1060 
 
 
 Am 
 
 
 Am 
 
 C/J 
 
 m 
 
 — ^ — I 
 r 
 
 r\ ^^™ 
 
 _^^^ m 
 
 u ^ 
 
 = 33 
 
 
 
 u = 
 
 
 S5S 
 
 
 5 ^ 
 
 — -^ 
 
 1 ^^ 
 
 -> 
 
 6 = 
 
 n 
 
 
 =^ -r. 
 
 1 = 
 
 == ^ 
 
 3 = 
 
 =^^= -n 
 
 4 ^ 
 
 
 ^i^ 
 
 , ^ 
 
 4 — 
 
 
 GP3' 
 
 Ilempire
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 
 'OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE." 
 
 I'.Y 
 
 MAJOR EVANS BELL, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THE OXUS AND THE INDUS", " RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS 
 
 OF INDIAN policy", ETC. 
 
 Reddite depositum ; pietas sua foedera servet ; 
 
 Fr.ius absit ; vaonas cnedis h.abete manus." — (1\ in. 
 
 LONDON : 
 TRUBNER & CO., 8 k 60, PATERNOSTEK ROAV. 
 
 1S70. ■ ,
 
 " He who woukl rightly appreciate tlie worth of personal indepen- 
 dence as an clement of happiness, should consider the value he himself 
 puts upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which 
 there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a man 
 judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people. 
 "When he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom 
 of action, — that tlieir own will has not sufficient influence in the re- 
 gulation of their affairs — his inclination is to ask, what are tlieir 
 grievances ? what positive damage they sustain ? and in what respect 
 they consider their affairs to be mismanaged ? and if they fail to 
 make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a suffi- 
 cient case, he turns a deaf eai", and regards their complaint as the 
 fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable will satisfy. 
 But he has quite a different standard of judgment when he is deciding 
 for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable administration of his in- 
 terests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his feelings : his per- 
 sonal exclusion from the deciding authority appears itself the greatest 
 grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even to enter into the ques- 
 tion of mismanagement. It is the same with nations. What citizen 
 of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skilful admi- 
 nistration, in return for the abdication of freedom ? Even if he could 
 believe that good and skilful administration can exist among a people 
 ruled by a will not their own, would not the consciousness of working 
 out their own destiny under tlieir own moral responsibility be a com- 
 pensation to his feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the 
 details of public affairs?" — J. S. Mill, The Suhjcdioii of Women, pp. 
 179, 180.
 
 IOC 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 In my last revision of those pages I have been troubled by an 
 unpleasant doubt whether, with regard to the Imperial mission 
 of Great Britain in India, they might not, in some degree, and 
 to some readers, convey a less grateful sense of past achieve- 
 ments, less hopeful views of future work, than Avould be truly 
 consonant with ray own feelings. I am desirous, therefore, of 
 repeating here, in words that were published six years ago, that 
 it is not because we have done so little, but because we have 
 done so much, that I wish to see our work in India consolidated 
 and naturalised. I can see no promise or hope of permanence 
 anywhere but in the reformed Native State. TUai, and not the 
 model British Province, is the mature and wholesome fruit of 
 Imperial cultivation.
 
 " Tt is a sli-iking fact, tliat the satisfactions and mortifications of 
 personal pride, tliough all in all to raost men when the case is their 
 own, have less allowance made for them in the case of other people, 
 and are less listened to as a ground or justification of conduct, than 
 any other natural human feelings ; perhaps because men compliment 
 them in their own case with the names of so many other qualities, 
 that they are seldom conscious how mighty an influence these feelings 
 exercise in their own lives." — J. S. Mill, The Suljediun of Wome)), 
 p. 181.
 
 u 
 
 OUR GEE AT VASSAL EMPIRE." 
 
 During the Session of 1869 both Houses of Parhament 
 devoted some hours to India. Our recent poHcy in 
 Afghanistan and Central Asia was brought before the 
 Lords on the 19th of April. The same topic was enter- 
 tained in the House of Commons on the 9th of July. On 
 the 23rd of that month the Duke of Argyll, as Secretary 
 of State for India, addressed the Peers on the subject of 
 Indian finance, confining himself entirely to receipts and dis- 
 bursements, and schemes of railway extension. 
 
 In the House of Commons Mr. Grant Dufi", the Under- 
 Secretary of State, made the annual statement of the 
 afiairs of "our great Vassal Empu'e" at the afternoon 
 sitting of the 3rd, and the adjourned debate was concluded 
 on the night of the 5th of August. 
 
 On the former of these two days, Mr. P. W. Crawford, 
 Member for the City of London and Chairman of the East 
 Indian Railway Company, advocated the guaranty system 
 under which the existing lines of railroad had been con- 
 structed' in India ; deprecated export duties on raw pro- 
 duce ; suggested some improvements in the telegraph 
 service, and proposed the consolidation of several small 
 loans into one large stock. 
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote, Member for North Devon and 
 Secretary of State for India in the late Conservative 
 Ministry, recommended strict economy in the finances ; 
 and doubted whether the Public Works Department was 
 in a proper state to undertake the construction of rail- 
 ways. 
 
 Sir Charles Wingfield, Member for Gravesend and 
 
 B
 
 2 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMrillE. 
 
 late Chief Commissioner of Oude, advised that all ex- 
 penditure, except tliat which was extraordinary or strictly 
 reproductive, should be met by income ; believed that 
 the outlay on barracks in the last ten years had been 
 "a frioflitful dram on tlie resources of India;" insisted 
 stron^lv on the separation of executive and judicial 
 functions, for " such a multiplicity of duties were now 
 thrown upon a Collector that it was impossible he 
 could get through them all except by devolving the 
 larger share of the duties upon his assistants," and " with 
 a view of ascertaining the opinions and feelings of the 
 Natives, and bringing these into harmony with the acts of 
 our officials, weighed down as they were by their various 
 duties," recommended the establishment of " consultative 
 Native Councils," 
 
 Mr. Fowler of Penryn and Sir Wilfred Lawson of Car- 
 lisle, two Meml)ers honourably noted for their attention to 
 matters of general philanthropy and national morality, 
 denoimced the opium traffic, on which one sixth of the 
 Indian revenue depends. 
 
 Colonel Sykes, Member for Aberdeen, felt convinced 
 that the income of India was amply sufficient to meet any 
 calls that mio-ht be made on it. 
 
 After the adjournment, Sir Stafford North cote having 
 moved for some correspondence on the subject of the ex- 
 tension of railways in India, Mr. Graves, the Member for 
 Liverpool, suggested that a map should be added to the 
 return, and "regretted to see that some of those works 
 would not be executed till 1890 or even 1900, and, if that 
 were so, the construction of railways would be entirely 
 inadequate to the wants of India or of this country. 
 " Another important point," continued Mr. Graves, " was 
 the constniction of the Council of India. If more sym- 
 pathy were shown for commerce in that body, there would 
 be a more prompt extension of the railway system. He 
 thought there should be a larger mercantile element in the 
 Council. 1'he railway system of India was not a mere Indian 
 question. For many years we should have to look to 
 India for cotton, and every mile of railway opened there 
 tapped new sources of production."
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 3 
 
 The adjourned debate on the evening of the 5th of 
 August enabled Mr. J. B. Smith, Member for Stockport, 
 Mr. Bazley of Manchester, and Mr. Piatt of Oldham, to 
 demand greater facilities for the supj)ly of cotton, and for 
 conveying that staple to the coast. 
 
 Mr. C B. Denison, Member for the Eastern Division of 
 the West Riding, formerly of the Bengal Civil Service, 
 apologised for the opium revenue ; desired more detailed 
 explanations as to the expenditure on Public Works, the 
 post, the telegraph, and the manufacture of small arms, 
 and supported Mr. Crawford's views as to the guaranty 
 system of constructing railways. 
 
 Sir David Wedderburn, Member for Ayrshire, proposed 
 certain measures for promoting the health and comfort of 
 the British army on Indian service. 
 
 All this was very well. If more railroads are wanted 
 they had better be made and worked on the most economi- 
 cal and efficient principles, — on some plan very different 
 from that which has been hitherto pursued. It is highly 
 desirable that there should be a constant and cheap supply 
 of cotton. Of course if sixty-five thousand British troops 
 are to be maintained in India they must be properly 
 housed : the only question is — and here Su" Charles Wing- 
 field again hit a blot — whether fifteen millions sterling 
 have been judiciously expended on solid and permanent 
 barracks during the last ten years ; whether our soldiers are 
 not more healthy and comfortable in less costly lodgings ;* 
 whether on military, political, and financial considerations, 
 they might not be more effectively distributed and occu- 
 pied in a rotation of cantonments and in moveable camps 
 of exercise.'!' 
 
 Barrack accommodation, the supply of small arms, the 
 Post, the Electric Telegraph, the Public Works, — all 
 these w^ere by no means inappropriate subjects of in- 
 quiiy and remark, though scarcely worthy to have formed 
 the chief topics of discussion. The annual inquisition 
 of the House of Commons might w^ell have been directed 
 less to administrative merits and defects, than to those 
 broader and more general principles of Government, which 
 
 * Appendix A. t Appendix B. 
 
 B 2
 
 4 OIH GREAT VASSAL EMPIRK, 
 
 must not only control the action of every department in 
 India, but affect the course, character, and credit of the 
 British Eni|)ire thronohout the world. 
 
 On the ^^■hole, the debates in both Houses were distin- 
 guished by an equal dearth of reference to the tribes and 
 nations of India, their political and social condition, and a 
 similar adherence to home interests and departmental 
 criticism. They contained marvellously little mention of 
 the people, or of the only organised communities in which 
 popular feelings and opinions can be fairly ascertained, 
 and in ^\'hich the durable results of British tutelage can 
 be correctly estimated — the Native States. 
 
 The peculiarly material, mechanical and selfish considera- 
 tions pervading the debate, seem to have struck in their 
 full force one Member of long standing, much respected 
 in the House and the country, not as a leader of party or 
 as an eminent orator, but because — like Sir Wilfred Law- 
 son and Mr. Fowler, whom he supported in their attack 
 upon the opium revenue, — he is one of those men over 
 whom the moral and religious aspects of a question are 
 always seen to exercise an irresistible attraction. The 
 Hon. Arthur Kinnaird, Member for Perth, said : — 
 
 " The people of India miglit suppose from this discussion that 
 in the House of Commons India was looked upon either as a 
 ^fanchester colony or a military settlement. Was India to be 
 f^ovcrned for her own welfare or for the sake of Manchester? No 
 doubt cotton was a good thing, and honourable gentlemen of one 
 idea thought that India was made for the purpose of receiving 
 ^lanchester goods. But he did not see it. He felt some sym- 
 jjathy for the Natives of India. ^^ 
 
 The collective temper and demeanour of the House of 
 Commons, towards India, during the past Session, can 
 only be adequately described as apathetic and negli- 
 gent. When the Under Secretary of State commenced 
 speaking on the 3rd of August — the regular annual op- 
 })ortuiiity ibr a discussion on Indian afliiirs — there were 
 about tliii'ty-five Menibers present, which number swelled 
 to a maximum of fifty-five by the time he had got half 
 way through his speecli, but dvvindhjd away towards the 
 clo.se to about forty, among whom was not one occupant
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE, 5 
 
 of the Treasury Bencli. No recognised leader, no ex- 
 Cabinet Minister, from either side of the House, except Sir 
 Stafford Northcote, took any part in the debate. Yet the 
 scanty attendance on the 8rd of August is said to have 
 constituted " the best Indian Budget house ever known." 
 
 India is not governed by the British Parhament. 
 
 And it would ajDpear as if the apathy of the House of 
 Commons was a very ftiir measure of the apathy in the 
 country. Indian affairs never once occupied the attention 
 of either candidates or constituencies at the General Elec- 
 tion of 1868. No pledges were exacted or offered on any 
 subject connected with India. I can trace no manifesta- 
 tion of political activity relating to India in any part of 
 the United Kingdom, during the year 1869, except the 
 proceedmgs of the Cotton Supply Association. 
 
 The only events, the only projects, the only measures, 
 affecting, or likely to affect the people of India, that seem 
 capable of exciting any interest or discussion at home, in 
 or out of Parliament, are those concerning the supply of 
 cotton and the extension of railways, for the benefit of 
 British commerce and manufactures. 
 
 India is not governed by the British nation. 
 
 It may be said, it has been said, especially by English- 
 men engaged m the public service of India, that this is all 
 just as it should be, — that India ought to be governed in 
 India ; that even the control of the Secretary of State and 
 his Council should be nothing more than formal super- 
 vision ; that Parliamentary dictation is particidarly ob- 
 jectionable ; that although the British public cannot invest 
 too much capital m the Indian funds, in railways, and 
 other works of utility, their mquhies and interference 
 should be strictly limited to the disposal and security of 
 their investments, — a field of inquuy sufficiently wide 
 after all to include all that was to be excluded, — and 
 that no irresponsible persons, miqualified by local observa- 
 tion and experience, ought to meddle with the pohtics of 
 India. 
 
 It is not by acquiescing in monstrous claims of this de- 
 scription, advanced by professional administrators, that the 
 people of Great Britain can shake off* their national respon-
 
 G OrU GREAT \AtSSAL EMPlPvE. 
 
 sibility for the defects, if there be any, in the Imperial 
 rule of India, or gain absohition from the consequences of 
 such defects. 
 
 Tlie error that has chiefly led to these claims, and 
 to the too frequent acquiescence in them, is that of 
 supposing f/orcnimcut and administ ration to be identical 
 and convertible terms. Good admmistration and good 
 government are very difierent things, and by no means 
 necessarily co-exist. 
 
 It' we institute an analogy which may some day be found 
 to be not unscientific, and compare a State with an indi- 
 vidual, government may be said to be its constitution, 
 that more or less perfect co-ordination of all the animal, 
 moral and intellectual energies, under the guidance of a 
 central organ, upon which, in a community as in a person, 
 depends healthy and harmonious life. Administration 
 would then correspond with that daily course of nutrition, 
 clothing, ablution, and exercise, by which the wants of the 
 organism are sujiplied. If the person, or the State, enjoys 
 a good constitution, the means and appliances for admin- 
 istering to its material wants may be very rude, rough, 
 and scanty, and yet life may be vigorous and its work well 
 performed. On the other hand, no amount of careful 
 administration — however lavish the provision, however 
 exquisite the apparatus — can rectify a constitution that is 
 inherently bad, or spoiled by long abuse. If some energies 
 are greatly in excess, and others quite deficient, if some 
 faculties have been over-cultivated, and others utterly 
 suppressed, if a limb or muscle has been too long in un- 
 natural repose, or dependent on foreign support, — harmony 
 will not be restored to the unbalanced functions by merely 
 palliative measures : there must be a constitutional change, 
 a refoiTii in the Government. 
 
 " They manage these matters better in France", is still 
 true to a very considerable extent. In many departments 
 of the public sei'vice France is more skilfully and more 
 fnigally administered than Great Britain, but she is as- 
 suredly not 80 well governed. She may be tended and 
 supplied more regularly and systematically, but her con- 
 stitution is not so good. Some of her functions may pro-
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 7 
 
 ceed with greater energy, but their aggregate is not so 
 harmonious, nor is the central organ so sound as ours. 
 She is hable to dangerous convulsions and hemorrhage on 
 the slightest change of regimen. She cannot assunilate 
 reforms as we do. 
 
 There might be many gradations of praise and blame 
 before the administration of a country coidd be fairly pro- 
 nounced as good, or its government as bad, as they were 
 in the Lombardo- Venetian Kingdom under Austrian rule. 
 In all probability no provinces of Italy, at any period, 
 were so carefully and conscientiously administered. The 
 Italians were not excluded from office ; there were no 
 religious differences; the system was, above all, untainted 
 by that scornfid prejudice agamst everything Native, en- 
 gendered by the premature authority and anti-social re- 
 lations of Anglo-Indian officialism. From 1815 to 1859 
 the Austrian administration of Northern Italy steadily 
 improved ; the government steadily deteriorated and be- 
 came more difficult, until latterly it became impossible, 
 except at the point of the bayonet. 
 
 It may be that great benefits would be conferred on 
 several disorderly and distracted States,- — Mexico, for ex- 
 ample, or Greece, — if they could be subjected for a few 
 years to the coercive management of Great Britain or 
 France. It may be disputed whether, since her indepen- 
 dence of Turkey, the progress of Greece has been delayed 
 by too much foreign interference or by too little. It may 
 be open to question whether Mexico wo aid not be likely 
 to settle down more quickly and decisively, after stagger- 
 ing and strugglmg through a period of confusion under 
 her own leaders, than after undergoing the process of 
 foreign discipline. These are matters of speculation ; but 
 it will hardly be denied or doubted that by extraordinary 
 sacrifices and exertions on the part of the more civilised 
 State, order might be unposed on the less advanced na- 
 tion, — life and property rendered secure, commerce pro- 
 tected and contracts enforced. But with the establishment 
 of a regular administration the difficulties of government 
 are sui-e to be redoubled. However enlightened and dis- 
 interested may have been the original intention, as the
 
 8 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 term of giiardiansliip is prolonged, its provocations and 
 temptations almost of necessity increase. The thankless 
 and burdensome natirre of the task, on the one side, the 
 loss and humiliation on the other, become every day more 
 and more apparent, and are more and more sensibly felt, 
 as the active work of organisation subsides into tranquil 
 management. The patient, restored to consciousness and 
 strength, expects to be relieved from restraint, requires 
 exercise and amusement, and wishes once more to dii-ect 
 his o^\^l affairs in his own way. Grateful at first, perhaps, 
 to his foreign doctors and nurses, he now resents their 
 control, and begins to doubt their motives. Those motives 
 have actually no tendency to improve, — they tend rather 
 to deteriorate as the curative process is pi'otracted. If 
 the practice has proved lucrative, the physician is averse 
 to lose it ; if it has been unprofitable, he requires some 
 compensatmg advantage. 
 
 We have had some experience of this treatment, and of 
 the patient's feelings towards us, on a small and unim- 
 portant scale, in the Ionian Islands, now happily off our 
 hands, just as their government, except by military force, 
 was ])ecoming impossible. On the great continent of In- 
 dia, — not aljle, or ready, or fit to Ije off our hands, but 
 not more vitally attached to us than the Ionian Islands, 
 — too long a course of the same treatment, in its most 
 depressing form, over an ever widening area, has gene- 
 rated the same feelings in the heart and braui of its vast 
 and various population, and threatens to render its go- 
 vernment incalculably more difficult. Divided and diffi- 
 dent as it may be, ignorant and indifferent as it may seem, 
 that vast popidation is not an inorganic or insensible mass. 
 
 The political diagnosis of India has been misunderstood, 
 Vjccause no distinction has been drawn between her con- 
 stitution and her daily functions, — between government 
 and administration. 
 
 The true government of every realm, great or small, 
 may be said to be carried on in two distinct spheres, that 
 of the Sword, or military force, and that of the Sceptre, 
 or civil authority. There can be no doubt or question of 
 our occupying the former sphere in India more fully and
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 9 
 
 firmly than ever. Against external and internal assailants 
 we are armed at all points. But military force can only 
 deal with open assailants, and cannot be everywhere pre- 
 sent and prepared. At a period of great national excite- 
 ment or distress, the efforts of secret conspu^acy and pas- 
 sive resistance, might cause enonnous loss, expense, and 
 terror, while military operations were yet aimless and 
 impracticable. Civil authority and social influence can 
 alone avail for the repression of imseen discontent and 
 growing disaftection. From the Viceroy downwards our 
 officials exercise no du"ect social influence, and no civil 
 authority — unsupported by British bayonets, — over those 
 leading and representative classes whose sentiments and 
 movements determine those of the population at large, 
 and whose disafiection and discontent must ever be ob- 
 structive and dangerous. Indh-ectly and intermediately, 
 no doubt, — especially m the Native States,— our views 
 are, to some extent, interpreted and our objects promoted, 
 by the persuasion and example of those whom the jDeople 
 respect and trust. 
 
 Although we are not as yet quite face to face with the 
 brutal appetites and wild fanaticism of all India, — al- 
 though many centres of conservatism and mtercommuni- 
 cation have been happily still preserved, — the general 
 tendency of our rule, excessively developed between 1848 
 and 1856, has been to weaken all civil authority apart 
 from ofiicialism, to destroy our friends and multiply our 
 mercenaries, to reject free co-operation and insist upon 
 monotonous conformity. And thus we have allowed the 
 Imperial Sceptre to be laid aside, and have come to rely 
 more and more exclusively upon the Imperial Sword. We 
 have decluied all assistance ; we have despised all profiered 
 services ; we have destroyed many little Sceptres, and 
 done our best to break every little Sword. 
 
 The Marquis Wellesley's pohcy of inducing Native 
 Princes to allow our troops, paid by tribute or cession of 
 territory, to be substituted for their own, was ingenious 
 and intelligible, at least as a policy of transition. Many 
 Native States then mamtained formidable forces, chiefly 
 disciphned and officered by Frenchmen, with whose na-
 
 10 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 tion vre were at ^yar. Under Lord Wellesley's treaties 
 some of these Native armies were considerably reduced 
 in numerical strength, and their foreign officers were dis- 
 eliarged ; wliile our brigades, placed in advantageous 
 positions, overlooked the whole field, and checked the few 
 remaining States not included in the Subsidiary system. 
 
 The victories and treaties of 1803 and 1805, completed 
 by the campaigns and negotiations of the Marquis of 
 Hastings between 1817 and 1820, made the British Go- 
 vernment, with one apparent exception, the only military 
 Power, and vu'tually if not formally the Imperial Head, 
 among all the States of India. The army of Scindia, the 
 Maharajah of Gwalior, the last shadow of a substantive 
 military Power in Hindostan, was dispersed in the one 
 day's campaign of 1843. 
 
 But Lord Dalhousie caricatured the policy of Lord 
 Wellesley when he applied the same set of terms to the 
 subordinate and submissive States of Sattara and Nag- 
 pore, spoke of them as " obstacles to safe communication 
 and combined military movement", and declared that their 
 annexation would "consolidate oui- military strength", and 
 " absorb separate military Powers".* They were not " mi- 
 litary Powers", and they were not "separate" from their 
 acknowledged superior. The military force kept up by 
 these and most other Native States, was so small as to 
 be nothing more than a demonstration of moral force in 
 favour of the Biitish Government, and always at its dis- 
 posal. During the momentous crisis of 1857 the Irregu- 
 lar Cavalry which the extinct States of Sattara and Nag- 
 pore were bound by treaty to furnish, t would have done 
 more, with the Princes themselves or some of their nearest 
 relatives at their head, to keep order in the Mahratta 
 country, Bundelcund, and the Central Provinces, and 
 genei'ally to prevent insurrection from spreading, than 
 could have been done by double the number of the finest 
 British troops. 
 
 • Sattara Ftipers, 1849, p. 83 ; Papers, Bajah of Bcrar, 1854, pp. 
 35, 36. 
 
 t Collection of Treaties, Calcutta, 18G4 (Longmans and Co.), vol. iii, 
 p. 124 ; vol. vi, p. 8.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 11 
 
 Even tlie hungry and ragged levies of Oude and Hyder- 
 abad, though large in numbers, — and larger still if their 
 muster-roll was to be believed, — were never dangerous or 
 menacing to our supremacy, and could have been easily 
 reduced, if we had undertaken in good earnest the ad- 
 ministrative reform of those States. Bnt it was the main 
 principle of Lord Dalhousie's policy that the friendly tui- 
 tion and reform of a dependent State was imprudent and 
 luiprofitable. There can be no doubt that he thought the 
 annexation of Oude, as he had said of the annexation of 
 Nagpore and Sattara, would " consolidate our military 
 strength", and " absorb a separate military Power".* 
 What was the result ? What is the actual consequence 
 after the lapse of thirteen years ? 
 
 There was not a single British soldier iii the Kingdom 
 of Oude from 1846 to 1856, when it was annexed, in- 
 cluding the period of our Sutlej and Punjaub wars, when 
 every man was urgently required. We have now in Oude 
 one Pegiment of Dragoons, live Batteries of Artillery and 
 four Battalions of Foot, at an annual cost of upwards of 
 £600,000, two-thirds of the net revenue of the Province. 
 If we add the annual charges of the Staff, the Native 
 troops (four Pegiments of Infantry and three of Cavaky), 
 and of the Pohce, we shall find nearly the whole revenue 
 swallowed up in paying for an armed force to keep the 
 country quiet. Before the annexation in 18.56 the unre- 
 formed Government of Oude, with an imbecile King at 
 its head, managed to preserve order, and play the part of 
 a good neighbour, with no assistance from us beyond one 
 Company of Native Artillery and three Sepoy Battalions. 
 This is the way we " have consolidated our military 
 strength", and "added to the resources of the public 
 treasury". 
 
 The Pajah of Nagpore paid us an annual tribute of 
 £80,000, one-fifth of the revenue of his dominions, and 
 mamtained a thousand of " the best description of Irregu- 
 lar Horse," " to serve with the British army in the field."*!* 
 
 * Sattara Papers, 1849, p, 83 ; Rajah of Berar, Papers, 1854, pp. 
 35, 36. 
 
 t Collection of Treaties, vol. iii, p. 124.
 
 12 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 Xow we have lost tlie tribute, and something more — for 
 the Nagpore Provinces, without anything being charged 
 for the troops quaii:ered mthin them, have never j^aid 
 their own expenses, — and we have lost the services of a 
 thousand Horse. But we have lost much more than the 
 tribute and the Horse, we have lost the moral authority 
 and intiuence of the Rajah and his Government. Wherever 
 a centre of conservative interests and political subordina- 
 tion, such as the Court of Nagpore, Sattara, Jhansi, or 
 Lucknow, is broken up, moral force is destroyed, and oiu* 
 own mihtaiy force must supply its place. 
 
 Nor can any one avoid joining issue on this point by 
 declaimmg on the alleged misrule of some of these States, 
 or the extravagance and self-indulgence of their Princes, 
 for which, it may be said, annexation was the only feasible 
 remedy. That plea was utterly erroneous then, — it would 
 be flagi'antly false now. It was not a plea upon which 
 Lord Dalhousie relied. He objected to the tuition and 
 reforai of Native States, not so much because it would 
 not be beneficial to them as because it would not, as he 
 supposed, be profitable to ourselves. One of his avowed 
 reasons for deciding to annex the Punjaub, after the re- 
 bellion of 1849, instead of continuing to give the promised 
 " aid and assistance in the administration of the Lahore 
 State, during the minority of the Maharajah Dliuleep 
 Sing,"* was that "we should have all the labour-, all the 
 anxiety, all the responsibility, which woidd attach to the 
 temtories if they were actually made our own ; icliile we 
 should not reap the corresponding benefits of increase of 
 revenue, and acknowledged possession. "t 
 
 The expected " increase of revenue" from the Punjaub, 
 which was bound Vjy treaty to pay, and was well able to 
 pay, an annual subsidy of £220,000 so long as our troops 
 remained in the country,:}: has been converted into a steady 
 drain of about two millions per annum, iindiminished to 
 this day, from the Lnperial resources of India. 
 
 In the same manner he recommended the annexation 
 
 * Collection of Treaties, Calcutta, vol. ii, p. 2G7. 
 
 t Pzi7ijauh Papers, 1849, p. <JG3. 
 
 I Collection of Treaties, vol. ii, p. 2G9.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 13 
 
 of the Kajpoot State of Kerowlee by refusing to recognise 
 an adoption, because we should otherwise " for many years 
 to come have to bear the labour of governing this State, 
 employing, always at inconvenience, a British officer for 
 the purpose," and at the end of the young Prince's minor- 
 ity have to " hand over the country with its revenue of 
 four lacks of rupees."* 
 
 And when in 1851 he was urged by General J, S. Fraser, 
 the able and accomplished Resident at Hyderabad, with 
 all the weight of many years' experience in that important 
 post, to undertake effectual measures for reforming the 
 administration of the Nizam's Dominions, Lord Dalhousie 
 recorded his entire disapproval of the Resident's policy. 
 " If," he said, " provision be made for carrying it actively 
 and practically into operation, all the toil of a laborious 
 task, and all its real responsibihty, must ever fall on the 
 British agent, by whom the Native ministry is controlled. 
 The agent, on his part, while he reaps no advantage from 
 his labours for his own State, must feel himself to be 
 without undivided authority, "t 
 
 General Su* William Sleeman, Resident at Lucknow 
 from 1849 to 1854, during those six years pressed upon the 
 Government of India his detailed plans for reforming the 
 administration of Oude, and pledged his great reputation 
 for the success of the experiment. He looked in vain to 
 Calcutta for sanction and support. His proposals were 
 coldly and silently received. Lord DaUiousie did not 
 want to reform Oude but to annex it, and pronounced 
 in one of his consultative Mmutes on the subject, that 
 if the British Government imdertook " the responsi- 
 bility, the labour, and the risk," of reconstructing and re- 
 forming a Native State, it ought, " after providing for the 
 pensioned dynasty, for the administration of the Province, 
 and for its progressive improvement," to be allowed to 
 appropriate the surplus revenue to Imperial purposes. :]: 
 There has been no surplus revenue from Oude up to the 
 present day. On the contrary, including the provision for 
 
 * Pfqjers, Keroivlee, 1855, p. 9. 
 t Papers, iHie Nizam, 1854, p. 38. 
 J Ott,de Papers, 1856, p. 190.
 
 14 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 *' the pensioned dynasty," and tlie military expenses, tlie 
 annual remittances from other treasuries to make up the 
 cost of om- administration cannot be less than £700,000. 
 Without makino- any charge against Oude for extraordi- 
 nary war expenditure during the Rebellion, what Lord 
 Dalhousie calked the " acknowledged possession" of this 
 Province from 185G to 18(59, must have consumed at least 
 eight milhons sterling, which the Government of India 
 has had to provide from the surplus revenues of Bengal 
 and Madras. 
 
 Both Lord Dalhousie and one of his most able and dis- 
 tinguished Councillors, Sir John Peter Grant,* did inci- 
 dentally, and as an additional argument, maintain the 
 uselessness of temporary instruction and management, and 
 set do^^^l badly governed Native States as " mcorrigible." 
 Yet the exam})les they adduced, if they had been carefully 
 stuched, would have been seen to be either inconclusive or 
 adverse to their views. Even in 1855 there were ample 
 data in the hands of Lord Dalhousie's Government to 
 prove that all the most recent efforts at reforming Native 
 States had succeeded, while the contemporary annexations 
 had failed to produce any profit. Scinde and the Punjaub 
 between them had upset every calculation, and brought 
 disorder and disaster into the finances of India. " We 
 were not prepared," the Court of Directors wrote in 1852, 
 *' to find that the annexation of Sattara would prove a 
 drain on the general revenues of India." 
 
