CONQUEST AND CHARACTER.
ONE of the oddest things in these discussions about the effect of conquest which have recently recommenced, as they recommenced in the eighteenth century, and will recommence in the twentieth, is the idea of those opposed to the process that, as regards the character of the people conquered, conquest can have no compensations. Conquest, they think, must degrade at any rate, if it enriches. Mr. Gladstone in all speeches on the subject implies that ; and the Comtists and most of the extreme Radicals maintain the same thesis. The English, in fact, in their natural boldness, and the regularity of the life which has been around them for centuries, appear to have lost all comprehen- sion of the main circumstances of semi-civilised and savage life, or, at least, all sympathy for their main trouble. They have forgotten what is the effect of continuous and hereditary terror upon all but the boldest or the most resigned races. Conquest produces many evils, and may destroy or seriously impair originating power, as it seems to have done to an extreme degree in South America, and has done in a less degree in British India, where, for example, the wonderful native power in architecture has withered quite away ; but it has, or may have, some noteworthy compensations which are not material. The special feature of semi-civilised, and still more, of savage life, is that under it the mass of mankind are the victims of continuous terror. Sometimes, as in Feejee, the people are always liable to torture and insult—which they feel keenly —or death, which they dislike less, at discretion. Thakomban and the other chiefs used to kill men and violate women when they would. If they launched boats, and rollers were not handy, they made men lie down lengthways, and rolled the boats over them, smiling as the weight crushed out their bowels and their lives. In India rent, till we came, was levied by torture, and brigandage was rampant in almost every district ; those who had anything, even the poor, being forced to disgorge by pain. In the Soudan, all men not pro- tected by an armed tribe were liable to be kidnapped—that is, to be sold into slavery, marched hundreds of miles under the -lash, and left, if they had even blistered feet, to die of hunger in the desert. In some districts, every girl had been outraged and tortured. In European Turkey, to this hoar, no Christian house- hold is secure for a day that its boys will not be tortured, its girls carried away to harems, at the will of the great men; or, worse, of the soldiery, let loose to comfort themselves for the want of monthly pay. In Indo-China, the Mandarins killed almost whom they would, and no one who possessed any- thing could be sure of passing through life without en- during torture. Throughout Southern Asia, the most ordinary operations of Government, tax-collecting, road-making, the maintenance of order, are controlled by men who make of cruelty an habitual instrument. The fear, too, of hunger—which, for some reason to us unknown, but quite certain, is the most maddening of fears—was never wholly absent. The man with- out land was never free from it; and the man with land had to dread drought, and therefore famine, as well as the oppression which took from him the whole crop. The millions hurt one another, too, each man preying upon his neighbour, until the dominant, all-pervading, mental influence in the country, ex- pressing itself and intensifying itself in its creed, was terror. This terror was increased by other and more direct sufferings. We English, in our temperate climate, hardly know what it is to fear the hostility of nature, fire, storm, and flood ; and, under our civilised arrangements, do not realise how a population without doctors or hygienic traditions can suffer from disease. The bold correspondent of the Daily News who has gone with Admiral Hewett to Abyssinia, and who sees everything, though with the eyes apparently of a towns- man, reports that in that country seven in ten of all the people seem in some way to be seriously diseased, and to feel their sufferings till they are ready to worship any rough-and- ready but fairly efficient European doctor. The writer him- self has lived in countries where a twentieth of the population
had faces like tripe, so deep and close were the pits of small-pox, where every child seemed to have, more or less, ophthalmia— the true proportion was probably one in five—and where victorious brigandage had taken the very souls out of the people, and stamped their faces with a look which in England we only see in Bethlehem and St. Luke's.
A. life of this kind, in which terror is the dominant force, and continues for generations, destroys human character. Scientific men believe that the peculiar rage of wild beasts, which is like nothing else, a rage compounded of fear and blood-thirst, is the result of the hereditary hunger which must come to animals who live by slaughter, and does not come to animals who can. eat grass ; and men are influenced like animals. In some races their terror breeds a dull ferocity, hire that of the wilder Caribs. In some it produces the slave qualities, an incapability of truthfulness, or honour, or fidelity, —such as is seen among Egyptians, or the lower races of India. and Indo-China. In some it produces "apathy," as we call it, —that is, a despair which seems incurable, and is incurable in one generation. In several, naturally bold, it breeds a fierce suspiciousness, an numanageableness, as the Europeans say, which is found in some negro tribes, and, as we think—though this opinion has been developed only from reading — is traceable among almost all the tribes of Australia and New Guinea. In others, as the Egyptians, many Christian races of Turkey, the tribes under Turkoman rule, and formerly the Bengalees, the manly virtues die away and are replaced by lying, submissiveness, and a dull fatalistic resignation to what happens, be it what it may. In all, selfishness grows supreme. It is impossible, amid such misery, such chances, such misfortunes, to think of anything except self-defence ; self becomes the sole pivot, even conjugal love dying, though parental and filial feeling may remain ; and in the generations the very power of sympathy dies away, as it is known to do among slaves, who,punish each other by order without a wince. This is the true origin of that pitilessness, that entire absence of sympathy for human pain, which the natives of India, who are by nature distinctly not cruel, will in their moments of con. fidenc,e acknowledge to be the differentiating quality between themselves and Europeans. The pressure has been too severe, and men have become like animals, compelled to think first of themselves, overmastered by their own wants, their own sufferings, their own terrors, which, if they are imaginative at all—as, for example, all men with Arab blood in them are, and all dark men with any Aryan strain—rise to morbid heights.
