THE UNREST IN INDIA.
WE are not so completely satisfied as to the wisdom of the arrangements made at Poona for stamping out the Plague as Lord Sandhurst and Lord George Hamilton evidently are. That the Government and its officers wished to act with all the consideration and gentle- ness possible in carrying out scientific ideas which are necessary to the health of the population but which are intensely repugnant to native feeling, we entirely believe. They are English gentlemen, to begin with, they have no reason whatever for annoying the Indian people, and. they have every reason, personal as well as political, for avoiding the creation of any needless discontent. They fear animadversion in Parliament as much as a civil officer fears rebuke from the head of his department. Nevertheless the sanitary measures themselves produced a collision of the two civilisations, and it was necessary, therefore, as sound science was to be made to prevail over ingrained prejudice, that the greatest care should be taken to avoid giving any unnecessary offence. We doubt if it was taken. We question whether the fact that the habit of seclusion from strange eyes is among native ladies of the very essence of their modesty was sufficiently allowed for, and we see no answer to the charge that European troops were employed instead of native. That of itself would be considered an outrage, the point not being that Tommy Atkins behaved badly or even roughly, but that he was of necessity mlecha, an outside barbarian who ought not to see, much less touch, secluded Indian women, whose dress is well understood by natives to be in European eyes insufficient. It is all very well to talk of the soldiers' gentleness, and we have no doubt whatever that they intended to be kind ; but if English ladies in London were carried to hospital in their night-gowns by the kindest of soldiers there would be a row. We believe a blunder was made without the slightest intention of disrespect to native ideas, and that it was seized by the opponents of British rule, who always exist throughout India, as ground for most malignant attacks. That the people were furiously angry is evident from the murders— our officers are usually as safe as London police inspectors —from the difficulty of obtaining evidence, and from their instant resort to the libellous charges which in Asia invariably accompany an outburst of popular anger. That in all this the Hindoos of Poona were utterly unreasonable is perfectly true; but when was one civilisation ever reasonable when it thought itself outraged by another, particularly if the other was the higher one ?
There is no reason for blaming the Government of Bombay for anything but an accidental blunder ; but we deprecate strongly the tone of mind which the crimes committed at Poona., and the riots in Calcutta, have developed among the Europeans on the spot and large classes of the population at home. The Europeans on the spot are excusable, for they cannot escape from the feeling that they are but tens among unsympathetic millions, the tradition of the great Mutiny clings to their very souls, and they always, sometimes with reason, sus- pect the authorities of dreading Parliamentary criticism over-much. But our own people here, who are quite safe, ought to remember more persistently than they do that we do not profess to govern India on Russian principles, that the Government has a long tradi- tion of justice to preserve, and that you cannot govern three hundred millions of people as if they formed a camp under a Provost-Marshal. We are absolutely persuaded that representative institutions are unsuited to India, that the country must be governed by a judicious and law-abiding despotism, and that armed resistance must under all circumstances be suppressed by the armed hand. If there is a collision of two civilisations, as nearly happened about Suttee and about the right of missionaries to preach, the higher civilisation must triumph whatever the danger to the State or whatever the sacrifice of human life. But those principles once accepted and habitually acted on, we are satisfied that the Indian tradition, under which an Indian is as free as a Londoner to say or print or do anything he pleases within the law, is the right one, and makes of the British " Empire " a vivify- ing instead of a crushing administration. For the Govern- ment to have yielded about the quarrel which was the origin of the rioting in Calcutta would have been mad- ness; but in hesitating to order the soldiers to fire, in trying to employ the native police at first, and in avoid - ing a recourse to extreme measures of repression, the authonties are, we are convinced, entirely in the right. Of course, if soldiers are produced soldiers must win ; but, as we understand the matter, there was no necessity even for producing them in Chitpore, the mobs melting away the moment the armed police, who stand behind the civil police, were allowed to fire. The order of the Superior Court, under which the disputed property is secular property and not until at all, will now be carried out, the ringleaders will be arrested and sufficiently punished, and Calcutta will sink back into the orderly quietude which, ever since Job Charnock founded it in 1690, has been its characteristic, and which has made it commercially and financially the capital of Southern Asia. We do trust we shall not be mistaken. If the Supreme Court gave a civil decision after a regular hearing, and if that decision was resisted by mob violence, we would lay Calcutta in ashes sooner than it should nct be carried out ; but we see neither sense nor Christianity in killing people merely as "a lesson" or an assertion of European ascendency. It is the law which is to be in the ascendant, and, not any class of the community. We want Calcutta to be a quiet city, not a city trembling at the idea of what Government may do. Of course it is possible to subject Calcutta to military law, to treat every riot as a rebellion, and in fact to govern on the principles, of military despotism; but if we do the cost will be excessive, the uneasiness will be permanent, and the very object of our administration, which is that Calcutta shall be as safe as a drawing-room under civil government alone, will be entirely foiled. The Pax Britannica must be maintained in our cities as well as in the Empire, but the Pax Britannica does not mean a policy of repression. based upon naked force, and kept up by frequent military executions. It means a silent order maintained by in- flexible adherence to law, kept up without violence, aria only defended when necessary by irresistible, but usually invisible, force.
We discussed last week the question of the native Press,. which we would leave free, though we would subject it te a more workable law of libel; but there is a question behind that of the Press which to our mind needs more examina- tion than it has ever yet received. What is the reason why most Indian journalists are so savage against the European regime? Most of them have been educated State Colleges. Almost all of them are aware that the Government means well. All of them know thoroughly that if Britain disappeared, or were superseded by another European State, their freedom would instantly become L. thing of the past. Russians would put them under the censorship, Frenchmen would send them to prison, Sikhs would probably cut out their tongues to teach them to Ix silent. Yet man after man as he takes to the profession dips his pen in vitriol when he describes either the Govern- ment, or the Magistracy, or Europeans in general. Some advise resistance, some counsel submission, a few endeavour to keep within the limits of reasonable argument, but all are obviously at heart suspicious, irritable, and hostile to the European ascendency. Why ? It is usual to say they are all hungering for appointments which they cannot get, or that they are all vain and feel insulted by insufficient recognition, or that they all have caught up European ideas of liberty and are applying them to their own position ; but though each of those explanations has force, the great puzzle remains unexplained. They can only live by finding readers, and the readers are not seeking employments, or made vain by education, or carried away by ideas belonging to a different stage of civilisation. Grant that we can explain the journalists, wherefore do their readers so agree with them as to prefer all that vitriolic rubbish to coldly sensible argument and narration ? The great in India are fairly loyal, the masses in India are fairly acquiescent—they pay taxes, they do not riot, and they enlist voluntarily in the Army, and indeed all services—why are the classes which read news- papers so viciously irritable and unfair ? It is a very curious problem, which neither Mr. Naoroji nor Mr. Bhownagree, whom we take to be representatives of opposing results of culture, at all adequately explain, the former attributing the phenomenon to "grievances." and the latter to a kind of cussedness in the journalists, but neither accounting for their readers. We will state our own conviction frankly. We believe that all through Asia the talk of the classes which discuss politics is of very much the same kind—acrid, censorious, and indifferent to facts—and that India differs from Turkey, Persia, and even China only in the fact that in India the criticism is 'uttered in print instead of in the cafd, the caravanserai, or the tea-house. If that is the case—and that it is the case to a considerable extent we are satisfied—the true policy is to bear with the Press, to regard it as the utterance of a class whom it is injudicious or tyrannical to silence, and to pass on, doing justice and loving progress, and as regardless of comment as Pashas or Mandarins. There is plenty of courage in India, but a little more fortitude would do us endless good.
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