized by statute to the Viceroy is that of Governor-General in Council, and how material is this conjunction of the Governor-General with his Council is shown by the exceptional character of the circumstances in which power is given to the Governor- General to act on his own responsibility alone, and by the extreme rareness of the cases in which a Governor- General has exercised that power. Thus, on the one hand, Mr. Montagu forgets the Crown when he talks of the Secretary of State acting through the agency of the Viceroy ; and, on the other hand, he forgets the Governor-General in Council when he talks of the relations between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State whose proper designation, moreover, is Secretary of State in Council, for, like the Governor-General, the Secre- tary of State has a Council intimately associated with him by statute in the discharge of his constitutional functions. Though the cases in which the Secretary of State cannot act without the concurrence of the Council of India, who sit with him at the India Office, are limited to matters involving the grant or appropriation of revenues, and in other matters he is not absolutely bound to consult them and still less to accept their recommendations, the Act of Parliament quoted by Mr. Montagu clearly implies that, in the exercise of all the functions which it assigns to him, he is expected to act generally hi consulta- tion and in concert with his Council, since those functions are assigned to him specifically as Secretary of State in Council. Now, as to the nature of the relations between the Governor-General in Council and the Secretary of State in Council as above defined by statute. The ultimate responsibility for Indian government, as Mr. Montagu intimated, rests unquestionably with the Imperial Government represented by the Secretary of State for India, and therefore, in the last resort, with the people of the United Kingdom represented by Parliament. The question is, What is in theory and practice the 310 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA [CHAP, xxvi proper mode of discharging this " ultimate responsi- bility " for Indian government ? It is not a question which can be authoritatively answered, but, if we may infer an answer from the spirit of legislative enactments and from the usage that has hitherto prevailed, it may still be summed up in the same language in which John Stuart Mill described the function of the Home Govern- ment in the days of the old East India Company " The principal function of the Home Government is not to direct the details of administration, but to scrutinize and revise the past acts of the Indian Governments ; to lay down principles and to issue general instructions for their future guidance, and to give or refuse sanction to great political measures which are referred home for approval." This seems undoubtedly to be the view of the relations, inherited from the East India Company, between the Secretary of State and the Government of India which has been accepted and acted upon on both sides until recently. Nor is any other view compatible with the Charter Act of 1833, or with the Government oi India Act of 1858, which, in all matters pertinent to this issue, was based upon, and confirmed the principles of the earlier statute. The Secretary of State exercises general guidance and control, but, as Mill laid it down no less forcibly, " the Executive Government of India is and must be seated in India itself." Such relations are clearly very different from those of principal and agent which Mr. Montagu would apparently wish to substitute for them. Besides the special emphasis he laid on his definition of the relations between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, other reasons have led to the belief that the Under-Secretary, who spoke with a full sense of his responsibility as the representative of the Secretary of State, was giving calculated expression to the views of his chief. I am not going to anticipate the duties of the historian, whose business it will be to establish the share of initiative and responsibility that belong to Lord CHAP, xxvi] LORD MINTO'S POSITION 311 Morley and Lord Minto respectively in regard to the Indian policy of the last five years. Whilst something more than an impression generally prevails both at home and in India that Mr. Montagu's definition does in fact very largely apply to the relations between the present Viceroy and the Secretary of State, and that every measure carried out in India has originated in Whitehall, it is only fair to bear in mind that Lord Morley has never himseli put forward any such claim, nor has Lord Minto ever admitted it. The Viceroy, on the contrary, has been at pains to emphasize on several occasions his share, and indeed to claim for himself the initia- tive, of all the principal measures carried out during his tenure of office, and especially of the new scheme of Indian reforms, of which the paternity is ascribed by most people to Lord Morley. The Secretary of State's great personality may partly account for the belief that he has entirely overshadowed the Viceroy, all the more in that he has certainly over- shadowed the Council of India as never before. But if Lord Minto has reason to complain of the prevalence of this belief, he cannot be unaware that he too has helped to build it up by neglecting to associate his own Council with himself as closely as even his most masterful pre- decessors had hitherto been careful to do. Lord Minto's position has no doubt been one of very peculiar difficulty, and no one will grudge him the warm tribute paid to him by Mr. Montagu. Whatever the merits of the great controversy between Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener, the overruling of the Government of India by the Home Government on a question of such magnitude and the circumstances hi which Lord Curzon was compelled to resign had dealt a very heavy blow to the authority and prestige of the Viceregal office in India. Within a few weeks of Lord Minto's arrival hi India the Unionist Government who had appointed him fell, and a Liberal Government came into power who could not be expected to display any special consideration 312 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA [CHAP, xxvi for their predecessors' nominee unless he showed himself to be in sympathy with their policy. Lord Minto's friends can therefore very reasonably argue that his chief anxiety was, quite legitimately, to avoid any kind of friction with the new Secretary of State which might have led to the supersession of another Viceroy so soon after the unfortunate crisis that had ended in Lord Curzon's resignation. If this was the object that Lord Minto had in view, his attitude has certainly been most successful, for Lord Morley has repeatedly testified to the loyalty and cordiality with which the Viceroy has constantly co-operated with him. That the Secretary of State and the Viceroy have, nevertheless, not always seen eye to eye with regard to the interference of the India Office in the details of Indian administration appears clearly from a telegram read out by Lord Morley himself in the House of Lords on February 23, 1909. In the course of this telegram, which acknowledged in the most generous terms the strong support of the Secre- tary of State in all dealings with sedition, the Viceroy made the following curious admission : " The question of the control of Indian administration by the Secretary of State, mixed up as it is with the old difficulties of centralization, we may very possibty look at from different points of view." The curtain fell upon this restrained attempt to assert what Lord Minto evidently regarded eighteen months ago as his legitimate position, and to the public eye it has not been raised again since then. But in India certainly the fear is often expressed in responsible quarters that, notwithstanding the courageous support which Lord Morley has given to legislative measures for dealing with the worst forms of seditious agitation, their effect has been occasionally weakened by that inter- ference from home in the details of Indian administration of which Lord Minto's telegram contains the only admis- sion known to the public. It is difficult to believe that Lord Minto's position would not have been stronger had he not allowed the CHAP, xxn] VICEROY AND COUNCIL 313 Governor-General in Council to suffer such frequent eclipses. The Governor-General's Council during Lord Minto's tenure of office may have been exceptionally weak, and there will always be a serious element of weak- ness in it so long as membership of Council is not recog- nized to be the crowning stage of an Indian career. So long as it is, as at present too frequently happens, merely a stepping-stone to a Lieutenant-Governorship, it is idle to expect that the hope of advancement will not sometimes act as a restraint upon the independence and sense of individual responsibility which a seat in Council demands. In any case, the effacement of Council during the last few years behind the Viceroy has not been calculated to dispel the widespread impression that, both in Calcutta and in Whitehall, there has been a tendency to substitute for the constitutional relations between the Governor-General in Council and the Secre- tary of State in Council more informal and personal relations between Lord Minto and Lord Morley, which, however excellent, are difficult to reconcile with the principles essential to the maintenance of a strong Government of India. Private letters and private tele- grams are very useful helps to a mutual understanding, but they cannot safely supplant, or encroach upon, the more formal and regular methods of communication, officially recorded for future reference, in consultation and concert with the Councils on either side, as by statute established. There is a twofold danger in any eclipse, even partial, of the Governor-General in Council. One of the remarks I have heard most frequently all over India, and from Indians as well as from Englishmen, is that " there is no longer any Government of India " ; and it is a remark which, however exaggerated in form, contains a certain element of truth. To whatever extent the Viceroy, in his relations with Whitehall, detaches himself from his Council, to that extent the centre of executive stability is displaced and the door is opened to that constant 314 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA [CHAP, xxvi interference from home in the details of Indian administra- tion which is all the more to be deprecated if there appear to be any suspicion of party pressure. Lord Morley has so often and so courageously stood up for sound principles of Indian government against the fierce attacks of the extreme wing of his party, and he has shown, on the whole, so much moderation and insight in his larger schemes of constructive statesmanship, whilst Lord Minto has won for himself so much personal regard during a very difficult period, that criticism may appear invidious. But the tone adopted, especially during the first years of Lord Morley's administration, in official replies to insidious Parliamentary questions aimed at Indian administrators, the alacrity with which they were transmitted from the India Office to Calcutta, the acquiescence with which they were received there, and the capital made out of them by political agitators when they were spread broadcast over India contributed largely to undermine the principle of authority upon which, as Lord Morley has himself admitted, Indian government must rest. For the impression was thus created in India that there was no detail of Indian administration upon which an appeal might not be successfully made through Parliament to. the Secretary of State over the head of the Government of India. Now if, as Lord Morley has also admitted, Parliamentary government is incon- ceivable in India, it is equally inconceivable that Indian government can be carried on under a running fire of malevolent or ignorant criticism from a Parliament 6,000 miles away. That is certainly not the sort of Parliamentary control contemplated in the legislative enactments which guarantee the " ultimate responsi- bility " of the Secretary of State. At the same time the effacement of the Viceroy's Executive Council has weakened that collective authority of the Government of India without which its voice must fail to carry full weight in Whitehall. Every experienced Anglo-Indian administrator, for instance, CHAP, xxvi] A NECESSARY CORRECTIVE 315 had been quick to realize what were bound to be the consequences of the unbridled licence of the extremist Press and of an openly seditious propaganda. Yet the Government of India under Lord Minto lacked the cohesion necessary to secure the sanction of the Secre- tary of State to adequate legislative action, repugnant to party traditions at home, until we had already begun to reap the bloody harvest of an exaggerated tolerance, and with the Viceroy himself the views of the ruling chiefs seem to have carried greater weight in urging action on the Secretary of State than the opinions re- corded at a much earlier date by men entitled to his confidence and entrusted under his orders with the administration of British India. Even i , one could always be certain of having men of transcendent ability at the India Office and at Govern- ment House in Calcutta, it is impossible that they should safely dispense with the permanent corrective to their personal judgment and temperament not to speak of outside pressure which their respective Councils have been created by law to supply. Let us take first of all the case of the Viceroy. His position as the head of the Government of India may be likened to that of the Prime Minister at home, and the position of the Viceroy's Execu- tive Council to that of the Ministers who, as heads of the principal executive Departments, form the Cabinet over wh ch the Prime Minister presides. But no head of the Executive at home stands so much in need of capable and experienced advisers as the Viceroy, who generally goes out to India without any personal knowledge of the vast sub-continent and the 300 million people whom he is sent out to govern for five years with very far- reaching powers, and often without any administrative experience, though he has to take charge of the most complicated administrative machine in the world. Even when he has gone out to India, his opportunities of getting to know the country and its peoples are actually very scant. He spends more than six months of the year 316 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA [CHAP, xxvi at Simla, an essentially European and ultra-official hill-station perched up in the clouds and entirely out of touch with Indian life, and another four months he spends in Calcutta, which, again, is only partially Indian, or, at any rate, presents but one aspect of the many-sided life of India. It takes a month for the great public departments to transport themselves and their archives from Calcutta to Simla at the beginning of the hot weather, and another month in the autumn for the pilgrimage back from the hills to Calcutta. It is only during these two months that the Viceroy can travel about freely and make himself acquainted with other parts of the vast Dependency committed to his care, and, though railways have shortened distances, rapid journeys in special trains with great ceremonial programmes at every halting point scarcely afford the same opportunities as the more leisurely progress of olden days, when the Governor-General's camp, as it moved from place to place, was open to visitors from the whole surrounding country. Moreover, the machinery of administration grows every year more ponderous and complicated, and the Viceroy, unless he is endowed with an almost superhuman power and quickness of work, is apt to find himself entangled hi the meshes of never-ending routine. It is in order to supply the knowledge and experience which a Viceroy in most cases lacks when he first goes out, and in some cases is never able to acquire during his whole tenure of office, that his Executive Council is so constituted, in theory and as far as possible in practice, that it combines with administrative experience in the several Departments over which members