To the average Briton India is still, we fear, an unknown and far

from interesting country. The scholar may revere it from a safe distance as the classic home of a race that once spoke Sanskrit, that precious key to the due understanding of Greek mythology, and to the solving of many a problem in the history of Aryan races and tongues. A few art-students may revel in the feast of beauty which any good collection of Indian art-treasures will offer to their gaze. A stray traveller may bring home pleasant memories of the cities he visited, the people he met, the strange things he witnessed, and the wild places through which he shot or botanised. Not a few old Indians may retain some interest, lively or languid, in the affairs of a country where their children are haply learning a later edition of their own experiences. Here and there an erewhile President of the old Board of Control, or of its latest substitute the India Council, may devote a fraction of his time to the discussion of Indian politics; a clerical enthusiast may sometimes bear witness against the curse of caste, or the obstacles thrown by Government in the way of missionary progress; and a body of merchants may now and then repeat their stereotyped demand that India shall grow cotton and cut down her import duties for the special benefit of Manchester and Liverpool.

But, taken as a whole, the British public pays very little heed to the affairs of a dependency as large as all Europe outside Russia, and standing third in the list of our commercial customers. So long as India pays her own expenses, and carries on a steady trade with Great Britain, most of us are quite content to let her keep the noiseless tenour of her way; caring little for such mere trifles as a famine, a pestilence, or the collapse of an important industry. Nothing short of an Afghan War, a Sepoy Mutiny, or a great financial deficit, rouses us out of our chronic apathy into a passing fever-fit of bewildered eagerness to do something or get something done; the chances being that our moments of action are even less profitable than our years of indifference. When the blundering of some of Lord Gough's commanders had nearly lost him the day at Chilianwalla, nothing would satisfy his excited countrymen at home but the immediate despatch of a rival general to the seat of a war which the conqueror of Goojrat proved quite capable of bringing unaided to a glorious issue. The great Sepoy rising of 1857 scared England out of another deep sleep. It all came, said somebody, of Lord Dalhousie's policy of annexation; and forthwith the greatest of Indian viceroys fell under a cloud of ignorant detraction, while the fruits of a century's conquests were imperilled by the popular demand for a policy of absolute self-surrender.

Presently broke out the American War. Lancashire, hungering for the cotton that could no longer come across the Atlantic, cried aloud for help from the far East. Was it not India's business to supply her mills and warehouses with their proper food? This new gospel of India's duty towards her remote neighbour was preached so carnestly, to such effect, that the rulers of the country gave up trying to stem the tide of popular feeling; the growth of cotton was encouraged in various ways, until in some places it threatens to supplant the more serviceable grains; and only the other day an amended version of the Cotton Frauds Act was carried through the Bombay Legislature in the teeth of a strenuous resistance from the whole mercantile community of Western India.* But perhaps the most fatal instance of rash meddling on England's part was the insane attempt to set up a powerless puppet like Shah Sujah on the Afghan throne, as a bulwark against Russian progress towards India. How that folly was punished, Mr. Kaye's eloquent history has long since made known. Besides saddling India with a heavy debt, it paved the way, through our consequent loss of prestige, to more than one costly war, and indirectly, it may be said, to the great Sepoy Mutiny.

On the whole, then, we are inclined for the present to acquiesce, however impatiently, in that state of general apathy to which Mr. * This measure has since been vetoed by the Viceroy.

Grant Duff made sarcastic reference a few months ago. When the House of Commons postpones the affairs of our Indian Empire to the discussion of a Park Gate, or a Chapel Marriages Bill, it obeys that natural instinct which, as Burke complained, leads people to regard their private sorrows as far more important than any public tragedy. Very few Englishmen have any direct interest in learning much about a country lying thousands of miles away, and making no demands on the British taxpayer. India, in this respect, is little worse off than Australia. Ignorant indifference has hitherto hurt her less than the misdirected energy which now and then takes its place. Enlightened criticism would, of course, be a very great boon, if the bulk of English critics in and out of Parliament were only half as enlightened as the Duke of Argyll or the present Lord Derby, or nearly as alive to broad results and manifest bearings as Mr. Bright. But pending a consummation still so far off, it is perhaps as well that British senators should forbear from constant meddling with the details of Indian administration. In the case of no other country under our rule would a little learning be fraught with so much danger. That vast peninsula contains not one country but several, each differing from the others in climate, language, manners, and institutions, almost as widely as France differs from England, or Russia from Germany. An Englishman conversant with the Punjab may know nothing whatever about Madras or Bombay. A regular Bengal civilian would find himself at sea among the wild Pathans on the north-west frontier. For those same Pathans, with their democratic lawlessness tempered only by obedience to a fanatic priesthood, quite another mode of government is required than that which serves the "political" in his dealings with the heads of Belochi clansmen in Sindh. The same half-knowledge that in 1793 handed over the land of Bengal for ever to a body of revenuefarmers mis-called Zemindars, in 1856 swept away at one blow the time-honoured rights of the Talookdars, or landed aristocracy of Oudh. It was this, and not the mere annexation of that province, which roused its people into rebellion the following year. Was it likely, indeed, that great landowners, each drawing rent from hundreds of villages, would tamely put up with the loss of princely revenues if any way of revenge were once opened to them? The legislation of 1858 had to repair the blunders of 1856, but the afterfruits of Lord Cornwallis's settlement are still to reap.

