THE FUTURE OF MUNEEPORE.
IT is hardly necessary, we fancy, to argue against the annexation of Muneepore. The small group of persons who really govern India—among whom the Secre- tary of State, the Premier, and the past Viceroys and Secretaries for India are the most important—have, we imagine, settled that question among themselves. It is just possible that the Government of India may in the end be induced by some geographical considerations, or by some policy not yet announced with. regard to the re- population of Burmah, to decide on the annexation of a valley which commands what must be the great route between Burmah and Bengal ; but failing some reason of that kind, we should suppose the question to be settled. Lord Cross would hardly have delivered himself with such emphasis on Monday, if he had thought the Viceroy deter- mined to annex ; while his deliverance, approved as it was by Lord Ripon, by Lord Northbrook, and partly by the Duke of Argyll, will, of course, materially influence the ultimate decision of the Government of India. European opinion in India is sure to be divided on the subject, while native opinion is sure to be opposed to the extinction of the only State which, as a State, has been converted en. mane to Hin- dooism within the memory of man. Muneepore, therefore, will continue to exist, and its continued existence includes, we may presume, the continuance of the present dynasty. The Maharajah selected must be a child, in order that he may be trained, and that the State may be placed for a few years in the hands of a picked ruler, whether a Resident or a Native Vizier, and the absurd law of succession, which is rather Mussulman than Hindoo, must be abrogated in favour of primogeniture ; but it would be unwise to break with a dynasty so closely con- nected with the State, and so peculiarly competent to extend its civilising influence among the surrounding hillmen. The reigning family in Muneepore, though not exactly either great in itself or old in Muneepore, is the family Which converted the people from the old worship of the Snake—still followed by the hillmen, and still recorded in all Muneepore emblems—to Hindooism, and is still re- garded by the Naga tribes, the "servants of the Snake," as their representative House. It is a pity, if we keep a Maharajah at all, to shatter an influence of that kind, which goes a great deal deeper than any claim of ; and as there was great energy in the family once, there is no reason why a child belonging to it, if wisely trained, and not educated out of all originality and brain-power, should not fifteen or twenty years hence show himself a competent administrator of the country, and a centre of enlightenment for the savages of the hills. They will not willingly take guidance from us, but they will from a chief whom they regard, as was shown during this very revolt,. as still their own greatest man.
The decision, we say, is practically taken, and though we did not expect it, we are not sorry to record and to defend it. There is something attractive to the imagination in the idea that the State which has risen against the British, and treacherously murdered British officers, should cease to. exist ; but there are at least three reasons against annexa- tion, all of them exceedingly strong. The first is the one of which so much was wisely made in the Lords' debate of Monday. We have been trying ever since 1860 to govern one third of India under a federal system closely akin to the one in force in the German Empire ; indeed, differing from it only in this, that the Empress on very grave occasions can exert, under a long series of treaties with the separate States, a controlling or disciplinary power to which there is in theory no limit. That federal system has worked fairly well, and may work admirably ; and it would be im- mensely stupid, without the gravest reason, to interfere with a wonderfully interesting experiment in governing, the only one, in fact, which has ever offered a fair chance of combining Asiatic ideas of good government with European results. If a Native Prince will govern like a. good European, though on the native method, an ideal , government is produced for a period of transition ; and though that is hard to attain, still it is impossible to say, with an example like Jeypore before us, that it is unattain- able. At all events, we must try the experiment for a century before we give it up, and we do give it up if we let ourselves be easily provoked into small annexations. They not only make the Princes doubt our intentions, and so produce a distrust which corrodes the very pillars of the edifice, but they provide too easy a remedy for failures which must almost always be our own fault as well as that of the native family. Our agents must have failed to " guide " in the right way before the Native House has declared our guidance to be intolerable. It is well that we should be forced to learn the art of managing Native Princes and Principalities aright, and we are forced if we grant to the Principalities a durability to be terminated only when their existence becomes incompatible with either the strength or the beneficial effect of the Imperial regime.. There will be occasional disorders in Native States, and there will be now and again intolerable Princes ; but though the disorders must be suppressed sometimes by cannon,. and though such Princes must be deposed, the State, until some new and greater policy than Federalism has been adopted, should be suffered to endure.