respectively preside such a knowledge collectively of the whole of India that the Viceroy can rely upon expert advice and assistance in the transaction of public business and, not least, in applying with due regard for Indian conditions the principles of policy laid down for his guidance by the Home Government. These were the grounds upon which Lord Morley justified the appointment to the CHAP, xxvi] DECENTRALIZATION 317 Viceroy's Executive Council of an Indian member who, besides being thoroughly qualified to take charge of the special portfolio entrusted to him, would bring into Council a special and intimate knowledge of native opinion and sentiment. These are the grounds upon which, by the way, Lord Morley cannot possibly justify the appointment of Mr. Clark as Member for Commerce and Industry, for a young subordinate official, however brilliant, of an English public Department cannot bring into the Viceroy's Executive Council either special or general knowledge of Indian affairs. Such an appoint- ment must to that extent weaken rather than strengthen the Government of India. The same arguments which apply in India to the con- junction of the Governor-General with his Council apply, mutatis mutandis, with scarcely less force to the importance of the part assigned to the Council of India as advisers of the Secretary of State at the India Office. If we look at the Morley-Minto regime from another point of view, it is passing strange that the tendency to concentrate the direction of affairs in India in the hands of the Viceroy and to subject the Viceroy in turn to the closer and more immediate control of the Secre- tary of State, whilst simultaneously diminishing pro tanto the influence of their respective Councils, should have manifested itself just at this time, when it is Lord Morley who presides over the India Office. For no statesman has ever proclaimed a more ardent belief in the virtues of decentralization than Lord Morley, and Lord Morley himself is largely responsible for legisla- tive reforms which will not only strengthen the hands of the provincial Governments in their dealings with the Government of India, but will enable and, indeed, force the Government of India to assume on many vital ques- tions an attitude of increased independence towards the Imperial Government. The more we are determined to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas and with Indian interests, the more we must rely upon a strong, 318 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA [CHAP, xxvi intelligent, and self-reliant Government of India. The peculiar conditions of India exclude the possibility of Indian self-government on colonial lines, but what we may, and probably must, look forward to at no distant date is that, with the larger share in legislation and administration secured to Indians by such measures as the Indian Councils Act, the Government of India will speak with growing authority as the exponent of the best Indian opinion within the limits compatible with the maintenance of British rule, and that its voice will therefore ultimately carry scarcely less weight at home in the determination of Indian policy than the voice of our self-governing Dominions already carries in all questions concerning their internal development. The future of India lies in the greatest possible de- centralization in India subject to the general, but un- meddlesome, control of the Governor-General in Council, and in the greatest possible freedom of the Government of India from all interference from home, except in regard to those broad principles of policy which it must always rest with the Imperial Government, represented by the Secretary of State in Council, to determine. It is only in that way that, to use one of Mr. Montagu's phrases, we can hope successfully to " yoke " to our own " democratic " system " a Government so complex and irresponsible to the peoples which it governs as the Government of India." CHAPTER XXVII. CONCLUSIONS. No Viceroy has for fifty years gone out to India at so critical a moment as that at which Lord Hardinge of Penshurst is about to take up the reins of government. In one respect only is he more favoured than most of his predecessors. The Anglo-Russian agreement, of which he himself helped to lay the foundations when he was Ambassador at St. Petersburg, has removed the greatest of all the dangers that threatened the external security of India and the peace of Central Asia during the greater part of the nineteenth century. It does not, however, follow that the Government of India can look forward with absolute confidence to continued immunity from all external troubles. Save for the Tibetan expedition and one or two small punitive expeditions against Pathan tribes, there have been no military operations on the Indian frontier since the Terai campaign was brought to a close in 1898. But signs are, unfortunately, not wanting of a serious recrudescence of restlessness on the North-West Frontier, where the very necessary measures taken to cut off supplies of arms from the Persian Gulf have contributed to stimulate the chronic turbulence oi 319 320 CONCLUSIONS [OHAP. xxvii the unruly tribesmen. There is no definite evidence at present that they are receiving direct encouragement from Cabul, but it is at least doubtful whether the some- what exaggerated deference shown to the Ameer on the occasion of his visit three years ago to India has per- manently improved our relations with him, and though he is no longer able to play off Russia and England against each other, he has not yet brought himself to signify his adhesion to the Convention which defined our under- standing with Russia in regard to Afghan affairs. The condition of Persia, and especially of the southern pro- vinces, has created a situation which cannot be indefinitely tolerated, whilst the provocative temper displayed by the Turkish authorities under the new regime at various points on the Persian Gulf is only too well calculated to produce unpleasant complications, however anxious we must be to avoid them, if only in view of the feeling which any estrangement between Mahomedan Powers and Great Britain inevitably produces amongst Indian Moslems. The high-handed action of China in Tibet, and, indeed, all along the north-eastern border- land of our Indian Empire, has introduced a fresh element of potential trouble which the Government of India cannot safely disregard, for we are bound not only to protect our own frontiers, but also to safe- guard the interests of Nepal and Bhutan, where, as well as in Sikkim, the fate of Tibet and the flight of the Dalai Lama have caused no slight perturbation. In Nepal especially, which is one of the most valuable recruiting grounds of the Indian Army, Chinese ascendency cannot be allowed to overshadow British influence. Lord Hardinge is by profession a peacemaker, and how efficient a peacemaker he proved himself to be at St. Petersburg during the Russo-Japanese war will only be fully known when the historian has access to the secret records of that critical period of Anglo-Russian relations. But it must not be forgotten that the maintenance of peace along such a vast and still largely unsettled CHAP, xxvn] A LULL IN THE STORM 321 borderland as that of India may at any moment be frus- trated by disturbing forces over which the most peacefully disposed Viceroy has little or no control. Peace and sound finance, which is inseparable from peace, have certainly never been more essential to India than at the present juncture. For without them the difficulty of solving the most absorbing and urgent of the internal problems of India will be immeasurably enhanced. There is a lull in the storm of unrest, but after the repeated disappointments to which official optimism has been subjected within the last few years, he would be a sanguine prophet who would venture to assert that this lull presages a permanent return to more normal conditions. Has the creation of a new political machinery which gives a vastly enlarged scope to the activities of Indian constitutional reformers, definitely rallied the waverers and restored courage and confidence to the representatives of sober and law-abiding opinion, or will they continue to follow the lead of impatient visionaries clamouring, as Lord Morley once put it, for the moon which we cannot give them ? Have the forces of aggres- sive disaffection been actually disarmed by the so-called measures of " repression," or have they merely been com- pelled for the time being to cover their tracks and modify then* tactics, until the relaxation of official vigilance or the play of party politics in England or some great international crisis opens up a fresh opportunity for mili- tant sedition ? To these momentous questions the next five years will doubtless go far to furnish a conclusive answer, and it will be determined in no small measure by the statesmanship, patience, and firmness which Lord Hardinge will bring to the discharge of the constitutional functions assigned to him as Viceroy i.e., as the personal representative of the King Emperor, and as Governor- General in Council i.e., as the head of the Government of India. I have attempted, however imperfectly, to trace to their sources some of the chief currents and cross-currenta 21 322 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvn of the great confused movement which is stirring the stagnant waters of Indian life the steady impact of alien ideas on an ancient and obsolescent civilization ; the more or less imperfect assimilation of those ideas by the few ; the dread and resentment of them by those whose traditional ascendency they threaten ; the dis- integration of old beliefs, and then again their aggressive revival ; the careless diffusion of an artificial system of education, based none too firmly on mere intellectualism, and bereft of all moral or religious sanction ; the applica- tion of Western theories of administration and of juris- prudence to a social formation stratified on lines of singular rigidity ; the play of modern economic forces upon primitive conditions of industry and trade ; the constant and unconscious but inevitable friction between subject races and their alien rulers ; the reverberation of distant wars and distant racial conflicts ; the exalta- tion of an Oriental people in the Far East ; the abase- ment of Asiatics in South Africa all these and many other conflicting influences culminating in the inchoate revolt of a small but very active minority which, on the one hand, frequently disguises under an appeal to the example and sympathy of Western democracy a rever- sion to the old tyranny of caste and to the worst super- stitions of Hinduism, and, on the other hand, arms, with the murderous methods of Western Anarchism, the fervour of Eastern mysticism compounded in varj^ing proportions of philosophic transcendentalism and degene- rate sensuousness. In so far as this movement is directed to the immediate subversion of British rule, we need not exaggerate its importance, unless the British Empire were involved in serious complications elsewhere which might encourage the seditious elements in India to break out into open rebellion. We are too often, in fact, inclined to under- rate the strength of the foundations upon which our rule rests. For it alone lends and can within any measurable time lend substantial reality to the mere geographical CHAP, xxvn] THE STRENGTH OF OUR POSITION 323 expression which India is. A few Indians may dream of a united India under Indian rule, but the dream is as wild to-day as that of the few European Socialists who dream of the United States of Europe. India has never approached to political unity any more than Europe has, except under the compulsion of a conqueror. For India and Europe are thus far alike that they are both geographically self-contained continents, but inhabited by a great variety of nations whose different racial arid religious affinities, whose different customs and traditions, tend to divide them far more than any interests they may have in common tend to unite them. We have got too much into the habit of talking about India and the Indians as if they were one country and one people, and we too often forget that there are far more absolutely distinct languages spoken in India than in Europe ; that there are far more profound racial differ- ences between the Mahratta and the Bengalee than between the German and the Portuguese, or between the Punjabee and the Tamil than between the Russian and the Italian ; that, not to speak of other creeds, the religious antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan is often more active than any that exists to-day between Protestants and Roman Catholics, even, let us say, in Ulster ; and that caste has driven into Indian society lines of far deeper cleavage than any class distinctions that have survived in Europe. We do not rule India, as is sometimes alleged, by play- ing off one race or one creed against another and by accentuating and fostering these ancient divisions, but we are able to rule because our rule alone prevents these ancient divisions from breaking out once more into open and sanguinary strife. British rule is the form of government that divides Indians the least. The majority of intelligent and sober-minded Indians who have a stake in the country welcome it and support it because they feel it to be the only safeguard against the clash of rival races and creeds, which would 212 324 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvii ultimately lead to the oppressive ascendency of some one race or creed ; and the great mass of the population yield to it an inarticulate and instinctive acquiescence because it gives them a greater measure of security, justice, and tranquillity than their forbears ever enjoyed. There are only two forces that aspire to substitute themselves for British rule, or at least to make the con- tinuance of British rule subservient to their own ascend- ency. One is the ancient and reactiona^ force of Brahmanism, which, having its roots in the social and religious system we call Hinduism, operates upon a very large section but still only a section of the popula- tion who are Hindus. The other is a modern and, in its essence, progressive force generated by Western education, which operates to some extent over the whole area of India, but only upon an infinitesimal fraction of the population recruited among a few privileged castes. Its only real nexus is a knowledge, often very superficial, of the Er/glish language and of English political institutions. Though both these forces have developed of late years a spirit of revolt against British rule, neither of them has in itself sufficient substance to be dangerous. The one is too old, the other too young. But the most rebellious elements in both have effected a temporary and unnatural alliance on the basis of an illusorj 7 " Nationalism " which appeals to nothing in Indian history, but is calculated and meant to appeal with dangerous force to Western sentiment and ignorance. It rests with us to break up that unnatural alliance. We may not reconcile aggressive Brahmanism to Western civilization, but we can combat the evil influences for which it stands and which many enlightened Brahmans have long since recognized ; and we can combat them most effectively by rallying to our side the better and more progressive elements which, in spite of its many imperfections, Western education and the contact with Western civilization have already produced. To that end we must shrink from no sacrifices to improve our CHAP, xxvn] SURGICAL TREATMENT 325 methods of education. The evils for which we have to find remedies have been of slow growth, and they can only be slowly cured. But they can be cured by patient and sustained effort, and by carrying courageously into practice the principle, which none of us will challenge in theory, that the formation of character on a sound moral basis, inseparable in India from a sound religious basis, is at least as important a part of the educational process as the development of the intellect. That, however, is not all. If we are to save and to foster the better elements, we must stamp out the worse. Do not let us be frightened by mere words. To talk, as some do, of the Indian Press being " gagged " by the new Press Act is absurd. It is as free to-day as it has always been to criticize Government as fully and fear- lessly, and, one may add, often as unjustly, as party newspapers in this country are wont to criticize the Government of the day. It is no longer free to preach revolution and murder with the cynical audacity shown in some of the quotations I have given various Nationalist organs. " Repression " in India, whether of the seditious press, or of secret societies, or of unlawful meetings, means nothing more cruel or oppressive than the application of surgery to diseased growths which threaten to infect the whole organism and especially so immature and sensitive an organism as the semi- Westernized, semi-educated section of Indian society to-day represents. This surgical treatment will probably also have to be patient and sustained, for here too we have to deal with evils of no sudden growth, though some of their worst outward manifestations have come suddenly upon us. Even if the improvement be more rapid than we have any right to expect, do not let us throw away our surgical instruments, but rather preserve them against any possible relapse. We have to remember not only what we owe to ourselves, but what we owe equally to the many well-meaning but timid Indians who 326 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvn look to us for protection against the insidious forms of terrorism to which the disaffected minority can subject them 24 . The number of our active enemies may be few, but great is the number of our friends who are of opinion that we are more anxious to conciliate the one sinner who may or may not repent than to encourage the 99 just who persevere. We want the Western-educated Indian. We have made him, and we cannot unmake him if we would. But we must see that he is a genuine product of the best that Western education can give, and not merely an Indian who can speak English and adapt his speech to English ears in order to lend plausibility to the revival in new forms of ancient religious or social tyrannies. We must remember also that even the best type of Western-educated Indian only speaks at present for a minute section of the population of India, and that, when he does not speak, as he often naturally does, merely in the interests of the small class which he represents, he has not yet by any means proved his title to speak for the scores of millions of his fellow-country- men who are still living in the undisturbed atmosphere of the Indian Middle Ages. One of the dangers we have to guard against is that, because the Western-educated Indian is to the stay-at-home Englishman, and even to the Englishman whose superficial knowledge of India is confined to brief visits to the chief cities of India, the most, and indeed the only, articulate Indian, we should regard him as the only or the most authoritative mouth- piece of the needs and wishes of other classes or of the great mass of his fellow-countrymen with whom he is often in many ways in less close touch than the English- man who lives in their midst. The weak point of the recent political reforms is that they were intended to benefit, not wholly, but mainly, that particular class. In so far as they may help to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the moderate Indian politician they deserve praise ; and in that respect, as CHAP, xxvn] NEW CHANNELS OF ACTIVITY 327 far as one can judge at this very early stage, they are not without promise. In effect they have also helped to give other important interests opportunities of organiza- tion and expression. Apart from the great Mahomedan community, whose political aspirations are largely different from, and opposed to, those of Hinduism, there are agricultural interests, always of supreme im- portance in such a country as India, and industrial and commercial interests of growing importance which cannot be adequately represented by the average Indian poli- tician who is chiefly recruited from the towns and from professions that have little or no knowledge of or sym- pathy with them. The politician, for instance, is too often a lawyer, and he has thriven upon a system of jurisprudence and legal procedure which we have imported into India with the best intentions, but with results that have sometimes been simply disastrous to a thriftless and litigious people. Hence the suspicion and dislike entertained by large numbers of quiet, respectable Indians for any political institutions that tend to increase the influence of the Indian vakeel and of the class he repre- sents. Our object, therefore, both in the education and in the political training of Indians, should be to divert the activities of the new Western-educated classes into economic channels which would broaden their own horizon, and to give greater encouragement and recog- nition to the interests of the very large and influential classes that hold entirely aloof from politics but look to us for guidance and help in the development of the material resources of the country. We have their support at present, but to retain it we must carefully avoid creating the impression that political agitation is the only lever that acts effectively upon Government, and that in the relations of India and Great Britain and especially in their fiscal and financial relations the exigencies of party politics at home and the material interests of the predominant partner must invariably prevail. 328 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvn Whilst, subject to the maintenance of effective execu- tive control, we have extended and must continue steadily to extend the area of civil employment for Indians in the service of the State, there would certainly seem to be room also for affording them increased oppor- tunities of military employment. It is a strange anomaly that, at a time when we have no hesitation in introducing Indians into our Executive Councils, those who serve the King-Emperor in the Indian Army can only rise to quite subordinate rank. A good deal has no doubt been done to improve the quality of the native officer from the point of view of military education, but, under present conditions, the Indian Army does not offer a career that can attract Indians of good position, though it is just among the landed aristocracy and gentry of India that military traditions are combined with the strongest traditions of loyalty. By the creation of an Imperial Cadet Corps Lord Curzon took a step in the right direction which was warmly welcomed at the time, but has received very little encouragement since his departure from India. Something more than that seems to be wanted to-day. Some of the best military opinion in India favours, I believe, an experimental scheme for the gradual promotion of native officers, carefully selected and trained, to field rank in a certain number of regiments which would ultimately be entirely officered by Indians just in the same way as a certain number of regiments in the Egyptian Army have always been wholly officered by Egyptians. Indeed, we need not go outside India to find even now, in the Native States, Indian forces exclusively officered by Indians. The effect upon the whole Native Army of some such measure as I have indicated would be excellent ; and though we could never hope to retain India merely by the sword against the combined hostility of its various peoples, the Native Army must always be a factor of first-rate importance, both for the prevention and the repression of any spasmodic outbreak of revolt. It is no secret CHAP, xxvn] THE FEUDATORY PRINCES 329 that reiterated attempts have been made to shake it? loyalty, and in some isolated cases not altogether without success. But the most competent authorities, whilst admitting the need for vigilance, deprecate any serious alarm, and it is all to the good that British officers no- longer indulge in the blind optimism which prevailed among those of the old Sepoy regiments before the Mutiny. One point which Englishmen are apt to forget, and which has been rather lost sight of in the recent political reforms, is that more than a fifth of the population ot our Indian Empire about one third of its total area is under the direct administration not of the Government of India, but of the Ruling Chiefs. They represent great traditions and great interests, which duty and statesman- ship equally forbid us to ignore. The creation of an Imperial Council, in which they would have sat with representatives of the Indian aristocracy of British India, was an important feature of the original scheme of re- forms proposed by the Government of India. It was- abandoned for reasons of which I am not concerned to dispute the validity. But the idea underlying it was unquestionably sound, and Lord Minto acted upon it when he drew the Ruling Chiefs into consultation as to- the prevention of sedition. Some means will have ta be found to embody it in a more regular and permanent shape. If we were to attempt to introduce what are called democratic methods into the government of British India without seeking the adhesion and support of the feudatory Princes, we should run a grave risk of estranging one of the most loyal and conservative forces- in the Indian Empire. The administrative autonomy of the native States is sometimes put forward as an argument in favour of the self-government which Indian politicians demand. It is an argument based on complete ignorance. With one or two exceptions, far more appar- ent than real, the Native States are governed by patri- archal methods, whicli may be thoroughly suited to the traditions and needs of their subjects, but are much 330 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvn further removed than the methods of government in British India from the professed aspirations of the Indian National Congress. Just as the Ruling Chiefs rightly complained of the effect upon their own people of the seditious literature imported into their States from British India before we were at last induced to check the output of the " extremist " Press, so they would be justified in resenting any grave political changes in British India which would react dangerously upon their own position and their relations with their own subjects. When we talk of governing India in accordance with Indian ideas, we cannot exclude the ideas of the very representative and influential class of Indians to which none are better qualified to give expression than the Ruling Chiefs. One furthur suggestion. The policy of annexation has long since been abandoned, and the question to-day is whether we might not go further and give ruling powers to a few great chiefs of approved loyalty and high character, who possess in British India estates more populous and important than those of many whom we have always recognized as Ruling Chiefs. The objections to so novel a departure are, I know, serious, and may be overwhelming foremost among them being the reluctance hitherto shown by the people themselves whenever, for purposes of administrative convenience, any slight readjustment of boundaries has been pro- posed that involved the transfer to a native State of even a few villages until then under British Administra- tion. The political reforms with which Lord Minto's Vice- royalty will remain identified are only just on their trial. All that can safely be said at present is that they are full of promise, and it would be rash to predict whether and when it may be safe to proceed further in the direction to which they point. It is difficult even to say yet awhile what share they have had, independently of the " repressive " measures that accompanied them, in stemming at least temporarily the tide of active sedition. Time is required CHAP, xxvn] THE INFLUENCE OF THE CROWN 331 to mature their fruits whether for good or for evil. One may hope that, though they address themselves only to the political elements of the present unrest, they will tend to facilitate the treatment of the economic and social factors of the Indian problem. It is these that now chiefly and most urgently claim the attention of the British rulers of India. To rescue education from its present unhealthy surroundings and to raise it on to a higher plane whilst making it more practical, to promote the industrial and commercial expansion of India so as to open up new fields for the intellectual activity of educated Indians, to strengthen the old ties and to create new ones that shall bind the ancient conservative as well as the modern progressive forces of Indian society to the British Raj by an enlightened sense of self-interest are slower and more arduous tasks and demand more patient and sustained statesmanship than any adventures in constitutional changes. But it is only by the successful achievement of such tasks that we can expect to retain the loyal acquiescence of the Princes and peoples of India in the maintenance of British rule. The sentiment of reverence for the Crown is widespread and deep-rooted among all races and creeds in India 25 . It is perhaps the one tradition common to all. It went out spontaneously to Queen Victoria, whose length of years and widowed isolation appealed with a peculiar sense of lofty and pathetic dignity to the imagination of her Indian peoples. It has been materially reinforced by the pride of personal acquaintance, since India has been twice honoured with the presence of the immediate successor to the Throne. The late King's visit to India has not yet faded from the memory of the older genera- tion, and that of the present King-Emperor and his gracious Consort is, of course, still fresh in the recollection of all. How powerful is the hold which the majesty of the Crown exercises upon Princes and peoples in India was very strikingly shown by the calming effect, however temporary, which the presence of the Prince and Princess 332 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvn of Wales had in Bengal four years ago, at the very moment when political agitation in that province was developing into almost open sedition ; and it was shown once more this year by the hush of subdued grief that passed over the whole of India at the sudden news of King Edward's death. Only such rabid papers as Tilak's old organ, the Kesari, ventured an attempt to counteract the deep impression produced by that lamentable event, and it could only attempt to do so, very ineffectively, by a spiteful and ignorant depreciation of the position and personality of the Sovereign, and of the part played by him in a Western democracy. In spite of the traditional prestige attaching to the Crown, we cannot, however, reasonably look for loyalty from India in the sense in which we look for it from our own people or from our kinsmen beyond the seas. There can never be between Englishmen and Indians the same community of historical traditions, of racial affinity, of social institutions, of customs and beliefs that exists between people of our own stock throughout the British Empire. The absence of these sentimental bonds, which cannot be artificially forged, makes it impossible that we should ever concede to India the rights of self-government which we have willingly conceded to the great British communities of our own race. And there is another and scarcely less cogent reason. The justification of our presence in India is that it gives peace and security to all the various races and creeds which make up one-fifth of the population of this globe. To introduce self-govern- ment into India would necessarily be to hand it over to the ascendency of the strongest. That we are debarred from doing by the very terms on which we hold India, and that is what Lord Morley must have had in his mind, when, in supporting the Indian Councils Act last year, he specifically excluded all possibility of such assemblies ever leading to the establishment of Parliamentary government in India The sooner that is made perfectly clear the better. But just because executive self -govern- CHAP, xxvii] THE PURPOSE OF BRITISH RULE 333 ment is inconceivable in India so long as British rule is maintained, we must recognize the special responsibility that consequently devolves upon us not only to do many things for India which we do not attempt to do for our self-governing Dominions, but, above all, not to force upon India things which we