THE INDIAN DOCTORS AND THE PLAGUE. T HERE is no question
connected with the government of India on which it is so difficult to make up one's mind as on that of our right to enforce great sanitary laws. It looks so simple, and it is so complex. Those laws are for the most part both right and wise, but pro- duce a direct collision between two systems of civilisation, and two sets of the ethical ideas which in the long run regulate the conduct of mankind. The Englishman is not, as an abstract thinker, at all desirous to keep masses of sickly Indians alive. He is painfully aware that the gravest danger which threatens India is over- population ; he has a strong impression that the pre- ventive ordained by Nature is to be found in spasmodic bursts of pestilence or famine; and as he has a con- viction that neither evil will greatly affect himself, he has something of judicial calmness in his interior reasoning. But he holds, both as Christian and as depositary of scientific knowledge, that his peremptory duty is to alleviate the pressure of famine if he can, and to put a stop to the ravages of pestilence. For the former end he spends treasure in great heaps, and for the latter he applies his scientific convictions as operative laws. He purifies water, he cleanses cities, he prohibits over-crowding, and he separates the diseased from the healthy, the unclean from the clean. He does this by persuasion where he can, but whenever his advice is resisted or disregarded he does it, if the emergency is grave enough, by force, and holds himself in doing it entitled, to his subjects' gratitude. The Indian holds the exact contrary. He does not object to the purifica- tion of the water-supply,—a very curious fact, for he will die of thirst before he takes water in detail from a foreign hand. He does not resist cleansing orders very strenuously, for though they excite his suspicions, he is personally a clean man, and they do not irritate him enough to induce him to run the risk of opposing distinct orders from the all-powerful Sirkar. But the orders for "segregation," as it is technically called, outrage the strongest of his acquired feelings ; residence in a hospital threatens, and does in truth imperil, his caste if he is a Hindoo; while if he is a Mussulman be feels that the privacy of his home, the one social privilege for which he is ready to lay down his life, is forcibly broken up. If a Hindoo, therefore, he conceals the fact that disease has struck his house, disobeys all orders, and is at last carried away to hospital protesting that he is a victim of shocking oppression ; while if a Mussulman he conceals the facts, disobeys the orders, and finally resists as if burglars had entered his home. The dreadful incident reported on Monday exhibits the real temper of the Indian Mahommedan in a dramatic form. A Mussulman lady was attacked by the Plague, and as she might be a centre of infection, was ordered by the doctors to be removed to hospital. Her husband protested violently, and finding the doctors resolute, first shot his wife dead and then himself. Observe that he did not shoot the doctors. That would have been a mere act of revenge, having no effect on the protection of his home, whereas his object was to prevent what he deemed dishonour falling upon him and on his house. This may be called an extreme case, and the Mussulman may have been a. man of violent temper ; but so far as we know his co- religionists, they would all agree that he had done his duty, and would wish under the same circumstances, and supposing an armed revolt to be hopeless, to have grace enough to follow his example. Now, in presence of feelings like that, what is the duty of the more civilised and scientific race ?
We must premise that an effective compromise is not within sight. In a very wealthy household the complete segregation of a Mussulman lady could be carried out— though it almost certainly would not be—but there are hundreds of thousands of Mussulman women who are poor, but who in their own judgment and that of all their kinsfolk are ladies, entitled to the privilege of the " purdah" (curtain), that is, to complete exemption from intrusion, and bound. by a code which has the full force of a moral law to preserve it even though the con- sequence should be immediate death. There can be no relaxation of this law in a Mussulman's eyes. The sanctity of the harem, even if it has but one tenant, is the one in- flexible caste-rule over which terror and circumstance, and even death, ought to have no power. To segregate poor Mussulman ladies in their narrow homes without leaving them to die untended is impossible, and to carry them away against their wills to hospitals managed by lady doctors, besides being in most districts impossible from the want of female science, is in a true Mussulman's eyes nearly as great an outrage on his cherished privacy as to carry them to a building into which male doctors are admitted. He does not, in fact, believe that his wife will be secluded as the doctors promise. To build a room for every case would overtax even the Government of India, and would, moreover, involve the strange alternative of leaving the plague-stricken victim untended, or abutting up her attendants as strictly as herself. Practically such a plan could not be carried out, and the choice lies between a despotic assertion of the supreme authority of science, and a permission to the people to resign them- selves, as they themselves wish, to the will of God. It is not the will of God, but the will of Nature, which Coleridge defined as "the Devil in a strait waistcoat ; " but the Mussulman repudiates blankly any such philo- sophical distinction, and it is therefore only at the risk of insurrection that the sanitary laws can be fully and successfully carried out. Ought they to be carried out ? It is for the English people to decide, and to decide quickly, for we see signs that the Indian Governuuent, pressed at once by its humanity and its finance, has in its own mind decided that science shall rule unchecked. Certainly Sir A. Mackenzie, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, an exceedingly able man of the Scotch variety, has so decided, and he will as usual carry his superiors.
