The Future of England/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
OUR ORIENTAL FUTURE
Meanwhile, a storm which had been threatening Traitor's Hill had not come on. In the very moment when it had appeared about to break over London, its ranks opened, its battalions yielded, its artillery limbered up, and, as they wheeled to go, the descending sun completed their catastrophe. For it shot remorselessly clean through their regiments and annihilated their van, until all cloudland was broken, lost with here and there a protest of thunder in the distant East.
Thought followed the omen, and went that way too. It seemed plain that if our first duty is to fortify our citizens in freedom, prosperity, and health, and if, in Christendom, we must strive for long-lost concord, all this must be crowned by another duty yet. The weightiest obligation of England lies eastward. Out there, we shall finally win, or lose, our title to lead the world.
At first sight that proposition may not appear entirely accurate. For England, behind her Asiatic empire of 320,000,000, is building up, in her inexhaustible way, another empire in its shadow. Hence, if our Asiatic Aladdin's palace were to vanish to-night, another immense dominion in North Africa organised, in our own day, by Lugard, Goldie, Cromer, and Kitchener, would be there to take its place. So that Asia, it may be said, cannot be so much to us.
Besides, the day will come when this secondary, this nether, dominion will deflect, or even for a time dominate, the policy of the world. For, in the tract more than three thousand miles long, stretching right across Africa, and bounded on the north by the Sahara deserts and south by the equator, live endless fighting races. At the close of the nineteenth century two processes, which had both been in operation for centuries, were completed in their regard. On the one hand, they were annexed by Europe wholesale; and, on the other, the long-standing Mohammedan invasions from Arabia were mostly accomplished. The European had come, with his precise machinery and his less precise ideas; and the Arab had come also, with a prayer-mat and a koran, bearing across the hot desert the hotter formulæ of Islam. These melt some of the chains round the limbs of the benighted African. For, to apply the words of Gibbon, "the subject or the slave, the captive or the criminal, arises in a moment the free and equal companion of the victorious Moslem." Thus, the most energetic peoples in west and east are combining to inspire three thousand miles of Fuzzy-wuzzy warriors with novel hopes and powers. A formidable prospect, when we remember that it only needed some few millions of Arabs to carry their faith and their rulership as far as Borneo one way and Morocco the other, to threaten Vienna and Paris, and nearly to make good the boast of Bajazet that he would stall his arab at the altar of St. Peter's itself.
However, our duty in those regions at present is negative, for the most part. In that quarter of the world, which for the time is as quiet as gunpowder, our business is to guard against two main dangers. The first of these is that in Islam the religious steam rises with inconceivable rapidity and force, when some one accuses every one else of impiety, and of having made crooked the straight path of the Prophet. Swords are drawn, and under the shadow of the swords is Paradise. Such, for example, at the opening of the nineteenth century, was the career of that Othman who founded the Foulah Empire and made Sokoto his capital; such too, at its close, were the histories of the Mahdi and the Khalifa in our Soudan. All this excites the fear and the faith of the idolatrous Fuzzy-wuzzy, so that Islam in Africa is far more than "a ring cast into the desert," as the Arab historian, Mohammed el Tounsy, calls it. Rather, it is an ocean into which tumbles an ever-breaking shore of primitive beliefs.
The second danger against which we have to guard, in that quarter of the globe, arises from the natural anxiety of the European powers to avail themselves of such an inexhaustible storehouse of soldiery. To arm and drill these men would be a tempting policy, not altogether lost sight of by those who are exhibiting such interest in Morocco and other parts of those territories.
Yet when all is said, and all allowance is made for the importance of our African dominion, Asia must be the touchstone of our greatness still. For us, Asia dominates Africa, or, more accurately, is linked with it. If, for instance, we can be friends with our 70,000,000 of Mohammedan Asiatics, these can whisper in our favour from Eastern Bengal to Lucknow, from Lucknow across the Indus, until their goodwill journeys to Cairo and the heart of Africa. For though the staff of the Prophet is bent, it is not broken. As he wished it in his last sermon, there is a brotherhood in Islam.
