THE LOOSHAI EXPEDITION.
WE cannot say we receive the telegrams about British success against the Looshais with any kind of pleasure. We do not, indeed, sympathize with the sentimental objections raised in some places to the Expedition, for we rely on the evi- dence, and the evidence shows that the tribes of mountain savages described for convenience' sake by that one title, unpro- voked by any encroachments on their territory, descend into our plains, cut off quiet people's heads, and retire with them exulting. Explanations may be offered of the practice which reduce its turpitude, but it is not one of which the victims can be fairly expected to approve, and as they are our subjects and pay taxes for protection they must have it to any necessary extent. If the Looshais cannot be coerced without the despatch of in- vading columns, invading columns must be despatched, without too much anxious thought about the ultimate cost. It may be cruel to burn stores, but not more cruel than to demand indemnities, and the savages have it always in their power to obtain pardon and immunity. What we maintain is that the necessity has not been proved, that while the punishment of the Looshais may be perfectly just, the method of punishment adopted is a crucial instance of the military policy now in the ascendant in India, a policy certainly opposed to all traditions, and, as we believe, to the best interests of the Empire. It is a policy of risking nothing except money. Instead of assuming as the cardinal condition of action that in European hands a small force can always beat a large one in native hands, that now, as always in the previous history of the Empire, numbers matter nothing and "geographical difficulties" very little, we organize an expedition as if it expected to encounter equal opponents. Lord Napier satisfies himself by careful calculation of the force to which failure is
impossible, and then demands that, and obtains what he demands. He actually sends against tribes of savages who could by no possibility put 1,000 men into the field in any one place a force as great as that with which Wellesley won Assaye, leaving 12,000 disciplined enemies dead upon the field. As our able correspondent Colonel Meadows Taylor—known here as litterateur, but known in India as a man who in twelve months made a province full of brigands as orderly as Suffolk —tells our readers to-day, every triumph we have won in India south of the Sutlej has been won against odds of more than ten to one. Our armies have been mere forlorn hopes, our generalship mainly audacity, our secret of success the military power inherent in superior civilization. Five hun- dred men, one-fifth of them British sailors, under a few picked officers, might and would have entered the Looshai fastnesses, have defeated any opposition, and have compelled the chiefs to come to terms. Of course there might have been disaster, as there was in Bootan ; but the condition of our power in India is that we should be ready to risk that, that we should not, in our eagerness to avoid remote possibilities of failure, burden our Treasury till the masses of quiet people over whom we rule begin to think us plunderers. This expedition, with its elephants and its engineers, its long roads cut through jungle, its slow marches, and its complete staff, will cost £750,000 at least, ten times the sum it would have cost to turn the tribes into a most useful frontier police. A million does not signify very much in India—though after all it represents a fourpenny income-tax—but the policy which causes that million to be spent signifies very much indeed. It is the policy of militarism, the policy of men who so love their machine that they would gild it if they could out of mere pride in its perfection ; who look to military efficiency as a thing good in itself ; who are half inclined to believe that Wellesley ought to have been cashiered for fighting Assaye in the teeth of such frightful risks. If, indeed, our victory acted as it might do in Europe, and prevented similar outbreaks by other tribes, then certainty could hardly be purchased at too high a price. But it is notorious that this is not the case. One special difficulty of ruling India is that no rebel or invader ever seems to calculate probabilities at all. Through- out the mutinies, regiments constantly exploded in situations where, as it appeared to politicians, lunatics would have kept quiet, in the very midst of superior forces, or in stations a thousand miles from the possibility of help. Take the very last insurrection, that of the Kookas, reported not a fort- night since. There was no conceivable reason for their rising on one day more than another, yet they selected the very time when a great camp had been formed at Delhi, 150 miles off, when we could have marched at three days' notice to over- throw a kingdom, and when they were as certain to be over- whelmed by superior power as if they had been mice defying a cat. The Indian Government, which tolerates everything except playing at eineutes, smashed the Kookas in a moment, killed half, executed half the remainder, and shut up the resi- duum for life, and yet would not feel the least surprise if an- other band of the same men broke out at Umritsur a week after. No conceivable extent of precaution would have averted that outbreak. Under no imaginable circumstances could we have been better prepared to put it down. For that especial pur- pose we were stronger than even Lord Napier would have deemed it necessary to be, and yet the insurrection occurred, as insurrections will occur again and again while we remain in India. We cannot prevent them by military precaution. All we can do is to cultivate carefully the qualities which hitherto have made our servants ready to stamp out sparks in the magazine without fear of the conceivable explosion.
We can quite understand and are not in the least inclined to ridicule the uneasiness just now perceptible in Anglo-Indian society, and reflected back again in Indian circles in Great Britain. There is very considerable discontent in the Native community, due, as we believe, to our financial fidgettiness, as Lord Napier believes, to the changed tone of the Indian Ser- vices, and as a good many close observers believe, to the natural unrest of millions shaken roughly out of their old religious and philosophic dreams. Assassinations have occurred, and assassinations are always supposed to imply a disposition to revolt, while there have been two &mutes at least which might have grown into petty wars. India is, in fact, always unsafe ; and keen, even suspicious, watchfulness on the part of men whose wives and children are as much endangered as themselves is neither unnatural nor undignified. But we would remind all who write or advise from the alarmist point of view that the grand Indian out-
breaks have not been preceded by this uneasiness, but by sleepy content ; that we have three times the Army which we possessed in 1857, that no native artillery is in exist- ence, and that most of our probable foes would fight us at the head of armies which we can defeat, not at the head of scattered insurgents. The Sikhs are born soldiers, the Marhatta Princes if they rose would move armies—not very formidable armies either—and the Mussulmans, are in Northern India at all events, scarcely armed. In India, as in France, it is the unforeseen which occurs, and the European may, as we write, be in the most hideous danger ; but of visible, and therefore preventible, reason for panic there is none. So far as the human eye can judge, there is no risk existing except of one of those wars which up to 1857 never ceased, in
which we always conquered, and against which we were never so well prepared. To the older and, as we think, wiser school of Indian politicians, to whom our correspondent belongs, a sentiment of dread as to anything a native army can do seems almost absurd. Misfortunes may occur ; but if we can but keep up the old spirit, the old imperious reliance on our superiority, the old readiness to dare anything, to attack armies if need be with musket-stocks, we are as safe to-day as at any time within the hundred years. Our single danger is lest we should forget our history, endeavour to hold India by military prescience instead of martial qualities, to gar- rison her as Austria garrisoned Lombardy, and find in the hour of crisis that our grand garrison is still but a handful among millions, and millions who have lost their fear. Do all we will, and still one stone from every Hindoo would bury us alive.
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