CHAPTER XII
THE NEW CIVILIAN

India may be regained. How could that be done?

The first point is the personnel of the Indian Civil Service, which holds all important offices in India, forms the Government, and fills most of the places on the Indian Council at home.

It depends, as I have said, for its success not upon the ability, but on the personality of its members. India was achieved by personality and successfully governed by personality. It is personality alone that humanises rule and makes it tolerable, that stands between the people and rigid law, and can create that sentiment which alone binds ruler and ruled together.

How can that necessary personality be restored to it?

That this lack of personality does not affect only the Indian Civil Service is a matter of notoriety. It is exactly what our generals deplored after the Boer War—that the ordinary officer had no personality. It is a matter of common remark nowadays how exactly alike all the young men are, echoing sentiments that are not theirs. It is what the Germans say of us and the Americans, who especially admire and try to cultivate personality. We once stood before the world as a nation of personalities. We do so no longer.

To what is this due? Not to natural deficiency, because all children abound in personality. It is due to what is called "education." That too is no new discovery of mine, but a matter of common knowledge and publicity. Read, for instance, Harold Gorst's The Curse of Education. In Paine's Life of Mark Twain, systematic training is called "a blight." Neither is it a new thing. The Duke of Wellington said Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton—not in the schools, be it noted. Yet in those days education was nothing like so rigid as it is now. Then take the notable Englishmen of the last fifty years; how few have been University men—many not public school men. Cobden and Bright, Chamberlain, Beaconsfield, Dickens and Kipling, Stanley, Captain Scott, and other pioneers of Empire, Huxley and Kelvin, all the great captains of industry. The two most prominent members of the Government to-day are not University men. Even where notable men were University men they did not attain their stature till they had thrown off its bonds. Gladstone was, for instance, the hope of the stern, unbending Tories till he had achieved his liberty, when he could think for himself. Yet even then he only achieved political, and never spiritual, freedom. Cecil Rhodes said that University dons were as children in some matters; meaning, however, ignorant and not ready to learn, which is not a child's attitude.

Therefore the fault lies with the "education."

What is Education?

There are two things that go to the proper upbringing of a child, and though they overlap in places they are distinct and even sometimes contradictory; one is Instruction, and the other is Education.

Reading and writing, arithmetic, and all information obtained from books or lectures or teachers is instruction; the bringing out of the powers of the child's own mind is education. The object of instruction is to enable the child to better his education. In itself it has no value. The mere acquirements of reading and writing—the mere accumulation of book knowledge—are in themselves worthless. "The learned fool is the biggest fool." They are only good insomuch as they help education.

What is education? It is the drawing out of a child's mind so that it can see life as it is, not a mere mass of phenomena, but a consequence of underlying causes; it is the exercising of his faculties of right judgment to meet events as they arise; it is an ability to gauge himself and others. Education is the cultivation of personality. It is to the child what careful gardening is to the tree—a help to growth so that it can develop its potentiality. The gardener helps each tree to put forth that essential quality of its own that differentiates it from all other trees and makes it a thing of use and beauty to the world. It is not a reduction to a common type or the standardisation of growth, because while the tree must harmonise with the rest of the garden it must have an individuality of its own.

That is education, and that alone is education. Instruction is simply providing the necessary food for growth, or giving the necessary weapons or implements to obtain that food. All instruction that does not directly tend to nourish personality is worse than waste—it occupies nerve and energy that are wanted for better things.

This is simple enough, yet the world is full of fallacies on the subject. Here is one from a well-known writer: "How can you draw out of a child a love for clean collars, Greek accents, the date of Bannockburn, or how to eat asparagus."

Well, you can only draw out a child's love for these things by helping him to see that the acquisition of them is a step towards a result the child desires to reach. Now Greek accents are only useful to a child who wishes to become a Greek tutor, and the date of Bannockburn is useful to no one because it can always be looked up if necessary; therefore no children have a taste for the latter, and not one in a thousand for the former. They are not education at all, and even as instruction they are worthless. A love of clean collars and how to eat asparagus can be drawn out of children by simply making them realise that unless they have their love for these things they will expose themselves to ridicule or contempt for no good purpose. For be it noted that until you do awaken this self-respect you will not get a child to put on clean collars enthusiastically, or be careful about asparagus. Instruction in such matters is useless—you must have education.

The man or woman properly educated will desire the right things, and will seek the right way of attaining these things. His actions will spring from a real living force within him. But if you teach him to do things because he is told or because it is the custom, you injure his personality; and as there is no driving force in a law or a custom, which are bonds, you confine him, whereas you should free him. It is an admission that he must not or cannot think for himself, but must blindly follow custom. It is true that he must, not only in boyhood but all through his life, yield obedience in act to persons, governments, or rules; but he must not do so blindly. It is a principal part of education to make the boy see for himself that such subordination of act is necessary to the progress of the world, because as individuals we can accomplish no great thing; then he will do it willingly, knowing its necessity. But it is equally necessary that the boy never subordinate his judgment to others, because any rule made absolute is death to progress, and there is no authority, nor rule, nor convention that should not be broken sometimes; and as time goes on all must be modified, changed, and relaxed; the ideal of education being that all authority will become unnecessary, as people will desire what is right, and do it proprio moto. The truth will have made them free.

Now seeing this difference, how much education is there in school or college? In the classrooms there is none. All that is given in classes is instruction, which may be useful or detrimental inasmuch as it helps personality or not. Usually it is detrimental, because it substitutes "authority" for insight. The child must accept something, not because he is helped to see that it is true, but because "somebody says so." Thus his personality is destroyed.

The only education he gets is in the playing-fields. There he learns to keep his temper, play the game, and co-operate, of his volition, with others to a desired end.

That is a valuable training, but it does not go very far. He is never taught to see life as it is for himself. On the contrary, he is forbidden to do so.

And this continues now till the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, so that by the time it is over the most receptive period of life is past. Bacon went to the University at thirteen, and left it at sixteen as he found it had no more to teach him.

Further, until some thirty or forty years ago a father considered that he owed some duty to his son—to help him, to lead him, to initiate him into life.

No one can do this but a father. No one can understand his son like a father and know what it is necessary for him to learn; to no one will the son listen, or confide in, as his father. But nowadays I notice that fathers have abdicated. They consider their duty fulfilled if they pay for the boy's schooling, and everything is left to the schoolmaster. Many fathers that I know are quite stranger to their sons. Mothers, on the contrary, strive more and more to obtain influence over their sons and bring them up in the principles of women. But a man must be a man or be nothing.

There is another and very considerable difference between schools now and the schools of sixty years ago and before. In the earlier period the schoolmasters were rarely clergymen; now they are practically always so; and not only that, but boys nowadays are far more under control and influence of their masters than they were.

Now whatever good points may be claimed for Church teaching by those who believe in it, there will, I think, be no difficulty about the admission that the frame of mind, the outlook on the world, of ecclesiastics is not suitable for men who have to lead an active life. It is, in fact, the very reverse of what a man requires whose first duty it is to understand the world and to lead the world. For to the ecclesiastic the world is a bad place, it has to be borne as best it can, to be condemned not understood, and all effort is directed not to this world but to some other. Moreover, the habit of thought of ecclesiastics is fixed. They believe that not only is truth absolute, but that they possess it or some of it; the very foundation-rock of their belief is authority, and freedom of thought is disliked by them as subversive of their tenets. Their principal qualities are those of submission, patience and obedience, not merely in act but in thought.

Now boys are apt to imitate their masters, and however secular a course of education may be, if it be given by ecclesiastics the boys are certain to be a great deal influenced by their master's outlook on life. That accounts for much of the pessimism that is observable, for the "unnatural mildness" of the modern young man. If you keep a boy under ecclesiastical habits of thought till he is twenty-three, how can he ever escape into the fresh air of free inquiry? How will he ever love the world instead of despising it? And no good work was ever done except by men who loved the world; and love comes from understanding, not from aloofness.

A boy's education should be directed from an early age towards the work he is to perform in life. What department of the public service is now held to be the best served? Is it not the Navy? And naval officers are caught young and trained ad hoc; not a narrow professional training, but none the less a training with an object. The present training of Indian civilians up till twenty-three is objectless, and therefore inefficient. That in the Army the special training is begun much later may account for the complaints of army officers wanting personality compared with naval officers.

With engineers and all specialised work the training begins young.

But the Indian civilian is ecclesiastically trained till he is twenty-three. Then he has to learn his work. Could there be a greater absurdity?

What then should be done?

In the first place he should be caught young. The work of the Indian civilian is as important to England as that of the sailor; it is even more specialised and difficult. He should be trained for it from fourteen or thereabouts, not from twenty-three.

It should be determined what special qualities are necessary for a good Indian civilian. I think some of them are obvious enough.

A good physique and a liking for sport.

Good manners and a knowledge of etiquette.

Discipline in act.

Freedom and courage in thought.

Knowledge of life and humanity as they are round him.

Let us consider these.

That physical fitness is the first necessity all will allow. The climate is severe and takes a great deal out of him, especially in the hot weather; there must be exposure in the districts; the work is hard and difficult, and makes great demands upon the physique. Therefore the physique must be good.

And a medical certificate of soundness is no guarantee of this. A man may be medically quite sound and yet so prostrated by the heat as to find his temper and his work affected. His physique lies at the base of all his work, and must be good. Nothing is now done to secure this; no investigation has ever been made as to the type that endures heat the best. Yet undoubtedly there is such a type. In that extraordinary book, A Modern Legionary, it is pointed out that in Tonquin, amongst the men of the Legion, a certain type stood the climate better than the others. Whenever any special service had to be performed it was men of a certain sanguine type that were chosen. Not that they were physically stronger or braver than the others, but because even in the greatest heat they retained a certain buoyancy of temperament which the darker types lost.

I have myself noticed something of the sort in Burma and India. Of course mere personal observation of this sort proves nothing, but the subject seems to deserve investigation. That all people do not bear heat and cold alike is undoubted. In the Russian campaign of 1812 it was the Italians who stood the cold best of all Napoleon's troops.

Anyhow, the cadet should have not merely a sound physique but a buoyant physique, and that cannot be ensured under the present system.

Then he should be made a good sportsman; for the Indian civilian no training is more necessary than this. I do not mean only a cricketer or football player; neither of these games is of much use out in the East. I mean a rider who is also fond of horses; a shot who is also interested in birds and animals.

There is in all sportsmen of this kind a quality which no one else has. I cannot define it. It comes, I think, from association with people out of his own rank in one pursuit, from having to go to them for knowledge he has not got himself and thereby recognising their value, from a subtle sympathy with nature as not apart from man, nor a setting for man, but another manifestation of the same Life that is in man. Nothing is more valuable in enabling a District Officer to keep his mind sweet. Official work is all concerned with the faults and shortcomings of others, wherein you are judge and they are culprits. Official work divides; it insensibly leads you to believe that all men are liars and robbers, and are trying to deceive you. Throw it aside, and go out to shoot, stopping in the villages talking of sport and village affairs, and the whole aspect of life changes. You wash off your priggishness; you cease to imagine yourself first cousin to the Deity; you return to your humanity, and with the first snipe you miss to your extreme fallibility.