Of the tremendous and even terrible importance to us of Asia, we seem to try not to think. Some eighty years ago, Macaulay said that three pitched battles in India were less accounted of here than a broken head in Coldbath Fields. Later, Dalhousie wrote that scarcely anything could rouse even a transient interest in Indian affairs. And, to-day, Lord Curzon confesses that "the indictment still remains true." So we attempt to forget that India is one-fifth of the human species, and that we are sponsors for the external safety, internal order, contentment, and prosperity of it all.
Indeed, our future there is even compromised by the slight acquaintance of Englishmen with oriental affairs. This proposition, however disputable it may appear, is founded on the report and evidence of the Committee on the organisation of oriental studies, published towards the close of 1909. The Committee has revealed a regrettable state of affairs. "The knowledge of the Indian languages," says the report, "and the knowledge of native thought which such knowledge implies, is less than it was twenty-five years ago." In this country, with trifling exceptions, "no instruction of any kind is provided" in the history and social customs of Eastern countries, though these have been changing fast. Even "the great majority of missionaries go to Eastern and African countries without any previous training in a vernacular." While our India Office applies only £300 a year to such purposes, Berlin assigns a headquarters staff of forty-two teachers, and devotes a princely budget of £10,000 annually to the same objects. Paris has its École des Langues Orientales Vivantes. In England, almost alone of European countries, "no oriental school exists." Yet the persons speaking such languages, and practising such customs, number 800,000,000 of the human race.
The report of that Committee should signalise, assuredly, a new activity in our Asiatic relationship. It explains so much. All this talk about the "inscrutable" East, which we do not scrutinise! And then the unexplained progress of Germany in the Orient! And then that inevitable quotation from Matthew Arnold about the East, which listens to the legions thundering past, and turns to thought again, as though we could march past in Asia and go off parade comfortably, without noticing what the oriental Archimedes is meditating in the dust!
To look, however, as best we may, through the untoward mist that thickens yonder, it would seem that, taking the past with the future, there will be altogether four main stages in our Asiatic destiny. We stand to-day midway in the third of these, but with the fourth stage already on the horizon.
Originally, we went to Asia for no loftier motive than to do business. But, though the motive was not particularly lofty, we have no reason whatever to apologise for it. Obviously, trade is for the mutual advantage of buyer and seller alike, and if the European gained, so did the Indian. This trading epoch was the primary stage in our Asiatic career.
The second stage began when we found that, for a twofold cause, we could not trade satisfactorily. Hindustan, during the eighteenth century, in consequence of the break-up of the Moghul Empire, of the Mahratta risings, and of the Pathan invasions, was little short of an inferno. Trade was becoming impossible. Besides this, an European nation, France, had come into India, and definitely aimed at possessing it, with the inevitable result that our commerce would go by the board, if she succeeded in her design. Therefore, extending our original position as traders, we adopted the political role, almost, as it were, perforce, and established our governmental ascendency.
Good work for India was accomplished at this second stage also. For eight hundred years India's capacity for political development had been limited to tyrannies, and these were now in the dust. She was constitutionally mere treasure - trove. We destroyed no organised governmental institutions, for there were none standing, except the Rajput States and Travancore, which we preserved from imminent submersion in the flood of anarchy. Politically, India is a novice. As has been justly said, "at the end of the eighteenth century, very few indeed of the reigning families in India could boast more than twenty-five years of independent and definite political existence." It was we who made Indian politics.
Besides securing internal order and erecting a government, we have provided India with the novelty of order on her land frontier, nowadays nearly 6000 miles long, and peopled by hundreds of tribes, mostly inured to hereditary rapine, and full of the ferment of religious war. In our own day we have, in the far east, settled Upper Burma from the Gulf of Martaban to the Hukon valley, and from Yunan to the Lushai Hills; in the far west, we have given peace to Beluchistan, from the Arabian Sea to the Registan desert, and from the Persian border to the Suleimans and the Gomal Pass.
Then, too, beyond that frontier, the muffled figures of European powers have been challenged by us. For France has been advancing again on India from the east; while west and north, across wide deserts, and lofty mountains, and debateable boundaries, there have been the nightly bivouac and the daily march of many legions. And now the Teuton is on the look-out too.
