THE FUTURE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT Before considering the case for self-government in British India, a few words may be said about the semi-independent Native States. There is an interest attaching to these Native States which is twofold for the political observer. They present in the first place a picture, instructive if not entirely accurate, of the India of past days, and so serve in some measure as landmarks and records of the changes for good and evil our rule has caused. And secondly, they afford indications of the real capacity for self-government possessed by the indigenous races. When one has seen a native court, with its old-world etiquettes, its ordered official hierarchies, and its fixed notions, one learns something, which no amount of reading could teach, about the tradition of paternal government long swept away in Madras and Bengal. One recognizes how much there was that was good in the past in the harmonious relations of governors and governed, in the personal connection of princes and peoples, in the tolerance which gave to each caste and creed its recognized position in the social family. One is surprised to find how naturally such adverse elements as the Hindu Brahmin and the Mohammedan nobleman lay down together under a system which precluded class rivalry, and how tolerant opinion was in all the practical details of life. One does not readily imagine from the mere teaching of history the reason which At the same time it is abundantly clear that in all that constitutes intellectual life the India of old days, as represented in the still independent States, was far more than a century behind the India of our day. Mental culture is at the lowest ebb in the capitals of the native princes. They possess neither schools on any large plan, nor public libraries, nor are books printed in them nor newspapers published. I was astonished to find how in the centre of busy intellectual India large flourishing towns were to be found completely isolated from all the world, absorbed in their own local affairs, and intellectually asleep. At certain of the native courts history is still represented by the reciter of oral traditions, letters by the court poet, and science by professors With regard to their material prosperity, as contrasted with British India, I can only speak of what I have seen. The territories of the native princes are for the most part not the most fertile tracts of India; and one cannot avoid a suspicion that their comparative poverty has been the cause of their continued immunity from annexation. Nearly the whole of the rich irrigated ricelands of the peninsula are now British territory; and the estates of the Nizam, and the two great Mahratta princes Holkar and Scindia, comprise a large amount of untilled jungle. These countries possess no seaports or navigable rivers, and their arable tracts are not of the first order of productiveness, while the Rajput princes are lords of districts almost wholly desert. It would be, therefore, misleading to compare the material wealth of the peasantry in any of these States with those of Bengal or the rich lands of the Madras coast, for the conditions of life in them are not the same. But, poor land compared with poor land, I think the comparison would not be unfavourable to the native States. I was certainly struck in passing from the British Deccan below Raichore into the Nizam’s Deccan with certain signs of better condition in the latter. Most of the Nizam’s villages contain something in the shape of a stone house belonging to the head man. The flocks of goats, alone found in the Madras Presidency, are replaced by flocks of sheep; and one sees here and there a farmer superintending his labourers on horseback, a It must not, however, be supposed that in any of the native States the ancient economy of India has been preserved in its integrity. Free trade has not spared them more than the rest. Their traditional industries have equally been ruined, and they suffer equally from the salt monopoly; while in some of them the British system of assessing the land revenue at its utmost rate, and levying the taxes in coin, has been adopted to the advantage of the revenue and the disadvantage of the peasant. On the whole the agricultural condition of the Hyderabad territory seemed to me a little, a very little, better than that of its neighbour, the Madras Deccan, and I believe it is a fact that it is attracting immigrants from across the border. The Rajput State of Ulwar, where I also made some inquiries, was represented to me as being considerably more favourably assessed than British Rajputana. The best administered districts of India would seem to be those where a native prince has had the good fortune to secure the co-operation of a really good English assessor, allowing him to assess the land, not with a view to immediately increased revenue, but the true profit of the people. Such are to be found in some of the Rajput principalities, where the agricultural class is probably happier, though living on a poor soil, than in any other part of India; for the assessor, freed from the necessity which besets him in British territory of raising a larger revenue than the district can quite afford, and With regard to the town population, I found the few independent native capitals which I visited exhibiting signs of well-being in the inhabitants absent in places of the same calibre under British rule. With the exception of Bombay, which is exceptionally flourishing, the native quarter, even in the Presidency towns, has everywhere in British India a squalid look. The “Black Town” of Madras reminds one disagreeably of Westminster and the Seven Dials: and there is extreme native misery concealed behind the grandeur of the European houses in Calcutta. The inland cities are decidedly in decay. Lucknow and Delhi, once such famous capitals, are shrunk to mere shadows of their former selves; and there is a distrustful