A LION'S IDEAS ON MAN.
THE Times of Tuesday, the 29th ult., contained a very singular paper, a paper which, if not unique, is, we believe, very nearly unique in English literature. It is a report certainly authentic, and probably literal, of a conversation between Sindhia, the Sovereign of Gwalior, the first Marhatta State, and Colonel Daly, English diplomatist of ability and tact, upon the merits and demerits of British rule in India, a conversation during which the Prince forgot for once both his personal caution and his Indian reserve, and spoke out with trustful smiles and confidential laughter what it was in him to say—the real thought in his head —the very thing one can so seldom induce a Hindoo to betray. The thought is a remarkable one considered merely as a political utterance. We do not suppose, for example, that any Englishman of cultivation who reads the conversation will ever again believe that Sindhia is a savage, a sort of Ashantee king, a barbarian on whom political argument would be simply thrown away,—a change of opinion which is in itself a great gain ; but that is not our point just now. Sindhia, who occupies among Indian princes very much the position of a Bonaparte among European sovereigns, not exactly a new man, but still a man necessarily at war with the old world, a Prince without a pedigree, —who asked, for example, when the Mutiny broke out why on earth he was expected to support the Indian Bourbon, the heir of Timour,—has been thinking hard over a problem which every now and then disturbs all studious politicians. What is the essential difference between an Oriental and a Western European? Why are a few thousand white boors, never a hundred thousand in all, led by a few hundred white gentlemen, never thirty hundred in all, able to coerce two hundred millions of slightly darker persons, of whom the majority are as brave as the said boors, nearly or quite as intelligent as the gentlemen, and decidedly better mannered than both ? Why, in short, is society in Asia stereotyped ; why cannot this very Sindhia, who, if he lifted his standard and won a battle would have all India at his back, kick us out into outer darkness, as any Western prince ruling Western subjects under the same circumstances infallibly would do? Sindhia has thought that out, he says, for many years,—" I have watched it and thought of it long,"—has driven about on mail carts incognito, like a modern Haroun al Rashid, seeking light upon that point within British dominion, and not being the fool a person with the golden bronze tinge ought to be, has arrived at a definite conclusion. You English, he says, and "to me it is the
most striking thing of all you do, husband your experience in a careful way."
Let us consider that opinion a little. It is a very foolish one no doubt, for Sindhia has the golden bronze tinge, was when this writer saw him fourteen years ago very nearly light copper-coloured, and a person so dark must talk nonsense, but still there is intellectual interest in watching even a poor picture of man painted by a lion, and we may therefore be forgiven for a momentary neglect of the compound householder, and the best means of suppressing the
. British rough, and the ideas of M. Deleyyani, and other entrancing subjects, just to consider what this particular lion really did mean. Clearly he had an idea of some kind,—that much may be allowed even to an Indian Prince talking transcendental politics,—and was not that idea this? European observers are accustomed to say that the first distinction between man and the brute is the want in the latter of the accumulative faculty. Rover the retriever learns many things, but Rover's heir is the wiser for very few of those things, and Rover's grandson perhaps for none of them, except the one or two which have become caste peculiarities,—exceptional faculty, for example, of bringing back dead birds without eating them. Speculative persons marking this have questioned, cautiously as becomes persons building a great theory on very imperfect data, whether it may not be possible that there is in each race some sort of a limit to the faculty of accumulation, a limit either of power or of will which it cannot or will not overpass, which once reached, that race begins to stereotype itself. Is there not, in Sindhia's language, a point at which men cease to "husband their experience," being, it may be, content with what they have acquired,—as Chinese, for example, who think they have attained perfection ; or unwilling to labour more, like most priesthoods ; or lacking storehouses in which to store up the new accumulations, like people who cannot write ? Most thoughtful men, we conceive, without directly answering in the affirmative, would consider the proposition worth at least some minutes' reflection, if. only because it would be so unspeakably pleasant to see a conceivable possibility of breaking the spell. Just imagine the feeling of the man who found, as the late Dr. Ballantyne of Benares fancied that he had found, the talisman, that he could melt the ice and set all Asiatic waters flowing, that he could give the shove which should set Chinaman and Hindoo and Arab all in motion spinning "down," or up, the "ringing grooves of change" and progress towards an independent but indefinitely advancing civilization. Life would be worth having to that man, even if he had gout. We ourselves have repeatedly tried to show that the first proposition is the true one ; that a race ceases to accumulate whenever it is content ; that the people who believe their social order divine do not and cannot attempt to advance, lest movement should break up a divinely established organization. The Hindoo Brahmins are in that stage, and the Ultramontane clergy of Europe. No, says Sindhia, as we understand him, that is not the true proposition ; the third is the truer. My people are stereotyped because they have reached the limit of their mechanical resources for accumulation, have
reached the margin of their mechanical or moral power of "husbanding their experience." "Tome the most striking is the careful way in which you husband your experience. Your records are so preserved that in almost all the positions filled by your officers the current of business is little affected by the men themselves. With a Native Government it is entirely otherwise ; its servants pay no deference to the records of their predecessors to follow them—if such can be said to exist—rather the reverse. The incumbent of the office probably strives to undo what has been done." The mere keeping of records, it will be seen,—of those "writings" which most Anglo-Indians condemn ,—strikes Sindhia as a source of power, of an incessant increase of force, of a growth, to put it in one word, wanting in the native society of which he is the representative. In other words, the quasi-mechanical habit of keeping the information one has got, and giving it to the next man who wants it, makes the whole difference between progress and stagnation, between Western Europe and the Eastern World.