should not dream of forcing upon them, and especially in matters in which British material interests may appear to be closely concerned. We must continue to govern India as the greatest of the dependencies of the British Crown, but we must do our utmost to satisfy Indians of all classes and castes and beliefs that we govern them as none of their race could govern them, with an equal and absolutely impartial regard for all law-abiding communities, with an intelligent appreciation of their peculiar interests, and with genuine consideration for all their ideas, so long as those ideas are compatible with the maintenance and security of British rule. The retirement of Lord Morley has been announced just as these last pages are going to press. The announcement has been received with genuine and widespread regret at home, where criticism of certain details and aspects of his administration has never detracted from a genuine recog- nition of the lofty sense of duty and broad and courageous statesmanship which he has displayed throughout a very critical period in the history of our Indian Empire. It will assuredly be received with the same feeling in India by all those who have at heart the destinies of the British Raj and the interests of the countless peoples committed to our charge. Lord Morley's tenure of office will remain for all times memorable in Anglo-Indian annals. He has set for the Indian ship of State a new course upon which she will be kept with increasing confidence in the future if we keep steadily before us the wise words which, with his own singular felicity of speech, he addressed two years ago 334 CONCLUSIONS [CHAP, xxvn fco the Indian Civil Service : " We have a clouded moment before us now. We shall get through it but only with self-command and without any quackery or cant, whether it be the quackery of blind violence dis- guised as love of order, or the cant of unsound and mis- applied sentiment, divorced from knowledge and un- touched by any eool consideration of facts." NOTE 1 (page 16). THE NATIVE PRESS. Not a single Indian member of the Imperial Council made any serious attempt to controvert the following description given by Sir Herbert Risley of the demoralization of the native Press when he introduced the new Press Bill on February 4, 1910 : We see the most influential and widely-read portion of the Indian Press incessantly occupied in rendering the Government by law established odious in the sight of the Indian people. The Government is foreign, and therefore selfish and tyrannical. It drains the country of its wealth ; it has impoverished the people, and brought about famine on a scale and with a frequency unknown before ; its public works, roads, railways, and canals have generated malaria ; it has introduced plague, by poisoning wells, in order to reduce the population that has to be held in subjection it has deprived the Indian peasant of his land ; the Indian artisan of his industry, and the Indian merchant of his trade ; it has destroyed religion by its godless system of education ; it seeks to destroy caste by polluting maliciously and of set purpose, the salt and sugar that men eat and the cloth that they wear ; it allows Indians to be ill-treated in British Colonies ; it levies heavy taxes and spends them on the army ; it pays high salaries to Englishmen, and employs Indians only in the worst paid posts in short, it has enslaved a whole people, who are now struggling to be free. My enumeration may not be exhaustive but these are some of the statements that are now being implanted as axioms in the minds of rising generation of educated youths, the source from which we recruit the great body of civil officials who administer India. If nothing more were said, if the Press were content to " let the lie Have time on its own wings to fly " things woul d be bad enough. But very much more is said. Every day the Press proclaims, openly or by suggestion or allusion, that the only cure for the ills of India is independence from foreign rule, independence to be won by heroic deeds, self-sacrifice, martyrdom on the part of the young, in any case by some form of violence. Hindu mythology, nncient and modern history, and more especially the European literature of revolution, are ransacked to furnish examples that justify revolt and 335 336 NOTES proclaim its inevitable success. The methods of guerilla warfare as practised in Circassia, Spain, and South Africa ; Mazzini's gospel of political Assassination ; Kossuth's most violent doctrines ; the doing? of Russian Nihilists ; the murder of the Marquis Ito ; the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna in the " Gita," a book that is to Hindus what the " Imitation of Christ " is to emotional Christians all these are pressed into the service of inflaming impressionable minds. The last instance is perhaps the worst. I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the ^sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses of preaching political murder. The consequences of this ever-flowing stream of slander and incite- ment to outrage are now upon us. What was dimly foreseen a few years ago has actually come to pass. We are at the present moment con- fronted with a murderous conspiracy, whose aim it is to subvert the Government of the country and to make British rule impossible by establishing general terrorism. Their organization is effective and far- reaching ; their numbers are believed to be considerable ; the leaders work in secret and are blindly obeyed by their youthful followers. The method they favour at present is political assassination ; the method of Maz/.ini in his worst moods. Already they have a long score of murders or attempted murders to their account. There were two attempts to blow up Sir Andrew Eraser's train and one, of the type with which we are now unhappily familiar, to shoot him on a public occasion. Two attempts were made to murder Mr. Kingsford, one of which caused the .death of two English ladies. Inspector Nanda Lai Banerji, Babu Ashutosh Biswas, the Public Prosecutor at Alipore, Sir William Curzon- Wyllie, Mr. Jackson, and only the other day Deputy Supdt. Shams-ul- Alum have been shot in the most deliberate and cold-blooded fashion. Of three informers two have been killed, and on the third vengeance has been taken by the murder of his brother in the sight of his mother and sisters. Mr. Allen, the magistrate of Dacca, was shot through the lungs .and narrowly escaped with his life. Two picric acid bombs were thrown .at His Excellency the Viceroy at Ahmedabad, and only failed to explode by reason of their faulty construction. Not long afterwards an attempt was made with a bomb on the Deputy Commissioner of Umballa. These things are the natural and necessary consequence of the teachings of certain journals. They have prepared the soil in which anarchy flourishes ; they have sown the seed and they are answerable for the crop. This is no mere general statement ; the chain of causation is clear. Not only does the campaign of violence date from the change in the tone of the Press, but specific outbursts of incitement have been followed by specific outrages. And now, Sir, I appeal to the Council in the name of all objects that -patriotic Indians have at heart to give their cordial approval to this Bill. It is called for in the interests of the State, of our officers both Indian and European, and most of all of the rising generation of young men. In this matter, indeed, the interests of the State and the interests -of the people are one and the same. If it is good for India that British rule should continue, it is equally essential that the relations between Government and the educated community should be cordial and intimate, that cannot long be the case if the organs of that community lay NOTES 337 themselves out to embitter those relations in every sort of way and to create a permanent atmosphere of latent and often open hostility. In the long run people will believe what they are told, if they are told it often enough, and if they hear nothing on the other side. There is plenty of work in India waiting to be done, but it will be done, if the energies of the educated classes are wasted in incessant abuse and suspicion of Government. As regards the officers of Government the case is clear. At all costs they must be protected from intimidation and worse. And it is our Indian officials who stand in most need of protection, for they are most exposed to the danger. The detailed work of investigation and detection necessarily falls upon them, and they are specially vulnerable, through their families. They have done most admirable work during the troubles of the last few years, and have displayed under most trying conditions courage and loyalty that are beyond all praise. We are bound in honour to protect them from threats of murder and outrage which sooner or later bring about their own fulfilment. To my mind, Sir, the worst feature of the present situation is the terrible influence that the Press exercises upon the student class. I was talking about this about a month ago with a distinguished Indian who is in close touch with schools and colleges in Bengal. He took a most gloomy view of the present state of things and the prospects of the immediate future. According to him the younger generation had got entirely out of hand, and many of them had become criminal fanatics uncontrollable by their parents or their masters. I believe, Sir, that this Bill will prove to be a wholesome and beneficial measure of national education, that it will in course of time prevent a number of young men from drifting into evil courses and ruining their prospects in life, and that in passing it this Council will earn the lasting gratitude of many thousands of Indian parents. NOTE 2 (page 29). THE SUPERIORITY OF HINDU CIVILIZATION. In an " Open Letter to his Countrymen," published at the Sri Narayan Press in Calcutta, Mr. Arabindo Ghose has in so many words proclaimed the superiority of Hindu to Western civilization. " We reject," he writes, " the claim of aliens to force upon us a civilization inferior to our own or to keep us out of our inheritance on the untenable ground of a superior fitness." NOTE 3 (page 44). SEDITIOUS PLAYS. One of the most popular of these plays is The Killing of Kichdka (Kichaka-vadd). The author, Mr. Khadilkar, was assistant editor of the Kesari until Tilak was arrested and convicted in 1908, and he then took over the chief editorship. The play has been acted all over the Deccan as well as in Bombay City to houses packed with large native audiences. The following account of it appeared in The Times of January 18 last : Founded upon the Mahabharata, The Kitting of Kichaka seems at first sight a purely classical drama. It will be remembered by Oriental students that Duryodhan, jealous of his cousin Yudhistira, Emperor of Hastinapura and the eldest of the five Pandava brothers, induced 22 338 NOTES him to play at dice with a Court gambler called Sakuni. To him the infatuated monarch lost his wealth, his kingdom, his own and his brother's freedom, and lastly that of Draupadi, the wife of all the brothers. Eventually, at the intercession of Duryodhan's father, it was agreed that the Emperor, in full settlement of his losses, should with his brothers and Draupadi abandon Hastinapura to Duryodhan for 13 years. Of these 1 2 were to be spent in the forest and one in disguise in some distant city. Should, however, the disguise of any be penetrated, all would be obliged to pass a further 12 years in the forest. When the 12 years had expired, the brothers fixed on Viratnagar, the capital of Virata, King of the Malyas, in which to spend their year of concealment. Yudhistira took the name of Kankbhat, a professional dicer, and Bhima that of Ballava, a professional cook. Under their pseudonyms all five brothers obtained posts in the King's service, while Draupadi, styling herself a sairandhri, or tirewoman, entered the service of the Queen Sudeshna. Before the year of concealment ended Kichaka, the brother of Queen Sudeshna and commander-in-chief of the Malya forces, returned from a visit to Duryodhan at Hastinapura. Duryodhan had given him as presents Yudhistira's regalia and Draupadi's jewels, and Kichaka boasted that, as Duryodhan's friend, he would one after the other kill the five Pandavas in single combat and then wed their queen. While telling King Virata's Court of his reception, his eye fell on Draupadi, and learning that she was a sairandhri and being struck with her beauty, he formally requested the King Virata that she might be sent to his harem. The King consenting, Yudhistira was faced with the dilemma of suffering his queen's dishonour or of revealing his identity. Eventually hia brother Bhima solved the difficulty by secretly killing Kichaka. It is out of this story that Mr. Khadilkar has sought for the materials of his play. It opens with the return of Kichaka to Viratnagar and his passion for the beautiful sairandhri. The latter seeks in turn the pro- tection of the King and his queen, and of Kichaka's wife Batnaprabha ; but Kichaka, who as commander-in-chief and on account of the number of bis followers is all-powerful in Malya, becomes daily more insistent. He reminds the King of his past exploits, and threatens to leave hia service, taking his followers with him. Finally, Virata is driven to make a feeble compromise. He will not himself hand over the sairandhri to Kichaka, but he will have her sent to a temple of Bairoba outside the town, washing his hands of all responsibility as to subsequent events. All this time the rescue of Draupadi has been repeatedly discussed between Yudhistira and his brother Bhima. The former is all for mild methods, feeling sure that justice will ultimately prevail. The mighty Bhima wishes to strangle Kichaka regardless of consequences. At last Bhima and Draupadi together extract from him a most reluctant permis- sion. Bhima goes secretly to the Bairoba temple, and removing from its stand the god's idol, he takes its place. So hidden, he is present when Draupadi, abandoned by the King's guards, is seized upon by Kichaka. In vain Draupadi appeals to the latter for mercy. He laughs alike at tears and menaces, and is about to carry her off in triumph when the god Bairoba is seen to rise from his pedestal. It is Bhima. He seizes the terrified Kichaka, hurls him to the floor, and strangles him at Draupadi's feet. ITS ALLEGORICAL MEANING. These things are an allegory. Although his name is nowhere uttered NOTES 330 on the stage or mentioned in the printed play, every one in the theatre knows that Kichaka is really intended to be Lord Curzon, that Draupadi is India, and that Yudhistira is the Moderate and Bhima the Extremist Party. Every now and again unmistakable clues are provided. The question, indeed, admits of no doubt, for since the play first appeared in 1907 the whole Deccan has been blazoning forth the identity of the characters. Once they have been recognized, the inner meaning of the play becomes clear. A weak Government at home, represented by King Virata, has given the Viceroy a free hand. He has made use of it to insult and humiliate India. Of her two champions, the Moderates advocate gentle that is, constitutional measures. The Extremists, out of deference to the older party, agree, although satisfied of the in- effectiveness of this course. Waiting until this has been demonstrated, they adopt violent methods, and everything becomes easy. The oppressor is disposed of without difficulty. His followers namely, the Anglo- Indians are, as it is prophesied in the play and as narrated in the Mahabharata, massacred with equal ease. And the Extremists boast that, having freed their country, they will be able to defend it against all invaders, thus averting the calamities which, according to Lord Morley, would overtake India on the disappearance of the British. It may be said that all this is mere fooling, But no Englishman who has seen the play acted would agree. All his life he will remember the tense, scowling faces of the men as they watch Kichaka's outrageous acts, the glistening eyes of the Brahmin ladies as they listen to Draupadi's entreaties, their scorn of Yudhistira's tameness, their admiration of Bhima's passionate protests, and the deep hum of satisfaction which approves