attitude about their inhabitants which a stranger cannot fail to notice. The faces of the inhabitants everywhere in Northern India are those of men conscious of a presence hostile to them, as in a conquered city. In the Nor is the cause of the better condition far to seek. Whatever revenue the native court may raise from the people is spent amongst the people. The money does not leave the country, but circulates there; and, even where the profusion is most irrational, something of the pleasure of the spending remains, and is shared in and enjoyed by all, down to the poorest. In British India the tamachas of governors-general and lieutenant-governors interest no one but the aides-de-camp and their friends; and a large portion of the revenue goes clean away every year, to the profit of other lands and other peoples. Of the administration of justice in the native States I had no opportunity of forming an accurate opinion, but I am willing to believe that it is less Having said this much about the native States, in which there is as yet no clamour for reform, I will go on to the question, one quite apart from them, of British India proper. Unless I have wholly failed to make my reasoning clear, readers of these essays will by this time have understood that, in answer to the question propounded at the outset of this inquiry—namely, whether My argument, in a few words, has been this: seeking the balance of good and evil, I have found, on the one hand, a vast economic disturbance, I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts to starvation, deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth accumulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands; the public revenue spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that the India of 1885 is not a poorer country, take it altogether, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. I believe, in common with all native economists, that its modern system of finance is unsound, that far too large a revenue is raised from the land, and that it is only maintained at its present high figure by drawing on what may be called the capital of the country, namely, the material welfare of the agricultural class—probably, too, the productive power of the soil. I find a large public debt, and foresee further financial difficulties. Again, I find the ancient organization of society broken up, the interdependence of class and class disturbed, the simple customary law of the East replaced by a complicated jurisprudence imported from the West, increased powers given to the recovery of debt, and consequently increased facilities of litigation and usury. Also great centralization of power in the hands of officers daily more and more automatons and less and less interested in the special districts they administer. In a word, new machinery replacing, on many points disadvantageously, the old. I do not say that all these things are unprofitable, but they are not natural to the country, and are costly out of proportion to their effect of good. India has appeared to me at best in On the other side, I have found an end put to the internecine wars of former days, peace established, security for life given, and a settled order of things on which men can count. I have never heard a native of India underrate the advantage of this, nor of the corresponding enfranchisement of the mind from the bondage in which it used to lie. A certain atmosphere of political freedom is necessary for intellectual growth. Where men were liable to fine, imprisonment, and death for their opinions there could be no general advance of ideas, and the want of personal liberty had for centuries held India in mental chains. No one had dared to think more wisely than his fellows, or, doing so, had speedily been stopped by force from teaching it to others. But under English rule, with all its defects, thought has been free, and men who dared to think have kept their heads, so that a generation has sprung up to whom liberty of opinion has seemed natural, and with it has come courage. The Indians in the towns are now highly educated, write books, found newspapers, attend meetings, make tours of public lectures, think, speak, and argue fearlessly, and an immense revival of intellectual and moral energy has been the result. It is not a small thing, again, that the gross licence of the old princely courts has given place to a more healthy life—that crime in high places is no longer common; that It would, therefore, be more than rash for Indian patriotism to condemn the English connection. Nor does it yet condemn it. There is hardly, I believe, an intelligent and single-minded man in the three Presidencies who would view with complacency the prospect of immediate separation for his country from the English Crown. To say nothing of dangers from without, there are dangers from within well recognized by all. The Indians are no single race; they profess no one creed, they speak no one language; highly civilized as portions of their society are, it contains within its borders portions wholly savage. There are tribes in all the hills still armed with spear and shield, and the bulk of the peaceful agricultural population is still in the rudest ignorance. The work of education is not yet complete, or the need of protection passed. All recognize this, and with it the necessity for India still of an armed Imperial rule. Were this withdrawn, it is certain at least that the present civilized political structure could not endure, and it is exceedingly doubtful whether any other could be found to take its place. I do not myself see in what way the issue of a rupture could be made profitable to the Indian nations, nor do I understand that the exchange from English At the same time I recognize that it is impossible the present condition of things should remain unchanged for more than a very few years. For reasons which I have stated, the actual organization of Anglo-Indian government has become