Then there is ability at languages. Now although some men may develop an excess of ability to learn languages, all people have that ability to a certain extent when young or they could not learn their own language.

But it is an ability that quickly departs unless kept alive. The way Greek and Latin are taught is a sure way to destroy any ability for learning a language a boy may retain. Grammar should never be taught. No child learns its own language by grammar, and, in fact, grammar only applies to dead languages, not to living. That has to some extent dawned on modern educators, but I see that French grammar and regular and irregular verbs are taught to those learning French. Did Loti and Maupassant learn French grammar? I wonder. If not, why should anyone else? But schoolmasters are a hard lot, and there is no one who so absolutely refuses to learn as he who makes a profession of teaching. Why should not Hindustani be made the school language for Indian cadets?

Then come good manners. I do not mean only good English manners—those manners which enable you to pass in a meeting of cultivated English men and women—but much better manners than those. They are concerned with your conduct to your equals; but the only good manners that will be of much use to you in the East are those deeper manners which are equal to all occasions and can show an equal courtesy to a ploughman as to a peer, to an old Subadar hero of a hundred fights, to a headman and to a coolie. Some of it is, of course, convention and must be learned, like the right thing to do when an old soldier offers you the hilt of his sword, or a Burman lady brings you some fruit; but most of it, I think, simply comes from a frame of mind. If you recognise that the common humanity that binds you is eternal and that the difference of rank or race or age is a temporary difference that will pass, I do not think you will quite want for good manners. Orientals are particular about manners, and they do not respect a man who has none, or who has his own and not theirs.

Discipline in act is, I think, enough taught now, but freedom of thought is woefully to seek. It is banned by theology, and ecclesiastics naturally do not teach it.

As to knowledge of life, that can only come in the living. But it will not come unless you find the world worth studying and your own life worth living. If this world is bad, then it is not worth study, and if the only object of your life here is to fit you or unfit you for life in some spirit world, then you will not care much to fit yourself for this world.

Finally, it would appear too as if civilians should go out to India much younger than they do now. Twenty-three is far too old to begin a totally new life. For it must be remembered that life in India is a totally new life to which men have to get accustomed. No matter how you are trained in England, nothing will enable you to know India but being in India. The real education cannot begin until the student lands in the country in which he is to do his life's work. Everything he may learn at home is preliminary only. Language, people, work have all to be learned after arriving. However good the material provided may be, it is, when it lands, simply so much raw material. It has to learn everything. I do not think the age of twenty is at all too young to begin such a training; in fact I think nineteen would be better.

But we are now come to what should be done after arrival in India, and that will require a new chapter.

CHAPTER XIII
TRAINING IN INDIA

Having got the young civilian out to his province he should be thoroughly trained before being put to work, not given six or nine months to look round and then put to do work he cannot understand.

If he came out to India at twenty, he could well afford eighteen months or two years of real training.

During the cold weather he should be with some District Officer, accompanying him in camp, observing how he works, getting an insight into the mechanism of Government; during the hot weather he should be in the hills. By thus keeping him out of the great heat at the beginning he would become slowly acclimatised. Now he is plunged straight out from England into the Indian plains.

As to the training he should receive, that is not very difficult to suggest. First and foremost comes the language, of which a good colloquial knowledge should be required. It can only be acquired by talking to the people. A teacher is useful to explain difficulties encountered by a pupil in trying to talk, but no teacher can teach a language. In fact, languages cannot be taught—they can be acquired. The ability of the ear and vocal organs to recognise and reproduce strange sounds comes only with constant practice; and it must be practice with the people, for educated men talk differently from peasants in India as elsewhere. All Acts should be learned by first clearly understanding the principles that underlie them, the object sought to attain, and the method by which it is hoped to attain it. That is the only way to really understand an Act or Code. The detailed knowledge can be filled in later. In order to enable this to be done Government would have to frame introductions to their Codes and Acts. And such introductions would be most valuable not only to learners but to Government itself. Suppose, for instance, an introduction were written to the Village Manual explaining exactly what the village organism is and that the Act and Rules were intended to preserve and strengthen this organism; it would be immediately apparent that as they are now they really injure and destroy it. This would lead to a complete recast of the Manual—a most necessary work. And so with the other Acts and Rules. Now they are issued in a perfectly naked state that would be almost immodest had they any real life in them. But there is never any intention or life manifest, only dead formulÆ. Such introductions would also be most valuable in keeping an Act up to date. A law may fairly fulfil its intention when issued, but as circumstances change it would become obvious that the Act was out of date. If however you don't know the intention of the Act, how are you to judge its relevancy?

Further, such introductions would prevent the abuse of certain sections. Did, for instance, the Government of India intend sections 109, 110, of the Criminal Procedure Code to be used as they are in Burma now? I doubt it. But Burma can always say: "How was I to know the intention? There are the sections. Why shouldn't I use them as I think fit?"

How would the imprisonment sections of the Civil Procedure Code be justified? What object are they supposed to attain? No one knows. It can't be to deter a man from being ruined—that is not necessary; it can't be to make him pay—the distraint sections are for that; it can't be to render him a better citizen—gaols don't do that. What are they for, then? To pander to the creditors' desire for vengeance? It can only be that. I would like to see Government avow it.

Then the young civilian should get an insight into the customs of the people and learn to understand what these customs mean. Nothing is more absurd than the way ceremonies are misinterpreted, not merely by the casual observer, but by what is called "science." A whole theory of "marriage by capture" has been built on ceremonies that are symbolical, not of an absurdity like that, but of certain facts of human nature common to all marriages in all periods all over the world. The Nairs of Malabar have been credited with the most extraordinary forms of polyandry on the strength of ceremonies which were adopted as a protection to deceive the Brahmins. Human nature is, in its essentials, always the same. If the learner is helped to look under ceremonies he will see this. A knowledge of ceremonies has its value, like a knowledge of clothes has; but as clothes are used for good reasons—sometimes to hide the form, sometimes to accentuate parts of the form—so are ceremonies. And ceremonies may and do persist long after the human need has left them.

Further, he should know something of the economic state of the people. I think that a District Officer should be acquainted with the principal industries of his district, so as to be able to give help if need be. Generally speaking, the help he can give is protection from rash innovations. The cultivator neither in India nor in Burma is blind to his own interest, nor is he ignorant. He has behind him an experience of thousands of years, which have taught him a great deal about the capability of crops and soils. But he is quite willing to learn more, only he must make sure first. He cannot afford to experiment. His system will give him a living, and a change may mean starvation. He cannot run the risk. Prove to him that a new crop will grow and will fetch a decent price, and he is eager to cultivate it; but nothing less than ocular proof will do. That is, of course, right. He has common sense.

Unfortunately, not everyone has so much sense, and there are continual attempts being made to get him to make experiments he cannot afford. He should be protected against these. I can remember two such attempted booms in Upper Burma, both engineered by Government—one was cotton, and one was coffee or tea planting.

The cotton boom was very rigorously pressed upon us from England because I believe someone in authority had promised to "take his coat off" to make it succeed. But Burma is not a good cotton country, and the long staple will not grow. Moreover, if it could be grown with irrigation it would not pay nearly so well as rice. Therefore the cultivator will have none of it.

Tea and coffee planting is only suitable for capitalists, not for peasants; and as a matter of fact coffee won't grow north of about 12° north latitude. So these booms fizzled out, but they created a good deal of trouble first.

Indeed, most of my experiences were putting dampers on enthusiasts, Government or other, who wanted something grown, and who were ready to affirm that if it would not grow it ought to grow and must be made to grow, and sell afterwards as well. I remember a correspondence I had with a gentleman in Lower Burma on the subject of a fibre-producing plant which is grown in small patches near the villages of my district to serve as string. This gentleman heard of the plant and wrote to me a glowing account of the future before it, strongly urging me to advise my people—nay, to force my people—to grow it in large quantities for export. I wrote back that if he was so interested in the matter he should come up to my district and enter into contracts with the villagers to grow it for him. They would, I knew, do it at a certain price which I gave, and I offered to help him in every way. He, however, indignantly refused. He was not a trader, and the villagers should grow it on speculation. As it happens, I have a considerable knowledge of fibre plants gained before I entered Government service, and as I knew there was no certain market for this fibre I let well alone.

But most of all, I think a young officer should learn that it is not only for the people's pleasure but for his own pleasure and for the good of Government that he should encourage the amusements of the people. Nothing will give him more influence than this, make him better known, or cause his official work to go so easily.

It is a continual complaint among the people now that life is so dull. Our administration has not only taken all the adventure and picturesqueness out of life, but it has been disastrous to sport. Boat-racing, for instance, which used to be a great sport all along the Irrawaddy, is now nearly dead, and amateur dancing troupes which used to be common in the villages are nearly all defunct. I believe they are all dead. Now this is a disastrous state of things. Man wants play as well as work, and if he can't get amusement he will do things he shouldn't. The principal reason given for this decay is that unless some high official will interest himself in sports and give them his encouragement, no one will get them up. Therefore, when I was in Sagaing I instituted a regatta in the October holidays. It was no trouble to me. Directly I said I would like to have races there were plenty of well-known Burmans ready to do all the work with pleasure and enthusiasm.

The riverside villages caught up the idea. They pulled out their old racing canoes and did them up anew. Crews were put into training, and for weeks all the talk was of times and spurts and the merits of this crew and that. Sagaing didn't know itself.

The races duly came off in the glorious full-moon week of October, when all Courts are closed for ten days and everyone has holidays. Many crews came, and their friends and relatives came, and their supporters and backers, and they brought their wives and sisters with them. In the evenings we had boat races, at night we had pagoda festivals and dances and illuminations.

All went well till the final great event, which was a race between our champion boat and a boat sent over from Mandalay to challenge us.

There was immense excitement about this because the Mandalay boat was said to be a swagger boat; but then so was ours, a very swagger boat. Mandalay bet on their boat. Sagaing laid their rupees on the Sagaing boat; and the banks on both sides the mile-wide river were thronged with spectators. Then a catastrophe occurred. Just before the race our steersman was discovered drunk and happy upon the beach. How this happened I don't know. Why the crew ever allowed him to be separated from them I can't think; and his own explanation threw no clear light on the subject. He said in self-defence that the enemy in disguise had lured him into a toddy shop and "must have hocussed the toddy, for I only had a couple of cups, yet see me now," and there was great indignation. Whether in consequence of his defection or not I don't know, but we lost. Mandalay just romped away from us, and not only secured the prize, but was declared to have carried off a "cart-load" of rupees won in bets.

