As formerly the Colonial Empire, so now the Indian Empire is to be considered only so far as it illustrates the general law of expansion which prevails in the modern part of English history. It will be considered not in itself, but only in its relation to our own state. It will be considered historically—that is, in the causes which produced it ; but also politically— that is, in regard to its value or stability.
From this point of view we shall not find it convenient to observe chronological order. Our acquisition of India was made blindl3\ Nothing great that has ever been done by Englishmen was done so unintentionally, so accidentally, as the conquest of India. There has indeed been little enough of calculation or contrivance in our colonisation. When our first settlers went out to Virginia and New England, it was not intended to lay the foundations of a mighty republican state. But here the event has differed from the design only in degree. We did
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intend to establish a new community, and we even knew that it would be republican in its tendency what was hidden from us was only its immense magnitude. But in India we meant one thing, and did quite another. Our object was trade, and in this we were not particularly successful War with the native states we did not think of at all till a hundred years after our first settlement, and then we thought only of such war as might support our trade; after this time again more than half a cen- tury passed before we thought of any considerable territorial acquisitions; the nineteenth century had almost begun before the policy of acquiring an ascendency over the native states was entered upon and our present supreme position cannot be said to have been attained before the Governor-Generalship of Lord Dalhousie little more than a quarter of a century ago. All along we have been looking one way and moving another. In a case like this the chronological method of study is the worst that can be chosen. If we were to trace the history of the East India Company from year to year, carefully putting ourselves at the point of view of the Directors, we should be doing all in our power to blind ourselves. For it has not been the will of the Directors, but other forces overruling their will, forces against which they struggled in vain, by which the Indian Empire has been brought into existence. For this reason it is almost necessary, as for other reasons it is convenient, to begin at the other end, and before considering how the Empire grew to its preseut 11 THE INDIAN EMPIRE 209 greatness to inquire what at the present moment it actually is.
We call this Empire a conquest, in order to mark the fact that it was not acquired in any degree by settlement or colonisation, but by a series of wars ending in cessions of territory by the native Powers to the East India Company. But let us be careful how we take for granted that it is a conquest in any more precise sense of the word.
Above I criticised the term “possessions of England,” which is so commonly applied to the colonies. I asked, if by England be meant the people inhabiting England and by the colonies certain English people living beyond the sea, in what sense can one of these populations be said to belong to the other? Or if by England you mean the English Government, which is also ultimately the Govern- ment of the colonies, Avhy should we speak of the subjects of a Government as its possession or pro perty, unless indeed they became its subjects by conquest 1 Now this criticism does not directly apply to India, because India did come under the Queen’s government by conquest. India therefore may be called a possession of England in a sense which is not applicable to the colonies. Nevertheless the word con- quest, which, like most of the vocabulary of war, has come down to us from primitive barbaric times, may easily be misunderstood. We may still ask in what sense England am be said to possess India. What we possess we dovote in some manner to our own enjoyment. If I own land, I either take the profits ? ^10 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lkct.
of the harvest, or, if I let the land to a farmer, I get rent from it. And in primitive times the conquest of a country was usually followed by possession in some literal sense. Sometimes the conquerors actu ally became landlords of the conquered territory or of part of it, as in that conquest of Palestine which we read of in the Book of Joshua, or in those Roman conquests where a certain extent of confiscated land was often granted out to a number of Roman citizens. Now assuredly India is not a conquered country in this sense. England has not seized lands in India, and after displacing the native proprietors assigned them to Englishmen.
