MR. DISRAELI ON' THE BENGAL FAMINE.
/THAT part of the work is over. There is no more need now, 1. we presume, to assert the reality of the Bengal Famine. For three months past, or rather more, since October, the London Press, true for once to its Imperial function, has warned the Empire that a calamity of unknown but certainly gigantic di- mensions was approaching with a slow, persistent march, before which any ordinary precautions, any precautions, indeed, save such as would be taken against an invasion, would be like heaps of sand against an advancing sea. With a strange and, except in a single instance—the affair of the Trent '—to us, unprecedented unanimity, London journals of all opinions and all politics, journals sometimes as hostile as the professional etiquette, fortunately a rigid one, permits journals to become, have warned the officials that they were living in a fools' paradise, indulging in dreams sure never to be realised. Strange to say—it is certainly the only case within our own experience—they received no apparent attention from the public whatever. The minor officials could not believe that the journals knew better than themselves, could not even imagine that for once they were being warned by experience as great as their own, by foresight in which they were totally deficient, and in- formation as superior to theirs as if the question in hand had been one of foreign politics, and up to Wednesday morning the public relied on the officials. The India House as a body, with one or two conspicuous exceptions, believed the entire affair to be a sensational invention of the Press, that is, either an invention or a gross exaggeration, circulated by men who had some impossible interest in saying things their constituents did not either like or believe. The Duke of Argyll, the responsible Minister, it is right to say, did believe ; 'was from the first as pessimist as his ignorance of India would allow him to be, and impressed on Lord Northbrook as strongly as it was courteous to do the great doctrine he had learned from Lord Dalhousie, that the tendency of dangers in India, as of all things else, is to assume an unexpected magni- tude like that of the Empire itself. The public, however, after the Duke's first and best despatch, remained entirely unconvinced ; no Member could be induced even to allude to the subject in any public address ; amid all the turmoil and free- dom of a General Election, not one Minister made this his topic ; and but one eminent Member made this his formal subject, and he, with every Indian Member or candi- date, except Mr. Bourke, likely to be of the smallest use, was summarily dismissed from Parliament. We restate this part of the case, not because the restate- ment is of any use, but because it is almost the only case we ever remember in which united journalism, thoroughly excited and angry journalism—journalism palpably better informed than the officials—ever failed utterly and entirely in catching the ear of the public, and forcing upon the authorities either the measures required or avowals of some kind adequate to the Occasion. Still they must have manured the public mind, for the moment a man likely to rule, and to rule quickly, took tip the subject, took it up in the most careful, cautious, and re- sponsible way, the whole country woke at once with an unanimous and loud response of gratification. Tories or Radicals, Englishmen are united on this one point, that Mr. Disraeli, not yet in power, has already filled up a disgraceful gap in the programmes of the parties. The Indian Famine is acknowledged at last to be the greatest subject with which, for the present, political thought can deal. They are not to perish, these poor millions, without a Premier ever giving them a thought, or at least one spoken word. A few sentences from a mere expectant of office telegraphed to India verbatim will, we have no doubt, abolish the disgraceful cruelty of the labour-test as quickly as they will convert the India House, we mean the House, not the Department, into the belief that people are dying of hunger in Bengal. The mere word of the expectant master of legions has been more powerful than all the words of all the scribes, backed though they were for ono with knowledge greater than that of their opponents. It was time some auth word was spoken ; and it is time, too, that the journals should speak out one other word. Mr. Disraeli, while condemning the cardinal doctrine of the Pauline Administration, both here and in India, that starving wOmen and children shall toil at out-door labour before they can be fed, spoke with the gentlest consideration of Lord Northbrook. He had no doubt, he said,—and his face as he said it must have been as impassive as a statue's would be,--4t would be found that this had been done and that had been done, and the other thing had been avoided, that although there was as yet little or no light, the darkness concealed nothing, that it was fearfully difficult to feed a people, and all the rest of the kind of thing a man once weighted with the prospect of power finds it essential to believe, or at any rate to say. Nevertheless—we say it with the most unfeigned regret--we scarcely doubt that Mr. Disraeli shares the opinion of most politicians that Lord Northbrook, with all his industry and all his conscientious painstaking, has hitherto not proved himself quite equal to a sudden and den- gereas crisia. He has endeavoured to do his very best, bathe has lacked imagination, financial courage, and appreciation of certain conditions of life among the people over whom he rules. Mr. Grant-Duff, in a speech at Elgin, on the 3rd inst., after the customary sneer at the exaggerations of the Press, which has not only not exaggerated, but has under- toned the facts, and does still undertone the magnitude of the danger, quotes the following sentence in a letter from Lord Northbrook : If the idea has had any prevalence in England that I am disposed to under-estimate the danger, and have required constant pressing from Sir George Campbell, I rely upon you to contradict it on my authority, if a suitable opportunity should occur." With all deference to Mr. Grant- Miff and the Viceroy, the charge against the latter is not in the smallest degree that of wilfully neglecting or under- estimating anything, not of any want of zeal or any need of pressure, but of being unable to foresee what dozens of humbler persons did foresee, that the danger, instead of being an ordinary, Would be an extraordinary one ; that instead of over-taxing a Department, it might over-strain an Empire; that it might rise to a height at which man can only bow his head, and humbly submit to the fiat he is unable to avert. From the very first it Was shown that every climatic condition of 1770 was pre- sent