A WORD FOR BENGAL.
SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE intends, we fear, to with- draw his second Bill for the better government of India, on the plea that the "state of public business" will not allow the necessary time for its discussion. He has, however, pre- sented to Parliament the usual pikes justificatives for his pro- posal in the shape of a blue-book of only 150 clearly printed pages, extremely well edited, and containing the opinions of all prominent Anglo-Indians on the best method of organizing an effective government for Bengal. Nobody, we suppose, will read it except as a matter of duty, yet it is very seldom that a book so well deserving a statesman's study is presented to the House of Commons. The great Anglo-Indians, as Macaulay long since observed, usually write above their ability, and roused by the magnitude of a topic which never excites without captivating the imagination of Indian statesmen, they have on this occasion outdone themselves. There are very few politicians or journalists in Parliament or out of it, who could have written papers heavier with thought or more brilliant in literary expression than those in which Sir Bartle Frere, Sir Frederick Halliday, Mr. Maine, or Major-General Durand have condensed the experience of entire careers ; and yet even they can scarcely rise, and visibly feel that they can scarcely rise, to the magnitude of their subject. If they could, if by any recapitulation of Indian facts or record of their experiences, if by any trick of literary skill or any multiplication of statistics, they could bring home to the House of Commons what Bengal is, Parlia- ment would ring with Indian debates before which its paro- chial discussions would seem at once frivolous and tame. No country which has ever existed or which now exists, not Rome in the acme of her power, or Spain when she owned half America, or ourselves when we sacrificed the sovereignty of the other half, ever possessed a dependency like Bengal, an estate at once so vast, so populous, and so rich as that ruled by a gentleman scarcely known out of India, Mr. William Grey. It is not our custom ever to load our columns with extracts, but Indian documents are as little read as if they were written in Pushtoo or in Dutch, and we cannot resist the temptation of quoting the description penned by Sir Bartle Frere, a Bombay man," who has passed much of his career in resisting what he considers the exorbitant pretensions of Bengal. The Government of Bengal, he says,— " Means the government of a country which is, according to Thorn- ton and Hornidge, 750 miles from north to south, and 800 miles from west to east, with an area of 216,785 square miles, aud a population of 424 millions ; that is, about the size of France, and much more populous ; or more than three times as large and twice as populous as England and Wales ; or six times as large and six times as populous as Ireland. Ben- gal has a sea coast of 800 miles long, which is more than all Germany possesses, with islands on it, 'some of which rival in size and fertility our Isle of Wight.' Among its ports it reckons Calcutta, the third largest city in the British Empire, and one of the greatest commercial emporia out of England. 'No tract of the same extent in the world,' we are told, 'is traversed by so great a number of rivers and watercourses' as Bengal. Among them are two, the Ganges and Burrumpootra, which rank amongst the greatest rivers in Asia ; the Ganges, as regards the traffic it carries, and the wealth and numbe.rs of the population on its banks, is one of the most important rivers in the world. On the borders of Bengal is the highest mountain in the world. Lower down Bengal has 'a coal and iron field equal,' we are told, in extent to the whole of England,' and between the eternal snows of the Himalayas and the almost intolerable heat of some of the plains, Bengal offers the equivalent of almost every known climate suit- able to human habitation on the face of the globe. Its rainfall varies from about the equivalent of England to the heaviest registered in the world. Much of the country is still under prima3val forest, but all is fertile. There are probably few countries in the Old World of equal extent where so little land naturally uncultarable is to be found as in Bengal, and few where the population is so dense. There are four principal languages, each spoken by many millions of the people under the Bengal Government, besides many which are spoken over a less extensive area, and some of them very imperfectly known to us. Some are noted in the margin, but Mr. Bryan Hodgson investigated the grammar of 16 tribes, all mutually unintelligible to each other, but all spoken within the Government of Lower Bangal or its feudatories, or on the southern slopes of the Himalayas and in Assam. The Austrian Empire, while it still included North Italy, was inferior in the numbers of its population to Bengal, and the variety of races and languages under Bengal is nearly four times as great as was ever reckoned under the old Austrian Empire. If we compare Bengal with our West Indian colonies, we find that Bengal is seven times as large and forty times as populous as all our West Indian possessions ; Calcutta and its suburbs alone containing a larger population than all Jamaica, Barbadoes, Antigua, and the Bahamas put together. The greater part of this population inhabiting Bengal are excellent agriculturists and keen traders. Except in China, there is probably no population in the world so dense and in every way so productive, and there are few countries where so little labour is needed to support individual life. The stranger travelling in Bengal, even if used to the tropics, is amazed at the fertility of the soil and the