The third stage is that in which we live to-day. It is quite incomplete, and has a long and arduous road ahead. For, having become rulers, we set ourselves next to develop the country, and restore, or create, its prosperity, thus pursuing, on the one hand, our original business object, and, on the other, fulfilling the obligations of our new governmental position.
This third stage began a little before the Mutiny, say in 1850. Before that date, material civilisation, which vitally depends on facility of communication, practically did not exist. Therefore, 1850 was roughly the initial date of India's entry into modern life, under our auspices.
More precisely, what the policy of public works then inaugurated has done, is to guard the Indian peoples against famine. Apart from the comparatively few towns, India is a mass of villages. Before our coming, these villagers, in the absence of communication and markets, could not sell their surplus crop on a good harvest; alternatively, on a bad harvest, they could not obtain food, and were at the mercy of the season. But, having established our canals, railways, and roads, our administrators, according to the report of the Commission of 1901, "for the first time reduced to a system the administration of famine relief," a policy amply tested and justified in recent years.
This third stage has had another aspect. The native has had to be protected not only against nature, but also against his fellow-men, by the enactment of law. To Asiatics law should be swift and cheap, and their ideal is an Aurungzebe, the emperor who would dispense justice in person to the raggedest of his subjects. But, as a fact, that system worked horribly ill. Besides, the will of the just man cannot decide if shirtings are up to sample, or if the documents in court establish agency, so that discretionary justice is incompatible with the most moderate commercial activity. Business demanded written law, and there were no written laws in India, or indeed in Asia, except the religious ones. These laws of Hinduism and Mohammedanism are, at the best, vague and contradictory, and in some of the branches of jurisprudence contain no rules at all.
Therefore, it was imperative to create law and compose a deuteronomy for India. Since 1860, when the penal code was enacted, we have formulated those codes which, in the words of Sir Henry Maine, "stand against all competition." The penal code itself is, according to Sir James Stephen, "by far the best system of criminal law in the world," and its fellow, the code of criminal procedure, which regulates the daily machinery of peace and order in that vast empire, is not less efficient. As regards the civil law, we have perhaps been scarcely so successful, mainly because a large part of the substantive civil law, covered by Mohammedan law which is impossible to codify, and by Hindu law of which there is no single body, cannot be touched by our legislators.
Of this same third phase there is still another aspect, and the last. Before our coming, public finance did not exist, or, so far as it did, was mere oppression and iniquity. To be candid, our own record was only moderate up to the Mutiny, and that rising, which entailed a large debt, added confusion to chaos. Public finance, on modern lines, dates in India from 1860.
During the fifty years since that date, our people have done wonders in finance. Hardly any important country nowadays, east or west, is well managed financially, except India. But India can easily be shown to be admirably administered in this department. For instance, she has reduced her non-productive debt so fast during this century that at the same rate of extinction it will be nil in eighteen years' time. Or again, to compare to-day with 1860, the land revenue is everywhere lighter; customs duties have been greatly reduced; the salt tax, the only obligatory imposition falling on the general mass of the people, has been cut down enormously. To have set up a modern government on such economic lines is without parallel.
And this has been effected by a covenanted civil service barely numbering 1000 men. A mere nothing in numbers; a handful of salt in the Indian Sea.
Therefore, in this third stage of our Indian career we have apparently been successful. Lord Curzon tells us, as indeed we know, that "wealth is increasing in India. There is no test you can apply which does not demonstrate it. Trade is growing. Evidences of prosperity and progress are multiplying on every side." The blue-books furnish the same story. Thus, if in India we began as traders, and continued as rulers, we are becoming, up to date, the successful agents of prosperity. On this showing, all may seem to be for the best.
But, then, if so, what need is there of any fourth phase? Why should India require more than all that she has already obtained at our hands—order and safety, and public works, and law, and sound finance—signal benefits these? And truly, these gifts are indeed important. But that India will rest content with them, or that the Asiatic future of England is to be limited to such services, no one will be so blind as to suppose.
In order, however, to understand why a fourth phase will be necessary, and the nature of it, we must look a little more closely than hitherto at the third, in the midst of which we stand.