However, notwithstanding that disaster the meeting was a great success, and now, after ten years, that is the principal event I remember of my three years' administration. It stands out in my memory, and I think that probably if the people ever remember me at all it is as the convener of the first regatta for many years.

There was an amusing sequel to this defeat by Mandalay. For months afterwards whenever I had an insolvent case in my Court the debtor attributed his failure to this race. The district was "stony broke" in consequence, at least so the insolvents in my Court said. The conversation would run as follows:

The Judge (myself). Well, I have read your schedule, and you are five hundred rupees out. How is that? Explain.

Debtor. I am a honest man, your Honour, and never in debt before.

Myself. No doubt. How did it happen this time?

Debtor. Well, your Honour will remember that last October your Honour got up boat races here.

Myself. Certainly.

Debtor. And Mandalay sent us a challenge.

Myself. Well?

Debtor. Naturally I believed in our boat. (Note the "our"—his and mine). I was sure it must win, and for our [his and my] credit I wagered all I could get on it.

Myself. Hum!

Debtor. We lost.

Myself. There was always a possibility of that.

Debtor (indignantly). Not with a fair race. But they drugged our steersman. I call it a swindle, but I had to pay, and consequently am now insolvent and in your Honour's hands.

Was there any truth in this? There was no truth, of course. These debtors became insolvent through the action of two or three newly arrived firms of money-lenders. That was clear enough. Possibly they had a rupee or two on the boat race, but that would hardly affect matters. They made this appeal to try to get at me—the man—behind the law in which I was encased. They will do anything to achieve that. Like all human beings they are terrified at law and want to touch humanity, no matter what it does. They can bear from a man what they cannot from a law. This is manifest all through one's official life. People, for instance, will not come to see you in Court, but come to your private house. That is to try to get at the humanity they know you possess. That is what they want—your personality; for it will understand; whereas a law—what can it know of anything?

Then there are the dancing troupes for girls. What other amusements have girls but these troupes? They love them. Many girls have told me that it was the practising for the dances which gave a meaning and an interest to their girlhood. It taught them what lessons could never do—grace and elocution and style. It collected the villagers together; it gave a village something to be proud of. There should be such troupes in all big villages, and when the village system is restored there will be no doubt a renaissance of these and other amusements.

Again, why should not there be village teams of football? The Burmans like the game immensely, and play it well. But of course for village play the rules would have to be greatly simplified. They are too scientific now. It should be a game.

Thus it seems to me a District Officer should be educated to be the head of his district in all ways, not merely its judge or its schoolmaster. His other work must be lightened. Much of the work he does should not be done at all. All interference with the village should cease. If the suggestions I have to make in a later chapter as to self-government were adopted, the District Officer would soon feel the relief. He now seeks for work to do. He should try to avoid work as much as he can. "Don't interfere, except where you must," should be his rule. Now it is the other way about. And Government should regard him quite differently from what it does now. It should trust him, and not law. He must work within law, but not by law. When he has something to decide he should consider what is the right and proper thing to do, and then see if he can legally do it. If not, he must modify his order till it is within law. Now he looks to the law to tell him what to do. That is bad. Laws are bonds, not guides. They cannot give you motive force. They tell you what not to do, and that is all.

He should be trusted far more than he is. He should not be made to "fall into line." He should be judged not by his acts, but by the result of his acts, or his refusals to act, that is, by the state of his district. He should not be transferred when it can be helped, but be encouraged to make long stays in a district. He will do so if you give him a free hand so that he can take a personal interest in his work and people. The secret of success is personality.

I think if the young men sent out were trained on these or some such lines there would soon be a very different feeling between people and Government from what there is now. There would be a mutual understanding and respect which are now lacking.

There is a further suggestion I have to make as regards District Officers, not for their training, but for regulating their relations to the Government above them. They should be consulted prior to all legislation that affects their districts.

It will, of course, be said that they are now so consulted. Drafts of new Acts or amendments of Acts are sent round for comment and criticism, and so District Officers are consulted.

I don't call that consultation; even if it come within the dictionary meaning of the word it does not come within its spirit.

Take a concrete case: Suppose a new Village Act to be drafted and sent round to District Officers for criticism, how can any one officer criticise it effectively, or make useful suggestions, except by chance? His experience is confined to one, or two, or three districts; the Act is for the Province. He may make suggestions to suit his district; he cannot tell if they will suit others. He has no idea why certain provisions are included. He has no certain basis for constructive criticism. Very often he won't criticise at all. He says: "What is the use? It's only sent to me as a matter of form." Besides, as I have pointed out, the opinions of a number of individuals taken one by one differ greatly from the opinion of the same number sitting together and discussing various points of view before framing an opinion.

But what Government wants is the collective opinion of its District Officers, and not many varying views. It would have far more confidence in such an opinion, and be more careful in disregarding it. Why should not District Officers meet once a year to discuss pending questions, to consider new Acts, to suggest changes in old Acts? Their proceedings would, of course, be private, and not for publication. Officers should be encouraged to speak out. It would be a great help to all of them, and I think it would give Government a sense of security it has not got now.

CHAPTER XIV
OTHER SERVICES

The Indian Civil Service is the principal service in India; it furnishes men for the executive, the magistracy, and judicature, the revenue administration; and its members constitute not only the Local Government, but, excepting for the Law member and one or two others, the Council of the Government of India. Therefore it is in every way the most important service to have in harmony with the people. It is not, however, the only service manned by Englishmen, and it is very necessary that the other services also should be efficient. These are the Forest Department, the Engineer Department, and the Police. Of the first two I have nothing to say. They are technical departments, and although of course I have had a good deal to do with them, only a member of their own department would have the specialist knowledge to criticise them. I believe they are dissatisfied, but how far their grievances can be rectified I don't know.

With the police it is different. Though a separate department, they work in close touch with the District Magistrate, who is, in fact, their legal head. He must be intimately acquainted with their working, and with his Superintendent of Police personally in order that work in the district may go easily.

The first requisite for a good police-officer is a knowledge of the language. It is even more necessary for him than for the civilian. It is an absolute essential. And in the men of my day it was an essential that was fulfilled for the most part. Whether it will be so with the men enlisted under the new system of competitive examination in England is more doubtful. The men of former days entered the service younger, and the receptivity of their minds for acquiring languages had not been destroyed by "education." It is, I think, a pity that a competitive examination has been made the entrance-gate to the police. Such examinations prove nothing good in those who pass them. They may be good men, but preparation for examination has not increased that goodness.

I do not believe in competitive examinations. For instance, take the Indian Police; what qualities are required in a good Superintendent of Police? They are ability to command, facility in two languages at least, tact, a knowledge of human nature. What does an examination select him for? Ability in any of these? No, but for a retentive memory of written words such as Greek or Latin, for dry rules such as grammar, for memory of dry and useless facts such as history as it is taught, for mathematics. Is there any obvious connection between these two sets of qualities? There is none whatever. Has experience shown that ability in the first argues ability in the second? Experience shows the reverse.

Neither is the athletic ability for which marks are given to Rhodes scholars any test whatever of anything but itself. Without wishing for a moment to infer that athletic ability argues a deficiency in mental ability, I would ask how many of the leaders the world has known were great athletes? Nelson, or Lord Roberts, or Napoleon, for instance. Whenever ability of muscle and of brain have occurred together it has been incidental, not causal. Muscular ability is a good thing, but there are better things.

Success in competitive examinations proves one thing only—that the candidate has a good memory for words. It very frequently follows that he is unable to go beneath words, and that he puts his trust in words and papers and formulÆ because the habit of mind set up by examinations tends to this.

There is no sense in these examinations for anyone, except perhaps for those about to be tutors of the same things. Men of action and scholars are different in grain and the test for one usually eliminates the other. That there are a few exceptions only demonstrates that human nature cannot be confined within hard and fast rules. But there can be successful generalisation.

Competitive examinations are a fetish which Government worships because it is afraid of taking the responsibility of appointing officers on its own initiative. It is afraid of the charge of nepotism. But it would not be nepotism to give the sons of its officers, Civil and Military, first chance of appointments in the Police. It would be a graceful recognition of the fact that when a man has spent his life in India he has lost touch with England and cannot get his sons placed at home, therefore he deserves consideration for them from the Government he has served. I do not believe in heredity in such matters because there is no evidence in its favour; but I do believe in early associations and traditions. Now the traditions and associations of the sons of officers who have served in India are with India.

I believe that a much sounder way would be to appoint sons of officers who have served in India. They have Indian traditions, and, what is more, having as children learned the language it soon returns to them.

I know this as a fact. Some twenty-five years ago in Upper Burma a young police-officer was sent to the same station with me in Burma. He came direct from India, but had been born and brought up in Burma till he was seven, when he went to England to school. From England, at eighteen or nineteen, he went to India—the Punjab, I think—and was appointed to the Police there. When Upper Burma was in need of officers he was sent to Burma on promotion. On arrival he did not remember a word of Burmese, but it came rapidly back to him. When sitting with me when I was talking to the Burmese he would continually say to me, "Didn't you say so-and-so?" and "Didn't he answer so-and-so?" Without learning it, his memory recalled the language to him, and in a month or two he was talking it well and with a good accent.

There remain the Subordinate Civil Service and the Lower Grades of the Police, all or nearly all of whom are native to the Province.

In another book, writing on this subject, I said: "I read and hear continually that many of our native magistrates and judges and police are corrupt. I am told they take bribes, that they falsify cases, that they make right into wrong. I wish to say that I have no belief in such charges. Exceptions there may be, but that the mass of our Burman fellow-officers are honest I have no doubt." All my experience has tended to support that view.

Everyone in the world requires looking after, requires check and supervision, requires that protection between himself and harm that only a watching eye can give, and in Burma, for the Burmese officials, these safeguards hardly exist.

It must be remembered that official Burma has no Press to criticise it, no native society to give it tone, no organised community to help the individual in the right path. He has many temptations, and a fall is easy.

I do not believe in the general charge that Burmese are corrupt. That occasional cases of undue influence should occur is natural if you consider the circumstances under which they serve. They are not, like the English officers, independent of their surroundings in social matters. They have, for company's sake, to associate with the pleaders, the merchants, the headmen, and others within their charge. Their families are with them, and they are interested in the happenings of the town or village, and are concerned in it. They are inevitably influenced in many ways, which we do not appreciate. They know things which we do not. In cases that come before them they often know of events behind the scenes which lead up to the final happening which comes into Court. It is useless to say that they should not be influenced by anything but the evidence on the record; they cannot help being influenced. They have, for instance, known of A being a trouble to his parents long before the charge which they have to try, and that is in their minds; or they know B to be a good character, and that his accusers are doubtful people. It has happened to me, not once but many times, that on appeal I have read a judgment of a Burmese Subordinate Magistrate which puzzled me, because, though not contrary to the evidence, there has evidently been in the writer's mind something more than the evidence. In such cases I have usually inquired personally from the magistrate what it was he knew before passing orders on appeal, and I have sometimes taken further evidence on that point so as to get the record straight. It is easy to say that magistrates should not be affected by anything but the recorded evidence, just as it is easy to say that a magistrate should be blind. Magistrates are human beings—fortunately.