There is another sense in which we may conceive the condition of a conquered country. We may think of it as tributary or paying tribute. Only we must be careful how we understand the expression. If it merely means that the people pay a tax, —in other words, that they meet the expense of their own govern- ment or of the army that protects their frontier, —there is nothing in this peculiar to a conquered people. Almost every people in some form or other pays the expense of its own government. If the word " tributary " is to be equivalent to " conquered " or " dependent " it must mean paying something over and above the expense of its government. We have an example of such a tribute in modern Egypt. The government of Egypt is in the hands of a Khedive who pays himself handsomely out of the pockets of the people ; but Egypt is tributary to the Sultan of Turkey, —that is, it pays to him a sum which does not II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 211 in any shape return to the country, but simply marks its relation of dependence upon the Sultan. Such a tribute as this would mark that the country which paid it was a possession of the country which received it, because it seems analogous to the rent which a tenant farmer pays to the landowner. Is India then tributary in this sense to England? Certainly not, at least not directly or avowedly. Taxes are raised of course in India, as taxes are raised in England, but India is no more tributary than England itself. The money drawn from India is spent upon the government of India, and no money is levied beyond what is supposed to be necessary for this purpose.
Of course it may be and often has been argued that India is in many ways sacrificed to England, and in particular that money is under colourable pretexts extorted from her. I am not now concerned with this question, because I am inquiring simply what is the relation established by law between India and England, and not how far that relation may by abuse have been perverted. India then is not a pos- session of England in the sense of being legally tribu- tary to England, any more than any of our colonies are so.
The truth is that, though the present relation between India and England was historically created by war, yet England does not, at least openly, claim any rights over India in virtue of this fact. In the Queen’s proclamation of 1st November 1858, by which the open assumption of the government by the
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Queen was announced, occur the express words, " Wehold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." That is, conquest confers no peculiar rights, or India is not for practical purposes a conquered country.
In fact, though the advance of civilisation has not as yet abolished wars nor even perhaps diminished the frequency of them, yet it has very much trans- formed their character. Conquest is nominally still possible, but the word has changed its meaning. It does not now mean spoliation or the acquisition of any oppressive lordship, so that the temptation to make conquests is now very much diminished. Thus our possession of India imposes upon us vast and almost intolerable responsibilities ; this is evident but it is not at once evident that we reap any benefit from it.
We must therefore dismiss from our minds the idea that India is in any practical sense of the word a possession of England. In ordinary language the two notions of property and government are mixed up in a way that produces infinite confusion. When we speak of India as " our magnificent dependency " or " the brightest jewel in the English diadem, " we use metaphors which have come down to us from primitive ages and from a state of society which has long passed away. India does indeed depend on England in the sense that England determines her condition and her policy and that she is governed by Englishmen, but not in the sense that she renders n THE INDIAN EMPIEE 213 service to England or makes England directly richer or more powerful. And thus with respect to India as with respect to the colonies, the question confronts us on the threshold of the subject, What is the use of if? Why do we take the trouble and involve our selves in the anxiety and responsibility of governing two hundred millions of people in Asia 1 Now in respect to the colonies I argued that this question, however naturally it may suggest itself, is perverse, unless it can be shown that our colonies are too remote either to give or receive any advantage from their connection with us. For they are of our own blood, a mere extension of the English nationality into new lands. If these lands were contiguous to England, it would seem a matter of course that the English population as it increases should occupy them, and evidently desirable that it should do so without a political separation. As they are not contiguous but remote, a certain difficulty arises, but it is a difficulty which in these days of steam and electricity does not seem insurmountable. Now you see that this argument rests entirely upon the com- munity of blood between England and her colonies. It does not therefore apply to India. Two races could scarcely be more alien from each other than the English and the Hindus. Comparative philology has indeed discovered one link that had never been suspected before. The language of the prevalent race of India is indeed of the same family as our own language. But in every other respect there is extreme alienation. Their traditions do not touch ours at any 214 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
point. Their religion is further removed, from our own even than Mohammedanism.