To begin with, it may be questioned, on a closer survey of what we have done for India, whether our administration, even in its strongest points, that is, in the points of order and safety, of public works, of law, and of sound finance, has been above criticism. Indeed, it may even be argued that, unfortunately, important blunders have been committed by our administration in all these respects, and need remedy in the future.
For instance, during years not distant the Indian government has displayed regrettable hesitation in respect of outrage and anarchy, hatched in the Deccan and Bengal, and even in London. Mr. Chirol, in his Indian Unrest, has explained "the extraordinary tolerance too long extended at home and in India to this criminal propaganda. For two whole years it was carried on with relative impunity under the very eye of the government of India in Calcutta." As Lord Minto himself said in February 1911, there has been "a far-reaching conspiracy against our existence in India." Our first duty was to have put it down and to have maintained order at an earlier date than we actually did.
It is worthy of note that, when our government had begun to realise the serious nature of this movement, the Viceroy laid the whole position before the princes and chiefs of the Native States, who govern about one-third of the total area of India and enjoy the allegiance of 71,000,000 of subjects. These potentates unanimously condemned the methods and motives of their misguided compatriots. Their replies were a rebuke to our supineness, and a reminder, too, that the East is governed by princes and by statesmen, and not by the hare-brained chatter of a seditious press. This consultation was something novel. It was a sudden omen of the future, and pregnant with things to come.
Again, though our codes are undoubtedly excellent, yet the slow course of Indian justice has become proverbial. If the Asiatic, justifiably enough after all, likes justice to be swift and cheap, we have not succeeded in supplying that article. As M. Chailley has recently observed, "outside of the Presidency towns, the procedure of the courts seems to be very complicated, slow, and costly, and unsuited for about one-third of India." Besides, English civil law is one of the most cumbrous systems in the world, and its application to India is not an unmixed success. To some extent we have thus compromised the value of a magnificent gift, and our judicial conceptions and procedure in the civil field have helped litigation to grow into a speculation, a mania, and a curse.
Or again, though our public works have saved the agricultural community from actual starvation, yet on the other hand, in the words of Sir John Strachey, the warm advocate of our policy here, "the indebtedness of the agriculturists is greater now than it was before the establishment of our government"; while in 1899 Lord Curzon stated that "the canker of agricultural indebtedness is eating into the vitals of India."
Admirable, too, as Indian finance has been on the whole, yet in its relation to the Bengal land settlement, for instance, it has been seriously at fault. The exhaustive inquiry, made in 1901 into the whole subject of the land revenue administration throughout India, refers with stricture to those measures, the result of which has been "to place the tenant so unreservedly at the mercy of the landlord," besides sacrificing revenue.
Nevertheless, these errors are either being remedied at the present time, or are for the most part reparable, and certainly cannot weigh for a moment in the scale against the corresponding achievements. Therefore, we must look a little deeper into our action at this third stage, in order to understand why it is still so imperfect, and must even eventually be supplemented from elsewhere.
Mr. Chamberlain has said that, as a young man, he ridiculed the saying of Lord Beaconsfield that health is the foundation of policy, but that in his maturity he regretted his levity, having learned that it was true. To apply that proposition to our rule in Asia, we may say that neither to have order, or public works, or justice, or finance, or all together, is so good as to be well. National health is the first postulate of prosperity, and it is prosperity that, at this third stage, we are setting out to supply.
Among the many virtues of the Asiatic, sanitation is not to be reckoned. When, for instance, we came to Rangoon, it is on record that this city of 100,000 inhabitants did not possess a single public lamp, or a drop of wholesome water, or one drain that was not open in the streets, or any system whatsoever of sewage. In Calcutta it was the same, till comparatively recent times. To ninetenths of its inhabitants clean water was unknown, and they drank the filthy sludge of the river, which was at once the cesspool and the common graveyard of the city. The capital of India was officially declared to be unfit to live in. So squalid is what those who do not know it, term "the gorgeous East."
It must be said at once that, in this department too, we are doing something. As regards Burma, the accounts of the Burmese municipalities, and of the municipalities in Bengal, show that even here, if we go down into detail, a beginning has been made, though it should be borne in mind that progress is limited by the consideration that no taxation is more unpopular in India than taxation for local purposes. In our medical colleges, too, we are now training Indians to serve with aptitude and success in our hospitals and dispensaries. Besides, a corresponding organisation has been set on foot for training women, to doctor, in the hospitals and dispensaries which we have established for them, the hitherto neglected members of their sex.