European conquest lifts up, or at least may lift up, this pressure. The liability to torture at the will of individuals, for example, ceases at.once. Neither Englishmen, Russians, nor Frenchmen allow that to continue. Hunger almost ceases; human beings, when sure of the fruits of their industry, rarely failing to raise enough to eat, or to accumulate some surplus, which civilised order permits them to distribute. Brigandage in its all-pervading form dies away, the European feeling an angry contempt for that kind of disorder which induces him to stop it with a heavy hand. Disease grows lighter, partly from the slow spread of hygienic knowledge and the presence of instructed doctors, but chiefly from the increased vitality of the population ; and last, and best of all, the women, who run in such countries a double risk and are always weak, feel moderately safe and happy. They can keep out of the way of mis- chief, and are protected by law sharply enforced, and are treated more or less—for conquering races are not all like each other —as human beings. Do the opponents of conquest fancy that such changes have no effect on character ? On the contrary, they often change it radically, always change it so much, that the altera- tion is perceptible to the Europeans who have produced it, and is not always agreeable. They hate the vices born of terror, yet can bear them with less irritation than the vices which often accom- pany restored confidence. Naturally, among races so depressed the certainty of justice produces first of all a relaxation of the intense self-control previously exercised, and the European says good-temper disappears, a change often observable among Indians who have become Christian. The habitual cringingness vanishes; and the peculiar self-assertion, often verging on insolence, which replaces it, is intensely disagree- able. Independence springs up, and with independence self-will, which, if you live by giving orders and getting them obeyed, and are still the wiser or more sensible of the two parties, is far from attractive. And Mildly, courage revives. It is quite true that there are races in which courage seems to survive
almost any extent of oppression ; but, as a rule, courage requires the support of self-confidence, and under constant humiliation it dies almost entirely away. Hardly any hope will teach slaves to rebel, even when they are of the masters' colour and race,— the secret of the otherwise inexplicable security of the Roman system in provinces where German and Gaulish slaves must have outnumbered the freemen by five to one ; and if colour or race are different, they often will not rise at all. The courage is dead, to revive, when they have once realised their freedom, with a suddenness which to their former masters is not only amazing but terrible, and when colour-pride comes in, almost unbearable. The occurrence of this change at the time when the Jacquerie broke out, when it is as certain as any fact provable by testimony can be that the French peasantry, naturally a brave race, had lost their hardihood and could not fight, has been repeatedly described, and in many districts some- thing like it, though less in degree, accompanied the French Revolution. The conquered races, in fact, become manly again, and gradually prepared for that stout battle with nature, with human greed, and with human perversity, through which Providence has apparently agreed that man shall be trained to a higher point. Servility ceases, cruelty is considered shameful, and a new and loftier energy is born, developing itself in all directions. The intellect revives slowly, for, as we have said, conquest impairs originality, and the effect of foreign culture and of the tendency to use a foreign literary language, is to the last degree depressing ; but character improves in great leaps. Truthfulness, no doubt, is reborn slowly, for the quality is ex- cessively inconvenient to all who serve, and is hardly yet developed even in Europe ; but it reappears, till it is once more possible, as a beginning, to base judicial decisions upon evidence. Sympathy is slow to arise, man being selfish by nature ; but it does arise, especially among women, so that in the Indian Mutiny, when whole populations approved massacre, the ayalus invariably shielded their mistresses and the children. Submissive- ness is replaced by a tenacity so rooted that the Law Courts are loaded with work, and statesmen fear to tax lest there should be insurrection ; and finally, civil courage, the courage which will not yield to oppression, reappears, and often even embarrasses the Government. The change is slow, like the change which adapts an animal to its surroundings ; but in four or 5ve genera- tions it is visible to all who choose to see. The natives of India, who have been secure for a hundred years, are changing visibly, and those who know them best believe that if the Roman Peace can be maintained steadily for another century, slavish- mess, and all that it implies, will have disappeared from among them. The five millions of Egyptians, if governed steadily.for -a century or two, would rise in character at least to the level of Italians, and would then differ from their former selves less than the Greeks of to day differ from the Greeks whom Pashas for five centuries tortured at will. Surely that gain is great, and -cannot fairly be declared to be purely material
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