BOOKS.

THE ANNALS OF RURAL BENGAL.* Mn. W. W. HUNTER, of the Bengal Civil Service, is a most impertinent and presuming person. What earthly right has he, a mere competition wallah of some seven years' standing, a man without Indian connection, or a grandfather in the India House, who won his appointment by an examination open to any compe- tent blacksmith, to write Indian history with the insight of Colonel Tod and the research of Mr. Duff, in prose ahnost as good as that of Mr. Froude ? It is a most unwarrantable proceeding, one fatal to all the traditions of a service which has hitherto believed, with some reason, that eloquence and scholarship were monopolies of the elder and more exclusive caste, the caste with cousins and grandfathers. Youth, however, and particularly youth which prospers at examinations, is apt to be " upsetting," and all the circumstances considered, we would recommend the Civil Service, the old stagers particularly, to make the best they can of it. It does not matter very much whether they adopt " this boy" or not, and therefore as old friends of theirs we are inclined, of coin's, in a whisper, to recommend them to adopt him. If they do not they may lose an extremely fair chance of boast- ing some day that the service of which they are so proud has produced the first of Indian historians. We mean it in all serious-

• The Annals of Rural Rowe. By Sir. W. W. Hunter, B.C.S. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

ness, although the form in which the meaning is expressed is more than half jocular. Mr. Hunter parades borrowed knowledge

rather too much, not out of vanity, but out of enthusiasm for the knowledge itself ; he is a little too confident where scholars to whom he looks up with awe walk in doubt and trembling ; and he is sometimes so embarrassed with his own materials as to grow a little confused ; but if Mr. Hunter does not ultimately compel recognition from the world as a historian of the very first class, of the class to which not a score of English- men have ever belonged, we entirely mistake our trade. We never remember to have heard his name before in our lives, he has no administrative reputation, and he can be scarcely thirty or thirty-two years of age ; but unless this book is, as occasionally happens, an exceptional or accidental effort, Mr. Hunter's name will one day be a household word among those who are interested in Asiatic history. Ile has executed with admirable industry and rare power of expression a task which, so far as we know, has never yet been attempted,—for Mr. Buchanan attempted and succeeded in a very different enterprise,—he has given life and reality and interest to the internal history of an Indian province under British rule, to a history, that is, without battles or sieges or martial deeds of any sort. He had considerable and somewhat novel materials to work on. Moved apparently by his instinct for history, or by an impatience of histories occupied with anything rather than the woes and joys of the people, Mr. Hunter endea- voured to collect from family archives, native records, and official documents a history of the two ancient Hindoo prin- cipalities now comprised in the Bengal county or district of Beerbhoom, the "Hero Land." He did not make much of it, for, as he says, in Bengal the new generation of dreamers forgets the deeds of the last generation of dreamers ; but he got some narratives of more or less value, and he stumbled by accident on a prize. In an old press in the district treasury, with padlocks so rusty that he had to break them open, he found the daily official history of Beerbhoom from the day succeeding its annexation. A similar record, comprising every document which has in any way come before a Government as all-pervading as that of France, exists in every district, and Mr. Hunter, fired with historical enthusiasm, suggested to his chiefs that he might write from such sources a genuine history of English Bengal. We dare say he wrote up to Calcutta something very like the analysis he has here published of his plan.

"In the Chief Government office of every district in Bengal are presses filled with 'papers similar to those I have described. They con- sist of reports, letters, minutes, judicial proceedings, and relate, in the words of eye-witnesses and with official accuracy, the daily history of the country from the time the English took the administration into their own hands. Many of them are written in the curt forcible language which men use in moments of excitement or peril ; and in spite of the blunders of copyists and the ravages of decay, they have about them that air of real life which proceeds not from literary ability, but from the fact that their authors' minds were full of the subjects on which they wrote. We learn from these worm-eaten manuscripts that what wo have been accustomed to regard as Indian history is a chronicle of events which hardly affected, and which were for the most part unknown to, the contemporary mass of the Indian people. On their discoloured pages the conspicuous vicissitudes and revolutions of the past century have left no trace. Dynasties struggled and fell, but the bulk of the people evinced neither sympathy nor surprise, nor did the pulse of village life in Bengal move a single beat faster for all the calamities and panic of the outside world. But these volumes, so silent on subjects about which we are already well informed, speak at length and with the utmost precision on matters regarding which the Western world is pro- foundly ignorant. They depict in vivid colours the state of rural India when the sceptre departed from the Mussulman race. They disclose the complicated evils that rendered our accession, for some time, an aggravation rather than a mitigation of the sufferings of the people. They unfold one after another the misapprehensions and disastrous vacillations amid which our first solid progress was made. They impartially retain the evidence of low motives and official incompetence side by side with the impress of rare devotion and administrative skill. But taken as a whole, they reveal the secret of England's greatness in the East. They exhibit a small band of our countrymen going forth to govern an unexplored and a half subdued territory. Before tho grave heroism and masterful characters of these men the native mind suc- cumbed. Our troops originated for us a rude Mahratta-liko supremacy ; but the rural records attest that the permanent sources of the English ascendancy in Bengal have been, not their brilliant military successes, but deliberate civil courage and indomitable