Yet, to look broadly at the matter, the battle for health has hitherto gone against us. The triple alliance of the rat and the flea and the mosquito has beaten the government of India. The modern Juggernaut is the bacillus unrestrictedly trampling down its millions.
Let us attend to what Professor Ronald Ross, who went out to India to discover the true cause of malaria, thinks of its civilisation from a medical point of view. "Racked by poverty, swept by epidemics, housed in hovels, ruled by superstitions, they presented the spectacle of an ancient civilisation fallen for centuries into decay. One saw there both physical and mental degeneration. Since the time of the early mathematicians, science had died; and since that of the great temples, art had become ornament. Here was the living picture of the fate which destroyed Greece, Rome, and Spain; and I saw in it the work of nescience the opposite of science."
And the representative of the Indian government, speaking in the House of Commons, in July, 1911, practically confirms all this. "The present standard of living," he says, "is deplorably low. Ignorance of sanitary or medical principles is practically universal." The death-rate of children is appalling. The general death-rate is also immensely high. "Plague has now been present in India for fifteen years, and the total of nearly 7,500,000 deaths from it has been recorded."
Thus an aspect of our Asiatic future rises before us. The Indian peoples, as we found them, were almost extinct politically, and we have provided them with a polity. Further, they lacked prosperity, and we claimed to furnish it. At first sight, it seemed that we had succeeded, with our public works, and our law and order, and our finance. But, on a closer view, it is plain that, if health is the root of prosperity, we have failed in the vital matter of all.
Might it not be possible that, since the health of the Empire is one of the most important, most urgent, and most neglected of imperial duties, an Imperial Medical Staff should be organised, wherein the various energies and experience of the doctor, the parasitologist, the entomologist, the hygienist, the engineer, the civil servant, and the statesman, should be mobilised and concentrated for the good of one quarter of the human race? Sanitation, now on a peace, should be put on a war, footing. We have recently been provided with an Imperial Military Staff for more efficient defence against our enemies. Why not an Imperial Medical Staff for the more efficient preservation of our peoples?
But if prosperity is founded primarily on the health of the body, it is founded next on the health of the mind. Unfortunately, the culture of the latter has for ages been slackening in southern Asia. So we have tried to educate India. But, to be brief, our policy in that respect has been largely a farrago of failures, a system seemingly elaborated to be nearly as bad as possible.
For instance, 90 per cent, or more, of the Indian peoples depend on agriculture. That is the pursuit which eclipses all others in their eyes. They matriculate in mother earth. Our educational system has avoided that subject.
Among the remaining 10 per cent, we are endeavouring to foster commercial prosperity, not without some result already. Indeed, at the present moment, there are some 2500 factories in India, run by mechanical power and employing nearly a million persons. Or again, though fourfifths of the exports of India consist of raw materials and food-stuffs, this proportion is being modified, and the recent rise in the export of manufactures is more than twice as great as the rise in the export of raw materials. Although it might be thought that we should have made it our first duty to provide the best commercial education, this has not been the case. Thus, in the words of an Indian economist, "the supreme need of to-day is managers of firms, pioneers, and entrepreneurs. The highest intellect of the nation should be educated for industries; our new ventures are run by amateur managers, and for this reason many of our new joint-stock companies have failed."
Or again, it may be recalled that, at the start of things, Lord William Bentinck, the Viceroy, decided that we should devote ourselves to teaching "English literature and science." Of this programme indubitably the scientific half would have been valuable, as the Indian mind is unscientific. Yet from the first, science was dropped out of our curriculum.
Later, in 1854, the Indian government issued what is usually called their educational "charter." It provided very wisely for the development of elementary education, with the object of "conveying to the great mass of the people, who are utterly incapable of obtaining any education worthy of the name by their own unaided efforts, useful and practical knowledge, suited to every station in life." A most admirable recommendation. It was, however, abandoned. Indeed, in July 1911 it was officially stated in the House of Commons that 80 per cent of the children of India are still "outside education." As the boys alone, of school-going age, number 16,000,000 at the present date, the widespread nature of native ignorance may be gathered.