 On the other hand, wherever British instruction had 
 been allowed a fair trial it had invariably wrought a marked 
 improvement in the administration of Native States, The 
 State of Nagpore, though treated with great neglect and 
 indifference between 1820, when British management 
 ceased, and 1854, when it was annexed, t never lost the 
 Vjenefit of the itiles and habits instituted by Sir Kichard 
 Jenkins, so that during twenty-five years of purely Native 
 administration, under an indolent and dissolute Bajah, our 
 active and open interference was not once required, to 
 
 • Now Governor of Jamaica. 
 
 + iSee the opinions expressed by Mr.- Manscl, the last llesident at 
 Nacrpore, Papers, Ttnjah of Berar, 18-54, p. 17.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 15 
 
 check oppression, to keep the peace, or to restore order. 
 In 1847 Lord Hardinge, warning the King of Oude that 
 liis continued misrule woidd compel the Government of 
 India to assume the temporary management of his country, 
 held up the case of Nagpore before him at once as an ex- 
 ample and an encouragement : — 
 
 " The Nagpore State, after having been restored to order by 
 a British administration of the land revenue, is now carried on 
 under Native management, with due regard to the rights of the 
 Prince and the contentment of the people/^* 
 
 Even in his very unfavourable report, "written after the 
 Rajah's death, Mr. Mansel, the last Resident at Nagpore, 
 bore testimony to the permanent residts of previous British 
 instruction : — 
 
 " The revenue system of fixed leases left behind by Sir Richard 
 Jenkins has, on the other hand, preserved the finances of the 
 State and the agricultural interest from being sacrificed wholly 
 to reckless folly or temporary expedients to raise funds. ^^f 
 
 And in a despatch dated the 10th of August 1868, Sir 
 Richard Temple, then Resident at Hyderabad, who had 
 recently been Commissioner of the Nagpore Provinces, 
 wrote as follows : — 
 
 " I have on the whole a favourable opinion of the administra- 
 tion of the Nagpore country by the Mahratta Sovereigns of the 
 Bhonsla House. There were many excellent points about their 
 rule; but some of these were owing to the care of British officers, 
 such as Sir Richard Jenkins, Colonel Wilkinson, and others." J 
 
 Some reforms in the administration of the Nizam's 
 Dominions, commenced by Sir Charles Metcalfe as Resi- 
 dent in Hyderabad in 1821, and carried out by English 
 Superintendents under his guidance, were quite successful; 
 but, unfortunately, on the very first application of the 
 youthfid Sovereign, Nasir-ood-Dowla, who came to the 
 throne in 1829, the wholesome supervision of the Resident 
 and his assistants was discontinued, and the beneficial 
 results of eight years' labour were almost entu'ely lost. 
 
 Lord Dalhousie adduced the two experiments of Hyder- 
 
 * Oade Tapers, 1858, p. 63, 64. 
 
 t Papers, Rajah of Berar, 1854, p. 16. 
 
 I Papers^ British and Native Systems, 1868, p. 69.
 
 16 (U'R GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE, 
 
 abad under Sir Charles Metcalfe, and of Nagpore under 
 Sir Richard Jenkins, as instances of the total failure of 
 temporary management,* whereas, if properly examined, 
 they are seen to be instances of signal success, marred 
 only by the premature relaxation and subsequent neglect, 
 for Avhich our Government was solely responsible. 
 
 British instruction had been eminently successful in 
 Sattara, — so much so that, while arguing against the re- 
 cognition of the second Ilajah's adopted son, Lord Dalhousie 
 admitted " the excellence" of the deceased Prince's " ad- 
 ministration," declarmg it to have been " conspicuous for 
 wisdom and mildness," "f* and only expressing a doubt 
 whether this was not attributable rather to " the personal 
 qualities of the Ptajah" than to "the nature of the institu- 
 tions of the State/' But the State had been equally well 
 governed by the first Pajah, whose rule was declared by 
 the Court of Directors to be " a model to all Native 
 Princes ;"+ and a great part of the credit which on this 
 occasion Lord Dalhousie ascribed to a Hindoo Puler, was 
 certainly due to the careful tuition and control of Captain 
 Grant Duff, the first Pesident at Sattara, and to the in- 
 stitutions which he established. 
 
 Althouorh in Lord Dalhousie's time the evidence from 
 
 O 
 
 very recent experience ought to have been enough to 
 demonstrate the financial failure of territorial extension 
 and the practicability of reforming Native States, that 
 evidence has become more clear and more abundant, in a 
 very remarkable degree, during the last twelve years. 
 Tlio thriving condition and orderly administration of the 
 important States of Gwalior under the Maharajah Jyajee 
 Rao Scindia, and of Indore under the Maharajah Tookajee 
 Rao Holkar, — both having been managed by British 
 officei-s during the minority of those Princes, — of Travan- 
 core, the principal State under the Madras Government, 
 and Kolapore, the chief Mahratta Principality witliin the 
 Bomljay Pi-esidency, — both taken in hand at different 
 periods in the midst of disorder and revolt, and reformed 
 by British instruction and supervision, — have from various 
 
 * Oude Papers, 1856, p. 186-7. 
 
 t Sattara Papers, 1840, p. 82. X Ibid., 1843, p. 1268.
 
 OUR GIIEAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 17 
 
 causes become the subject of public notoriety with in the 
 last few years. In all these inst^mces the good work was 
 carried on and completed without the States being over- 
 run and their revenues devoured by those costly establish- 
 ments under highly salaried Englisli officers, whose vested 
 interests in Mysore almost procured the annexation of that 
 Principality, and still impede its straightforward reorgan- 
 isation as a self-acting Native State. 
 
 A Parliamentary Return of 1867 thus describes the 
 results of British instruction and management in one of 
 the States abovementioned, Kolapore. 
 
 '^In the course of tlie year, the Governor of Bombay made a 
 tour through the Southern Mahratta country, and at Kolapore he 
 congratulated the Rajah in having proved himself worthy, after 
 a long probation, to assume the direct government of his terri- 
 tories. Every department of the State was found to be well ad- 
 ministered by his Highness in person, and there was every visible 
 mark of justice being properly administered, and of the people 
 being well governed, prosperous, and contented.^'* 
 
 An examination of the series of Reports of the Centi^al 
 India Political Agency horn. 1865-6 to 1867-8 suggests for- 
 cibly that there are some depths m the social and adminis- 
 trative problems of Native States, some secrets in the state- 
 craft of Native Sovereigns, which theu' appointed guides 
 and teachers, — conscientious, energetic, and well-informed 
 as they are,^ — ^have failed to fathom. A little more tolerance, 
 a little more sympathy, a little more humility, might open 
 those secrets and make those depths transparent. As it is, 
 our Political Agents appear sometimes, and avow them selves 
 to be, quite puzzled and bewildered to account for the fact 
 that a system so irregular and so rude, when compared with 
 ours, as that of a tolerably governed Native State, can 
 work so well on the whole, and give occasion to so little 
 complaint or perceptible discontent. In his Report dated 
 the 1st of August, 1866, Colonel R. J. Meade, Agent to 
 the Governor General for Central India, describes the 
 administration of Indore by the Maharajah Holkar as 
 " arbitrary and despotical in the fullest Eastern sense" — • 
 
 * Moral and Material Progress, 1855-6, 1867, p. 43. 
 

 
 18 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 words wliich, unintentionally no doubt, suggest the 
 bastinado and the bow-string. Yet, he continues, 
 
 "The marvel is that, under such a system, tlie administration of 
 the State is carried on as well as is the case ; and that it is so is 
 mainly, in my opinion, due to the fact that the Chief, when roused, 
 acts with undoubted energy ; that he readily hears and inquires 
 into complaints of corruption or oppression against his officials, 
 and, when sucli are proved to his satisfaction, punishes the accused 
 parties with the utmost severity. The dread thereby inspired 
 amongst this class doubtless prevents the amount of aggravated 
 mismanagement that would otherwise naturally occur ; and to it 
 may also, probably be ascribed the comparatively greater admi- 
 nistrative activity of the District Officials of this State; while the 
 Chief's orders to his officers are, as a rule, unquestionably 
 promptly attended to." 
 
 Colonel Meade "regrets that the system m this State" is 
 not "more in harmony with the known views of the British 
 Government ;" but, he adds, " though the State is not 
 governed in the Hberal and enlightened spirit that might 
 perhaps reasonably be expected from a Kuler who was 
 brouglit up mider British guardianship, and had the 
 advantage of receiving an English education, its adminis- 
 tration is, on the whole, better supervised and conducted 
 than that of most of the Native Chiefships with which I 
 am acquainted." 
 
 Thus, from what has been already cited, we may, I 
 think, conclude that the State of Indore and the sulyects 
 of Holkar have derived great benefit, if not all "that 
 might, perhaps, reasonably be expected," from the "British 
 guardianship" and " English education" enjoyed by their 
 Prince in his youtli. The following extracts from the 
 same Beport tend to confirm that conclusion : — 
 
 '* ^laharaja Holkar contributes handsomely towards the Malwa 
 Dispensaries, and the Charitable liospitals at the city of Indore 
 and the Kesidency, which are maintained by his annual grant, 
 and some other local subscriptions, on a very liberal and creditible 
 scale, are of invaluable benefit to the poor of the town and neigh- 
 bourhood."* 
 
 In another part of the same Beport the Agent laments 
 that so " few of the Native Bulers liave any just concep- 
 
 * Central India Agevcy Report, 186-5-6, Calcutta, 1867, p. 20, 21.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 19 
 
 tion of the advantages of education," while " some of them 
 even regard its progress among their people as undesirable 
 and objectionable/' but 
 
 " The Maharajas of Gwalior and Indore both take an interest 
 in this question ; and the Madrissas" (colleges) " at their respec- 
 tive capitals are creditably maintained and well attended. That 
 at Indore has turned out several pupils with an unusually good 
 knowledge of English, and otherwise well educated, some of 
 whom occupy important posts in the service of the State. ^' 
 
 The College at Indore he describes as " a very creditable 
 institution," and believes ''it wiU improve imder the 
 direction of a new Master from the Poona College, who 
 has lately jomed it."* 
 
 Among the leading events of the year the Political 
 Agent refers to the approaching termhiation of a new 
 land settlement for a term of twenty-one years through- 
 out the Indore territories, in which the Maharajah had 
 been " engaged for the last eighteen months," and he fears 
 that " there is a good deal of dissatisfaction amongst the 
 people at the advanced rates to be imposed under this new 
 settlement," — " these rates bemg arbitrarily fixed accord- 
 ing to the class of the land, and the cultivators having ap- 
 parently little option allowed them as to their acceptance of 
 them or not."']' In the Report of the next year, however, 
 the Agent candidly admits that further mformation had 
 led him to modify the unfavourable oj^inion he had at first 
 conceived with respect to the new settlement. 
 
 " His Highness was good enough some time ago to explain to 
 me in detail the basis on which he is endeavoui-ing to carry it out, 
 and the reasons which he believed had caused it to be view^ed with 
 dissatisfaction ; and in illustration of these points he went over 
 with me the settlement papers of some three or four villages, 
 which were drawn up most clearly and creditably, and which cer- 
 tainly quite bore out his statements." J 
 
 The gist of the Maharajah's explanation was that the 
 new settlement was based on a careful Survey of each 
 village, which deprived many land-holders as well as the 
 local officials of the illicit profits they had been derivmg 
 
 * Central India Eeport, 1865-6, p. 8. f IhicL, p. 21. 
 
 X Ibid., 1866-7 (Calcutta, 1868), p. 7. 
 
 C 2
 
 20 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 from iinassessed land, now bought under assessment ; and 
 that these iiiHucntial persons had done their best to alarm 
 the cultivators and to bring the measure into popular dis- 
 credit. This is only what has notoriously occurred under 
 our own Survey and Settlement operations in every part 
 of India. The Agent adds : — 
 
 " Maharajah Holkar lias shown much readiness to hear and 
 discuss personally with the Zemindars the representations urged 
 on this subject, and His Highness has, in some cases, been in- 
 duced thereby to authorise slight concessions being made to dis- 
 satisfied parties."* 
 
 Another plea for an enhanced assessment is mentioned 
 by the PoUtical Agent very slightingly, as if it were quite 
 insufficient, — "the high prices of all agricultural produce;" 
 vet the fact is undoubted, has raised wajxes throuofhout 
 India, increased the profits of the agricultural classes, and 
 uicreased the expenses of the public service. In all the 
 recent settlements in the Bombay Presidency and in 
 Mysore, the rise in prices has been taken as one element 
 in calculating the new rates to be assessed. A Bombay 
 paper just received states that " thirty years ago unhusked 
 rice was sold at 12 to 13 rupees per khandi"t (500 lbs.) "in 
 the Concan : about ten years later the price rose to from 
 18 to 20 rupees ; and during the last ten years it has been 
 oscillating between 30 and 40 rupees.":}: 
 
 We learn from a recently printed Blue-Book that the 
 gross revenue of the Nizam's Territories had risen from 
 £1,103,850 in 18G1-G2 to £1,601,846 in 1865-66, about 
 37 ])er cent, in five years ; and the increase is chiefly 
 accounted for by " the great rise in prices," " allowing the 
 cultivators to command nuicli higher rates for their pro- 
 duce." The increase in the land revenue is said to be " by 
 no means proportionate to the increased means of the tax- 
 payer. "§ 
 
 Two subsequent short paiiigrjiphs in the Central India 
 Report for 1866-7 seem to indicate a judicious and liberal 
 
 * Central Jndln, Report, 18G0-7, p. 7. 
 
 t Often f-allod candij. 
 
 X If'i'fJn Ui'former, Bombay, December 4tli, J 800. 
 
 § Moral and Material Progress of India in 1867-8, 1869, p. 114-15.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 21 
 
 expenditm^e to some extent in departments hitherto 
 neglected by too many Native Princes. 
 
 "Three new schools have been established by the State durinj^ 
 the past year, one, a female school, at ludore, which is attended 
 by forty-three girls." 
 
 '' The water-works and aqueduct for supplying the city of In- 
 dore were completed and opened during the past year."* 
 
 In the Central India Report for 1867-8 we are told that 
 the Kajah of the small State of Dhar, which was under 
 British management dnring the Prince's minority, after 
 its narrow escape from extinction, •]" " takes much interest 
 in his schools, which he visits and examines every week," 
 also that the financial condition of the State is sound and 
 satisfactory," and that "the Chief has adopted the essential 
 points of the British Criminal and Civil Procedure Codes 
 as the guide for all the Courts in his State, and exhibits 
 an intelligent interest in their working. "J 
 
 It was of this little Principality that a most mischievous 
 misleader of public opinion, the Calcutta correspondent of 
 the Times, who for several years, both in that capacity 
 and in his other character as Editor of the Friend of 
 India, has kept up an incessant fire of slander and insult 
 upon Native Prmces and their administration, wrote in a 
 letter dated the 10th of March, 1866, that "Lord Stanley's 
 persistence in causing the restoration of Dhar has reduced 
 that State' to " a miserable condition.''^ 
 
 Sometimes, however, facts of a very different complexion, 
 when officially attested, will find their way even into the 
 Friend of India. An article published m January, 1870, 
 gives some interestmg mformation from the recently 
 printed Administration Beport of the Bohilla State of 
 Bampore, containing a dense pojDulation of nearly half a 
 million, on an area of 608,784 acres, of which, it is said, 
 "the cultivation is of a higher order than in any of the 
 adjoining British districts." 
 
 * Central India Report, 18GG-7, p. 7. 
 
 t See D]uxr not Restored, by John Dickinson (King', Parliament 
 Street), 1864. 
 
 + Befort, 1867-8 (Calcutta, 1868), p. 18. 
 
 § See Appendix C, "The Little State of Dluir".
 
 22 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 "The revenue last year was 13,00,380 Ks. (£130,038), and the 
 expenditure 11,22,858 Es. (£112,285), leaving a comfortable 
 little surplus." "The Courts are modelled on the British system, 
 an ultimate appeal lying in every case to the Nawab." " The 
 Ram]iore jail is built on the plan of the Benares prison, and the 
 convicts are employed in the manufacture of carpets." " Ram- 
 ]iore has schools of Arabic, Persian, and English, to which stu- 
 dents from Cabul, Kandahar, and even Bokhara resort for the 
 study of i\lahommedan divinity and law. It is pleasant to find 
 female education thriving under the shadow of such severely or- 
 thodox institutions." 
 
 We are fiu-tlier informed that " the State has a little 
 army 2,G85 strong, which costs 271, G92 Es. (£27,169) a 
 year," and the writer admits that "a 'crack' district officer 
 would not be ashamed of the Nawab's management."* 
 
 Sir Donald Macleod, the present Lieutenant-Governor 
 of the Punjaub, reportmg on his tour of inspection in 18G6 
 through the Native States of Puttiala, Nabha, Malair- 
 Kotla and Kapoorthulla, writes as follows : — 
 
 " Notwithstanding the existence in some of these States of 
 court intrigues and factions prejudicial to good government, his 
 Honour was glad to perceive in most of them signs of substantial 
 progress. In all of them an attempt has been made to assimilate 
 the administrative sj^stem in some degree to that of the British 
 Government. Begular settlements of land revenue have been in- 
 troduced ; the Indian Penal Code is adopted as the basis of their 
 criminal law ; and in most of them a system of Civil Procedure 
 has been prescribed, more or less borrowed from the Punjaub 
 Civil Code ; while in all the capitals, and especially in those of 
 Puttiala and Malair Kotla, are excellent schools, the scholars of 
 which would not do discredit to the best schools of the adjoining 
 districts of British territory."t 
 
 The same high authority, in a letter dated .5th Sej^tem- 
 ber, 1867, again refers in the following terms to this 
 brotherhood of Sikli Chieftains : — 
 
 " The principal Cis-Sutlej Chiefs and the Rajah of Kapoor- 
 thulla have made considerable progress of late years towards the 
 adoption of more enlightened principles of government," J 
 
 A very favourable account of the same region is given by 
 
 * Extracted from the Homeward Mall of February 5tli, 1870. 
 
 t Punjouh n^'porf, 18GG-7 (printed at Lahore), paragraph 377, p. 123. 
 
 X Papers, Brllisk and Native Adininistraiion, 18G8, p. Il3.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 23 
 
 Sir Bichard Temple, now a member of the Viceroy's 
 Council, who served in the Punjauh for many years with 
 great distinction, in a despatch dated the 1 Gth of August, 
 1867, written when he was Eesident at Hyderabad. 
 
 "From 1854 to 1860 I had particular knowledge of the pro- 
 tected Sikh States, Cis Sutlej. These are intertwined and interlaced 
 amongst British districts supposed to be administered in our very 
 best method." "The villages of the Puttiala and Jheend States es- 
 pecially were among the finest and happiest I have ever known, and 
 seemed to be on a par with the choicest pieces of British territory.* 
 
 Major C F. Prescott, a Commissioner of Survey and 
 Settlement, replying to the circular from the Government 
 of India dated the 1st of July, 1867, regarding the general 
 feeling of the Natives towards British rule, naturally up- 
 holds the great advantages of our administration, magni- 
 fying especially his own ofEce. And yet in the following 
 extract he bears testimony to the readiness of Native Bulers 
 to appropriate those parts of our administrative system 
 that they see to be practicable and profitable, and that 
 they know to be popular. 
 
 " The Survey settlement of this Presidency has conferred on 
 the ryots a vast property in land, and given them a security of 
 tenure they know they never would have obtained under Native 
 rule. They, therefore, to a man, love our Raj ; and it is a sig- 
 nificant fact that, in all the Gaekwar's districts adjoining our ter- 
 ritory, a Revenue Survey on our principle has been introduced, 
 and is in progress, his Highness being thoroughly convinced of 
 the prosperity and happiness of our ryots under that system, and 
 fearino- that a migfration of his cultivators on a large scale into 
 British districts is imminent."t 
 
 Sir Richard Temple, in the despatch already quoted, 
 makes the foUowmg remark on the Native State last 
 mentioned : — 
 
 "In 1864 I passed through theBaroda territory (the Gaekwar's 
 Dominions) ; certainly that district, the valley of the Mhye, is in 
 external prosperity hardly surpassed by any British district, — 
 any that I have ever seen at least.^^J 
 
 The Report on the administration of Baroda for the year 
 1867, by Colonel J. T. Barr,is dated in March, 1868. In 
 
 * Papers, British and Native Administration, 1868, p. 09. 
 t Ihid., p. 66. X Ihid., p. 69.
 
 24 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 tlie most unfavourable passage I can find in it, the Resi- 
 dent says lie has occasionally received reports of " mis- 
 management on the part of the Durbar ottieials, causing 
 loss of revenue, and sometimes injustice to portions of the 
 population, not, however, amounting to open tyranny or 
 opjn'ession. These reports," he continues, "are promptly 
 connnunicated to the Durbar at Baroda, and have, as a 
 rule, been as promptly attended to, and the grievances 
 brought to light redressed." Referring to some admmis- 
 trative reform introduced by his predecessor's influence, 
 and which, for some time, it requu^ed a little watchfulness 
 to maintam, he says, " there will be no resistance to its 
 continuance, for Native States are never prone to alter 
 arrangements they have become used to." The recently 
 appointed Minister he describes as "a man of good cha- 
 racter, highly esteemed by the Gaekwar," and under his 
 ride " the State continues to be managed generally to suit 
 our views." 
 
 He then refers to the circular from the Government of 
 India " on the comparative merits of British and Native 
 rule," intended by Sir John Lawrence to crush Lord Cran- 
 bome under what he termed " a concentration of statistics 
 from different parts of India."* 
 
 As in duty bound, and as might fairly be expected, the 
 Resident declares that " the superiority of the British 
 system of rule over that of the Gaekwar, or any other 
 purely Native rule I have known, is in my opinion clear, 
 and not to be doubted ; and yet," he adds, " I believe 
 that the people of India do find something in the Courts 
 of Native Princes which compensates for the better ad- 
 ministration under our own immediate cfovernment." Pro- 
 
 1111 • 
 
 bably, he suggests, " they find favour from the careers 
 whicli they open out to Natives of the middle and higher 
 classes, "f 
 
 Quite lately the news from Bombay has told us of the 
 Gaekwar having engaged in a movement for the extinc- 
 tion of some of the social abuses arising from caste and 
 custom, in wliich direction the exertions of a liberal Prince 
 
 * Papers, Britixh and Native Administratiov , p. 4. 
 t Homeward Mail, October 26th, 1868.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 25 
 
 are certain to be far more effective than any conceivable 
 amoimt of Britisli legislation or missionary preaching. 
 The subjects that he has taken up are widow-marriage, the 
 marriage of infants, and the permission of foreign travel 
 without loss of caste. The manner in which his Highness 
 is givuig his aid to the movement, by associating himself and 
 co-operating with the highly educated Natives of Bombay, 
 and bringing them into pubhc controversy with the learned 
 Brahmins of his own Court, affords the best promise of a 
 decisive result on the public opinion of Western India.* 
 
 Even in the Dominions of the Nizam, the largest exist- 
 ing Native State, — formerly a byword for misrule, and in 
 which Lord Dalhousie, who dechned to attempt its reform, 
 could anticipate nothing but such " a crash " as would 
 compel the British Government to " adopt strong mea- 
 sures," and the Nizam to submit to "the fate which would 
 then have overtaken him,"'|' — great progress has been 
 made under the enlightened ministry of the Nawab Salar 
 Jung. Sir Richard Temple, when Resident at Hyderabad 
 in 1867, wrote as follows in the despatch that we have 
 ah'eady quoted : — 
 
 " In the Deccan, of late years, the constitution^ system, and 
 principles of the Nizam^s civil government are really excellent ; 
 this much is certain. That the result must be more or less bene- 
 ficial to the country is hardly to be doubted. Whether full effect 
 is given to the intentions of His Highness's Government, through- 
 out the Deccan, I cannot yet say ; but independent testimony is 
 constantly reaching me to the effect of great improvement being 
 pei'ceptible."J 
 
 In the annual Return of Moral and Material Progr^ess 
 for 1867-8, compiled at the India Office from the latest in- 
 formation, we are told that 
 
 " The vigoi'ous efibrts made towards reform have now placed 
 the financial credit of the Nizam's Government on a satisfactory 
 footing ; it enjoys the confidence of the monied class, and it can 
 now raise money at very modei-ate rates of interest^ instead of the 
 usurious charges of former days."§ 
 
 With recrard to the assessment of land-revenue it is said 
 
 o 
 
 * Appendix D. t Papers, the Nizam, 1854, p. 40. 
 
 J Papers, British and Native Administration, p. 69. 
 § Moral and Material Proyress, 1867-8, p. 113.
 
 26 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 that " pains have been taken more and more to render 
 the annual settlements equitable and moderate ;" and that 
 " all classes, high and low, connected with land or with 
 tmde, conthnie to flourish."* 
 
 The judicial institutions are undergoing the process of 
 being entirely though gradually remodelled, and the fol- 
 lowing reference is made to the new class of regularly ap- 
 pointed Magistrates and Judges, who will in time replace 
 throughout the country the hereditary and land-holding 
 jurisdictions which are still maintained in the Sovereign's 
 domains and on some great nobles' estates. 
 
 " All these oflBcers are well educated^ though all have not done 
 well ; several had originally received a training in one or other of 
 the British Provinces. Many discharged their duties with more 
 or less of efficiency ; and some have by their firmness and up- 
 rightness brought credit to their department.^^f 
 
 The results of the restitution to the Nizam, under the 
 Treaty of 18G0, of two of the Districts assigned to British 
 management by Lord DaUiousie's Treaty of 1853, have 
 been most encouraging, both by the continued good man- 
 agement of the retransferred Districts, and in the stimulus 
 and example thereby given to the general progress of the 
 coimtry. Complete restitution, conditional on the intro- 
 duction of every essential reform into every Province, 
 and into every department of the administration, might 
 be made the means and occasion of regenerating the 
 Nizam's Government. 
 
 One of the most satisfactoiy symptoms in the process 
 of improvement now observable in so many Native States, 
 is that the Sovereigns in general, even those who have 
 themselves received no English education, are willing 
 enough to engage the services of Natives brought up at 
 our Colleges, and trained in our administrative system. 
 Sir Madava Kao, K.C.S.I., the Brahmin Minister of Tra- 
 vancore, formerly tutor to the Maharajah and his brother, 
 the First Prince, Vjoth of them accomplished English 
 scholars, — is a graduate of the Madras University. The 
 State of Jeypore, the most populous and the richest in 
 
 * Moral and Material Progress, p. 114. 
 t J bid., 18G'J, p. 117.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 27 
 
 Rajpootana, owes much of the advance it lias made 
 towards a system of law and order, to the labours of the 
 late Pundit Sheodeen, a graduate of Calcutta, who was 
 chosen by Maharajah Ram Singh, the present intelligent 
 Kuler, first to be his Private Secretary, and afterwards to 
 be his Prime Minister. 
 
 The Indian papers of September, 1869, announce that 
 the Rajah of Bikaneer, another Rajpoot State, has ap- 
 pointed Pundit Manphool, C.S.I., late Extra Assistant 
 Commissioner under the Punjaub Government, to be his 
 Dewan or Chief Minister. 
 
 We have already remarked that several of the judicial 
 officers in the Nizam's Dominions had originally received 
 a training in one or other of the British Provinces. The 
 same may be said of some recently appointed officials in 
 the revenue and executive departments under the same 
 Government. 
 
 It has also been brought to our notice in quotations 
 from the Political Agent's Reports, that several pupils 
 from the Indore College, " with an unusually good know- 
 ledge of English, and otherwise well educated," now 
 " occupy important posts in the service of the Maha- 
 rajah Holkar."* The present Governor of Bombay, Sir 
 Se3niiour Fitzgerald, speaking as Chancellor of the Uni- 
 versity on the 12th of January, 1869, mentioned as "a 
 very great proof of the growing influence of the University, 
 that among those who had lately matriculated two came 
 from Indore, from the Madrissa of his Highness the 
 Maharajah Holkar. "f The local papers also explain that 
 these students — two only having successfully passed the 
 matriculation out of four sent from Indore, — are enthely 
 supported at the Maharajah's expense durmg the prosecu- 
 tion of their studies for a degree. 
 
 And in describing the Convocation of the present year, 
 a Bombay daily paper mentions as a fact very "significant 
 of the wide range of the University's influence, that the 
 first award of Mr. EUis's prize of books goes to a youth 
 from the Madrissa of his Highness the Maharajah Holkar 
 at Indore. "+ 
 
 * Ante, p. 10. t Times of India, 14th Jan., 1869. 
 
 + Ibid., 13th Jan., 1870.
 
 2S OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 In 1SG7 his Higliness the Eao of Kutch, himself a good 
 English scholar, acting, it is said, under the advice and in- 
 liuence of the late Anundashram Swamy, the celebrated 
 "Political Sunyassee,'* appointed a Mussulman gentleman, 
 Kazee Shahah-ood-deen Ibrahim, to be his Dewan or Chief 
 Minister. Kazee Shahab-ood-deen had pursued his studies 
 before any University degrees were confeiTed in India, at 
 the College and at the School of Engineering at Poona, 
 and subsequently rose m the service of the Bombay Go- 
 vernment to be Deputy Collector and Magistrate of Surat. 
 Before mentioning the reforms introduced under his ad- 
 mmistration, it ought to be observed that Kutch has for 
 many years borne the credit of being fairly and benevo- 
 lently ruled. The Bombay Administration Report for 
 1860-1 thus refers to the reign of the present Rao's father, 
 during whose minority, from 1819 to 1834, the State was 
 under a Begency controlled by the British Political Agent. 
 
 " The first event whicli requires notice in connection with the 
 affairs of the States and Principalities in Guzerat under the poli- 
 tical supei'\asion of this Government, is the death of his Highness 
 the Rao Desuljee of Kutch, which occurred at the close of July 
 1860, after a singularly enlightened and prosperous reign of 
 twenty-six years. In his Highness the ]3ritish Government lost 
 a faithful and esteemed Ally, and the people of Kutch a wise and 
 beneficent Ruler." 
 
 The following remarks on Kutch occur in the Bombay 
 Report for 1866-7:— 
 
 "The revenue administration has been successful, and educa- 
 tion has progressed. The schools at Anjar and in other places 
 were well attended during the year and have been favourably re- 
 ported on by the Political Agent. A second Girls' School is to 
 be opened almost immediately at Bhooj." 
 
 We read in the Report for 1867-68 : — 
 
 "A marked improvement has taken place in the administration 
 of the Province of Kutch since the office of Dewan has been as- 
 sumed by Mr. Shahab-ood-deen, lately Deputy Collector and Ma- 
 gistrate of Surat. '^ 
 
 And after noticing several reforms effected during the 
 year, such as the separation of judicial from revenue busi- 
 ness, the establLshment of a dispensary, the construction 
 
 * Appendix E.
 
