THE TENURE OF THE INDIAN VICEROYALTY.
IT is very hard to get a hearing for a reform which would, we believe, be of great advantage to India,— viz., an extension of the term for which the Viceroyalty is held. The Viceroys do not like to suggest it, because they would seem to be pleading their own cause and would be accused of interested motives ; and Premiers do not like to consider it, because they value this, the greatest appointment in their gift, as patronage, and think vaguely that if there is any necessity they can extend the term of an individual Viceroy. Yet the present system is obviously almost absurd. The appointment is only for five years, of which one is lost in obtaining familiarity with most complex work of a kind in which European experience is rather a drawback than a help, and another in learning to know who are the safe, who are the original, and who are the dangerous counsellors of the Empire, many of them in positions which render personal intercourse next to impossible. A Viceroy, for instance, often speaks but twice to the Governor of Bombay—on his arrival and his departure—and may never see, usually never does see, the Governor of Madras at all. He has, be it remembered, no Cabinet, for the Secretaries of State, as we call them, are merely his chief clerks, without responsibility ; and the Members of Council, though the work is by consent distributed among them, are only collectively responsible. The Viceroy, in fact, unless, like Lord Dalhousie, an auto- crat by the will of heaven as well as his own temperament, is only real master of his work for three years, during which he must fritter away endless time in convincing the India Office that his proposals are expedient and safe. At the end of that time, when everything he wished to try is just beginning to be tried, or to exhibit results, he departs for ever, to be succeeded by another chief who may be different from him in all respects, who probably thinks differently as to all ideals to be attained, and who, at all events, has to go through the same wearisome pro- cess of practical education. The Viceroyalty of India, in fact, which is so often described as a Kingship, is in reality always a Regency, with the heir nearly grown to man's estate. If a Viceroy's plans succeed, another reaps the benefit of them ; if they fail, he is exempt from all the consequences of his blunders. Lord Elgin will not see the results either of the currency system which he in- augurated, or of the Frontier War, which against his better judgment—it is his own statement—he felt com- pelled to sanction. A Viceroy can now form no school of subordinates, he can carry out no policy requiring time, he can, in truth, found nothing, and has done well if he can hand over the Empire uninjured to his successor. We ask any statesman alive whether in Europe he would dream of establishing a constitu- tion of which these were the inevitable results. It is mere folly to say that at home the same system prevails, for Premiers are often changed within five years. The Sovereign is not changed. The bureaucracy is not changed. The most influential representatives are not changed. The people are not changed. And the Premiers themselves were born and bred in the country they administer. In India there is no Sovereign ; the higher bureaucrats come and go like shadows ; there are no representatives ; and the people never interfere, except by a very infrequent veto such as that which at this moment is pulverising the Plague Laws. And the Viceroys are of a foreign race, another language, and totally different system of ideas. We are quite aware of the usual argument that India uses up Viceroys and con- stantly requires "a fresh mind" at the helm, but we cannot believe that a system so opposed to all historic experience and all the maxims of statecraft is a good one, or that a rapidity of change which would be considered ruinous in changeful Europe, can be the best to apply to the affairs of a country on the unchanging Asiatic Continent. Sup- pose Lord Cromer had been twice superseded, what would have been the situation in Egypt ? Yet, compared with India, Egypt is what Holland is to the British Empire.