The second reason for not annexing Muneepore, which was just hinted at by Lord Cross, is that we can govern it much better if it remains a separate Principality. It is just in that condition, half of savagery and half of Asiatic civilisation, in which the flexible Asiatic system of government, which meets all dangers, however emergent, and allows of all experiments, works better than the European method, with its rigidity and slowness. To govern well in Munee- pore, the ruler must constantly initiate reforms, must con- stantly "put down" evils by sudden and despotic acts, must constantly pick agents solely for their ability— ability unproved by a long record or by examina- tions—and must, above all, constantly bend the laws, and especially the fiscal laws, so as to meet unexpected facts. A Government based on European ideas can- not do these things, cannot sufficiently free itself from the routine, cannot get rid of the notion that it may have to defend itself in the House of Commons. It is possible, of' course, to make of the annexed State a peculium, to exempt it from any laws but its own, and so to turn the new Com- missioner into a sort of White Maharajah; but if we do, half the benefit of annexation is lost, and the population lacks alike the stimulus in all directions which a good and popular native autocrat can impart, and the prosperity which grows up under our somewhat leaden but just and unswerving rOginte of written law. With a population like that of Muneepore, half-civilised, half-savage, with men in the capital who could be taught like Cambridge under- graduates, and men on the uplands to whom Maories or Zulus are orderly and rational folk, the Asiatic method is best, at least until the idea of law has got fairly into the. blood. It is all very well to sanction relaxations, but the Com-. missioner will have his taxes sent up in cash and not in kind, will have them paid to the minute, even if the seasons are bad, and will not allow any trace of that respect of persons which Asiatic society, when left to itself, not only permits, as European society does also for all its talk, but holds to be unquestionably of divine ordination, part of the system of Nature which neither ought to be nor can be set aside.
And thirdly, the system of a Native State does allow careers to its prominent inhabitants of a kind for which under our regime there is no place whatever. We do allow natives to " rise," and we could, and probably shall, extend their opportunities much further ; but even if we threw open every office under the Viceroyalty, the native could never rise to the position he really desires, could never attain to anything but what Lord Beaconsfield described as "the closely watched slavery mocked in England with the name of power." The highest official can never escape surveillance and responsibility, never overstep the law even for the best object, never play that part of local Providence which it is the passion of an Asiatic who is at once able and good to play. He always lives, and under our system of thought must live, in fetters, which in his own mind he believes to be as injurious to the people as they are crippling to his own origi- nality and energy. The great arts, as natives consider them, of soldiership, of courtiership, and of pleasing the people, can never be practised under our rogime, which reduces the most successful of its agents very much to the position of a great expounder of the law. We concede, and can con- cede, no power to birth, to popularity, or to special fitness of mind ; we never promote by leaps, except in Parliament, a,nd very little there ; and we shut the gate of authority against the young in a way which leaves them all, even when we do put a ladder before them up which they may painfully climb, men of unsatisfied ambition. It is not so in a Native State, where to this hour the ruler can make a boy or a subaltern Premier or Commander-in-Chief, where, in fact, careers are no more barred by examinations than by "bars of gold ; " and though our own system is in the abstract the better, and if the objects of life are order, comfort, and security, produces better results, it is a pity the Asiatic one, so much bettei liked by the people, should be abruptly suppressed. The longing of men is not only for careers, but careers of the kind they wish for, and Native States offer these to Indians in a way the Empire can never do. There are plenty of reasons to be urged for the other system, and under certain circumstances they are unanswerable ; but we are trying a great experiment from which much is to be hoped, and it would be a pity to violate its conditions for the sake of directly administering Muneepore. We have work and land enough without governing the Valley ; and as for the hills around it, we are loaded down with the charge of savages for whom we have scarcely names, and from whom we are so far removed in thought that we cannot without subjugation influence them for good. A Muneeporee dynasty can, and may well be allowed to go on with the work which it has pursued in its own interest alone for more than a hundred years. We can secure in a long minority all that is really needed without changing the little State into a sub-district of an Indian Commissionership.
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