 OUR CHEAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 29 
 
 ot roads and works of irrigation, the Report goes on to 
 
 say, 
 
 " His Highness the Rao continues to evince a warm interest in 
 education. He has personally examined the schools at Bhooj and 
 Mandavee, and distributed prizes. Tlie Girls' School established 
 by him at his capital is attended by fifty girls of different ages ; 
 the Mandavee school by about forty girls. His Highness has also 
 employed a teacher solely for his young daughter, and has thus 
 displayed to the Chiefs of the Province his entire emancipation 
 from the popular prejudice against female education." 
 
 Besides the Dewan, his Deputy, Moorleedhur Geerd- 
 hur, the head of revenue affairs, Bhojlall PranvulluLh 
 Dass, and some recently appointed judicial officers, have 
 received a good English education, and some of them 
 underwent their official trainino- in the service of our 
 Government. 
 
 Yet with all this evidence of States reformed and re- 
 forming,- — with and without British instruction as the first 
 stage, — before theu^ eyes and recorded in their archives, 
 the Government of Sir John Lawrence at Calcutta, and 
 the majority of the Secretary of State's Council in London, 
 wrote m 1865 and 18GG, when striving to obtain the an- 
 nexation of Mysore, as if the reform of a Native State 
 were a hopeless task, and as if the restoration of a Native 
 State to its own Buler, after a period of British manage- 
 ment, would be an unheard of and unprecedented measure. 
 Although they ought to have known, and had the means 
 of kno^ving, that several States — Travancore, for instance, 
 under the Madras Government, and Kolapore, under tliat 
 of Bombay, — had been brought from anarchy to good 
 order by Native agency, superintended by only two or 
 three British officers, the authorities at Calcutta as- 
 sumed the necessity of quartering a full complement of 
 English gentlemen in every department on Mysore, and 
 protested that any less " radical alternative" would have 
 been " futile and pernicious,"* They declared in a de- 
 spatch of May 5th, 1865, that — 
 
 " When once his^^ (the Rajah's) '^mismanagement had brought 
 things to that pass, that rebellion had to be put down by the 
 
 i- 
 
 Mysore Fapers, ISflG, p. 59.
 
 30 OUE GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 marcli of British troopSj it admitted of no question, but that any 
 attempt to rule the country through the Maharojah and his func- 
 ti(,>uanes, b}' the issue of regulations and ordinances entrusted to 
 tliem for execution, would have been regarded by an exasperated 
 and revolted people as a piece of cruel mockery/^* 
 
 This line phrase of " an exasperated and revolted people," 
 is one example of how, in their anxiety to retain so valu- 
 alile a field of patronage, — for this, however disguised even 
 from themselves, was at the bottom of all their objections, — 
 the resources of rhetoric were stretched in Calcutta de- 
 spatches and London Minutes very near the confines both 
 of the suj^jn'essio veri and the suggestio falsi. In alluding 
 to the Rajah's misrule and to the petty revolt in part of 
 his territories, the original grossly exaggerated accounts 
 are taken as accurate narrations, and no hint is given of 
 new light thrown on the facts by subsequent careful in- 
 quiiy. The Mysore rebellion of 1830 was declared by the 
 Special Commissioners, in their Report of 12th December, 
 1833, to have been " partly attributable to causes which 
 were beyond the control of the Rajah's administration," 
 especially " to the withdrawal of the advice of the British 
 Resident," who " was prohibited by his instructions not 
 only from the public reception of complamts from the sub- 
 jects of Mysore, but from the avowed support of the cause 
 of those whose grievances might become known to him." 
 The insurrection was by no means general. It broke out in 
 the Province of Nuggiu', the conquest of which by Hyder Ali 
 was a circumstance " unfavourable to the easy maintenance 
 of the Rajah's authority." It was not a popular rising 
 caused by intolerable tyranny, but was chiefly the work 
 of an ambitious pretender to a large feudal estate, aided 
 by insurgents who flocked to the rebel standard from the 
 British Province of Canara, and by the intrigues of an in- 
 fluential Brahmin family at Mysore, whose oppressive and 
 corrupt practices were then under investigation, and who 
 ho])ed to evade inquiry amid the turmoil of an insurrection. 
 
 The Commissioners say expressly : — 
 
 " The fact of the assembling of the ryots and their complaining 
 that the taxes were too burdensome to be borne, of itself really 
 
 * MijKore Papp.rs, 18GG, p. 50.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 31 
 
 proves little or nothing. At the very same time, the Eyots as- 
 sembled in the same manner, and made similar complaints in the 
 Province of Canara, where we understand the public demands 
 have since been found, on full inquiry, to be decidedly moderate. 
 We also understand, and it is a curious coincidence, that those 
 proceedings of the ryots in Canara were instigated hj intrigues 
 on the part of the public servants, as has been already shown to 
 have been the case in Mysore."* 
 
 Both by the Commissioners of Inquiry and by the 
 Governor-General, Lord William Bentmck, after his own 
 strict local investigation, the Rajah was almost entirely 
 acquitted of personal misconduct. It was indeed admitted 
 by his Lordship, that if he had known the true history of 
 the case, as detailed in the Report of the Special Com- 
 mittee, he would not have suspended the Rajah's authority, 
 but would have resorted to milder measures of reform. 
 
 In a despatch to the Court of Directors dated the 1 -Ith 
 of April, 1834, recommending that the greater part of the 
 Rajah's dominions should be restored to his dkect rule, 
 three districts being retained by the Honourable Company, 
 under a new Treaty, to secure their subsidy. Lord Wilham 
 Bentinck wrote as follows : — 
 
 " It is admitted by every one who has had an opportunity of 
 observing the character of the Rajah, that he is in the highest 
 degree intelligent and sensible. His disposition is described to 
 be the reverse of tyrannical or cruel." " The personal character 
 of the Rajah has, I confess, materially weighed with me in re- 
 commending the measure above alluded to. I believe he will 
 make a good ruler in future." 
 
 The Court of Directors, in their reply dated the 25th of 
 September, 1835, negative the project of partition. They 
 advert to " the deferred and future possession of the whole 
 Kingdom" by the Maharaja, when certam described safe- 
 guards against misgovernment shall be established ; when, 
 they say, "the same reasons which would recommend the 
 restoration to the Rajah of a portion of the country, wiU, 
 in our opinion, recommend the restoration of the whole."t 
 And in making some remarks on the new forms of ad- 
 ministration proposed for Mysore, they observe : — 
 
 * Mysore Papers, 1866, p. 19. f Ihicl, p. 23.
 
 32 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 ''We are desirous of adhering, as far as can be done, to the 
 Native usages, and not to introduce a system which cannot be 
 •worked hereafter by Native agency when the country shall be re- 
 stored to the Kajah." 
 
 But long- before 18G5 the vast increase of patronage in 
 Mysore had driven far away all notions of " Native agency," 
 or of restoring the country to the Rajah. The idea of not 
 merely being unable to provide for the candidates already 
 on the Governor-General's list, but of having to turn adrift, 
 or remand to regimental duty, all the English gentlemen 
 actually in the enjoyment of those luci'ative offices, had 
 become revoltino- at Calcutta. In a Minute dated the 
 IGth of January, 1856, Lord Dalhousie advised the an- 
 nexation of Mysore at the death of the reigning Rajah. 
 Wishing devoutly, and working towards, the same con- 
 summation, the Government of Sh' John Lawrence, in the 
 despatch already quoted, loudly and emphatically pro- 
 nounced as their opinion, 
 
 " That the reversion of Mysore to the power and adminis- 
 tration of the Maharajah is synonymous with the withdrawal 
 of the European officers, and the abandonment of a system of 
 upwards of thirty years' growth. It is tantamount to the col- 
 lapse of order, and a rapid return to the state of confusion and 
 of insecurity of life, honour, and property, from which, in 1831, 
 the people of Mysore were rescued."* 
 
 Why should "the system" be "abandoned," when "the 
 European officers" are " withdrawn ?" They cannot, or 
 ^^•ill not, think of any intermediate plan, by which the 
 Prince's power might for the future be limited by law, 
 and by which an efficient Native hierarchy might be gra- 
 dually trained to replace their English instructors. No — 
 a full complement of English gentlemen of the Civil, 
 Military, and Uncovenanted Services having been quar- 
 tered in every department — new departments having been 
 frr)m time to time devised for them, — that full comple- 
 ment must be permanently maintained in Mysore. 
 
 The same views were lU'ged with even greater vehe- 
 mence at the India Office in London. One of the Coun- 
 cillors, Mr. 11. D. Mangles, formerly of the Bengal Civil 
 
 * Mijsnrp, Pnpnrft, 1 ROG, p. ^>9.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 33 
 
 Service, and who for many years represented the Borough 
 of Guildford and the East India Company in the House 
 of Commons, declared that if the Maharajah of Mysore 
 were permitted to choose a successor from his family, 
 " only two courses would be open to us," — 
 
 " Either the adopted son must be permitted to become the 
 actual ruler of his country, to appoint his own officers, and to ad- 
 minister justice and the revenue according- to his own views and 
 principles, or affairs must be carried on, as at present, by a British 
 Commissioner, assisted by a body of British officers."* 
 
 Notwithstanding the undeviating consistency with which 
 Mr. Mangles for the last quarter of a century, m the Court 
 of Directors, in Parliament, and in the Council of India, 
 has advocated a policy of annexation, it is difficult to 
 imderstand the strange blmdness here shown to the happi- 
 est and most hopeful results of our political operations in 
 India. Why must a Rajah placed at the head of a re- 
 formed Government, " admmister justice and the revenue 
 according to his own view^s and prmciples" ? Why shoidd 
 he not administer justice and the revenue accordmg to our 
 views and principles, as several Native Princes have, to a 
 great extent, learned to do ? 
 
 This blmdness to recorded facts is even more manifest 
 in a subsequent passage of the same paper, in which Mr. 
 Mangles avows his firm opinion that "Native Government" 
 must be " entirely dependent upon the character of the 
 Prince, or, if he be a nonentity, of his Minister," and that 
 they " have, as a general rule, been going from bad to 
 worse ever since the reign of Akbar."t 
 
 At a later period in the discussion, the same eminent 
 authority protested once more agamst the j^eople of Mysore 
 being "handed over by Her Majesty's present Government 
 to the capricious domination of such another Prince, with 
 the inevitable concomitants of hungry courtiers, and a 
 rabble of hangers-on, after they and their fathers had 
 tasted for nearly half a century the unspeakable blessings 
 of wise and fixed principles of law, and a just system of 
 revenue, administered by such men as Cubbon, Bo wring, 
 
 * Mysore Papers, 1866, p. 85. f H'icl., p. 87. 
 
 D
 
 o4 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMl'IRE. 
 
 and Charles Saunders."* The introduction of these 
 EnofHsh names at tlie end of the sentence is an effective 
 sti'oke of rhetoric. But wliy should " capricious domina- 
 tion" be assumed, or the possibihty of" capricious domina- 
 tion " ? Is the British Government really incompetent to 
 exercise Imperial supremacy ? 
 
 Durino- the same controversy another much respected 
 Councillor, ^Ir. H. T. Prinsep, also an old Bengal Civilian, 
 Avho had been Secretary to Government under Lord 
 William Bentinck when the administrative sequestration 
 of Mysore took place, maintained in a Minute dated the 
 l.jth of April, 1866, that "it would be impossible ever to 
 make over a large territory hke ]\Iysore, that has once 
 been governed upon system by British officers, who have 
 made revenue settlements and decreed or otherwise estab- 
 lished rights of property, to a Native Prince to he timnaged 
 accord ijif/ to his caprices, assigning districts to favourites 
 with unchecked p>oivers, or' leasing them to the highest 
 bidders, as is the universal jyractice ivhen the dominions 
 are large." And then he assumes, as an incontrovei'tible 
 and acknowledged position, that the only plan for " se- 
 curing the rights and interests created by our institutions," 
 is to maintain " a British administration."! Now the 
 practice of " assigning districts" to " favourites," or to " the 
 highest bidder," is not, and never was, "universal" by any 
 means among the Native States of India, whether " the 
 dominions are large" or small. Mr. Prinsep has here fallen 
 into one of tliose exaggerations which are especially detri- 
 mental wlien put forward in grave considtation by a per- 
 son of gi'eat official and local experience. And why must 
 the "caprices" of a Prince, and the "powers" of his 
 " favourites" be " unchecked" ? The bad custom of grant- 
 ing temtorial assignments to favourites and farmers of 
 the revenue, had grown in Oude before the annexation to 
 the greatest height and enormity it had probably ever 
 attained in India : but if the controlling force of the 
 British Government had been firmly and steadily applied, 
 this abuse mii^ht have been effectually checked and 
 abolished. 'J'his abuse does not prevail in the States of 
 * Mysore Papers, May l«r,7, p. 13. t //><>'-, P- ^.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 35 
 
 either Scindia or Holkar, the two largest and most import- 
 ant in Central India, and is quite incompatible with their 
 administrative system, for which, no doubt, their subjects 
 are greatly indebted to the management of British ofHcers 
 during the minority of the two reigning Princes. In 
 Travancore, in Kolapore, — in any State once fairly brought 
 under supervision, and where regular forms and public 
 channels have been laid down throuo^h which all acts of 
 the Sovereign must pass, — corrupt and capricious grants 
 of land are practically impossible. Even in the Nizam's 
 Dominions, the largest existing Native State, although 
 the prevalence of this abuse in former generations has left 
 its trace in some overgrown hereditary jurisdictions, the 
 executive agency of the Chief Minister, supported by the 
 influence of our Resident, has so over-mastered the nomi- 
 nal despotism, that, during the last three reigns, the 
 Prince has quite lost the Oriental prerogative of alienating 
 the public revenue. These limitations of arbitrary power, 
 though secured by no public ordinance, soon grow into 
 established rules, and an Indian Sovereign would find it 
 quite as difficult and dangerous to break through them as 
 have the Princes of Europe after consenting or submitting 
 to constitutional restrictions. 
 
 The Nawab Salar Jung, having become head of the 
 Regency of Hyderabad upon the sudden demise of the 
 late Nizam, and retaining all the functions of Prime Min- 
 ister, has been able already to make a great stride towards 
 the liberalisation of the Government by associating several 
 of the principal nobles with himself in a sort of Council 
 of State, and allotting to each of its members a depart- 
 ment of the public administration, — a measure which w^as 
 quite impracticable so long as the Minister was liable to be 
 thwarted at every turn by petty Palace intrigues set on 
 foot by those who could obtain no voice in the State ex- 
 cept by supplanting their rival and stepping into his place. 
 Having overcome and out-lasted the despotism of the 
 Sovereio'u, this enlip'htened statesman is now eno-ao-ed in 
 breaking down in his own person the isolated autocracy of 
 the Minister. Properly advised and supported by our 
 Government on a plan more consistent and more conside- 
 
 D 2
 
 36 OrR HREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 rate than lias liitlierto been observed, the Nawab Salar 
 Jung ought to be able during the minority of the Nizam 
 to raise the reformed institutions of Hyderabad above all 
 fear Of retrogression, to bring a limited monarchy into 
 working condition on principles that shall be acceptable 
 and suitable to all ranks of the people. 
 
 It is to be hoped that our Government may do as much 
 during the concurrent minority of the Rajah of IMysore. 
 But there the stumbling-block of place and patronage 
 stops the way at present. 
 
 The aggregate salaries of the English gentlemen em- 
 ployed in Mysore, about ninety in number, from the Com- 
 missioner with his £6000 down to the Assistant with 
 £600, averaging £1000 a year, amount to £90,000 per 
 annum, one tenth of the annual net revenues of the Pro- 
 vmce. The official mind cannot contemplate without 
 horror the gradual destruction of such a splendid list of 
 appointments, the vested rights of meritorious gentlemen 
 havmg so many strong claims on the consideration of 
 Government. Even the stagnation and stoppage of pro- 
 motion among such a body, the first painful result in the 
 process of reconstructing the fabric of a Native State, 
 cannot be faced by the dispensers of patronage without 
 distress and consternation. What is the degradation of 
 a race, ahen in colour and creed, compared with the dis- 
 heartening of a Service recruited from our own country- 
 men ? 
 
 Consequently the instructions understood to have been 
 issued by the Secretary of State in 1867 for the gradual 
 substitution of Native for English officials, as opportunities 
 presented themselves, in all district and judicial appoint- 
 ments, has remained a complete dead letter. In three years 
 not a single Native has been placed in any one of the 
 superior offices in Mysore hitherto held by English gentle- 
 men. No such prcjmotion has, indeed, occuiTed for nearly 
 six years. Mr. Krishna Ayengar is still the only Native 
 Deputy Supei'intendent ; and he was appointed to the 
 charge of a district on the 31st of August 1864. And so 
 it will be to the very last possible moment, — the diffi- 
 culties of transition will be enhanced, the immediate sue-
 
 "> "7 
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 37 
 
 cess of the change will be endangered, the good faith of 
 our Government will be compromised, — unless the pro- 
 fessional interests and national prejudices of Calc\itta are 
 counteracted and swept away by the statesmanlike deter- 
 mination of the Viceroy and the Secretary of State. 
 
 It is useless to descant, as Mr. Mangles and others do, 
 on " the unspeakable blessings of wise and fixed principles 
 of law, and a just system of revenue,"* because these can 
 be provided for as effectually iii a reformed Native State 
 as in a model British Province, andean be "administered" 
 in a style much more congenial to popular feelings and 
 much more instructive to the popular mind, by Native 
 Princes and functionaries, than by " Cubbon, Bowring, or 
 Charles Saunders." The best institutions that can be 
 devised are not permanently safe unless they are under 
 the personal and responsible custody of men who are 
 bound to the soil by the ties of blood and property. The 
 happiness and progress of nations do not depend on forms. 
 
 One fruitful cause of error in the study of Indian 
 politics, one ground for hastily takmg for granted, without 
 alloy or deduction, "the unspeakable blessmgs" of British 
 administration, consists in the indiscriminate eulogy that 
 has been too often lavished on the Indian Civil Service. 
 Indiscriminate eulogy applied to a class, a sect, or a party, 
 must always lead to some very false conclusions. It was 
 once the fashion m Parliamentary speeches and periodical 
 essays to extol that Service as "the most accomplished in 
 the world," at a time when a safe passage, " with great 
 credit," through the formal probation of Haileybury, was 
 never refused to a Director's nominee, and as a "nursery 
 of heroes and rulers," when, in proportion to its numerical 
 strength, it had certainly produced very few men of marked 
 originality or conspicuous power. But in those days the 
 rapid growth of British India in territory and revenue 
 cast a glamour over all eyes. The structure was so vast, 
 and had been so hidden, that what was a mere appropria- 
 tion seemed like a creation of our own. Distance lent 
 enchantment to the view, — -young Civilians, and military 
 officers in civil employ, engaged for the most part in the 
 
 * Ante^ p. 33.
 
 38 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 formal superintendence of an immemorial routine, were 
 transtio-ured into patriarchs and statesmen. And thoiiofh 
 the cpmpetitive system of first appointments has raised 
 the standard of erudition, it is no test of administrative 
 capacity or of the ruling faculty, and has certainly added 
 nothing to any social authority that may be possessed by 
 the Indian Civil Service. 
 
 When we consider the early age at which English 
 gentlemen engaged in the public administration of India 
 are placed in positions of great emolument, and of unat- 
 tainable exaltation and command, over a large number of 
 Native officials of tried skill and long experience, whose 
 guidance is indispensable for the successfid despatch of 
 business, it is not surprismg that they learn to magnify 
 their office, that they habitually suppose themselves to be 
 governing the country when they just understand the 
 plan of admmistering a district, when they can make a 
 neat English report on results furnished by their sub- 
 ordinates. As an illustration of the prevailing delusion 
 on this point, we may quote the able editor of the Bombay 
 Gazette, a journal representing veiy fairly the views of 
 the higher class of British officials and merchants in the 
 Western Presidency, who, recently defending the Great 
 Council of the Empke from the charge of negligence, de- 
 clares that 
 
 " AVhat is called neglect of India is one of the wisest charac- 
 teristics of Parliament. That India is not neglected, the host of 
 able Englishmen sent here to govern her testifies before the 
 ■whole world. ^^ 
 
 The writer confounds administration with governinent. 
 The Englishmen, able or otherwise, annually sent out 
 from home in the civil and military Services, do not 
 govern India, any more than our Commissioners of Cus- 
 toms and Excise, officers of Police, and County Coui't 
 Judges, govern Great Britain. In both countries the 
 fimctionaries in permanent employ administer laws which 
 they had no share in making, have little or no influence 
 over ]>ublic opinion, and no political influence by virtue 
 of their office. Wliether they have or have not any 
 social influence, depends not upon their office so much as
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 39 
 
 upon tlielr personal cpialities. The social influence of 
 Englisli functionaries in India is scarcely appreciable, 
 Tliey have, as a rule, n(j social influence wliatever among- 
 any class of the people, simply because they neither de- 
 sire nor deserve to have any. They have no social in- 
 fluence with the Natives, because they have no social in- 
 tercourse with them. Even with the most accessible of 
 our Collectors and Commissioners in India, the practical 
 notice at their doors is, "No admittance except on busi- 
 ness." The subject races in their milhons, high and low, 
 rich and poor, and the scattered representatives of the 
 dominant nation, live entirely apart, and have nothing in 
 common. The public avocations of the Anglo-Indian "Ser- 
 vices" give them no direct share, and their private course 
 of life jDreclucles them from taking any indirect share, 
 in what is properly called the government of the country. 
 
 A very few British functionaries, those who rise to the 
 Secretariat and to seats in Council, do, indeed, obtain ac- 
 cess to a certain direct share in the Government ; and 
 these extraordinary prizes to which all may aspire, have, 
 perhaps, contributed more than anything else to the false 
 lustre surrounding the Indian Civil Service, and to the 
 erroneous notions habitually formed by the members of 
 that profession as to the sphere and compass of their daily 
 duties. 
 
 There are, again, British Commissioners and Collectors, 
 — very few, however, in number, — singularly free from 
 the prevalent failings of our nation and of their profession, 
 largely endowed with that genial tolerance and adapt- 
 abihty, which are supremely requisite for governing an 
 alien race on any principles but those of coercion and 
 contempt. Some of these have undoubtedly, from time 
 to time, gained an influence, considerable though local 
 and temporary, over the public mind, and have made me- 
 ritorious efforts of limited success, to keep up something- 
 like social intercourse with the higher class of Natives 
 around them. 
 
 A still larger number of British officials among the 
 Eesidents at Native Courts, and the l\)litical Ao-ents set 
 over the groups of petty Chieftainships, really take a cer-
 
 40 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 tain indirect share in the Imperial Government, just be- 
 cause thev have some social influence and control over the 
 leaders and idols of the people. It is only in these here- 
 ditary jm-isdictions, where the executive power remains 
 in Native hands, that Native volition and intellisfence are 
 sufficiently free to make it worth while to study them, 
 to consult them, and even to humour them. It is only 
 in these last refuges of nationality, where there is a 
 ciireer for talent, and where distinctions of rank and 
 station have a real value, and receive due recognition, 
 that anything like personal intercourse on fair terms can 
 exist between our representatives and those of India. As 
 might be reasonably expected, in the dependent States, 
 where Native mfluence manifestly counts for something, 
 where it is always effective, and frequently decisive, it is 
 more courted than in our own Provinces, where it seems 
 to count for nothing. 
 
 Our most distinguished countrymen now or recently 
 engaged in the administration of British Provinces, have 
 not failed to remark and to deplore this utter disassocia- 
 tion of the dominant and the pupil race. Sir Ilobert 
 Montgomery, late Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjaulj, 
 in a Memorandum published in The Times in March 1868, 
 caUed forth by the appearance of the Blue Book on the 
 comparative merits and popularity of British and Native 
 rule, writes as follows : — 
 
 " Our officers are young, and few and scattered, and have 
 much to learn. To administer the mass of law imposed on them 
 they are chained to their courts and their offices from morning 
 till night. They have no leisure for personal intercourse, to mix 
 ■with the people, to gain their trust, to disabuse them of unjust 
 prejudices, to make known our motives of real benevolence, and 
 to ascertain their views. An acute observer of one of our most 
 recently annexed Provinces informs me that the gulf is increasing, 
 the people are disheartened,^' 
 
 An acute observer in the capital of one of our oldest 
 Provinces, the official metropolis of the Indian Empire, 
 tells the same story. The Editor of the Friend of India, 
 who may certainly be considered as an imwilling witness 
 ratlier than as one prejudiced against British administra- 
 tion, writes as follows : —
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 41 
 
 " It is as true of Bcngiil to-day as it lias been any day for tlie 
 last eighty years, that there is a Government and there are forty 
 millions of people, but somehow the one does not come into close 
 contact with the other. Some of the people know our policemen 
 and the scum of our courts, and the better they know them the 
 more they hate them and us. But the villagers do not know the 
 district officer, and the district officer and his superiors cannot 
 know them." 
 
 Similar testimony is given by a very able ofHcial, the 
 late Mr. A. A. Roberts, tlien Judicial Commissioner in 
 the Punjaub, who declares that 
 
 " The gulf between us and our Native subjects is becoming 
 wider year by year. It is wider in Bengal than in the North- 
 Western Provinces, and it is wider in the latter than in the Pun- 
 jaub. It is becoming wider every year in the Punjaub. Our 
 executive officers, partly from increase of work, and partly either 
 froDi want of inclination, or from not understanding the necessity 
 and advantage of friendly intercourse with the people, see less 
 and know less of them than formerly, and they know less of us, 
 and misunderstand us and our motives and acts.^"** 
 
 The longer and more thoroughly our system has been 
 established, the less we are liked. He concludes thus, after 
 a not very hopeful allusion to " the necessity of greater 
 intercourse with, and knowledge of, and sympathy to- 
 wards our Native subjects": — 
 
 " The following words of Sir John Malcolm express so exactly 
 my views of our duty towards the people of this country that I can- 
 not do better than quote them : — ' The people of India must, by 
 a recurring sense of benefits, have amends made them for the 
 degradation of continuing subject to foreign masters ; and this 
 can only be done by the combined efforts of every individual em- 
 ployed in a station of trust and responsibility, to render popular 
 a Government which, though not national, has its foundations 
 laid deep in the principles of toleration, justice, and wisdom.^ "f 
 
 We may render our Imperial Government popular : we 
 can never make our direct administration popular. The 
 divergence of feeling and interest between our people and 
 the Natives is not an evil that tends to decrease or to 
 cure itself On the contrary, it has increased, is increasing, 
 and must continue to increase, in proportion as the grow- 
 ing facilities of correspondence and communication with 
 
 * Papers, British and Native Administration, 1868, p. 112. f Ibid.
 
 42 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 Europe (limiiiisli the attractions of Indian service and en- 
 liance the charms of home. 
 
 '' Our own" Calcutta Correspondent, in a letter which 
 appeared in the Times on the 23rd of March, 1868, says : 
 — " No non-missionary remains in India an hour Ljnger 
 than he can help." 
 
 There is a remarkable unanimity in the tidings from all 
 parts as to the growing aversion to long service or residence 
 in India. From a paper published at the Neilgherry Hills 
 in the Madi'as Presidency the following sentence is ex- 
 tracted : — 
 
 *' Eveu here in Ootacainuud, where so many advantages as to 
 health, soil, and climate oflFer themselves, we doubt if a score of 
 Europeans could be found who are not looking forward to return, 
 sooner or later, to the old country. A man comes out to India, 
 either as a Government servant, a railway employe, a planter, or 
 what not; but not one of them has the faintest idea of making a 
 home here : — to make a ^ pot of money' and go back again is the 
 aim of every one of them."* 
 
 The EufjlUhman, the leading daily paper of Calcutta, 
 gives the same account : — 
 
 " Individually, we are more than ever birds of passage. If 
 Europeans did not build houses forty years ago, when they looked 
 upon India somewhat as a home, there is very little chance of 
 their doing so now that their main object is to get away from 
 India as fast as possible. "f 
 
 Consequently, as might be expected, the members of 
 the most higlily paid Services, civil and military, in the 
 world, send up their continuous cry for a higher scale of 
 remuneration, in the form of salary or pension or bonus 
 on retirement. The Calcutta Correspondent of the Times 
 tells us that 
 
 " India has ceased to offer a career to poor men. Saving by 
 men on salaries of from £1500 downwards is almost impossible. 
 Pitiable often is the state of an English gentleman on £500 a 
 year in Indian exile. J 
 
 * South of Lid la Observer, extracted from the Asiatic of August 1 Itli, 
 1860. 
 
 t Englijfhrnav, from the Homeward Mail, August 30th, IBtJD. 
 
 X " Our own Correspondent", Calcutta, March 0th, The Times, April 
 8th, \H*u.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 43 
 
 And nearly three years later the Editor of the Friend 
 of India, well informed in snch matters, writes as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 "The Anglo-Indian with less than twelve hundred a year finds 
 it impossible to meet the cost of hving here, and pay foi' his chil- 
 dren at home. That sort of pecuniary care so well known in 
 England, but almost unknown in India before the mutiny, is 
 silently working in Anglo-Indian society changes which are to 
 be reo-retted."* 
 
 It can hardly be expected that this '' pecuniary care", 
 these " changes in Anglo-Indian society", the growing 
 aversion to long residence in India, the yearning to get 
 home as fast as possible, will be in the least mitigated or 
 diminished when educated Natives are admitted, in 
 rapidly increasing numbers, to the superior branches of the 
 public service, hitherto reserved for covenanted Civilians. 
 That inevitable measure will cert.ainly not accelerate the 
 promotion, improve the prospects, or alleviate the discon- 
 tent of any English official. 
 
 Bat, it may be said, although this measure, just, liberal, 
 and beneficent as all must acknowledge it to be, may un- 
 favourably affect a class of our countrymen, and even 
 bring some administrative difficulties in its tram, it will 
 so conciliate and gratify the people of India as to render 
 the great task of Government more easy. That flattering 
 expectation is open to very considerable doubt. The ad- 
 mission of Natives to the higher official posts, except as 
 part of a large plan of Imperial reconstruction, wiU not, 
 in my opinion, strengthen, but will rather weaken, the 
 hands of Government, and complicate the problem be- 
 fore it. 
 
 Native officials of high rank could not form an effective 
 bond of connection between the British Govenment and 
 the people of India. They would not be sympathetic with 
 us so much as antipathetic to the masses. In popular 
 estimation, and partly in their own, they have loosened 
 their root in the soil, and have become parasites planted 
 in our hot-houses. Natives educated in our colleges and 
 
 * Friend of India, extracted from Homeivard Mail, December 6tli, 
 1869.
 