Our colonies, as I pointed out, were in the main planted in the emptier parts of the globe, so that their population is for the most part either entirely English or predominantly so. I pointed out that this was not the case with the colonies of Spain in Central and Southern America, where the Spanish settlers lived in the midst of a larger population of native Indians, whom they reduced to a kind of serfdom. Here then are two kinds of dependency, of which the one is much more closely cognate to the mother-country than the other. But both are con- nected by real ties of blood with the mother-country. Now India belongs to neither class, because its population has no tie of blood whatever with the population of England. Even if colonies had gone out from England to India, they must have continued insignificant in comparison to the enormous native population; but there have been no such colonies. England is separated from India by one of the strong est barriers that nature could set up between the two countries. Nature has made the colonisation of India by Englishmen impossible by giving her a climate in which, as a rule, English children cannot grow up.
And thus, while the connection of England with her colonies is in the highest degree natural, her connection with India seems at first sight at least to be in the highest degree unnatural. There is no natural tie whatever between the two countries. No community of blood ; no community of religion, forn THE INDIAN EMPIRE 215 we come as Christians into a population divided betv/een Brahminism and Mohammedanism. And lastly, no community of interest, except so much as there must be between all countries, viz. the interest that each has to receive the commodities of the other. For otherwise what interest can England and India have in common 1 The interests of England lie in Europe and in the New World. India, so far as so isolated a country can have foreign interests at all, looks towards Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asia, countries with which, except through India, we should scarcely ever have had any communication.
The English conquest of India has produced results even more strange than the Spanish conquest of America, though the circumstances of it were, I think, considerably less astonishing and romantic. Whether we think of it with satisfaction or not, it is the most striking and remarkable incident in the modern part of the history of England. In a history of modern England it deserves a prominent place in the main narrative, and not the mere digression or occasional notice which our historians commonly assign to it. But how important it is we shall not see so long as we only consider its strangeness ; we must also bear in mind its enormous magnitude.
Much has been written to show the immensity of the task we have undertaken in India ; yet with surpris ingly little effect. Figures seem only to paralyse the imagination when they pass a certain magnitude, and thus, while in our domestic politics we grow the more interested the larger the question at issue is shown to 216 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
be, we cease to be interested when our ’ Empire with its much vaster questions is brought before us. Point out that this Indian Empire is something like what the Roman Empire was at its greatest extension, and that we are responsible for it; the only effect pro- duced is a disinclination to attend to the subject. Can we seriously justify this"? I fancy we are in some degree misled by an impression that in the outlying parts of the world large dimensions are a matter of course and make no diflference. Thus if India is large, Canada and Australia are still larger, and yet we do not find that the affairs of Canada and Australia require much of our attention. True, but we over- look an important distinction. In Canada and Australia the territory is vast, but the population exceedingly small ; the country also is not merely distant from us, as India is, but also distant from all the great Powers with which we might possibly en- gage in war. India really belongs to quite a different category of countries. It is a country as populous and in some large regions more populous than the most thickly peopled part^of Europe. It is a country in which we have over and over again had to wage war on a grand scale. Thus in the second Mahratta war of 1818 Lord Hastings brought into the field more than a hundred thousand men. And, distant as it may seem, it is by no means out of the range of European politics. Thus throughout the eighteenth century it was part of the chess-board on which France and England played out their game of skill. Again since about 1830 India, and India almost alone, II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 217 has involved us in differences with Eussia, and given us a most intimate interest in the solution of the Eastern Question.
India therefore is rather to be compared to the countries of Europe than to the outlying, thinly peopled countries of the New World. Let us then contemplate a little the magnitude of this Empire, and take some pains to realise it by comparing it to other magnitudes with which we are familiar. Let us think then of Europe without Eussia—that is, of all that system of countries which a few centuries ago formed almost the whole scene of civilised history, all the European countries of the Eoman Empire plus the whole of Germany, the Slavonic countries which are outside Eussia, and the Scandinavian countries. India may be roughly said to be about equal both in area and population to all these coim tries taken together. This Empire, which we now govern from Downing Street, and whose budget forms the annual annoyance and despair of the House of Commons, is considerably larger and more populous than the Empire of Napoleon when it had reached its utmost extent. And, as I have said already, it is an Empire of the same kind, not some vast empty region like the old Spanish Dominion in South America, but a crowded territory with an ancient civilisation, with languages, religions, philosophies and literatures of its own.