Relinquishing, then, the systematic instruction of the masses in anything, we confined our education mainly to literary subjects, to be taught through the medium of the English tongue. For that purpose it may be supposed that we should have needed masters who understood our language and ways of thought. Yet out of 127 "colleges" to-day, there are 30 with no Europeans at all on the staff, 16 with one, 21 with two, and so forth. In the secondary schools it is even worse. Altogether, in the early years of this century, the total number of Europeans under government engaged in educational work has numbered barely 250, whilst that of natives engaged in similar work in colleges and secondary schools has been over 27,000. The Director-General of Education himself recently denounced the whole status of the latter teachers as "scandalous in Bengal and Eastern Bengal, and unsatisfactory in every province."
In a word, our educational policy in India has been that rare thing—a policy of which nobody can approve. Nay more, it has been so misguided on the whole, up to 1904 at any rate, that on its reform the justification of our rule must depend. For we only hold India on the tenure of continuous amelioration.
So far, then, it has seemed that, as regards the third phase of our policy, we are still no more than half-way in it. But, to go a step further, is it not, conceivably, impossible that we should succeed here? All question of our own official policy apart, do not the very facts of Indian life forbid prosperity to be anything but a languid exotic?
Forexample, the Hindu population of 220,000,000 is divided against itself more profoundly than any other in recorded time. Out of that total, no less than 53,000,000 at the present date are reckoned so unclean by the others that their very touch or presence is pollution, and they are doomed to a shameful ostracism. An Englishman may be entitled to agree with what an Indian prince, the Gaekwar of Baroda, says of this system that, "claiming to rise by minutely graduated steps from the pariah to the Brahman, it is a whole tissue of injustice, splitting men equal by nature into divisions high and low"; and he adds that, therefore, reckoning the Mohammedans into his calculation, "one-sixth of the people are in a chronically depressed and ignorant condition."
But even this opposition of Hindus and pariahs is unimportant compared with the caste system, which divides the Hindus inter se to an incredible extent. The castes, again, are infinitely parcelled out, the Brahminical alone containing over 1800 subdivisions. The principle of caste being that its members exclusively eat together and exclusively intermarry, the result is that India consists of a population indescribably heterogeneous. As Sir Bampfylde Fuller has explained: "For at least twelve centuries intermarriage between castes has been absolutely prohibited; the population of a district or a town is a collection of different nationalities—almost different species—of mankind. It is hardly too much to say that by the caste system the inhabitants of India are differentiated into two thousand species." India, in fact, is a continent of stereotyped chaos. The first preoccupation of each Hindu is to maintain his caste, his separateness, his ceremonial purity, sanctioned, as it is, under the segis of the Brahmans, by rules, laws, prejudices, and traditions. From one point of view, in caste is a man's salvation and happiness; from another, it is the utter negation of equality, the very bar of progress, and the heaviest chain which humanity has ever worn.
And then, piled high upon the top of all the endless detritus of caste, comes the pyre upon which Hindus and Mohammedans burn Indian unity to ashes. This is an animus, radical, utter, and final, ever vitalised by inextinguishable memories, and fed daily by the clash of warring beliefs. The wisest and most liberal Mohammedan of the nineteenth century, Syad Ahmad Khan, has said that on the day on which England left India there would be war, and that, if the Mohammedans were hard pressed, "then our Musalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys—like a swarm of locusts would they come." A gruesome prospect for Bengali journalists, and able editors! A prospect more than ever certain to-day, when Hinduism and Islam are both busy with revivalism, with delimitations of doctrinal frontiers, and the fortification of theological stockades.
