Chapter II: Preface (2)

The peace or ‘established’ strength of the British army in India is nearly 230,000 men, of whom about 156,000 are natives and 74,000 Englishmen. To these there may be added the so-called ‘active reserve’ of natives who have served with the colours, about 17,000 men, and about 30,000 European volunteers. Besides these there are of course the troops of the native princes, estimated at about 350,000 men, many of them, however, far from effective. But as these troops, though a source of strength while their masters are loyal, might under altered circumstances be conceivably a source of danger, they can hardly be reckoned as part of the total force disposable by the British Government. Recently, however, about 20,000 of them have been organized as special contingents of the British army, inspected and advised by British officers, and fit to take their place with regiments of the line.

It would obviously be impossible to defend such widely extended dominions by a force of only 230,000 or 250,000 men, but for the remoteness of all possibly dangerous assailants. The only formidable land neighbour is Russia, the nearest point of whose territories in the Pamirs is a good long way from the present British outposts, with a very difficult country between. The next nearest is France on the Mekong River, some 200 miles from British Burma, though a shorter distance from Native States under British influence. As for sea powers, not only is Europe a long way off, but the navy of Britain holds the sea. It was by her command of the sea that Britain won India. Were she to cease to hold it, her position there would be insecure indeed.

In another respect also the sharp severance of India from all the surrounding countries may be deemed to have proved a benefit to the English. It has relieved them largely if not altogether from the temptation to go on perpetually extending their borders by annexing contiguous territory. When they had reached the natural boundaries of the Himalayas and the ranges of Afghanistan, they stopped. Beyond these lie rugged and unprofitable highlands, and still more unprofitable wildernesses. In two regions only was an advance possible: and in those two regions they have yielded to temptation. They have crossed the southern part of the Soliman mountains into Baluchistan in search for a more ‘scientific’ frontier, halting for the present on the Amram range, north-west of Quetta, where from the Khojak heights the eye, ranging over a dark-brown arid plain, descries seventy miles away the rocks that hang over Kandahar. They moved on from Arakhan and Tenasserim into Lower Burma, whence in 1885 they conquered Upper Burma and proclaimed their suzerainty over some of the Shan principalities lying further to the east. But for the presence of France in these regions, which makes them desire to keep Siam in existence as a so-called ‘Buffer State,’ manifest destiny might probably lead them ultimately eastward across the Menam and Mekong to Annam and Cochin China.

The Romans too sought for a scientific frontier, and hesitated often as to the line they should select, sometimes pushing boldly eastward beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates, sometimes receding to those rivers. Not till the time of Hadrian did they create a regular system of frontier defence, strengthened at many points by fortifications, among which the forts that lie along the Roman Wall from the Tyne to the Solway are perhaps the best preserved. So the English wavered for a time between the line of the Indus and that of the Soliman range; so in the wild mountain region beyond Kashmir they have, within the last few years, alternately occupied and retired from the remote outpost of Chitral. It has been their good fortune to have been obliged to fortify a comparatively small number of points, and all of these are on the north-west frontier.

There have been those who would urge them to occupy Afghanistan and entrench themselves therein to resist a possible Russian invasion. But for the present wiser counsels have prevailed. Afghanistan is a more effective barrier in the hands of its own fierce tribes than it would be as a part of British territory. A parallel may be drawn between the part it has played of late years and that which Armenia played in the ancient world from the days of Augustus to those of Heraclius. Both countries had been the seats of short-lived Empires, Armenia in the days of Tigranes, Afghanistan in those of Ahmed Shah. Both are wild and rugged regions, the dwelling-places of warlike races. Christian Armenia was hostile from religious sentiment to the enemies whom Rome had to fear, the Persian Fire-worshippers. Musulman Afghanistan dreads the power of Christian Russia. But the loyalty or friendship of the Armenian princes was not always proof against the threats of the formidable Sassanids, and the action of the Afghans is an element of uncertainty and anxiety to the British rulers of India.

To make forces so small as those on which Rome relied and those which now defend British India adequate for the work they have to do, good means of communication are indispensable. It was one of the first tasks of the Romans to establish such means. They were the great—indeed one may say, the only—road builders of antiquity. They began this policy before they had completed the conquest of Italy; and it was one of the devices which assured their supremacy throughout the peninsula. They followed it out in Gaul, Spain, Africa, Britain, and the East, doing their work so thoroughly that in Britain some of the roads continued to be the chief avenues of travel down till the eighteenth century. So the English have been in India a great engineering people, constructing lines of communication, first roads and afterwards railways, on a scale of expenditure unknown to earlier ages. The potentates of elder days, Hindu rajahs, and subsequently Pathans and Moguls, with other less famous Musulman dynasties, have left their memorials in temples and mosques, in palaces and tombs. The English are commemorating their sway by railway works, by tunnels and cuttings, by embankments and bridges. If India were to relapse into barbarism the bridges, being mostly of iron, would after a while perish, and the embankments would in time be swept away by torrential rains, but the rock-cuttings and the tunnels would remain, as the indestructible paving-stones of the Roman roads, and majestic bridges, like the Pont du Gard in Languedoc, remain to witness to the skill and thoroughness with which a great race did its work.