hateful to the natives of India, and however much their reason may be on the side of patience, there is a daily increasing danger of its being overpowered by a passionate sentiment evoked by some chance outbreak. Nor do I believe that it will be again possible for England to master a military revolt, which would this time have the sympathy of the whole people. Moreover, even if we should suppose this fear exaggerated and the evil day of revolt put off, there is yet the certainty of a Government by force becoming yearly more costly and more difficult to carry on. It is a mistake to suppose that India has ever yet been governed merely by the English sword. The consent of the people has always underlain the exercise of our power, and were this generally withdrawn it could not be maintained an hour. At present the Indian populations accept English rule as, on the whole, a thing good for them, and give it their support. But they do not like it, and were they once convinced that there was no intention on the part of the English people to do them better justice and give them greater liberty than they have now, they might without actual revolt make all government impossible. It cannot be too emphatically stated that our Indian administration exists on the goodwill of the native employÉs. What then, in effect, should that reform be, and towards what ultimate goal should reformers look in shaping their desires and leading the newly awakened The Indian Government as at present constituted is a legacy from days when the advantage of the natives of India was not even in name the first object with its rulers. Its direct ancestor, the East India Company, was a foreign trade corporation which had got possession of the land, and treated it as a property to be managed for the exclusive advantage The government of the country was then vested in a Board of Directors sitting at the India House, and delegating their executive powers to a civil service of which they themselves had in most instances been originally members, and whose traditions and instincts they preserved. It was a bureaucracy pure and simple, the most absolute, the closest, and the freest of control that the world has ever seen; for, unlike the bureaucracies of Europe, it was subject neither to the will of a sovereign nor to public opinion in any form. Its selfishness was checked only by the individual good feeling of its members, and any good effected by it to others than these was due to a certain traditional largeness of idea as to the true interests of the Company. It was only on the occasion of the renewal of the Company’s charter that any interference could be looked for from the English Parliament and public; and so it continued until the Mutiny. In 1858, however, the Company as a Company The explanation of so great a failure I believe is this. When the sovereign power was transferred from the Company to the Crown, it was considered convenient to preserve as far as possible the existing machinery of administration. The East India Company had formed a civil service composed of its own English nominees, whose interests had gradually The only real change introduced in 1858 was to substitute appointment by examination for appointment by nomination; but the composition of the service has remained practically the same, and the English covenanted civilian is still, as he was in the days of the Company, the practical owner of India. His position is that of member of a corporation, irremovable, irresponsible, and amenable to no authority but that of his fellow-members. In him is vested all administrative powers, the disposal of all revenue, and the appointment to all subordinate posts. He is, in fact, the Government, and a Government of the most absolute kind. But the covenanted Civil Service is also a wholly conservative body. Composed though it may be admitted to be in large part of excellent and honest men—men who do their duty, and sometimes more than their duty—it has nevertheless the necessary vice of all corporations. Its first law is its own interests; its second only those of the Indian people. Nor is it casting a reflection on its members to state this. There has never been found yet a body of men anxious to benefit the world at large at the expense of its own pocket; and the Indian Civil Service, which is no exception to the rule, sees in all reform an economy of its pay, a curtailment of When, therefore, I say, in common with all native reformers, that the first reform of all in India must be a reform of its covenanted Civil Service, I am advocating primarily the removal of an obstruction. But the covenanted service is also at the present day an anachronism and an entirely needless expense. Fifty, and forty, and even twenty-five years ago, it may have been necessary to contract on extravagant terms and for life with Englishmen of education, in order to obtain their services in so remote a country as India then was. Such men a generation since were comparatively rare, and the India House, and after it the India Office, may have been right in establishing a special privileged service for its needs, and in granting the covenants it made with them. But modern times have altered all this, and now the supply of capacity is so great that quite as good an article can be obtained without any covenant at all. The commercial companies have all long ago abandoned the old idea, and get their servants for India now as for other parts of the world, in the open market; nor do they find the quality inferior because they enter into no lifelong engagements with them. And so also the Indian Government must do in times to come if it is to keep its head financially above water. It is altogether absurd at the present day to contract with men on the basis of their right to be employed and pensioned at extravagant rates as long as they live. It is not done in the English diplomatic service, whose duties are somewhat similar, nor in any other civil service