LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
SIR JOHN STRACHEY.
[To TEE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.1
SIR,—The obituary article on Sir John Strachey in the Times of December 20th was so full and accurate that it is difficult to improve on it ; but perhaps it may be per- mitted to one who has been his devoted admirer for more than thirty years, and who learnt more from him than from any other person he served under as regards the main principles of administration in India, to attempt a brief sketch of what he personally knew of Sir John Strachoy's
I had held the post of Secretary to Government (now called Chief Secretary) under Sir William Muir, and when Sir John Strachey succeeded him as Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces (now called the Upper Provinces) in 1874 he expressed a desire that I should remain in the post, and my acquaintance with him, which till then had been slight, soon became intimate. Our relations seemed to me then, and still seem to me, quite ideal; absolute confidence on the part of the Lieutenant-Governor, perfect acquiescence in his chief's views and eager desire to carry them out on the part of the Secretary. What impressed me most about him was his immense grasp of the main outlines of work in all departments and the profound way in which he seemed to have thought out the principles which should govern every issue. About the details, when he could employ a hand that he trusted, he cared little. He was then in very weak health, as indeed he was always; and often when I came to bin), at the fixed hour with papers on which his orders were
required he would say, with a languid sigh : " Well, Elliott, do you want any more J. S.'s ' P " Then we talked over the questions involved, and he satisfied himself that the general lines of what was suggested were right, and the " J. S." was affixed. Bat in all important matters he had sketched out the outlines which it was my business to fill in. One of the first instructions he gave me was that no censure of an officer was to go out without his having seen and approved the actual words. The Times article says that " he came down with a heavy hand on any one who failed in his duty or made foolish mistakes." I do not know how this may have been elsewhere, but I cannot remember that while I served under him in the North-West Provinces, whatever may have been said or written privately, a single severe official censure was passed on any officer. He delivered to me the watchword which guided me during my official life and which when I was giving up the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal I passed on in my farewell speech to the members of my Service : " Never throw your officers to the wolves." It would have been well for India if this maxim had been remembered last year when the brilliant Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Bengal was sacrificed to placate seditious agitation,—and sacrificed in vain.
I have spoken of his habit of prescribing principles and leaving the working out of details to his subordinates ; but when he deemed occasion required it he was ready to elaborate a whole system down to the minutest detail. Shortly after he took over the Lieutenant-Governorship in 1874, the rains of August and September failed in Behar and the Eastern part—i.e., the Benares division—of the North-West, and there was prospect of considerable distress and scarcity. The Bengal Government had hardly recovered then from the discredit thrown upon it by the failure to deal efficiently with the Orissa famine of 1866, and the Lieutenant-Governor was resolved that there should be no remissness this time. Little was known then, and least of all in Bengal, of the agri- cultural productions and economic possibilities of the country, and preparations were made to throw in supplies of food on the largest scale. It seemed that what was needed in Behar must also be required in the Benares districts, and our officers began to make similar preparations to those of Bengal. Sir John set out for Gorakhpur in September, taking me with him, and inspected some large relief works on which many thousands of people were doing desultory and rather useless work ; and in the course of the day he pointed out some defects of organisation, and dropped some doubts as to whether the right thing was being done, to which I fear I paid slight attention, so in the evening I drafted a rather commonplace resolution, mainly concerned with details of organisation and provision of funds, but assuming that things were to go on as we had seen them, and left it with him. Next morning he met me with a new and totally different resolution, all written in his own hand—he sat up most part of the night to write it—in which he laid down fundamental maxims as to the relief of famine, the use of large works, the minimum wage, the measured task, and the labour test,—in short, all the principles which, as since elaborated, have turned famine relief from the feeding of an irregular mob into the greatest machine for the employment of organised labour that the world has ever seen, and which, while saving the Treasury from plunder, have put heart and courage into millions of despairing peasants, and have justified the Governmental boast that no human being need die of starvation if only he will come in time to accept the means of salvation offered him.