If we read Lord Elgin's farewell speech, which we have tried in another column to boil down, we shall find, we think, much evidence in support of the con- clusion that the renewal of a Viceroy's term at least three times should be an etiquette only to be departed from on grounds of palpable necessity. Lord Elgin has not been one of the great Viceroys, but he has been a fair Chief Administrator through a period marked by some severe trials,—the failure of the currency, the Frontier War, the great Famine, and the conflict between East and West as to the treatment of the Plague. Distinctly unpopular at first owing to some personal peculiarities, he has evidently won a large measure of general confidence, is trusted as an efficient man of business, and is addressed by all manner of grave bodies in language which implies considerable regret at his departure. He is a considerate man, unwilling to hamper his successor, and his speech on taking leave is, therefore, unusually reticent ; but it is evident that Lord Elgin had begun to form strong opinions about the best policy for Government to pursue. He doubts, we should say, the suitability of Simla as the official capital, and, though he will not offend all great officials by denouncing it, he insists that the legislative centre shall not be transferred from Calcutta to the cloudy Olympus where the rulers of India, like the gods of Greece, "recline careless of mankind" toiling in the plains. He evidently disbelieves in peace upon the frontier, where the tribes, he says, are " wayward, wild, ignorant, and excitable," and is averse to any per- manent measure—like annexation ?—which will limit the Viceroy's freedom in dealing with their outbreaks. He is absolutely against fresh taxation, putting it, _in- deed, out of court with a vehemence which indicates that he thinks existing taxes very heavy, and which may embarrass his successor, and looks for larger resources to an industrial development of India which he would promote by three policies,—the adoption of a gold standard, a large but carefully considered extension of the railway system, and the attraction to India of great masses of unemployed English capital. We may not agree with all those ideas—we are not certain, for example, of the possibility of a gold standard for India—but it cannot be denied that taken together those ideas constitute a large scheme of policy, internal and external, slowly formed by close observation in the brain of a competent man, to whom everything must have been told. Of that large scheme not an item will be carried out unless Lord Curzon agrees with his predecessor, which he is no way bound to do, nor compelled to do by any force. Unless Lord Elgin has an unusual gift of persuasiveness upon paper, which he probably has not, and has exerted it in abstract Minutes, for which he probably had not the time, all the experience he has gathered in years of steady watching is lost to India for ever. Lord Elgin will never be an English Secretary of State, and dignity will compel him not to accept a seat in the Council of India. There will be, because of his departure, as regards final con- clusions a solution of continuity in the Viceroyalty,— a solution all the more complete because with him departs the Financial Member of Council, Sir James Westland. It is quite possible that Lord Curzon and Mr. Dawkins may be the superiors of both ; but can any one imagine an organisation which, as an organisation, inspires less hope ?
Each Viceroyalty of India, under any circumstances, ought to be longer lived; but in the circumstances of India, its duration is exceptionally important. Everything that is English there flits. No man of the great corpora- tion which administers the continent intends to remain for his life, no man founds a family, no man has any per- manent relation whatsoever with the people. He performs the duty assigned him, always with assiduity, often with devotion, sometimes with singular energy and self-sacrifice, but he has no link with the past, no reason for care as regards the future. He is never stationed in the same county, often not in the same province, for more than ten years. What with deaths, promotions, and departures, the shifting of the personnel is incessant, and with it the alteration of local, as well as general, plans for improve- ment. Everything depends on individuals, and the individuals are always marching. Plans which have taken years to mature are arrested at the very moment of completion ; ideas diffused for a period, and just on the point of acceptance, are contradicted by the next arrival ; the natives who have grown to influence under one " shadow " find the next " shadow" chilling to all their aspirations. A bridge will be built by three " authorities " in succession each with a different view of bridge architecture, a school system will be petted for one five years and neglected for the next five ; the very taxes are exacted in 1895 with severity, and in 1900 with a lenity which takes off half their weight,—at least from the peasant's imagination. In such a panorama, always twirling when it is not shaking, there should be at least some fixed point, and the best would be the natural pivot, the character of the absolute Viceroy, who, remember, rules, and is intended to rule, not like Lord Salisbury, but like the German Emperor. To make of that pivot a centre of further motion, to change the man who initiates all legislation, who appoints and dismisses all great officers, who is, in fact, King in the older sense, every five years, seems to us the extremity of foolishness. That the Indian Empire survives it is true, but it is because the Indian Empire has in it some spring of vitality for which no man can account, not because it is well organised by the hands to whom, for unrevealed purposes, Providence has entrusted its control.
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