We confess to deep perplexity, and think that if the objection of the Mussulman ladies involved only their own lives we should be inclined to differ from the Government of India. It would be hardly worth while to endanger the whole fabric of Indian administration, and perhaps excite the permanent hostility of fifty millions of our subjects, in order to prevent a limited number of suicides, committed from motives which to those wig, commit them seem honourable, and even sacred. Indeed. they would hardly be suicides, for frightful as the ravages of the Plague are when it takes hold of a village or a city, no victim can say with certainty that he or she will not recover, or that wise treatment and nursing are absolutely without use. But unfortunately we have to protect not only the thousands of the plague.
stricken, but the millions of the healthy, who may be plague-stricken because we have not segregated those who were earliest attacked. The Plague, if allowed its way, might sweep away whole populations, as the Black Death is believed to have done in Gour, might dislocate society for a generation, and might reduce a prosperous Empire to a vast collection of tradeless, spiritless, and impoverished human beings. No Government can be bound to tolerate that risk, even though its prevention should create a counter risk of insurrection, or what is worse, of permanent hostility and disgust with our rule among fifty millions of our Indian population. It cannot be right to allow poison centres to exist, and spread pestilence around them, even though the probable victims are so bemused by tradition that they would rather die in battle than allow such centres to be disinfected. If the wise may not rule the foolish as of their own right, provided they do it in the interest of the foolish, it would be hard to find a moral excuse for our presence in India at all. Upon the whole, therefore, though we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that there is serious risk of disaffection, and it may be in some places even of armed resistance, and though we cannot wholly remove from our minds a suspicion that we are oppressing, we must, we think, come to the conclusion that the risk is one which it is the duty of the Government of India to run, that the task now set before them is to stop the Plague before it is changed into the awful visitation known as the Black Plague, and that the necessary measures must be carried out, if needful by force, as necessary measures, the appropriation of all food, for example, would be carried out in a besieged town. Any traveller, pilgrim or not, liable to convey infection should be arrested. Any house incurably infected should be burned to the ground, and any family or person certain to be a poison centre for the neighbourhood should be ordered into hospital, and compelled to go. The conse- quences may be most disastrous, but we must face them in the performance of duty, just as we should face them in war, or in performance of our frequent obligation to reduce an anarchic province into obedience and order. Our right to debar our subjects from destroying themselves may be as incomplete as the Mussulman who killed his wife thought it was, but our right to prevent their destroying their neighbours is, and must be, if a Government has any rights at all, quite complete.
Upon one point alone do we question the action of the Government of India. We are unable to believe that they could not obtain, if they tried, more effectual native assistance than they do. In every city and district of the vast peninsula there are a few native gentlemen upon whose advice Indians, when in perplexity, implicitly rely. Sometimes they are priests, sometimes landlords, sometimes Professors, sometimes persons absolutely without rank, social or intellectual, but possessed of the confidence of their countrymen. Many of these persons are men of decided intelligence, with few prejudices, and with capacity to perceive that the British Government in ordering sanitary measures can have no object other than the benefit of its people. It must be possible, if Governors and Commissioners will but try to obtain the adhesion of such men, to make tbem intermediaries with the majority, and thus, at all events, to remove the idea that we are capable, even from preju- dice, of seeking their harm in any way. If the masses would help us, even with good wishes, half the difficulty would be removed; and we are too apt to give up all hope of their help before we have reached their understandings. No doubt they are often foolish, usually suspicious, and always prejudiced, but still a native of India, whether Hindoo or Mussulman, is a being with reason, who wishes to remain healthy as much as any European, and who has always an idea stored away somewhere or other in his brain that, after all, the disagreeable white man may be in the right. Only a week or so ago the Maharajah of Gwahor sent his English doctor to deal with a village of his own that was horribly plague-stricken. The doctor camped out the people, burnt the village to the ground, rebuilt the huts, and restored the people clean and free from their liability. We venture to say that not one man in that village even thought that the Maharajah meant mischief, or that he had exceeded his unquestionable rights as Prince.
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