 44 Om GREAT VASSAL EMPIKE. 
 
 seekino- for our service are not a turbulent or fanatical 
 
 o 
 
 class, and they cannot aid us in keeping such classes in 
 order. They are not very often of the right breed to 
 govern, and as a matter of fact they are, in manners, 
 customs, and morals, governed by the same laws and the 
 same lawgivers as then* more ignorant countiymen. They 
 can never wrest social influence, in our favour or in their 
 own, from the hands of the Princes, the Chieftains, the 
 old families possessing titles, property and traditional fame, 
 or from the Brahmins and other classes learned in popular 
 love and revered on religious grounds, who are themselves 
 by no means debarred for ever from the advantages of 
 European learnmg and science. As a matter of fact old 
 prejudices, both in British Provmces and in Native States, 
 are yielding to the surrounding pressure, and Western 
 education is spreading, though slowly, among the real 
 Koverninix classes. 
 
 Moreover, it may well be doubted whether our Govern- 
 ment can ever possess, as it is possessed by a good Native 
 liuler, the faculty of selecting and distributing its agents 
 according to their special capabilities where they can com- 
 mand the respect and obedience of those who are under 
 theii' authority. We impose our own wide range on men 
 whose force and value is essentially local. ]ielying too 
 much on forms and regulations, disregarding not merely 
 personal qualities but the strength and weakness, the 
 attractions and repulsions of tribe and race, our latest 
 liberality would send Bengalee and Parsee graduates, in 
 a very undue proportion, to rule over Sikhs, Mahrattas, 
 and llajpoots. There may be Parsees and there may be 
 Bengalees, and there may be Chettys and Moodellys from 
 ^ladj-iis, who are well qualified for such duties, but mere 
 erudition is a very poor test of the requisite qualifica- 
 tions. 
 
 There is another view to be taken of this question. 
 Educated Natives are certainly not at present a turbulent 
 or aggressive class, Ijut it does not follow that their open 
 competition with English oihcials on something like equal 
 terms, will make tliem more submissive, or will raise the 
 reputation and Ijeighten the dignity of those with whom
 
 I 
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE, 45 
 
 tliey compete. Already tlie transmutation of the old 
 Head Slieristadars, or Office Managers, into the compara- 
 tively new grades of Deputy Collectors and Magistrates, 
 Extra Assistants in the Non-Ilegulation Provinces and 
 Assistant Superintendents in Mysore, — more honourable, 
 perhaps, but not more highly paid than their old appoint- 
 ments,- — ^is understood to have vitiated the source, un- 
 paired the quality, and aggravated the corrupt results of 
 the information and guidance on which all young English 
 officials for a time, and the failures and "hard bargains" 
 during their entire career, must depend for the despatch 
 of current business. Failures and " hard bargains," 
 thougli less common under the competitive system of 
 first appointments than during the continuance of 
 Directors' patronage, can not be totally eliminated from 
 a hierarchy, in which neither dismissal nor stoppage of 
 promotion is practically known. Formerly the untrained 
 young Civilian, or the incompetent old one, was pulled 
 through his daily work by a ministerial expert of long 
 service and high salary. Now he is pulled through by a 
 younger man of lower standing and much smaller pay. 
 The better class of Native subordinates who used to work 
 unseen for the relief and credit of their "covenanted" supe- 
 riors, ai'e now beginning to officiate in open day at the same 
 description of work, endowed with the same powers and 
 in visible emulation. 
 
 The more Natives are employed in the higher posts, 
 the more visible will this emulation become, the more con- 
 spicuous will be their administrative superiority over the 
 average of their English compeers, — already sufficiently 
 conspicuous in judicial business, — the less will they be 
 content with anything but a perfect equality of standing 
 and preferment. Then, whether their claims are recog- 
 nised or resisted, interminable jealousies and antagonisms 
 will ensue, and the difficulty, insurmountable in my opi- 
 nion, will present itself, that English gentlemen will not 
 serve amicably and harmoniously, except in rare instances, 
 in subordination to Native seniors. The conflict will be- 
 come more bitter on both sides. 
 
 As education is extended, as the means of commimica-
 
 46 (HTv CiREAT VASSAL EMPlPvE. 
 
 tioii and locomotion are improved, both in India and be- 
 tween the East and Europe, — in wliicli the Suez Canal 
 may prove an unexpectedly important element, — there 
 must come a closer approximation to our ways of thouolit, 
 to our principles and practice of political movement. The 
 reflective and influential among our Indian fellow-sub- 
 jects will become at once more national and more cosmo- 
 politan. They will better our instructions. The Press is 
 free in India. We shall find ourselves in imminent danefer 
 of finding our own weapons turned against us. As the peo- 
 ple become more enlightened we must expect our Govern- 
 ment, if conducted on the present contemptuous and exclu- 
 sive plan, to be depicted in the most odious colours, and our 
 agents to be attacked at every opportunity with ridicule 
 and invective. We must be prepared, in short, for an 
 era of satire and sedition, which we may be led, against 
 our will and against our convictions, to resist by coercive 
 measures, until we give up our moral and intellectual 
 superiority, and oppose our military force to the physical 
 force of awakened India. 
 
 We shall never be able to deal satisfactorily with a 
 Hindoo Savonarola, a Hindoo Junius, a Paul Louis 
 Courier, or even a Henri E-ochefoi-t. A Native Prince 
 would have all the aversion we could wish aofainst both 
 the old-fashioned fanatic and the new-fangled agitator, 
 and could, with the countenance and support of the Im- 
 ])erial Power, suppress or moderate either of them more 
 firmly, more gently, and with more discrimination, than 
 the Imperial Power could possibly do by itself. 
 
 In the following passage of his speech on the Governor- 
 General of India Bill in the House of Lords on the 1 1th of 
 March, 186!), the Marquis of Salisbiuy manifested, if I 
 am not mistaken, some statesmanHke insight into the 
 eml^arrassments we are preparing for ourselves, and into 
 the only possible remedy for them :— - 
 
 " The other portion of the noble Duko's measure was that 
 which dealt with the difficult prohlein of taking Natives into Go- 
 vernment eniploynient. lie lliought tlie noble Duke's plan in- 
 finitely .superior to the system of competitive examinations. He 
 thought it far better that the appointment of Natives should rest
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMi'IRE. 47 
 
 exclusively on the responsibility of the Governoi'-Generalj l)ut he 
 ho])od that the Governor-General would not be fettered too uiucli 
 in his discretion. The great difficulty would be to avoid jealousy 
 between the European and Native Civil servants. He believed 
 that the true way of admitting Natives to a participation in the 
 Government would be to maintain the Native Sovereignties which 
 are at present protected in India." 
 
 Yes, — I should say, — maintain, restore, consolidate and 
 enlarge the Native Sovereignties. The essential problem 
 of Indian statesmanship is how to reconcile self-govern- 
 ment for India with Imperial supremacy for Great Britain. 
 The true solution is that the more we concede the former, 
 the more we confirm the latter. 
 
 The nearest approach to self-government that the peo- 
 ple of India can make in their present phase of civilisation, 
 must be made by means of reformed Native States, own- 
 ing allegiance and subordination to the Imperial Power. 
 The British Government of India should attempt no longer 
 to be ubiquitously executive ; it should be constructive 
 and critical, not operative ; it should everywhere contrive 
 or revise the political fabric, but wherever Native agency 
 is available, it should not undertake more than superin- 
 tendence or visitation. 
 
 The rule which, with some real and some apparent 
 qualifications, has long held good, is now becoming abso- 
 lute, that the maximum of direct dominion and direct 
 European agency, involves the minimum of European in- 
 fluence. In order to spread British principles, to extend 
 and intensify the moral authority of our Government, the 
 area of British admmistration should be considerably di- 
 minished. 
 
 The system under which local affairs are formally 
 managed in every district and in every department by 
 Englishmen, administerino- the same set of stiff re^ula- 
 tions, lowers the moral influence of the Paramount Power, 
 deprives of political privileges those among the Natives 
 who, with a little help and guidance, are fit to use them, 
 and does not educate for political life those who are as yet 
 unfit. The continuance of such a system can only be 
 plausibly justified on those grounds of utter contempt for
 
 48 OUn GREAT VASSAL EMPIKK. 
 
 the races to be governed which must consign them to per- 
 petual stagnation, or incite them to privy conspii'acy. 
 
 The ninnerous annexations and confiscations between 
 IS 48 and 1S5G attracted the attention and sympathy of 
 all India towards the Native Princes and Chieftains, 
 whose representative value was recalled to mind when 
 their last hour seemed approaching, and who subsequently 
 acquired strength, credit and authority on all sides by the 
 events and results of the Rebellion of 1857. Since that 
 crisis we may have elaborated some of our administrative 
 machinery, — ^we have certainly effected a vast amount of 
 over-legislation, — but we have not resumed our grasp 
 upon the popular mind or upon the popular imagination. 
 What we have lost the Princes have gained. We have 
 now a smaller actual share in the true government of 
 India, in the tranquillisation and progressive direction of 
 the Indian people, than we had twenty years ago. We 
 may regain the leadership, which will otherwise slip from 
 us altogether, but only by deciding to rule India as a 
 great Vassal Empire and not as a Vassal Kingdom, — by 
 abstaming as far as possible from du^ect administration, 
 and gradually transferring a great part of our immediate 
 possessions to Native States, thoroughly reformed and 
 thoroughly subordinated to the Paramount Imperial 
 Power. 
 
 Sir Robert Montgomery in the remarkable Memo- 
 randum published in the I'imes in March 1868, which we 
 have already quoted,* says : — 
 
 " The common error lies in our insular proneness to contract 
 and generalise — to embody in one class all the many separate 
 nationalities and distinct races which have been successively 
 added to the rule of England. In an Empire made up of such 
 differinf( languages and distinct customs, it must be popular, as 
 it is politic, to encourage to a ^reat extent a local administration 
 and a local adaptation of laws.^' 
 
 That "local administration" and "local adaptation of 
 laws", which Sir Ilobert Montgomery sees is so urgently 
 required, can never be so effectually promoted as by the 
 maintenance, restoration, and enlargement of Native Prin- 
 cipalities. 
 
 * Anip p. 40.
 
 \ 
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 49 
 
 But we have still more recent, and stronger because 
 unintentional testimony to the excessive centralisation 
 and straining after \niiformity of wliich we complain. The 
 Honourable IT. S. Maine, Legal Member of the Viceroy's 
 Coiuicil, in a Minute dated the 8th of October, 1868, re- 
 plying to the charge of over-legislation that had been 
 brouo-ht aofainst the Government of India, observes that 
 " the great bulk of the legislation of the Supreme Council 
 is attributable to its bemg the local Legislature of many 
 Indian Provinces. These Provinces", he remarks, " ex- 
 hibit very wide diversities, and it is growing more and 
 more difficult to bring the population of two or more Pro- 
 vinces mider any one law which goes closely home to 
 their daily life and habits." 
 
 Hahemus conjitentein reum. India is not a country 
 but a continent. The varying interests and requirements 
 of its two hundred millions of inhabitants, speaking up- 
 wards of twenty distmct languages, cannot be adequately 
 watched and tended by a centralised Government of 
 salaried officials such as now attempts to rule all India by 
 correspondence from Calcutta. Such a Government can- 
 not continue for an indefinite period to be satisfactory and 
 improving to the people in its action. 
 
 Peforms of political doctrine and practice in Native 
 States are sohd and secure ; the vast administrative es- 
 tabhshments in our own Provmces, — so far as they are 
 dependent for their success on foreign imported agency, 
 and foreign imported material, — are superficial and pre- 
 carious. Showy specimens may be produced — under 
 glass, as it w^ere, — exotic fruits may be grafted on the 
 native stock ; even artificial flowers may be hung on the 
 branches Avith brilliant effect; but they will not stand the 
 climate : a bad season spoils their appearance ; the first 
 storm sends them flying. Nations cannot live in glass 
 houses, and a horticultural show is not a harvest. 
 
 Much of our vast administrative structure in India is 
 little more than a show, — a show veiy burdensome to the 
 country. Some departments have outgrown all reason- 
 ble proportions, have quite ceased to imjDose upon the 
 people, and far from being regarded by them as " un- 
 
 E
 
 .30 iA'u (;in-:AT vassai. empire. 
 
 speakable blessini»s," are felt as extremely oppressive by 
 the poor, and regarded as monstrously inefficient and 
 expensive by those who are more competent to criticise 
 tmd to condemn. I shall not attempt here to present this 
 aspect of the question in detail, or to discnss very fully 
 the financial delinquency which has only just been such as 
 might have been expected from an irresponsible professional 
 Government, instructed by no popular voice, controlled by 
 no public opinion. 
 
 After nine years of profound peace, the revenue having 
 increased twenty-five per cent, (from thirty-nme to more 
 than forty-eight millions*), " the Indian Exchequer,"- — to 
 use the recent words of Mr. J. W. S. Wyllie, late Foreign 
 Secretary at Calcutta, certainly well informed and as cer- 
 tainly well disposed towards the Government of India, — 
 " shows a chronic deficit of two millions, and wholesale 
 reduction of public expenditure combined with the pros- 
 pect of increased taxation is spreading discontent and 
 distress throughout the Empire, "f 
 
 All the phenomena in that same matter of " increased 
 taxation," which has caused so much official disagreement 
 and recrimination, so many commercial remonstrances, so 
 many popular complaints and so much dumb misery during 
 the last ten years, demonstrate most clearly that want of 
 harmony between " the opinions and feelings of the Na- 
 tives," and " the acts of our officials," of which Sir Charles 
 Wingfield is conscious,^: which might in some degree be 
 be palliated and relieved by those " consultative Native 
 Coinicils" that he suggests, but which can never be en- 
 tirely cured by any thing but local self-government. And 
 no local self-government but government by Native States 
 will ever work smoothly. The same tax will never suit 
 equally well, either in its incidence or in the mode of col- 
 lection ])rf'scribed, all the Provinces of our centralised 
 Empiie, dilt'ering, as they do, in their prevailing races and 
 languages, in their centres and staples of industry, in their 
 standard of comfort and rate of living. 
 
 * Sir Richard Tomplo's Budget Speech in the Viccrc<^al Council ;it 
 Calcutta, on flic Oth of Mfirch, 1809. 
 t FoHuliihlhj RevicTV, March 1870, p. -308. + Ante, p. 2.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. T) I 
 
 Fliiving l)ii]iglcd for the last eight or nine years witli 
 our Income Tax and our License Tax, we are now, it is 
 said, going to try our hand at a Succession Duty, which 
 if levied m the same way by an Act of the Viceroy's 
 Legislative Council, will assuredly prove a similar failure, 
 inquisitorial and oppressive in its operation, and producing 
 very little for a great amount of heart-burning. 
 
 We shall never have either the knowledge or the in- 
 fluence to make a new tax adapt itself to the local circum- 
 stiinces and social customs of so many various regions. 
 'Those who coidd help us have no mducement to do so, 
 and have no confidence in our good intentions. Li the 
 endeavour to assess all the Provinces of a vast contment 
 on a uniform scale and by a uniform process, whether 
 applied to property, income, profession, or inheritance, the 
 same results will follow. The new taxes will disgust and 
 demoralise, but they will not draw. In some localities 
 they will not go deep enough ; in others they will not rise 
 to a sufficient height ; in all they will be evaded. 
 
 We have observed that the Indian revenues have in- 
 creased nearly twenty-five per cent, in the last nine years, 
 or by about ten millions sterlmg. But only a small part 
 of this mcrease can be attributed to any real financial 
 elasticity, or be considered as a proportionate measure of 
 the general progress and prosj)erity of India. Partly it 
 must be accounted for by the universal rise m prices, which 
 has affected all new assessments as well as all expenditure. 
 But at least nine millions out of the ten are due to heavier 
 taxation and to a precarious augmentation of nearly four 
 millions in a precarious resource — the Opium monopoly. 
 Of the new and enhanced taxation of six millions and a 
 quarter, one million and a quarter arise from increased 
 consumption of ardent spirits, encouraged by our peculiar 
 Excise laws, — two millions and a quarter from the ad- 
 ditional tax on salt, raising an article essential to the 
 health of a very poor and vegetarian population to twenty 
 times the price it bears m England, the richest country in 
 the world, — one million and a half from a higher Stamp 
 duty, or in other words a higher tax on justice. The 
 license tax only produced £G5U,000. The Land revenue 
 
 E 2
 
 52 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 did not increase materially in the decade between 1859 
 and 1801), and the Customs, the duties havmg been largely 
 reduced, did not increase at all. 
 
 The most ingenious analysis woidd fail to trace any ap- 
 preciable share in the augmentation of the revenues of 
 India, luider any heading, to the influence of railways,* — 
 
 nothinof that could form the most trifline: set-off ajxamst 
 
 11 1 
 
 the annual charge of at least £2, 400,000, t which the 
 
 guai'anteed railways have entailed upon the State. With 
 this annual charge staring them in the face, — with the 
 facts before them, admitted in recently published de- 
 spatches, that the average net income of the existing lines 
 only amounted to three per cent, on the bare cost of their 
 formation,:|: " although the hues already completed, or in 
 course of construction, occupy the most fruitful field for 
 railway enterprise," — the Government of India, with the 
 Siuiction of the Secretary of State, has pledged itself to 
 imdertake the construction of ten thousand miles of new 
 railways at an estimated expense of £100,000,000, "raismg 
 the money upon its own credit, and expending it by the 
 * agency of their o^\^l officers. "§ That is to say, nearly a 
 hundred millions having; been laid out in constructino- five 
 thousand miles of railway which, far from paying, impose 
 an annual burden on the country of two millions and a 
 half sterling, and all the lines of first importance being 
 occupied, we are now to construct ten thousand miles more 
 
 * Appendix F. 
 
 t Deficiency of guaranteed interest paid by Government. . .£1,500,000 
 Interest at 5 per cent, on (at least) £18,000,000 bor- 
 rowed to pay for land and for guaranteed interest . . . 900,000 
 
 £2,400,000 
 
 X From the Viceroy in Council to the Secretary of State, dated the 
 llih of March, 18G0. Here are the figures from the Report of Mr. 
 Juland Danvcrs for the year ending oOtli June, 18G8 (issued in August 
 18G0) — Capital expended, exclusive of the cost of land (paid by Gro- 
 vrrnmcnt), £78,080,000,; Net receipts for the year, £2,100,122, being 
 £2:37,178 less than the previous year. This is less than 3 per cent. If 
 the cost of land and accumulated guaranteed interest were added, at 
 least £1*^,000,000, the net returns would belittle more than 2 per cent. 
 
 § See Speech by the Duke of Argyll in the House of Lords, on the 
 2;3rd of July, 1800.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 53 
 
 at a cost of a hundred millions more, on lines of compara- 
 tively small traffic, and perhaps they may pay. This is 
 the panacea for a cln^onic deficit ! 
 
 It would be difficult to point out any symptoms of 
 statesmanlike originality and insight, of far extended re- 
 search and inquiry, of administrative skill, or even of con- 
 scientious frugality, in the financial history of India during 
 the last ten years. But for the candour and energy dis- 
 played by the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, on the magnitude of 
 the crisis becoming known to him, there would be little 
 groimd for hope m the immediate future. Sir Richard 
 Temple, in his speech before the Viceregal Council on the 
 Gth of March 1869, mtroducing the Budget for 1869-70, 
 which even then showed an acknowledged deficit of one 
 million sterling, very soon to be more than doubled by 
 more careful calculation, eulogised the financial policy of 
 Government as "at once safe, just, and sound;" and 
 proudly mentioned "the national balance-sheet exhibiting 
 eighty millions on each side of the account, — truly a high 
 figure demonstrative of the calibre of our power in the 
 East," as " a spirit-stirring fact." As if there were any- 
 thing " demonstrative of power," anything that ought to 
 be " spirit-stuTing," in the mere magnitude of money 
 transactions, irrespective of their solvency and sohdity. 
 
 To an intelligent Native who has watched and analysed 
 the extravagant expenditure and the delusive economies 
 of the last ten years, the vituperations of the late Vice- 
 roy and of a party in the Secretary of State's Council, 
 when advising the annexation of Mysore, agamst " exces- 
 sive extravagance," " reckless profusion and dissipation of 
 means,"* by a Native Prince, must seem a hollow mockery. 
 As a general rule, the administration of a Native State is 
 carried on with remarkable frugality, and hard cash accu- 
 mulates in the treasury, or in the private hoards of the 
 Prmce, to provide for future exigencies. With augmented 
 taxes and a rapidly increasing revenue, our Government 
 gets deeper into debt, the expenditure of the last three 
 financial years having exceeded the income by nine millions 
 sterhng.'l* The excellence and purity of our motives and 
 * Mysore Papers, 18G6, p. 60. f Appendix G.
 
 54 OUK GREAT VASSAL EMPIKE. 
 
 intentions cannot aflect tlie financial results, can afford no 
 consolation or compensation for tlie large amount of use- 
 less expenditure. 
 
 Without being ol)liged to argue, with Mandeville, that 
 }>rivate vices are public benefits, the Natives of India can- 
 not fail to see that what we call the " reckless profusion" 
 of a Native Prince, — in the few cases admittino- of such an 
 im})utation, — is far more advantageous to the country 
 than the temperance and thrift of the English officials who 
 would supplant him. Whatever the Native Prince may 
 sjiend is spent in India, chiefly in his own Principality. 
 His patriarchal bounty supports thousands who would 
 find no place at our boai'd. The manufacture of many 
 fabrics and articles of luxury, the encouragement of native 
 art and learning, depend almost entirely upon the patron- 
 iige of the Sovereign and his Court. The splendour of 
 his genial hospitality, public ceremonies and processions, 
 is a constant soiu'ce of national pride, entertainment and 
 social recreation to all ranks and classes. All this must 
 cease if the Prmcipality becomes a British Provmce ; 
 everything then must settle down to a dull and uniform 
 level. The stately dinner-parties and gay balls, in which 
 the small English community take delight, may be highly 
 civilised and intellectual diversions, worthy of general re- 
 spect and admiration ; but these festivities can hardly be 
 expected to rouse much popular interest, for Natives, even 
 of the highest rank, are very seldom invited to them. The 
 liigh moral character and domestic vu-tues of our officers, 
 who do not mix with the Natives at all and never meet 
 them except officially, afford no equivalent in popular 
 estimation for the money they drain out of the Province 
 to su])ply the wants of their families, ,and to provide for 
 their future years of retirement at home. 
 
 When a well informed Native hears the Pajah of Mysore, 
 or any other Pruice, denounced for siuTounding liimself 
 with " parasites," " hangers on," " favourites," and " cour- 
 tiers,"* who are declared to " exist on the public revenues," 
 and to " fatten on the corruption of the Court,"t he can 
 
 ♦ Ml/sore Papers, 18GG, p. HO ; Ditto, 18G7, p. i.'. 
 t I'll purs, Rajah of Berar, ]8-!j4, p. 54.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL P:MP1RE. 55 
 
 hardly avoid inquirmg whether the British Government has 
 no " hangers on" of* its own? What is he to think of " the 
 hundreds of* highly paid military officers leading a lifeof aim- 
 less idleness, under the verbal fiction that they are ' doing 
 duty,'" — of " the hill stations presenting an array of un- 
 employed Colonels and Majors," receiving salaries of £1{)0() 
 and £800 per annum respectively, to the amount of " some- 
 thing like a million sterling a year," These things we 
 find mentioned in a recent number of the Friend of India, 
 by no means a seditious journal ; and most people would 
 be inclined to admit the truth of its very mild comment, 
 that " the payment of handsome salaries for doing nothing 
 is at best unreproductive expenditure."'* No doubt need 
 be throwQi on the good intentions of the Government, on 
 the merits of the unemployed officers, far superior in every 
 pomt of view to the "parasites" of a Rajah, or on the 
 assertion that they are justly entitled to all that they re- 
 ceive. But it may well be disputed whether the system 
 under which these gentlemen have become entitled in a 
 very poor country to such very large pay for httle or no 
 work, can be fairly extolled for its far-sighted economy, 
 or is likely to be regarded by a Native politician as an 
 utterly "unspeakable blessing." The "parasites" of a 
 Kajah, it must also be observed, are not regarded by Na- 
 tives, who know them better than we do, with that im- 
 patient horror and indiscrimmate indignation so natural 
 and so admuable in members of the dominant race. 
 
 When we complain that as m the Army so also in almost 
 every civil department, a superfluous number of highly 
 paid and (if I may coin the word) highly pensionable 
 English gentlemen, are entertained, no question or doubt 
 is raised of the great benefits conferred by the establisli- 
 ment of regular and orderly government, which, in many 
 instances, could only have been effectually mitiated by 
 British intervention. But this could have been equally 
 well done without destroying the fabric of local institutions, 
 without excluding and proscribing Native talent, and 
 treating an entire population with contempt. The work 
 foi' which, perhaps, forty English officers were employed 
 * Friend of India, extracted from the Asiatic of Juuuary 10th, 1870.
 
 56 OUR GREAT VASSAL EM TIRE. 
 
 could have been performed as well, witli the assistance of 
 Natives alone, by the two or three able and well qualified 
 men who, in fact, devised and directed the whole process. 
 Instead of tliis wise and just moderation, English gentle- 
 men Avitli no special qualilications have been everywhere, 
 in our own Provinces and in Mysore, forced into office, so 
 that at the present day every district and every depart- 
 ment is over-manned and over-paid to a degree that will 
 not be believed vuitil it is thoroughly and impartially 
 invest ifTH-ted. 
 
 A very strikino- disclosure and clear admission of this 
 abuse, at least in one department, has been very recently 
 given in the reductions in the Police ordered by Lord 
 Mayo in November 18G9, when the magnitude of the 
 financial emergency seems to have forced itself upon his 
 mmd. Fifteen English gentlemen of the high rank of 
 Deputy Inspector-General, paid at the rate of £1500 a 
 year and uj)wards, and about a hundred and five District 
 Superintendents and Assistants, on an average of £500 a 
 year each, — in all one hundred and twenty supeiior ofiicers 
 drawmg salaries m the aggregate of about £80,000 per 
 annum, — were marked down for summary removal. 
 
 If these reductions are carried out to the full extent 
 originally ordered, — to which the Home Government is 
 understood to have demurred, — it may well be doubted 
 Avhetlier the efficiency of the Police will sufier in the 
 slightest dega'ee. Into the general merits of the Police 
 under the new organisation, as a protective or as a detec- 
 tive body, we need not enter at present. No one who is 
 at aU acquainted with the opinions and feelings of the 
 Natives, more especially as expounded in their own news- 
 papei'S, both English and vernacular, will deny that it is 
 an eminently unpopular body. It is not regarded as an "un- 
 speakable blessing." The former system of Police having 
 failed, particularly in Bengal, changes far too sweeping 
 were made, and instead of building on the old foundations, 
 which we had damaged but not destroyed, of the village 
 watchmen and the responsibility of the village authorities, 
 to be secured by due remuneration, the usual panacea of 
 rules and forms under highly paid Euro])ean superintend-
 
 OUR CREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 57 
 
 ence was applied in wliolesale flishion. The following 
 extracts will suggest the possibility of dispensuig witli a 
 large number of English officers without any very great 
 loss or damage to the })ublic service or to general content. 
 Our first extract shall be from the Report on the Famine 
 in Orissa, by Mr. George Campbell, now Chief Commis- 
 sioner of the Central Provmces, dated the 26th of Novem- 
 ber 1867. 
 
 " The impression is very general that the appointments in the 
 Bengal Pohce were somewhat hastily filled. It is certain that 
 many of the European officers have no sufficient acquaintance 
 with the language of the people among whom they are employed ; 
 some, I believe, have no acquaintance with it whatever. I was a 
 member of the Board of Examiners (although I took no active 
 part in the proceedings) when that body represented to the 
 Lieutenant-Governor the failure of the officers of Police to pass 
 the prescribed tests; and although instructions were then issued 
 requiring the junior officers to qualify in future, I desire to take 
 this opportunity of stating that, in my opinion, the Government 
 of Bengal adopted a course very much to be regretted, when at 
 the same time, on the mere recommendation of Lieutenant- 
 Colonel Pughe, Inspector-General of Police, it exempted from 
 examination a large number of tlie least qualified officers, and 
 permitted them to be placed in the higliest posts without the ne- 
 cessary qualifications. My impression is that the officer in charge 
 of the Cuttack PoHce at the commencement of the famine was 
 one of those exempted officers (although I cannot speak exactly 
 on this last point), and he avowed himself wholly ignorant of the 
 language of the people of his district.* 
 
 The next piece of testimony shall also come from a 
 witness friendly to our administration in general, and to 
 the Police Department in particular, — the Calcutta Review, 
 most of the contributors to which belong either to the 
 Civil Service or to the Army of Bengal, t The writer of 
 the article to be quoted criticises the working of the new 
 system, which had then been four years m operation, 
 suggests one of the very measures that has just been 
 ordered by Lord Mayo, the abolition of the rank of Deputy 
 
 * Papers, Administration of Bengal, 18G8, p. 27. 
 
 t A reviewer in the number of the Calcutta Review, p. 476, we are 
 about to quote, says : — " It is no secret that to the youiio- members of 
 the Civil Service this licvicw is mainly iudcbtcd for its continued 
 existence."
 
 58 UUIi CHEAT VASSAL EMl'TRE. 
 
 Inspector-General, and says of the gentlemen holding that 
 ofhce, that " they are far less practised and capable, as 
 orticers, than their own subordinates whom they are ex- 
 pected to supervise;" that "there is no highly paid 
 otheer whose existence is so entirely unfelt and unnoticed 
 as is the case with these Deputy Inspectors-General." 
 *■ Their time," he adds, " is chiefly taken up in correspond- 
 ing, reporthig, and making returns." " On the whole," he 
 continues, " we think we never knew either a more useless 
 or more mischievous waste of public money than is incuiTed 
 for these officers."* They remained in office, however, 
 (liu'ing the whole of Sir John (now Lord) Lawrence's Vice- 
 royalty. 
 
 The reviewer, after noticing some " local and national" 
 peculiarities which, in his opinion, impede the course of 
 justice m India, proceeds thus : — 
 
 "Tliese difficulties arc further very materially increased^ by the 
 fact that the Police are managed and controlled by a few (a very 
 much too small number), of foreigners, of different colom-, religion, 
 and language to their subordinates and the general community ; 
 who are quite curiously ignorant of the Natives, who have no 
 intimate intercourse with them, know nothing of their inner life, 
 liabits, or feelings, and can't (as a vnrij general rule), understand, 
 or be understood by, any ordinary villager they may come 
 across."t 
 
 The words in a parenthesis, (" a very much too small a 
 numljer,")are very characteristic of the irresistible tendency 
 of official life in India to foster, in spite of adverse experi- 
 ence, the ever mcreasing employment of English gentle- 
 men in all the best offices. In the very sentence in which 
 be admits their utter want of indispensable qualifications, 
 this clever Bengal Civilian — for such he evidently is — 
 proposes to place more of them in the Police. He pro- 
 poses to abolish the rank (jf Deputy Inspector-General, 
 \)\\t to bring in a larger number of young Englishmen in 
 the lower grade of Assistant Supermtendent, who may be 
 trained in the De[>artment. Fiat exjyerimentum in coiyore 
 rill. In the following passages the reviewer tells us what 
 liave been some of the results of the actual experiment 
 
 * Calcutta lievlew, No. Lxxxiv, 1866, p. 346, 7, 8. f I/jid., p. .V3l.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 59 
 
 under the new organisation of the Police as it exists at 
 present. 
 