The opening up of India by railroads suggests not a few interesting questions which, however, I can do no more than indicate here. Railroad construction has imposed upon the Indian exchequer a strain all the heavier because some lines, especially those on the north-west frontier, having been undertaken from strategic rather than commercial motives, will yield no revenue at all proportionate to their cost. It has been suggested that although railroads were meant to benefit the peasantry, they may possibly have increased the risk of famine, since they induce the producer to export the grain which was formerly locally stored up in good years to meet the scarcity of bad years. The comparative quickness with which food can be carried by rail into a famine area does not—so it is argued—compensate for the loss of these domestic reserves. Railways, bringing the numerous races that inhabit India into a closer touch with one another than was possible before, are breaking down, slowly but surely, the demarcations of caste, and are tending towards an assimilation of the jarring elements, racial and linguistic, as well as religious, which have divided India into a number of distinct, and in many cases hostile, groups. Centuries may elapse before this assimilation can become a source of political danger to the rulers of the country: yet we discern the beginnings of the process now, especially in the more educated class. The Roman roads, being highways of commerce as well as of war, contributed powerfully to draw together the peoples whom Rome ruled into one imperial nationality. But this was a process which, as we shall presently note, was for Rome an unmixed gain, since it strengthened the cohesion of an Empire whose inhabitants had every motive for loyalty to the imperial Government, if not always to the particular sovereign. The best efforts of Britain may not succeed in obtaining a similar attachment from her Indian subjects, and their union into a body animated by one national sentiment might become an element of danger against which she has never yet been required to take precautions.

The excellence of the highways of communication provided by the wise energy of the Romans and of the English has contributed not only to the easier defence of the frontiers of both Empires, but also to the maintenance of a wonderfully high standard of internal peace and order. Let any one think of the general state of the ancient world before the conquests of Rome, and let him then think of the condition not merely of India after the death of the Emperor Aurungzeb, but of the chief European countries as they stood in the seventeenth century, if he wishes to appreciate what Rome did for her subjects, or what England has done in India. In some parts of Europe private war still went on two hundred and fifty years ago. Almost everywhere robber bands made travelling dangerous and levied tribute upon the peasantry. Even in the eighteenth century, and even within our own islands, Rob Roy raided the farmers of Lennox, and landlords in Connaught fought pitched battles with one another at the head of their retainers. Even a century ago the coasts of the Mediterranean were ravaged by Barbary pirates, and brigandage reigned unchecked through large districts of Italy. But in the best days of the Roman Empire piracy was unknown; the peasantry were exempt from all exactions except those of the tax-gatherer; and the great roads were practically safe for travellers. Southern and western Europe, taken as a whole, would seem to have enjoyed better order under Hadrian and the Antonines than was enjoyed again until nearly our own times. This was the more remarkable because the existence of slavery must have let loose upon society, in the form of runaway slaves, a good many dangerous characters. Moreover, there remained some mountainous regions where the tribes had been left practically to themselves under their own rude customs. These enclaves of barbarism within civilized territory, such as was Albania, in the central mountain knot of which no traces of Roman building have been found, and the Isaurian country in Asia Minor, and possibly the Cantabrian land on the borders of south-western Gaul and northern Spain, where the Basque tongue still survives, do not appear to have seriously interfered with the peace and well-being of the settled population which dwelt around them, probably because the mountaineers knew that it was only by good behaviour that they could obtain permission to enjoy the measure of independence that had been left to them. The parts of provincial Africa which lay near the desert were less orderly, because it was not easy to get behind the wild tribes who had the Sahara at their back.

The internal peace of the Roman Empire was, however, less perfect than that which has been established within the last sixty years in India. Nothing surprises the visitor from Europe so much as the absolute confidence with which he finds himself travelling unprotected across this vast country, through mountains and jungles, among half savage tribes whose languages he does not know, and that without seeing, save at rare intervals, any sign of European administration. Nor is this confined to British India. It is almost the same in Native States. Even along the lofty forest and mountain frontier that separates the native (protected) principality of Sikkim from Nepal—the only really independent Indian State—an Englishman may journey unarmed and alone, except for a couple of native attendants, for a week or more. When he asks his friends at Darjiling, before he starts, whether he ought to take a revolver with him, they smile at the question. There is not so complete a security for native travellers, especially in native States, for here and there bands of brigands called Dacoits infest the tracks, and rob, sometimes the wayfarer, sometimes the peasant, escaping into the recesses of the jungle when the police are after them. But dacoity, though it occasionally breaks out afresh in a few districts, has become much less frequent than formerly. The practice of Thuggi which seventy years ago still caused many murders, has been extirpated by the unceasing energy of British officers. Crimes of violence show a percentage to the population which appears small when one considers how many wild tribes remain. The native of course suffers from violence more frequently than does the European, whose prestige of race, backed by the belief that punishment will surely follow on any injury done to him, keeps him safe in the wildest districts[6].