in 1873, but the Governor-General did not understand —as we will in a minute show by a crucial instance—the in- evitable deduction, that though history seldom repeats itself, nature often does. In 1770 the worst spot in all Bengal was North Moorshedabad. That county has never been named by the 'Viceroy. Yet by the telegrams of Wednesday it is once again the one which will give way first. The patent truth of the matter is that Lord Northbrook, able and willing to speed a moderate amount—we believe he has spent three or four millions on food, which, if not wanted, could be resold—has been unable to rise to the height of a terrible opportunity, or to cast all thought of the Treasury aside,' spend as Lord Palmerston would spend in a campaign, and save the people if it cost him — not his life, he would have thrown that away readily enough,—but his reputation among officials as a "safe man," and very prudent financier. His special orders were to produce a surplus, and rather than destroy his surplus, he hoped and hoped, and looked up at the Sky, and telegraphed about rains, and bought corn, and did everything except that which would have made a surplus impossible,—provide adequate transport to the centres, and abolish the utterly evil labour-test, by which women, to whom even the exposure of their faces is degradation, are compelled to do useless work upon the roads, among coolies as brutal, in all but physical power, as English roughs. Sir Richard Temple, says a telegram of Saturday, has ordered 50,000 carte from the North-West. Why were they not ordered two months ago ? Merely to avoid the loss that provision would have caused to the Treasury if the famine, which here in England was visibly imminent, should, by some miracle or other, not arrive. What keeps up these ridiculous relief-works? Nothing, except an idea that if that " test " were not applied the Treasury might possibly relieve some one not in actual starving want. We believe that fear to be utterly unreal, that Bengaleee who can buy their food would as soon let their women beg publicly for grain as English Peers would ; but suppose they, in some few instances, had done so. Can we not in the hour of extremity spare a million for the poor people who in the century since the conquest have uncomplainingly paid a thousand mil- lions in order that with the money we might master the "India," for which none but the learned among them have a name ? The Pall Mall Gazette says in de- fence, in an article otherwise thoroughly humane and good, that the Viceroy acted under compulsion, that he literally had not the money, and that he could not pillage an overburdened people even to save Bengal ; but the statement is inaccurate. It is due to the Duke of Argyll to say that on this point no inquiry can alter his position. Lord Northbrook had not only millions placed at his disposal, but by an extraordinary exercise of power he was authorised to raise a loan which, as the Calcutta quotations show, he could have obtained at 4 per cent. Money I Why, the mere saving effected this year in paying off the India Stock allows the Viceroy to raise eight millions, without adding one penny to the usual amount of Indian in- debtedness. We do not believe that India is at the end of her resources • but apart from that vexed subject, she is not, as both the Viceroy and the Pall Mall Gazette are well aware, at the end of her economies. This very year a Fleet is being collected which will cotst half the loss by famine ; this very year the "public Werke' will cost seven millions sterling ; but we will not use arguments which may raise controversy, but confine ourselves to 'a question intelligible to all. Is it not a certainty, 'e certainty past all doubt oreavil, that if is great
campaign had been imminent, the Indian Government could and would without a scruple or a difficulty have raised by economies and in the market twenty millions sterling ? They will lose that, and double that, even now, if the people perish and their revenue losses are ever calculated as capital. Lord Northbrook's ability cannot be questioned, but the crisis rem-mired imagination, and of his imagination we can only j= nge by this, that with the famine fairly upon him, with the people beginning to die, he stood up in the Calcutta Town Hall and asked for a subscription The policy of economy in such circumstances is utterly futile, but out of that policy of saving—a policy, we freely admit, most creditable to Lord Northbrook in ordinary times—the Viceroy apparently could not rise. Waste of money was as impossible to him as to Mr. Gladstone, and to avoid waste time has been lost, till expense will be multiplied threefold, and an incoming Premier can venture to hint that England should surrender her surplus for a Famine grant.
What would we have had the Viceroy do ? We may not venture to suggest, or officials will sneer at "irresponsible " opinion ; but we may venture to say what Lord Dalhousie would have done. At the first glimpse of danger he would have raised his head, would have felt for a moment the fierce plea- sure real danger always brought him, would have discerned the true point, the difficulty of transport, and silently, quietly, without fuss, but with no tolerance for discussion and cool contempt for home instructions, he would have issued orders under which the carrying resources of all India north of the Kurumnassa would have converged upon his threatened pro- vinces. The carts would have covered counties ; the coolies would have been armies ; every disposable engineer or active young civilian would have been on the spot ; the provision for cattle would have outdone the pro- vision for a campaign, and when the supreme moment arrived the master, who forgave everything save failure, would have been within an hour's reach of his battalions. This is no imaginary sketch, but a plain deduction from what Lord Dalhousie, a person forgotten and rather despised nowadays, did do when, in 1855, he was.threatened by the one danger which could in horror surpass a fatnine, an Indian religious war. There was not a village in the North which did not look to its swords as it heard of the armed contest between Hindoo and Mussulman in Oude for the temple of the Monkey-god. By a piece of unequalled good-fortune a daring officer, Captain Barlow, stamped out, in a battle not recorded in gazettes, a fanatic outburst which in ten days would have set North India in flames, to find, as he receded with his work done, that had he failed a corps darrale nearly as strong as that which won Sobraon was within two days' march behind. The Treasury was not thought of then, yet India was governed at half its present price. It is the strong, the Hohenzollerns, who govern cheaply, not the weak.
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