 " It is undeniable tliat the Pohce and the administration be- 
 tween them have made a criminal prosecution a burden of such a 
 crushino' wei<i'ht, not only upon those who are connected with the 
 trial, but also upon all the inhabitants of the place where the in- 
 vestigation is made, that it has become the one object of the whole 
 population of Bengal, to attempt to hush up crime, to keep out 
 the Police when possible, and, when it is not possible, to hush up 
 each his own individual knowledge of it, in order that they may 
 not undergo the severe misfortune of being required to appear as 
 witnesses. The Police being met by a difficulty so great, and 
 being at the same time compelled to detect crimes, took the one 
 step that suggests itself to Native minds in such cases, and 
 proceeded to extort their knowledge from the villagers by hard 
 usage, in fact, by torture.^' 
 
 "The amount of consideration and deferential respect which 
 has been thrust upon them lately, even the pretentiousness of 
 their garb and of their semi-military training, — have conferred 
 upon the new Police an arrogance and unwonted sense of power, 
 which, it is much to be feared, have made them bolder in the 
 abuse of power, while it has assuredly made the people more ab- 
 ject to them, than ever.-'^* 
 
 The writer asks this question in the eonckiding para- 
 graph of his essay : — 
 
 " Supposing that such a Committee were to be appointed 
 to-morrow for Bengal, as was appointed formerly for the torture 
 cases in Madras, is there any one now engaged in camying on 
 the government of the country who would not dread a fearful 
 exposure ?^'t 
 
 Let us now glance at another " unspeakable blessing," 
 mentioned by Mr. Mangles in the Minute already cited, 
 that of " wise and fixed principles of law," as practically 
 admmistered in oui- Courts of Justice. The late Lieutenant 
 Governor of the Punjaub, to whose paper, published in 
 the Times in March 1868, we have referred more than 
 once, will not be considered as a malicious assailant of our 
 system : — 
 
 " Our judicial system is most unpopular, with its long delays, 
 its niceties, and complicated system and legal technicalities, and 
 is very costly. It has been prematurely raised to a standard 
 
 * Calcutta Eevieiv, No. Lxxxiv, 1866, p. 353. t /^"?., p. 368.
 
 60 OUH GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 suited to European requirements, and uncongenial to the people, 
 whose simple idea of justice is, that it should be prompt, cheap, 
 and vigorous. '^ 
 
 " Another cause of popular dissatisfaction is our constant call 
 for witnesses from their remote homes, their delay and their scant 
 compensation, or often no compensation at all." 
 
 Very similar strictures have recently fallen from another 
 very competent and impartial observer, Mr. L. H. Ash- 
 burner, of the Bombay Civil Service, Magistrate of Khan- 
 deish, 
 
 " On the frontier of an ill-governed Native State, where the 
 people are brought in more immediate contact with oppression 
 and misgovernment, our system may have its advocates ; but 
 even there, for every instance of insecurity of life and property, 
 the Patels will quote equally distressing cases of respectable fa- 
 milies impoverished and ruined by the action of our Civil Courts, 
 or of notorious murderers let loose upon society owing to some 
 legal quibble. Not understanding the stringency of our rules of 
 evidence, they attribute these failures of justice, which are every 
 day becoming more common, to the corruption of the Judges. ^^* 
 
 The oft repeated suggestion that our judicial system, 
 " prematurely raised," as Sir Kobert Montgomery says, 
 " to a European standard," has introduced a train of moral 
 and social evils among the people of India, is very forcibly 
 stated, by an unexceptionable witness, in the following 
 extract of a letter from Mr. H. C. Tucker, Commissioner 
 of the Fifth Division, to the Sudder Board of lievenue, 
 Noilh WesteiTi Provinces, Agra; No. 606, dated 8tli 
 December, 1854 : — 
 
 " Our involved system of technical law leads to endless expen- 
 sive and uncertain litigation ; and all these evils are on the in- 
 crease. Our whole sj'stem of Law, and Government, and p]duca- 
 tion, tends to make the Natives clever, irreligious, and litigious. 
 No man can trust another. Formerly a verbal promise was as 
 good as a bond. Then bonds became necessary. Now bonds go 
 for nothing, and no prudent banker will lend money without re- 
 ceiving landed property in pledge. "f 
 
 Mr. Tucker gives as his deliberate opinion and the re- 
 sult of Ills experience that in " the recently acquu-ed Pun- 
 
 * Papers, Bril'isli, find Native Achniriistration, 18G8, p. 16. 
 t S>Ai^:iionJi from the Records of Government North- West Frovinces, 
 Fiirt XXIV, Agra, 1850, p. 225.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. Gl 
 
 jab, where the people have had Httle of our Law," they 
 " are comparatively truthful and honest," but that " the 
 population becomes worse and worse as you descend lower 
 and lower to our old possessions of Calcutta and Madras," 
 It must not be supposed that because a regular code of 
 law and procedure does not exist in unreformed Native 
 States, a creditor or aggrieved person is necessarily left with- 
 out any remedy except violence against the opposite party. 
 Public opinion and social influence are much more potent 
 there than in British territory, where hardly any distinc- 
 tion of rank is recognised, and where the pettiest official 
 may override and supersede every sanction that the people 
 have been accustomed to respect. Supported by theu' 
 tenants, neighbours, and fellow-townsmen, the superior 
 landholders, the head men of villages, the elders of tribes 
 and castes, and, in some cases, religious teachers, with or 
 without a Punchayut or jury of five, exercise an authority 
 for the settlement of clamis and the redi'ess of wrongfs that 
 is not easily resisted or evaded. These customary juris- 
 dictions, dependent on rough and anomalous means for 
 enforcmg theu" decrees, are of course irregular and un- 
 certain in their action, but they can never furnish so cruel 
 a weapon to the rich extortioner as our procedure, which 
 enables him, as plaintiff or defendant, to pursue or retreat 
 through several Courts, with an ultimate apj)eal, if the 
 suit involves more than £1000, to the Judicial Committee 
 of Privy Council m London.* 
 
 * Why should a wealthy litigant be enabled to drag his opponent 
 across a whole continent, a distance of thousands of miles, to England, 
 and to force him to employ the most expensive process possible, ia 
 order to have another appeal ? Would not litigants in India prefer 
 perhaps an inferior quality of justice in the High Courts of the Presi- 
 dencies, to justice administered by the first judges in the world in Lon- 
 don? There is one class of cases, those in which the local Governments, 
 or high officials, stand in the position of defendant, to which, in my 
 opinion, the riglit of appeal to the Judicial Committee should be con- 
 fined, and into this class should be admitted those matters of disputed 
 succession, alleged lapse and escheat in reigning and mediatised fami- 
 lies of sovereign rank, and cases raised between Native Princes and 
 their feudatory Chieftains, which, often involving the interpretation of 
 treaties, are considered as affairs or acts of " state", are excluded from 
 the cognisance of any tribunal of appeal, and are summarily decided
 
 r»2 OUH CliEAT VA8SJAL EMPTIJE. 
 
 There is another DepaTtment, the constant butt of 
 ridicule in the Native Press of our Provinces for its costly 
 inefficiency and elaborate waste, which would appear from 
 the following passage m a Report by Colonel Daly, Politi- 
 cal Agent at Gwalior, dated the 22nd of April 1868, not 
 to be regarded as an " unspeakable blessing" by either the 
 Prmces or the people of Native States. 
 
 " It is quite on the cards that, with one of Scindia\s capacity 
 and temperament, Gwalior may one day be as conspicnons in the 
 prosecution of public works as it is now for the absence of them. 
 Unhappily, the daily experience of our own Public Works De- 
 partment does not afford us much room for suggesting them to 
 notice. The oppression wliich overtook the villages along the 
 line of the Agra and Bombay road during its construction, has 
 left a painful impression with Scindia and the people. I make no 
 comment on the barracks and other buildings at Morar and the 
 Fort ; a full report of these works will be made by the Public 
 Works Department.'^* 
 
 General Sir Mark Cubbon, who, with the assistance of 
 one or two Engineers to guide the operations of his Dis- 
 trict officers and their Native subordinates, had covered 
 Mysore with good roads before any British Province was 
 equally well supplied, strongly objected, but in vain, to 
 the introduction of the Public Works Department into the 
 territories which were under his charge for a quarter of a 
 century. There are now about thirty English gentlemen 
 in Mysore, employed on very simple work in that Depart- 
 ment on very handsome salaries, where two or three at 
 the most would really be required, if any pains were taken 
 to train Native Engineers, or even any encouragement 
 offered for them to come forward. 
 
 In the Jjombay Gazette of November 20th 1809, there 
 is an article commenting on a striking letter that had then 
 ju.st appeared in the Pioneer, a journal pul)lislied at Alla- 
 habad, not likely, the Gazette says, "to print malevolent 
 insinuations on no sort of authority, or apparent authority." 
 
 by Political Agents, sure of sujjport in the Foreign Department, or by 
 the Govemmcnt, and too frequently in a very unjudicial manner. 
 These are the very cases that ought to be appealable to the Queen in 
 Council. 
 
 * Cc/itral India Rt'iiorf, 1807-8, Appendix, p. xiv.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 03 
 
 Tlie letter purports to be written from actual experience 
 obtained within the Department. 
 
 "Tho writer makes tlio following solemn declaration. He 
 says : — ' I can in all truthfulness assert, after a most close con- 
 nection with the Department for years, and without semblance of 
 fear that my views could be controverted, that no Department 
 under any Government could exhibit such reckless expenditure.'" 
 
 " He goes on to imply the existence of positive fraud. He 
 asserts, not only that some men have charged one hundred per 
 cent, more than others would have charged — not only that sums 
 are paid far beyond the value of the work done — but that enor- 
 mous sums have been charged for the repairs of a certain road, 
 which road, nevertheless, was always out of repair. He intimates, 
 more than once, that overseers have made fortunes." 
 
 It is quite unnecessary, in order to prove the notoriety 
 of these scandalous administrative abuses, to cite the ver- 
 naculjir newspapers, or those printed in English under 
 Native management, for we find very similar allegations 
 made, about the same time, by the principal weekly paper 
 of Calcutta. The Friend of India, in December 1869, 
 " commends to the study of Colonel Strachey," Secretary 
 to Government for Public Works, the following two 
 facts : — 
 
 " The Calcutta Sailors' Home, built three years ago to a con- 
 siderable extent out of charitable subscriptions, has already begun 
 to give way owing to what we may call fraudulent beams. The 
 second fact, which goes far to explain such scandal as this, is that 
 a subordinate of the Public Works Department recently died 
 worth several — we are assured, eight — lakhs of rupees" (£80,000). 
 " He had been a private soldier and had made all his money in 
 the Department."* 
 
 The Times of India, published at BombPoy at about the 
 same date as our last extract, warns the Government that 
 public woi'ks must be constructed " on commercial prmci- 
 ples," and that " even irrigation works and railways, like 
 gold, may be bought too dearly." A correspondent declares, 
 " after an experience of twenty-five years," that " no State 
 can afford to build refrigerators in the shape of double- 
 storied barracks, — patent producers of asthma, lumbago, 
 and rheumatism, — costing lakhs of rupees, or to pour coin 
 
 * Homeward Mail, January l<»tli, 1870.
 
 G-4 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 into the hands of Native and European contractors to 
 simply carry out tlie departmental rule — of useless ex- 
 penditure and wanton waste of money," The Editor 
 attributes the shoi-tcomings of the " costly mihtary En- 
 gineers" employed in all the higher offices to " a want of 
 insight, an habitual neglect of close supervision and inde- 
 pendent check, with a deficiency m knowledge of details 
 quite sufficient to account for the abuses and serious mal- 
 versations charged agamst the lower ranks of the Depart- 
 ment."* 
 
 " Want of insight," and " deficiency in knowledge of 
 details," are terms equally descriptive of the weak points 
 in the qualffications of most English officers in India, and 
 consequently of the Imperial Government, in almost every 
 branch of administration. Having no social intercourse 
 with the Natives, and takinof little interest in their works 
 and ways, the great majority of our officers are more or 
 less at the mercy of theu' Native subordmates — usually 
 of one or two in close attendance — for information on all 
 matters of detail, of local circumstances and current events. 
 The minority, more independent, more confident, more 
 determined to judge for themselves, and to be guided by 
 no one, perhaps, on the whole, mislead themselves more 
 than they could have been misled. 
 
 Still maintaining my objections to over-centralisation 
 and a straining after Procrustean uniformity, whether mani- 
 fested in violent acts of annexation or m milder acts of leofis- 
 lation, I should say that, speaking generally, our Imperial 
 work has been more efficient, our Imperial influence has 
 been more beneficial, than our local work or our local in- 
 fluence. Local work can be better done by Natives than 
 by Englishmen. Native talent can never be so well se- 
 lected or so well applied to the work of local administra- 
 tion by the British Government as in a Native State. 
 
 And this will sei've to reconcile an apparent contradiction 
 that may have struck some of my readers as running 
 throughout these pages. I have freely questioned the 
 peH'ection, and cast doubt on the perfectibility of British 
 administration as well as of British Governm.ent in India. 
 * Extracted from the Asiatic, December 22nd, 18G9.
 
 oui: (.;iiEA'r VASSAL EMi'iiiii:. 65 
 
 And yet I have taken as the chief sign and criterion of a 
 Native State's progress m reform, that it lias adopted to 
 a greater or less extent our principles of government and 
 onr forms of administration. 
 
 This is because our principles are as good as ever, 
 although our practice may have fallen off, or may have 
 become, by force of altered circumstances, unsuitable for 
 the time and inconsistent with our principles. 
 
 I do indeed believe that the work of government in our 
 hands is declining, rather than rising, in efficiency and 
 general repute, absolutely in some degree, but still more 
 relatively, or with reference to the keener perceptions and 
 more advanced capabilities of our political pupil. We 
 should be proud, rather than jealous or apprehensive, of 
 these results of oiu" teaching and example. We ought not 
 to be blind to the moral and intellectual growth that calls 
 for a relaxation of discipline. 
 
 I believe, also, that the enactment of law, the organisa- 
 tion of procedure, and the submission of Government to 
 its own laws and pledges, having been exhibited by us on 
 a large scale, in supersession of the arbitrary and capricious 
 methods which we found in force, the advantages of a rule 
 of law and order are appreciated by a sufficiently large 
 number of the governing classes of India to admit of its 
 beinof introduced and enforced everywhere imder the 
 aus{)ices of the Imperial Power. But w^hile our general 
 idea and plan of reducing Native institutions to a civihsed 
 shape has been almost always excellent, our changes have 
 frequently been premature, too complete and too compre- 
 hensive. What we have gained in precision we have lost 
 in flexibility and self-action. 
 
 Native States, — if tolerably well administered, some- 
 times when very badly administered, — are for the most 
 part well and easily governed. British Provinces, with an 
 elaborate and expensive administration, could not be 
 governed at all without a formidable military force, always 
 on the alert and frequently displayed. 
 
 The best proof possible of a Government being so far 
 good as to be suitable and acceptable to the people, is that 
 it can withstand and outlast its own bad administration. 
 
 F
 
 (')<) OIR (JUEAT \AS,SAL EMl'lUE. 
 
 The luiretbrined Native States of India are reproached, 
 and justly, because the pay of their troops and estal)lish- 
 nients is always, as a matter of course, several months in 
 arrears. That is bad administration. But iJi,ood govern- 
 ment, in some rude fashion or other, surmounts the diffi- 
 culty, even when it has led, as it often does, to mutiny. 
 The Prince himself comes forward ; one or two petty 
 otheials are ostensibly dismissed or disgraced ; a portion of 
 the pay is distributed ; a few presents of clothes are given, 
 and quiet is restored. The constitution being sound, a 
 speedy recovery is made from severe privations and acci- 
 dents. 
 
 Our troops and civil establishments are paid monthly, 
 with the most admirable regularity. That is good ad- 
 ministration. But if we were to try the experiment, or 
 be reduced to the necessity, of allowing pay to fall six 
 months m arrears, we should find that good administration 
 was all we had to rely on, and that when once that was 
 interrupted there would be no government at all. The 
 constitution is radically weak and unsound ; the biilliant 
 aspect is due to unhealthy repletion and the use of stimu- 
 lants ; a factitious appearance of streng'th is kept up only 
 by the constant purveyance of costly provisions and exotic 
 drugs, and by a complicated apparatus of artificial support. 
 H the supplies should at any time be cut off, if the foreign 
 support should be partially withdrawn, there would be 
 imminent danger of collapse, or of some inflammatory erup- 
 tion that coidd only be treated by blood-letting and other 
 " heroic" remedies. 
 
 ^lutiny or insubordination in our Native army, disaffec- 
 tion or conspiracy anywhere in the British Provinces of 
 India, cannot be quelled or cured by conciliation and com- 
 promise, Vjy the redress of wrongs or by gracious |)romises. 
 Force and terror — stern repression and penal inflictions — 
 are the oidy means Ijy whicli we can touch that side of 
 the Native character with which alone we come really in 
 contact. The cynical assertion, frequently heard from 
 Anglo-Indians, that Asiatics can only be ruled by fear, 
 has much tnitli in it, with reference to existing relations 
 between the i-aces, but tlie truth is not fV)r us either 
 eulogistic or exculpatory.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 67 
 
 And if any one should demur to these views, and claim 
 for the British Government in India a higher share of 
 moral authority, let him explain where it resides and how 
 it is to be applied. By what operations, except military 
 operations, does he conceive the British Government can 
 oppose the disintegrating forces of ignorance, fanaticism, 
 and wild ambition ? How would he, for instance, meet an 
 impending or incipient rebellion ? Would he rely on Pro- 
 clamations or General Orders ? They did not produce 
 much good in 1857. Not only did their persuasive effect 
 amount to nothnig, but their statements of fact were 
 invariably disbelieved. 
 
 The gfeneral course and numerous incidents of the Re- 
 bellion served to bring out in strong relief the self-sustain- 
 ing faculties of a Native State, and the vital support it 
 can give to the Imperial Power, strikingly contrasted with 
 the utter inability of our own administration, in District, 
 Province, or Presidency, to stand its ground, unless backed 
 by British troops, against an outburst of popular fury. A 
 very competent authority. Sir Bartle Frere, late Governor 
 of Bombay and now a Member of the Secretary of State's 
 Coiuicil, has officially recorded his opinion that " no ad- 
 ministration could have been more surprised by rebellion, 
 none could have been more powerless to arrest or confront 
 it, than the Government of the North- West Provinces in 
 1857."* 
 
 It would be too much to expect this eminent public 
 servant, — conscious of great skill and knowledge acquired, 
 of much good work performed, and of well merited honour 
 gained in his past career, with a grand field of usefidness, 
 and, perhaps, some still more splendid prize open to him 
 in the future, — to interpret these political phenomena in 
 anything like the way that I shoidd, or to draw anything 
 like the same inferences from them. To do so would 
 probably seem to him almost an acknowledgment that his 
 occupation was gone, that he had " scorned delights and 
 lived laborious days" to very little purpose. And yet, 
 what is the remedy he proposes to apply to those defects 
 in the Government of the North- West Provinces that, in 
 
 * Papers, Administration of Bengal, 1868, p. 49. 
 
 F 2
 
 OS (»ril GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 his o\vn M-ords, " blinded it to the mine of popular discon- 
 tent which so suddenly exploded" ? How does he propose 
 to endow the Lieutenant-Governor with that " sympa- 
 thetic appreciation of what the people really in the long 
 run desire, or will tolerate," which he believes to have 
 been " the real source of the power" of Runjeet Smgli and 
 Dost ^lohammed. which he justly declares to be " a more 
 essential element in the composition of a successful despot," 
 than even " a strong will,"* and which he evidently thinks 
 we must not expect to find very often in the person of a 
 British Lieutenant-Governor? A Council! Give him a 
 Council such as those of Bombay and Madras. He has 
 not, however, much confidence in the remedy he proposes. 
 He LS in the puzzled state, usual, and indeed inevitable, 
 when an Anglo-Indian functionary considerably above the 
 average calibre gets out of the groove of administration, 
 and becrins to think and talk like a statesman. The in- 
 competence of the Agra Government in 1857, "cannot," 
 he says, " be attributed to any want of ability in the 
 Lieutenant-Governor or his advisers, for they were all 
 among the ablest in India, and I do not say that a Governor 
 and Council w^ould have done better."t Still a Council 
 might be an improvement. At any rate, he urges : — 
 
 " It cannot be said that the special form of Government in the 
 Xorth-AVest Provinces gave any sort of special facility in dealing 
 with the Rebellion, and it is at least open to argument that the 
 complacent acquiescence in the personal views of the head of the 
 Government, Avhere there is no one in authority to discuss them 
 as a colleague, was a fatal element in blinding the Government." 
 
 He could, he says, name some men who, " from their 
 accessibility and tact in eliciting opinions, would never be 
 wTong as to the popular view of a question," " But such 
 gifts as they possess are very rare." And he " knows 
 nothing more likely to be fatal to our rule in India than 
 the autocracy of an able, well-intentioned man, who has 
 not this peculiar aptitude i'or divining the wants and 
 wishes of the people,":]: Therefore, try a Council. If one 
 " able, well-intentioned" man witliout this " rare gift,'' 
 
 * Papers, Administration of Benqol, 3868, p. .'jO. 
 t Ibid., p, 40, ■ ; Ihid., p. 50.
 
 OUll CHEAT VASSAL EMPIIIE. 69 
 
 " this peculiar aptitude," will not do, associate three or 
 four more of the same class with him as his colleagues. 
 Perhaps one of them may by a happy chance possess that 
 rare and peculiar aptitude. If not, his colleagues would 
 be a check upon the Governor, and there would be less 
 danger of " wanton change under the more elaborate form 
 of government." " There can be no doubt," he contmues, 
 " that the tendency to such change, which is one of the 
 crying evils in our modern Indian system, is seen in its 
 most aggravated form where the Government is autocratic." 
 I should have thouglit that there was very great doubt on 
 this point. I should have supposed, on the contrary, that 
 a tendency to such change, for want of " an appreciation 
 of what the people really desire, or will tolerate," — a ten- 
 dency to over-legislation and over-regidation, — had been 
 a much more " crying evil" under the elaborate forms of 
 the Supreme Government than under the more autocratic 
 institutions of the Punjaub and Central Provinces. 
 
 But I am more immediately concerned at present with 
 that other capacity which we look for in a Government, and 
 in which Sir Bartle Frere tells us that of Agra failed in 
 1857, the capacity of maintaining the " public peace," of 
 " arresting and confronting rebellion." This is the funda- 
 mental duty of the Executive ; and it is difficult to con- 
 ceive from what incidents m the great crisis of 18.57 
 Sir Bartle Frere has been led to suppose that the political 
 vision of the Lieutenant Governor of Agra would have 
 been prolonged or his hands strengthened, if two or three 
 more gentlemen of the Bengal Civil Service had been with. 
 him as his Councillors. No Governor-General was ever 
 surrounded by more able Councillors than was Lord Can- 
 ning at the outbreak of the Mutmies, Yet assuredly that 
 excellent and lamented public servant, Mr. John Colvin, 
 who was then Lieutenant Governor of the North- West 
 Provinces, was not, so far as we can judge from the re- 
 cords of the time, one whit more " surprised" by the 
 Rebellion, one whit more " blinded" to the tremendous 
 proportions it was about to assume, one whit more " power- 
 less to arrest and confront it," without British troops, 
 than were the Viceroy and his Councillors.
 
 7U OUR GREAT \ASSAL E^IPIRE. 
 
 What they wanted then, what tliey want now, what 
 we shall always want in India, is a vital communication 
 with the conservative interests and free intellio-ence of the 
 coimtrv. And this we can only secure through the Native 
 Princes. We want the Native Princes much more than 
 they .want us. We want them for the discipline and the 
 education of two hundred millions of Asiatics, We can in- 
 struct and manage the two hundred Pruices, their families 
 and followers; we cannot sway the millions without the aid 
 and good will of their natural leaders. No British Collector, 
 no Commissioner, no Lieutenant Governor, no Councillor, 
 however able, however experienced, however highly edu- 
 cated, — though strained and sifted by a dozen successive 
 competitions, — can ever maintain order or propagate re- 
 f >rm as can be done by a Native Prince, however ignorant, 
 whom we have rendered amenable to our purpose. And 
 there is no necessity that Native Princes should be ignorant. 
 If most of them are so, it is only another proof of our 
 negligence. 
 
 There is no intention here of asserting- that Native 
 Princes or Native States are all that they ought to be, 
 or that they no longer need the restraint of British poli- 
 tical supremacy. My object in the evidence and illustra- 
 tions I have adduced has been rather to prove the inherent 
 capabilities of improvement displayed by many Native 
 States, than to afhrm the great progress made by any one 
 <jf them. My opinion is very decided that not even the 
 most advanced Native State in India has yet arrived at 
 that development of reformed institutions, to which with 
 our aid and guidance it might very easily attain. 
 
 The evils arising from the systematic neglect of our 
 Imperial duties of instructLng and reforming the allied 
 and protected States of India, had been a frequent topic 
 of cornj^laint and remonstrance for years before Lord Dal- 
 housie jiunped to the conclusion that destruction was the 
 only remedy for them. When the objections made by the 
 Court of Directors to the Oude Treaty of 1837 were un- 
 der the consideration of the Supreme Coimcil, Mr. T. C. 
 fif»bertson wrote a,s follows in a Minute dated the 28th of 
 January, 1830 : —
 
 OUR GUEAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 71 
 
 " Our persevering iiidifi'eveiice towards the lavish profusion 
 and other extravagancies of the late Ruler of that State, was, 1 
 apprehend, regarded by the Native community, more especially 
 the Mahomedan portion, as flowing from any rather than disin- 
 terested motives, and was even imputed by many to a crafty de- 
 sign of bringing his dominions into a condition toaSbrd a pretext 
 for adding them to our own/'* 
 
 Mr. Mansel, tlte last Resident at Nagpore, imputed the 
 disorders that had crept into the administration of that 
 State to tlie want of "' certainty and permanence" in the 
 control of oiir Government. He speaks of " the oscilla- 
 tion of the Resident's policy and system", in a style that 
 clearly indicates that our Government had no system or 
 policy whatever of its own, and fuiiiished its diplomatic 
 agents with no definite instructions as to their control 
 over the local administration. 
 
 " The Chief who to-day is subject to the control of a strict 
 Resident, is amused by his flatterers with the prospect of a suc- 
 cessor of a wholly different chai'acter. The advice of to-day is 
 disarmed of half its force if it can be expected to be followed by 
 a different course of policy on the morrow ; and when the season 
 of indifference and ease has produced its natural effects of mis- 
 government and debt, the reaction must needs be violent and 
 doubly distasteful to an arbitrary Prince, on the appointment of 
 an ofiicer impelled b}' duty to enforce a general reform. ''' 
 
 " The main cause of the difiiculty lies in the system of filling 
 up diplomatic appointments. It seems to be quite a chance if 
 the system of the oSicer who precedes, and of the ofiicer who 
 follows, agrees. The Rajah and his Ministers speculate on this 
 difference of action or opinion. Honesty is lukewarm and roguery 
 is fearless, as there is no certainty or no permanence in the policy 
 to be enforced.^' t 
 
 In a somewhat later despatch he writes : — 
 
 " My own opinion is that, had the same course of interference 
 been carried out from 1840 to 1853 in a uniform, kind and efi'ec- 
 tive manner, much or most, if not all, of this trouble would have 
 been avoided. The argument of the Natives with whom I have 
 frequently conferred on this subject is, that the Bi-itish Residents 
 at Nagpore should participate in the blame charged to the Rajah 
 by myself: for if the same system of advice and check which was 
 contemplated by the last Treaty had been carried out from first 
 
 * Oade Papers, 1858, p. 52. t Papers, Berar, 1854, p. 17.
 
 I — 
 
 '1 OUR CiREAT VASSAL EM PIKE. 
 
 to last, the l?aj:ili -wonld never have heeii tempted into habits of 
 indolfuee and avai-iee.'''^^ 
 
 And here are some of Lord Metcalfe's reflections on the 
 reforming measures which had been introduced in the 
 Nizam's Dominions by his own mfluence as Resident : — 
 
 " It is remarkable that our interference was then for the first 
 time exercised with a benevolent view to the protection and hap- 
 piness of the Nizam's subjects. Every former act of interference, 
 however subversive of the independence of the Hyderabad State, 
 was dictated soleh' by a regard for our own interests, wnthout 
 any cai-e or thought for the welfare of the people whom we had 
 delivered up to a Ruler of our own selection/'f 
 
 These operations were suspended with strange alacrity 
 at the first suggestion of a yovmg and inexperienced 
 Prince, in 1829 ; and the positive refusal to renew them 
 in 1851, has already fallen under our observation m these 
 pages. We have also remarked upon Sir William Slee- 
 man's appeal with regard to the Kingdom of Oude, fruit- 
 lessly continued through five years. :|: 
 
 Those who opposed the policy of annexation in the hey- 
 day of its ap]3arent success were, for the most part, the 
 very men who had contended and laboured most earnestly 
 for the welfare of the people of India, who had insisted 
 most strongly on the maintenance of British supremacy, 
 and on the necessity of its being exercised for the good of 
 all classes. But they believed that British supremacy 
 would be weakened by bad faith. They would have 
 j)romptly employed that supremacy to reform the institu- 
 tions of alhed and friendly States ; while Lord Dalliousie 
 iield aloof, refusing to interfere, because no immediate 
 material profit could be reaped, but watching for some 
 trumpery pretext to destroy and despoil. 
 