Yet all these are merely some of the difficulties which check the movement of a decomposed society towards integration and cohesion. For example, there is the status of women in Hinduism. We may credit the eulogies so often devoted to the domestic influence and character of the women of India. In India, Sister Nivedita with pardonable exaggeration tells us, "the sanctity and sweetness of family life have been raised to the rank of a great culture," and she adds that there is "a half-magical element in this attitude of Hindus towards women." But all this must not conceal from us the tremendous practical disadvantages under which the women labour, disadvantages so burdensome as to react with severity upon the race. We are told officially that, at the present date, there are no less than 9,000,000 girl-wives between the ages of one and fifteen, of whom 2,500,000 are under eleven years of age. Also, there are 4,000,000 girl-widows who may not re-marry. Where an Englishman cannot tread without indiscretion, a distinguished Indian has recently come forward to denounce "this baneful custom" of child-marriage in all its aspects, and to declare, besides, that "enforced widowhood has hung like a heavy millstone round the neck of India." In fact, the female, as an infant, is less cared for, as a girl, is less educated, even than the male; as a betrothed, is engaged to marry in ignorance; as married, is in a backwater of life; and as a widow, is little more than an outcast. All this must work in two opposite ways. In the breasts of a minority infinitesimally small, it must excite a determination to escape from such dire bondage, and to embrace the outstretched hands of western civilisation and freedom. But upon the huge overwhelming mass it must work conversely, weakening the fibre of the mind and the sinews of the will, so that they welcome their trammels, and stand at cross purposes with their own enlightenment. And they excite their men against us. They recapture the native reformer, making western culture and science look cold and comfortless, and even impious, to their husbands returning hot with reform from some congress of the Arya Samaj. As one of the most eminent of modern native reformers has said, "the women are not with us."
And yet all this is not a tithe of all that, in the endless Indian world, is calculated to resist our progress. To so many of those peoples the past, in which we have no part, is so much more than the present or the future. The Islamite, remembering the centuries of his ascendency since Mahmud of Ghazni, and the Hindu, thinking of centuries in the older night of time, wish them back. It is aristocracy to live in the past, and they are all aristocrats. They revere ancestry more deeply than we can understand. Still more, they worship power, which to them is of God. Hence if, on the one hand, they obey a Maharana of Udaipur, the reputed descendant of Vishnu, or a Maharaja of Travancore, sprung, they say, from the old emperors of Malabar; on the other, they can yield allegiance no less, when a body-servant founds the dynasty of Scindia, or the brigand, Sivaji, becomes a monarch, or when a corporal seizes the crown of Mysore. So they are irked by the hum of "progress," and prefer their native hills and valleys to the bare blank plain of equality, even with safe-conduct from Padgett, M.P.
Nevertheless, when all this has been said as to the difficulties in the way of our policy of prosperity, we know little if we do not take a deeper sounding yet. In Asia we operate in the presence of some of the greatest creeds that have sought to reconcile humanity to its lot. There is Hinduism, the faith meditative, and Islam, the faith militant. Farther off, rise the peaks of Buddhism, those Himalayas of the sky spiritual, wrapt in the snows of eternal thought.
Under the cold disapproving eyes of all these votaries, it is a stiff task for us to wean men to calico and cutlery, and the whole programme of the flesh. For the Mohammedan, in spite of his Aligarh college, cannot easily forget the dictum of Omar that all that agrees with the Koran is superfluous, and all that differs from it is error. The Hindus, though divided so much, yet agree in viewing all things as a curtain ever tremulous with breaths from the unseen. For them, in the phrase of the Adonais, life does no more than to stain the white radiance of eternity. Last of all, the Buddhists remember how the Master said that they should be free from the passions which, like a net, encompass men; and how he wrought out the great Renunciation; and how he straitly charged them to overcome this world's "thirst," by aid of the four Meditations, and the five moral Powers, and the seven kinds of Wisdom, and the noble eightfold Path; and how, dying, he enjoined them to go in that way for ever, of which the gate is purity, and its goal is love.
Yet, even so, in this interminable exhaustless East, into the mazes of which we have somehow stumbled, we have to turn another corner still. After all, the Moslem, in spite of his fatalism, can cry out when he is hurt like other people. The Hindu himself is growing as fond of money as the denizens of Park Lane or Capel Court, can agitate, as well as the best of us, for the good things of this life, and is utterly material in his baser rites. For in Asia the religious torch burns dark at its foot.