But, of course, the standard might be higher. This raising of the standard can, however, only be attained by raising the standard of independence in the people, and our rule tends to decrease this. Under self-government it will rise. It is self-government and its consequent publicity which have purified Courts in England. Look at Judge Jeffreys and his time. We are not people to adopt too Pharisaic an attitude.

Elsewhere I have commented on the failure of the "educated" native to make a good official, and I need not repeat myself. The education we give is not good for them, but until a national system of education is instituted I don't see what we can do. The subordinate service, as long as it is subordinate, cannot attract the best men, because the prospects are poor.

As to the rank and file of the police I have this to say—they are unsatisfactory, and the Police Commission did not get at the real causes. Do Commissions ever get at real causes? Are they not merely excuses to give "face" to Government? What is the use of examining innumerable witnesses none of whom have probed the subject? Answers to difficult questions are not got by asking, but by personal experience: by a man or men capable of understanding what they see and finding out the causes.

Pay has something to do with the poorness of the material, but in Burma at least it is not the principal cause. That cause is that the police are disliked, and they are disliked because they are part of a legal system which is disliked and disapproved of. The police are considered almost as enemies of the people. To rehabilitate the police and get really good men into it the whole criminal system requires amendment. When the people like and admire the Courts they will like and will enter the service of those Courts. Now they will do neither. A popular Government may be a good Government; an unpopular Government cannot possibly be so.

Further, it is said that the Burman takes badly to discipline and will never, therefore, make a good policeman nor soldier.

That he takes badly to discipline is true, but what is the reason? That he is essentially different from other people? That is absurd. The reason of it lies in his past history, his environment and education.

When we took Upper Burma it was hardly an organised nation at all. It was only a mass of villagers which acknowledged a king over all. There was no national army—because no need for one—and no large industries. The Burman has been a free man and he has the religion—or want of religion—of a free man. He has never had priests to rule him, to force on him reverence and obedience as virtues, to destroy his individuality. Therefore he has lived free. And nowadays, although he is lectured enough on his want of discipline, the advice is given in the wrong way and apropos of the wrong subject.

He ought in the opinion of his critics to be a good policeman or a good soldier, or a good employÉ for the rice merchants in Rangoon, and he is not. Therefore he is lectured on his want of discipline. "That is to say," thinks the Burman, "I am lectured and abused in order that I may be a more useful tool in the hands of a foreign Government, or a more profitable servant to a foreign merchant—who will reap the benefit."

That is what he thinks and rightly thinks, for the advice is so prompted and so meant.

He has yet to learn that discipline in act is necessary to enable him to attain his own ideals, to create and maintain his own self-government, and to establish industries that will compete with the foreigner's. He must himself establish organisms in order to succeed.

The Burman is afraid of discipline, partly because it is new to him, and partly because he is afraid that by surrendering independence of act he will surrender independence of spirit.

This can only be got over by a true education, by making the boy see for himself that only in union is strength, and that he must learn to act with others, and therefore under leaders. He will see this fast enough if it is carefully shown him when young. He will accept it also if it is clearly demonstrated to him that obedience in act does not infer surrender of his soul. It is the latter he is afraid of, and wisely. Tell him that not only may he think for himself, but that he is bound to do so, while at the same time subordinating private opinions to a common end, and you will get discipline as much as you like. It is a matter of common sense, and he has plenty of that.

The mechanical obedience to masters and spiritual or material pastors because they have been "set in authority" over us should never be taught. They have not been set in authority. They may deserve obedience if they are leaders in the right way, and we should co-operate with them there by serving them towards an end good for both. Get the boy to understand that. Then you get that willing and intelligent obedience which is worth all the mechanical obedience in the world. This is true in all walks of life. If you wish to read of a startling example, read of how the Revolutionary troops of France, as soon as they had gained a little experience, met and overthrew the wooden and lifeless battalions of Prussia, which had been drilled to death.

There must be life and intelligence, and a purpose in obedience as in all else for it to be a virtue. In itself obedience is not an end, it is only justifiable as a means to an end. It must arise from the exercise of will, not from its atrophy or from surrender to the will of others. You obey because you wish to obey, not because you are forced to do so.

That is the true education in discipline.

But all this can only come with local self-government, local patriotism, and a national education. They are what make a nation.

CHAPTER XV
LAW REFORM

When the personnel of the Government of India from the bottom to the top has been reorganised on a basis of understanding of the people, it will begin to revise its laws, and the first will be its Penal Law, its Criminal Courts and Procedure.

To do this with any success it will be necessary first to study the causation of crime, because until you know how it is caused you cannot possibly frame any system of prevention that is likely to do less harm than good.

This is a subject that many men have been studying for some years past, but very little progress has yet been made. The old shibboleths that crime results from a desire for crime and that the only cure is savage punishment still hold good with all Governments, though quite discredited outside official circles. It is a most fascinating subject, and as it is one I have worked at for many years I may be excused for devoting a somewhat large space to it here.

It is more than twenty-five years ago that my attention was first attracted to the causation of crime. I was a young magistrate then, trying my first cases; very nervous, very conscientious that I should fulfil all the legal requirements as laid down in the Codes. It had never occurred to me then that there was any gulf between justice and law—I supposed that they were one, that law was only codified and systemised justice; therefore, in fulfilling the Law I thought that I was surely administering Justice.

I was trying a theft case. I cannot remember now what it was that had been stolen, but I think it was a bullock. The accused was undefended, and I, as the custom is, questioned him about the case, not with the view of getting him to commit himself, but in order to try to elicit his defence, if any. He had none. He admitted the theft, described the circumstances quite fully and frankly, and said he was guilty. I asked him if he knew when he took the bullock from the grazing ground that he was stealing it, and he answered "Yes." I asked him if he knew that the punishment for cattle theft was two years' imprisonment, which practically meant ruin for life, and he replied that he knew it would be heavy.

Then I asked, "Why did you do it?"

He moved uneasily in the dock without answering, looked about him, and seemed puzzled.

I repeated the question.

Evidently he was trying to remember back why he had done it, and found it difficult. He had not considered the point before, and introspection was new to him. "Why did I do it?" he was saying to himself.

"Well?" I asked.

He looked me frankly in the face. "I don't know," he said. "I suppose I could not help it. I did not think about it at all; something just made me take it."

He was convicted, of course, and I forgot the case.

But I did not forget what he had said. It remained in my mind and recurred to me from time to time, I did not know why. For I had always been taught that crime was due to an evil disposition which a person could change, only he would not, and I had as yet seen no reason to question this view. Therefore the accused's defence appealed to no idea that was consciously in my mind. I did not reflect upon it. I can only suppose that, unconsciously to myself, these words reached some instinct within me which told me that they were true. And at last from the very importunity of their return I did begin to think about them, and, consequently on them, of the causation of crime in general. A curiosity awoke which has never abated, has indeed but grown, as in some small ways I was able to satisfy it.

What causes crime? Is it a purely individual matter? If so, why does it follow certain lines of increase or decrease, or maintain an average? That looks more like general results following on general causes than the result of individual qualities. Why is it not curable? It should have been cured centuries ago. Why does punishment usually make the offender worse instead of better? If his crime were within the individual's control, its punishment certainly would deter. It does not. Any deterrent effect it may have is rarely on him who is punished, but on the outside world, and that is but little. So much I saw very clearly in practice, and every book I read on the subject confirmed this. The infamous penal laws of England a hundred years ago did not stop crime; flogging did not stop garotting, it ceased for other causes. I began to think and to observe.

Some three years later my attention was still more strongly drawn to this subject.

I was then for a short time the Governor of the biggest gaol in the world, that in Rangoon. It was crowded with prisoners under sentence for many different forms of crime, from murder or "dacoity"—that is gang robbery—to petty theft.

The numbers were abnormal, and they were so not only here, but in all the gaols of both the Upper and Lower Provinces. The average of crime had greatly risen.

Why was this?

The reason was obvious. The annexation of the Upper Province six years before had caused a wave of unrest, not only there, but in the delta districts as well, that found its expression in many forms of crime. There was no doubt about the cause. But this cause was a general cause, not individual. The individual criminals there in the gaol did not declare the war. That was the consequence of acts by the King of Burma and the Government of India controlled by the English Cabinet, and was consequent on acts of the French Government. Therefore half of these individuals had become criminals because of the disagreements of three Governments, two of which were six thousand miles away from Rangoon.

There is no getting out of that. In normal times the average of convicts would have been only half what it was. The abnormality was not due to the convicts themselves.

Thus if A and B and C were suffering punishment in the gaol the fault is primarily not theirs. A special strain was set up from without which they could not stand and they fell.

But if this is true of half the prisoners, why not of the other half? There was no dividing line between the two classes. Political offences apart, you could not walk into the gaol and, dividing the convicts into two parts, say: "The crimes of this half being due to external causes, they must be pardoned; the crimes of the other half being due to their own evil disposition, they must continue to suffer." There was no demarcation.

Therefore, general causes are occasionally the cause of crime. Here was a long step in advance.

Again, four years later I was on famine duty in the Upper Province, and the same phenomenon occurred. There was an increase in certain forms of crime. Thefts doubled. Other crimes such as cheating and fraudulent dealings with money decreased. Here was again a general cause. Half of those thieves would have remained honest men all their lives, been respected by their fellow-men, and, according to religions, have gone to heaven when they died, but for the famine.

The causes of the famine were want of rain acting on the economic weakness of the people reared by the inability of government. Thus, had rain fallen as usual, had the people been able to cultivate other resources, had government been more advanced and experienced, half these thieves would not have been in gaol; and no one knew which half, for thefts of food did not increase. There was, in fact, no reason they should, as Government provided on the famine camps a subsistence wage for everyone who came.

On the other hand, certain individuals were saved from misappropriating money, or cheating in mercantile transactions, because there was little money left to misappropriate and not much business. If they lived honestly and went to heaven, the chief cause would be the failure of rain that year, not any superior virtue of their own. But no one knew who these individuals were who were so luckily saved.

But when you have acknowledged this, what is becoming of the doctrine of individual responsibility for crime? If a man has complete free-will to sin or not, if crime be due to innate wickedness, how does want of rain bring this on? And where is the common sense or common justice in punishing him for what is really due to a defective climate? He cannot control the rain. Manifestly then, as regards at least half of these thieves, there was no innate desire to steal, because that could not be affected by the famine. Had they desired to be thieves they would have been so in any case. The truth is that they did not desire to be thieves, but when the famine increased the temptation, and, through physical weakness, decreased their power of resistance, they fell. They sinned—not through spiritual desire of evil, but through physical inability to resist temptation.

But if this is true of half, why not of the whole? There is no line of demarcation. If true of some crime, why not of all? The doctrine of a man's perfect free-will to sin or not to sin as he pleases is beginning to look shaky. It will be as well to consider it.