the slaughter of the tyrant. NOTE 4 (page 48). SHIVAJI'S EXHORTATIONS. In the Kesari just a week before the Poona murders, the following verses were put into the mouth of Shivaji : " I delivered my country by establishing ' Swaraj ' and saving religion. I betook myself to the Paradise of Indra to shake off the great exhaustion that came upon me from my labours. Why, O my beloved ones, have you awakened me ? I planted in the soil of Maharashtra virtues that may be likened to the Kalpavriksha (one of the five trees of Indra's Paradise that yields whatsoever may be desired) ; sublime policy based on strong foundations, valour in the battlefield like that of Karma, patriot- ism, genuine unselfishness, and unity, the best of all .... Alas, alas ! all I see now is the ruin of my country. Those forts of mine to build which I poured out money, to acquire which torrents of fiery blood streamed forth, from which I sallied forth to victory roaring like a lion all those are crumbling away. What a desolation is this ! Foreigners are dragging out Lakshmi (the goddess of Good Fortune) by the hand of persecution. Along with her Plenty has fled, and with Plenty, Health. The wicked Akabaya (the goddess of Misfortune) stalks with Famine at her side through the country, and relentless Death scatters foul diseases. " Say, where are those splendid ones who promptly shed their blood on the spot where my perspiration fell ? They eat bread once in a day, but not even enough of that. They toil through hard times by tightening up their bellies. O People, how have you tolerated in the sacred places 222 340 NOTES the carrying off to prison of those holy preceptors, those religious teachers of mine, those saintly Brahmans whom I protected who, while they devoted themselves to their religious practices in times of peace, ex- changed the Darbah (sacrificial grass) in their hands for weapons which they used manfully when occasion required. The cow, the foster-mother of babes when their mother leaves them, the mainstay of the hard- worked peasant, the importer of strength to my people, whom I wor- shipped as my mother and protected more than my life, is taken daily to the slaughter-house and ruthlessly butchered by the unbelievers. How can I bear this heartrending spectacle ? Have all our leaders become like helpless figures on the chess-board ? What misfortune has overtaken the land ! " NOTE 5 (page 49). TILAK IN THE CIVIL COURTS. The Tai Maharaj case came up once more in September on the Ap- pellate side of the Bombay High Court on appeal against the decision of the Lower Courts. It was contended on behalf of Tai Maharaj, the widow, that her adoption of one Jagganath was invalid owing to the undue influence brought to bear upon her at the time by Tilak and one of his friends and political associates, Mr. O. S. Khaparde, who were executors under the will of her husband, Shri Baba Maharajah. Mr. Justice Chandavarkar, in the course of his judgment reversing the decisions of the Lower Courts, said that on the one hand they had a young inexperienced widow, with a right of ownership but ignorant of that right, and led to believe that she was legally subject to the control of the exe- cutors of her husband's will as regarded the management of the estate which she had by law inherited from her son, prevented from going to Kolhapur even to attend a marriage in a family of relations, and anxious to adopt a boy from Kolhapur as far as possible. On the other hand they had two men of influence learned in the law, taking her to an out-of-the- way place ostensibly for the selection of a boy, and then, as it were, hustling her there by representing that everything was within their dis- cretion, and thereby forcing her to adopt their nominee. In these cir- cumstances they came to the conclusion that the adoption was not valid, because it was brought about by means of undue influence exercised over Tai Maharaj by both Tilak and Khaparde. Mr. Justice Chandavarkar is a Hindu Judge of the highest reputation, and the effect of this judgment is extremely damaging to Tilak's private reputation as a man of honour, or even of common honesty. NOTE 6 (page 62). KHUDIRAM BOSE'S CONFESSION. A similar confession was made by Khudiram Bose, the author of the fatal bomb outrage at Muzafferpur. When he was brought before the District Magistrate on May 1, 1908, within twenty-four hours of the crime, he stated : I came to Muzafferpur five or six days ago from Calcutta to kill Mr. Kingsford. I came of my own initiative, having read in various papers things which incited me to ccme to this determination. These papers were the Sandhya, Hitabadi, Jugantar, and many others. They wrote NOTES 341 of great Zoolum done to India by the English Government. Mr. Kings- ford's name was not specially mentioned, but I determined to kill him because he put several men in gaol. Besides reading the papers I heard the lectures of Bpin Pal, Surendranath Banerjee, Gisputty Kabyatirtha, and others. There were lectures in Beadon-square and College-square [in the student quarter of Calcutta], and they inspired me to do this. There is also a Sanyasi who lectures in Beadon-square, who is very strong. NOTE 1 (page 84). RELIGION AND POLITICS. On this point a very important piece of evidence has been recently produced in Court in the course of the Dacca Conspiracy trial. It is a letter, of which the authenticity is beyond dispute, written by Mr. Surendranath Banerjee to one of the extremist leaders, in which he suggests means for carrying out the proposed celebration of the " boy- cott " anniversary on August 7 in spite of the prohibition of public meetings under the Seditious Meetings Act. " My suggestion," writes this distinguished politician, who is also the head of Ripon College, one of the most popular colleges in Calcutta, " is that you should organize a religious ceremony on the 7th of August such as Shdkti-puja and Kali-puja, and have Sicadeshi katka or jatra and Sicadeshi con- versation by having a sort of conference. Give a religions turn to the movement. As for the Muhammedans, if you can get them to your side, why not have a wuz followed by Swadeshi preaching? Kindly let me know what you do. But something must be done." Shakti rites and the worship of Kali are associated with some of the most libidinous and cruel of Hindu superstitions. The simultaneous attempt to attract Mahomedans by grafting " Swadeshi preaching " on to one of their accustomed religious services betrays Mr. Surendranath Banerjee *s cynical indifference to any and every form of religious creed so long as it can be exploited in the interest of his political creed. NOTE 8 (page 97). THE " REMOVAL OF INFORMERS." Shortly after the murder of Shams-ul-Alam, the following " Appeal " was printed and issued in Calcutta with reference to the " removal of informers " : HATYA NOY JAGNA. (Not Murder but Sacrifice.) Cash price : the head of a European or the heads of two informers. 50th issue Calcutta, Sunday, 6th Chaitra, 1316. Tempted by gold, some native devils in form of men, the disgrace of India the police arrested those great men Barendra Ghose and others who worked for the freedom of their country by sacrificing their interest* and dedicating their lives in the performance of the sacred ceremony of Jagna, preparing bombs. The greatest of these devils in human form, Ashitosh Biswas, began to pave for these heroes the way to the gallows. Bravo, Charu ! [the murderer of Biswas] all honour to your parents. To glorify them, to t-how the highest degree of courage, dis- regarding the paltry short span of life, you removed the figure of that 342 NOTES monster from the world. Not long ago, the Whites by force and trick, filched India from the Mahomedans. That mean wretch Shams-ul- Alam, who espoused the cause of the enemies of Alamghir Padshah, who put a stain on the name of his forefathers for the sake of gold to-day you have removed that fiend from the sacred soil of India. From Nuren Gossain to Talit Chakravarti, all turned approvers through the machinations of that fiendish wizard Shams-ul-Alam and by his torture. Had you not removed that ally of the monsters, could there be any hope for India ? Many have raised the cry that to rebel is a great sin. But what is rebellion ? Is there anything in India to rebel against ? Can a Peringhee be recognized as the King of India, whose very touch, whose mere shadow compels Hindus to purify themselves ? These are merely Western Robbers looting India Extirpate them, ye good sons of India, wherever you find them, without mercy, and with them their spies and secret agents. Last year 19 lakhs of men died of fever, smallpox, cholera, plague, and other diseases in Bengal alone. Think yourselves fortunate that you were not counted amongst those, but remember that plague and cholera may attack you to-morrow, and is it not better for you to die like heroes ? When God has so ordained, think ye not that at this auspicious moment it is the duty of every good son of India to slay these white enemies ? Do not allow yourselves to die of plague and cholera, thus polluting the sacred soil of Mother India. Our Shastras are our guide for discriminating between virtue and vice. Our Shaslras repeatedly tell us that the killing of these white fiends and of their aiders and abettors is equal to a great ceremonial sacrifice (Asyamedh Jagna.) Come, one and all. Let us offer our sacrifice before the altar in chorus, and pray that in this ceremony all white serpents may perish in its flames as the vipers perished in the serpent slaying ceremony of Janmajog. Keep in mind that it is not murder but Jagna a sacrificial rite. NOTE 9 (page 99). BENGALEE LAWLESSNESS. A very striking, and at the same time sober, picture of the conditions produced by Bengalee methods of agitation is to be found in the speech delivered at the opening of the Provincial Legislature of Eastern Bengal at Dacca on April 6, 1910, by Sir Lancelot Hare, the Lieutenant-Governor appointed in succession to Sir Bampfylde Fuller. " We have had abundant experience," he said, " in the last three years that the advocacy of the boycott at public meetings is invariably followed by acts of tyranny and brutality and illegal interference with the rights of a free people to buy and sell as they, and not as a particular set of agitators, prefer. No district officer anxious to maintain the peace of his district can allow a recrudescence of these disturbances. I have seen it denied that there have been such cases, but the state calendar of crime is there to refute such an assertion ; and you and I well know that the cases which have been brought to trial bear a very small proportion to the cases which have arisen but which the raiyats have been afraid to press home. When we remember the enormous power of the zemindar following from the unfortunate absence of any record of right upon which the tenant can lean and rely, we can well understand how a raiyat hesitates to oppose NOTES 343 his landlord's will. I have seen it claimed that such advocacy of the boycott is a constitutional right. The extraordinary fallacy of this asser- tion hardly needs refuting. With a democratic Government an appeal to the public is an appeal to the Government, as it is an appeal to the voter who appoints the member of Parliament who appoints the Government. Such a condition does not exist in this country, and when an agitator who wishes to press his views on Govern- ment says that the boycott will be preached until Government takes a particular course which Government has decided is not for the good of the people, and has announced that it will not adopt, such an appeal is not a constitutional act nor an appeal to Government but an act of defence and open resistance to Government. This Government now as always will do what it believes to be in the best interests of the people. It will always give such regard as it can to respectful repre- sentations, even when they come from a small minority only of the population ; but appeals to force and violence, appeals to the mob for race hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, do not constitute con- stitutional agitation. I would say a few words on the mischief of the boy- cott agitation. The boycott agitation has been the curse of this province for the past five years, causing endless suffering and unrest, obstructing the path of progress, exciting ill-feeling between Government and the people, and hindering their co-operation in the work of reconstitution and reform. The agitation has displayed itself in many evil forms, all tending to oppression and lawlessness. " MANY-HEADED MISCHIEF." It is difficult to review this many-headed mischief in a few words, but its main features may readily be brought to mind. First there is the economic disturbance which resulted from the enforcement of the boycott whether by persuasion or by intimidation or by force. This has been a very real mischief and a very real suffering in masy parts of the country where the cultivators found themselves unable to obtain the products to which they were accustomed at prices which they could afford to pay. Next is to be noted the violent scenes in the bazaars, where the sale of British goods was sought to be obstructed by organized force. The deplorable riot at Jamalpore, with its terrible sequel, is only one among many such scenes. A closely allied evil was the picketing of the bazaars by students and other young men, which became an intolerable nuisance until it was put down with a strong hand. The case at Jhalakati, where the young boycotters practically took possession of the bazaar, is a pro- minent typical instance. Them followed the numerous cases of inter- ference with individuals with the accompaniment of assault and mischief and criminal restraint. The long list of crimes of this nature that have been punished in due course would be wearisome to repeat. No less mischievous and perhaps even more widespread and more common have been the cases of criminal intimidation, in which notices have been posted, or letters have been sent, threatening vendors or purchasers individually or collectively with arson or murder or other outrage. Wealthy zemindars and bankers, shopkeepers of all grades, and villagers and townsfolk have alike prayed to be protected from such interference in the lawful pursuit of their ordinary avocations ; and too often it has beett impossible to afford this protection. That these threats were not mere idle extravagance has beea proved to the hilt by the grave incidents that have actually taken place. More widespread, more difficult to deal 344 NOTES with, and causing even greater suffering than these violent methods has been the social persecution which has been exercised upon those who have failed to bow down to the orders of the boycotters. This is one of the most serious chapters in the whole history of the agitation, and Government has again had to deplore the sufferings to which quiet and law-abiding persons have been subjected. The constitution of Hindu society lends itself with great readiness to this form of compulsion, and no weapon is more feared than social ostracism when ruthlessly used in pursuance of a political object. Another most grave aspect of the boycott agitation has been the constant attempt to excite disaffection against Government by public meetings, speeches, propagandist tours, newspapers, pamphlets, songs, flaunting and noisy processions, and dramatic performances. Every effort has been made to try and persuade the people that the Government is hostile, callous, and neglectful and that boycott, and its kindred measures, are the means by which to bring it to a better course. S( me of the worst offenders have been prosecuted under the law and have paid the penalty of their crimes, but it is impossible by such means to counteract or nullify the mischief that they and others have caused. YOTTTHS AND POLITICS. There remains another point which is at the present time of the most sinister significance. The promoters of the agitation conceived the deplorable idea that their propaganda might best be spread, and that their designs might best be carried out by the youths of the country. From this selection has arisen what is now the worst feature of the situation. It is impossible to condemn too strongly the use of the students and other youths