density of the population, and at what has been called the air of sluttish plenty,' which seems to make it difficult for any one to starve. All these millions, though probably the most docile people in the world as regards external government, are not savages, nor even mere agri- cultural machines. I have no doubt that any one of the 42k millions of natives of Bengal is intellectually superior to the less than one million of negroes in the West Indies. Indeed, the Bengalis proper, who form the great majority, are, in point of intelect, among the most remarkable nations in the world. Many races excel them in vigour, and in power of applying intellectual processes to produce practical results, but in general keenness and subtlety of intellect I know of no people in or out of India who generally excel the Bengalis, and I doubt whether, in any population under the British Crown, will be found such a large proportion of minds among the educated classes apt at every branch of abstract speculation in morals or philosophy, and so capable of applying the results to th e theory of law and morals. There is not a question which has ever occupied the moralists, philoso- phers, and legislators of the civilized world which has not been, or is not now, intelligently discussed by the writers and thinkers, indigenous or exotic, who are to be found in the schools of BengaL In a sacred lan- guage of their own, more precise, copious, and complete than any known tongue, they have, and now habitually study, the original germ of every great system of philosophy and morals which occupied the great teachers of Persia, Greece, and Rome. And this Sanscrit teaching is in various ways popularized in their own Bengali language, which was formed and copious, and had an extensive literature of its own when most of our modern European languages were unformed. It is no facility in dealing with such people to find that they are deficient in some of those masculine qualities of character which are necessary to form an inde- pendent nation. Indeed it is this defect which constitutes one of the chief practical difficulties in providing them with a good government. I do not by any means accept the popular estimate of Bengali character, even when vouched by such authority as Macaulay ; but admitting it for the sake of argument, to the fullest extent, would 44 millions of intel- ligent women and children be such an easy charge to manage 2"
Even this brilliant sketch gives a faint idea of the claim of Bengal Proper on the attention of Great Britain. This vast province is literally studded with cities the very names of which are utterly unknown to the people who claim the sovereignty of them all, with cities so thickly planted and so large that the civilians who rule them lose their sense of proportion, and call places as populous as French departmental capitals " villages ' or petty towns. We do not exaggerate when we say, though the assertion will be received by most Anglo-Indians with a stare of incredulity, that there are in Bengal upwards of three hundred towns which in England would have two members apiece, which in population and wealth equal the seats of most French pre- fectures, and which are only overlooked because they are built of slight or combustible materials ; while there are also regions, as, for example, the valley of the Brahmapootra, which would contain millions, and yet which even in India are only names. This immense population, one-third greater than that of the Austrian Empire, is as industrious as any in the world, lives on a soil which returns such riches that a peasant can borrow money at seventy-five per cent, per annum and yet grow wealthy, bears on its shoulders the whole pecuniary weight of the Empire, and in a hundred years has never protested in arms against British dominion. The solitary thn,eute in its records was directed against the money-lenders, the solitary riot against the Indigo planters, and in its capital, with its half-million of people, no soldier has ever yet since its founda- tion been called on to aid the civil power. In counties as great as Yorkshire one white man levies the taxes to the hour, and up to the Mutinies there were provincial treasuries in which the treasure chests were innocent of hinges or of locks. The Presidency has a revenue of sixteen millions and an expenditure of only five, the surplus providing for the whole interest of the Debt and the entire cost of the Home Admin- istration. It is not too much to say that Bengal is worth the rest of India put together, that if we were driven, say by a Russian attack, out of the North, or by a Mussulman rising out of the South, England would still, if she held Bengal, be the greatest power in Asia, able to maintain armies and fleets, and to preserve faith with the public creditor.