If that or anything like it was sent up, we can tell almost exactly what happened. The Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, then Sir Cecil Beadon, stared a little at the request, smiled with an odd, half humorous, half disdainful appreciation of the literary power displayed in the application, and granted the applicant every authority, privilege, and exemption "consistent with a due regard to the interests of the public service." No Indian Government ever impedes effort of this kind, or ever promotes a man because he has displayed this kind of ability. Mr. Hunter, however, was 1– very fairly treated, obtained holidays when he was not wanted, received letters before which very jealously guarded locks flew open, and tacitly or formally was protected against any kind of pecuniary loss—a point upon which Indian Admini-

strations, to do them bare justice, are as civilized as the Princes of mediaeval Italy. So with labour among worm- eaten records at which we can only admire, Mr. Hunter produced this book, the history of the Company's rule in the district of Beerbhoom, a history which most annalists would condense into a paragraph, but which is full of human interest, of suffering such as few States on earth have endured, of famine and pestilence and depopulation, and gradual revival under a single-eyed, wise, but fearfully stern system of English rule. We do not remember to have read in Eastern or Western history a description of a catastrophe superior to Mr. Hunter's account of the awful famine of 1790, a famine greater than that of Orissa, a famine which literally pulverized society throughout

Bengal, leaving whole districts in the great dependency deserts,

to be repeopled as well as reinvigorated by their English rulers. Certainly there has been no such account of the mode in which the Indian revenue system, with its iron regularity and scientific pitilessness, can sometimes crush a province, driving the people slowly back into the jungles, till at last the silent, reticent, enduring Bengalees emigrate in despair. Often they have never even made their complaint known to the ruler :— "It does not appear that the conviction entered the minds of the Council during the previous winter months that the question was not so much one of revenue as of depopulation. This misconception, strange as it may appear, is susceptible of explanation. From the first appear- ance of Lower Bengal in history, its inhabitants have been reticent, self-contained, distrustful of foreign observation, in a degree without parallel among other equally civilized nations. The cause of this taciturnity will afterwards be clearly explained ; but no one who is acquainted either with the past experiences or the present condition of the people can be ignorant of its results. Local officials may write alarming reports, but their apprehensions seem to be contradicted by the apparent quiet that prevails. Outward palpable proofs of suffering are often wholly wanting; and even when, as in 1770, such proofs abound, there is generally no lack of evidence on the other side. Tho Bengali bears existence with a composure that neither accident nor chance can ruffle. He becomes silently rich or uncomplainingly poor. The emotional part of his nature is in strict subjection ; his resentment enduring, but unspoken ; his gratitude of the sort that silently descends from generation to generation. The passion for privacy reaches its climax in the domestic relations. An enter apartment, in even the humblest households, is set apart for strangers and the transaction of business, but everything behind it is a mystery. The most intimate friend does not venture to make those common-place kindly inquiries about a neighbour's wife or daughter which European courtesy demands from mere acquaintances. This family privacy is maintained at any price. Daring the famine of 1866 it was found impossible to render public charity available to the female members of the respectable classes, and many a rural household starved slowly to death without uttering a complaint or making a sign. All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandman sold their cattle ; they sold their implements of agriculture ; they devoured their seed-grain ; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found ; they eat the leaves of trees and the grass of the field ; and in June, 1770, the Resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the great cities. At an early period of the year pestilence had broken out. In March we find smallpox at Moorshedabad, where it glided through the Viceregal mutes, and cat off the Prince Syfut in his palace. The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead. Interment could not do its work quick enough ; even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens."