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Footnote 6:

An incident like the murder in 1889 of the British Resident at
Manipur, a small Protected State in the hill country between Assam and
Burma, is so rare and excites so much surprise and horror as to be the
best proof of the general tranquillity. In that case there had been
some provocation, though not on the part of the Resident himself, an
excellent man of conciliatory temper.

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I have referred to the enclaves within the area of the Roman Empire where rude peoples were allowed to live after their own fashion so long as they did not disturb the peace of their more civilized neighbours. One finds the Indian parallel to these districts, not so much in the Native States, for these are often as advanced in the arts of life, and, in a very few instances, almost as well administered, as British territory, but rather in the hill tribes, which in parts of central, of north-western, and of southern India, have retained their savage or semi-savage customs, under their own chiefs, within the provinces directly subject to the Crown. These tribes, as did the Albanians and Basques, cleave to their primitive languages, and cleave also to their primitive forms of ghost-worship or nature-worship, though Hinduism is beginning to lay upon them its tenacious grasp. Of one another’s lives and property they are not very careful. But they are awed by the European and leave him unmolested.

The success of the British, like that of the Roman administration in securing peace and good order, has been due, not merely to a sense of the interest which a government has in maintaining conditions which, because favourable to industry are favourable also to revenue, but also to the high ideal of the duties of a ruler which both nations have set before themselves. Earlier Empires, like those of the Persian Achaemenids or of the successors of Alexander, had been content to tax their subjects and raise armies from them. No monarch, except perhaps some of the Ptolemies in Egypt, seems to have set himself to establish a system from which his subjects would benefit. Rome, with larger and higher views, gave to those whom she conquered some compensations in better administration for the national independence she extinguished. Her ideals rose as she acquired experience, and as she came to feel the magnificence of her position. Even under the Republic attempts were made to check abuses of power on the part of provincial governors. The proceedings against Verres, which we know so well because Cicero’s speeches against that miscreant have been preserved, are an instance of steps taken in the interests of a province whose discontent was so little likely to harm Rome that no urgent political necessity prescribed them. Those proceedings showed how defective was the machinery for controlling or punishing a provincial governor; and it is clear enough that a great deal of extortion and misfeasance went on under proconsuls and propraetors in the later days of the Republic, to the enrichment, not only of those functionaries, but of the hungry swarm who followed them, including men who, like the poet Catullus, were made for better things[7]. With the establishment of a monarchy administration improved. The Emperor had a more definite responsibility for securing the welfare and contentment of the provinces than had been felt by the Senate or the jurors of the Republic, swayed by party interest or passion, not to speak of more sordid motives. He was, moreover, able to give effect to his wishes more promptly and more effectively. He could try an incriminated official in the way he thought best, and mete out appropriate punishment. It may indeed be said that the best proof of the incompetence of the Republican system for the task of governing the world, and of the need for the concentration of powers in a single hand, is to be found in the scandals of provincial administration, scandals which, so far as we can judge, could not have been remedied without a complete change either in the tone and temper of the ruling class at Rome, or in the ancient constitution itself.

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Footnote 7:

Poems x and xxviii. It is some comfort to know that Catullus obtained
in Bithynia only themes for some of his most charming verses (see
poems iv and xlvi). Gains would probably have been ill-gotten.

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On this point the parallel with the English in India is interesting, dissimilar as the circumstances were. The English administration began with extortions and corruptions. Officials were often rapacious, sometimes unjust, in their dealings with the native princes. But the statesmen and the public opinion of England, even in the latter half of the eighteenth century, had higher standards than those of Rome in the days of Sulla and Cicero, while the machinery which the House of Commons provided for dealing with powerful offenders was more effective than the Roman method of judicial proceedings before tribunals which could be, and frequently were, bribed. The first outbreak of greed and corruption in Bengal was dealt with by the strong hand of Clive in 1765. It made so great an impression at home as to give rise to a provision in a statute of 1773, making offences against the provisions of that Act or against the natives of India, punishable by the Court of King’s Bench in England. By Pitt’s Act of 1784, a Special Court, consisting of three judges, four peers, and six members of the House of Commons, was created for the trial in England of offences committed in India. This singular tribunal, which has been compared with the _quaestio perpetua_ (_de pecuniis repetundis_) of Senators created by a Roman statute of B.C. 149 to try offences committed by Roman officials against provincials, has never acted, or even been summoned[8]. Soon after it came the famous trial which is more familiar to Englishmen than any other event in the earlier relations of England and India. The impeachment of Warren Hastings has often been compared with the trial of Verres, though Hastings was not only a far more capable, but a far less culpable man. Hastings, like Verres, was not punished. But the proceedings against him so fixed the attention of the nation upon the administration of India as to secure for wholesome principles of conduct a recognition which was never thereafter forgotten. The Act of 1784 in establishing a Board of Control responsible to Parliament found a means both for supervising the behaviour of officials and for taking the large political questions which arose in India out of the hands of the East India Company. This Board continued till India was placed under the direct sway of the British Crown in 1858. At the same time the appointment of Governors-General who were mostly men of wealth, and always men of rank and position at home, provided a safeguard against such misconduct as the proconsuls under the Roman Republic had been prone to commit. These latter had little to fear from prosecution when their term of office was over, and the opinion of their class was not shocked by offences which would have fatally discredited an English nobleman. The standard by which English public opinion judges the behaviour of Indian or Colonial officials has, on the whole, risen during the nineteenth century; and the idea that the government of subject-races is to be regarded as a trust to be discharged with a sense of responsibility to God and to humanity at large has become generally accepted. Probably the action of the Emperors, or at least of such men as Trajan and his three successors, raised the standard of opinion in the Roman Empire also. It was, however, not so much to that opinion as to their sovereign master that Roman officials were responsible. The general principles of policy which guided the Emperors were sound, but how far they were applied to check corruption or oppression in each particular case is a matter on which we are imperfectly informed. Under an indolent or vicious Emperor, a governor who had influence at Court, or who remitted the full tribute punctually, may probably have sinned with impunity.

