THE FUTURE GOVERNMENT OF BRITISH INDIA. THE article in our
last Number on this subject has, we are grati- fied to think, contributed materially to direct public attention to the true merits of the scheme propounded for the future ad- ministration of India. Friends and foes have suggested several popular or vulgar objections to our plan for the assumption of the government of India by the Crown, exclusive of that which re- gards the patronage, already sufficiently disposed of. These ob- jections we shall now endeavour to obviate. If, say the objectors, the government of India be vested in the Crown, it will fluctuate with every change of Administration ; whereas the government of a country so peculiarly circumstanced as India ought to be as stable and permanent as possible,—ought, in a word, to be vested in the hands of an experienced, unchanging body, unconnected with party. The great absurdity of this no- tion is, that it would go to place the patronage and administration of India in men beyond the control of the Legislature and of the pub- lic. To render the thing complete, the next proposal ought to be, to make the home administration of India hereditary. Every statesman in this country, pretending to direct its destinies, ought to be acquainted with every branch of its administration, Colonial as well as Domestic ; and, of course, with the affairs of the seventy millions of British subjects in India, in common with the rest. To isolate so great a branch of the national interests, and to con- fide it to a peculiar set of men, would be to create an Indian go- verning caste,—to convert the administration of an empire into an offensive craft,—in short, to perpetuate the very system which 'has hitherto made India, with the English public, an irksome and;un- popular topic. The habit of dabbling in Indian details, or even a local knowledge of India, is by no means necessary for directing the home administration of India. Quite the contrary ; they may be even mischievous. A witness is very useful and necessary in a court of justice, but no one thinks of placing him in the judg- ment-seat. In a Parliamentary inquiry into Slavery and the Tim- ber-trade, the evidence of a West India planter and a shipowner may be necessary ; but no one thinks of making a West India planter or a shipowner a Colonial Secretary or an Under Secretary of State. No one thinks that sea captains, commodores, and admirals, are the only men from among whom to choose First Lords of the Admiralty. No one imagines that clerks in the Foreign Office, and attaches to Legations, are the only men who ought to rise to the sta- tion of Foreign Secretaries. On the same principle, can any thing be more ridiculous than to think that for the mere purpose of secur- ing a greater share of permanency in the home administration of India, the destinies of the Indian empire should be confided to re- tired collectors of the Indian Land-tax—to retired framers and expounders of " the Company's Regulations"—to retired agents of the Company's monopolies of salt and opium—to retired tea su- percargoes—to retired commanders of 'merchant ships—and to actual London bankers and traders ? Yes, there is one thing more ridiculous and extravavagant than all this,—namely, that the persons thus mentioned should be chosen by the holders of a cer- tain annuity—by the old men and old women whose selfish brawl- ing has for the last three weeks proclaimed to the world their in- difference to India or their ignorance of it.
The next objection to the assumption of the government of India by the Crown, is drawn from the acknowledged bad Colonial management of the latter, and the supposed better management of the Company. There is here an obvious begging of the question. The bad management of the Crown, a comparatively easy and circumscribed subject, is tolerably well known, and even familiar to the British public. The management of the Company—a wide, difficult, and much-mystified question—is scarcely known at all ; and of course, of what is little known no distinct evil can be pre- dicated. We make bold at once to assert, that the Crown, since it first possessed colonies, from the reign of JAMES the First to the present hour, has hardly possessed one that did not advance to prosperity with a rapidity unknown in any portion of the territo- ries under the management of the East India Company. We further make bold to say, that there is not a colony of the Crown which, in any period of its history, would not either have sunk under, or been driven into rebellion by one half the exclusive mo- nopolies and heavy taxation which the Company has inflicted on the territories subject to its management. The patient Hindus bore these inflictions, because, bad as they were, they had been for ages inured even to worse. It would be to reason most inconse- quentially, to argue, that, because speaking in a foreign language, at the distance of half the globe, and with a rude hand clapped on their mouths, we did not hear their complaints, they had really less reason to complain than those who are nearer home, and have the power to make their grievances known in our common language. We shall not unfairly compare the progress of the Company's territories, inhabited and settled by semibarbarous Asiatics, with that of colonies" settled by Englishmen in new and unoccupied lands ; but we may safely compare the advance of the Indian ter- ritories with that of slave colonies acquired by the Crown from foreign nations. We have one of these in the East Indies, the Mauritius. This contains an area of about 250 square miles, with a population of 100,000 inhabitants, with a soil somewhat thin, and a climate exposed to hurricanes; and it has been three- and-twenty years in our possession. It produced no sugar when it was conquered. It now exports to Great Britain about half a million of hundredweights of sugar yearly; being more than double the quantity imported from the whole of the East India Company's territories,—of territories more than two thousand times its extent, —containing seventy thousand times the number of inhabitants,— and moreover, the native land of the sugar-cane, and the parent country of the invention of the manufacture of sugar! No doubt the discriminating duty on sugar has contributed to this re- markable result; but the free application of British skill, industry, and capital (carefully excluded from the Company's territories), a great deal more. In the same manner, Dutch Guiana, ceded to us but eighteen years ago, furnishes Great Britain with more than four times as much su gar as Bengal, which has belonged to the Com- pany for nearly eighty years. Our quondam colonies in America, with a slave population (and here there is no discriminating duty to complain of), furnish to the greatest of our manufactures three- and-twenty times the quantity of raw material, and all of a better quality, than British India does ; although in the former cotton was not cultivated for exportation forty years ago, whereas in the latter the plant and the manufacture have been known from the earliest antiquity, and familiar to the inhabitants of India when unknown, except through them, to the rest of the world. The island of Ceylon is a Crown colony ; and its mismanage- ment has often been contrasted with the supposed better manage- ment of the Company's territories adjoining to it. This, to all ap- pearance, is bringing the relative management of the two parties concerned, to the test