To every separate sentence in that striking description there is a numeral appended, indicating the date, authorship, and para- graph of the letter in which the official proof of that particular touch can be found. The famine, it must be remembered, had stricken all Bengal, though Mr. Hunter quotes his evidences mainly from Beerbhoom ; and though the next year was one of plenty so singular, that the revenue could not be collected because grain was hardly worth selling, yet,— " Two years after the dearth Warren Hastings wrote an elaborate report on the state of Bengal. He had made a progress through a large portion of the country, instituting the most searching inquiries by the way, and he deliberately states the loss as at least one-third of the inhabitants.' This estimate has been accepted by all official and by the most accurate non-official writers. It represents an aggregate of individual suffering which no European nation has been called upon to contemplate within historic times. Twenty years after the famine the remaining population was estimated at from twenty-four to thirty millions ; and we cannot help arriving at the conclusion that the failure of a single crop, following a year of scarcity, had within nine months swept away ten millions of human beings To the native mind, on the other hand, the questions of responsibility probably would not occur in such cases even at this hour, except within the narrow circle influenced and instructed by the Anglo-Indian Press. The loss of life was accepted as a natural and logical consequence of the loss of the crop. Tho earth had yielded no food ; and so the people, in the ordinary and legitimate course of things, died."

Two-thirds of the native aristocracy perished out of the land, crushed partly by direct losses, partly by inability to pay a land tax which, amidst all this suffering, was still mercilessly exacted.

To this famine and two others Mr. Hunter gives all his strength ; but to the ordinary reader this record of misery will probably be less interesting than his account of the gradual super- imposition of a fair-skinned Aryan tribe upon the true dark population of Bengal,—the Dasyus, as they still call themselves, the thirty millions of whom history takes no account, and of whom Government only asks that they be orderly,— and of the perpetual segregation, the class suspicion, the incapacity for national life, as we still see in Ireland, which that conquest produced. The Aryan in Bengal has despised the con- quered races as a Southerner despises a slave, has declared toil ignoble—to this hour a Brahmin may do anything but toil with his hands,—has refused to amalgamate with them, has monopolized education, and has at last suffered the penalty of receiving where he ought to have bestowed. The creed he imported,—a bright and, in its way, a pure creed,—has been ruined by the ad- mixture of the devil-worship of the aborigines, till it is degraded as Christianity was in the eleventh century, and in the orthodox churches is still, into a scheme for conciliating a hostile power, and the social organization has yielded in turn to every barbarian strong enough to hold down the only active class. The account of these aborigines, their creed, their legends, and their ways, is singularly complete and readable, and pervaded by a cool, critical philosophy, which, accurate or not, leaves the mind satisfied that at least the author has enjoyed light, that in his conclusions there is no confusion.

The latter half of this remarkable volume relates the slow but steady reinvigoration of Beerbhoom, the establishment of the Settle- ment,the effect of what was perhaps the greatest triumph of Lord Cornwallis's life the reform of the currency—a really extraordinary chapter, choked with information which will be new to those most familiar with Bengal—and the real working of that wonderful system now known only as the Company's mercantile monopoly. Mr. Hunter's account of this system, from the rural cultivator's point of view, strikes us as throughout too favourable ; but we are bound to say he brings forward heaps of facts hitherto unnoticed, and especially those which explain the influence of the system on civilization. How many of our readers have any idea of the follow- ing facts :—

" Long before the Company deemed it necessary to assume the direct administration of the western principalities, it had covered them with trading concerns ; and, indeed, the peril into which the Rajahs' misrule brought the factories, formed one of the main reasons that induced Lord Cornwallis to take Beerbhoom under his own care. A Commercial Resi- dent supervised the whole, and three head factories, in conveniently central positions, regulated the operations of twelve other subordinate ones. Silk, cotton cloths, fibres, gums, and lac dye furnished the staple articles of the Beerbhoom investment. Mulberry-growing communes fringed tho margin of the great western jungle, and every bend of the Adji on the south, and of the More on the north, disclosed a weaving village. These little industrial colonies dwelt secure amid the disorders of the times, protected not by walls or trained bands, but by the terror of the Company's name. They afforded an asylum for the peaceable craftsman when the open country was overrun ; and after the harvest of the year had been gathered in, the husbandman transported thither the crop, with his wife, and oxen, and brazen vessels, careless of what the banditti might do to the empty shell of his mud hovel. Some of these unfortified strongholds grew into important towns ; and as one set of names tell of a time when the country seems to have been divided between robbers and wild beasts, so another, such as Tatti-Parah (weaving village), disclose how the artizans and small merchants found protection by clustering together under the Commercial Resident's wing."