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Footnote 8:

See Sir C. P. Ilbert’s _Government of India_, p. 68. The provision
creating this Court has never been repealed.

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The government of India by the English resembles that of her provinces by Rome in being thoroughly despotic. In both cases, whatever may have been done for the people, nothing was or is done by the people. There was under Rome, and there is in British India, no room for popular initiative, or for popular interference with the acts of the rulers, from the Viceroy down to a district official. For wrongs cognizable by the courts of law, the courts of law were and are open, doubtless more fully open in India than they were in the Roman Empire. But for errors in policy or for defects in the law itself, the people of a province had no remedy available in the Roman Empire except through petition to the sovereign. Neither is there now in India any recourse open to the inhabitants except an appeal to the Crown or to Parliament, a Parliament in which the Indian subjects of the Crown have not been, and cannot be, represented. This was, and is, by the nature of the case, inevitable.

In comparing the governmental systems of the two Empires, it is hardly necessary to advert to such differences as the fact that India is placed under a Viceroy to whom all the other high functionaries, Governors, Lieutenant-Governors and Chief Commissioners, are subordinated, whereas in the Roman world every provincial governor stood directly under the Emperor. Neither need one dwell upon the position in the English system of the Secretary of State for India in Council as a member of the British Cabinet. Such details do not affect the main point to which I now come.

The territories conquered by the Romans were of three kinds. Some, such as Egypt, Macedonia, and Pontus, had been, under their own princes, monarchies practically despotic. In these, of course, there could be no question of what we call popular government. Some had been tribal principalities, monarchic or oligarchic, such as those among the Iceni and Brigantes in Britain, the Arverni in Gaul, the Cantabrian mountaineers in Spain. Here, again, free institutions had not existed before, and could hardly have been created by the conqueror. The third kind consisted of small commonwealths, such as the Greek cities. These were fitted for self-government, which indeed they had enjoyed before they were subjected by Rome. Very wisely, municipal self-government was to a large extent left to them by the Emperors down till the time of Justinian. It was more complete in some cities than in others; and it was in nearly all gradually reduced by the equalizing pressure of the central authority. But they were all placed under the governor of the province; most of them paid taxes, and in most both the criminal and the higher civil jurisdiction were in the hands of imperial officials. Of the introduction of any free institutions for the empire at large, or even for any province as a whole, there seems never to have been any question. Among the many constitutional inventions we owe to the ancient world representative government finds no place. A generation before the fall of the Republic, Rome had missed her opportunity when the creation of such a system was most needed and might have been most useful. After her struggle against the league of her Italian allies, she consented to admit them to vote in her own city tribes, instead of taking what seems to us moderns the obvious expedient of allowing them to send delegates to an assembly which should meet in Rome. So it befell that monarchy and a city republic or confederation of such republics remained the only political forms known to antiquity[9].

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Footnote 9:

The nearest approach to any kind of provincial self-government and
also the nearest approach to a representative system was made in the
Provincial Councils which seem from the time of Augustus down to the
fifth century to have existed in all or nearly all the provinces. They
consisted of delegates from the cities of each province, and met
annually in some central place, where stood the temple or altar to
Rome and Augustus. They were presided over by the priest of these
divinities, and their primary functions were to offer sacrifices,
provide for the expense of the annual games, and elect the priest for
next year. However they seem to have also passed resolutions, such as
votes of thanks to the outgoing priest or to a departing governor, and
to have transmitted requests or inquiries to the Emperor. Sometimes
they arranged for the prosecution of a governor who had misgoverned
them: but on the whole their functions were more ceremonial and
ornamental than practically important; nor would the emperors have
suffered them to exert any real power, though they were valued as
useful vehicles of provincial opinion (see Marquardt, _Römische
Staatsverwaltung_, vol. i, and an article in _Eng. Hist. Review_ for
April, 1893, by Mr. E. G. Hardy.)

