THE LATEST INDIAN NEWS.
IT isjust fifteen years since the writer of these lines wrote, speaking of the Queen's Proclamation—the Indian Golden Bull—" The annexation of territory in India has ended, the annexation of powers will now begin." The process began at once with the very first Durbar after the Mutiny, and has now culminated in Lord Northbrook's reported decision in the case of the Guicowar, the Mahratta ruler of Guzerat. He has been, it. is stated, distinctly informed by the Indian Foreign Office that unless he reforms his ways, unless he ceases to misgovern his people and waste his revenues, he will, in 1875, be deposed. In other words, the Indian Government acknow- ledges that it is responsible for the good government of the whole population of the Indian Peninsula, that the Princedoms are merely forms of administration, that it is bound to watch and punish acts which do not affect its own interests or its own position in any but the most indirect mode. It was cer- tain from the first that the policy of abstaining from annexa- tion would come to this ; that the moral logic of the situation was inexorable ; that we could not go on guaranteeing Princes from rebellion, without securing to their subjects the justice which the fear of rebellion would other- wise have secured. The situation of an Indian Prince is like that of no other man in the world, unless it be that of a German Prince before the Diet passed away from the political scene. He is invested with absolute power, power of life and death, power as of a Czar—for the Resident rarely interferes except to protect the people—and is delivered from every fear of resistance, except in the practically impossible form of assassination. Successful rebellion even by the whole people is out of the question, as much out of the question as it was in Italy before 1859, when the pettiest Prince could summon an Austrian corps d'arinee to garrison his -capital. If it occurs,. as it does in some States frequently occur, the Prince sends his guards to put it down ; if the guards are beaten, he calls out his army ; if they are defeated, he mentions the matter to the Resident, and the slow, heavy roller begins to move, the roller which, once in motion, can pulverise a pro- vince. There is no resistance conceivable to the British Army, and behind the Native Prince stands not only the British Army, but the British Empire, which must be defeated before the Resident's order directing such and such a rebel to yield can be made of no avail. To entrust such power to anybody whatever is a serious responsibility, to entrust it to an Asiatic bred in the harem is a responsibility to strain the conscience even of men who are convinced that it is necessary ; but to entrust it to a native Prince without controlling its exercise is a crime of the highest magnitude,—a crime like- sanctioning slavery, a crime involving sanction to every con- ceivable offence. The British Government of India cannot commit it, whatever the political danger of interference, and it refuses to commit it ; but the difficulty of avoiding its com- mission is one of which very few Englishmen are aware. It is excessively difficult to define in a Native State what " misgovern- ment " is. A native ruler may do every day acts for which any European ruler anywhere would be dethroned, and yet remain, upon the whole, a successful and decidedly popular Prince. His courtiers may disappear, his subjects' daughters may be seized, his barons' estates may be confiscated, and yet he may be over the masses of his people a popular and even a beneficent ruler. It is necessary, if Native sovereignty is to mean anything except British sovereignty exercised through an inefficient agent, to lay down as a principle that the Paramount Power only repre- sents the people ; that it will only interfere where the people, if free, would interfere ; and that, apart from one or two Christian ideas, such as the total prohibition of assassination, it will only punish what in any country in the world would be termed "misgovernment ."
