SIR JOHN LAWRENCE IN OUDE.
IT will be worth the while of some member of Parliament to inquire what Sir John Lawrence is doing or attempt- ing to do in Oude. He is acting, we fear, somewhat un- wisely,—trying, if we understand his policy, to break up an experiment deliberately commenced by Lord Canning, sanc- tioned by the Cabinet, and approved by the English people and Parliament. He is not doing anything rash, but he is slowly and steadily, after his nature, swaying in a direction which may very speedily lead to serious mischief. The country of Oude, as all men know, was during the mutiny the only pro- vince of India in which the mass of the population from the highest noble to the meanest labourer took up arms against British rule. While Nagpore with its genuine grievances and the Punjaub with its military clans remained faithful, Oude with its pampered population and vivid recollection of native oppression was earnestly opposed to our sway. It appeared to Lord Canning, after patient consideration of the evidence, and to most Anglo-Indians, that the main cause of this opposi- tion—apart from subsidiary causes, such as the excessive wrath of the sepoy families at their own loss of privilege—was the violent social revolution effected by annexation. This revolu- tion had occurred in this way. The great officials of the Com- pany were governed in their administration by two impulses— an honest desire to benefit the people and an honest incapacity to perceive any rule of right except the greatest physical comfort of the greatest number. They always went in for the peasantry as against the noble, and under the complicated system of Indian tenures, all of which are au fond based on the single phrase, " whose is the sweat, his is the soil," they generally contrived to oust the proprietary in favour of the peasant. They succeeded in Madras so completely that a keen observer, the Rev. Dr. Mullens, a missionary devoted to the masses and hostile to the aristocracy, declared that within his immense experience no rain had ever been so complete, that in the Presidency of Madras, with its twenty millions of people, there was scarcely a proprietor with ten thousand pounds, and the Presidency was periodically ravaged by famines so severe that twice in ten years whole districts were directly maintained by Government. In Bengal the civilians failed, an abrupt and imperious " adventurer " named Lord Cornwallis having created by the perpetual settlement an aristocracy which forbad famine. So great is the change created by permitting the aggregation of capital, that while just after Clive's departure famine so desolated Bengal that children were sold for rice, Bengal Proper is now probably the single country on earth where with every other evil rampant there is no actual hunger. In the North-West they succeeded, with this difference, that whereas in Madras there was no capitalist left, in Hindostan the village being a coparcenery could weather a bad harvest or two, and was only reduced to actual suffering from hunger after the third. In the Punjaub Sir John Lawrence partially crushed the aristocracy, not unwisely, for there were too many of them to exist, except under a system of slavery which the Company, to its credit be it spoken, had long since abolished by the most beneficial practical joke ever recorded in history. It would not in the teeth of old Indians abolish slavery,—that was violent and an interference with native creeds,—so it only prohibited every court of justice from taking cognizance of the institution, whereupon every slave walked away serenely, and if his master kicked him, first kicked him back again, and then sued for damages for being kicked. Well, the old system was tried in the new province, and as a preliminary reform every title was submitted to investigation. Did our readers ever hear of Empson and Dudley ? Their names have come down to this day as bywords of execration, yet knowing something of English history, we venture to ask Mr. Froude whether those two men ever did anything specially execrable except examine the titles of all England against all England's will? In their case the object was to revive oldCrown rights, which, the Crown being original owner, were pretty considerably extensive ; in the Onde case the object was to reserve the peasants' rights which, they having been before the Musaulman conquest sole owners, were nearly universal. The great nobles saw themselves within an ace of being ousted like the great nobles of the North- West, and of course rebelled. Unluckily for the theorists their tenantry, who were to have been so happy under the new regime, had found out that a malleable landlord who asked a great deal and took little was easier to deal with than a tax- gatherer who asked a little for the State but would have it, and a great deal for himself and would have that too. They rather preferred the uncivilized freedom in which they could do as they liked, "eating stick" included, to the civilized order under which, as a great revenue officer said, " the peasant who wants to spit applies to the native tax- gatherer, who memorializes the collector, who writes to the Revenue Board, which appeals to the Lieutenant- Governor, who consults the Governor-General, who sends a supreme order that the man may spit, and he spits accord- ingly." The opportunity arrived, the whole country to a man revolted, and Earl Canning, after two severe campaigns had restored his authority, resolved to end the system. There was no way to get out of the scrape and simplify the inconceivable mass of rights created by usage, grants, statutes, revenue orders, and judicial de- cisions except a social revolution, and he placed his own reputation on the die. By a decree absolutely without pre- cedent in history, a decree of more than Imperial grandeur and more than Jacobin lawlessness, Lord Canning declared all rights of property throughout Oude forfeited by rebellion, the holding of the peasant equally with the claim of the noble. No man after its issue legally possessed anything, from his wife's nose-ring upwards to the county his ancestors had owned since Portia fled before Alexander. The decree was condemned, justly we think, as furnishing a precedent to men of less grand con- ceptions than Lord Canning, but it was allowed to stand, and Oude was regranted to its landholders on the English tenure, —copyhold direct from the Crown,—i. e., in absolute pro- prietorship subject to a perpetual quit-rent. Immediately after the landowners were made magistrates, and the country immediately subsiding to perfect order and reasonable content, commenced an English career.