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India is ruled despotically by the English, not merely because they found her so ruled, but because they conceive that no other sort of government would suit a vast population of different races and tongues, divided by the religious animosities of Hindus and Musulmans, and with no sort of experience of self-government on a scale larger than that of the Village Council. No more in India than in the Roman Empire has there been any question of establishing free institutions either for the country as a whole, or for any particular province. But the English, like the Romans, have permitted such self-government as they found to subsist. It subsists only in the very rudimentary but very useful form of the Village Council just referred to, called in some parts of India the Panchayet or body of five. Of late years municipal constitutions, resembling at a distance those of English boroughs, have been given to some of the larger cities as a sort of experiment, for the sake of training the people to a sense of public duty, and of relieving the provincial government of local duties. So far the experiment has in most cities been only a moderate success. The truth is that, though a few intelligent men, educated in European ideas, complain of the despotic power of the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, the people of India generally do not wish to govern themselves. Their traditions, their habits, their ideas, are all the other way, and dispose them to accept submissively any rule which is strong and which neither disturbs their religion and customs nor lays too heavy imposts upon them.

Here let an interesting contrast be noted. The Roman Emperors were despots at home in Italy, almost as much, and ultimately quite as much, as in the provinces. The English govern their own country on democratic, India on absolutist principles. The inconsistency is patent but inevitable. It affords an easy theme for declamation when any arbitrary act of the Indian administration gives rise to complaints, and it may fairly be used as the foundation for an argument that a people which enjoys freedom at home is specially bound to deal justly and considerately with those subjects to whom she refuses a like freedom. But every one admits in his heart that it is impossible to ignore the differences which make one group of races unfit for the institutions which have given energy and contentment to another more favourably placed.

A similar inconsistency presses on the people of the United States in the Philippine Isles. It is a more obtrusive inconsistency because it has come more abruptly, because it has come, not by the operation of a long series of historical causes, but by the sudden and little considered action of the American Republic itself, and because the American Republic has proclaimed, far more loudly and clearly than the English have ever done, the principle contained in the Declaration of Independence that the consent of the governed is the only foundation of all just government. The Americans will doubtless in time either reconcile themselves to their illogical position or alter it. But for the present it gives to thoughtful men among them visions of mocking spirits, which the clergy are summoned to exorcize by dwelling upon the benefits which the diffusion of a pure faith and a commercial civilization will confer upon the lazy and superstitious inhabitants of these tropical isles.

Subject to the general principle that the power of the Emperor was everywhere supreme and absolute, the Romans recognized, at least in the earlier days of the Empire, considerable differences between the methods of administering various provinces. A distinction was drawn between the provinces of the Roman people, to which proconsuls or propraetors were sent, and the provinces of Caesar, placed under the more direct control of the Emperor, and administered in his name by an official called the _praeses_ or _legatus Caesaris_, or sometimes (as was the case in Judaea, at the time when it was ruled by Pontius Pilate) by a _procurator_, an officer primarily financial, but often entrusted with the powers of a _praeses_. Egypt received special treatment because the population was turbulent and liable to outbursts of religious passion, and because it was important to keep a great cornfield of the Empire in good humour. These distinctions between one province and another tended to vanish as the administrative system of the whole Empire grew better settled and the old republican forms were forgotten. Still there were always marked differences between Britain, for instance, at the one end of the realm and Syria at the other. So there were all sorts of varieties in the treatment of cities and tribes which had never been conquered, but passed peaceably through alliance into subjection. Some of the Hellenic cities retained their republican institutions till far down in imperial times. Distinctions not indeed similar, yet analogous, have existed between the different parts of British India. There is the old distribution of provinces into Regulation and Non-Regulation. The name ‘Province,’ one may observe in passing, a name unknown elsewhere in the dominions of Britain[10] (though a recent and vulgar usage sometimes applies it to the parts of England outside London) except as a relic of French dominion in Canada, bears witness to an authority which began, as in Canada, through conquest. Though the names of Regulation and Non-Regulation provinces are now no longer used, a distinction remains between the districts to the higher posts in which none but members of the covenanted service are appointed, and those in which the Government have a wider range of choice, and also between those districts for which the Governor-General can make ordinances in his executive capacity, and those which are legislated for by him in Council in the ordinary way. There are also many differences in the administrative systems of the different Presidencies and other territories, besides of course all imaginable diversities in the amount of independence left to the different ‘Protected States,’ some of which are powerful kingdoms, like Hyderabad, while many, as for instance in Gujarat, are petty principalities of two or three dozen square miles.

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Footnote 10:

The use of the word to denote the two great ecclesiastical divisions
of England (Province of Canterbury and Province of York) is a relic of
the Roman imperial system.