When misgovernment, however, is proved, when the cry of a people goes up to their earthly Providence, the British Government must act ; but when it has determined to act its difficulties have only just begun,—difficulties which are almost sufficient to distract the coolest mind. It is most repulsive whatever, to order a Revolution without a reason assigned,. or strike down a man who is acknowledged to be a sovereign without giving him a chance of behaving properly, to send a born ruler to a State prison without allowing him to be heard in his own defence. Yet to give him a warning may sometimes be more ruinous than to strike out of the blue. The secret is certain to ooze out, the decision of the Viceroy is certain to be known, and between its record and its execution there is no government in the State. The Prince is all in all, and no one knows whether the Prince is a sovereign or a State prisoner.. His feudatories have no motive for obedience, his officers no. temptation to exertion, he himself no certainty as to his own authority, or the directions in which it can be safely exercised. His Court becomes a scene of intrigue, his army a rabble, his. collectors thieves. The single object of every man in his do- minions great enough to know what is going on is to ascertain his probable successor, and pay court to him, without, never- theless, rendering himself an object of vengeance to the ruler, should a new Viceroy perchance take a different view of the- magnitude of his offence. Native society is distracted by hopes, fears, and suspicions, and the Government is almost as, distracted as native society. It is necessary to avoid the old solution,—annexation, for that policy has, in theory at all events, been finally abandoned. It is necessary to find a ruler. And it is necessary that this ruler should, if possible, be taken from among the extremely limited number of persons among whom, in native judgment, the lot ought to fall. The British Government does not like to adopt, formally and absolutely,. the principal of primogeniture, for this might involve, when- ever a son did not exist, the assassination or life-long im- prisonment of the heir, a case which actually occurred in this very Guzerat. It does not like, for the same reason, to adopt the Ottoman principle, the selection of the eldest male ; and it never has adopted the one which would be the- wisest, the appointment of the ablest of the royal House. Of late years, the Viceroys have, in any question of disputed suc- cession, given a preference to the English order of precedence; but they have never formulated their theory, never established a system so unvarying as to preclude intrigue. They have to select, and owing partly to the infrequency of children in some reigning families, partly to the customs—which differ in each family—and partly to a standing dispute as to female rights of succession, decision is as difficult as decision in a Chancery suit would be if the Chancellor had no law to guide him, varying precedents before him, and a certainty that any decision what-- ever would produce almost as much evil as postponement.
The difficulty is immensely increased by an artificial rule, which the Government of India appears to have laid down for itself, of never, even in the eatreme case of the failure- of a dynasty, exercising its full right of choice, and esta- blishing a new family in the land. It is so anxious. to guard itself from a suspicion of selfishness, so desirous to appear to act from a spirit of justice, that it will select the- most remote collateral, or even the head of a dispossessed House rather than appoint the man whom itself deems the most fitting, but who has no claim except capacity or career. If we are rightly informed, there is in this very case, should the Guicowar- be deposed, no heir, no person extant, male or female, who- can fairly claim by custom or descent a succession to the- vacant throne. There is, if we recollect rightly, no brother,. no son, no cousin, and no near collateral ; while there is certain to be no adoption, a ceremonial which, in the Guicowar's, judgment, would greatly facilitate his own dethronement Yet the Viceroy will not, we may be sure, nominate- any one wholly outside the Court circle of Baroda,—will not, for example, promote a man like Dinkur Rao, the- best Hindoo administrator in India, to the vacant throne. There is no rule and no reason against such a step, and yet anyone who knows India knows that it is as improbable as that the Emperor of Germany should suggest Prince Bismarck as: the fitting successor to the Duke of Brunswick. He might take the Duchy himself, but he will nominate no subject. That would be intelligible, if Baroda belonged, like Oodeypore, to a family of vast antiquity, or if natives cared greatly about descent, or even if there existed any strict claim of blood ; but as the Guicowar is a dynasty scarcely older than British power, as natives have constantly accepted low-born rulers—Ryder All was a Sepoy, the first Mahratta a cultivator, the- first Guicowar a brigand—there seems to be no reason: for a practice which closes to every able native all chance of the prize which, of all others, would stimulate. his faculties ; while it closes to us all chance of ascertaining — -- by experience what a native possessed of absolute power, but uncorrupted by the purple, could actually do, and what line a dynasty owing everything to the British would actually take. We can understand the objection to such an experiment while a collateral existed, for it might result in the formation of a Legitimist party, and consequently in endless intrigue ; and we can understand the objection to life-sovereignty, for that, in a country where the Sovereign is absolute, destroys all continuity of administration ; but we do not understand the reluctance to establish new dynasties, and so open to the ablest native admin.istrators a supreme career. Such a prize would be a new and a magnificent temptation to the Native Premiers of India, a most remarkable class of statesmen, who are far less known to Great Britain and the world than they deserve to be. There are among them men who, if we were away, would carve out kingdoms for themselves, and who evto now accomplish most of the work for which their employers obtain outside their own States nearly all the credit. There seems to be little reason except prejudice against trying the experiment, and we do not know, if the Guieowar is to disappear, that a better field for native statesmanship could be found than Guzerat,
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