Sir John Lawrence does not like all that. Ho says the British Government is bound to look after its people, and not a parcel of nobles,—which is true,—that subordinate "rights" in Oude are interfered with,—which is nonsense unless the great decree destroying all rights is cancelled,—and that the magisterial authority oppresses the cultivators, which is a pos- sible, but, as we shall show, an irremediable evil. He believes, too, that the nobles are extravagant, which is conceivable, and more disposed to luxury than improvement, which is a foible one has heard of in other countries. He has there- fore issued a commission to inquire into boundaries, into snh-tenures, and into all the complaints all the ryots in Oude may bring against the landlords, in order, as it is clearly understood, to define their rights by law, i. e., to re-create the tenant-rights destroyed by Earl Canning's edict. It is a generous effort, and if the Viceroy were omnipotent and omniscient, and able to act by pure volition, we could scarcely conceive a nobler exercise of his powers. Unfortunately he is only mortal, and therefore must act through civilians, and they are also mortal, and therefore must act through native court offi- cials, perhaps the worst class of men who ever existed upon the face of the earth. Being mortal, he will give to the inquiry the bias of his own mind, which is in favour of the cottier ; being civilians, his agents will try to paralyze the great landowners in order to raise the peasantry ; and being " amlah," their agents will make the inquiry an excuse for reaping a rich harvest of extortion. Not a peasant will be heard, not a peer escape condemnation without payment of at least six months' income. Supposing the inquiry to fail, everything is em- bittered by a year or two of uncertainty, of trouble, and of ceaseless extortion; supposing it to succeed, literally nothing will have been accomplished. The great landowners of Oude cannot be crushed, even granting it wise to crush them, for there is a new and insuperable obstacle in the way. There is one act before which the conscience and the courage of the Viceroy will alike quail, and that is to violate the word of the British Government. That has guaranteed the perpetual settlement, and short of breaking that nothing can be accom- plished. The tenures can only be altered as changes arise subsequent to the grant, the position of the landholders can only be lowered from that of regular and restrained magistrates to that of irregular and unrestrained lords of the land. Even if socialism be wiser than English society the Viceroy cannot secure it, for the one obstacle over which he has no power, the word of the Government he represents, stands in his way, and Oude is in the position of Bengal, where the civilians have given up their policy as hopeless, and where trade is con- sequently head for head just eleven times what trade is in Madras. All Sir John Lawrence can do is to order inquiry, t hat is,—as inquiries are conducted in India,—to raise hopes in the peasant, worry the landlord, and leave in all classes once more the terrible feeling that the social system is insecure, that calculation is vain, that property is valueless and effort unproductive, which preduces revolutions. And all for what ? In order to destroy an experiment which, wise or unwise, still breaks the frightful Indian uniformity which enables Government to deal with 500 visible persons whom it understands and can hang if necessary, instead of eight millions of obscure persons whom it does not under- stand, and cannot hang if they commit all the crimes known to mankind ; and which at the worst involves a grand effort to ascertain which system the people prefer for themselves. Our own impression is that they prefer the aristocratic, and for these two reasons. One is, that during the mutiny they could in Bengal Proper have broken it up if they liked ; but they remained faithful save in one single case, when a landlord lifted his own standard, and then they followed him to visible ruin. The other is, that in every province abandoned by the British authority the peasants restored the families whom we, in their interest, had displaced. We will not, however, press that argument. We will allow the full force of the simple truth that Sir John Lawrence is acting from a philanthropic desire to raise the people at the expense of their landlords, and still we ask whether it is well that an experiment begun by a man so cool and so wise as Earl Canning, supported by his most bitter political foes, and obviously tending to the security of our rule, should be interfered with before it has had time even to fail, and in- terfered with to secure an impossible result ? The English system we all know ; socialism we can all of us understand; tenant right we are all discussing; but the mixture of them all worked under a despotic Government, amid an alien people, who ask only for the first of the three,—there seems to be material in this for a new " culbute ge'nerale." If any of the landlord magistrates prove oppressive let them be removed from the Bench ; if they break their new contracts give the peasants county courts ; if the nobles are extravagant buy their estates as they fall in; if a county is growling bring the tremendous pressure Government can exercise to bear upon its individual lord; but for God's sake do not revolutionize the social system of Oude thrice within seven years
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