THE "DEMON OF WRITING."
LORD CURZON is said to believe that the administra- tion of India is impaired as well as impeded by too much writing, and according to a telegram received this week, he has made arrangements which he hopes will diminish the amount, at least in the secretarial offices. We fear he will be disappointed. There is too much writing in India, but the evil has not arisen from any laxity or perversity among the officials, but from circumstances which cannot be seriously modified. The first of these is distance. When your next superior resides a hundred miles away, and you do not meet him three times a year, it follows that you must write to him, write often and write much. We talk together in England and take counsel through the ears, but in India counsel must be taken, if at all, by full and careful correspondence. If a man, burning perhaps with zeal for improvements, has a pro- posal to make, it must be on paper, the subsequent discussion must be on paper also. and not only the resulting orders, but the report as to the effects which those orders have produced. Naturally, as the subordinate and superior really wish well to the work, and each if they differ wishes to persuade the other, the correspondence tends to become full. Each debater collects all the facts he can, uses as many arguments as he can, and states both facts and arguments as persuasively as he may, occasionally, like any other debater, growing sarcastic and sometimes even angry, though the last is not considered good official form. This necessity of debating on paper in- stead of with the mouth is the first cause of the much writing in India, and we cannot think how except by silence, which would generally imply apathy, it is to be removed. The parts of the machine mast be connected somehow, and there is no other nexus even thinkable. There is, moreover, another cause even more operative which is always at work, and which tends to produce exactly the same result. The Government of India in every department but the strictly legal is worked as a responsible despotism, each man explain- ing to some superior what he is doing with the authority committed to his hands. To enforce this responsibility is the universal and most proper preoccupation of the control- ling officials, and it cannot be enforced unless the superiors are fully informed, and unless the information is checked by full " returns." An Assistant-Commissioner, say—sab- prefect is the nearest European analogy—is entrusted with large authority, he has power over the fortunes and the honour of great numbers of individuals; if those individuals are aggrieved are they to have right of complaint or not ? If they are not they will become disaffected, and gradually great abases will arise, as they always must arise if men. however conscientious, are placed in possession of unrestricted authority. Yet if the complaints are allowed there must be endless writing, inquiries, explanations, accounts of fact, rejoinders to what seem to be counter-facts; above all, proofs, all in writing, that the official complained of is doing light, or has at least reasonable grounds for his questioned action. This is, of course, only one illustration ; but the necessity for explanatory writing arises in a hundred ways, and especially in one other, which may be called the philanthropic way. The Governments of India sincerely desire the improvement of their people. They accept and they devise incessant plans for realising this object of their ambition, and naturally they ask, as a basis of action, for the fullest information. That means the collection of returns, the explanation of returns, often long correspondence as to the accuracy of returns. Every official in India is compelled
to statistical officer for his district, as well as its governor in details ; and that fact alone involves infinite and most wearisome writing, which as India grows more and more civilised threatens to become more and more overwhelmirg. Precisely the same complaint is made under every civilised Government in the world except our own and the American, the complaints in France, Germany, and Italy being even louder than in India. Yet what remedy can we so much as think m
of where personal intercommunication is impossible, except indeed to allow subordinates to go their way, and forego all these burdensome efforts at improvement? There is, of course, the device, largely tried upon the Continent, of multiplying officials; but we have not the means for that in India if the officials are to be good men, and if we had it is doubtful if the device would make things move any quicker. The experience of the Continent is that wherever departments are too full of agents everything tends to delay, and that for every official added to the staff there is a new and hampering mass of writing. We suppose the evil could be diminished by trusting subordinates more, and assuming that they were always doing the right thing, but the responsibility which is the real corrective of our despotic system would then be most seriously diminished. Without record drawn np by the responsible official there is, under an absolute government, no valid check, yet a government of record must be a government of much writing. Some of it may be unnecessary, we dare say is, but if the major portion is not required it is a little curious that the wonderfully experienced men who, as Lieutenant-Governors, Commis- sioners, and so on, keep the machine in motion are always adding to the burden. It is often said that this system must grievously cramp energy, that its inevitable effect must be to produce literary men instead of men of action, and that all this debating and reporting and calculating on paper must end in a certain sterility of result. Well in strict logic that is true, but in fact we do not know that much writing produces worse results than the much talking prevalent in countries under a government of more freedom. A class does grow up nit donbtedly which is very efficient on paper, and nowhere else, just as there is a class here which is very efficient on the platform. but off it is very sterile. The class, however, is not a large one. India produces at least a fair proportion of men of action, with energies which the world thinks only too active, while the majority of her officials are as efficient in doing their work, as distinguished from writing about their work, as any class of professionals in Europe. Like our own solicitors, they get through a lot of business, though they are always writing. The truth seems to be that the official does his writing as well as he can, but when action is required gets somebody to do it for him, or leaves it undone. A certain number grow jaded, or even collapse, but the average British official, like the average British boy at school, has a not un- healthy repugnance to letting too much be taken out of him, and resists " pressure " with a kind of passive stolidity which for its purpose is very effective. A few men are worked to death, but the majority refuse to do more than they are capable of doing, get through their term of service very creditably. and go home just as healthy as the rivals they left behind them, who have become barristers, or doctors, or engineers. Very few indeed become literary. The Anglo-Indians who are always writing, and who Macaulay thought often wrote " above their ability," have produced very few books, and not one author who ranks in the first class. They have not more of the cacoahes scribendi than other men, not nearly so much as the same class in England has of the cacoethes loquendi. They have written, in fact, whole reams, not for love of writing—moat of them hate it—but as part of their business in life, for which they cannot as yet perceive any effective substitute. By and by perhaps an improved telephone will provide one; bat even then, if the rulers are to exercise any effective control, there must be what seems to outsiders a most unnecessary quantity of paper covered with words. We do not believe in Utopia, and do not see how government by deliberation is to be secured without much talk, or how government from above is to be made benevolent or beneficial unless responsibility is maintained by very full and very numerous reports. Checks are nuisances, impediments to action; but unchecked power in the hands of subordinates is apt to be a nuisance too.
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