What is free-will?

There is no necessity to discuss the meaning of "free"; we all know it; there is nothing ambiguous about it; but with "will" it is different. There are few words so incessantly misused as this word "will." Philosophers are the worst offenders, and the general public but follow their blind lead; yet unless you know exactly what you mean by it how can you use it as a counter of your thought?

What does will mean? "Where there's a will there's a way"—what does this mean? Does it mean wish? If, for instance, you are poor and stupid, can any quantity of wish make you rich? If you are weak will it make you strong? If you have no ear will it make you a musician? If you are a convict can it liberate you? That is absurd.

"Will," then means more than wish; to the desire must be added the ability—actual or potential. That is evident, is it not? Without the ability the wish avails nothing.

"Will," then, has two complements, both of which are necessary to it. Its meaning is not simple but compound; never forget this; never suppose that merely wishing with all your power can produce "will." It cannot unless the ability be developed to aid it.

And now we get back from words to human nature—Is the criminal so because he wants to be so? No, and No, and No again. No such wicked fallacy was ever foisted upon a credulous world as this. Nobody at any period of the world ever wished to be criminal. Everyone instinctively hates and fears crime; everyone is honest by nature; it is inherent in the soul. I have never met a criminal that did not hate his crime even more than his condemners hate it. The apparent exceptions are when a man does not consider his act a crime; he has killed because his victim exasperated him to it; he has robbed society because society made war on him. The offender hates his crime.

"But he is not ashamed of it."

Now that is true. He is not ashamed of it in the current sense. He hates it; he fears it; but it does not fill him with a sense of sin.

"Therefore," says the purist, "he has a hardened conscience. It is his conscience, as I said, that is at fault."

But the purist is wrong. He does not understand the criminal. He has never tried to understand him as I have tried. What the criminal feels towards his crime is what the sick man feels towards the delirium that seizes him—what the "possessed of devils" feels towards the possession when it comes. It terrifies him; he knows he must succumb; he fears not the mere penalty, but the crime. But he is not ashamed, because he knows he cannot help it. And punishment exasperates him because he has not deserved it, and it will do him harm, not good. He wants to be cured—not made a fit dwelling for still worse devils. And that is what punishment does.

The effect of punishment in deterring a criminal from repeating his crime is small. All study of criminal facts proves this. It generally makes him more prone to crime, not less; and all the great crimes are committed by men who have been still further ruined in gaols. What good effect punishment may have is mainly exercised on other than the criminal.

Punishment has some effect, but how much we do not yet know, because the matter has never been investigated, and it is not on the patient. Crime is a disease, and will you stop a fever by punishing the patients? Whatever good gaols do lies in the fact that they isolate the unhealthy from the healthy and so stop for a time infection, as do hospitals with disease. But the hospitals do not discharge the patient till he is cured; the gaol aggravates the liability to the disease and turns out the sufferer worse than before.

Let us go back. A man is criminal not because he wishes to be so, but because he cannot resist the temptation. He lacks will. True, but it is the ability he lacks, not the wish. Why does he lack ability?

This brings us to the second theory of crime—a new one—that criminals are born, not made. The tendency to crime is said to be inherent, to be a reversion, to be inherited. That explains why it is generally incurable when once contracted.

Many books have been written on this, but one fallacy vitiates them all. The observers have not observed the criminal in the making but when made. They have assumed the criminal to be of a race apart, and so founded their house upon the sand. Lombroso went so far as to lay down certain stigmata that inferred a criminal disposition. The stigmata have been shown to be universal, and there is no such thing as a "criminal disposition." If there be other qualities that do differentiate the criminal from the normal man, they are not innate.

That those born crippled in some way frequently become criminals is no exception; it denotes no criminal disposition. But the cripple is handicapped in the struggle for life. He is cut off from the many pleasures of work and play, of love and children, which his fellows have. He is sensitive and he is jeered at and despised. Is it any wonder that under such circumstances he becomes sometimes embittered? A cripple is set apart from his fellow-men. There are for him but two alternatives—to be a saint or a criminal. Love and care and training will make him a saint; neglect too often makes him a criminal. But to whom the blame for the latter? Not to him.

Connected with this theory is the supposition that criminality is hereditary.

There are few subjects on which so much "scientific" nonsense is talked and written as this of heredity. Not very much is known of it as regards plants, less of animals, and almost nothing as regards humanity. Furthermore, the experience gained in plants and animals is useless as regards humanity. Evolution in humanity tends to greater brain power, but all cultivation in animals and plants has tended to destroy brain power and even adaptability. To read books on heredity is to read a mass of suppositions and hazardous inductions where most of the facts are negative and the exceptions are positive. There is nothing so easy and nothing so fatal as this tendency to attribute to heredity what is due to training, or want of training. It excuses supineness in Governments and professions. Here is what John Stuart Mill, a profound thinker, thought of this facile recourse to heredity as an excuse:

"Of all vulgar methods of escape from the effects of social and moral influences on the mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversions of conduct and character to inherent natural differences."

This, too, is what Buckle said: "We often hear of hereditary talents, hereditary vices, and hereditary virtues; but whoever will critically examine the evidence will find that there is no proof of their existence. The way in which they are usually proved is in the highest degree illogical; the usual course being for writers to collect instances of some mental peculiarity found in a parent and his child, and then to infer that the peculiarity was bequeathed. By this mode of reasoning we might demonstrate any proposition. But this is not the way in which the truth is discovered; and we ought to enquire not only how many instances there are of hereditary talents, etc., but how many instances there are of such qualities not being hereditary."

I have for myself, neither in life nor in books, found one single case in which it could be confidently said that a criminal weakness was inherited. That A, a criminal, has a son B, who also became criminal, proves nothing. You must first prove that a similar child of different stock would not become criminal if brought up as A's son was. You must also prove that if you took away A's son as a child and brought him up differently he would still show criminal weakness. But all the facts negative this. The child even of a criminal tribe in India, if removed from its environment, grows up like other children. Coming of criminal ancestors has not handed down a criminal aptitude. You must not mistake inheritance of other traits for inheritance of criminal aptitudes. A is very quick-tempered, which he has not from a child been trained to control. Under sudden provocation he kills a man. His son B inherits his father's quick temper, is similarly badly brought up, and the same thing occurs. The hasty hereditary theorist says: "Behold the inheritance of a propensity to murder." But quick temper is not a criminal trait; it is often an accompaniment of the kindest disposition. It is an excess of sensitiveness. The training, physical and mental, was in each case lacking, and a coincidence of provocation caused a coincidence of crime.

Let it be once clearly discerned that if a quality be hereditary it is always hereditary, and cannot appear, except as the result of heredity—and the absurdity of modern theories will be manifest.

There is not—there has never been in anyone—a tendency to crime until either gaols or criminal education creates it. No one ever wanted to commit crime as crime. A daring boy with no outlet for his energy may break out into violence, robbery, and later into burglary; he would not have done so had his physical need for exercise and his spiritual need for facing danger had another outlet. The instincts that led him into crime were good and noble instincts which, finding no legitimate channel, found an illegitimate channel for themselves.

In that fine book of Mr. Holmes', entitled London's Underworld, is an account of how hooligans are made. The young men are full of energy—they want exercise, struggle, the fight of the football field or the hockey match, and they cannot get it. They have no playground but the streets and no outlet for their energy save hooliganism. The pity of it!

What, then, causes crime?

It is never the wish for crime. It is one of two causes. Either it is the only outlet for some natural instinct which is denied legitimate outlet by the environment, or it is due to an inability to resist temptation when it offers.

How can it be prevented?

Now this inability is physical. The wish is spiritual—the ability is physical and depends greatly on health. With ill-health or malnutrition in the young the first thing to give is the power of control. The average of criminals are a stone underweight. Therefore, crime is dependent to a great extent on health. Ill-health causes crime; accidental mutilation causes crime; accident creates an aptitude to crime; neglected youth and education cause crime.

Religion does not affect crime one way or another. The greatest criminals are often religious. MediÆval Europe was very religious and very criminal, and there are many other instances. Honesty is inborn in all; it is part of the "light that lighteth every man that is born into this world"; it requires no teaching. What must be acquired is the ability to give effect to it. Crime is a physical, not a spiritual disease. And crime is no defect of the individual. It is a disease of the nation—nay, of humanity—exhibited in individuals. You have gout in your toe, but it is your whole system that is wrong. This disease can be cured by Humanity alone. Criminals are those whom we should pity, should prevent, should isolate, and, if possible, cure.

Remember what John Bradford said, looking on a man going to be hanged: "But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford." He, too, would have been the same had he had bad training in his youth.

We have all of us within us instincts which rightly directed result in good, which in default of outlet we can be trained to control, but which without outlet and without the receipt of training may result in crime. Crime is, therefore, a defect of training and environment, not of personality.

CHAPTER XVI
COURTS REFORM

But, pending any such great change as must come in all penal law when the subject has been carefully studied, there are many smaller amendments that might be made both in Civil and Revenue Courts and Law.

The pressing need in Criminal Procedure is, I think, a change in the treatment of an accused person when he is arrested.

The first instinct of an offender is, as I have said, to confess, even if an understanding person is not available to confess to. He has offended the Law; he wants to make all amends he can by confessing to the representative of that offended Personality. I have seen very many first offenders and talked to them before they got into the hands of pleaders and others, and my experience tells me that a man who has committed his first offence is very like a man who has caught his first attack of serious illness. He is afraid not so much of the results as of the thing itself. Sin has caught him, and he is afraid of sin. He wants protection and help and cure. He does not want to hide anything; his first need is confession to some understanding ear. Many, many such confessions have I heard in the old days. That is the result of the first offence.

But this tendency to truth is choked when it is ascertained that as a result the offender will be vindictively punished and made in the end far worse than he was at the beginning. Naturally the offender says to himself: "I am bad now. What shall I be after two years' gaol? Better fight it out. If I win and get acquitted, at least I shall have a chance to reform. If convicted that chance will be taken from me for ever. And fighting will not lose me anything. The penitent prisoner who confesses gets no lighter punishment than if he had put the Court to the expense of a long trial. Why therefore repent? It will do me harm, not good." That is the case now; under reasonable laws it would be the other way. But even yet in country places he often confesses to the police by whom he is arrested.

Now by Indian Law no confession to the police may be offered in evidence. The reason of this is that the police, in their keenness to secure a conviction, may extort a false confession by torture, and there have been in fact enough of such cases to cause doubt and to prevent the police being allowed to receive a confession. Therefore if the offender wishes to confess he is taken now to a magistrate, there his confession is recorded. Then he is sent back to police custody. He is visited by his relatives, a pleader is engaged for him. His folly in confessing is pointed out to him and he withdraws the confession, alleging that he had been tortured to confess. His confession is not only negatived, but a slur is cast on the police which is hard to remove. Their case and evidence appear tainted, and the accused often secures an acquittal though the Magistrate knows that the confession was true.