I think perhaps it may assist conception if I split up this immense total into parts. The reason, no doubt, why the thought of all Europe together im- 218 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leci.
presses us so much, is that there passes before the mind a series of six or seven great states which must be added together to make up Europe. Our con- ception of Europe is the sum of our conceptions of England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Greece. Perhaps the name India would strike aa majestically upon the ear, if in like manner it were to us the name of a grand complex total. Let me say then that in the first place it has one region which in population far exceeds any European State except Eussia, and exceeds the United States. This is the region governed by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Its population is stated actually to exceed 66,000,000 on an area considerably less than that of France. Then come two other regions which may be compared with European States. These are the North-West Provinces, which answer pretty well to Great Britain without Ireland, being in area some- what smaller, but somewhat more populous. Next comes the Madras Presidency, larger in area—being about equal to Great Britain with Ireland—but less populous, being about equal in population to the Kingdom of Italy. The population in all these three cases rises far above 20,000,000. Then come two provinces in which it approaches 20,000,000, the Punjab, which is somewhat superior in population to Spain, and the Bombay Presidency, which is slightly inferior, though in area it is equal to Great Britain and Ireland. In the next class come Oude, which is rather superior, and the Central Provinces, which are about equal, to Belgium and Holland taken together.
II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 219 These provinces, together with some others of less importance, make up that part of India which is directly under English government. But the region which is pi’actically under English supremacy is still larger. When we speak of the Empire of Napo leon, we do not think only of the territory directly governed by his officials; we reckon -in States nominally sovereign, which were practically under his ascendency. Thus the Confederation of the Rhine consisted of a number of German states which had by a formal act consented to regard Napoleon as their Protector. Now England has a similar dependent confederation in India, and this makes an additional item which, reckoned by population, is superior to the United States.
Is it possible that besides our terrible hive of population at home, giving rise to most anxious politics, and besides our vast colonial Empire, we are also responsible for another Empire densely peopled and about equal to Europe ? Is it possible that about this Empire we neither have, nor care to acquire, the most rudimentary information ? Would it be possible for us, even if we did try to acquire such information, to form a rational opinion about affairs so remote and complicated ? There have been great Empires before now, but the government of them has generally been in the hands of a few experts. Rome was forced to commit her Empire to the care of a single irresponsible statesman, and could not even reserve for herself her old civic liberties. In the United States we do indeed 220 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
see a boundless dominion successfully guided under a democratic system. But the territory in this case, extensive though it be, is all compact and continuous, and the population, however large it may come to be, will still be in the main homogeneous. If the United States should come into the possession of countries separated from her by the sea, and of different nation ality, her position in the world would be at once essentially altered. What is unprecedented in the relation of England to India is the attempt to rule, not merely by experts, but by a system founded on public opinion, a population not merely distant, but wholly alien, wholly unlike in ways of thinking, to the sovereign public. Public opinion is necessarily guided by a few large, plain, simple ideas. When the great interests of the country arc plain, and the great maxims of its government unmistakable, it may be able to judge securely even in questions of vast magnitude. But public opinion is liable to be be- wildered when it is called on to enter into subtleties, draw nice distinctions, apply one set of principles here and another set there. Such bewilderment our Indian Empire produces. It is so different in kind both from England itself and from the Colonial Empire that it requires wholly different principles of policy. And therefore public opinion does not know what to make of it, but looks with blank indignation and despair upon a Government which seems utterly un-English, which is bureaucratic and in the hands of a ruling race, which rests mainly on military force, which raises its revenue, not in the European fashion, II THE INDIAN EMPIKE 221 but by monopolies of salt and opium, and by taking the place of a universal landlord, and in a hundred other ways departs from the traditions of England.