Mr. Cheap, the last Commercial Resident in Beerbhoom, was a kind of Titus Salt, a civilizing manufacturer with the power of a noble and the wealth, and so deeply did he plant his name into the district, that to this hour the firm he founded on the abolition of the Company's trade has never had a quarrel with the people. Mr. Hunter, though strongly favourable to the natives, whom he calls a noble people impeded by a bad social organization, is also friendly to the settlers ; and the following sketch will probably give our readers a new idea of the position occupied by some of the men who have made the trade, and the telegraphs, and the railways of India, whose resistance to oppression secures honest Courts for the natives as well as themselves, and whom the majority of civilians and native landlords overwhelm with insult, and would if they could overwhelm with oppression, simply because, as Mr. Hunter says, " they force Government to do its work well :"— " The benefits which Mr. Cheap conferred upon a large scale, Mr.

Prushard repeated on a smaller one. He spread a ring of cultivation and prosperity round his factory, and soon founded little tributary filatures throughout the whole north-eastern jungle of Beerbhoom. He seems to have been a very typical Englishman—too sanguine to be prudent at first, and too insular to sympathize with native ways, but eventually settling down into an experienced English planter, with that rough, paternal liking which almost every Englishman in a Bengal district sooner or later gets for the simple people among whom he lives. His factory, rebuilt several times, now forms the most imposing mercantile edifice in Beerbhoom. It is charmingly situated on a rising ground on the bank of the More, defended from the river by colossal buttresses, and surrounded by a high and many angled wall, enclosing a space large enough for a little town. The remnant of its ancient library still bears witness to a fair degree of mental culture on the part of its ancient possessors, particularly an editio princeps of Gibbon, six noble quartos, over whose pages, let us hope, the isolated ' adventurer often forgot his squabbles with the collector and the floods that threatened his mulberry fields. His successors now employ two thousand four hundred artizans for the single process of winding off the cocoons ; and if to these be added the unnumbered multitudes of mulberry-growers and silkworm- breeders, with their families, it may be calculated that the factory gives bread to fifteen thousand persons. Its annual outlay averages 72,000L, or nearly half as much again as the whole investment of the Com- mercial Resident in bygone days, and the yearly value of the general silk manufactures of the district exceeds 160,0001., sterling. It must be remembered that this is only one of many staples. Besides Mr. Frushard's successors on the More, there are Mr. Cheap's successors on the Adji, with smaller factories scattered up and down ; and besides silk, the district produces indigo, lac dye, iron, fibres, and oil seeds to an enormous value, not to speak of the large annual exportation of grain,— a branch of its commerce which still remains in native hands. It is this influx of English capital that has chiefly given employment to the increased inhabitants, whom long continued security to person and property has developed. Rural Bengal has ceased to depend for its subsistence entirely on the land ; and so, although the quantity of land stands still, the population may with safety multiply. Nor is it too much to say, that independent British enterprise, once so hated and suspected by the Company's servants, has now rendered it possible to give good government to India, without intensifying the struggle for life."

We hash given but a faint sketch of the mass of matter in this volume, the rare merit of which will sometimes only be perceptible to Anglo-Indians unaccustomed to see their dry annals made as interesting as a novel. We can, however, cordially recommend it to every man with the slightest interest in Bengal, and most cordially counsel Mr. Hunter—of whom it is needful to repeat the writer never before heard—to continue the career he has chalked out for himself. He need have no fear of success. The India House, with all its shortcomings, never forgets any one who illus- trates its service ; and, unless we utterly misjudge literary power exerted in a field with which we are familiar, Mr. Hunter belongs to the limited class of civilians who will be remembered when all recollection of their "services" has faded from men's minds. The Indians who live are not the men who administer, but the men whose thoughts Englishmen keep upon their shelves.