word to say against their application to India; if such rules were not of purely European value, nothing could indeed be plainer than our duty to shed abroad their splendor over the darkness of the East.

But, alas, the answer is loudly rendered from every part of an empire shattered, because it was too highly finished, from every groaning functionary of a system too good for its purpose, who has barely escaped from the wreck alive; and who sees with a shudder that the re-fitting is likely to proceed on the same principles, and in the same docks which built the old vessel. Shall we cite the Press? and Englishmen may speak the thing they will, because all Englishmen have an interest in bringing about the welfare of the state by free discussion; in this country the natives in general are nearly quite apathetic, and those natives who take the trouble to conduct a printing press make it a medium of obscenity, of personality, or of disaffection.

The Natura ad summum

Shall we take jurisprudence? producta of Westminster, introduced bodily at the Presidency, and hardly less fatally into the Mofussil Courts, has broken down the landed classes* from Calcutta to Kurnal; from the semiregal Zemindar of Bengal to the cottier Rajput of the Doab: thus furnishing to the men strongest in hardihood, numbers and local influence, an irresistible temptation to take advantage of the temporary weakness of Government that they might vent their wild justice alike on the authors of the system, and on the monied classes to whom, alone, it had been beneficial.† In Criminal procedure, again, how futile has been the introduction of that exclusive marshalling of evidence required of the Courts, which is founded on the principle, admitted at home, that in a Court of Law it is more likely that a man will speak truth than falsehood; but against which all the habits of orientals entirely and (to us) notoriously militate. Here, a Court of Law is the last place in which the usually untruthful native will think of truth. Of prison reform, and the abolition of corporal punishment (the best of all corrections for orientals) mention has been made above. European ideas could alone produce such weakness. Prisons in the North. west have now reformed themselves; and corporal punishment has been legalised.

*Such landholders as Raja Man Singh were required, on the annexation of Oude, to shew the titles on which they held their Estates!

†The Mahajuns were the people who had, by mortgage and sale, ousted the agricultural proprietors; and were everywhere robbed, tortured and murdered, in 1857. Ought land to be transferable in India, except to the State, for political offences ?

DEC., 1858.

01

Turn to Political Economy. Rulers in this country are afraid to interfere with forestalling and regrating, or to regulate prices when starvation and mutiny have been the alternative; because English science says-" leave the markets alone." But why does it say so? Because facts have shewn that competition will keep them level. Among the grain-dealers of this country, united by the strictest conformity, social and religious combination is the general rule; and is it not clear that combination can always defeat laws for the freedom of trade formed on the opposite basis? "Thou shalt not press labor " is the eleventh commandment of Calcutta (actuated no doubt by English philanthropy,) for a most just and beneficent modification of which a conscientious and able district officer was punished, some years since, with ruinous severity. Now it happens that in the part of India where lay the sphere of his administration, there are no professional laborers, and that the system (declared by M. Le Play to exist, even now, in some parts of Europe) is in full operation; namely, that the laborer is a predial serf of the land-owner, at whose bidding alone he works cheerfully. The Ganges Canal works were at hand, and must be carried on; the Collector was called on to provide laborers; he had likewise to keep up the road-communication of his district. To do this he thought proper to regulate the supply of labor, and to obstruct the oppression of the native subordinate through whom he had to work, by a plan almost identical to what has been rendered law by the Supreme Government at the beginning of the present year. Such is the fate of fair-weather legislation; such legislation as must be expected as long as English law-givers are allowed to proceed, in India, upon English ideas. The only English idea we want, indeed, is that of Induction; form your rules here, as you do at home, from the facts of the case before

you.

Not only has the European race been injured and degraded to a dangerous extent by the gratuitous assertion of native equality, but let it be further remembered that familiarity has necessarily a tendency to diminish admiration; the frogs, in Phædrus, learned to leap upon king Log. And, yet further, there is (as Mr. Helps has shewn in his reflective book on the Spaniards in America) a continual demoralization of halfcivilized men, when they are brought into close personal contact with a conquering race of superior knowledge and better habits. Remember, likewise, the constant diminution of power, salary, pomp and retinue which has been lowering in this

* An idea totally opposed to native notions.

country the visible greatness of English officials for the last thirty years, so that a General of Division or a Chief Commissioner of the present day, presents no appearance of dignity in the eyes of his subjects. Even in practical England, the circuit judges enter a town with javelin men and sheriffs' processions; at an Indian court the British envoy is not allowed an elephant, and the Judge proceeds to Sessions on a twentypound hack.

Sic volo, sic jubeo; a present despotism, surrounded by signs of strength, and enforced by stern consistency, with punishment and reward equally certain and summary-this is the system best known to Asiatics, and which might not have been inconsistent with the most adequate control and upright integrity; while a very considerable amount of the sweets of (subordinate) office might have found their way into the mouths of the subject races. That of course, they have, by their own conduct, rendered impossible for many a day, but we need not forget that it was thus the Moguls, in their palmy days, treated the Hindus, and thus that Runjeet Singh ruled the Punjabee Mussulmans, who were placed in charge of large districts, and in commands of high military responsibility, but never petted.