And it may be asked, For what end ? As I have remarked, the connection itself is not directly profitable to England. We must look therefore to advantages which may come to us from it indirectly. We find then that the trade between the two countries has gradually grown to be very great indeed. The loss of the Indian trade which might follow if the country fell again into anarchy or under a Government which closed its harbours to our merchants, would amount to £60,000,000 annually. But we are to set over against this advantage the great burden which is imposed by India upon our foreign policy. In the present state of the world a dependency held by military force may easily be Hke a millstone round the neck of a nation; for it may lock up an army which the nation may grievously need for other purposes or even for defence. We all conceive with what satisfaction Bismarck at the present moment sees France undertaking schemes of conquest in Africa and Asia. Now if England, which is not a military state, had in reality to hold down by English military force a population of two hundred millions, it is needless to say that such a burden would overwhelm us. This is not so, owing to a fundamental peculiarity of the Indian Empire, upon which I shall enlarge later, the peculiarity, namely, that in the main England conquered India and now keeps it by means of Indian troops paid with Indian money. We keep there only 222 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
an English army of 65,000 men. But this is by no means the whole of the burden which India lays upon us. India, at the same time that she locks up an army, more than doubles the difficulty of our foreign policy. The supreme happiness for a country of course is to be self-contained, to have no need to inquire what other nations are doing. Very wisely did “Washington advise his countrymen to retain this happiness as long as they could, England cannot well enjoy it, but if she did not possess India she might enjoy it comparatively. Her colonies as yet have for the most part only peaceful or insignificant or barbarous neighbours, and our old close interest in European struggles has passed away. But we continue to be anxiously interested in the East. Every movement in Turkey, every new symptom in Egypt, any stirring in Persia or Transoxiana or Burmah or Afghanistan, we are obliged to watch with vigilance. The reason is that we have possession of India. Owing to this we have a leading position in the system of Asiatic Powers, and a leading interest in the affairs of all those countries which lie upon the route to India. This and this only involves us in that permanent rivalry with Russia, which is to England in the nineteenth century what the competi tion with France for the New World was to her in the eighteenth.
My object in this lecture is to lay before you the Indian question in its broad outlines. I have put together at the outset some considerations which might incline us to take an anxious or desponding II THE INDIAN EMPIEE 223 view of it. If it is doubtful whether, we reap any balance of advantage from our Indian Empire, and if it is not doubtful that it involves us in enormous responsibilities and confuses our minds with problems of hopeless difficulty, may we not feel tempted to exclaim that it was an evil hour for England when the daring genius of Clive turned a trading company into a political Power, and inaugurated a hundred years of continuous conquest 1 Must we not at least hold, as many among the distinguished statesmen who have devoted their lives to Indian affairs have held, that the Empire is ephemeral, and that the time is not far off when we must withdraw from the country ? On the other hand the wisest men may easily be mistaken when they speculate on such a subject. The end of our Indian Empire is perhaps almost as much beyond calculation as the beginning of it. There is no analogy in history either for one or the other. If the government of India from a remote island seems a thing which can never be permanent, we know that it once seemed a thing which could never take place, until it did take place. At any rate, if the Empire is to fall, we ought to be able to point already to proofs of its decline. Proofs certainly we can show of the immense difficulties it has to con- tend with, but scarcely symptoms of anything which can be called decline. And again if we should admit, or not deny, that England has not been repaid in any way for the trouble that this dependency has cost her, the admission by itself would have no practical 224 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
importance. Between such an admission and any practical project, such as that of abandoning the Empire, there is a gulf fixed.