of experience : let us therefore analyse the example. In the first place, it is to be observed, that Ceylon, compared with almost any considerable portion of the Company's dominions, possesses but an unfruitful soil, an unsalubrious clithate, and a barbarous and scanty population. The land which affords its most remarkable product, cinnamon, is a barren sand; and its most industrious inhabitants are a few emigrants from the continent. In no age and under no rule has it possessed fertility enough, or industry enough, to raise for itself a sufficient supply of bread corn, which it has invariably received largely from its neighbOurs. The progress of such a country can no more be com- pared in fairness with the progress of the Company's territories, than that of a Portuguese or Russian colony, established in a poor country and unfavourable climate, with a colony of Englishmen founded in a fertile country and an auspicious climate. Then, Cey- lon, for the first seven years of our possession of it, was under the management of the East India Company ; and down to the pre- sent year, that is, for a period of very nearly forty years, it has been managed by the Crown on the pure model of the Company's govern- ments, with their monopolies, their privileged civil service, and their grinding taxation ; and it is the only colony of the Crown that has ever been so administered. With the explanation now given, we shall find that the management of the Crown in Ceylon, notwithstanding its many sins and jobs, has still some advan- tages over that of the Company. In Ceylon, it is the object of the King's Government to confirm a private right of property in the soil to the native inhabitants : in the Company's provinces, for the last thirty years, the object aimed at, with great industry and con- siderable ingenuity, has been to obliterate it, by taking the entire rent as tax. In Ceylon, British subjects may hold land, and Bri- tish skill and industry are expressly invited to improve the coun- try: in the Company's territories, the owning of land by British subjects, and the express exclusion of British skill and industry from the country, are among the most fundamental principles of the administration. In Ceylon, Englishmen may travel all over the island without a passport : in the Company's territory, no Englishman must presume, without express leave, to go beyond ten miles from the capitals, at the risk of being banished, or " deemed to he illegally trading," (albeit a botanist or geologist), and prosecuted in the King's Bench, paying double costs of suit in that enviable situation, for his impertinent curiosity. In Cey- lon, civiland military salaries are comparatively moderate: in the Company's territories, they are invariably from 25 to 50 and even 100 per cent. higher. In Ceylon, the Whig Ministry, under the auspices of a Reformed Parliament, has just done away with forced services, purveyance, and the cinnamon monopoly : in many of the Company's territories, forced services and purveyance still exist, and the salt monopoly exists everywhere. These are samples; and as we have here pointed out the truth for the first time, we beg the reader to attend to our statement. The advocates of the existing system complain of the encroach- ments of the Crown,—very thoughtlessly and very inconsistently. According to the Company and its friends, their administration has, in every age of it, been quite perfect, and never ought to have been interfered with by meddling Ministers and meddling Par- liaments. Under CLIVE, and after the battle of Plassey, when the rapacity of the Company's servants would have disgraced the conduct of a horde of Tartars, the interference of Parliament was loudly exclaimed against. When Parliament interfered in 1/73, the happiness of the people of India and the good of England were the sole motives which induced the benevolent Company to resist its encroachment. When, ten years after, Mr. Fox was on the point of establishing for India the only fair form of adminis- tration ever contemplated for the country, the East India Com- pany became again alarmed for the happiness of Hindus and the welfare of Englishmen ; it intrigued successfully, and drove the encroacher on Indian happiness and British prosperity from the administration. The deprecated interference, however, was car- ried into effect in another form; and in 1793, after ten years' trial, the system was declared to be once more perfect. It was perfect before the interference of the Board of Control, and perfect after it. Notwithstanding the perfection which preceded 1793, some changes were forced upon the Company in that year also. With these changes, the system worked admirably in 1513 ; and the nation was entreated, as it valued its own honour and prosperity, and the happiness of the people of India, not to alter a tittle of the existing system. Greater innovations than -ever were perpetrated in that year; and after twenty years' experience, the Company again declares that perfection has been attained; and we are once more implored, "as we love the Hindus and dear tea," to attempt no more rash innovations.
Our inconsiderate monopolists wholly forget, that Parliament has encroached on every practicable occasion for more than sixty years; and that every fresh encroachment; even by their own con- fession, has been followed by some amelioration in the govern- ment of India, and by some advantage to the people of England. They forget that, under the pure unmixed administration of the Company, India was the victim of an extent of avarice, anarchy, and spoliation, of which there is no modern European example, except in the conquests of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth cen- tury ; and that, always in proportion as the Crown has succeeded in taking a share in the Indian administration, has that adminis.: tration been improved and India prospered ;—the worthy Company all the while deprecating change, and loudly complaining of vio- lated rights at each successive encroachment.
Exclusive of direct and substantial responsibility, the great advantage of having the Indian administration conducted by the -Ministers of the Crown, over an administration con- ducted by any joint-stock association, is that a responsible Minister can have no interest separate and distinct from that of the country governed. The interest of the East India Com- pany has heretofore been distinct from that of the people of India. The interest of the people of India is to be well go- verned; and, as an important element in it, to be lightly taxed. The prominent interest of the East India Company has been to secure or increase the dividends; and therefore to tax India as heavily as India can bear without risk of revolt. This has in fact been done. Every new tax that could be thought of has been im- posed ; and no tax once imposed has ever been relinquished, except on an experience of its utter unproductiveness, or when the Company has been compelled to abandon it by actual rebellion, of which there have been several examples. This insuperable objection lies against the new association projected,--a fact which must be obvious to any one who has attended to the late discussions at the India House, where, instead of the interests of the people of India, we had the weary debates of hours and days on such miserable topics as " guarantee funds," " surplus revenues," "assets," and " profit and loss."
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