ASIATIC NEIGHBOURS.*
Mn. THOR/317RX has written what the French call une here de bonne foi, and this character of his book, coupled with his
own position and experience, gives it unusual value. He is an Indian civil servant of five-and-twenty-years' standing, whose life's work has been done in the Punjab, much of it in the district between the Indus and the Sulaiman
mountains. He is a keen and close observer, as is proved by his volume entitled Bannu ; or, Our Afghan Frontiur,
which contains the most trustworthy record ever pub- lished of the ways of life and of the character of the inhabitants of an Indian district bordering upon Afghani- stan. His essay on " Mnsalmans and Moneylenders in the Punjab" was the expression of a deep personal sym- pathy with the peasantry of the land in which he has long been an administrator. To say that Mr. Thorbnrn knows India, would be to say what can truthfully be said only of Lord Roberts and perhaps half-a-dozen other men, whose duties have taken them successively to every portion of the great continental area which is covered by that name.
But undoubtedly Mr. Thorburn knows his own province —the Punjab—as very few know it, and understands, as only a civilian of long service can, the relations between the Indian Government and the population of the great North-West. To have been brought up in the Punjab Civil Service, almost implies being imbued with the belief in Lord Lawrence's frontier policy of masterly inactivity ; " and this was in fact the attitude of Mr. Thorburn's mind until, two years ago, he determined to examine for himself the problem of Indian frontier policy, and to form, if he could, a fair judgment with regard to it. Of this effort the present volume is the result.
With the literature of the subject before him, and setting oat with the view, traditional in his service, that Lord Lawrence was the safest guide, Mr. Thorburn has found himself compelled to discard Lord Lawrence, and to adopt the point of view, the arguments, and the conclusions of the authors of Imperial defence. With them he places himself first in the position of a Russian Government contemplating advance towards India, and then in that of the Indian Govern- ment obliged to consider its attitude towards such a move- ment. With them he holds that the main water-parting line, from the Hindu Kush to the spurs south of Herat, must be
adhered to by the Indian Government as the ne plus ultra of Russian advance. With them he considers that any Russian move across the recently delimited border must compel the Indian Government to prepare for the occupation of Can- dahar, and to move close up to Cabal:— "Should Afghanistan ever be partially dismembered, and reduced to its Cis-Hindu-Kush portion in the North, and the deserts and oases between the Helmand and the Siah Koh or
other boundary south and east of the Herat valley, it would appear politic that we should at once advance to the neighbourhood of Jalalabad, Jagdalak, or Gandamak, prepared, should necessity arise, to garrison Kabul, Bamian, and inter- mediate points. We should make our advance, if possible, as friends and allies of the Afghans, but, if necessary, as their benevolent master."
• Asiatic Neighbours. By S. S. Thorburn, Bengal Civil Service, With 2 Nape. London; Blackwood and Sons.
This is Mr. Thorburn's conclusion upon the main question raised in his book. The opinion to which he has been almost reluctantly converted is that now most widely accepted among Englishmen in Northern India, and corresponds closely with that upon which the policy of the Indian Govern- ment in recent years has been based.
If this were all, Asiatic Neighbours would be interesting merely as showing how recent writings upon the question of Central Asia had affected a capable and open mind. But the book contains more than this. Mr. Thorburn gives us an account, based, not like his frontier policy, upon a recent coarse of reading, but upon his long personal experience, of the effect of British administration upon the Indian population,—that is, primarily, of course, upon the population of the Punjab. The chapters entitled "India Restive under Machine Rule" and "Loosening the Bonds of Empire," are a forcible criticism of the development of Indian government since the Mutiny. The advent of the Queen's rule has brought with it the rigidity of European law and the centralisation of Western systems. The result is that the Hindoo, who is nothing if not a litigant, has been able to use the Law- courts as a lever by which, in the Punjab at least, to oust the Mussulman peasant from his holding, and to step into his place, becoming, by foreclosing his mortgage, an absentee landlord. The English local administrators sympathise with the peasant, but are helpless in the strait-waistcoat of mechanical law, and under the control of red-tape officials at Lahore, Simla, or Calcutta. To Mr. Thorburn, this particular case of the Punjab peasantry is the type of that of all the villagers, who are the bulk of the population throughout the peninsula. They are under the care of a British Collector or Commissioner, who is fairly familiar with their needs, their struggles, their hopes and their fears, and whose impartial justice they recognise and respect. But he is bound by codes and rules enacted and laid down by men who never knew Indian village-life, lawyers trained at Westminster and tem- porarily exported to Calcutta, or civilians who have risen step by step through all the grades of a secretariat without ever having been planted out among the people. In the long-run, the local civilian abandons the struggle for equity in the par- ticular case, and submits to the fetters that he cannot break. The villager perceives that his Deputy-Commissioner is no longer a King, but merely the telephone at the end of a wire, and that to gain his point, he has not to convince the Deputy. Commissioner, but to secure a clever lawyer at the High Court in the capital of the province hundreds of miles away. But at that game the moneylender, who lives in the capital, can easily beat him, and the villager ends in just such a frame of mind as would be desired by any one who wished him to join in an insurrection. This is the pith of Mr. Thorburn's book,—his contribution from his own life to the study of Indian government. These chapters should be read and pondered by all those who, not having seen the East for themselves, are yet bound to share the responsibility for weal or woe that British government brings to India.
The rest of the book falls into two parts, of quite unequal value. There is a review of Russian history, compiled from one or two well-known sources, and an account of Afghan geography and history, also drawn from sources easily acces- sible. These the judicious reader will quickly skim. But the description of local frontier administration in the Punjab and in Baluchistan, is full and valuable, and much of it will be new to all but close students of the subject. Here Mr. Thorburn has first-hand knowledge. It is to be regretted that in this part of his work his prejudices as a Punjab officer cling to him, so that while he rightly condemns the system of raids upon offending tribes so conducted as never to lead to a result, he can yet see no difference between the Punjab and Baluchistan systems, except that the latter is more expensive. Surely the difference is that whereas the Punjab has for forty years refused to advance its border, so as to include the tribes upon whom it has waged a dozen costly but useless little wars, and whom, at the expense of the expedition now acting in Waziristan, it has at last been compelled to take over ; the Baluchistan agency, without a war and without an expedition worthy of the name, has ex- tended the Queen's peace from the plain of Sind to the red desert beyond Pishin, and from Makran to the Gumal River. We need not now compare the doctrines of the Sind and the
Punjab Schools of Administration, or even examine how far the expansion of the border begun by the one, and ultimately accepted by the other, was inevitable. But Mr. Thorburn in comparing them should have shown the results just mentioned ; and, may we add, should not have forgotten the memory of Sandeman, nor the good work done in the Khyber district by Sandeman's disciple and emulator, Colonel Warburton.
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