to foster political aims. It has resulted in a wave of excitement amongst immature and impressionable minds throughout the affected districts. In this province in the first instance this evil exhibited itself in the constant appearance of youths in the forefront of political demon- stration, however hostile and objectionable in character. This phenom- enon was naturally accompanied by numerous instances of indiscipline among students which Government has repeatedly been obliged to denounce. The effect on the minds of the most impressionable youths, and especially among those who had a ready means of livelihood and an available occupation, has reached a pitch which was doubtless never contemplated by the more sober among those who initiated this regret- table movement. Nevertheless a series of crimes in which youths belonging to the respectable classes have been known to participate must be regarded as directly attributable to the excitement of political agitation. It is impossible to avoid mentioning in this connexion the system of national schools which was to be lauded in all three of the prohibited Conferences, and which has been encouraged in other similar meetings that are taking place. During the past few years in this Province the record of these schools is an evil one. They were established in open hostility to the State system of education, which is the true national system, and several of the most important were opened for the purpose of receiving boys expelled from or punished in other schools for taking part in political demonstra- tions of a most reprehensible character. Their subsequent history has accorded with the spirit in which they were founded and their close connexion with forms of political agitation most unhealthy for young minds has been evinced in many a regrettable incident. NOTES 345 THK OUTLOOK. If we review the present position we find that during the past year there has been some subsidence of the acute stage of the malady, or rather it has taken a different turn. The bulk of the reasonable inhabi- tants have become wearied of the senselese agitation which brings annoy- ance and suffering without doing them good. There is less active boycott and the ordinary citizen has become less amenable to the leaders of the agitation. But in spite of this, two circumstances stand out first, the local leaders have not in general abated one tittle of their efforts to enforce the boycott, and where in any locality they showed signs of resting, their chiefs are ready to urge the m forward ; secondly, the perversion of our young men has reached a most alarming stage, not merely from the point of view of the crime and the sense of insecurity that it engenders, but also from the more general aspect of the character and prospects of the rising generation. Many parents have most bitter reason to lament their failure to guide, control, and restrain their children. On the 7th August boycott celebrations occurred at the headquarters of each district of the Dacca division, and at a number of places in the interior. The boycott vow was everywhere renewed and at several meetings speeches were delivered, the tendency and object of which was to excite renewed disaffection and to stir up zeal for the cause. The observances for the 16th October were prescribed in an order of the chiefs published in the Calcutta papers, and the local leaders did their best to carry out these instructions. Rakhibandan bathing, abstinence from cooked food, and the solemn renewal of the boycott vow were the principal features. In some places public meetings were held and again the tone of several speakers was most reprehensible. District conferences and other similar meetings played their usual important part in the year's programme. In the Dacca division, Jhalakati, Faridpur, and Pangsa were selected as the theatres of those performances. The resolutions were varied in character, but however guarded and mild their phraseology, the speeches advocated boycott in its most blatant form, and sentiments were expressed tending to keep alive the most pernicious and dangerous characteristics of the political and social situation. Similar conferences, in which the boycott played a prominent part, and hi which ill-feeling against the Government was excited, were held in August and September at Pabna and Dinajpur, and in the Sylhet district in October a series of meetings took place. In a portion of the Faridpur district, the unsettled condition of which has for some time been a cause of anxiety, the inhabi- tants are mostly Namasudras. The ostensible object of these meetings was to raise the social condition of the people, but it appears from the accounts published in the Press that the Anti-Partition agitation and the boycott of foreign goods were urged and the promise of social privilege was only made as a reward or return for promising to take the boycott vow. This condition of affairs could not be permitted to continue indefinitely, and it became evident that sooner or later and the sooner the better the mischief must be stopped and the people of the province given the opportunity which they need and desire to settle down to their normal life and to co-operation with the Government for their material and moral progress. NOTE 10 (page 103). SACRIFICING " WHITE GOATS " The term occurs, for instance, in one of the most violent fly-sheets 346 NOTES issued only a few months ago from a clandestine press in India, under the heading Yagantar, killing no murder : Rise up, rise up, O sons of India, arm yourselves with bombs, despatch the white Asuras to Yana's abode. Invoke the mother Kali ; nerve your arm with valour. The Mother asks for sacrificial offerings. What does the Mother want ? The cocoanut ? No. A fowl or a sheep or a buffalo ? No. She wants many white Asuras. The Mother is thirsting after the blood of the Feringhees who have bled her profusely. Satisfy her thirst. Killing the Feringhee, we say, is no murder. Brother, chant this verse while slaying the Feringhee white goat, for killing him is no murder : With the close of a long era, the Feringhee Empire draws to an end, for behold 1 Kali rises in the East. NOTE 11 (page 125). HINDUS AND MAHOMEDANS IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE. Some statistics have been collected lately by the Moslem League with reference to the relative numbers of Hindus and Mahomedans employed in Government service in India. The figures are still subject to revision, and therefore can only be given as approximately correct. Moreover, the classification adopted does not seem to have been precisely the same in the different provinces. But even if a considerable margin is allowed for discrepancies which may yet have to be rectified, the figures quoted below for several important branches of the service are instructive : EXECUTIVE OFFICERS OF THE RANK OF DEPUTY COLLECTORS, DEPUTY MAGISTRATES, ASSISTANT COMMISSIONERS, &c. Hindus. Mahomedans. Bombay Madras Bengal Eastern Bengal Central Provinces United Provinces Punjab . 53 61 265 136 60 125 74 9 7 59 49 24 98 68 SUB-DEPUTY COLLECTORS, SUB-DEPUTY MAGISTRATES, &c. Hindus. Mahomedans. Bombay 186 3 Madras 161 11 Bengal 165 33 Eastern Bengal 107 39 Central Provinces 52 16 United Provinces 122 106 Punjab 142 90 SUB-DEPUTY JUDGES AND MUNSIFFS. Hindus. Mahomedans. Bombay Madras Bengal Eastern Bengal Central Provinces United Provinces Punjab 109 132 195 21 117 111 81 2 1 17 1 6 35 62 NOTES EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT. 347 Hindus. Mahomedans. Bombay Madras Bengal Eastern Bengal Central Provinces United Provinces Punjab 39 127 110 56 23 58 53 17 10 16 15 2 5 6 NOTE 12 (page 126). INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS SUBSIDIES TO ITS SUPPORTERS IN ENGLAND. The following resolutions passed by the Indian National Congress show that considerable financial support has been regularly given by that body towards the expenses of its London organ, India, and of the British committee it co-operates with. MADRAS, 1898. " That a sum of Rs. 60,000 be assigned for the expenses of the British Committee and the cost of the Congress publication India, and also for the expenses of the Joint-General Secretary's Office, and that the several circles do contribute, as arranged, either now or hereafter in Committee for the year 1899." AHMEDABAD, 1902. " That with a view to meet the balance required to defray the expenses of India and the British Committee a special delegation fee of Rs.10 be paid by each delegate in addition to the usual fee now paid by him with effect from 1902." MADRAS, 1903. " That a sumofRs. 10,500 be assigned for the expenses of the British Committee and that the several Congress circles do contribute the amount allotted to each." BOMBAY, 1904. " That a sum of 700 be assigned for the expenses of the British Committee and that the several Congress circles do contribute the amount allotted to each." NOTE 13 (page 145). AN ENGLISH SOCIALIST " MANIFESTO." The support given to Indian Nationalists by a certain class of politicians in England goes sometimes to such lengths that the tolerance extended to them is open to very serious question. For instance, in a London newspaper which calls itself " the Organ of Social Democracy," Justice there appeared on August 27 a " Manifesto " headed " The Infamies of Liberal Rule in India, "which contained, along with much indiscriminate denunciation of British tyranny, the outrageous statement that Savarkar, who is now undergoing trial in Bombay on grave charges, including the abetment of murder, had been arrested in England " for an alleged political offence, and in order that he might not have a fair trial defended by Council, and safeguarded by public opinion in this country, he was sent back to India, where, innocent or guilty, his condemnation could be officially ensured." In conclusion, it was stated : " We, at any rate, 348 NOTES shall take care that this little manifesto of ours shall be distributed in the native languages throughout Hindustan, in order that the population of that great Empire may know that there is an active and growing party in this island which has neither part nor lot in the outrages and crimes committed by our rulers, and that its members heartily sympathize with the legitimate efforts of Indians of all races, castes, and creeds to emancipate themselves finally from the monstrous domination under which they suffer to-day." Many loyal Indians, and indeed the disloyal ones too, may very reasonably ask whether it is right and just to allow language of this kind to be used and circulated with impunity in this country when, if it were used and circulated in India, it would at once give rise to a crimimal prosecution. NOTE 14 (page 153). INDIAN STUDENTS IN ENGLAND. An Indian Correspondent of The Times who has made a special study of the condition of his fellow-countrymen studying in England writes that it would be almost impossible for an Englishman who has never been in the East to realize the enormous difference between the life to which the student has been used and the life to which he has come. In many instances his home is in some far off lonely village. He may have been to some town to study in a Government or missionary school or college. But that has not given him an insight into English life. In the Government institution he sees little of his English teacher or professor outside lessons or lecture hours. He never has the chance of knowing an English lady. The student has little time for more than his studies, so numerous are the subjects and the prescribed text-books for Indian examinations. In the vacations the Professors go to the hills, or sail for England, and the student goes back to his village. He has acquired little or no knowledge of the English. He comes to England feeling there is a gulf between the East and the West, save in the case of a missionary interest in his soul. He is by nature extremely sensitive. On board ship he and his brother Indians keep together. The English passengers, fatigued after a period of hard work in a hot climate, have no energy left for the effort of trying to draw out and know this batch of silent Orientals. So the gulf gapes wide. If they tarry in Marseilles or Paris there are those who are anxious and ready to widen this gulf between the Indians and English. Then the student arrives in London, where a man can be more lonely than anywhere in the world. Here he has to find a dwelling. The man from a dreamy, lonely, Eastern village, from the land of the sun has to select an abode in London. Hotels and boarding houses and lodgings there are in abundance ; but the hot-el or boarding house or lodging suitable to this man's need fitted to introduce him to English life, may exist, but how is he to find it ? He is not only bewildered, he is terribly home-sick. His wish to come to England has been gratified, but oh ! for a sight of his own people and his simple home. He must drown this longing as best he may. There are many ways of drowning it in London. There are many who will assist him to forget what he had better never forget his village home. But after all there are some English people who will know him. He has found lodgings, and the landlady and her family make themselves most agreeable. He NOTES 349 knows no other English people. He wants friendliness so far away from home, so these and theirs become his friends. In London the majority of Indian students gain admission to the Inns of Court. The new regulations, which come into force in January next, were intended to render admission more difficult to attain ; but they will fail of their purpose, for success in the Oxford and Cambridge senior local examinations is a qualification for admission, and these examinations are held in various parts of India. Students will in future avoid entering the Indian Universities, but will get private coaching, and sit for these examinations in India, with a view to gaining admission to one or other of the Inns. It never seems to have occurred to the Honourable Societies of the Inns to take any steps to look after the well-being of these number- less students, who bring hundreds of pounds to their corters every year. So different is their position from that of the English student that their case merits special attention. To look after them might be unusual, it would certainly be expedient. The eating of a few dinners and attend- ance at certain lectures are no tax on the student's time. He puts off real study to the last moment. It is so easy to learn all the subjects just before each examination. With a few exceptions the English and Indian students do not speak to each other. So the Inns do not provide the Indian with society. A youth from the East, dwelling in a London lodging, finding himself for the first time in command of a banking account, with abundance of leisure, and no English friends of his own standing can he become a loyal, useful citizen of our Empire ? Some of them go to Oxford and Cambridge. They have heard in India, from some Indians who were up at these Universities from ten to fifteen years ago, how delightful the life is how sociable the under- graduates, how hospitable the dons. Surely then at these ancient seats of learning they will find friendliness, and will come to know the English. They go up only to find disappointment. The numbers have largely in- creased and all sorts and conditions of men come. Colleges are reluctant to admit them. The English undergraduate accepts any man who is good at games and ready to enter into the University life.but leaves severely alone the man of any nationality who has had no opportunity of learning English games, and who is too shy and sensitive to show what he is worth. Those who are good at games get on, the others are far from being happy. A few gain admission to colleges, the rest are " unattached." Lodging- house existence at Oxford or Cambridge is preferable to that in London ; but it does . not assist to a knowledge of the English. Foreigners at the Universities take the trouble to try and know the Indian, and extend to him that friendship which the English undergraduate, through youth- ful lack of thought, withholds. The Imperial instinct is lacking in. the youth of to-day ; else would they realize that it is an important duty to try and know fellow-subjects