All this is very common both in Burma and India, and it is disastrous to allow and to encourage such things, as by our procedure we do encourage them. There should be a complete change.

When a man is arrested some such procedure should be adopted as this:

He should be told by the police that he is being taken direct to the magistrate who will try the case, who will hear anything accused has to say. He should be warned to say nothing to the police. Then he should be taken direct to the magistrate, who should explain to him fully what he is accused of and ask him what he has to say.

Whatever his statement be, the magistrate should tell him that he will himself at once investigate it and summon witnesses; meanwhile the accused should be remitted to custody, but not to police custody. That is where all the trouble comes in and all opportunities for making charges against the police. If there be no gaol there should be a lock-up in charge of Indian police who are under the magistrate and are not concerned in the guilt or otherwise of the accused. The investigating police should only have access to accused by permission of the magistrate. He should, however, be allowed to see his friends and a pleader if he wish. But I am sure of this, that the first offender would rather trust the magistrate, if he were a personality who he knew would help him, than any pleader.

Further, if a man confess truly, his punishment should be greatly reduced. I do not say this should be done because he gives less trouble, but because the frame of mind induced by a free and full confession is a sounder frame of mind on which to begin reformation than are defiance and negation, which are now inculcated by our system.

The trial need not wait till the case is complete. The magistrate could summon the police witnesses at once, and he should examine them himself, allowing only the police to suggest questions if they wish. Similarly, with the defence witnesses, they could be examined as they came in and should be examined by the magistrate himself. No one but the magistrate should be allowed to speak directly to any party to the case.

All cross-examination should be absolutely prohibited. If either side have matters they wish brought out of a witness, they should tell the magistrate and he would ask such questions as he thought fit. There is no such curse now to justice as cross-examination by a clever pleader or barrister. It is a sort of forensic show-off by the advocate at the cost of the witness, and frequently at the cost of justice. For, naturally, no one cares to be bullied by a licensed bully, and witnesses consequently will not come to Court if they can help it. When in Court they are bamboozled and made to contradict themselves where they have originally spoken the truth.

I have often been told that acute cross-examination by a clever barrister is the greatest safeguard justice can have from false evidence. I don't believe a word of it. A magistrate can by far fewer and simpler questions expose false evidence better than an advocate does, because the magistrate is intent only on his business—to find the truth; the advocate is advertising himself, and trying to destroy truth as well as falsehood.

But if the magistrate did all the questioning I don't believe there would be much false evidence. Witnesses will lie to the opposite side, but not to an understanding Court.

Perjury would disappear. What is its present cause? Contempt of the Court and sympathy with either complainant or accused, which sympathy sees no chance of justice for its object except by perjury. Because a trial is a fight. There is not a human being East or West who would not be ashamed to lie to a Court he knew was trying to do its best for all—parties and public. It is because the Courts as at present constituted do as much harm as good that perjury is rampant and condoned. It is so in all countries, it has been so in all periods.

Then, as soon as possible, juries should be introduced. This cannot be done until the law, especially as regards punishment, is greatly altered in accordance with the common sense of the people, but it is the objective to be aimed at as soon as possible. Until the public co-operate with the Courts in all ways you will never have a good system of justice. Crime hurts the people far more than it hurts Government. Don't you think the people know that? And don't you suppose they want it prevented even more than Government does? In any case that is the fact. They hate the Courts now because they don't prevent or cure crime; they only make matters worse.

The only objection I see to this proposed alteration is that it will take more time and so cost more money. At first it may do so, but even then what the public loses by more taxes it will more than save in having to pay less to lawyers. How much unnecessary money is now paid to lawyers? Enough, I am sure, to double the magistracy and then leave a big balance. Courts should be made for the people, not for lawyers. And in time crime would so decrease that there would be saving all round.

The reform of the Civil Courts should follow somewhat the same lines. A man should not have to wait to see a civil judge till his case is all made out. He should be able to go to him at once and confide in him, and the judge should send for the other party and try to make an arrangement between them so that no suit should be filed. Not until that has been done and not unless a judge give a certificate of its necessity should a suit be allowed to be filed as it is now. And then when it is filed the judge should conduct the case and not the advocates on each side. That is the only way to stop the perjury which increases and will increase. Magistrates and judges must cease to be umpires of a combat, and become investigators of truth.

As regards the laws of marriage and inheritance, no great change can be made until there is a real representative Assembly to make these changes, but even there something could be done. That fossilisation of custom described by Sir Henry Sumner Maine should stop. Because a High Court proved a hundred years ago that a certain custom existed there is no evidence that it does or should exist now. To establish precedents of this nature is to stop all progress of every kind; we have a vision different from the poet's

Of bondage slowly narrowing down
From precedent to precedent.

Why should not fresh inquiries into custom be made from time to time, it being understood that any Court-ruling only applied to that time and place, and did not bind the future? Something must be done. Things cannot go on as they are. We reproach the Indians for want of progress, but we ourselves are the main cause of that stagnation. We bind them and they cannot move.

As regards land policy there is this to be said, that fixed ideas are a mistake.

In Bengal there was at one time a fixed idea that all land did and must belong to large land-owners, and so, partly out of sheer ignorance, partly out of prejudice, a race of Zemindars was created out of the tax-gatherers to the Mogul Empire. The result has been sad.

Again in Burma the same idea prevailed for a while, and headmen were encouraged to annex communal waste as their private land. This was unfortunate.

Then came a reaction, and all large estates were denounced as bad. There was to be a small tenantry holding direct from Government, forbidden to alienate their land, and all leasing of land to tenants was forbidden.

This I understand to be the policy still. It is a policy of fixed ideas, and as applied to anything that has life, like land tenure, it is unfortunate, no matter what the fixed idea be.

If there be one truth above another that is clear in studying land systems it is that no one permanent system is good. The cultivation of land, like all matters, undergoes evolution and change. What is good to-day may not be good to-morrow. The English system of large estates cultivated by tenants did, at one time in English history, produce the best farming in the world. English farming was held up as an example to all countries and was so admitted by them. The system of large estates allowed of the expenditure of capital, experiments in new cultivations and new breeds of cattle, and variety of crops. It suited its day well. And though its full day has passed, there will never be a time when some large estates will not be able to justify themselves. Even if, as apparently is the case now in England, petite culture is that best adapted to the cultivation of the day and the needs of the people, yet there is still room for large estates. A dead uniformity of small holdings could not but be unfortunate for any country.

Further, although excessive alienation of land through money-lenders may be very bad, yet stagnation in ownership may be worse. India and Burma are progressive, and changes must take place. Cultivators will become artisans and traders; city people will like to return to the land. There is an ebb and flow which is good for all. Too great rigidity of system will stop progress. A good system of land tenure is that which is in accordance with the evolution of the people it applies to and assists in that evolution.

While recognising that for the bulk of the people small holdings are best, it will not forbid larger estates; while admitting that the alienation of land through borrowing recklessly from money-lenders is bad, it will see that the progress of the people from purely agricultural towards a state of industrial activity is not checked. It takes all sorts to make a State.

It may be good for the cultivator to hold direct from Government, but if Government is to be the landlord it must act up to its name. It must give compensation for improvements when a tenant has to relinquish the land. Otherwise no tenant will improve, and the necessity for improvement, for wells, irrigation, embankments, manuring, and so on, is the greatest necessity of agriculture. In my own experience I have seen that the system of State land tenure in Upper Burma does stop improvements.

That is the light in which the land question has to be worked out, on broad comprehensive lines—that, while acknowledging the present, sees also the future, which, while seeing one form of good does not deny another.

So, with an understanding and a sympathetic personnel, the administration would be brought nearer to the people, until at length when their capacity for self-government had developed they would be able to take over our administrative machine little by little and work it themselves.

They could never do that now. If by any chance they did get possession of the machinery at present, they would set to work to smash it till none remained.

CHAPTER XVII
SELF-GOVERNMENT

And thus the sheltering Government of India having been reformed both in its personnel and in its laws, brought into touch and sympathy with its people, a start would be made with self-government.

That, of course, must begin with the village, which is the germ from which all self-government that is of any value has always begun, and on the health and vitality of which it must always depend. The village organism must be restored to the state in which we found it, and from that be helped and encouraged to grow to greater things.

The whole of the present conception of the village as an appanage of the headman, and the conception of the headman as an official of Government, must be swept away and a new and true conception must be arrived at.

The village is a self-contained organism, and the headman is its representative before Government and its executive head, the real power being in the Council. Powers and responsibility reside in the village as a whole and in no individual. The people must not be ruled, but rule themselves.

Now as to the exact way in which this conception should be carried out it is impossible to say. In each Province—in distinct parts of the same Province—the village system assumed different forms to meet different circumstances. In Madras the village community was in many details different from that in Burma, and in the North-West still more so. Therefore, the particular way in which the conception should be realised would vary greatly. And only by experience could a satisfactory form for each Province be evolved. Neither would it be possible even in Burma to go back to the old form exactly. Events have marched since then, and what was satisfactory thirty or more years ago would not be so now. The villages must not be reconstituted by copying the past; they must be constituted anew, maintaining, however, the spirit of the past and giving scope for evolution in the future.

Therefore, the scheme that I am about to unfold must be taken to be merely tentative and apply only to Burma. The principles are, I think, right; the details must, of course, be discovered by experience. Practice alone would show how far they realised the objective that is to be aimed at—the constitution of a village organism on natural lines that would govern itself without any need for interference and would be able to grow and evolve.

My scheme is as follows:

In every village a Council should be constituted and the headman should be its executive head.

How this Council should be constituted I do not know. I think there should be wards, each of which should have an elder, representative of the people, but no rigid system of election should be laid down. I have found that villages and wards can very often appoint a representative man by general consent, which is much better than by election. That should only occur in case of a dead-lock. The Council should itself define the wards, and it should be allowed to co-opt additional members. All representation by class or religion should be prohibited. The unit is not so many people, but a section of a village—neighbours dwelling together and whose interests are thereby united. Appointment to the Council should be indefinite; that is to say, an elder should remain an elder until he resigned or until the ward turned him out. I don't think they would like continual elections. An election is a bad means to a desired end—that of obtaining the best representative. And in small communities the sense is usually apparent without it.

The headman should be chosen by the Council from among its members and his election confirmed by Government. His appointment should be according to the wish of the Council, that is to say, for life, unless he resigned or the Council turned him out. He should be responsible to the Council. The Council, as representing the village, should be responsible to Government, and it would always be possible for the Deputy Commissioner to bring pressure on a recalcitrant Council by threatening to suspend the constitution and place the village under an appointed headman for a time if they did not carry out their duties properly.