 I do not shut my eyes to the fact that counsels more 
 just and more generous now prevail, that the leading men 
 of britli parties, in and out of office, have declared against 
 further acquisitions of territory, and have recognised the 
 political prudence f)f maintaining Native States. But 
 these declarations have generally been somewhat vague 
 
 * Fnrthfn- Papers, Berar, 18ot'>, p. 7. 
 
 t Mdcnlfe'is Pajiers, p. 22-'. X Ante, p. bl.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 73 
 
 and indeterminate. Even the opponents of annexation, 
 instead of cordially recognising a reformed Principality as 
 at once the most progressive and permanent result pos- 
 sible of British power in India, have seemed rather to 
 look upon each Native State as a sort of privileged Alsa- 
 tia which it was advisable to tolerate, partly out of respect 
 for rights of prescription and compact, partly as a foil to 
 our w^ell-regulated method, and as a field for ill-regulated 
 ambition. There is no element in this contemptuous toler- 
 ance that can form an absolute safeguard against the first 
 plausible temptation. Several refuted heresies showed 
 great vitality a few years ago, when the State of Mysore 
 narrowly escaped extinction, — for instance, the doctrine 
 of " lapse", and the perpetuity of British management, — 
 while, the corporate character of a State being completely 
 overlooked, it was held that a Native Prince, even in his 
 dying agony or his dotage, might lawfully bequeath his 
 Sovereignty to the Paramount Power, and that the ac- 
 ceptance of such a bequest was quite consistent with Im- 
 perial duty and dignity. 
 
 I do not forget or undervalue the good work that has 
 already been accomplished, and is in course of accomphsh- 
 ment, in the very direction reconmiended in these pages. 
 What I wish to point out is, that this good work has 
 been done, and continues to be done, on no principle and 
 imder no system, — that the reform of a Native State is 
 taken up by mere chance, as it is forced on the considera- 
 tion of our Government by the succession of a minor, by 
 the violence, vice, or incompetence of a reigning Prince,* 
 or by the exceptional combination of a thoroughly com- 
 petent Resident with an enlightened Mmister or Sove- 
 reign. 
 
 In order that a Pesident should be thoroughly compe- 
 tent, it is not enough that he should be able and active : 
 he must also be genial, patient, and persuasive. He may 
 very easily be too active. If he possesses the requisite 
 tact and talent for the noble task before him, the mere 
 fact of his representing the Imperial Power will clothe 
 him with sufficient influence, without its being necessary 
 * As in the recent cases of Tonk and AH Rajporc.
 
 74 OUll GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 that his interference should be unpleasantly felt at every 
 turn. He sIkhiIcI learn that his office is to teach and in- 
 duce the Native Government to work well, — not to do the 
 work himself, or even to correct it when wrongly done. 
 He should sink his personality and efface himself, rather 
 than allow any rumour of undue pressure or direct action 
 on his ]iart to impair the authority of the Native Sovereign 
 or his Muiister. He should never be tempted impatiently 
 to assume, after the manner of Mr. Mangles and the Civil 
 Service m general, that the work of government and ad- 
 ministration must always be done in a superior style, and 
 be more of an " unspeakable blessing" to the people, at 
 the hands of educated Christian gentlemen like " Cubbon, 
 Bowring, or Charles Saunders", than at the hands of a 
 Hindoo Prince or Mussulman Minister. He should un- 
 derstand that when the new system involves innovations 
 on national habits and customs, the remodelling of old in- 
 stitutions, and the introduction of new forms, the question 
 is not so much what men can do the work best, as who 
 are the best men to do it. The foreign doctor may de- 
 serve all the credit of detecting the disease and prescribing 
 the medicine, and yet the Native practitioner, simply be- 
 cause he is a Native, may alone possess the power of re- 
 moving popular prejudices, of making the new treatment 
 palatable, and giving it vogue, and of securing a per- 
 manent cure by appropriate diet and regimen. 
 
 Better men cannot be found to carry out a poUcy of 
 Imperial reconstruction than those who are at present 
 actively employed in the civil and political offices of India. 
 I am not a believer in the universally diffused capacity 
 for administration and government of a "Service", whether 
 recruited by patronage or by competition ; but if we would 
 confine ourselves to our appropriate and legitimate sphere, 
 there would be no lack of well-qualified agents. All that 
 they rcfjuire are clear instructions on the subject of Im- 
 perial policy. When the national instinct is roused and 
 the national voice has spoken,— when broader views of 
 our mi,ssion and our duties are expoimded by the highest 
 authorities in Great Britain, — administrative power and 
 administrative loyalty will not he wanting, either in the
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 75 
 
 central executive Council or amonof tlie scattered subordi- 
 nate officers, for the fulfilment of the national decree. But 
 no broader views will ever originate in Calcutta. 
 
 Law reformers do not look for much help or countenance 
 from the great body of judges, advocates, and solicitors, 
 or ecclesiastical and educational reformers from the bishops 
 and beneficed clergy. Old soldiers and sailors are gene- 
 rally opposed to all military and naval novelties. The 
 cause of local self-government never meets with much 
 favour from members of the permanent Civil Service. No 
 one likes to find that his craft and mystery is to lose its 
 value, or to be thrown open to general competition. In 
 India the natural reluctance of a privileged profession to 
 sacrifice its pride and its interests, to relinquish power, 
 place, or patronage, to learn a new procedure and assume 
 new relations towards the outer w^orld, is heightened by 
 strong distinctions of race, creed, and colour. The national 
 conscience and absolute decision of the United Kingdom 
 must overcome these obstacles. The public opinion of 
 Great Britain translated into precepts by the Secretary of 
 State, with or without some Parliamentary action, would 
 soon suffice to modify and transform the temper of the 
 Indian Services and of the Viceregal Government. The 
 more liberal spirit must come from home. It will never 
 spring up unbidden in official circles. 
 
 A remark officially recorded two years ago by Colonel 
 Hopkinson, Commissioner of Assam, is here very much to 
 the pouit : — , 
 
 " Lastly, I would observe that if endeavours are ever made to 
 develope the moral nature of the Natives after the fashion of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race, it will be found that for the most part they 
 originate either in England or with Englishmen out of the official 
 pale in India. ^^* 
 
 The besetting sin of every organised body of professional 
 functionaries, — the desu^e to magnify its own importance 
 and power, — affects most deeply the superintendence of 
 Native States by the Calcutta Foreign Office and its 
 Agents. Instead of strengthening the Prince's hands and 
 
 * Papers, British and Native Administration^ 1868, p. L(i.
 
 7 b OUH GREAT VASSAL EMl'IllE. 
 
 g-iiidlno- his steps, tlie official tendency is always to weaken 
 his authority and to fetter his movements. 
 
 It ought to be clearly understood, for instance, that the 
 fault of the Oude Government for many years before the 
 annexation, Avas not that of tyraimical oppression, but 
 rather a certain weakness and looseness of administration, 
 and a total incapacity to cope with the great landholders, 
 ;;11 lieino- due m a o-reat measure to our own derelictions 
 and neglect. Far from its being true, as has been often 
 alleged, that the Oude Government was enabled to be op- 
 pressive with impunity in consequence of British military 
 support. Sir William Sleeman declares that its inability 
 to control the more powerful feudatories arose from that 
 support not being given to which the Government was 
 justly entitled. From time to time, he tells us, Regiments 
 liad been withdrawn from several points, which " to do 
 our duty lionestlij hy Oude', we ought to restore.* 
 
 " The British force in Oude is much less than it was when the 
 Treaty of the 11th September, 1837, was made, and assuredly 
 less than it should be with a due regard to our engagements and 
 the Oude requirements.'^ 
 
 "Our exigencies became great with the Affghan war, and have 
 continued to be so from those wars which grew out of it with 
 Gwalior, Scinde, and the Punjaub ; but they have all now passed 
 away, and those of our humble Ally should be no longer forgotten 
 or disregarded. Though we seldom give him the use of troops 
 in the support of the authority of his local officers, still the 
 prestige of having them at hand, in support of a just cause, is 
 unquestionably of great advantage to him and to his people, and 
 this advantage we cannot withhold from him with a due regard 
 to the obligations of solemn trcaties.'''t 
 
 Tlie very same weakness in the Head of the State, 
 curable only by Imperial intervention, is the main obsta- 
 cle to improved government in the larger Principalities 
 of Eajpootana, especially in Joudpoor and Oodeypoor. 
 There the great feudatories, regarding the Sovereign as 
 little more than primM.s- inter pares, claim unlimited sway 
 witliin their own estates, resent all judicial or executive 
 interference, and deny all right of appe<al against their 
 
 * Sleeman's Oude, vol. i, {). 186. See also vol. i, p. Ixiv, Ixv. 
 t fOid., vol. ii, p. 200.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL fLMPIRE. 77 
 
 acts and orders. Colonel Keatinge, the present Agent to 
 the Governor-Genei^al in Rajpootana, one of the most dis- 
 tinguished and acconiplislied officers in India, gave the fol- 
 lowing strong hint on the subject in a recently published 
 Keport : — 
 
 " Stagnant as no doubt the condition of society is in Native 
 States^ there are Chiefs who desire reform, but the opposition 
 they meet from their nobles is so serious^ that they can seldom 
 accomplish much. I am convinced that the ancient feudal system 
 of the Rajpoots cannot exist in close contact with the civilisation 
 from the West^ which now surrounds it. Before long it will, I 
 apprehend, be necessary for Government to recognise openly this 
 difficulty, to collect reliable information on the subject, and to 
 promulgate general rules regarding the extent to which it ex- 
 pects nobles in their different degrees to render obedience to 
 their Chiefs. At present, neither the Chiefs, the nobles, nor 
 even the Political staff, have a clear understanding on this sub- 
 ject." 
 
 Unfortunately there have been very few officers m the 
 Political department durmg the last twenty years, and 
 there are very few now, who have adopted the enlightened 
 and far-seeing views to which Colonel Keatinge has given 
 expression. The Foreign Office at Calcutta, from which 
 the Residents and Political Agents must take their cue 
 and from time to time draw inspiration, though greatly 
 restrained and softened of late by home influence, still 
 seems to treat every spontaneous effort of Native states- 
 manship in a sub-acid and slightly contemptuous tone. 
 Native Princes and Ministers may feel themselves tole- 
 rably secure from total abolition, but they are still pretty 
 sure to be snubbed and humiliated whenever they presume 
 to display the slightest originality of thought or indepen- 
 dence of character, to turn their attention towards any 
 administrative change that has not been suggested by the 
 British representative, and, m particular, to ask for Im- 
 perial aid or permission for any extension or consolidation 
 of their authority. The predilections of the Department 
 are all the other way, — towards the extension of its o^^■n 
 direct authority. Every petty Chieftain in feudal depen- 
 dence on a Native State, is a special object of interest to 
 the Political Ap'ent. With or without the existence or
 
 /b our. GREAT VASt^AL EMPIRE. 
 
 semblance of a British guaranty, — originally intended to 
 secure him from confiscation and oppression, not to exempt 
 liim from service and obedience to his lawful Suzerain, — 
 the Native Prince's feudatory is made a virtual feudatory 
 of the British Government. His customary jurisdiction 
 within his own estate becomes inviolable and unchano-e- 
 able in extent and consequence, free from any visitation 
 and review by the Sovereign, but subject to an appeal to 
 the Political Agent, and under his general supervision. 
 
 The subversion of the Prince's rule, and substitution of 
 our official supremacy, over a large number of his vassal 
 Chieftains, has proceeded to a greater or less extent, with re- 
 sidts more or less injurious, and more or less easily remedi- 
 able, in various Native States, according to local circum- 
 stances and customs, and according to the notions of the 
 particular Bi'itish officer who was in power at some critical 
 period. For although ready enough to suppoi't and carry out 
 the proposals and decisions of its Agents, our Government 
 has never, so far as I can ascertain, laid down any principles 
 for their guidance, or appeared to encourage any plan ex- 
 cept that of acquiring as much direct power as possible by 
 any available means. In some cases, as in Bajpootana, 
 wliere our control is perhaps the least stringent, the semi- 
 independence of the more powerful feudatories is of ancient 
 origin, has always been — -if not so decided and unquestion- 
 able as at present, — of a very substantial character, and 
 could not now be peacefully restricted or modified with- 
 out Imperial interference. In others it has been of our 
 creation, or strengthened and confirmed by our conni- 
 vance and approval. In more than one instance tribute 
 and service due from a feudatory to his Native Suzerain 
 have been diverted from the legitimate channel and ap- 
 propriated by our Government. 
 
 Apart from any consideration of the wrong and loss in- 
 flicted, and of the general deterioration of sovereign 
 authority by the fact and rumour of repudiated allegiance, 
 it must be at once obvious that in temtories traversed 
 and intersected by many separate jurisdictions, great and 
 even insurmountable obstacles are raised against effectual 
 administrative reform. Were there no other objection,
 
 OUR GllEAT VASSAL EMl'IKE. 7!> 
 
 it ouglit to be enough to point out that the liuler of* a 
 State of moderate size may be able to secure the services 
 of highly educated men for judicial posts and other im- 
 portant offices, w^liile no such help could by any possibility 
 be obtained by a petty Chieftain, whose income w^ould in 
 many cases not exceed £500 a year, and w^ho w^ould fre- 
 quently be himself destitute of even the rudiments of an 
 Indian education. 
 
 In consequence, as it w^ould seem, of the scandals and 
 loud complaints caused by the misgovernment and mis- 
 conduct of the Maharajah of Joudpoor, — misconduct that 
 would almost have justified his deposition, — the Govern- 
 ment of India turned its attention in the middle of 1869 
 towards the condition of Rajpootana. Some well intended 
 though imperfect measures for suspending personal rule in 
 Joudpoor were ordained, but nothmg permanent, nothing 
 going to the root of the evil, — central weakness and 
 general irresponsibility. The only additional result of 
 these deliberations was the appointment of six more 
 Assistant Political Agents. Six fortunate English officers, 
 not selected for any special aptitude, merely appointed by 
 virtue of patronage or by dint of their own pertinacious 
 importunity, are sent to reside at the capitals of as many 
 Principalities, whence they will write elaborate reports to 
 their official superior. We hear not a word of any states- 
 maidike instructions or counsels addressed either to the 
 Governor-General's Agent or to the Princes themselves, or 
 of any general measures for initiating progressive reforma- 
 tion. Not a thought seems to have been given to an in- 
 strumentality that has been hitherto entirely neglected, 
 by which we could most effectually penetrate into the 
 inmost recesses of Native Courts, — Native agency, care- 
 fully selected and educated, properly paid, trusted and 
 honoured. 
 
 Until a policy of reconstructive reform to be applied to 
 the internal wants and resources of each Native State, is 
 authoritatively mculcated from home, the Calcutta Foreign 
 Office will assuredly persist in its policy of msatiable patron- 
 age, barren criticism, and irritating encroachments. The 
 disorder to be cured being beyond all doubt or dispute,
 
 80 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 the Government of India, instead of trying to improve tlie 
 constitution, can think of no treatment but blisters and 
 restraint, will continue to surround the patient with 
 otHoious niu'ses and ignorant medical students, when one 
 skill'ul practitioner, fully empowered to act, would soon 
 establish the regularity of every function and the free 
 movement of every limb. 
 
 Provided the Government is so orgranised as to be no 
 longer entirely dependent for its efficiency on the personal 
 qualities of the Prince or his Minister, a Native State 
 cannot be made too free or too strong. If we could only 
 realise this truth with special reference to the military 
 resources and requirements of India, we might find therein 
 a satisfactory solution of that much disputed problem, — 
 how to mauitain a Native armv of sulficient streno'th in 
 safe and responsible hands. 
 
 Those officers in the British army who have been most 
 successful and distinguished in the command of Native 
 troops, — unequalled as leaders of such troops in war, — 
 must for ever be, as they were seen to be during the 
 mutinies of 1857, completely divided in thought, feeling, 
 and interests from the Sepoys, and practically unacquainted 
 with their hopes and fears, their objects, and their pro- 
 jects. They cannot undertake to be responsible, and they 
 cannot be held responsible, for the conduct of their men 
 at any period of great I'eligious or political excitement. 
 At the moment of critical urgency their detective insight 
 would fail, and their controlling inffiience would be at its 
 lowest point. 
 
 Pjut the most perfect controlling influence is ready to 
 our call and open to our supervision, if we only choose to 
 use it. The military resources of India and of the Em- 
 pire might be husljanded witli greater care and kept more 
 witliin reach, the force required on a peace footing might 
 be organised and disposed more advantageously and more 
 economically, if in the fulness of time which has now ar- 
 rived, we were to commence V)y judicious degrees the pro- 
 cess of reversing the Subsidiary system of the Marquis 
 Wellesley, — restoring and transferi'ing to Native States, 
 in consideration of military service, territories that would
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. .^1 
 
 be no loss to iis. The gain in consolidated strength and 
 reduced charges, would far more than compensate for the 
 nominal sacrifice of revenue. 
 
 The troops of dependent Sovereigns, so long as their 
 pay, regularly disbursed, does not unduly encroach on the 
 local finances, cannot be made too efficient. Native troops, 
 properly organised, and subject to Imperial inspection, 
 cannot be kept under any control equally effective with 
 that of a Native Prince, whose personal and hereditary 
 ties and engagements constitute a chain of subordination 
 and responsibility to the Paramount Power, more clearly 
 defined and more easily enforced than any that has ever 
 yet existed, or can be devised.* 
 
 We need have no suspicion of the visible armies of all 
 the Native Sovereions of India. Not one of them has the 
 slightest wish to measure his strength against ours. They 
 are neither willing nor able to combine against us. So 
 long as we can see their little armies, we know where to 
 have them, in case of any unavoidable collision or unex- 
 pected contumacy. It is far better that the warlike ele- 
 ments of the population shall be organised and disciplined 
 under responsible leaders, than that they should be com- 
 pressed or driven out of sight into predatory courses or 
 hidden conspiracy. We cannot rely too much on the as- 
 surance contained in Lord Canning's last letter to Gene- 
 ral Sir Mark Cubbon, dated the 24th of November, 
 I860:— 
 
 " I have no doubt that the poHcy of disruption and separation 
 was the right one fifty years ago, when the Rohillas and Mahrat- 
 tas possessed armies and artillery which they could increase at 
 pleasure without our consent, and, indeed, without our know- 
 ledge. But now it is quite different. These Chiefs can scarcely 
 cast a gun, — they certainly could not equip it unknown to us. 
 They feel their dependence on us, since 1857, more than ever. 
 We have nothing to fear from them individually, if we treat them 
 rightly ; while they have individually an influence which is in- 
 valuable to us as Supreme Rulers in India, if we will but turn it 
 to account." 
 
 The following narrative will serve to show how the pro- 
 fessional rulers of India, when relieved for a. time from 
 
 * Appendix B. 
 
 G
 
 82 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 the check and restraint of a British statesman as Viceroy, 
 relapse into their naiTow views, reject and despise the in- 
 fluence deemed invaluable by Lord Canning, refuse to turn 
 it to any account at all, and do their best to destroy or 
 pervert it. 
 
 In the worst days of the Rebellion of 1857 the chief 
 obstacle to the free exercise of the Maharajah Scindia's 
 authority on our side, the chief support of the turbulent 
 party aroimd him, consisted of the Gwalior Contingent, a 
 force complete in itself, — Horse, Foot, and Artillery, — 
 ^^4th its own arsenal, stores, and cash-chest, raised and 
 disciplined by British oflicers, according to what used to 
 be considered the only safe plan for organising Native 
 troops. The expense of this force w^as imposed upon cer- 
 taui districts assigned to our management by the Gwalior 
 State under the Treaty of 1844, when its unmanageably 
 large Army had been disbanded after Lord EUenborough's 
 campaign. At a very early period of the outbreak the 
 Gwalior Contingent mutinied, some of the English officers 
 being murdered. The mutineers, nearly ten thousand 
 strong, of all arms, left their cantonments, preserving their 
 military order under chosen leaders, and thronged, clamo- 
 rous and wild with excitement, around the Maharajah 
 Scindia's Palace, callinof on him to lead them to Delhi. 
 The brave young Prince confronted this formidable host, 
 humoured them and temporised with them, since he could 
 not fight them, — though he tried that also at last, and 
 failed ; he kept them idle and harmless for months at 
 Gwalior, until Dellii was taken, and after marching on 
 Cawnpore and holding General Windham at bay, the mu- 
 tineers of the Gwalior Contingent, still a compact body, 
 were at last routed by Lord Clyde. 
 
 It is quite clear that but i\)v the contagion of our re- 
 volted Sepoys, the Maharajah Scindia could have easily 
 kept even the most violent of his own people quiet, and 
 that he could have kept the Contingent quiet also, if it 
 liad ever been lujder his command. At an advanced stage 
 of the Kebellion, his own troops, though quite as ill-dis- 
 posed towards us as our mutineers, were in a great mea- 
 sure obedient to the Maharajah's orders, so fjir at least as
 
 OUR GEEAT VASSAL EMPIKE. (S3 
 
 to be inactive and innocuous : while tlie men of the Gwahor 
 Contingent, brought up under British discipUne, f rom which 
 they had broken loose, set him at defiance, and took the 
 field against us. As there was no doubt or question of 
 the loyalty and steadfastness of this excellent Prince, 
 w^hich had been tried severely enough, — Scindia liaving 
 perilled his life in our cause with consj)icuous gallantry 
 on several occasions, — the wisest and most natural policy 
 would have been by every possible means to increase his 
 influence, and strengthen his hands within his own domi- 
 nions. Such, in fact, was Lord Canning's pohcy. Such 
 was not the policy of Sir John (now Lord) Lawrence. 
 
 On the re-establishment of order, the Gwalior Contin- 
 gent havmg been wiped out, its several posts and military 
 duties were taken up by regidar British troops, and by 
 the Maharajah's augmented forces. As the Contingent 
 system had manifestly failed in this instance, a new Treaty 
 was concluded, ratified by Lord Canning on the 12th 
 December, 1860, under which certain pecuniary advan- 
 tages were conferred on the Gwalior State, and its mili- 
 tary force, restricted under the Treaty of 1844, might be 
 raised to the hmit of " 5000 drilled" (Infantry) "soldiers, 
 6000 Sow^ars" (troopers), and "36 guns wdth 360 gunners."* 
 
 Scindia, who is described as being a born soldier, with 
 a remarkable talent for military organisation and evolu- 
 tions, w^ell pleased with the concessions of the Treaty of 
 1860, had taken full advantage of them to indulge his 
 martial tastes. The greater part of his little army, the 
 " drilled soldiers' permitted by the new Treaty, were 
 massed at his capital under his own eye ; and here, in 
 unsuspectmg complacency, he invited the Political Agent 
 to witness a grand review of all his troops. Whether this 
 officer or the Viceroy first took fright, does not appear, 
 but the immediate result w^as an absolute order, in the 
 form of a polite letter from the Governor-General to the 
 Maharajah, desiring that his little Army should at once 
 be broken up, the several corps dispersed about the coun- 
 
 * Article ix of the Treaty of 1860 ; Collection of Treaties, Calcutta, 
 1864 (London, Longmans), vol. iv, p. 274. 
 
 r' *^
 
 84 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 try, and that no such large assemblage of troops should 
 again take place. 
 
 We learn from the Report of the Central India Agency 
 for 18G()-7,* that the measm-es for the reduction and dis- 
 persion of these troops were taken in Februaiy, and " a 
 full and detailed report of the cii'cumstances was fur- 
 nished" in a despatch dated 15th March, 1867. The 
 Agent to the Governor-General says (para. 62, p. 13), "it 
 would be hardly possible to overstate the soreness caused 
 by the check that has thus been given to the indulgence 
 of his" (Scindia's) "passion for military organisation and 
 parades, and of his desire to keep his whole Force with 
 this object at the capital under his personal control and 
 command". \ 
 
 He continues thus (para. 63) : — 
 
 '* I will only add that this result, however to be lamented, was 
 altogether inevitable ; and that the necessity for the adoption of 
 the measures under advertence being deemed imperative under 
 the circumstances, no consideration that I am aware of could 
 have broken, or even mitigated, the effects of the blow to His 
 Highness. Certainly no effort was spared by either the Political 
 Agent or myself with this object." 
 
 It cannot be considered wonderful after this, that the 
 Agent (para. 05 to 68, pp. 13, 14), while "cordially admit- 
 ting" Maharajah Scindia's "friendly personal bearing," 
 declaring his Highness to be " accessible and courteous, 
 and prepared to discuss most subjects in a pleasant way, 
 and to listen with attention to the arguments addressed to 
 him", and giving his testimony to " the Maharajah's re- 
 spect for the authority of the British Government", should 
 still find that the Prince is now and then "suspicious and 
 distrustfud", and sometimes " considers the intervention 
 of the British Government, or its officers, unwarrantable". 
 ILnv coulcl it Vje otherwise while Imperial supremacy was 
 exerted for his personal discomfiture in a manner so offen- 
 sive and vexatious ? 
 
 It would be difficult to conceive a measure more mise- 
 rable and more unmeaning. It might indeed be urged 
 that such peremptory interference was inconsistent with 
 
 • Published by authority, Calcutta, 18t]8.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 85 
 
 the eno-ao'ements between the British Govemment and 
 that of Scindia. The Treaty of 18 GO, whicli Umits the 
 number of troops, permits no control over their location 
 or distribution ; while, in Article VIII of the Treaty of 
 1804, confirmed by every subsequent engagement, it is 
 expressly stipulated that " no officer of the Honourable 
 Company shall ever interfere in the internal affairs of the 
 Maharajah's Government";* and Article IV of the Treaty 
 of 1817, confirmed and declared to be "binding" in the 
 Treaty of 1860, pronounces the Maharajah to be "the 
 undisputed master of his own troops and resources".t No 
 stress need be laid upon tliese conditions ; they are only 
 to be taken as a starting-point ; for undoubtedly, the 
 Paramount Power, responsible for the peace of the Em- 
 pire, cannot be bound by the strict letter of Treaties, when 
 the public safety is endangered, and immediate action 
 may be required to check hostile intrigue or dangerous 
 excitement. Nor is any account or explanation of susj^i- 
 cions and precautions due to the minor State. But such 
 coercive action, equivalent to open war against a Power 
 of equal standing, ought to be very sparingly used, and 
 only in case of urgent necessity. Sir John Lawrence could 
 allege no such necessity for interfering with Scindia's legi- 
 timate authority over his own troops, withm his own 
 territories. He manifested groundless mistrust of a sub- 
 ordinate Ally before all India. Nothing could have been 
 more impolitic or more ungracious. It was just the old 
 leaven of the permanent official, the characteristic disease 
 of the Bengal Civilian, — a sort of fussy jealousy, always 
 sure to be roused by the portentous phenomenon of any 
 Native, whether Prince or peasant, presuming to act or 
 think for himself. 
 
 Even if there had been any cause or ground for mis- 
 trust, it was most indiscreet and undignified to show it. 
 The action of Sir John Lawrence seems to have involved 
 every fault that should be avoided in dealing with the de- 
 pendent States. It betrayed petty suspicions and in- 
 glorious apprehensions, unworthy of the Imperial Power. 
 It violated a Treaty, — thereby shaking respect for the 
 
 * Collection of Treaties, vol. iv, p. 286. f Ibid., p. 272.
 
 S6 OUll LiKEAT VASSAL EMPIllE. 
 
 solemn engagements on which the moral authority of our 
 Government depends, not only in the particular State 
 injured, hut in every State throughout India, It tended 
 to alienate an able and estimable Prince, and to make 
 British supremacy hateful and oflensive in his councils, 
 and among all his compeers. By an affront so galling, and 
 so ]nibliely administered, aimed at what w^as known to be 
 the Maharajah's special pride and tenderest point, his in- 
 fluence nuist have been weakened generally in his own 
 dominions, and that of the malcontent party everyAvhere 
 enlianced. The influence of the Maharajah, faithfully and 
 beneflcially exerted on oiu- side in the last great crisis, 
 has been weakened exactly where, judgmg from the ex- 
 perience of those days, it most deserved strengthening, — 
 his personal and undivided command over his own troops. 
 
 Having thus low^ered at one stroke the moral power of 
 Great Britain, and of a most useful and deserving friend, 
 what positive result did Sir John Lawrence obtain? None 
 except that of having made himself intensely disagreeable. 
 There could be no actual danger or menace to British su- 
 premacy in the encampment of our Ally's small Army, — 
 a mere Division of second-rate Sepoys after all, — at his 
 capital. The idea is ridiculous. He did not in the least 
 diminish the physical force available for bad purposes 
 within or without Scindia's territories. He weakened the 
 Maharajah's controlling influence ; he certainly gained 
 none for any British authority. He probably oft'ended 
 and disgusted an intelligent and high-spirited Prince ; he 
 assuredly pleased nobody whose goodwill or good opinion 
 was worth having. 
 
 What ought to have been done under the circumstances, 
 is obvious. On receiving the Resident's report of the 
 unlr)oked for efficiency and smartness of Scindia's troops, 
 a Viceroy whose ideas of Imperial statesmanship could 
 rise above those of our own military readiness and admin- 
 istrative tidiness, would have grasped at once at the 
 opportunity of raising the self-respect of a well-disposed 
 Prince, and of promoting substantial and solid progress in 
 one of the largest Native States. He would have con- 
 gratidated and complimented the Mahara;jah on having
 
 OUll GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 87 
 
 commenced of his own accord the reform of his estabhsh- 
 ments by that of his Army, which he rejoiced to hear was 
 now in a high state of discipline ; and he would then have 
 suggested some other public department, organised on a 
 faulty principle, where improvements, hinted or sketched 
 in outlme, might be introduced with great advantage to 
 the people, and witli great honour to his Highness's name. 
 The administrative and executive reform of a Native 
 State is not a plant that can grow to its full size in a 
 day. Tact and cordiality, genial confidence, and warm 
 appreciation of small beginnings, may make the plant 
 strike deep root. The cold shade and rough usage to 
 which official cultivation has been of late confined, can 
 only stunt the growth, corrupt the soil, and poison the 
 atmosphere. 
 
 No one can fail to observe how powerful a lever to move 
 the mass of prejudice and ignorance that obstructs the 
 progress of India, is placed in our hands by the possession 
 of so much superfluous and unprofitable territory. Under 
 no pressing necessity to part with it, under no obligation 
 to confer any portion of it on any particular Prmce, the 
 Imperial Power could, in every case of transfer, impose its 
 own conditions. A certain proportion of the Indian debt 
 would have to be paid of£ or assumed by the enlarged 
 feudatory after fair calculation and arrangement ; while 
 the advantages gained by the Imperial Government would 
 be found not only in the riddance of so much dead-weight, 
 but also m the reduction of establishments, and in the 
 prospective diminution in the annual tribute of pensions, 
 furlough allowances, passage money of troops, and other 
 Home charges. 
 
 By the gradual and more perfect formation of India into 
 a great Vassal Emj^ire, in the true sense of the term, the 
 Imperial Power would gain strength at home and abroad, 
 and relief from the ever present possibility of hideous 
 disaster and disgrace. With the very doubtful exception 
 of the small class that is supposed to profit directly by 
 Indian patronage, no class of our countrymen would lose 
 anything. The interest of the British nation in the annual 
 provision made for some hundreds of young gentlemen,
 
 88 OUK GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 and the fortunes and pensions acquired by some scores of 
 retired t^tiieials, is of very circumscribed importance, of 
 infinitesimal value, when compared with its interest in the 
 development of the energies, in the cultivation of tlie 
 tastes ami desires of an immense and intelligent popula- 
 tion occupying an inexhaustible field of producmg and 
 purchasing- power. 
 