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The mention of these protected States suggests another point of comparison. Rome brought many principalities or kingdoms under her influence, especially in the eastern parts of the Empire; and dealt with each upon the basis of the treaty by which her supremacy had been acknowledged, allowing to some a wider, to some a narrower measure of autonomy[11]. Ultimately, however, all these, except a few on the frontiers, passed under her direct sway: and this frequently happened in cases where the native dynasty had died out, so that the title lapsed to the Emperor. The Iceni in Britain seem to have been such a protected State, and it was the failure of male heirs that caused a lapse. So the Indian Government was wont, when the ruling family became extinct or hopelessly incompetent, to annex to the dominions of the British Crown the principality it had ruled. From the days of Lord Canning, however, a new policy has been adopted. It is now deemed better to maintain the native dynasties whenever this can be done, so a childless prince is suffered to adopt, or provide for the adoption of, some person approved by the Government; and the descendants of this person are recognized as rulers[12]. The incoming prince feels that he owes his power to the British Government, while adoption gives him a title in the eyes of his subjects.

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Footnote 11:

For instance, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Commagene were left as subject
kingdoms till 17 A.D., 63 A.D., and 72 A.D. respectively.

Footnote 12:

‘The extent to which confidence has been restored by Lord Canning’s
edict is shown by the curious fact that since its promulgation a
childless ruler very rarely adopts in his own lifetime. An heir
presumptive, who knows that he is to succeed and who may possibly grow
restive if his inheritance is delayed, is for various obscure reasons
not the kind of person whom an Oriental ruler cares to see idling
about his palace, so that a politic chief often prefers leaving the
duty of nominating a successor to his widows, who know his mind and
have every reason for wishing him long life.’—Sir A. C. Lyall in _Law
Quarterly Review_ for October, 1893.

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The differences I have mentioned between the British provinces are important, not only as respects administration, but as respects the system of landholding. All over India, as in many other Oriental countries, it is from the land that a large part of revenue, whether one calls it rent or land tax, is derived. In some provinces the rent is paid direct to the Government by the cultivator, in others it goes to intermediary landlords, who in their turn are responsible to the State. In some provinces it has been permanently fixed, by what is called a Land-settlement[13], and not always on the same principles. The subject is far too large and intricate to be pursued here. I mention it because in the Roman Empire also land revenue was the mainstay of the imperial treasury. Where territory had been taken in war, the fact of conquest was deemed to have made the Roman people ultimate owners of the land so acquired, and the cultivators became liable to pay what we should call rent for it. In some provinces this rent was farmed out to contractors called _publicani_, who offered to the State a sum equivalent to the rent of the area contracted for, minus the expense of collection and their own profit on the undertaking, and kept for themselves whatever they could extract from the peasantry. This vicious system, resembling that of the tithe farmers in Ireland seventy years ago, was regulated by Nero and abolished by Hadrian, who placed the imperial procurator in charge of the land revenue except as regarded the forests and the mines. It exists to-day in the Ottoman Empire. Convenient for the State as it seems, it is wasteful, and naturally exposes the peasant, as is conspicuously the case in Asiatic Turkey, to oppressions perhaps even harder to check than are those of State officials. When the English came to India they found it in force there; and the present landlord class in Bengal, called Zemindars, are the representatives of the rent or land tax-farmers under the native princes who were, perhaps unwisely, recognized as landowners by the British a century ago. This kind of tax-farming is, however, no longer practised in India, a merit to be credited to the English when we are comparing them with the Romans of the Republic and the earlier Empire.

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Footnote 13:

One finds something similar to this Land-settlement in the Roman plan
of determining the land revenue of a province by what was called the
_lex provinciae_.

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Where the revenue of the State comes from the land, the State is obliged to keep a watchful eye upon the condition of agriculture, since revenue must needs decline when agriculture is depressed. There was not in the Roman world, and there is not in India now, any question of agricultural depression arising from foreign competition, for no grain came into the Empire from outside, or comes now into India[14]. But a year of drought, or, in a long course of years, the exhaustion of the soil, tells heavily on the agriculturist, and may render him unable to pay his rent or land tax. In bad years it was the practice of the more indulgent Emperors to remit a part of the tax for the year: and one of the complaints most frequently made against harsh sovereigns, or extravagant ones like Justinian, was that they refused to concede such remissions. A similar indulgence has to be and is granted in India in like cases.

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Footnote 14:

Rice, however, is sent from Lower Burma into India proper.

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Finance was the standing difficulty of the Roman as it is of the Anglo-Indian administrator. Indeed, the Roman Empire may be said to have perished from want of revenue. Heavy taxation, and possibly the exhaustion of the soil, led to the abandonment of farms, reducing the rent derivable from the land. The terrible plague of the second century brought down population, and was followed by a famine. The eastern provinces had never furnished good fighting material: and the diminution of the agricultural population of Italy, due partly to this cause, partly to the growth of large estates worked by slave labour, made it necessary to recruit the armies from the barbarians on the frontiers. Even in the later days of the Republic the native auxiliaries were beginning to be an important part of a Roman army. Moreover, with a declining revenue, a military establishment such as was needed to defend the eastern and the northern frontiers could not always be maintained. The Romans had no means of drawing a revenue from frontier customs, because there was very little import trade; but dues were levied at ports and there was a succession tax, which usually stood at five per cent. In most provinces there were few large fortunes on which an income or property tax could have been levied, except those of persons who were already paying up to their capacities as being responsible for the land tax assessed upon their districts. The salt tax was felt so sorely by the poor that Aurelian was hailed as a benefactor when he abolished it.

