BOOKS.

LORD LYTTON'S INDIAN ADMINISTRATION.* WE hope that the next edition of this book will appear with the motto "Si Pergama dextral" on either cover. Its authoress

has done all that hard work, good sense, good feeling, and intelligence could do to put in the most favourable light her

father's policy. On one very important point, but on one only, she has not succeeded. She will not reve rse the verdict of March and April, 1880. We do not propose to stir the embers of a painful controversy, more especially as Lord Lytton was not the prime mover in the Afghan folly. So far from that being the case, his views or inclinations were, when be left Portugal, precisely those of the Lawrencian school. It

was not till he reached England and came under the influence of those who were then at the head of affairs that he adopted quite other opinions. If wise counsels had then prevailed in Downing Street Lord Lytton would have been to ld that the very last thing the Ministry wanted was that he should begin to play again the "great game of Central Asia" which had led to such disastrous results when played by the opposite party a generation before. The Prime Minister would have said to him :—' Hear everything, know everything, weigh everything, that goes on around and near your frontiers, but you have nothing to do with Russia or her designs save to communi- cate anything worth hearing to us. If anything needs to be done we will do it, but you have quite enough on your hands wit Inut scheming or dreaming about the Northern Colossus. Do your best to promote for five years the prosperity of the gigantic Empire which we are committing to your charge, but relegate the haute politique to the British Foreign Office.'

Although, however, we consider that the best thing to be done for Lord Lytton's memory is to forget the blood and treasure which he wasted on the North-West Frontier, he did many things in India besides wasting blood and treasure. Some of his acts were commendable in the very highest degree, while others were in the nature of good and wise experiments,—moat useful to his successors.

Strange to say, he was mach more successful as a financier than in any other capacity which he filled while in India. Every one knows that the importance of the Salt-tax in that country is quite enormous. It is the only impost which is paid by millions and millions of the population, who get in return for it all the blessings which a civilised Government can ensure. Wh en, however, Lord Lytton landed in India it varied very greatly in different parts of the country, and there were not a few places where it was actually difficult, not to say impossible, to obtain a sufficiency of this necessary of life. A vacancy which occurred soon after his arrival enabled him to call to his assistance Sir John Strachey, who had as Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West been brought into close contact with the evils of the existing system, and thoroughly understood them. One of the worst of these was the Customs line, which ran for more than fifteen hundred miles from a point north of Attock to near the Berar frontier :—

" It consisted principally of an impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes, supplemented by stone walls and ditches, across which no human being, or beast of burden, or vehicle could pass without being subjected to detention and search. It wds guarded by an army of some eight thousand men, the mass of whom received as wages Es. 6 or 7 a month. The bare statement of these facts is suMcient to show the magnitude of the evil."

In order to get rid of this it was necessary to take a very long step towards equalising the Salt-tax in various parts of India, and that was done. The point which Lord Lytton's Government reached was this,—the Salt-duty in Madras, Bombay, Scinde, and the Central Provinces was equalised at a very moderate figure. In the North-West Provinces, Ondb, the Punjab, and Lower Bengal it still varied a good deal, but Lord Lytton hoped before returning home to reduce all the higher rates to the level reached in Southern India,—Rs. 2-8 for a quantity of rather more than 80 lb.

He was not able to attain this object, but Lord Ripon's Government, entering into his labours, crowned the edifice and

equalised the Salt-duties throughout India. Not less wise * The History of Lord Lytton's Indian Administration, 1876 to 7880: Compiled from Letters and Official Papers. By Lady Betty Balfour. London : Lonitulaus aud Co. [18a.j

was Lord Lytton's action about the Cotton-duties, which is folly set forth by his daughter in these pages. He very nearly succeeded in abolishing them altogether ; but in this case, too, it was Lord Ripon's Government which actually made an end of them. The pressure of financial difficulties has been the cause or the pretext for reimposing them, as well as for raising the Salt-tax and saddling commerce with very many other import duties. We use the word "pretext" because we believe that large numbers of persons connected with Indian administration are incurably opposed to the sound doctrine that India, which has many misfortunes of her own, should be nearly quite free from the artificial and unnecessary misfortune of Customs-duties.