But no auspicious precedent seems to support the advocates of a remote despotism, conducted on revolutionary principles, freakish in operation, and undermined by an endless ramification of appeal, and such has been the system which has prevailed in British India, more and more, for a long period of years, and who can wonder if that system is at last crashing in every direction?

We have seen the results of two systems of Centralization; in Europe the destruction of local authority, in Asia its usurpation. Of the two the latter is the system best suited to oriental habits and existing institutions; and, when wielded by foreigners situated as we are, is free from the dangers to which it succumbed, under the later Mogul rulers. But the principle should be modified; a new word must be coined to express that principle-simple though it be. For "Centralization" we must substitute "Unifaction," a word unknown to lexicographers, but containing, it may be, the germ or text of our duty in this country. To weld into a whole, having life in each part, should be the steady practice, as it has, by fits and starts, been the theory of Indian administration. The results might lack that comprehensive completeness so charming to those who regard Government as one of the fine arts; but they would be fruitful in happiness to the subjects, and in honor to the rulers. This is not the place to enter into a minute exposition of what should be the details of such a plan;

doubtless the collective wisdom of the different Presidencies will be employed in their adaptation to local peculiarities. All that the modest scope of a paper like the present, can embrace, is the protest of one who has seen the mistakes of the past, in their results, on the spot; who has shared the suffering of the time; and has earnestly bent himself to study the feeling and opinions of those around him, native as well as European. He protests in their name against three things chiefly; first, against the inconsistent treatment of India by the people of England, their occasional unsympathising criticism, and equally mortifying intervals of neglect; second, against the wholesale importation of English ideas-however suitable at home-especially during the present period of excitement; thirdly, against the weakening of local authority by endless central control.

Part of such a scheme may involve the discontinuance of a special service for civil duties of administration. It is not requisite that one should here support, much less confute, the usual accusations brought against this body of public officers, either by the tradespeople and barristers of Calcutta, or by the barkelings of India Reform in London. They may be universally given to believe and support the natives; or they may be in the habit of robbing them by slow torture; both charges are at any rate not likely to be commonly true: by those who judge without passion or prejudice, they seem to be held able and high-minded; and the cries that have been raised against them have been generally considered traceable, for the most part, to personal feeling, not creditable to their authors. But, looking to history, we must admit that there is a basis of truth in the complaints of their military confrères. No instance occurs to memory of a military power, in which a special service has had the precedence of the army; great satrapies might be civil employments, but from Ninus to Napoleon, they are usually found in the hands of successful captains. Now, whatever controversy may have existed in former days, it cannot be doubted that, for some time to come (at any rate) India must be ruled by the sword; and to have district officers with the power which they would exercise according to the views set forth in the present article, yet wanting in military experience, and in that influence over their military subordinates which such an experience can alone ensure, would be likely to lead to much dispute, scandal, and weakness. On the other hand, some appointments-and good appointmentsare now given as rewards to soldiers, which might be much better filled by civilians; not so much on account of greater business aptitude, as by reason of advantage to discipline in the army. It seems to be allowed on all hands that military preferment should be the stimulus to military merit, which,

however, in the Indian army has been hitherto often encouraged by the bestowal of such posts as are to be found in the Commissariat, the Audit Office, and the Clothing Board. Such employ, together with judicial and revenue appointments in districts which are not in a position to be disturbed, should absorb the existing civil servants, with whom Government cannot break the faith implied in their covenant. But the command of inflammable districts should henceforth be military command, the presiding officer uniting the control of all departments therein. Two branches of the staff might in future exist-the regimental and the executive; the former for officering the native corps, to which no man should be hereafter posted until he has given satisfactory proofs of efficiency, the purely civil departments being kept totally distinct from either, as is the case in England.

As above said, details are beyond our province, but it seemed proper to point out a practical application of our principles, that we might be protected from the charge of being mere visionaries. We disapprove that character no less than the other of a mountebank herald of empirical nostrums, whereof the value has to be tested by the fate of Empires, and the advance or retreat of human improvement and human happiness. The subsidence of the rebellion has presented us with a clear development of Centralization. It now seems certain that not only had our system erred in depressing the Civil and Military Local Authorities, but had perniciously affected the native noblesse also. While on the one hand the Zemindars of Oude, upon whom we had, in a spirit of blind pedantry, striven to force proprietary rights they did not want, were unable and unwilling to hold aloof from-much less opposethe Talookdars who had risen to recover their own claims and avenge the spoliation; on the other, those who shewed any systematic adherence to their own fallen fortunes in the N. W. Provinces were usually members of the comparatively small body of tenants-in-chief, whom Mr. Thomason's settlement had spared. So closely does one form of despotism resemble another in its tendencies, and so nearly did the British Rulers of India complete the fatal parallel with their Mogul predecessors, and with the ancient monarchy of France.

This is emphasized. The dangers and life-long banishment of such duty will depress it enough, without the degradatión sure to follow if it have no compensating advantage over the European branch of the service. What respectable young man will serve with treacherous Asiatics, with no chance of exchanging into a home or colonial corps, unless his service become in some degree one of selection and merit ?