To this village community should be handed over certain duties, rights, and responsibilities, much what the headman has now, the collection of revenue, etc. All civil, criminal, and revenue cases under certain values and of certain denominations should be handed over to them to try; that is to say, that cognisance should be refused by our police and our Courts, so that the parties could go to the Village Council if they liked. There should be no appeal from the decisions of the Council, no advocates should be allowed, and no record should be required. All penalties imposed should be paid into the village fund.

This fund should exist for all villages, and its nucleus should be, say, half an anna in the rupee of the revenue collections, to which should be added fines, special rates which the Council should be empowered to impose for specific purposes, and other forms of revenue which would vary from place to place. I think a percentage of the district fund should be given to them. A rate on inhabited houses—a rent on house sites—would be a good way of raising money. The purposes for which the fund could be used would be water-supply, sanitation, roads, lighting, watchmen, and so on. Simple account-books would have to be kept, and these accounts would have to be audited once a year.

Model schemes for sanitation, village roads, etc., could be made out for each village to live up to as fast as it could.

Further, villages should have the power to carry out irrigation works on their own initiative and under their own control. I consider this a most important proviso, because I know many villages where this could be done by the village, whereas it is not possible to individuals. I also know one recent case in my district where it was done with great success by the headman and elders. I got them a small grant, and I often went to see how the work was getting on, but I never interfered in any way, and the result was most satisfactory. There was at first a difficulty about collecting the rates, because there was no legal system under which a man who used the water could be made to pay. However, this also settled itself.

Irrigation works, roads, and bridges are most necessary to many villages, but now, unless Government carry out the work, there is no one to do it. And Government will not carry out small works.

It is by the execution of such works that the village would prosper and the village fund grow. Loans should be granted for these purposes by Government, to be repaid out of the profits.

Before our annexation all works were executed by the villages, and the considerable irrigation works in many places are evidence of their ability. All this initiative has now been killed. Yet it is a most valuable asset, not only materially, but morally.

As regards this fund, it will, I know, be objected by many people that it will be simply an excuse for peculation. "Orientals," they say, "cannot be honest, and the funds would be misappropriated right and left."

Exactly this same charge was made when the Co-operative Credit Banks were started. Their history will sufficiently refute such an absurdity. Orientals are just as honest as any other people, and, given a good system, village funds will no more be stolen in India or Burma than municipal funds are in England.

In organising these villages there is another point to be borne in mind. In that desperate struggle after rigid uniformity which distinguishes the Indian Government, every separate hamlet in Burma was put under a separate headman, and thus made a separate organism.

Now it may be that occasionally the village was too large, and a division was needed, but in many other cases the disintegration of long-established units was severely felt. Several hamlets may have one interest in common. They may be grouped round a small irrigation work, or along a stream, or have a fishery in common, or be in other matters of great use to each other. If run as separate organisms there is bound to be strife, each trying for his own benefit. If allowed to remain one organism they will be not only more peaceful, but stronger, and better able to manage their affairs. Thus the rigid formulÆ of Government in this matter as in others should give place to common sense.

Further: in future, villages should be allowed to coalesce if mutual interests attract them. Two or three villages if allowed to combine would carry out works that one could not do.

I see no great difficulty in Burma in thus restoring the organism of village life. It would require mainly tact on the part of the District Officer and ability to let alone. His tendency now is always to interfere if he can. His rule should be never to interfere if he can help it. When things go wrong persistently it will probably be found that there is something amiss with the way the village is organised, and that it requires some slight modification. If a horse can't draw a cart it is better to see what is wrong with the horse or the cart than try to move them both along by turning the wheels round yourself. You won't get far that way. The more you push the more the horse will jib. And Village Councils will be very willing horses if let alone and the cart be not too cumbersome or the hill they have to climb too steep. But they must be left alone. Read the history of municipal institutions in England and note the principles. They are universal.

Once the village communities are strong and healthy, a further step could be made by instituting a township or sub-divisional Council, and later a District Council.

For these I am not prepared to offer any suggestions. It would require a very careful study of local conditions and of the people, a wide experience gained from the working of the resuscitated villages, to know how these should be constituted and what powers and responsibilities should be entrusted to them. I think a sound analogy might be obtained from a study of English counties—not so much perhaps as they are now, but as they were—in spirit, not in law.

After the village organism was established, perhaps in order to its proper establishment, a local Government Board would have to be created. This would have to be in time entirely native to the Province. It is, I think, essential that it should be so. What its relations with the District Officer would be I do not know. I foresee difficulties. It is essential for good order in the district that there be no one between the head and the people. Nevertheless, I don't think he could establish and work the village organism himself. I think he would be too tempted to interfere; and, moreover, there would have to be a certain co-ordination between the systems in various districts. They need not be the same in detail, but the idea should be the same. That is because eventually they must coalesce into bigger organisms. But a District Officer with a strong personality would, I think, be liable to impress that personality on the village, and as it must be self-governing that might create difficulties. For as the villages increased the District Officer would decrease. Gradually his powers would devolve on the local organisms. There would thus be a certain rivalry between the District Officer and the local organisms, which, if the officer were the head of both, might result in injury to the latter. Perhaps some such relation as exists between the Land Records Department and the District Officer would be possible. The Land Records has its own organisation, which works independently of the district but in harmony with it. All this, however, is not a matter which can be thought out. It will have to be worked out, and a correct system can only come little by little, experience showing how modifications should be made. I do not see any great difficulty provided there are common sense and unity of aim on both sides.

And from districts—when they had settled down into distinct organisms more or less self-governing—representatives, not delegates, could be sent to a Provincial Council. Then you would have a real Council, one representative of the people because proceeding from the people, not less surely because not directly. I am not sure that direct election such as is practised in England and America, for instance, does cause representation of the people. In England, at all events, it is not so now. The only power the people have now is to choose between the delegates of two or more parties. Beyond this they have no voice nor choice. They cannot find any expression for their own wishes. Their member may be, probably is, a man they never heard of before the "Party" sent him to contest the seat. There is, in fact, in England to-day no real representation of the people at all. By people, of course, I mean the people as a whole, including all classes. But under some such scheme as I have sketched out for Burma there would be real representation of the people, of localities as a whole, units; local men acquainted with the local conditions would be chosen and not pleaders, and the locality would hold them responsible. Thus the opinion of such a Council would represent the wishes of the people; it could be depended on, and to it could considerable powers be delegated permanently. It would, in fact, in time constitute a Provincial Government in federal relations with the other Provincial Governments. That is the only possible way that a real government can be built up.

And it must always be remembered that the basis is the Village. On the health of the Village all other things depend; from the healthy working of the Village all things may proceed. It is the first but not last word in local self-government.

A very integral part of any self-government is Education, and to that I come in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XVIII
EDUCATION

To the success of any form of self-government a good education is absolutely essential; that a people should be able to exercise self-government it is necessary that they be educated to self-government; for this capacity no more comes by itself than ability to build a ship or steer it when built. And as the government must be self-government, so the education must be a national education and not an imported one.

I have already had something to say on this subject in former chapters when writing of the Indian civilian, and the principles which underlie good education are the same everywhere. A well-educated man is he in whom his mental and physical powers have been so brought out that he can face the ordinary vicissitudes of his life with confidence, that he can understand them and combat them materially to the best of his ability, and that when materially defeated he may still rise spiritually above all defeat and discouragement. Education is necessary to everyone—man or woman, peasant or prince, merchant or artisan—and that man is best educated who can make the best of his life whatever its station may be.

Thus it will be seen that education is mainly relative. A man who would be well educated if in one station of life would be hopelessly ignorant if in another. I doubt if Whewell would have been considered educated had fate suddenly made him a soldier, a political officer on a frontier, or a cultivator. A keen eye gained by experience for market fluctuations is better for a merchant than all the learning of all the libraries.

But this specialisation belongs properly to higher education. There are certain foundation principles necessary to any success in life, to being able to live it in whatever station with dignity and with prosperity. What are those principles?

I think the Indian Education Department would say that these are reading, writing, and arithmetic—that is to say, acquirements. I should say they are qualities of character.

What are these qualities?

First and foremost is belief in his own people, not his caste or his creed, but in the people who inhabit his Province, who will eventually make up his nationality. If the man is to do good work for his people the boy must desire to do good work—he must have a certainty in the unlimited possibilities of his people, that though they may be young now they will grow to a world stature. Therefore, that it is his duty to help them. He must be sure that this world is good—to be made better by him and his fellows and his descendants. He has inherited much; he must hand on more. He has no right to live unless he does his duty to life and in life—that is to say, he must have a purpose in life, for without a purpose life cannot be lived.

Secondly, he must see that to the accomplishment of his purpose, which is but part of the World's Purpose, he must cultivate two qualities, obedience in act and freedom of thought. He must learn to obey, because he must see for himself that only by men acting together under authority can anything be achieved. His obedience will then be a willing and cheerful obedience, because necessary to his own purpose. He must obey that later he may be obeyed. He must keep his mind free, because to admit authority in thought is to kill thought. He must see things for himself and judge for himself, that when he is able to act for himself he may do so on truth and not on hearsay. He must learn to respect the opinions of others which they have founded also on experience, while not necessarily adopting them, because he may see things differently.

He must learn self-knowledge to recognise what he can do and what he can't.

He should cultivate self-command that must not mean self-extinction.

On a base like this all other things come naturally.

Is there any such ideal in elementary education in India? I can safely say that there is no such ideal. All that the Department seeks to do is to stuff a child with reading, writing, and arithmetic, and other learning, regardless of his character or his objective in life.

Therefore elementary education is not popular in Burma, because it seems to have no good purpose.

That was true of education before we took the country. It was then mainly, for boys, in the hands of monks, and I do not think that education when controlled by religion has been popular anywhere in the world. It has been accepted because there was no other means of education available, but it was not admired. Our Government has accepted the monastery schools, and it has also encouraged lay schools, but neither seem to give much satisfaction.

Now this is not the place to discuss religion of any kind, and I have no intention of entering into such a vexed question. There are good things in all religions—borrowed from humanity; there are doubtful things; there are bad things. But the foundation of every religion is a declaration that this world is evil and that we should despise it. Now the objective of all education is to fit a boy for his life, and he cannot be so fit if he despise life. He must love it, admire it, desire in all ways to help it, to increase it, beautify it. His objective must be in this life. Further, the tendency of all faiths is to raise barriers between races and castes. But it is an essential part of any true education that a boy understand that in striving for the good of the community he must ignore all differences. Humanity is one, and the God of Humanity is One, whatever faiths may say.

Thus religions when mixed with education have a paralysing effect. I have often heard this said in Burma. Here is a conversation I once had at a village I knew very well. It occurred, as did most of the talks I had with the people, just after sunset, when I had my chair set outside my rest-house, and the people came dropping in to gossip. There were a number of people, the headman, elders, their wives and children, and two monks from a neighbouring monastery. They talked quite freely because they knew that after office hours I forgot I was an official, or even an Englishman, and just talked to them as one human being to another. I may add that I had been inspecting the village school where little boys and girls learned together. I had also been to a monastery where the elder boys went.