from a distant part of the Empire. There is nothing that Orientals will not do to make the stranger to their country feel at home. They cannot understand the reserved Occidental who leaves the stranger to his Western country all alone. Some of the Indian students think that the only way to bid for the English undergraduate's acquaintance is by a lavish expenditure on wine parties ; and so he spends largely, and acquires an acquaintance, but not with the typical English- man. If Indian students at the old Universities are only to know each Other 01 foreigners, how are they to be bound by a loyal attachment to 350 NOTES England ? At Edinburgh the gulf is wide indeed. A number of Colonial students help to make it wider. The two sides seldom or never meet. They just tolerate each other's presence. So the Indian student is tempted to seek for company in circles which do not help his education or tend to elevate him. Should such a state of things continue ? Engineering and medical students are in better case than others. Their work is so hard and exacting, if they do it aright, they have no time to feel solitude. The one complaint of engineering students is that they find it enormously difficult to gain opportunities for learning the practical side of their work. Firms are most reluctant to admit them as apprentices. France and Germany welcome them, and Continental firms extend to them the aid the English firms deny. Is it always to be so ? Other nations gaining that esteem and gratitude which England should so jealously acquire and guard. Americans, too, are winning the good will of the Indian student both in India and abroad. They have well-equipped schools and colleges all over India. They spare no efforts to make the Indian student feel they are there solely for him. They are with him in and out of school and college hours. They inspire him with their enthusiasm. Wherever they meet him they give him a grip of the hand which leaves him in no doubt as to their frank friendliness. Yet it is not to America nor to any other nation that India belongs, but to England. But there is no security in mere possession. The only safety lies in the constant effort to hold to hold pleasantly, gaining the heart and head. Surely the fact that many influences are at work systematically striving to estrange these students from England should rouse the English to effort. It may not be an easy task to gain these men. It will need patience and zeal. There must be no touch of patronage in the attempt. Their deep-rooted belief that no real friendship can exist between the English and the Indian has to be overcome ; the much misrepresentation which has made the Indian student misjudge the English character has to be counteracted and set right. It must be remembered that he is a being far away from home, excessively sensitive, situated in extremely unusual surroundings, and in most cases having lost that religious belief without which no Oriental is really happy or able to live and be his best. He is, in truth, not himself. Such is the student who is to be won to attach- ment. The difficulty of the task should appeal to the English nature. What is required is not a sudden and indiscriminate rush to seek out and know the Indian student. That would not last and would lead to much disappointment on both sides. The great need of the present is workers who know both sides and who will judiciously draw them to- gether. Connecting links to bring the right Indians into touch with the right English. They will need very special qualifications, these workers, if they are to succeed. There is enough to be done to employ the full time of exceptionally energetic men. Wonders could be worked if Eng- land only realized her duty to these men. The Indian student would return to his home at any rate with no feeling of bitterness. He would have his chance of seeing the real English, and of being influenced aright. Misconceptions would be banished. He would live in an atmosphere better adapted to hard work. He would attain a higher standard in his studies and examinations. He would be better fitted to be a useful citizen. Friendliness would, at any rate, have blunted antagonistic tendencies. And what a difference it would make to his people ! The NOTES 361 father who has spent so much on him would no longer feel that his son has lost and not gained by crossing the seas. The mother who, though behind the purdah, has eagerly been watching his career, dwelling lovingly on the weekly news, counting the days to his return, would no longer need to weep that it is not well with her son, who has come back so different from all she had hoped. Whole families would bless the England which had made their member manly, upright, better for his sojourn there, fitted to earn a living honourably, and possessed of grit to strive to do his best. And he, the student, stirred by memories of kindness in the West, would win those with whom he comes in contact to a friendlier feeling for the British race. The seditionist would find no soil here ready for his seed. Could anything be better worth accomplishing ? NOTE 16 (page 171). THE VICEROY'S EXECUTIVE COUNCIL. A Mahomedan gentleman, Mr. All Imam, has been appointed to succeed Mr. Sinha as Indian member of the Viceroy's Executive Council. He too is a leading member of the Bengal Bar, and, like Mr. Sinha, will take charge of the Legal Department. Though the selection of a Mahome- dan in succession to a Hindu cannot fail to gratify Indian Moslems, Mr. All Imam's appointment should not be altogether unacceptable to the Hindus. For when the details of the reforms' scheme were being worked out in India, he adopted, on the subject of separate electorates for the Mahomedan community, a line of his own which was applauded by the Hindus, but was very much resented by the vast majority of his co-religionists. The Government of India seemed inclined to favour his proposals, and he proceeded to England to press them upon Lord Morley. But the Secretary of State wisely decided that the pledges originally given by Lord Minto to the Indian Mahomedans must be scrupulously and fully redeemed, so as to secure to them substantial representation in the new Councils. NOTE 16 (pagelll). The first Indian Member of the Bengal Executive Council is expected to be Mr. R. N. Mookerjee, a partner in the well-known Calcutta firm of Messrs. Martin and Co., to whom I have referred (page 258) as " the one brilliant exception " amongst Western-educated Bengalees, who has achieved signal success in commerce and industry and has shown the possibility and the advantages of intelligent and business-like co- operation in those fields between Englishmen and Indians. NOTE 17 (page 212). THE WASTAGE IN INDIAN UNIVERSITIES. The most striking feature about the number of graduates at the Indian Universities is not the magnitude of their total or any increase in it, but the very high proportion of wastage. It takes 24,000 candidates at Matriculation to secure 11,000 passes, it takes 7,000 candidates at the Intermediate examination to secure 2,800 passes, and it takes 4,760 candidates for the B.A. degree to secure 1,900 passes. There are 18,000 students at college in order to supply an annual out- put of 1,935 graduates. This means that a very large number fall out 352 NOTES by the way without completing successfully their University career. The phenomenon, peculiar to India, of candidates for employment urging as a qualification that they have f ailod at a University examination (mean- ing that they have passed the preceding examination and added thereto some years of study for the next) is due to two causes, the large number of students whom the University rejects at its examinations before it grants the B.A. degree to the remainder, and the dearth of graduates. (Quinquennial Report on the Progress of Education in India for 1902- 1907, by Mr. H. W. Orange, Director-General of Education.) NOTE 18 (page 220). ENGLISH HISTORY IN INDIAN SCHOOLS. At the opening of an Educational Conference held last April in Bombay under the joint auspices of the Director of Public Instruction and of the Teachers' Association, the Governor, Sir George Clarke, alluded to some of the effects of Western education on the younger generation of Indians : "It is widely admitted by the thoughtful Indians that there are signs of the weakening of parental influence, of the loss of reverence for autho- rity, of adecadence of manners and of growing moral laxity. The restrain- ing forces of ancient India have lost some of their power ; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India. There has thus been a certain moral loss without any corresponding gain. The educated European may throw off the sanctions of religion ; but he has to live in a social en- vironment which has been built up on the basis of Christian morality, and he cannot divest himself of the influences which have formed his conscience. The educated or partially educated Indian who has learned to look on life and the affairs of men from a Western standpoint has no such environment and may find himself morally rudderless on an ocean of doubt. The restraints of ancient philosophies, which have uncon- sciously helped to shape the lives of millions in India who had only the dimmest knowledge of them, have disappeared from his mental horizon. There is nothing to take their place. Ancient customs, some of them salutary and ennobling, have come to be regarded as obsolete. No other customs of the better sort have come to take their place, and blindly to copy the superficial customs of the West is to ignore all that is best in western civilization." Commenting on his Excellency's speech, the Bombay Examiner, a weekly paper very ably conducted in the interests of the Roman Catholic missions, drew attention in the following terms to some of the causes of the mischief. (1) The study of English history in schools reveals a gradual transi- tion from an unlimited monarchy to a limited monarchy differing barely from a republic, the gradual transfer of political power from kings and aristocracy through the barons and then through the burghers and finally to the whole people. In reality this process took almost a thousand years, but in the schoolroom it is compressed into a term. The gradualness of the process, the long preparation of each class of citizens, the slow political education of the masses, all of which forms a long historical perspective, is through the medium of the text-book thrown upon the screen at once as a flat picture. It may not occur perhaps to the young mind to apply the precedent to his own country ; but as soon as he falls under the influence of the political agitator the question suggests itself : NOTES 353 If the English people thus fought their way to supremacy, why should not the Indian people do the same ? Losing sight of the perspective of history, it seems to him feasible that India should achieve in one bound what it took nearly a thousand years for the English people to bring about. (2) In studying political economy and social science he meets with such principles as these that the ruler is merely the delegate and representa- tive of the people, from whose will he derives all his power. This power is to be exercised for the well-being of the people who have conferred it, and according to their will in conferring it. The old idea that all power, even that conferred through the people, is ultimately derived from God and exercised in His Name, is of course never heard of. The ruler is a public servant of the collective nation, and that is all. To introduce this notion among a people whose idea of government has run for thousands of years on the lines of absolute monarchy and hereditary if not divine right is nothing short of revolutionary. All idea of the sacredness of authority is at once gone. The Government is a thing to be dictated to by the people, to be threatened and bullied and even exterminated if it does not comply with the nation's wishes. Hence as soon as the political agitator appears on the scene, nothing seems more plausible to the raw mind of the student than an endeavour to upset the existing order of things. This cannot, of course, all be done at once ; but at least a beginning can be made. Let us agitate for the redress of tJ us or that grievance, for the increase of native appointments, and the like ; and if we do not at once get what we ask for, let us try what bullying and intimidation can do aspiring ultimately to substitute a representative for a monarchical form of government, and having secured this, wait the opportune moment for driving the foreigner into the sea. Thus a change which, to be successful, would require the gradual educa- tion of the people for generations, is to be forced on at once ; and " if constitutional means are not sufficient to achieve our ambition, why not try what unconstitutional means will do ? " NOTE 19 (page 223). A SHAMELESS APPEAL. Perhaps the most audacious defence of the enlistment by Hindu politicians of schoolboys and students in the service of a lawless propa- ganda occurs in an article in the Bengalee of August 2, 1906, shamelessly appealing to the language of Christ. The Bengalee, which is published in English, is Mr. Surendi-anath Banerjee's organ : " In all great movements boys and young men play a prominent part, the divine message comes first to them ; and they are persecuted and they suffer for their faith. ' Suffer the little children to come unto Me,' are the words of the divinely-inspired Founder of Christianity ; and the faith that is inseparable from childhood and youth is the faith which has built up great creeds and has diffused them through the world. Our boys and young men have been persecuted for their Swadeshism ; and their sufferings have made Swadeshism strong and vigorous." NOTE 20 (page 241). THE BRAHMANS AND WESTERN EDUCATION. The special caste grievances of Brahmans against Western education are very frankly set forth in a speech on " The Duties of Brahmans," 23 354 NOTES delivered in Bombay at the beginning of this year to his fellow caste-men by Rao Sahib Joshi, a distinguished and very enlightened member of the Yajurvidi Palshikar sept of Brahmans. Mr. Joshi, who laid great stress upon the duty of loyalty to the British Raj, began by recalling the patent conferred upon them by a British Governor of Bombay at the beginning of the eighteenth century for the protection of their privileges, especially in connexion with the teaching of medicine. But their com- munity had gradually lost ground from various causes, and amongst those which he enumerated, he laid the chief stress upon the diffusion of secular education. He fully recognized the benefits of English educa- tion, but " all education being of a secular character, it made the new generation a class of sceptics. People brought up with English ideas, and in the atmosphere of secular education, now began to pay less respect to their Gurus and hereditary priests. In former days when the Guru or head priest came to one's house people used to say : ' I bow down to the Guru ; the Guru is Brahma, the Guru is Vishnu, the Guru is Shiwa ; verily the Guru is the Sublime Brahma ! ' This idea, this respect the secular English education shattered to pieces, and so the income and importance of the hereditary priests dwindled down." NOTE 21 (page 252). FEMALE EDUCATION. In his quinquennial review of the progress of education in India, Mr. H. W. Orange quotes the following remarks by Mr. Sharp, Director of Public Instruction in Eastern Bengal, on the position of female education, adding that they describe the prevailing, if not quite universal, state of affairs : " All efforts to promote female education have hitherto encountered peculiar difficulties. These difficulties arise chiefly from the customs of the people themselves. The material considerations, which have formed a contributing factor in the spread of boys' schools, are inopera- tive in the case of girls. The natural and laudable desire for education as an end in itself, which is evinced by the upper and middle classes as regards their sons, is no match for the conservative instincts of the Mahomedans, the system of early marriage among the Hindus, and the rigid seclusion of women whi ch is a characteristic of both. These causes prevent any but the most