 The Imperial Government would still exclusively conduct 
 the external relations of the Empii'e ; control and restrict 
 the political intercourse between the States. Our troops 
 would visit and occupy, at pleasure, any and every place 
 and post throughout the land. The military force of every 
 minor State would be strictly subordinate and auxiliary, 
 some Native Princes and Chieftains holding Her Majesty's 
 connnission, and certain Imperial roads and fortresses 
 being specially entrusted to their charge, for w^liich, as well 
 as for the general efficiency, good conduct and discipline 
 of their Contingents, they would be held personally and 
 politically responsible. No customs or transit-duties could 
 be levied without Imperial concurrence. By her treaty- 
 right of authoritative counsel the Imperial Power could 
 modify and direct the institutions of every State. Surely 
 here are some securities both for order and progress. Surely 
 here there will be full scope for British statesmanship, 
 ample space for British energy and enterprise.* 
 
 Our advocacy of an Imperial system of instructed and 
 superintended self-development for India, in contradis- 
 tinction to a policy of territorial possession and dhect ad- 
 ministration, is sometimes met with objections which 
 desei-ve to be stigmatised as absolutely truculent, and 
 wortliy only of the dark ages. It has been said that 
 the Biitish nation rules India by right of conquest, that 
 we are the concj^uerors of the country, and are, therefore, 
 fVilly warranted and justified in extracting from India such 
 y^rrttits, in exercising such patronage, and in assuming such 
 privileges and pre-eminences, all for the special advantage 
 
 * It has been most pratifjing to me to observe that, however much 
 the policy I have jidvocated for many years may have been misunder- 
 stood in some quarters, it has met with init'l]i<^(;rjt and iemperate ap- 
 preciation in those Knghsh and veinacular journals which represent 
 the higher class of educated natives of India, — see Appendix H.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 89 
 
 of the dominant race, as may seem for the time being 
 convenient and attainable. It may not be now expedient, 
 perhaps it would not be strictly justifiable, to impose a 
 palpable tribute, but contributions may be, directly and 
 indirectly, levied upon India, over and above what is 
 absolutely required for its administration, in order to re- 
 lieve British taxpayers, to provide lucrative employment 
 for our sons, and to enrich our traders and manufacturers. 
 These contributions are to be measured only by our dis- 
 cretion, and limited only by our magnanimity. Some of 
 as, speaking of the nation as Lord Clive did for himself, 
 seem to be astonished at oui' own moderation. 
 
 " No !" — say the able editors of the Anglo-Indian press, 
 representing the Services and the British mercantile com- 
 munity, — " do not let the educated Natives deceive them- 
 selves. The futui'e is not for them. We are by no means 
 trustees ; we are conquerors, and entitled by virtue of 
 that position to study oiu" own interests in all our execu- 
 tive and legislative action quite as much as*the interests 
 of the people of India. We are not going to rule the 
 country merely for the benefit of the conquered, to give 
 them gradually a larger share in the government, and to 
 hand it over to them entirely when they think they can 
 "undertake it. Not at all, — we shall keep it for ourselves 
 as long as we choose, and as long as we keep it we shall 
 try to make it as profitable to ourselves as we can." 
 
 All this appears to me not only very erroneous, but 
 very stupid and very shallow. Those principles of govern- 
 ment must be shallow and stupid that are based on con- 
 tempt for the governed, and find expression in cynical 
 insolence. 
 
 Whether India can properly be said to have been con- 
 quered by Great Britain is open to very great question. 
 Some of its Provinces, — for example those which formed 
 part of the dominions of Tippoo Sultan and of the Peishwa, 
 — came into our possession by conquest. But in each of 
 the wars which led to these acquisitions Native Princes 
 were our Allies, and shared in the partition of the con- 
 quered territories.* Many minor Chieftains assisted on 
 * Collection of Treaties, Calcutta, 1864, vol. v, pp. 4, 6, 7.
 
 90 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 our side, and a large number of Natives of India fought 
 in our ranks. Other Provinces were acquired by cession 
 or exchange under Treaties with Native Sovereigns with 
 whom we were at peace, and with some of whom we had 
 never been at war. It were well if certain other Provinces 
 now in our possession had been conquered, for there can- 
 not be a more clear and explicit title to sovereignty than 
 that of conquest confirmed by treaty ; but in the cases to 
 which I refer, — of which only one of great importance, 
 the Carnatic, need be mentioned, — territories are now held 
 and administered by the British Government solely as the 
 silent result of breach of trust and broken treaties, with- 
 out any visible process or public proclamation whereby a 
 title might be acquired or even asserted. 
 
 But it really matters nothing to our argument whether 
 India is correctly described as a conquered country or not. 
 Neither in International Law as expounded by the old 
 jurists, nor in modern treatises on the same subject, is any 
 eifect of coifquest alleged except that of giving a good 
 title to sovereignty and dominion. The effect of conquest 
 is in its essence transitory and investitive. It simply de- 
 notes the mode of acquisition. Conquest does not impair 
 the obligations of political ethics, destroy rights and duties, 
 or set up a peculiar set of slavish relations between the 
 rulers and the ruled. If it were so, such possessions would 
 be a curse and a disgrace to a civilised and free nation. 
 If it were so in India, contented allegiance would there 
 be cowardly corruption, and the highest form of pohtics 
 would be a permanent conspu'acy. 
 
 But it is not so. Whatever may be occasionally written 
 or said by rash and irresponsible persons, the heart of this 
 great nation is sound. No Minister in his public despatches, 
 no representative of the people before his constituency or 
 in the House of Commons, wovdd venture to proclaim the 
 doctrine that one penny should be extracted from India 
 beyond the necessary cost of administration, or that any 
 privileges or distinctions, for the benefit of Great Britain 
 or of any class of our population, should be enforced or 
 recognised. But it is highly advisable that the vulgar 
 notions on these heads, so jjrevalent among our professional
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. [)l 
 
 and commercial countrymen in India and those who are in- 
 structed by them at home, should be dispelled by a voice 
 of national authority. 
 
 If the British people, in their homes and in their Par- 
 liament, can only be occasionally roused from utter apathy 
 towards India under the feelings of terror and fuiy gene- 
 rated by some terrible calamity, if no statesman is to arise 
 who can more truly represent the national spirit and apply 
 the national maxims of Great Britain to our Imperial 
 tutelage than has hitherto been done in practice by our 
 professional delegates in India, the relations between the 
 races, which are now sufficiently unsocial to cause the most 
 painful forebodings, will by degrees become positively in- 
 human. All the intellectual and emotional force living 
 and moving on that vast continent, — inferior, perhaps, 
 in intrinsic worth and energy, but infinitely superior in 
 volume and in popular affinity to ours, — will gradually be 
 turned from us and against us. At last our military force 
 alone would be left confronted with the physical force of 
 two hundred millions of opponents. 
 
 No military force in India can ever be superior, or equal, 
 or comparable w^ith ours. Even without Native auxiliaries, 
 a British army of twenty thousand men would meet with 
 no formidable opponent on the soil of India. But without 
 an immense body of auxiliaries, military and civil, such 
 an army would, at no great distance from the coast, find 
 no subsistence in the soil, and would stai've in the midst 
 of plenty. Is it really supposed that the physical force of 
 two hundred millions of people can only be used in fight- 
 ing ? The physical force of India, obstructively exerted, 
 negatively arrayed against us, or merely withheld from 
 our side, would lower us at once from the rank of rulers to 
 that of foreiofn invaders. 
 
 If we persist in trying to make permanent that which 
 is only defensible as a temporary discipline, the emancipa- 
 tion of India from a pupilage which must become mtole- 
 rable if unduly prolonged, will hardly be delayed, though
 
 92 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 it may be accelerated, by our determination, and will come 
 to pass in the fulness of time as certainly as the tree will 
 bear its fruit. The only choice open to us is whether the 
 change is to take place peacefully, harmoniously and with 
 good will, or with ruinous confusion and violence, with 
 misery, calamity and hatred on both sides. 
 
 The choice is open to us now, but no one can foretell 
 how long it will remain open. I do not say that the 
 pupilage, from which India has reaped so many blessings, 
 has been as yet unduly prolonged ; but I do think that 
 everything warns us to prepare for a critical period of 
 transition. And how that period of transition is to be 
 made a period of more diligent instruction, — ^how the 
 process of transition can be kept more closely and more 
 tirmly under Imperial control, and yet left more freely 
 and confidently to Native direction than has ever been 
 hitherto realised, — except by earnestly and systematically 
 promoting the reform of Native States, and, as they are 
 reformed, by their territorial expansion, I am quite at a 
 loss to understand. 
 
 All attempts to reconcile the in^econcileable, and to sa- 
 tisfy the fair aspirations of the ambitious, by the more 
 liberal admission of Natives to the higher branches of the 
 pubhc service, will certainly fail in the desired effect, 
 and, if exclusively relied on, may even be expected, for 
 reasons on which we have already touched,* to stimulate 
 antagonism, and to weaken British authority. The en- 
 courajjement of education in our o^vn Provinces as well as 
 in the dependent States, and the introduction of well 
 fpialiiied Natives into every department of the adminis- 
 tration, are beneficent and necessary measvu-es, and no 
 considerations of national pride or class interest ought to 
 be allowed to obstruct their progress. These, measures 
 furnish the medicines and the instruments wherewith to 
 treat the political and social diseases of India, and restore 
 her constituent Kingdoms and nations to a healthy and 
 regiilar life. They are the means of cure, but are not the 
 cure itself On the contrary, if not rightly applied they 
 may produce a new and more intractaljle disease. If, 
 
 * Ante, p. 43 to 4G.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. O:"? 
 
 having trained our workmen, we do not set them to work 
 on a sufficiently large and fruitful field, their suppressed 
 energies and talents may find a vent in some very danger- 
 ous channel. 
 
 Can any unprejudiced and thoughtful observer be so fiir 
 deceived as to accept the present unnatural form of govern- 
 ment for India as if it ought and were to endure for ever? 
 Is that great continent to be ruled and administered for 
 ever by "birds of passage", who have "not the faintest 
 idea of making a home there", whose " main object is to 
 get away from India as fast as possible", and who live in 
 a state of "pecuniary care" that is quite " pitiable" if their 
 income is less than £1.500 a year.* Does that system seem 
 calculated or destined for perpetuity, under which, for 
 example, in one of the poorest countries of the world, the 
 Commissioner of a Division, an officer entrusted with no 
 initiative or independent authority, receives a salary about 
 three times as large as that allotted, in one of the richest 
 countries of the world, — France,— to an officer of much 
 higher functions and heavier responsibility, the Prefect of 
 a Department ?t Does it seem probable, considering the 
 economical vicissitudes and spiritual convulsions to which 
 nations are liable, considermg the growing perceptions, 
 the rising intelligence and the reviving spirit of those who 
 lead and sway that vast population, that the enormous 
 
 * Ante, p. 42, 43. 
 
 t The salary of a Commissioner is never less than £3500 a year. 
 I imagine there are few Prefets receiving more than 30,000 francs per 
 annum. And yet in Bengal, where in consequence of our thriftless 
 Permanent Settlement the collection of the land revenue is much more 
 easy and simple than in any other part of India, to strengthen the con- 
 trol over the Collectors of Districts exercised by the Commissioners, 
 it is found necessary to have a Board of Revenue sitting at Calcutta, 
 whose members draw salaries of between £4000 and £5000 a year, 
 and are commonly reported to obstruct business. In the Madras 
 Presidency, where the minute subdivision of land renders the collec- 
 tion of revenue much more laborious, there is a Board of Revenue, 
 but there are no Commissioners. In the Bombay Presidency there 
 arc two Commissioners, but no Board. But it would never do to dimi- 
 nish the number of prizes for the Bengal Civil Service, more especially 
 of that class of prizes that can be safely conferred upon those meri- 
 torious gentlemen of long service whose abilities and activities have 
 always been manifestly mediocre.
 
 94 OUR grii:at vassal empire. 
 
 remittances now required for disbm-sement in London, 
 amount inix to eleven millions a year, nearly a quarter of 
 the annual revenue of India in these prosperous days, will 
 always be provided without a struggle and without a 
 nuirnuir ? 
 
 There was great exultation lately, and on very good 
 grounds, when the Rajah of Puttiala was known to have 
 invested forty lakhs of rupees (£400,000) in the Indian 
 funds. The Kajah of Dhar, whose whole revenue scarcely 
 exceeds £50,000 a year, now holds £40,000 of Govern- 
 ment paper. The Friend of India, fairly representing 
 the average oflficial opinion of Calcutta, justly observed of 
 the Puttiala Rajah's purchase that there could be no 
 more satisfactory pledge and bond of loyalty and good 
 behaviour, and that such transactions ought to be en- 
 couraged to the utmost. There can be no doubt of it. 
 We ought not only to encourage Native Princes to make 
 investments of this description, but we ought to induce 
 them to cancel by payment or to take upon their own 
 shoulders, some portions of the Public Debt. The stipu- 
 lated consideration for the territorial cessions recommended 
 as the motive power of our future ImjDerial policy, should 
 be partly exacted in this form. 
 
 For to any calm and dispassionate uiquirer, not afraid 
 to scan the dark as well as the bright side of affairs, the 
 Debt of India presents a strange and portentous aspect. 
 It now amounts to a hundred millions, and the annual 
 interest is upwards of five millions sterling. It is like no 
 other Puljlic Debt that has ever existed. It has been 
 contracted without the authority or approval of any Native 
 Sovereign or of any Native representative body,— a matter 
 to Ije passed over at present, perhaps, with levity or de- 
 rision, but which may not always deserve such treatment. 
 It is not in Native liands, but in the hands of English 
 capitidists. Only a fraction, a fluctuating and, I believe, 
 a decreasing fraction, is held by Natives, rather for pur- 
 poses of speculation than of investment. 
 
 It behoves the statesmen and the taxpayers of the 
 United Kingdom to reflect most seriously on their own 
 continirent lisk wifli reference to all Indian securities.
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 9.") 
 
 Successive Secretaries of State have, it is true, protested 
 that this country will not guarantee, either in a strictly 
 legal or in a loose commercial sense, the payment of prin- 
 cipal or interest of Indian Debt. It is a burden, they say, 
 that India must bear herself, just as Canada and Australia 
 bear theirs, for whose debts Great Britain is no more re- 
 sponsible than for those of the United States or other 
 foreign Governments in which our subjects have largely 
 invested. 
 
 It is a burden that India must bear. There is this 
 difference between the several cases, that India must be 
 made to bear the burden, — she has no choice in the mat- 
 ter. It is an unmitigated burden to the Indian popula- 
 tion, no class deriving any profit from its existence. A 
 large proportion of the Public Debt of Australia, Canada, 
 and the United States is held by their own citizens, form- 
 ing an influential class upon whom repudiation would in- 
 flict great loss or total ruin. But the Native holders of 
 Indian Debt are so few in number as not to constitute a 
 class at aU. Thus, instead of the Debt of India being 
 really National, and constituting a bond of mutual obliga- 
 tion and confidence between the Government and the 
 most powerful classes of the country in whose name it is 
 borrowed, it is only a bond of mutual obligation between 
 the British Government of India and a certain class of 
 British investors. 
 
 The s;5stem of open loans which the Emperor Napoleon 
 III introduced into French finance, and by which he suc- 
 ceeded in tapping the hoards of the middle class and even 
 of the landholding peasantry, may well have strengthened 
 his dynasty and Government ; for all the holders of pub- 
 lic securities, a large and influential body of taxpayers, 
 thereby became directly interested in maintaining general 
 tranquillity, in upholding their debtor and legalising his 
 rule. But neither the open loans of Calcutta, nor those 
 negotiated on the London Stock Exchange, can have 
 tended in the least to strengthen our Government. No 
 class of taxpayers has thereby become interested in main- 
 taining tranquillity, or in confirmuig those transactions. 
 On the contrary, the whole body of taxpayers is directly
 
 96 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 interested in repudiating tliem. Both general taxes and 
 local rates have increased of late, and are increasing. 
 These new imposts, for the most part direct in their inci- 
 dence, are very distinctly felt. As diffused education and 
 more frequent communication with the outer world, create 
 a pohtical consciousness in India, the Natives will ever 
 have before them a very simple motive to dislike us, when 
 they nnderstand not only that we incurred the Debt, not 
 only that we have imposed new taxes to pay the interest, 
 hut that our people hold the Debt, and that the interest 
 (or as they will say, the produce of the new taxes), is an- 
 nually abstracted from India to Great Britain, with other 
 large remittances, for the benefit of the British Govern- 
 ment and people. 
 
 Still, it may be msisted, even if we suppose that a feel- 
 ing somewhat more bitter than the usual ignorant impa- 
 tience of taxation may at some time or other be roused in 
 India with regard to these payments, if we imagine tlie 
 most alarming possibiHties,- — general distress, widely ex- 
 tended insurrection, foreign sympathy and intervention, 
 battle, mui'der, and sudden death, — if we agree with you 
 that the Indian Debt and Indian Railways may not be 
 always quite as safe as Consols, it will not the less remain 
 perfectly true that the British Government does not 
 guarantee those investments, and that people who lent 
 their money, trusting solely to the credit and resources 
 of the Indian Government, have no more claiiii on tlie 
 British Exchequer than tlie unguaranteed creditors of a 
 British Colony or of a foreign State. But it seems doubt- 
 ful whether such a claim could be so summarily dismissed. 
 
 The Canadian and Australian loans were raised under 
 laws passed by local representative bodies, in which the 
 Colonial revenues and resources are pledged to the pay- 
 ment, the Home Government n<')t interfering at any stage 
 to sanction or confirm. Tlie Indian loans were raised 
 partly by the absolute fiat of an Executive appointed by 
 the British Government and all of whose acts are subject 
 to the approval of a Cabinet Minister, latterly under the 
 special niles and conditions prescribed by the British 
 LeoHslaturo, the Tnrlinn Govprnment beinjx forbidden to
 
 OUK GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 97 
 
 l)orrow in the London market witliout an Act of Parlia- 
 ment. It is not very wonderful if nnwary investors have 
 come to look upon the commands of the Crown, under 
 which Indian wars have been carried on, — for example, 
 the Afghan War, — and the Acts of the Legislature, under 
 which Indian loans to pay for those wars have been con- 
 tracted, as coming very near to a British guaranty. If, 
 in deftuilt of payment through the ordinary channel, they 
 should consider themselves at least as much entitled to 
 some compensation from the national treasury as were, 
 for instance, the sufferers from the Cattle Plague, we 
 could not be much surprised, and could not blame them 
 severely. 
 
 Forty millions, the cost of suppressing the Sepoy Pe- 
 bellion, were borrowed in London in 1857 and 1858 on 
 tolerably easy terms. Admitting that there is no ex- 
 press Parliamentary pledge for either principal or interest 
 of the Indian Debt, it can hardly be doubted that if at 
 any future crisis there should be less alacrity to supply 
 funds for w^arlike operations in India, the Home Govern- 
 ment w^ould have to come to the rescue in some form or 
 other. The Government of India has hitherto found no 
 difficulty in raising money in the European market ; but 
 if the poHtical phenomena of Hindustan were again to 
 assume a threatenmg aspect, an Imperial guaranty might 
 be absolutely required to restore the waning confidence 
 of capitalists, and to save the Indian Exchequer from 
 ruinous exactions. We should then be in for it beyond 
 all retreat, and the next step — as the simplest financial 
 transaction, to save time and mitigate the terms, — might 
 be to raise our own money, and to advance it to the 
 Indian Government, m the hope of being ultimately re- 
 paid. 
 
 Fortv millions were added to the Indian Debt in two 
 years of msurrection, between June 1857 and June 1859. 
 Who can tell what another insurrection would cost ? It 
 cost us two hundred millions to lose America. What 
 would it cost us to keep or to lose India ? 
 
 The Imperial Government may not be legally or formally 
 responsible for the liquidation of Indian securities, but 
 
 TT
 
 98 OUll GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 
 
 assuredly it is so far morally answerable, that any inter- 
 mission in the punctual solvency of the Government of 
 India would be most damaguig to Imperial credit. The 
 less, therefore, that there is of capital and interest for 
 which we can be held answerable the better for us. 
 Whether we firmly abide by our previous refusal, or 
 whether we at last consent to give a decided guaranty, 
 we should insist on every measure being adopted for the 
 decrease of Indian Debt. If it is not positively curtailed, 
 its growth will not be checked. 
 
 Tlie most efficacious measure — the only practicable 
 measure on a large scale, — for the financial relief of the 
 Paramount Power in India, and for the moral release of 
 the Imperial Government, is that of reducing our civil and 
 military establishments, contracting the territories under 
 our direct administration, and promotmg self-government 
 by the enlargement of Native States. The burden can- 
 not be shaken off, — it must be shifted. And this is the 
 only way to do it. We cannot, as in France, tap the 
 hoards of the middle class and of the thriving peasantry, 
 — they can employ their money to greater advantage in 
 their own occupations, and obtain much larger interest in 
 their oAvn neighbourhood. But we can tap the hoards 
 and forestall the savings of Native Princes by the legiti- 
 mate and irresistible temptation of territorial and politi- 
 cal aggrandisement. 
 
 And thereby, as already shown, we can dispel prejudices 
 and enforce reform, improve our military position while 
 diminishing the number of British troops, and establish 
 a most powerful conservative interest in every State, 
 each balanced against each, incapable of combination, but 
 separately connected with the Paramount Power by pre- 
 cise ties of allegiance and service. The Indian Empire 
 would Vjecome a living organism instead of being a 
 mechanism. The Statesman and the Viceroy would then 
 have some scope for Government, instead of wasting their 
 energies on the incessant fuss and fidget of extravagant 
 and inappropriate administration. 
 
 To reconcOe the just and growing demands of educated 
 and experienced Natives with the very natural claims and
 
 OUR GREAT VASSAL EMPIRE. 99 
 
 expectations of our " Services", is an insolvable problem. 
 It is useless to strive after a hybrid and insincere amal- 
 gamation. Any compromise must of necessity be unstable 
 and untenable. We have to choose between the coercive 
 centralisation of a continent, or the local self-government 
 of nations and languages. The choice lies before us, — to 
 move steadily and deliberately towards a future of free- 
 dom and progress, or to drift blindly along towards a 
 future of animosity and confusion. 
 
 II 2
 
 APPENDIX, 
 
 (A.) 
 
 PALATIAL BARRACKS. 
 {Page 3.) 
 
 " It is impossible sufficiently to condemn the authorities who 
 fixed upon the present site of the main frontier post in the Valley 
 of Peshawur, containing so large a force as ten or twelve thou- 
 sand men of the three arms^ more or less, 
 
 " The cantonment having been once commenced upon, it was 
 gradually and inconsiderately augmented ; enormous sums were 
 expended; and the quarters for troops became not only extensive 
 but were unnecessarily costly. To abandon, should it be found 
 expedient, a large portion of such a station, where millions of 
 money had been expended, was next door to impracticable. 
 
 "The author does not hesitate to state here, as he has for many 
 years officially recorded, that the system of building costly and 
 permanent barracks for our f]uropean soldier}^ in India, is the 
 worst that could possibly be adopted. In nine cases out of ten 
 "vve have taken root, as it were, in localities which have proved to 
 be objectionable. Nothing could be more unwise or injudicious 
 than the hasty decision that has been arrived at in such matters ; 
 and the permanent barracks are the source of great evil, and of 
 endless embarrassment. 
 
 " The author can never admit, and never did admit, that per- 
 manent barracks, even in well-selected localities in these newly- 
 acquired territories, are advantageous to the troops. The tem- 
 porary buildings of mud and thatcli are vastly cooler, and are 
 generally preferred by the soldiers themselves. The temporary 
 buildings will last seven year.s, and it is very desirable for the 
 health of the troops that the ground should be occasionally 
 shifted. All that is really wanted is a standing camp, covered in 
 sufficiently', and no more, to save the troops from the effects of 
 the climate. The Engineer Department, taking a professional 
 view of the question as to which system should be preferred, de-
 
 APPENDIX. 101 
 
 cicled, as may well be imagined, that permanent buildings would 
 be the cheapest in the long run, and so the Government went 
 headlong into the mischief. 
 
 " Now at this moment in the Punjaub, and in the Cis-Sutlej 
 Territories, there are several most extensive permanent canton- 
 ments, which are not only of no value in a political point of view, 
 but are positively injurious to the troops themselves. This is an 
 admitted fact ; some of these stations are unhealthv in the ex- 
 treme, but they have cost millions of money, and on that account 
 only cannot be abandoned. 
 
 " Meeanmeer, near the Punjaub capital, has proved to be the 
 very hot-bed of sickness. 
 
 "Nowshera, in which is a set of the very best built and finished 
 barracks in the world, is not only unhealthy but positively dan- 
 gerous. 
 
 " Peshawur cantonment is probably one of the most unhealthy 
 places in the world, and it contains quarters for three or four 
 thousand European troops. 
 
 " All over India the troops are now suffering from being per- 
 manently fixed in places where they ought not to be, simply be- 
 cause the costly palaces that have been built for troops cannot be 
 thrown away."* 
 
 " It is being found that the boasted scientific excelltncies of these 
 extravagant barracks are theoretical rather than practical. The 
 Umballa paper thus brings out what seems a fatal defect in their plan : 
 — ' The new bari'acks at that station are no more approved by their 
 inmates than those at Allahabad ; the upper storeys are said to be in- 
 tensely hot. The truth seems to be, that the structures have been 
 designed on such a magnificently extensive scale as regards cubic feet 
 of air per man, that the walls and roofs have insignificant cooling 
 power, or power for the prevention of the generation or access of heat 
 within, and that there is not so much difference as there should be 
 between the temperature of the internal and external atmosphere.' "f 
 
 From the Times of India, October 30th, 1869 : — 
 
 " The cost of housing European soldiers is becoming excessive ; for 
 instance, a barrack calculated to accommodate fifty men onl}^, has 
 lately been completed at Poona at a cost of one lakh and a half of 
 rupees, £15,000, or at the rate of £300 per man. There are few 
 bungalows available for officers that have cost more than rupees 3,000, 
 or £300." 
 
 " The upper-storied barrack is a great mistake, the men prefer the 
 lower to the upper rooms at all times ; and during the hot months the 
 
 * General Sir Sydney Cotton's Nine Years on the North-West Fron- 
 tier of India (Bentley, 1808), p. 60, 61. 
 
 t Times of India, extracted from Ilomeivard Mail, December Otli, 
 1 Stilt.
 
 1 02 APPENDIX. 
 
 iipiHT rooms arc quite uninhabitable. Buildings that afFonl sufficient 
 protection I'rom the sun, with means and appliances for cooling them, 
 comprise all requisites ; but the palatial barracks that have of late been 
 constructed, are not one whit more healthy than those constructed in a 
 less expensive and less pretending style, nor are they more appreciated 
 by the occupants. 
 
 " Those who live in palaces can no more stave off epidemics than 
 those who live in less humble abodes, and for ordinarj^ protection, the 
 inexpensive barrack will always prove as salubrious as the palatial one." 
 
 AVe have had an abundance of melancholy proof during 1869 
 in the North-^Vest Provinces that our scientifically constructed 
 barracks afford no protection against cholera. 
 
 The following extracts of a letter to the Calcutta Eiirjllshman 
 are taken from the Times of India, of the 22nd of May, 18G9 : — 
 
 " Gwalior, as most of your readers, I dare say, are aw^are, has been 
 selected as one of our principal military centres. 
 
 " An enormous expenditure is being incurred, both at IMorar and in 
 the fortress, on the new double-storeyed barracks for the European 
 soldiers. 
 
 " !Morar is a notoriously unhealthy station. In ordinary years fevers 
 are rife, and when epidemics, such as small-pox or cholera, appeal*, 
 they seem to get a lending hand from the atmospherical peculiarities 
 of the place ; just as in agriculture certain plants ai-e found to thrive 
 more luxuriantly on some soils than on others. 
 
 " The fortress at Gwalior stands on a large isolated rock, about three 
 hundred feet above the level of the suiTounding country. The plateau 
 contains an area considerably under one square mile, although it is 
 upwards of a mile in length from end to end. 
 
 " Both here and at Morar duriucf the hot months of the vear, the 
 register of a thermometer will show an intensity of heat throughout the 
 twenty-four hours. Night brings no relief; for the surrounding low 
 hills and rocks, in which iron ore is the chief clement, give out through 
 the hours of darkness the broiling heat which they have absorbed in 
 the day-time. Some of these low hills are situated close to the sites on 
 which, at Morar, new barracks are being built. A locality more 
 unsuitable for the habitation of Europeans, it would have been difficult 
 to discover all over India. 
 
 " Tradition has it that the new Artillery lines are built on the site of 
 a village which was deserted many years ago, on account of the constant 
 breaking out of cholera. It might be worth while to make enquiry into 
 the matter, especially as the large majority of cases of cholera, which 
 has lately vi.sited us, and killed upwards of twenty Europeans, was 
 amongst the Koyal Artillery. It is said that the visitation was not of 
 a veiy severe type, and if tliis be the case, it is awful to contemplate 
 what the extent of mortality may be whenever the worst form of the 
 epidemic may appear at Morar. 
 
 " The mortuary return and statistics of health for the last two or 
 three years may have been favourable. And on the strength of these, 
 large building operations are being carried on. l}ut it is well-known
 
 APPENDIX. 103 
 
 that a dense population offers the least resistance to the ravages of epi- 
 demics, and it must bo borne in mind that for some years to come the 
 full garrison cannot be stationed at Morar. It has, in fact, to be in- 
 creased by a whole Regiment of European Cavalry and one of Infantry, 
 and there can be no doubt that the cantonment boundaries enclose an 
 area too contracted for the occupation of so large a force in so unhealthy 
 and hot a climate;. 
 
 " It is melancholy to think, that with all our vaunted improvement 
 in the science of sanitation during the last ten years, such a terrific 
 blunder should have been perpetrated as that of laying out a canton- 
 ment for so large a force within such insufficient space as is available at 
 Morar. 
 
 " Experience of the past has shown that when a certain rate of 
 mortality is reached stations must be abandoned. Such was the case 
 many years ago with Kuruaul, and such, it is confidently pi'edicted by 
 many, will be the case again with Morar. But before such a desirable 
 consummation is attained, millions of money will have been spent in 
 carrying out the experiment of massing European soldiers in one of the 
 hottest and most unhealthy spots in India, and thousands of our 
 countrymen wiU have fallen victims to the obstinate folly and short- 
 sightedness of onr rulers." 
 
 (B.) 
 
 MOBILISATION OF THE INDIAN ARMY. 
 
 {Page 3.) 
 