It is clearly a half-truth that, but may not even a half-truth if it be a real half-truth be of importance, when, if it were a whole truth, it would change the face of the world as undoubtedly this one would? The mere mechanical faculty, or rather habit, of record, of stowing up knowledge in a granary, is one which can be communicated, which may as easily be acquired by a race like, for instance, the Hindoos, as by a class like, for instance, the hereditary labourers of Yorkshire. We know that education, much if not all of which is intended to teach the Yorkshire lads to study recorded experience, has changed them, and why should it not also change the natives of India, or Egypt, or Thibet?
Access to such records did once change Europe. The origin of the Renaissance, the great movement which founded modern society, was just that,—access, through the fall of Constantinople, to the husbanded and recorded experience of the ancient world, and more especially to its granary of ideas. The Italians read the manuscripts the flying Greeks carried with them, and added their experience to their own, and the Old World slowly melted away. We all acknowledge in words the power of the printing-press, but we scarcely understand, as Sindhia from his experience understands, what its absence would mean, how difficult it would be without it to "husband experience," or rather so to husband it that all mankind, or a large section of mankind, should benefit by it. We might describe the theory of spectrum analysis on stone, as a. Chinese would do, but how many would see it? And why should the discoverer make his knowledge common? The Hindoo world, which in this respect is the whole Asiatic world, has as yet few records ; those are scarce, costly, and confined by an etiquette as strong as a law to comparatively few families. No secular book other than an almanack, and, we believe, a translation of Robinson Crusoe, has ever attained a circulation in India which would fairly pay expenses, and no manuscript, not more or less religious, can be said to be popularly known. No experience is really husbanded except by tradition, and verbal tradition is liable to sudden gaps, while nothing which is so transmitted can, if lost, be recovered. Entire arts have, in this way, been lost in India by the extinction of the castes who keep the tradition. It is very difficult, or, say impossible, to hand down history thus—ask the sons of English soldiers about Waterloo—and nearly as difficult to preserve political ideas, or any but the most elementary social laws. Question a country squire whose grandfather would have died for Pitt as to Pitt's ideas, or ask the new generation to explain any change —like the change in the criminal law—which occurred between the time when their school books end and their personal experience begins. Naturally a race aware that every idea or rule is liable to be falsified, recurs perpetually to the past in order to prevent falsification, protects itself by prohibiting change in the few good laws it has acquired, and guards a social order it approves by declaring it beyond change, and thus makes progress impossible to itself, except as the result of foreign conquest, or of a social cataclysm. Sindhia directly applies his thought only to the domain of political administration, being interested mainly in that ; but it is clear from the context that lie thought this husbanding of experience the source of that social peculiarity which strikes all natives of India with wonder—the perfect reliance of the English upon each other—the suppression among them of the individual will, which natives with no vast granary of experience cultivate till, as Sindhia says, every man, unless prevented by religious tradition, upsets every other's work. And is not the existence of law, and particularly secular law, as a system of thought controlling individual will, wholly dependent upon this power of husbanding experience, of recording the knowledge acquired by long-continued dealing with mankind ? Of course the removal of mere mechanical difficulties in the way of such recording will not be sufficient to melt the stereotyped surface of Asiatic society. The Orientals might if they liked have kept all the knowledge they acquired in writing, as the Benedictines pretty honestly tried to do. Something more must be born among them, a wish to husband experience ; but we know that education evokes this among classes as stereotyped as they are, the British husbandmen, and why not among them ? Little has been done
as yet, no doubt ; but, after all, the first native type was cast in the lifetime of men still living, and already we have Sindhia, that is, a Hindoo Prince, who calmly suggests a crude and imperfect, but still distinct and philosophical, explanation of the reason why he has to take orders from a white invader, a native who reasons on a matter of transcendental politics, if not with the acumen, at least in the spirit, of Mr. Mill. As yet the majority are using the new knowledge they are husbanding chiefly upon the old problem, "Whence comes he, whither goes he ?" and " experience "
acts mainly as a religious solvent ; but then this was the case also in the European Renaissance. The Reformation succeeded the im
portation of the Greek literature, but preceded the rise of the philosophy of induction. From Gutenberg's Bible to Bacon's Essays there was a space of 147 years.
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