But that consideration opens up at once a grave issue for ourselves. If in the East, as elsewhere, the old contests between the spirit and the flesh have their hard-fought battlefield, and if materialism gains ground visibly, are we justified in thus marching, horse and foot, in rescue of the latter? To make life worth living, and to raise the standard of comfort, sounds well. Yet the East may say that to stimulate unruly affections, and to put an edge to appetites, is practically our mission, and a disputable one. It is not an unquestionable thing to substitute the multiplicity of desires for the multiplicity of deities. Is England to be the agent provocateur of disbelief? For the rising flood of our western rationalism saps the foundations of the tabernacles where the tribes go up. We lay our unwitting axe in the primeval woodland of the divinities. We make our clearings in the matted jungle of the gods.
All this is dubious work, even from a practical point of view. For, as Comte wrote in his Cours de Philosophie, "a decisive experience has proved the necessary instability of all purely material regimes, founded only on men's interests, independently of their affections and convictions." That thesis is being verified in India: Sir John Strachey, who knew that country administratively as well as any man, has stated that: "I never heard of a great measure of improvement that was popular in India, even among the classes that have received the largest share of education"; and he adds that the masses of the people "dislike everything new, they dislike almost everything that we look upon as progress." And the main cause of all this is that even to-day, as Sir Alfred Lyall has told us, "it is in the religious life that Asiatic communities still find the reason of their existence and the repose of it."
Thus it is that England, surveying her own work in India, in that third phase of her policy which would make men prosperous, has to apply to herself the words of Napoleon, "I am the Revolution." We shall discover, too, that the more eagerly we push that revolutionary programme of utilitarianism, and the more hastily India puts on the West, to the detriment of her old order, the more she will resent our disruption of the "reason of her existence and the repose of it."
Meditating on these deep issues, a thinker may have a dream. Resisting all present appearances, he may remember that the truer Hinduism never fails. The Greeks came, and made nothing of the Brahmans. Against that bulwark all -subduing Islam itself was checked. Buddha, who founded the most widely spread religion, was a Hindu, yet, because Buddhism was not orthodox, it was finally evicted from Hindustan, and had to conquer its world elsewhere. England herself, with her steam-roller of democratic right, in reality avails little, for, if she is levelling out caste on the surface, it is only tightening down below. Though India may be giving ground nominally before the materialistic jehad, yet perhaps her retreat will only be on the first line of her entrenchments. She will fall back on the inner keep of her mysticism, upon the central fortalice of her esoteric faith. In the last resort of battle she will turn the stream of her despondency upon Europe, and will open upon our optimism the dykes of her immemorial despair.
Beyond this, the thinker may ponder on a still more audacious hypothesis. If we will kill their faith, they may try to kill our faith too. They will have no Metz. They will sally out for a religious sortie in force. They will argue that this one life on which, in our view, all our future status hinges, is, to them, more scientifically, but a link in the long chain. We desire consciousness; they would be rid of it. We presuppose, they deny, the soul. We anchor ourselves on a Personal Godhead; to them such personality of the divine is the most repugnant of heresies. As for immortal life, they draw back with horror from its torture or its bliss. Such is the arch of meditation through which they would have us gaze on the vista of reality. Such is the height, terraced by wisdom or by folly, which they would have us tread. Such is the forbidden opium of metaphysics which they will export West.
Thus at last would be realised the old prophecy of Schopenhauer that "Indian philosophy, streaming back to Europe, will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought." Then would come true the words of the Swami Vivekananda: "The land above all of introspection and spirituality is India. Hence have started the founders of religion, and here again must start the wave which will spiritualise the material civilisation of the world. Political greatness or military power is never the mission of the Hindus. But there has been the other mission given to us: to accumulate, as it were, into a dynamo all the spiritual energy of the race, and to pour forth that concentrated energy on the world. India's gift to the world is the light spiritual."
But these are dreams, the light infantry of speculation, only skirmishers from the ivory gate. The flank of England is too solidly posted to be readily turned by such assailants as these.
We have to look at facts. Facts tell us that, for generations still to come, our third phase in India, our policy of prosperity, will not reach its fulfilment, or be crowned with final success. Facts tell us, too, that, even if our aim were to be consummated to-morrow, it would not satisfy India at all. Therefore, a fourth phase of policy must be initiated, and indeed is beginning to-day.
In that fourth phase the Indian question will be not of prosperity, but of freedom. On our solution of that question will depend the ultimate future of England.