The policy of Lord Lytton was also very wise in carrying farther the system of financial decentralisation which bad been introduced in the days of Lord Mayo. By this system the provincial Governments have been led to pay far greater attention to finance than heretofore, and to develop their resources in a quite new way, while a great deal of friction between them and the supreme Government has been obviated. There was a time, not long before the Mayo and Strachey reforms, when the relations between Bombay and Calcutta had a very ugly look indeed. Lord Lytton was wise, too, in abolishing, or getting the Secretary of State to abolish, the unlucky term "Extraordinary Public Works," and in substituting for it "Productive Public Works." We should like to quote, if there were room, his excellent remarks on this subject given on p. 491. It only remains, in dealing with his work as a financier, to mention his famine insurance taxation, based upon the idea that about every ten years the Government of India would have to expend about fifteen millions on account of famine. The use of the phrase "Famine Insurance Fund" in connection with this was unfortunate, for many people imagined that the Government of India had bound itself every year to put a million and a half into a bag to be expended on famine and on nothing else. Of course the idea was preposterous, but it was not unnatural. Lord Lytton's dealing with the great famine which desolated Southern India in 1877-78 was based, we think, on rational principles ; and the Famine Commission which he appointed, after the storm and stress of that terrible time had gone by, laid the foundation for all the wise measures which have been taken since.

A successful experiment of Lord Lytton's, unconnected with finance, was the Delhi Assemblage to proclaim to the Indian world that the Queen had become its Queen-Empress. The change in the Royal title had been strongly opposed in Parliament by the natural critics of the Government, and there had been much exaggeration on either side with regard to the probable effect of the measure: Those who knew India best, however, could not say more against it than that things were going extremely well in her Majesty's Eastern dominions, and that there was much to be advanced in favour of letting well alone. Lord Lytton, who was, above all things, a poet, considered that to alter the title of the Queen would "convert popular satisfaction into a National enthusiasm, the force of which would be felt far beyond our frontier and more than justify every argument used for the defence of the measure," and the authoress of this work tells us that "the proclamation of the paramount superiority of the British Crown was an act of political wisdom and foresight which has not only strengthened our position throughout the vast territories of India proper, but has had no small effect, also, beyond the frontier of the Indian Empire." Such language is altogether excessive ; but, on the other hand, many prophecies of evil that were made in con- nection with the change of the Royal style came to nothing. Lord Lytton was just the man to take part with real delight in the gorgeous ceremonial at the old Mogul capital, in which he was the principal figure, and comes out of the whole busi- ness very well.

Highly creditable, too, was his attempt to settle the extremely difficult question how best to admit natives of India to the exercise of duties and the enjoyment of advantages more or less akin to those which have long been possessed by the members of the Covenanted Civil Service. The plan favoured by Lord Lytton involved the reduction of the number of admissions to the Covenanted Civil Service, and the creation of a close native Civil Service, which should have a monopoly of the appointments removed from the list of those hitherto reserved to the Covenanted Service, together with a portion of those now held by the Uncovenanted Service. This scheme required legislation, and Lord Cranbrook, when Secretary of State for India, declined to sanction anything

which involved going to Parliament. He encouraged the Viceroy, however, to submit a smaller plan, and that plan was sent home and sanctioned in August, 1879. The result was the establishment of the so-called Statutory Service, under which a considerable number of young men—for the most part belonging to good native families—passed, in the course of eight years, into the ranks of the higher Civil Service. This arrangement, however, did not work very well. Great pains were taken by the two Governors and the various Lieutenant-Governors to find eligible candidates, but it would be rash to say either that the results were satis- factory, or that native opinion considered that they were. The scheme was modified by Lord Ripon's Government, and altered by that of Lord Dufferin. How the new plan is working we do not know, but Lord Lytton certainly made a vigorous effort to get over the very great and very real problem of bringing the native, who is already employed to an immense extent in all the minor offices, into the Superintending Staff, on the good working of which, more than on any other thing, the prosperity of our great Eastern Empire must depend.