It was an ignorant disregard of native prejudice that fired the train of Sepoy disaffection in 1806. British martinets presumed too far on the Madras Sepoy's indifference to caste rules. Stripped of his earrings, forbidden to paint his forehead with the mark of his caste, and ordered to appear on parade with clean-shaven chin, he was next

told to exchange his turban for a regulation shako, made in part of unholy leather. The Mutiny of Vellore proclaimed the grossness of a blunder for which blood alone could pay. The story of the greased cartridges of 1857 points pretty much the same moral. Not a few of the false steps taken from time to time by Indian officials might have been avoided, if the traditions of one province had been less sweepingly applied to another. Lord Canning himself had the honesty to own that the knowledge gained by him in his subsequent journeys up country, would have saved him from the mistakes committed with his sanction during the first years of his rule. Lord Mayo, with all his shrewdness and ready tact, has by this time found equal cause to distrust the guidance of his Bengal secretariat in matters pertaining to Madras or Bombay.

If people on the spot are thus liable to err, what can we expect from those who, dwelling afar off, catch but the dimmest echoes, the faintest reflections, of facts which may have no direct bearing on their daily experiences? As things are, it is only natural that the average Briton should regard the people of India as a vast multitude of rice-eating barbarians, should know no difference between a Rajah and a Nawab, a Jagheer and its possessor,* an Anglo-Indian collector and an English tax-gatherer, and should catch at any excuse for remodelling in harmony with Western ideas the minds and manners of races that were already civilised "when wild in woods the noble Teuton ran." If he cannot plumb the depths of Irish disaffection, or gauge the force of that unsleeping hate which so many Frenchmen cherish against the dynasty of the 2nd December, or understand why the countrymen of Garibaldi hunger so fiercely after Rome, how can we expect him to have clear or accurate views on the subject of Indian land tenures, or to read aright the character of the different races that people Hindustan? His acquaintance with the inner life of a kindred people, speaking his own tongue, and sharing many of his own habits, in America and Australia, being still so vague and limited, what chance is there of his taking a livelier interest in the manners and customs of a collection of races, with none of whom he has aught in common save linguistic evidences of a common ancestry, dating very far back in the prehistoric past? And there is little enough in the way of popular literature to guide him in the search for riper knowledge. A few writers, from Macaulay down to Mr. Kaye, have done their best to reduce the limits of his ignorance, while here and there a novelist like Meadows Taylor, or an observer like Mr. Kerr, has wooed him with pleasing, yet faithful, pictures of home life in the remoter parts of rural India. But all their efforts have hitherto failed to do more than rouse a fleeting curiosity,

* See Mr. Henry Kingsley's last novel.

followed by a settled belief that such things transcend the sphere of his regular interests, or, at best, by a serene acceptance of mere broken glimmerings in the place of broad daylight and clear connected views.

If anything could tend to deepen the interest of our home public in things Indian, a review of the progress which India has made in many directions, during the first ten or eleven years of the rule which superseded that of the East India Company, ought to have such an effect. The great mutiny of 1857, followed by the transfer of the government from an old trading company to the Crown, closed one important epoch in British-Indian history. It serves to mark off with curious sharpness a whole century of outward growth from the new era of internal reconstruction. Between the India of Lord Dalhousie and the India of Lord Mayo there is much of the difference that divides the Englishman of to-day from the Englishman of a hundred years ago. As Chatham was the last of our aggressive statesmen, so with Lord Dalhousie ended a career of dominion begun by Lord Clive. The first decade of royal rule in India has stamped her destinies with a colouring at once distinct and ineffaceable. With no real solution of continuity, with none of the cataclysmal rendings that marked the first stages of the French Revolution, so great is the change already visible, that Anglo-Indians who remember the India of other days are astonished at the marvels wrought in these few years under a government which differs from that of yore in little but a name. The Secretary of State for India reproduces the President of the old India Board, much as the old Court of Directors lives again in the new India Council. In the Royal Proclamation of November, 1858, nothing was enunciated which the statesmen of Leadenhall Street had not repeatedly enjoined on their servants, or professed to practise towards their native subjects. They had always striven, in word if not in deed, to respect the rights, privileges, customs, and religious ways of the people under their charge. They, too, had repeatedly disowned all wish for further aggrandisement, all thought of invidious distinctions between the conquering and the conquered races. Not one line, in short, of the new message broached a single new doctrine. Still, to many a hearer the new message seemed to speak of a real difference, not only in the rulers, but in the policy they meant to pursue. The well-worn phrases carried all the charm of novelty, coming, as they did, from the lips of men who had just put down a formidable rising against an unpopular rule. After a storm so violent any change would seem full of unwonted promise to those who forgot the good days before the storm.

"Jam nova progenies cælo demittitur alto;

Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,"

is a cry continually raised on the smallest provocation.