THE NEW DANGER REPORTED FROM INDIA. L ORD HARRIS'S little speech
on the recent cow-killing riots in Bombay is not, to Anglo-Indians, pleasant reading. The Governor of Bombay, though no doubt his character as a statesman is obscured by his great reputa- tion as a cricketer, must be a man of some ability, or the Government would not have placed him in so anxious a post. Cricketing is no claim on a Cabinet. At all events, he has able men round him, and access to all sources of information ; and his statement that an extensive machinery is at work to excite disorder under pretext of preventing the killing of cows, must be more or less true. It is confirmed, too, we see from the other side of India, by the editor of _Reis and Ryot, a man of much ability, not likely to be taken in, and who, if we mistake not, has been Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Native State. That looks very much as if there were a plot on foot intended to rouse the Hindoos all through Northern and Eastern India to prevent the slaughter of cows, and thus by creating a kind of civil war over an immense area, to bring the Government into a position of grave embarrass- ment. They might have serious religious riots to meet over the greater part of India, and so find themselves in this un- comfortable position. They cannot accede to the Hindoo demand, which is unjust alike to Mahommedans and Christians ; while if they take sides, or appear to take sides, with the Mahommedans, they. would be left at the end of the shindy with the majority of the popu- lation against them, and with the Mahommedans full of the feeling that they had saved the Empire, and ought to rule it as they used to do. It is an ugly story, and might in a moment become uglier still. The Mahommedans are the strongest single body in India, because they will act together, because battle is part of their creed, and because they have the traditional right to the Empire ; but the warrior-races of India are all Hindoo. if the Mahrattas, and the Rajpoots, and the Sikhs, and the Goorkhas all took up the cause of the cows, we should be left with no fighting Asiatics behind us ex- cept the Mussulmans, to whom, as we have explained, it would be in the highest degree inexpedient, almost im- moral, to appeal. Our business in India is to prevent civil war, not by letting loose the creeds to foster a civil war, which would be the. greatest and most sanguinary the world ever saw. The Hindoos and Mahommedans are not separated sectionally. There are MahommedanStates and Hindoo States, and Mahom- medan villages and Hincloo villages, but the creeds live side by side everywhere, just as they do in Bombay ; and though they cannot intermarry or dine with each other, they are incessantly in contact, both for business and pleasure. A serious rising on a question like cow-killing Would mean massacres throUgh the length and breadth of a continent, massacres which would very soon throw up men with far wider ideas than any which fanatics are likely to entertain. It is purely a Hindoo movement as yet, but so was the Great Mutiny, the greased-cartridge story not greatly affecting the Mussulmans; who have no caste to lose ; and the Mutiny ended in Brahmins dying that a Mussulman might reign. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that if the Native Congress has anything to do with it, it is the Hindoos in Congress who are annoyed ; and who threatened, if we are not mistaken, an appeal to the Sepoys, while the Mussulmans stand aloof, or are even hostile to the movement, seeing clearly that under any conceivable system of voting, they would be governed by Hindoos,—which they do not intend to be. They will tole- rate Hindoos, even in very high oflice—Akbar's Vizier was a Hindoo, and there is some reason to believe that neither he nor his master believed a word of any creed under the sun, and that both were inclined to invent one —but the Empire is theirs, as they think, by divine right the moment the English cloud has passed across the sky.
The matter may turn out nothing, for the generation which saw the Mutiny, and was astounded and cowed by the iron firmness with which the English put it down— they thought, poor people, like the Irish just now that the English had " gone soft "—has not completely passed' away, and respect for the aged is very powerful in India. The movement may be a mere experiment, though it has cost so many lives. Still, somehow, we do not like the story, and we suspect that the able old Indian soldiers who all over the country are letting their very souls grow rusty in forced inaction, will like it still less. Bombay, Azimghur, North- East Bengal, all moved by the same impulse, and that a quasi-religious one ; what does that mean if not a big danger ahead ? A popular revolt in India, even if confined at first to the Hindoos, would be an awful business. The Great Mutiny in 1857 had, no doubt, many elements in it of popular revolt—the Mahrattas, for example, swarming up to enlist with Tantia Tepee—but the leaders of that move- ment made from the very first a colossal blunder. They were not statesmen—in the whole of that great uprising no man turned up with even third-rate brains—and they did not know where the strength and weakness of the White men lay. They knew that the drilled brown soldiers were many, and the drilled white soldiers few, and resolved therefore to win India back by battle. It was brave ; but it was exceedingly silly. The twenty thousand white sol- diers stood to their guns ; the Sikhs, after a pause never sufficiently described—a pause during which the strongest gasped for breath—decided that they would have nothing to do with an Emperor of Delhi or a Mahratta Peishwah, seventy thousand white soldiers came floating across the sea, and the fighting-strength of India was practically stamped out. The effort had been left to the Sepoys, and with their defeat it died out. A popular revolt would be a much worse affair, not because any village could hold out for two days against troops, but because in every village there would be anarchy, and the Govern- ment could not get at them all. You cannot distribute an army over a continent in squads of five, or levy revenue over a dozen Kingdoms by marching-parties. The work could be done in a moment, no doubt, by appealing to the Mussulmans and, supporting them with flying-columIns ; —but the Viceroy who gives that order must be surer of his right to give it than we can profess to be. It would cost ten million lives, and we should have to fight the Mussulmans at the end of the slaughter. Our business in India is to rule with cold, disagreeable, British in. partiality, which regards all castes alike with an immovable inner disdain, not to hound on one of the creeds at the throat of another, and then say we are irresponsible for the consequences.
What, then, is to be done if any movement such as Lord Harris expects is actually at hand ? Wait and watch, and if an outbreak comes in any big place, stamp it out instantly, at whatever cost to life, so that all. India may know that the English are awake and fierce. If that succeeds, punish as few as possible, but punish with the whole rigour of the law. Arrests by the thousand, such as have been made in Bombay, do no good, and cause endless irritation. If, on the other hand, the movement spreads, concentrate force at points chosen by the experts, and wait till the invincible Asiatic tendency to gather armies and found kingdoms has time to manifest itself. That change is as certain to arrive shortly after the insurrection breaks out in strength, as the people are certain to form regiments ; and once gathered in strength, the European power of fighting, on which the Empire in the long-run rests, will crush the insurrection once more. Popular resistance in Asia never survives the loss of a regular engagement. The day after a pitched battle, ten thOusand villages sub- mit, and swear, in the melancholy monotone of beaten Orientals, that they never dreamed of doing anything else,—that, in fact, they never rebelled, and that, as to cows, they never thought about them, and for a. hundred years have let the Sahibs eat them,—which is true. As to preventive measures, laws against the Press, laws against seditious harangues, laws against secret " instigations," we do not believe they are fruitful of any- thing but worry. Before the Mutiny, the complaints, the signals, and the orders were carried through the country by fakirs and sunyasees, by Sepoys on leave, by ordinary travellers, by runners, whom no Government would dream of suspecting, and could. not arrest if it did. When a movement is at hand in India the police know nothing, the soldiers know nothing, the traders know nothing ; only here and there an individual officer is warned by a friend, and sends on the warning to his superiors, almost invariably to receive a snubbing for his pains. The only thing to do is to watch carefully, to pay for information liberally, to pro- tect the telegraphs as far as possible—they ought to be underground—and then to rely on the only solid basis of power, the inability of a Native force to cope with a British one, be the disparity of numbers what it may. The British Empire in India is not a structure, but a miracle, and though we are bound to use all means for its preservation, it will fall in the hour God wills, and not one second sooner.
Previous page
