THE " SATURDAY REVIEW " ON THE BENGAL FAMINE.
THE Saturday Review is obviously holding a brief for the Council of India—the English Council in Downing Street, not the Council on the spot, which, for the sake of convenience, we always call the Indian Cabinet—and we are happy to perceive that it is holding one. Its advocate is a little inclined, or was a fortnight ago, to deal in personal misrepre- sentations, which we could expose in a line, if it were worth while to break through newspaper etiquette ; but it is only just that the body upon which next session, or even this, the weight of statesmen's indignation is likely to fall, should be fairly represented in the Press. The Council in itself is an unmitigated political nuisance, established in defiance of all constitutional precedent, compelled to make work for itself by revising masses of detail which ought never to be sent home at all, responsible for all that financial policy for which the Secre- tary of State ought to be responsible, and the main defence of the astounding system under which the Viceroy, who can order a war, cannot sanction finally any expense beyond 5,000 rupees. The single defence for so anomalous and cumbrous a body is that its local knowledge enables it to be prescient, and to guide the Secretary of State, and if this prescience has not been shown, it ought to be swept away as an incumbrance. The publication of all its minutes and votes upon the Famine, as well as all despatches sent home, will, we cordially agree, greatly enlighten the public upon this point,—and, with the Saturday Review, we are for the most unreserved publicity, providing only that it is complete. The grand political question to be decided, after the people are saved or dead, is not whether Lord Northbrook is in the wrong, though that is serious as regards him ; or whether Sir George Campbell is in the right, though he also will have to defend himself ; but whether the machine set up in 1859, under a feeble compromise between the Com- pany and the State, is or is not efficient ; whether, for example, the Council increased the mortality in Orissa by concealing the famine from England, or did not ; or whether it has or has not helped to make this famine the awful calamity it will now prove, by steadily denying that it would prove a calamity at all ? Did it, for example, foresee more or less than the Duke of Argyll, who, in a published despatch, recorded his opinion that every Indian danger tended to exceed antici- pation ; while some at least of his councillors held the danger to be imaginary, and declared that "if one man died of hunger after the preparations made, the Government would deserve to be impeached "? And the advocate of the Council is quite wise in calling for the early publication of the papers, because, supposing the Council to have been prescient, they will be instantly acknowledged to be wise ; while if they were short- sighted, their disastrous incapacity will, when the full truth is known—which can hardly be till the now nearly inevitable " gap " between provision and destitution occurs—be partially forgotten. For the Duke of Argyll, for Lord Northbrook, for Sir George Campbell, for the Council of India, this question of prescience is all in all. Nobody doubts their energy, their humanity, or their industry ; but if they did not, with the evidence before them, perceive as soon as the jour- nalists did that a gigantic supply of food would be required ; that there was no r ek worth mention in buying it, as both wheat and rice will keep, and if not required, could be resold to shippers or sent to Europe as a Government remittance ; that transport would be the crucial difficulty, requiring pro- ' vision from all India ; and that draught by men to the villages would in the end be the only possible form of local transport, then they stand convicted not of negligence, nor of laziness, nor of want of humanity, but of incompetence resulting in a huge calamity. In the case of the Council, it will be seen whether the friction their existence necessarily creates is or is not com- pensated for by the wisdom they infuse into the Secretary of State. The more papers that are published, the more the public will be able to judge with fairness and impartiality upon the benefit or evil of their continued existence.
Nor do we think the divisions of inquiry suggested by the Saturday Review at all unfair, though they may require one material addition. The official writer asks first that the ques- tion about the non-prohibition of export should be thoroughly examined. So it should, and the result will be, we doubt not, the total exculpation of the Viceroy and the Indian Government at home. Apart altogether from the economic question whether, if grain were kept in India forcibly, it would necessarily have been sold at low rates to the starving population—an assertion of which we do not believe one word, as the owners, unless tempted by famine prices, would and could have held over for a year— there are some acts which even famine does not justify, and one of them is the direct robbery of part, and part only, of the community. It would have been perfectly fair during the Irish famine to lay on the Three Kingdoms an income-tax of 10s. in the pound if need existed, and such a tax would work, but it would have been an outrageous theft to lay it on the Eastern Counties alone. That is what the Government was asked to do,—to deprive a few rich districts of half their in- comes in order that famine should be stopped, not by the State, but by a special knot of farmers and landlords. On that point Government stands clear. Either they were asked to confiscate the rice of " Backergunge "—using that as a word for all the territory with a surplus—and Burmah, or they were asked to buy it. In the first case they were right to refuse; and now let us examine the second, which is part of the Saturday Reviewer's next point, the extent of the provision made.