This was my first initiation into famine work under the guidance of Sir John Strachey, and from that time till 1881, during the famine of 1877-78, when the principles he laid down in 1874 were enforced in Bombay, Mysore, and Madras, and afterwards during the sitting of the Famine Commission, which met daily, as long as we carried out our preliminary inquiries in Simla, in his house, his influence and guidance were con- stantly felt by me. • General Sir Richard Strachey was President of the Commission, and his views on these subjects, as indeed on most others, coincided with those of his brother. And out of the Commission's Report, besides its direct offspring, the construction of the Famine Code, two indirect results flowed which were not among the least important achievements of Sir John's life in India. One was the creation of the Agri- cultural Department, the objects of which were the perfecting
of the. system of survey and settlement, the maintenance and proper use of the village records of rights and tenures, and the employment of trained experts to study the crops and soils and methods of agriculture, and to introduce improve- ments in them. The other indirect result was the establish- ment of the Famine Insurance Fund, or special famine surplus. A review of the past seemed to indicate that India was liable to suffer from a great famine about once in ten years, and that the cost of relieving the sufferers from famine on the new approved principles would be about fifteen millions. Accordingly, if taxation was so imposed that there should be an annual surplus of one and a half millions, a fund would be created in ten years to meet that expenditure and produce financial equilibrium. That forecast has not been altogether justified by events, for after 1878, though there were several severe scarcities, there was no great famine till that of 1896-97, followed, before the country could recover its prosperity, by a still more tremendous famine in 1900-1. And yet the principle was not discredited, for under the system initiated by Sir John Strachey the finances of the country stood the strain with no material addition to the Public Debt.
It would require more of your space than I am entitled to ask if I were to write about what would generally be considered the two greatest measures of Sir John Strachey's career,—the removal of that gigantic relic of an age of dark- ness, the Inland Customs Line or Salt Barrier, and the abolition of the import-duties on cotton, carried out under his impulse by the autocratic act of Lord Lytton, who overruled the majority of his Council. These are matters of general history, and I have little to add from personal knowledge ; but I may mention that the very last conversation I had with him not long before his death turned on this latter subject. I had pointed out to him that, however striking was the victory he had won for Free-trade ideas in the "seventies," it would not be permanent, because as soon as India obtained any real measure of fiscal self-government the overwhelming passion for Protection felt by the whole people would make itself obeyed, and duties would be imposed on British goods to benefit local production. He told me that the one thing be longed to write—and would have written but for his extreme weakness—was a restatement of his altered views on this question, and he sketched out for me (much hindered by failing breath) a policy which seemed to me closely akin to that announced by Mr. Arthur Balfour at Birmingham.
It is a delicate matter to dwell on personal characteristics, and it would be difficult to describe the delight which those who enjoyed intimate acquaintance with him took in his con- versation, enriched by wide study of all that is best in literature, British or foreign, especially Dante, and the sweet- ness of temper which enjoyed the clash of differing opinions, and never resented opposition even to views he held most strongly. His interest in art and poetry was unfailing and catholic, but in scenery he would never admit that anything could equal the Kumaon Himalayas, in which be spent many of his earlier years. He used to say of Colonel Ramsay, the well-known " King of Kumaon" of those days, that his was the only post he really envied. I was a votary of the Alps, and used to pelt him with quotations from Raskin and allusions from Dante to their beauty, but nothing could shake his allegiance to the mountains whose hoary summits—Trisul, Nandikote, and Nandigiri—we used to watch from Naini Tal. I accompanied him once in a trip into the interior of Kumaon, and it was pretty to see the enthusiasm with which he pointed out the three peaks of Trisul, the mountain lately climbed by Dr. Longstaff, which, though invisible from the south, are disclosed when you get behind him., and which give him his name, the Trident of Siva ; or when he got me to confess that the isolated pyramid of Dunagiri is very like, and equal in majesty to, the Matterhorn.
But I think the prevailing feeling among his nearest friends was one of wonder and regret at the contrast between the strength of his keen intellect and the weakness of his bodily frame,—at the constant sickness and malaise which strove to dull his mental -vigour, and the successful struggle he main- tained to overcome them. Surely it seemed a cruel spite of fate—the malevolence of some bad fairy at his birth— which housed so bright and powerful a mind in so frail a shell. While he spoke, you listened and felt you were before a master; when be ceased, you saw how he suffered and were penetrated by the tenderness and sympathy you
feel for a woman. I used to apply to him those lines of Browning :—
" Had I been two—another and myself—
Our heads would have o'erlooked the world."
Now he o'erlooks the world in another sense and from another
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