that I know of. I feel certain that as good Englishmen could be obtained now at a third Instead of the covenanted Civil Service, therefore, there would be an uncovenanted service obtained in the open market, and endowed with no more special privileges than our services at home. The members of this would then be under control and, in a true sense of the word, the servants of the State. Now they are its masters. That they are its masters has been abundantly proved by the success of their efforts to thwart Lord Ripon’s policy during the last three years. Lord Ripon came out to India on the full tide of the Midlothian victory, and quite in earnest about carrying out Midlothian ideas; nor has he faltered since. But the net result of his viceroyalty has been almost nil. Every measure that he has brought forward has been defeated in detail; and so powerful has the Civil Service been that they have forced the Home Government into an abandonment, step by step, of all its Indian policy. This they have effected in part by open opposition, in part by covert encouragement of the English lay element, in part by working through the English press. When I arrived in India I found Lord Ripon like a schoolboy who has started in a race with his fellows and who has run loyally ahead, unaware as yet that these have stopped, and that all the world is laughing at his But if the covenanted Civil Service is an obstructive and burdensome legacy from the defunct Company, so too is the constitution of the Indian Government in London. In 1858, when the Company came to an end, the India House was replaced by the India Office, and the Board of Directors by the Indian Council: a change which was doubtless intended to signify much, but which in practice has come to signify hardly anything at all. The India Office represents of necessity the traditions of the past, and the Council, which was designed to check it, has proved a more conservative and acquiescent body than even the old Board of Directors, its prototype and model. The reason of this is obvious. The Council, composed as it is almost exclusively of retired civil or military servants, views Indian matters from the point of view only of the Anglo-Indian service. It is even less amenable than this is to the influence of new ideas, and is more completely out of touch with modern native thought. Its experience is always that of a generation back, not of the present day, and it refuses, more persistently even than the younger generation in active service, to admit the idea of change. Thus the Secretary of State, who is dependent on this blind guide, is in no other position at home than is the Viceroy in India. Ignorant, as a rule, of all things Indian, and dependent for advice on the India Office and his Anglo-Indian Council, he never gets at the truth of things, and blunders blindly on as they direct. It is almost impossible for him, however robust his will, to hold his own as a reformer. The reforms, therefore, at home and in India which native opinion most strongly and immediately It is obvious, however, that such initial changes are a first step only in the direction of reforms infinitely more important. What India really asks for as the goal of her ambitions is self-government—that is to say, that not merely executive but legislative and financial power should be vested in the native hands. At present the legislative authority of each Presidency resides in the Governor in Council, and there is no system whatsoever of popular representation, even of the most limited kind. The Councils are composed wholly of nominees, and, except in very small measure, of English official nominees, and their functions are limited to consultation and advice, for they are without any real power of initiative or even of veto. In each of these Councils a few natives have been given places, but they are in no sense representatives of the people, being, on the contrary, nominees of the Government, chosen specially for their subservience to the ideas of the Governor of the day; and their At the same time, I would not be understood as advocating for India anything in the shape of an Imperial parliament. Empires and parliaments to my mind have very little in common with each other; and India is far too vast a continent, and inhabited by races far too heterogeneous, to make amalgamation in a single assembly possible for representatives elected on any conceivable system. Possibly in the dim future some such thing might be, but not in the lifetime of any one now living, and any attempts of the sort at present would find for themselves the inevitable fate of the Tower of Babel. The Imperial power should, on the contrary, if it is to be effective, remain in the hands of a single man; and instead of weakening the Viceroy’s authority I would rather see it strengthened. But with the provinces and for all provincial affairs, self-government is a growing necessity, and the present age is quite capable of witnessing it in practice. The crying need of India is economy, and for this the decentralization of finance is the only cure. Each province should have its own budget and its own civil lists, which should be voted annually by the Council of the province. Its civil service should be its own, its police its own, and its public works its own, without any right of interference from Calcutta, or any confusion of provincial with Imperial accounts. At present, from the vastness of the country ruled, and the variety of Imperial services which have their seat at Calcutta or Simla, waste and jobbery receive no adequate check. Places are multiplied, men without local knowledge are employed, and the accounts are confused. Supervision I should like, therefore, to see each province of India entirely self-managed as regards all civil matters, raising its own revenue in its own way, providing for its own needs of internal order, public works, and administration of all kinds, and controlled by the constant supervision