India has for many years past been, if not in financial straits, yet painfully near the limit of her taxable resources. There too the salt tax presses hard upon the peasant; and the number of fortunes from which much can be extracted by an income or property tax is, relatively to the population, very small. Comparing her total wealth with her population, India is a poor country, probably poorer than was the Roman Empire in the time of Constantine[15]. A heavy burden lies upon her in respect of the salaries of the upper branches of the Civil Service, which must of course be fixed at figures sufficient to attract a high order of talent from England, and a still heavier one in respect of military charges. On the other hand, she has the advantage of being able, when the guarantee of the British Government is given for the loan, to borrow money for railways and other public works, at a rate of interest very low as compared with what the best Native State would be obliged to offer, or as compared with that which the Roman Government paid.

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Footnote 15:

The total revenue of British India was, in A.D. 1840, 200,000,000 of
rupees, and in 1898-9, 1,014,427,000 rupees, more than a fourth of
which was land revenue and less than one-fourth from railways. (The
exchange value of the rupee, formerly about two shillings, is now
about one shilling and four pence.) £190,000,000 has been expended
upon railways in British India and the Native States. The land revenue
is somewhat increasing with the bringing of additional land under
cultivation. It is estimated that forty-two per cent. of the
cultivable area is available for further cultivation. The funded debt
of India is now £195,000,000, the unfunded about £12,000,000.

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Under the Republic, Rome levied tribute from the provinces, and spent some of it on herself, though of course the larger part went to the general expenses of the military and civil administration. Under the Emperors that which was spent in Rome became gradually less and less, as the Emperor became more and more detached from the imperial city, and after Diocletian, Italy was treated as a province. England, like Spain in the days of her American Empire and like Holland now, for a time drew from her Indian conquests a substantial revenue. An inquiry made in 1773 showed that, since 1765, about two millions a year had been paid by the Company to the British exchequer. By 1773, however, the Company had incurred such heavy debts that the exchequer had to lend them money: and since that time Britain has drawn no tribute from India. She profits by her dominion only in respect of having an enormous market for her goods, industrial or commercial enterprises offering comparatively safe investments for her capital, and a field where her sons can make a career. Apart from any considerations of justice or of sentiment, India could not afford to make any substantial contribution to the expenses of the non-Indian dominions of the Crown. It is all she can do to pay her own way.

Those whom Rome sent out to govern the provinces were, in the days of the Republic and in the days of Augustus, Romans, that is to say Roman citizens and natives of Italy. Very soon, however, citizens born in the provinces began to be admitted to the great offices and to be selected by the Emperor for high employment. As early as the time of Nero, an Aquitanian chief, Julius Vindex, was legate of the great province of Gallia Lugdunensis. When the imperial throne itself was filled by provincials, as was often the case from Trajan onwards, it was plain that the pre-eminence of Italy was gone. If a man, otherwise eligible, was not a full Roman citizen, the Emperor forthwith made him one. By the time of the Antonines (A.D. 138-180) there was practically no distinction between a Roman and a provincial citizen; and we may safely assume that the large majority of important posts, both military and civil, were held by men of provincial extraction. Indeed merit probably won its way faster to military than to civil distinction, for in governments which are militant as well as military, promotion by merit is essential to the success of the national arms, and the soldier identifies himself with the power he serves even faster than does the civilian. So, long before full citizenship was granted to the whole Roman world (about A.D. 217), it is clear that not only the lower posts in which provincials had always been employed, but the highest also were freely open to all subjects. A Gaul might be sent to govern Cilicia, or a Thracian Britain, because both were now Romans rather than Gauls or Thracians. The fact that Latin and Greek were practically familiar to nearly all highly educated civil servants, because Latin was the language of law as well as the tongue commonly spoken in the West, while Greek was the language of philosophy and (to a great extent) of letters, besides being the spoken tongue of most parts of the East, made a well-educated man fit for public employment everywhere, for he was not (except perhaps in Syria and Egypt and a few odd corners of the Empire) obliged to learn any fresh language. And a provincial was just as likely as an Italian to be highly educated. Thus the officials could easily get into touch with the subjects, and felt hardly more strange if they came from a distance than a Scotchman feels if he is appointed to a professorship in Quebec, or an Irishman if he becomes postmaster in a Norfolk village. Nothing contributed more powerfully to the unity and the strength of the Roman dominion than this sense of an imperial nationality.