 A military correspondent of the Times of India, under the 
 signature " Chiliarch", writes : — 
 
 " I believe that the ISTative army is the question of the day, and the 
 o-reat difficulty with which the Government of India has to contend. 
 
 " I have much faith in the late General Jacob's principle of localising 
 Native corps. Each Regiment should have its home, where its families, 
 its aged soldiers, and its pensioners, might take root, and whence they 
 would not be called upon to move. But do I propose that Regiments 
 are to settle down in their home and never leave it till the alarm of war 
 calls them forth ? Certainly not. My notion is that the best way to 
 keep the army of India, British and Native, in perfect readiness for 
 sei'vice, and at the same time to impress the people with a sense of our 
 military power and alacrity, is not expensively to rear palatial bari-acks 
 in the burning plains, and more expensively to keep British soldiers in 
 them, but to organise field forces and flying brigades, and keep them 
 moving about the country so long as the weather would permit it to be 
 done with safety. Each Native Regiment should form part of such a 
 force once in three or four years. It would march with the least pos- 
 sible encumbrance, and be prepared to go to any part of India.^ 
 Manoeuvring and military operations of every descrijitiou would of
 
 104 APPENDIX. 
 
 course be practised, aucl every commauder of a column would have 
 some dcHuite scheme prescribed to him by the Commander-in- Chief 
 Avhich he would be required to carry out, its subordinate detail being 
 left to his own judgment. This would constitute an excellent school 
 for generalship, and both for ofiicers and men would be the best kind 
 of military training. Such is the mode in which I would propose to 
 deal with Native troops in quarters and in the field. 
 
 " There would be no such thing as relief of Native Regiments, and 
 the movements of British corps might be so regulated as to make the 
 change from one station to another — let us suppose from Peshawur to 
 Lncknow — an opportunity for exercising with two or more flying 
 columns ; the families and details, of course, being sent separately to 
 their destination." 
 
 "As a set-of!' against the expense attending the system of mobilising 
 the Army of India, the great diminution of numbers it would render 
 possible must be considered. Is it too much to say that it would enable 
 reduction to be made to the extent of £4,000,000 to £5,000,000 on 
 our present expenditure ?"* 
 
 I have no doubt that a redaction iu our monstrous military ex- 
 penditure — now grown to upwards of sixteen millions a year, — 
 to a mucli greater extent than is contemplated above, might be 
 made, if some such plan were adopted, combined with the great 
 tactical change recommended by a very able and accomplished 
 siildier, — too young of course to be listened to ! — Colonel Sir 
 Henry Havelock, now Deputy Quartermaster-General at Dublin, 
 that of converting nearly all the British Infantry in India into 
 Mounted Eifles.f 
 
 The letter of "Chiliarch^^ is particularly satisfactory to me, and 
 I feel myself justified in thus appropriating it, because two years 
 before its publication I had proposed the same system, with this 
 essential difference that, according to my views. Native troops 
 should be "localised", and a "home" found for each corps in the 
 hot season, by nearly all of them being converted into Auxiliary 
 troops belonging to Native States. 
 
 " ify opinion is that if we make the Native Princes trust us, we can 
 always trust them. Their troops, properly equipped and disciplined, 
 occuisionally hriffaded in camps of exercise ivith the moveable rohimns which 
 
 * Homeward Mail, December Gt;h, 1869. 
 
 t Three Main Military Questions, Longmans, 18G7. The author 
 — personally unknown to me — describes the remarkable effect produced 
 in many cami)aigns, especially in the Amcricaii Civil war, by Mounted 
 Infantry, but with a graceful modesty that we may admire and regret 
 at the same time, abstains from any allusion to his own exploit in 
 1858 with a ver}' small force organised by himself and mounted on 
 every sort of available animal, against the rebels under Kooer Sing and 
 Oomer Sing in IJchar. I wish I could tell the story myself as I heard 
 it told by a gallant officer of the Bengal Engineers.
 
 APPENDIX. 105 
 
 should take the place of ozor subsldianj divisions and garrisons, ouglit to 
 be a source of military strength, and, still more, a visible display of 
 moral strength in our favour, to the great relief of our finances and our 
 muster-roll."* 
 
 Additional testimony to the fact that Native States can furnish 
 efficient x\.uxiliarics is to be seen in the following extract of a 
 letter, dated 3rd of April, 1869, from a correspondent of the Bom- 
 bay Times of India, at the Viceroy's Camp at Umballa during the 
 visit of the Ameer Sher Ali of Afghanistan. It will also be ob- 
 served that, with the usual official tendency, the writer considers 
 that the little army of the Puttiala Rajah is much too efficient. 
 
 " While on military topics, your correspondent may as well say that 
 the evident efficiency of the portion of the ]\Iaharajah of Puttiala's troops 
 here just now, is such, that were the Force of that Chief as numerous as 
 that of Scindia, it would have to be similarly reduced by order of the 
 Government of India. They are the best uniformed and altogether most 
 serviceable Native State troops that your correspondent has seen. The 
 men are well-statui'ed, and for the most pai^t Sikhs, men who, in open 
 fight on the plain, would ' lick' three times their number of Aflfghans, 
 and whose fathers did so. Returning to their lines from a distant 
 parade, they march 'at case' as all soldiei's are allowed to do when 
 there are miles to be got over ; but they, nevertheless, seemed quite 
 capable of great precision of alignment and movement, were the 
 word 'attention' to be given. The horses of the Cavalry were well- 
 sized and capable of work. The guns were of Government foundry 
 manufacture, and not old, well carriaged and horsed. A European 
 gentleman, who sold out of one of Her Majesty's Regiments, is, I believe, 
 Commandant of the Force." t 
 
 A higher and more uniform standard of organisation and disci- 
 pline could easily be maintained under Imperial inspection, and 
 by means of camps of exercise. 
 
 (C.) 
 
 THE LITTLE STATE OF DHAR. 
 
 {Page2\.) 
 
 The following extracts from a leading article in the Bombay 
 Times of India, of the 21st of Decembei-, 18G9, give a pleasing 
 picture of the young Prince of Dhar. 
 
 " Some weeks back we drew attention to the continued distress in 
 Rajpootana, more especially with reference to the orphan cliildren 
 whose hard fate still claims the active sympathy of the Indian com- 
 
 * Retrospects and Prospects of Indian Policy, pp. 332-3. 
 t Times of India, 10th of April, 1809.
 
 lOG AFPEXDIX. 
 
 manity eveiywhere. In mentioning vai'ious measures wliicli had been 
 taken towards mitigating the distress, we stated that the Dhar Chief 
 had set aside a considerable sum of money for the cstablishuTcnt of an 
 orphanage which was maintained at Erinpoorah under the oversight of 
 the Governor- General's Agent in Rajpootana. 
 
 " It Avas in the course of conversation, now some three months back, 
 with Major J. Cadell (at present acting as Bheel Agent) that the sub- 
 ject of tlie Rajpootana distress was brought before His Highness of 
 J)liar. His interlocutor had scarcely finished describing the classes 
 most in need when, with the promptitude and silent dignity befitting a 
 Prince, three bags, each containing 2,000 rupees " (£200) " were 
 placed at the British ofiicer's feet, in aid of the famishing Marwarries 
 and Rajpoots. 
 
 " The surplus funds of the little State of Dhar cannot be very large ; 
 but such portions of them as are devoted to charitable purposes appear 
 to be laid out with some judgment. In addition to the 6,000 rupees" 
 (£G00) " disposed of as above mentioned. His Highness not long ago 
 appropriated 2,-500 rupees" (£250) "to the building of a refuge for 
 lepers — a purpose which some charitable soul in or near Bombay might 
 do well to imitate. But the Dhar Chief not only built the lazar house, 
 he has set aside 10,000 rupees" (£lO00) " to be invested in Govern- 
 ment paper, for the maintenance of the luckless inmates of the refuge. 
 
 "We know nothing of the Dhar Ciiief except through his brief, 
 eventful political history ; but we ai'e glad to have an opportunity of 
 placing his benevolent actions in their proper light. It is also not un- 
 instructive to note that to other Chiefs in Central India his example of 
 wise giving, is one clear gain from the act of political justice wdiich, in 
 the restoration of the Dhar Raj, Lord Stanley and the Home Government 
 carried through against the determined opposition of the Calcutta 
 Foreign OflBce." 
 
 Lord Stanley, there can be no doubt, would frankly admit that 
 without the persistent vigilance aud clear expositions of Mr. John 
 Dickinson,* who has for many years applied himself to Indian re- 
 form as a study and a pursuit, as other men apply themselves to en- 
 tomology or astronomy, he would never have been sufficiently well 
 informed on the facts and merits of the Dhar question to have 
 baffled "the determined opposition of the Calcutta Foreign Office". 
 But for this volunteer interference, the young Rajah of Dhar, who 
 has proved such an excellent ruler, would have been dispossessed 
 and degraded into a pensioner, with no object or career in life 
 open to him except that of a conspirator. As it was, the Calcutta 
 Government, dislodged from their first, succeeded in holding their 
 second position ; and a severe penalty, though short of utter ex- 
 tinction, was inflicted on the Dhar State, because a portion of its 
 troops, following the example of ours, had mutinied. We appro- 
 priated the district of Buirseea, one-sixth of the Dhar territory 
 
 * Jthar Not Eaxtored, by John Dickinson, F.R. A.S., etc. (P. S. King, 
 Parliament Street), 1804; and A S(^q>Ml l.o Dhar Not lieslored, 1805.
 
 APPENDIX. 107 
 
 with a I'evouuo of £10,000, and by granting it to the Nawab 
 Begum of Bliopal, cheaply rewarded that faithful and enlightened 
 Princess at the expense of our innocent Ward. 
 
 The whole revenue of the Dhar State in the year 18G7-8 was 
 only 528,000 rupees (£52,800), out of which 20,000 rupees 
 (£2000) are paid as a military contribution to the Briti:^h Gov^ern- 
 ment, and yet there was a total cash balance of 506,400 rupees 
 (£50,640) in its treasury, of which 350,000 rupees (£35,000) were 
 invested in the 4 per cent. Govern nient Loan. This, at any rate, 
 is not I'eckless extravagance or bad stcwai'dship. 
 
 (D.) 
 refop.:m by the gaekwar. 
 
 {Page 25.) 
 ''''{From our oivn Correspondent.^ 
 
 "Baroda, Nov. 16th, 1869. 
 
 ''In continuation of my letter of the 27th October last, I have 
 much pleasure to furnish you with a detailed and faithful account 
 of the further progress of the Widow Marriage cause at the Court 
 of His Highness the Gaekwar. In accordance with the invitation 
 sent to the promoters of Widow Marriage at Bombay to come 
 over to Baroda and discuss its legality according to Hindu law 
 with the Shastris at His Highness's capital, a party of fifteen gen- 
 tlemen, including such influential and learned persons as Messrs. 
 Vishnu Parashram Shastri Pandit, Mahadeva Govind Eanade, 
 M.A., LL.B.; Ballajee Pandurang; Wamon Abajee Modak, B.A.; 
 Wittul Xaraycn Pathak, M.A.; Janardhan Sakharara Gadgil, B.A.; 
 Venayek Trimbac Gole ; and Ballajee Narayen Kolatkar, started 
 for Baroda on behalf of the Widow Marriage Association. Rao 
 Bahadoor Gopalrao Hari Deshmookh came from Ahmedabad to 
 join the Bombay party. All were at Baroda by Sunday, the 15th 
 instant, and in the afternoon proceeded to see His Highness and 
 the Dewan" (the Minister) " at Makarpoora, His " Highness's re- 
 sidence. After the formal introduction. His Highness at once 
 expressed to Rao Bahadoor Gopah-ao Hari that he was ready to 
 act as the party desired. It deserves to be mentioned that His 
 Highness is extremely affable, and converses freely with his guests 
 as if he were one of their own rank. He offered to call the Shas- 
 trees of his Court, and bring them to a face to face discussion with 
 the Bombay party at his Palace under his own supervision, with the 
 Dewan and Scuapati Sahib. It was eventually proposed that the
 
 lOS APPENDIX. 
 
 discussion slioukl take place during tlie next Christmas holidays, 
 when all friends of the Widow Marriage cause could afford to stay 
 for some days at Baroda. His Higliness said that the party might 
 consult thoir own convenience. Rao Bahadoor Gopalrao and his 
 fi'iends were left for an hour to themselves to arrive at some reso- 
 lution. AVlien the party met again His Highness himself sug- 
 gested a plan which was most satisfactory to both sides. As the 
 discussion was to be a written one, even if the two parties came 
 face to lace, it was suggested by llis Highness that written ques- 
 tions should be given by the Bombay party which the Baroda 
 Shastris should answer. These answers would be sent to Bom- 
 bay. The Bombay party might then write their answer, and the 
 Shastris of Baroda might give their rejoinder. In this mauner 
 the whole ground being prepared by writing, in the Christmas 
 holidays both parties should meet at Makarpoora. Neutrals should 
 be named on both sides to pronounce an opinion on the discussion, 
 and His Highness himself with the Dcwan Sahib and Senapati 
 Sahib, would be present and pronounce decision on the merits. The 
 plan of His Highness was readily assented to, and it was decided 
 to give the written questions next day. After this. His Highness 
 went into some Shastrical points on which question^ are usually 
 raised. He asked whether there were clear authorities for Avidow 
 marriage after SaptapacU ; what ritual was to be made use of at 
 the second marriage ; who was to give away the girl ; and how 
 the iiatria potestas of the father over the girl revived at the death 
 of her husband when he'' (the father) "had once given her away? 
 He was satisfied on all these points by Mr. Vishnu Shastree Pan- 
 dit and others ; and it must be confessed that the intelligence in 
 questioning and the quickness of comprehension displayed by His 
 Highness would have done credit even to a learned Brahmin. All 
 the Bombay party will bear witness to the truth of this remark. 
 His Highness had the frankness to express again and again that 
 he was already ' twelve annas' — that is seventy-five per cent. — 
 in favour of widow marriage; that he could not see why little 
 girls who never knew what a husband was should be doomed to 
 pei-petual widowhood ; that it was the duty of Kings to look to 
 the happiness of females as well as males ; and that, as God was 
 the Lord of all, not only of males, His laws would not sanction 
 the prohibition of Widow Marriage. 
 
 " The interview lasted for more than four hours, at the end of 
 which His Highness insisted on entertaining the whole party at 
 supper, for which he issued orders forthwith. After supper the 
 party saw the Dewan Sahib, where an equally agreeable conver- 
 sation took place for about an hour. The whole party then re- 
 turned to Jiaroda from ]\Iakarpoora. Next day (Monday, the 
 IGth) written questions were submitted by the Bombay party.
 
 APPENDIX. 109 
 
 and His Highness after hearing them read, ordered the same 
 to be forwarded to the ecelesiastical officer of the Court for 
 the rephes of the Shastris, and required the original repHes to be 
 brought to himself. The questions relate to three subjects^ viz. : 
 — widow marriage, early marriage, and foreign travel. 
 
 •' I hope the above account will interest your readers and the 
 public and will encourage lovers of progi-ess. I have given simple 
 facts, scrupulously abstaining from any reflections except in one 
 or two places where it would have been sheer injustice to His 
 Highness not to do so. The public may draw their own inferences." 
 — Tiwes of India. 
 
 (E.) 
 
 A POLITICAL "SUNYASSEe". 
 
 {Page 28.) 
 
 To those who imagine that political apathy prevails among the 
 races of India, and that even with the stimulus of English educa- 
 tion they are incapable of political movements in a progressive 
 direction, the following extract from the Bombay newspaper 
 Nat ice Ojjinion, January 9 th, 1870, may prove instructive : — 
 
 " We ai'B extremely sorry to have to record the death of a character 
 who, in the present state of our society, may well be styled extraor- 
 dinary. We refer to the late Anandasln^am Swamy, who died on the 
 30th ult. at ]\Iandavee in Kutch, revered and regretted by the whole 
 people cf that State and of its neighbour of Jamnuggur. The people 
 of Mundavee, we are told, voluntarily closed all shops and business for 
 the day as a tribute of respect to the memory of the deceased, and 
 mourned as if each of them had lost his father. 
 
 " Who was this individual who was thus honoured, and what were 
 the means by which he had enshrined himself in the people's hearts ? 
 He was no royal personage, no grandee, — not even a Native of the 
 Province of Kattyawar or of Kutch, where he was held in such singular 
 estimation. He was, however, peculiarly a public man after the fashion 
 of ancient India — a genuine Rishi in short — a character deservedly ad- 
 mired by the educated and blindly adored by the orthodox Hindu. To 
 illustrate this statement it is only necessary to mention such particulars 
 of his life and conduct as could be made known under the rules of 
 secrecy which appear to have been imposed on the performance of all 
 meritorious deeds in former (unlike the present) days. 
 
 " The deceased was, we believe, a Native of Bengal, and belonged to 
 a mercantile family of Calcutta. He was possessed of more than average 
 abilities, and had received a good English education. Twelve years 
 ago he gave up the pleasures of the world, and entering one of the 
 monkish orders set out on his travel. What the i)rime cause of his
 
 1 1 APPENDIX. 
 
 i-enunciatiou was is not known ; but it is certain that a strong bent for 
 ti-avel and a desire to witness the varieties of human luituro was 
 one of the motives to that act. We know nothing of his history 
 until he turned up at Jamnuggur* three or four years ago. From 
 thence he wrote news-letters to this journal, the publication of which 
 led to an inquiry into their authorship. Anandashram Swamy was 
 taken before tlie Jam. He freely admitted the charge, and expressed 
 his determination to persist in the course of exposure so long as 
 His Highness permitted the people entrusted by Providence to his 
 care to be oppressed. For a time he was imprisoned ; but compunction 
 came over the Jam, who ordered the i-elease of the holy and disin- 
 terested man, placed himself under his advice, and asked him virtually 
 to undei'take the management of his atFairs. This he refused ; but 
 agreed to procure for the Jam a man qualified for the task morally and 
 otherwise. An advertisement was then given to the papers inviting 
 applications for the place ; subsequently Mr. Venayek Narayan Bhag- 
 wat, then connected with the management and editing of this journal, 
 accejited the post, and with the advice of his spiritual guide and tem- 
 poral head introduced those rcfox'ms in the government of Jamnuggur 
 some few of which took deep root, but which brought about the fall of 
 the reforming party. This is the truth which Dr. Norman Macleod 
 .seems to have got hold of, and with his usual felicity arranged into the 
 following anecdote. 
 
 '• I may take this opportunity of giving another instance of the in- 
 direct iniluence of English education. A Rajah of a small Principality 
 iu the West had had transmitted to him some severe articles, written 
 in English, which had appeared in a Bombay Native paper, exposing 
 grievous errors in his government. Irritated at the exposure, he em- 
 ployed spies to detect the writer, A Suiujassee was brought before 
 him as the offender. To a Native Ruler such a charge against such a 
 man seemed absurd. It was very much as if an Irish tinker had been 
 accused of writing articles in the Times against Lord Derby. Yet the 
 ascetic, with little clothing, and no ornament except ashes, claimed 
 the articles as his, and proved his right to do so. On being questioned, 
 he said: — 'I was educated in a mission school. I did not see it to be my 
 duty to become a Christian, but chose to remain a devotee to my own 
 religion. As such I journey through the country examining into and 
 e.'sposing all that is false, cruel, and unjust, and giving my support 
 to whatever is good wherever F find it ; and this I shall continue 
 to do.' 
 
 " ' I make you my prime minister ! ' exclaimed the wondering 
 Rajah. 
 
 " ' I refuse the post,' replied the Sunyassee ; * for I have this other 
 work given me to do. But I can get you as good an adviser as my- 
 self, and one who has been educated like; me.' 
 
 "He accordingly scut to his I'ricnid the editor of the paper for a ])rimc 
 
 * Or Nowanuggur, one of the petty States of Kattyawar, the re- 
 venue of which is about £00,000 per nurmm. 'J'he Prince of a Raj- 
 poot family, is styled the Jam.
 
 APPENDIX. 1 1 1 
 
 ministei' to the Rajah, while lie himself went on his lonely way to fnllil 
 his calling in the name of that truth and justice which he had been 
 taug'ht at the mission school." 
 
 " The old Karbharees were alarmed at the blow aimed at their per- 
 sonal interests by the chano-es, and combining began to work upon the 
 pliant Jam. They soon found a subject suited to the occasion. The 
 Jam was anxious to have a chikl of his by a Mahommedan concubine 
 recognised as his successor. Against this step the reform party de- 
 clared itself with too imprudent an openness. A handle was fairly given 
 to the intriguers to work with. The Swamy was then on a visit to 
 Bomba}-, and it was represented to the Jam that his object there was to 
 work out the defeat of His Highness's project for the succession. Mean- 
 while, a foul trick was played to the prejudice of the new minister, and 
 he was told to leave the State forthwith. This he did, and what Jam- 
 nuggur cast away, the Political Agent at Rajcote willingly utilised into 
 an excellent government official. 13ut to return. The Swamy left Bom- 
 bay by a steamer and landed at JNIandavee in Kutch, where he heard 
 of the contretemjhs endangering his work and undeservedly discrediting 
 his agent. While he was meditating what to do, he was pressed by 
 the Rao of Kutch to repair to his Court. He at last yielded, and it is 
 to his promptings and advice that those nominations of eligible persons 
 and measures of reform in the administration of the State are chiefly 
 due which have been credited to other parties. He was suffering from 
 ill health for some time past and wished veiy much for a change ; but 
 the crisis through which the Kutch Durbar and State is passing pre- 
 vented him from following his wishes, and he thus fell a victim to his 
 goodness. 
 
 " Such is a brief history of this singular character. His moral and 
 political aspirations were those of the educated Native — his life was 
 devoted entirely to their furtherance. He lived on the voluntary charity 
 of the people : but like the Rishies of old, he more than repaid it by 
 contributing to their general good. Morning and evening he preached 
 to crowds of men and women the duty of doing spiritual service to God 
 and good to man. At the same time he kept himself informed of all 
 the public news of the State, and of the politics of India and the world. 
 His advice to Native Princes was judicious and firm. He would never 
 consent to their yielding a jot of their just right to the demands of the 
 Political officers of the British Government, but he insisted also on the 
 reform of their administrations as the prime duty and function of their 
 existence. The Government Agency at Rajcote styled the man a 'Poli- 
 tical Sunyassee'. May there be many such political characters, and may 
 those who have had hitherto the benefit of their advice, seeing what 
 they have lost, value and cherish it the more. We may remark that 
 in Kutch the Swamy was not less opposed in his endeavours than in 
 Jamnuggur, and he and his agents had often rough paths to travel. 
 But we trust that his shrewd Highness the Rao has now attained to a 
 full appreciation of his position, and that the valuableness and purity 
 of the advice of which he has been deprived will enable him to see the 
 worthlessness of that by wdiich he has been occasionally misled."
 
 1 I 2 APPENDIX. 
 
 (F.) 
 RAILWAYS AND REVENUE. 
 
 {Fa.je 52.) 
 
 The following statement of the comparative progress of Irriga- 
 tion Districts, Kailwaj Districts, and Unimproved Districts in the 
 ^Madras Presidency, is extracted fi-om the Homeward Mall, of the 
 27th of August, I860:— 
 
 " In-iijatioii Districts. — Average revenue of Guntoor, ]\rasulipatara, 
 and Rajalimundry, from 18-41 to 1845, £470,000 ; Goclavery and Kistna 
 (same districts as above under new names), for 1865-66, £930,000, — 
 an increase of £460,000, or 100 per cent. ; capital expended in irrigat- 
 ing above districts, under £750,000; upon which the increased revenue 
 is 60 per cent. 
 
 Raihraij Districts. -^Ayernrre revenue of North Arcot, Salem, Coimba- 
 tore, and Malabar, from 1841 to 1845, £1,034,000 ; same districts for 
 1865-66, £1,135,000— an increase of £101,000, or 10 per cent ; capital 
 expended on 450 miles of railway in those districts, at £15,000 per 
 mile (including cost of land and interest paid by Government), 
 £6,750,000; increase of revenue on that cajiifal, 1| per cent. 
 
 Comparatively Unimproved Districts. — Average revenue of Ganjam, 
 Vizagapatam, Nellore, Cuddapah, Bellary, Kurnool, Madura, Tiunevelly, 
 in which districts no Railways have been laid, and only partial Irriga- 
 tion works, from 1841 to 1845, £1,690,000 ; ditto for 1865-66, 
 £2,156,000,— an increase of £466,000, or 27 per cent. 
 
 " But much of this is owing to improved Irrigation, as it is also in 
 the Railway districts ; besides which, the balance of working expenses 
 and interest against the Railways in Madras is £148,000 by the last 
 Report, or more than the whole increase of revenue in those districts. 
 There is thus no proof of any increase of revenue at all in the districts 
 on which 6| millions have been expended, against nearly half a million 
 increase in those on which under three-quarters of a million has been 
 expended on Irrigation works ; for it so happens that the districts in 
 which no Railwavs have been laid have increased in revenue much 
 more than tho.se in which they have been. 
 
 " Can we be surprised at the Madras Athenmum, of the 27th July, 
 saying : ' Starvation, disease, and death are reported as prevalent from 
 all quarters, and unless rain speedily falls to an extent that cannot 
 reasonably be expected, we are still only on the threshold of dire 
 calamities that must inevitably follow; save where the great hydraulic 
 works .still furnish some supply to adjacent districts, the ultimate 
 re.«;iiltg will be appalling beyond description. Had such works been 
 construr-ted throughout tlio length and bi'eadtli of tlie country, as Sir 
 Arthur Cotton an<l numberless pupils of his school have vainly urged 
 for the last thirty vears, how different a story should we now have to 
 tell.'" 
 
 I need liardly add that neai'ly all that lias been said in tlie text 
 on the Railway question, has been condensed from the numerous
 
 APi'ENDIX. 1 ] :5 
 
 official and officious writings of Sir Arthur Cotton on the subject, 
 which commencing twenty-five years ago, before one sod of an 
 IiKlian railway was turned, have stood the test of verification, 
 while the "splendid" Minutes of Lord Dalhousie and the con- 
 fident expectations of the original projectors, have been falsified 
 and contradicted by every practical result as to travelling, traffic, 
 ])r()iits, and effect on the public revenue. 
 
 (G.) 
 
 INDIAN FINANCE. 
 
 {Page 53.) 
 
 From the Calcutta Englishman. 
 
 " The total deficit during the three years is over five millions 
 and three-quarters, and the average annual deficit has been ex- 
 actly £1,932,883. These facts are sufficiently startling, but worse 
 remain behind. There has been an admitted deficit of five and 
 three-quarter millions, but we regret to be compelled to arrive at 
 the conclusion that there has also been a secreted deficit of three 
 millions more. At the close of 1865-66 we observe that the cash- 
 balances exceeded thirteen and three-quarter millions sterling ; 
 at the close of 1868-69 they had fallen to ten millions and a third, 
 and, notwithstanding the recent loan of £2,400,000, we observe 
 that they are still lower than they have been in this month for 
 many years. The total amount abstracted from the cash-balances 
 from 1866 to 1869 amounts to £3,310,000, which, in addition to 
 the acknowledged deficit above shown of five and three-quarter 
 millions, makes the vast sum of £9,108,541, by which the expen- 
 diture has exceeded the revenue during the last three years. 
 
 " But even this is not the worst. During the same three yeai's 
 the Indian Government has borrowed six and a half millions ster- 
 ling, of which only thi*ee millions have been spent on reproductive 
 works. Between deficits, cash-balances, and loans on non-repro- 
 ductive works, we have managed to accumulate a deficiency 
 during three years of peace that would do credit even to an 
 Ottoman financier."* 
 
 (H.) 
 
 {Page 88.) 
 
 "If the past of Indian Policy was one of unwarranted and un- 
 justifiable spoliation, what will be, or ought to be its future? 
 
 * Extracted fi-om the Uovienmrd Mail, October oOth, 18C''J. 
 
 1
 
 114 APPENDIX. 
 
 'Reform or destroy' the Native States ? Wliich to choose? 
 There can be very little doubt as to wiiat sort of" answer will be 
 given in the present state of public opinion. But Major Bell 
 cautions us not to be over-sanguine in our hope that the fatal 
 policy of annexation has licen given uj) for good by English states- 
 men. For how hard did the annexationists work for the spolia- 
 tion of the M3'sore State ! But supposing that politicians of all 
 parties (including the high-priest of the worshippers of St. Dal- 
 housie, the Friend of India), have come over to the belief that the 
 preservation of Native States is compatible with the best interests 
 of the Empire, what policy should the British (xovernment adopt 
 in dealing with them ? It will not do simply to perpetuate their 
 existence. If the Indian Government have the will^ they have 
 the power of not simply absorbing them, or burdening them with 
 * cumbrous establishments' overloaded with English incumbents, 
 to impede their natural growth and free development, and to de- 
 feat the purpose of their existence, but of reforming them by 
 active supervision, by a system of check and advice, so as to make 
 them the instruments of ' pi'eparing the people for self-govern- 
 ment'. This, we believe, is Major Bell's main argument." — Tito 
 Indu PraJcdsh, Bombay, 13th July, 18G8. 
 
 " As the British Government is responsible for whatever 
 misrule may prevail in Native States over and above that which 
 their subjects voluntarily put up with, it is bound to cure it in 
 compensation, not by violent annexation, but by persuasion and 
 advice, and the recommendation of well-educated and honourable 
 Native officers for employment at Native Courts. The system 
 adopted by Travancore, the Council of Administration instituted 
 at Jeypore, the i-egularisation of his administration by the Maha- 
 rajah Holkar, and the reforms introduced at Khetree and in the 
 States of Gwalior and Hyderabad, show that Native Princes are 
 fully amenable to the influence of wise precept and example when 
 only brought to bear on them. These eflbrts require to be guided 
 ])y a disinterested and sympathetic agency, until they culminate 
 in Major Bell's three guaranties of good government :—• (1) a 
 separation of the judicial from the executive functions and func- 
 tionai-ies ; (2) a code of laws ; and (3) a limit to the Sovereign's 
 personal deuiand on the State revenue. The first two are being 
 adopted generally, the last has been acted on by Travancore for 
 the last few years. It is for our Government to see that its 
 political officers are — which at present they generally are not — 
 men who would zealously, disinterestedly, and patiently bring 
 about this consummation. No other course towards the Native 
 States would command the sympathy of good men, while if this 
 cannot bo done, no stretch of the conception of the right can 
 justify any iiiterfr-i'enre with those States." — Naiirr Opinion, 
 Bombay.
 
 LONDON: 
 PRINTED BY T. RICHARDS, 37, ORRAT QIIKKN SIRKKT, W.C.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 HCO tDUR. 
 
 ?R 3 
 
 197^ 
 
 Form L9-75m-7,'61(C1437B4)444
 
 AA 000 516 134 4