16 DECEMBER 1911, Page 22

IN INDIA AND IN PARLIAMENT.*

THESE are the candid reminiscences of an amiable man who has one obvious defect. He lacks the sense of proportion, the modest humorousness which enables us to make a shrewd guess at our own importance to others. In a brief and rather pathetic preface Sir Henry Cotton trusts that his book will add to his many friends and will "not increase the ranks of those enrolled upon the other side." It is his friends who will wince at certain ingenuous com- parisons between the author and other distinguished Anglo- Indians. Speaking of his friend and chief, the late Sir Charles Elliott, he deprecates the laborious attention to detail of that ablest of modern Indian administrators. It would have been better, he thinks, if Sir Charles Elliott "had devoted more attention to the larger questions which were formulating around us in regard to the political and economic tendencies of the time." The vagueness of this definition of an adminis- trator's duties is characteristic. Later on Sir Henry Cotton became Chief Commissioner of Assam, and like his pre- decessors and subordinates had to face the difficult and delicate question of regnlating the relations between European tea- planters and a huge and often troublesome native labour force. After some hesitation—for, RS he candidly admits, he had no desire to make himself unpopular among the planting com- munity—he recommended more drastic interference than the Viceroy was prepared to allow. He compares his attitude to that of "the most illustrious of Bengal officials—Sir Frederick Halliday and Sir John Peter Grant "—in suppress- ing the high-handedness of a past generation of indigo planters. He attributes his own failure to the pusillanimity of Lord Curzon. "In the face of a rising storm of unpopu- larity from his own countrymen, Lord Curzon quailed," to quote the author's own werds. Yet Lord Curzon has not the reputation of a ruler who condoned the wrong-doings of Europeans in India.

Sir Henry Cotton's own account of his career plainly shows that he had not the administrator's temperament; that he was a man of theories rather than of action. He seems to have owed his advancement to high office to his personal charm, his literary ability, and, at first perhaps, to the fact, of which he is justly proud, that he was the son and grandson of Indian civilians. His most memorable official performance was a literary work, the excellent Revenue History of Chittagong, from which some amusing and interesting extracts will be found at pp. 158-162. Those pages of Sir Henry Cotton's book which deal with the raernoties of his social life in India show, pleasantly enough, -why he was a man of many friends, and how, while he was the subordinate of stronger men, he was a useful and even brilliant official. The tale of his administration of Assam quite patently reveals the fact that he was entrusted with a task beyond his-competence ; a task, let us admit for his com- fort, which might have been better performed by men less versatile and clever, but possessing the British instinct for handling the agenda of official life in a downright and not too ambitious fashion.