The English in India have, as did the Romans, always employed the natives in subordinate posts. The enormous majority of persons who carry on the civil administration there at this moment are Asiatics. But the English, unlike the Romans, have continued to reserve the higher posts for men of European stock. The contrast in this respect between the Roman and the English policy is instructive, and goes down to the foundation of the differences between English and Roman rule. As we have seen, the City of Rome became the Empire, and the Empire became Rome. National independence was not regretted, for the East had been denationalized before the Italian conqueror appeared, and the tribes of the West, even those who fought best for freedom, had not reached a genuine national life when Spain, Gaul, and Britain were brought under the yoke. In the third century A.D. a Gaul, a Spaniard, a Pannonian, a Bithynian, a Syrian called himself a Roman, and for all practical purposes was a Roman. The interests of the Empire were his interests, its glory his glory, almost as much as if he had been born in the shadow of the Capitol. There was, therefore, no reason why his loyalty should not be trusted, no reason why he should not be chosen to lead in war, or govern in peace, men of Italian birth. So, too, the qualities which make a man capable of leading in war or administering in peace were just as likely to be found in a Gaul, or a Spaniard, or a German from the Rhine frontier as in an Italian. In fact, men of Italian birth play no great part in later imperial history[16].

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Footnote 16:

After the fifth century, Armenians, Isaurians, and Northern
Macedonians figure more largely in the Eastern Empire than do natives
of the provinces round the Aegean.

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It is far otherwise in India, though there was among the races of India no nation. The Englishman does not become an Indian, nor the Indian an Englishman. The Indian does not as a rule, though of course there have been not a few remarkable exceptions to the rule, possess the qualities which the English deem to be needed for leadership in war or for the higher posts of administration in peace[17]. For several reasons, reasons to be referred to later, he can seldom be expected to feel like an Englishman, and to have the same devotion to the interests of England which may be counted on in an Englishman. Accordingly the English have made in India arrangements to which there was nothing similar in the Roman Empire. They have two armies, a native and a European, the latter of which is never suffered to fall below a certain ratio to the former. The latter is composed entirely of Englishmen. In the former all military posts in line regiments above that of subahdar (equivalent to captain) are reserved to Englishmen[18]. The artillery and engineer services are kept in English hands, _i.e._ there is hardly any native artillery. It is only, therefore, in the native contingents already referred to that natives are found in the higher grades. These contingents may be compared with the auxiliary barbarian troops under non-Roman commanders whom we find in the later ages of Rome, after Constantine. Such commanders proved sometimes, like the Vandal Stilicho, energetic defenders of the imperial throne, sometimes, like the Suevian Ricimer, formidable menaces to it[19]. But apart from these, the Romans had but one army; and it was an army in which all subjects had an equal chance of rising.

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Footnote 17:

Among these exceptions may be mentioned Sir Syed Ahmed of Aligurh, and
the late Mr. Justice Trimbak Telang of Bombay, both men of remarkable
force and elevation of character.

Footnote 18:

The subahdar, however, is rather a non-commissioned than a
commissioned officer, and is not a member of the British officers’
mess.

Footnote 19:

Russia places Musulmans from the Caucasian provinces in high military
posts. But she has no army corresponding to the native army in India,
and as she has a number of Musulman subjects in European Russia it is
all the more natural for her to have a Colonel Temirhan Shipsheff at
Aralykh and a General Alikhanoff at Merv.

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In a civil career, the native of India may go higher under the English than he can in a military one. A few natives, mostly Hindus, and indeed largely Bengali Hindus, have won their way into the civil service by passing the competitive Indian Civil Service examination in England, and some of these have risen to the posts of magistrate and district judge. A fair proportion of the seats on the benches of the Supreme Courts in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Allahabad, and Lahore have been allotted to native barristers of eminence, several of whom have shown themselves equal in point of knowledge and capacity, as well as in integrity, to the best judges selected from the European bar in India or sent out from the English bar. No native, however, has ever been thought of for the great places, such as those of Lieutenant-Governor or Chief Commissioner, although all British subjects are legally eligible for any post in the service of the Crown in any part of the British Dominions.

Regarding the policy of this exclusion there has been much difference of opinion. As a rule, Anglo-Indian officials approve the course which I have described as that actually taken. But I know some who think that there are natives of ability and force of character such as to fit them for posts military as well as civil, higher than any to which a native has yet been advanced, and who see advantages in selecting a few for such posts. They hold, however, that such natives ought to be selected for civil appointments, not by competitive examination in England but in India itself by those who rule there, and in respect of personal merits tested by service. Some opposition to such a method might be expected from members of the regular civil service, who would consider their prospects of promotion to be thereby prejudiced.

Here we touch an extremely interesting point of comparison between the Roman and the English systems. Both nations, when they started on their career of conquest, had already built up at home elaborate constitutional systems in which the rights of citizens, both public and private civil rights, had been carefully settled and determined. What was the working of these rights in the conquered territories? How far were they extended by the conquerors, Roman and English, and with what results?