2. We hold the Government to have been wrong, but wrong solely from want of foresight. The Viceroy did buy in the market all he thought he wanted, 410,000 tons, and so far did his duty to the full. His failure, if any, was in not com- prehending the vastness of his need, all the climatic conditions of 1770 being present ; in not realising that his calculation of one-tenth as the pauper class of the population might be wrong, at least fractionally—it is, we deeply fear, wrong by more even than our estimate, wrong by the difference between three-tenths and one-tenth—and in not perceiving at once that as grain will keep, the purchase of every pound at any usual price could cost the Treasury only a small risk—say, for example, there being 800,000 tons to be had, 20 per cent. upon the value, or a million and a half. That is the mistake about food which was made, and will be so disastrous. The Viceroy has not, as we understand his own and Sir Richard Temple's figures, more food than will keep North Behar alive till 15th September, his own date, far less November, the date for- warded this week by Lord Salisbury to the Lord Mayor. He will save Tirhoot, we dare say, and Chumparun, if the whole population of Nepal does not come pouring in ; but how of an immense, secluded, and neglected district like Dinajpore, whence the private accounts are already those of men fright- ened into fever ; of Rungpore, where natives obviously dread the worst ; and of Moorshedabad, where the prices have already passed the famine range ? Let the Saturday Reviewer reject our anticipations and welcome, if he will take Sir Bartle Frere's map with the populations marked on it, and ask himself, if the worst of those districts are, as we firmly believe, about to be as North-eastern Tirhoot, how he will keep the people alive. There is not the food to do %— unless Sir R. Temple is talking nonsense when he says he wants 180,000 tons for Tirhoot alone,—and if it were bought now, how is it to be got there? The rains will be upon us directly, and the Reviewer must know perfectly well that if grain were sent from London it could not be there, in Central Dinajpore, say, in good time.
3. For—and this is the main point of all—no prescience whatever has been shown about the means of transport. The papers may reveal anything humanly possible, but they cannot, in the face of the Viceroy's own telegrams, of the corre- spondence on the spot, of notorious facts like the sudden order of Sir R. Temple for 70,000 carts nearly three months after the danger had begun, reveal the preparation of sufficient means for transport even in Tirhoot, where the greatest energy, for very obvious reasons, appears to be displayed. If this difficulty had been foreseen, as it would have been foreseen if the official chiefs had foreseen the vastness of this special difficulty—a point foreseen not by us alone, but by the entire journalism of London two months ago— it might have been met ; nay, it could be met even now, if the Government would abandon the labour-test, use all male labourers to pull trucks or carry rice on the old native system, and so penetrate by relays to every accessible village. Mr. Forbes, who is watching the operations himself, admits that this plan, which we have urged for months, will alone reach the villages, but says no order for it could be obtained. The Reviewer acknowledges the difficulty even in Tirhoot, but what will he do with Dinajpore, when the need is sorest and the rains have come, and the boats can hardly go up stream, and carts cannot move a mile a day, and even human beings unloaded can scarcely travel ? We are perfectly will- ing to be contradicted about facts, for every such contradiction will show so many thousands saved ; but we ask the Reviewer himself, if Dinajpore has only food, on famine allowances, for six months from February 20, and if Government sent none there till Sir R. Temple's visit, does he know any earthly effort by which the people can be saved ? Is it not evident that Government expected all who wanted food to come to the public works, that the 400,000 or so who have come are, even if they are all males, but a section of those to be fed, and that those four hundred thousand would have been better em- ployed in the portage of grain ? The Reviewer's fourth point, whether the works are useful or not, does not matter a straw to the general question, and might be left to Sir Arthur Cotton, who pointed out as soon as we did that such crowds, without engineers or supervision, must be useless, but we will say just one word upon that matter also. The Viceroy intimates in one of his telegrams that the "works " are roads. This means that the labourers are making, or ordered to make, the embanked roads wanted everywhere in Bengal, and seems at first sight sensible work enough. But as a road of the roughest kind must in that territory at every fifty yards have a covered watercourse, and at every thousand yards a serious bridge, and as the labourers do not know how to build either, and as the work, being unfinished, will be swept away by the rains, and as it is done by carrying earth in little baskets from the fields, we submit that our de- scription of the whole business as " spooning earth from a place where it is missed to a place where it is not wanted " is, if rhetorical, as accurate as if it were too dull to read.
Previous page