of its own provincial assembly. In this way it would be possible to differentiate at once between the various provinces as to their special needs and the composition of their special services. In some the expenditure, and with it the taxation, might be at the outset reduced by the employment almost entirely of native servants; in others the substitution of native for English service would have to be more gradual. In some, large public works might be profitably afforded; in others, economy would have to be the rule. In all there would be an incentive to reduce unnecessary expenditure, seeing that the burden of providing for it would fall directly on the province. On the other hand it is clear that, as long as India remains under the protection of England, certain charges on the revenue and certain executive and With regard to the army, there can be no doubt that the charge should be an Imperial one, for though Southern India has little need of troops to preserve order within her borders, she enjoys, in common with the North, that immunity from invasion which the army alone can guarantee, and she should have an equal share of the burden of its cost. To adopt a system of provincial armies would, in my view of the case, be both a mistake of economy, and an injustice to those provinces which lie upon the frontier, as well as a considerable danger from the rivalries they might engender: a mistake of economy, inasmuch as the higher commands would be multiplied, and the less warlike provinces would at an equal cost provide inferior material to the general strength of the empire; an injustice, inasmuch as the North-Western provinces would have to bear nearly the entire burden of defence. Strongly, therefore, as I advocate decentralization in all matters of civil administration, I as strongly advocate centralization in matters military. The Imperial army, according to my ideas, should be under the sole control of the Viceroy, officered, I think, by Englishmen, and composed of the best fighting material to be obtained in India, irrespective of prejudice in favour of this or that recruiting ground. It is manifestly the first condition of an army that it should be efficient, and the second that it should be without political colour, and on both grounds I am inclined to think that Englishmen would prove more useful servants to India in a military capacity than any The diplomatic relations, again, of India must of necessity remain Imperial, and their management vested solely in the Viceroy. Indian diplomacy, as at present managed, is a complicated and costly thing; but in the India of the future we may hope this will be much simplified. Two cardinal points of policy might with advantage be observed: the first, to keep wholly apart from foreign intrigues and foreign wars; the second, to keep rigid faith with the still independent native princes within the border. Of foreign wars India has long had enough, and more than enough. The Chinese, the Persian, the Afghan, the Abyssinian, the Egyptian, and now the Soudanese, all these India has been forced to take part in, solely against her interest and her will. Apart from their money loss, there is in these wars a loss of dignity, which the Indian people are beginning to resent. Those who have been educated in the humane literature of Europe find it humiliating that they, a conquered people, should be used With regard to the Debt, much as we may regret that it was ever incurred, it must remain, I fear, in our new India a charge on the Imperial Government. Its annual interest, like the cost of war and diplomacy, should be apportioned as a fixed charge to each province in proportion to that province’s wealth, except in so far as it relates to the guarantees of railways, which might be made a charge on the provinces served by them. It should, however, be a cardinal point of policy that no further debt should be incurred and no further guarantees given for Imperial works. The provinces henceforth should be charged with all works of communication, irrigation, and improvement, the utility of which they will best appreciate. Remain the Customs. These too must remain an Imperial matter; and it may be hoped that when, in Such, very briefly and imperfectly given, is my scheme of self-government for India. That it is one possible—I do not say easy—to realize few will doubt who have marked the wonderful success achieved in a case not very dissimilar nearer our own shores. The Empire of Austria, within the recollection of men of the present generation, was a bureaucratic despotism of the harshest and least sympathetic kind. It had got within its rule, by conquest or inheritance, a half score of nations, owning no ties of birth or language, and united only by a common hatred of their oppressors. The Austrian official of 1847 was a byword of arrogance and self-sufficient pride, and while vaunting to the world the virtues of his own method of rule, was preparing the way for a general revolt against the Empire. Few who watched the history of those days believed that Austria was not doomed to perish, and none that she was destined to achieve the love of her people. Yet we have lived to see this. We have lived to see the Hungarians reconciled, and the very Poles who in their despair had filled Europe for fifty years with their denunciations, thanking Austria for her share in their ruin. If this has been possible through the gift of self-government, I dare not, however, dwell too much upon this prospect. I know the huge perils which surround the birth of every new thing in the political world, and I know the unscrupulous rage of vested interests threatened. The interests of the Anglo-Indians stand stoutly in our way, and the interests of an ever more hungry commerce and an ever more pitiless finance. Commerce and finance find their gain in the present system. Manchester must be appeased before India can hope to live, and to stop suddenly the career of Indian extravagance would |