In the spring of 1878 Lord Lytton's Government enaeted an important measure for the purpose of controlling the seditious excesses of the native Press. It was a good deal discussed in this country. Of coarse it was. The English- man knows that, after all allowance has been made for manifest inconveniences, the freedom of the Press, as under- „stood in England, is highly advantageous, and it would be odd if he did not jump to the conclusion that it is likely to be equally advantageous in India. Every sensible person who considers the subject thinks so at first ; but the more he inquires and the more he is brought into contact with the Indian Press the more is the conviction forced upon him that the state of circumstances in India is so different from what it is at home that it is impossible to argue from one case to the other.

In England we govern ourselves. In India we govern partly by the right of conquest, partly by policy; but most assuredly we should not govern at all if force, and a great -deal of it, were not latent behind all the excellent forme, phrases, and platitudes which are the commonplaces of our. rule. That being so, it is quite certain that if the news- papers are allowed to abuse their rulers and to find fault with all they do quite unchecked, the result will be, sooner or later, that a very dangerous amount of disaffection will grow up, and that, with the spread of elementary education, things will always grow worse and worse. An Englishman might think that one newspaper would cancel the effect of another, but that is not so. With the rarest exceptions they are all agin the Government,” and ever will be so, for on that depends their circulation. Being unable to bite, they bark as loudly as they know how. Lord Lytton accordingly was quite right in attempting to restrain their lawlessness. He may have been wrong in making his Act preventive, rather than punitive. He may have been wrong in legislating only for the vernacular Press. These are questions which we need not discuss. The present legislation on the subject, quite recently passed under Lord Curzon, assumes that he was wrong ; but we cannot help recognising that whether he was right or wrong, he made an intelligent attempt to grapple with a great and constantly increasing evil of which the twentieth century will hear a great deal more than it will at all like.

We had rather that the pages which treat of the miserable mistake made, no one yet quite knows how, about the expen- aiture on the Afghan War, had been kept out of the chapter devoted to Lord Lytton's finance, to which, as will have been observed, we have nothing to give but praise. How either he or his very able advisers could have failed to see that some- thing was going very wrong indeed, and that vast sums of money were being spent beyond what they had intended, is quite unintelligible. What made matters worse was the suspicion which prevailed in this country that the terrific expenditure had been deliberately concealed until the General Election, which took place in the spring of 1880, was all but over. That suspicion was, no doubt, unfounded, but a party which gives itself up to the guidance of a man like Lord Beaconsfield mast not be surprised if it is thought unlikely to stick at trifles. We wish, we say, that section had been put in another part of the book. It was a portion of the whole regrettable drama of the Afghan War, on which from first to last a curse seems to have rested, and which, if it is ever to be fairly described, should be prefaced by some such words as those with which the Messenger in the " Pena° " begins his narrative to Queen Atossa.

We trust, then, that when the Life of Lord Lytton comes to be published as little as possible will be said about the Afghan episode. It is hopeless to make a satisfactory defence for a policy which was totally wrong in its inception, and un- necessary to do so when it is remembered that the policy was not originally Lord Lytton's, but that of his masters. That he sometimes bettered their instructions and alarmed his instruc- tors is true enough, but it was they who pat him on the down- ward incline which led him and them to disaster. This was quite well known at the time, and some persons who most bitterly attacked the policy took special care not to attack Lord Lytton but to turn their batteries in the direction of those whom they believed to be the real authors of the mis- chief. Mach of it arose from Lord Beaconsfield's anxious desire to show how much better he could deal with an Oriental question than could his political opponents. We remember a story told in debate,—was it by Mr. Leatham, the very able Member for Huddersfield? A man was being driven in a crowded thoroughfare when his horses took fright and ran away. He called to his coachman "Can you stop them ? " "No," replied the man. "Then," said the other, "run into something cheap." Afghanistan—four Switzerlands, as some one rather hyperbolically called it, inhabited by savages— did not turn out to be cheap.