elementary education from being given to girls. The lack of female teachers and the alleged unsuitability of the curriculum, which is asserted to have been framed more with a view to the requirements of boys than those of girls, form subsidiary reasons or excuses against more rapid progress. To these difficulties may be added the belief, perhaps more widely felt than expressed, that the general education of women means a social revolution, the extent of which cannot be foreseen. ' Indian gentlemen,' it has been well said, ' may thoroughly allow that when the process has been completed, the nation will rise in intelligence, in character and in all the graces of life. But they are none the less apprehensive that while the process of education ia going on, while the lessons of emancipation are being learnt and stability has not yet been reached, while, in short, society is slowly struggling to adjust itself to the new conditions, the period of transition will be marked by the loosening of social ties, the upheaval of customary ways, and by prolonged aud severe domestic embarrassment.' There is, it is true, NOTES 355 an advanced section of the community that is entirely out of sympathy with this view. In abandoning child-marriage they have got rid of the chief obstacle to female education ; and it is among them, con- sequently, that female education has made proportionately the greatest progress in quantity and still more in quality. But outeide this small and well-marked class, the demand for female education is much less active and spontaneous. ... In fact the people at large en- courage or tolerate the education of their girls only up to an age and up to a standard at which it can do little good, or, according to their point of view, little harm." NOTE 22 (page 255). THE THEORY OF THE " DRAIN." The Master of Elibank, then Under- Secretary of State, included in his Indian Budget speech on Aug. 5, 1909, a brief but effective refuta- tion of the " drain " theory : " If the House will allow me, I wish to digress for a moment to deal with a charge that is constantly made , and has recently been repeated, to the effect that there is poverty in India which is largely due to the political and commercial drain on the country year by year, the political, it is asserted, amounting to 30,000,000 and the commercial to 40,000,000. These figures have been placed even higher by those who wish to blacken the Indian Administration in order to bolster up a malicious agitation against this country. I think it is incumbent upon the representative of the Indian Government in this House to deal with the statement. I may at once say that it has no foundation in fact. (Hear, hear.) Its origin is to be found, no doubt, in the fact that India makes annually considerable payments in England in return for services rendered, such as the loan of British capital ; but there is no justification for describing these payments as a drain, and their amount is only a fraction of the figures which I have just quoted. Let me deal first with the question of amount. As the method by which India makes her payments in England is that she exports more than she imports, all calculations as to the amount of payments must necessarily be based on the returns of Indian trade, which show by how much the Indian exports exceed her imports. If the trade returns are examined for 1904, 1905, and 1906, after making due allowance for the capital sent to India in connexion with Govern- ment transactions, the average excess of exports over imports, or in other words payments by India to England for services rendered, is 23,900,000 per year during the three years that have been mentioned. This payment is made up of, first, 21,200,000, being the average annual amount of the Government remittance during three years, which corre- sponds to the alleged political drain of 30,000,000 ; and, secondly, 2,700,000, the average annual amount of private remittances during the same period, which total has been most carefully examined and corresponds to the alleged commercial drain of 40,000,000. Now let us examine for a moment the nature of these two remittances. The Government remittance is mainly for the payment of home charges namely, those charges in England which are normally met from revenue. These charges, in the three years to which I have referred, averaged 18,250,000, made up in the following manner: Interest on debt, 9,500,000 ; payments for stores, ordered and purchased in this country, which cannot be manufactured in India, 2,500,000 ; pensions and 232 3C6 NOTES furlough pay to civil and military officers, 0,000,000 ; and miscellaneous, 1,260,000. It will thiM be scn that after deducting 0,000,000 for petition* and furlough pay, the bulk of the remittance represent* interest for railway development* and other matter** with which the interests of the people*) of India are Intimately bound up. Besides the home charges proper, certain sums were remitted to England by the Govern- ment to defray capital charge*. These bring the Government remit- tance to the total of 21,200,000 already mentioned. Now let us turn for a in- in. -iii to the supposed commercial drain of 40,000,000 per year, which, an I have endeavoured to show, in in reality 2,700,000, being the difference during the period referred to between the private rcmit- i from India, representing private profits, savings, &c., sent home to Kngland, and the private remittances to India representing the trans- mimilon of KngliMh capital to that country. We can therefore say de- finitely that wlil<-\iT India may have sent to England within the three yearn, she received from Ki^'Und an capital a tmm falling hort of that amount by 2,700,000 a year ; und perhaps I might incidentally remind tin- I (mine that at the end of 1 1)07 the capital outlay on railways al"iu- in India amounted to 2G,000,000 sterling, the bulk of which is BriUnh capital, but by no moanx reprehend 1 ! the. full amount of Britinh capital Invented in India, which hoM taken its part in commercially developing It* resource* and providing employment for the mannes of people in that great continent. Hon. member* who have followed a recent discutwinn in Ihe pug.-H of the Kconomixl an to whether 300,000,000 or 600,000,000 won the amount of Dritinh capital invented in India for it* commercial and industrial deve|i.pm< nt ami for providing employment of the people in that land, will agree that the sum could not be placed lower than 360,000,000." NOTE 23 (page 306). I'lli; SKCKKTAKY OK STATE AND THE VICEROY. This isnuo wan rained, for inntance, during the Viceroyalty of Lord Northbrook, when Lord Salinhury won Hncretory of Stale, Mr. Itcrnard Mailed 'M memoir of Lord Norlhbrook contains the following noteworthy remark* upon the nuhject by Lord Cramer, who, an Major Baring, was Private Secretary to I/ml N'ort hlironk : 'I'll, i an be no doubt that I/ml Salisbury's idea was to conduct the government of India to a very large extent by private correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy. He was disposed to neglect and, I alno I hink, to underrate the value of the views of the Anglo- Indian officials. . . . Thin idea inevitably tended to bring the Viceroy into the same relation to (lie Secretary of State for India an that in which an Ambassador or Minister at. a foreign Court ntandn to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affair*. . . . Lord Northbrook's general view was the exact opposite of all thin, and I am strongly convinced that he was quite right. ... lie recognized the (subordinate position of thn Viceroy, but he. held that Parliamant hod cmiieiT. .1 . ii.iin rigbtM not only on this Viceroy but on his Council which differentiated them in a very notable degree from subordinate officials Miirh as those in the diplomatic service. . . . I/ml Nortlilmiok regarded ( In- form of government In India on a very wise combination \\bieb enabled both purely Ktiglmh and Ariglo-Indi.-ui experience, to be brought to boar on the treatment of Indian questions. NOTES 357 11.- did !'.>( l>y any moann always follow (he Indian official view ; (nil ho hold -i (hi' tlrst place, (hat to )>\i( a-sido (hal view and not to accord (> (ho two Councils in 1/ondon and Calcutta (h<>ir (nil right* wan unconstitutional in (bin ncnso (liat. thou?:h the form might be preserved, (lio spirit of (ho Act of r.'irlinmont regulating Ibo government of India Would be evaded. In tho second place, ho hold that fi>r a Viceroy or a Secretary of state without Indian experience to overrule thono who pofwewod nuoh experience waa an oxtroin-My un\vino procrciling, and avourrd of an unduo oTerol-e ,owor of \\hioh he himself wan very unjustly acousod. ffOTK 34 (rag* 336). TIM' IMVFirriTM-x UK I.OVM, HINDUS. A nindu Rnnl Ionian "\\>* h.-i* (:Ven ;i oonsidorablo par( In (ho strviffRlo against Hrahnianiral dmloyalty aiul in(oler;>i\e.> in (ho Dooonn \\nn xon( me .-t .-.'|<\ of a letter addrwwod to (he Titncs nf India in which ho explain* (he peculiar difficulties with which loyal Hindus tln.l Mum confronted : cii hanily appn-ciate the true maRnitude of the dinienltir ,-.'Ml,n,l \\i1h in :m\ at(:.,- ne.li(i.>u. Ml Ih.- social for. ( in I lin.hi si>ci, t \ i un counter to anti-Hrahtninical n\ nl-.. The in(hionc.< which (ho Krahminn oiorciwe on the popular mind is t-lill eoiiM.leral'lo. \ n\-m \\lio is ilainne.l by (,ho villiv^o-priont or the Itrahmin kulkarni in doomed for poo.l. Ixiyalty han heon rendoivd ...li.Mis to the ordinary mind l>y this well us by many other intluenco. I My i- (lattery. Thin i a dictum now nlmost universally recognized iu the Pecc*n. A Hiipporter of (he Uoverum--i\l is a. " .lohukum." a " hireling." or ;v " traHor." The 1'rcRB haa of late become mtftlciendx powerful to make or mar (h.> r.-putation of a man o far an the native public in concerned. Kvory advocate of tJovornmont mAMUrra even of the boat of them 1 held up to ridicule by the l*rwwi. Thin in immediately reflected in (he mont exivggera(-d form in what wo m.i\ call pul'lio opinion in (he land. (Vrt.-tinly very groat courage in ncccHHitry in one who is railed upon to boar calumny Riich i> thin fn>m bin H. and his cast. men. Hut there are other foreen moro threatening ntili. The rowdier section of t ho people never fails to hoot t he man out on . \ , i \ poNoible occasion and even the women of bin family may be nuhjected to indignities. The vaklln aro a very powerful claaa in the Ileccun. M:in> of them do not openly dahlilo in politic*; but you can hardl\ (hid many among (h.m who d.> no( sympathi/.e with extremlnt politics. The landholders, (radei-s and itgricult uristn in general aro al\va\N In n>rd ( if (be Cervices or. MS (hey think, of the favour of the legal profession wh -e pro jud icon will never he wounded lry one who wiahra to conduct ;in\ pul-lie mo\omcnt. Hut iv loyal mo\.in.-nt can ncTW Mvo lUelf from comlemnat ion at the hands of this powerful clana. Although reluctantly. I must add that the lower nervleen of (he Government arc tilled li\ men w lu> passively help extremism. The\ form the bulk of the total const it uency of our public IVonn. That in a fad t,i nhow their political inelin -\tionn. Kvon they do no( henitnte to use their little art-- to \x on \ :i man known to lie " Milt i-polit ical " w h. he happeiu. to c.-nn- iu contact with them. An agriculturist friend of 358 NOTES mine who belonged to the caste to which I have the honour to belong once came to me and asked me why I was taking a particular step connected with the political movements in Kolhapur. The reason he gave for his attempt to dissuade me from participation in any anti- Brahmanical movement was that every Jain would be put to immense trouble In his dealings with pleaders and clerks simply because another Jain (in this Instance myself) was against the leaders of their caste ! Another class which always forms a check on a pro-government man is composed of the chiefs, sirdars, landholders, &c., who belong to the agitators' caste and who certainly cherish admiration for the doings of the " patriots." Many of us have to come in contact with some one or other belonging to this class and if he be known to favour anything against the great figures of the city-politics, his business is sure to be spoilt. This is in brief the doleful tale of the loyalist in the Deccan. I shall briefly touch upon one or two things with reference to what will strengthen the hands of the loyal citizen. The first thing is that the Government should boldly come forward to help on the coming into existence of A bigger class of educated men among the backward or lower classes of the Deccan. The suspicion that they too will join hands with the agitator must vanish once for all. The half-heartedness due to such lurking suspicion gives a fine tool in the hands of Government's enemies. The English people should realize the probable danger of this and should use their vast resources to create a strong body of educated men from the ranks of the loyal castes. H. H. the Maharaja of Kolhapur, in his attempts to break down Brahmanical supremacy, found nothing so useful as the bringing into being of such a class and for this he is doing the best he can. Unless this example is followed by the Government, there is no hope of a strong loyal party coming forth to combat the evil work done by Extremists. The strengthening of the loyal Press such as it exists and adding to it is another measure the Government might wisely adopt. NOTE 25 (page 331). HINDU THEORIES OF GOVERNMENT. Englishmen are apt to ignore the hold which ancient Hindu traditions concerning the rights and duties of kingship and the old Hindu theories of government derived from the sacred books of Hinduism still have on the Indian mind. They have been recently reviewed in an article contributed to The Times from a very scholarly pen. The ancient Hindu theory of government is fully disclosed in the Mahabharata, the most majestic work ever produced by the human intellect, a work, too, which is to-day as popular with Indians as when 40 centuries ago it was chanted to instruct the youth and beguile the tedium of the princes of Hastinapura. Unlike all systems of government known to the West, the Hindu system contains no popular element whatever. In it we find no Witanagemote in which the nobles may advise the monarch ; still less has it any place for a comitia centuriata, with its stormy masses of spearmen, to scrutinize and control the encroachments of the Royal prerogative. In the kingdoms described in the Mahabharata the inhabitants are rigidly divided into four wholly distinct and separate classes (Udhyog Parva, p. 67, Roy's translation). First come the Brahmans whose duty it is to study, to teach, to minister NOTES 359 at sacrifices receiving In return gifts from " known " or, as we should say, respectable persons. Then follow the Kahattriyaa or the warrior class, whose whole life has to be spent in fighting and in warlike exercises. Thirdly come the Vaisyaa who acquire merit by accumulating wealth through commerce, cattle-breeding, and agriculture. Fourthly, we have the Sudras, or serfs, who are bound to obey the other three classes, but who are forbidden to study their scriptures or partake in their sacrifices. High over all classes is the King. He is the living symbol of strength and power. He is " the tiger among men," the " bull of the Bharata race," and his form and features bear the visible impress of the Most High. The whole arduous business of government rests on his shoulders. He cannot appeal to his subjects to help him in carrying out good administration nor can he leave his duties to others. For to beseech and to renounce are both against the laws of his order (Vana Parva, p. 457). At the utmost he can employ counsellors to advise him, but their numbers must never exceed eight (Qanti Parva, p. 275). In any case they only tender advice when asked (Udhyog Parva, p. 100), and the full responsibility of all acts rests on the King only. It is he who must keep up the arsenals, the dep6ts, the camps, the stables for the cavalry, the lines for the elephants, and replenish the military storehouses with bowa and arrows. It is he who must maintain in efficient repair his six different kinds of citadels his water citadels, his earth citadels, his hill citadels, his human citadels, his forest citadels, and his mud citadels (