"Well," I said, "what is the news?"

There was an expectant silence. Evidently there was some news; the question was—who should tell it?

"What is it, Headman?" I asked.

The Headman rubbed an ankle reflectively. "The fact is," he answered, "there is no news that would interest your Honour; only just village doings, foolish doings."

"Hum," I said; "that sounds to me as if a young man had been doing something."

Several of the men smiled—"Possibly with the assistance of a girl"—and I glanced at some girls. They giggled, and the Headman said briefly:

"Maung Ka's son has run off with a girl."

"Oh!" I said, turning to Maung Ka, whom I knew well enough—a tall, fine-looking man, who was looking very gloomy. "It's a way boys have. There's no harm in it."

"Not if he can support her afterwards," said Maung Ka gruffly.

"Can't he do that?" I asked.

It appeared he couldn't. He had spent all his boyhood in a monastery "learning" till his father fetched him out. Then he went to the other extreme and levanted with a girl. "He doesn't know one end of a bullock from the other," said the father; "he can't plough or sow; he can't work; he has no common sense. That's what schooling does for a boy."

Most of the other men agreed with him, and we had a discussion on education, in which everyone took part.

The general opinion was that schooling should be to fit you for life. The monks said for eternity, but the villagers—though out of respect for the monks they said little—evidently didn't make any such distinction. What wasn't fit for time wasn't fit for eternity. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were good, because a boy needed these. Beyond that they seemed to think schooling did harm. A boy learned more from his father and the other villagers than from school. As to a girl, "What," asked an elder indignantly, "is the use of a girl learning to write? What will she write? Love-letters only."

"Well," I asked, "and isn't that good—for the boy who gets them?"

The fact is, the villagers are plain, common-sense men and women, and what they want for their children is that they be better fitted for the struggle of life. They do not observe that to be the case at present. They judge by results, and the results are not good, they say.

In fact, except as to the actual acquisition of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which may or may not be of much use, the teaching—and still more than the teaching, the influence—is bad. It unfits for life, it gives wrong ideals, or it kills all ideals.

The higher education is, I think, worse. It follows an imported system, and in the importation all the good is left out. In England a boy's real education comes from association with the other boys and from his father. From them he learns whatever he does learn of conduct, of ambition to true ends, of acting in concert, of ability to judge for himself and stick up for himself.

In India a wrong ideal has been conceived from the beginning. It has been assumed, tacitly maybe, that an Englishman is the final and completely perfected work of God and man, and that all nations should copy him and try to become, if not a sterling Englishman, at least an electro-plate one.

That is disastrous. It depresses the people by depreciating their own races and holding up an objective which is impossible, and if possible would be wrong.

There are in the pasts of nearly all Oriental people ideals which are quite as good as ours, and far better fitted for them. Are these ever taught to them? India once led the civilisation of the world; is that past ever brought up and explained and realised for them? Never, I think.

Further, higher education to be of any use must be objective. You must know what you want the boy to be. What does Government want the products of its higher education to be? I have no idea. Has the Government?

Of what use are these products of the higher education in India? They are useful but for two things, to be lawyers or pleaders, or to be clerks. They are dealers in words, and not in facts or in humanity.

Government accepts a certain number into its service, because the first ideal of Government is a man who can fill up forms and returns, speedily, accurately, and punctually. They can do that. When they have district work to do they fail, because they have no personality, no freedom of thought, and because the people despise them. The old officials whom we took over from the Burmese Government, whatever their defects, had "auza"—personality. It is a commonplace to say that the Burmese have deteriorated. That is not true. They have as much potentiality as before, but this potentiality is wiped out by "education." Far from being really educated, they are merely stuffed, and their natural abilities stifled. Moreover, they cease to be Burmans, or Madrassis, or Bengalis, and become a sort of hybrid. This is due to their English masters, who are obsessed with the idea that the only way to "educate" anyone is to turn him into a plaster Englishman. I have had some experience of these unfortunate boys who have taken degrees.

Personally, if I had to administer a difficult district, I should choose my Burmese assistants from men who had never been to school, and to satisfy Government I would engage some B.A.'s and F.A.'s to be their clerks and fill up the forms. I should be sorry for the B.A.'s, because I think they have as good stuff in them as the others, but their want of education has unfitted them for work requiring "auza."

That is really what it amounts to; the school-trained boy is not educated, whereas the boy brought up in contact with the world is perforce educated. The first is a hothouse plant; the second a useful field plant.

I am aware that current opinion puts down the failure of the educated young Indian to his want of religion. He has been educated out of his own faith and not accepted into any other; hence his want of character. Of all the wild shibboleths about India and the Indians this is, I think, the wildest. That a man is injured by being brought to see the foolishness of caste, of infant marriage, of harems and zenanas, of all the forms and ceremonies with which all religions are covered, seems to me a triumph of illogic. Only the "Occidental mind" at its best could conceive such an idea. In so far as education destroys these ideas it does good. Wherein it harms him is by taking him apart from his people, rendering him not desirous to help them but to disown them. He is taught that to be an Englishman should be his ideal—that he "should cultivate English habits of thought"—as if true thought had any habits—so that, finally, he can't think at all. He is directed to wrong ideals; he is rendered unhappy; he is dÉpaysÉ; he is useless for any work, except being a clerk or lawyer; he has no more character than a jelly-fish. Instead of wishing to lead his people he wishes to identify himself with the English Government, be a civilian, and rule his people. He should be filled with a boundless confidence in the future of his people, and that it is his duty to help that future to be realised. He is discouraged and rendered hopeless. Instead of being a help he is the greatest danger his own people will have to meet when they move forward. He is a danger to all.

The Education Department of the Government of India is the new Frankenstein, and the Higher Education is its monster. The students have sunk under their "education," and in consequence they are unhappy. Who wonders? But, in fact, an alien Power cannot introduce or work any real system of education. It must be indigenous—something of the soil, and not exotic. It, like self-government, must begin with small things in the village and gradually rise.

Like all things, if it is to live and prosper and extend it must have a soul. And the soul of education, like the soul of life, is an emotion tending towards a desired end. The desired end of education is the rise and progress not merely of the individual but of the nation. That has been the soul of the progress of Japan; that must be the soul of the progress of any people; and education will only be enthusiastically taken up when it is seen to be a means to that end.

Such an education cannot be given by Englishmen. Any Education Department must be Provincial and draw its vigour from below. It must not be a machine governed from Simla with text-books as thumbscrews and manuals as beds of Procrustes.

Before there can be a real Education Department it must be entirely native of the Province, responsible to the Province for its success. Can we create such a Department? I think we could, slowly, by handing our village schools as much as possible to Village Councils, district schools to District Councils, and the University to the head Provincial Assembly when it comes into being. They will each have to think out what result they want, and then how to attain that result.

But all must begin with the village; within it alone is the germ cell of all future progress.

CHAPTER XIX
CONCLUSION

There are many other subjects connected with the renaissance of India that I should like to enter into, but I cannot do so here. This book is already too full of matter that is never easy, and is sometimes controversial. Such subjects are the real ideals and ideas that underlay the religions of India, Hindu, and Mohammedan, and which gave them life until they were hidden under priest-made ritual and killed; the early history of India as a history of ideas and civilisations, and not a stupid agglomeration of battles and intrigues; the absolute necessity, as shown in all history, of representation and legislation being by territory, and not by class, nor race, nor religion; and there are many others. Perhaps some day I may return to these matters, or, more happily, other writers will undertake them. They will see the interest and pleasure to be derived from the study of humanity and ideas, and will leave on one side the dusty frippery of ceremonies and creeds and customs, of the details of battles and palace intrigues and dynasties. Life lies under all these things, and they but affect it as old clothes do a man. Meanwhile, I have done what I can to show the causes of the trouble in India and to indicate in what way it may be met.

Only in some such way as that I have sketched, only by following principles of the nature here indicated, can the Government of India be drawn into accordance with the people. The Government must learn to understand those many millions over whom it has acquired so great a power, and in understanding them acquire sympathy with their desires and needs. The people must learn to know, and recognise, and feel that Government does understand them; that it has sympathy with them, and will help them onward to that goal whither their Destiny is calling them. So will both work together toward that end.

To conquer India was great; it is the one great deed whereby we shall live in history; but to make of India a daughter, not a subject, to help her grow out of our care till she is strong enough to walk alone, that will be greater still.

No nation in the world's history has ever done a deed like that.

To conquer India required great courage, it required ability of the highest, it needed self-denial, self-sacrifice of the individual for the nation. What will the freedom of India need in us? It will need qualities higher even than these are. It will need courage, as great as or greater even than that which we have shown before—the courage to leave alone; it will require self-abnegation and self-sacrifice, not for our own nation, but for India, for Humanity; it will require a sympathy and understanding such as no nation has ever yet felt for a foreign people.

Can we do this?

I do not know. Can we with whom representation except of the wire-pullers of the party has ceased to exist, in whose schools of all kinds and in whose universities there is no education, whose legal system is bad beyond all expression, who have under free forms less real freedom than most other countries, can we give to India what we have not? I think that we shall have to take the beam out of our own eye first. Are we prepared to do that?

What will it need in India? It will need courage too, it will need self-restraint not less than that which we shall have to show, the courage to go slowly, to restrain the rising tide within the banks of safety, to so direct it that the flood will fertilise, not destroy.

It will need more than this. What ruined India twice, and what ruins her now? Division. Race, caste and creed are curses when they make one man despise or hate another. There is one God. Brahma and Allah and Jehovah are but names for One if truly seen. His kingdom is in neither Church nor creed nor Prophet, neither in temple nor in holy place, but in the hearts of men—all men. If you read truly you will see that in the beginning all religions were ideas, great streams of hope and truth driving to one ideal. All truth which is a living truth is One. But formulÆ and castes and creeds and ceremonies and forms, rites of all kinds, are priest-made things that kill and petrify. All souls come here from God; not Brahmin souls nor Pongyis' souls nor Christian souls alone, but every soul in every man that lives, they come from God and so return. They are part with us of the eternal "I" in which are lost all "yous" or "theys." Can the Brahmins forget their legendary pride and prove their vaunted worth by leading India to an equal freedom and not keeping her back by the slavery they have thrown upon her? Can the Moslem, casting off the mould of dead tradition, remember the Omniades, their tolerance, their wisdom, their civilisation; what they did and, above all, what they did not do?

Can the Buddhist believe that life is good—not evil; to be made the most of, not feared nor shunned? to be loved and lived?

I do not know. These things are all upon the knees of God.

But for a real new India to arise all these things must come to pass. She is now India Irredenta. And to be redeemed all Indians must offer up as sacrifice, not their good things, but all those evil things they cling to blindly—their hates and their divisions, their pride in what they should be thoroughly ashamed of, their quarrels and misunderstandings. There were a sacrifice that God would love.

Will it come to pass? Who knows? We can only do our best—all of us.

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