It is possible to hold that England would be better off now had she founded no such Empire at all, had she remained standing, as a mere merchant, on the threshold of India, as she stands now on that of China. But the abandonment of India is an idea which even those who believe that we shall one day be driven to it are not accustomed to contemplate as a practical scheme. There are some deeds which, though they had been better not done, cannot be undone. A time may conceivably come when it may be practicable to leave India to herself, but for the present it is necessary to govern her as if we were to govern her for ever. Why so 1 Not mainly on our own account. Some tell us that our honour requires us to maintain the acquisition which our fathers made with their blood, and which is the great military trophy of the nation. To my mind there is something monstrous in all such notions of honour; they belong to that primitive and utterly obsolete class of notions, of which I have spoken before, which rest upon a confusion between the ideas of government and property. Nothing is to be con- sidered for a moment but the well-being of India and England, and of the two countries India, as being by much the more nearly interested, by much the larger, and by much the poorer, is to be considered before England. But on these very principles, and especially on account of the interest of India, it isII THE INDUN EMPIRE 225 impossible for the present to think of abandoning the task we have undertaken there. We might do so if our own interest alone were considered. Not that it would be easy, now that such a vast trade has grown up and such vast sums of English money, particularly in these latest years, have been invested in the country. But it would be possible. On the other hand if we consider the interest of India, it appears wholly impossible. Much may be plausibly alleged against the system under which we govern India. It may be doubted whether it is altogether suited to the people, whether it is not needlessly expensive, and so forth. We may feel a reasonable anxiety as to what will come in the end of this unparalleled experiment. But I think it would be a very extreme view to deny that our Government is better than any other which has existed in India since the Mussulman conquest. If it should ulti- mately fail more than any one imagines, we could never leave the country in a state half so deplorable as that in which we found it. A very moderately good Government is incomparably better than none. The sudden withdrawal even of an oppressive Government is a dangerous experiment. Some countries, no doubt, there are, which might pass through such a trial without falling into anarchy. Thinly-peopled countries, or countries whose inhabit- ants had been long accustomed to much freedom of action, might be trusted to devise for themselves very speedily as much government as might be necessary. But Avhat a mockery to lay down such Q 226 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
propositions with India in view ! When we began to take possession of the country, it was already in a state of wild anarchy such as Europe has perhaps never known. What government it had was pretty invariably despotic, and was generally in the hands of military adventurers, depending on a soldiery composed of bandits whose whole vocation was plunder. The Mahratta Power covered the greater part of India and threatened at once Delhi and Calcutta, while it had its headquarters at Poonah, and yet this power was but an organisation of pillage. Meanwhile in the North, Nadir Shah rivalled Attila or Tamerlane in his devastating expeditions. It may be said that this was only a passing anarchy produced by the dissolution of the Mogul Empire. Even so, it would show that India is not a country which can endure the withdrawal of Government. But have we not a somewhat exaggerated idea of the Mogul Empire? Its great- ness was extremely short-lived, and in the Deccan it seems never really to have established itself. The anarchy which Clive and Hastings found in India was not so exceptional a state of things as it might seem. Probably it was much more intense at that moment than ever before, but a condition of anarchy seems almost to have been chronic in India since Mahmoud, and to have been but suspended for a while in the Northern half by Akber and Shah Jehan.
India then is of all countries that which is least capable of evolving out of itself a stable Government II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 227 And it is to be feared that our rule may have diminished what little power of this sort it may have originally possessed. For our supremacy has neces sarily depressed those classes which had anything of the talent or habit of government. The old royal races, the noble classes, and in particular the Mussul- mans who formed the bulk of the official class under the Great Moguls, have suffered most and benefited least from our rule. This decay is the staple topic of lamentation among those who take a dark view of our Empire ; but is it not an additional reason why the Empire should continue? Then think of the immense magnitude of the country ; think too that we have undermined all fixed moral and religious ideas in the intellectual classes by introducing the science of the West into the midst of Brahminical traditions. When you have made all these reflec- tions, you will see that to withdraw oui- Government from a country which is dependent on it, and which we have made incapable of depending upon anything else, would be the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes, and might possibly cause the most stupendous of all conceivable calamities.
Such then in its broad outline is the Indian Question of the present day. In what way did such a question grow up 1 How did we come into posses- sion of a dependency so enormous ? LECTUEE III