Have a people like this a moral claim to be governed as well as we can govern them ? Well, they are not so governed. Up to 1854 they were not governed at all, there being no Governor or pretence of a Governor except the Viceroy, who devoted to the great province those few and weary snippets of time which he could spare from the supervision of the Empire. Since then some of his power has been delegated to an officer called the Lieutenant-Governor, chosen invariably from the highest class of local officials, invested with little power except over details, and crushed by those details to the ground. There have as yet been but four Lieutenants, and it has happened, partly by accident, let Mr. Mangles say what he likes, that those four have been men of very unusual though very different capacity. Sir Frederick Halliday added to the mental bias of
!„English statesman the knowkilge of an Old Indian and a Grey is a fine example of the judicial mind. But no man rather than English, Rattazzi, not Palmerston; and Mr. William was a statesman of a high type, though the type was Italian anger for work, and would have succeeded in any position in ir Cecil Beadon, despite his disastrous mistake about Orissa, hick success was possible ; Sir J. P. Grant, the present "th a constructive genius, but with no permission to construct ; vernor of Jamaica, was that rarest of characters, a man except a man who will decide only on principles could deal single-handed with Bengal, and no man trained in Bengal is permitted to initiate, or can ever bring himself to govern without interfering in details. Indeed, there is nobody else to settle them. The Lieutenant-Governor is alone, with two Secretaries who are rarely independent, and a Board of Revenue which has enjoyed the services of men like Mr. Henry Ricketts, and yet has never been praised by mortal man. The "Government," writes Mr. Grey, receives eleven hundred business letters a week, and there are not a hundred among them all which can be satis- factorily settled without his own perusal. If the Lieutenant- Governor is mad enough to initiate new business he can settle none of it, can do nothing except refer it to the Viceroy who refers it to the India House, which refers it back for further information, and then sanction comes at last, just when a new Lieutenant with a new policy takes the reins. The consequence is that there is in Bengal, over this splendid province and this vast population, no government, even in the English sense, and it wants a government in the Continental sense. The initiative must come from above, and there is and can be no one to initiate. Political order is maintained, and the revenue is collected, and in some wretchedly imperfect way civil justice is administered, and there the matter ends. Immense tracts, like this valley of the Brahmapootra, with its seventy rivers, and endless possibilities of mining, and special cultivations like tea, are left half unpeopled, and governed really by the great employers of labour or great zemindars. There is one railway and one great road. Great counties like Hooghly, with a population to the square mile believed to be double that of Belgium, and with twice the inhabitants of Greece, are supposed to be governed by a single man, scarcely more powerful than an English Magistrate would be if he were also tax collector, and half a dozen half experienced assistants. In more distant districts the landlords are the real rulers, and for a hundred years scarcely one new thing, not even a new public work, has been attempted. The population has such a hunger for instruction that peasants are willing to eat only once a day that their children may go to school, but " colleges " are planted in twos and threes, at intervals often of five hundred miles, and whole districts as big as Yorkshire cannot read. There are no banks, the peasants borrow on landed security at seventy-five per cent., and the price of grain varies fifty per cent. in villages not a hundred miles apart. It is vain to go over the story to an audience which does not well know even Sicily, the only place in Europe a little like Bengal; but no thoughtful Anglo- Indian ever denies that in Bengal, in the province without which India is useless, among the one people to whom we owe gratitude, civilized government has scarcely yet begun. It never will begin until the country has a government in some degree like that of Ceylon, presided over by a man chosen in England, aided by a sufficient Cabinet, allowed a fixed but liberal margin of expenditure, inclined to consider provincial even before Imperial interests, and with weight enough to ensure that his view shall have due authority at home. We quite admit the difficulties in the way of change, the danger of diminishing the Viceroy's authority, the Imperial character of most Calcutta questions, the impossibility of inventing a new capital for the Empire—though a new capital might be found for the province—but they all seem to us trifles when compared with the moral obligation of Great Britain to give to a mighty people, who have not only accepted her rule over themselves, but bear the cost of ruling for her the remainder of India, the highest form of government of which their civilization will admit. It is not a policy we have to carry out in Bengal, but the performance of a duty which we have to commence.
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