by the water’s brink. He was of those who all the year long tread
the bank of the Ganges, from her source in the mountains to her
mouth among the forest swamps, and back again to her source in
the mountains. On that day’s walk he happened to be passing again
through her most sacred city, but that seemed hardly to interrupt his
contemplation of her holiness.

[Illustration: ON THE BANK.

[_Face p. 264._ ]

“Yours is the Order I should belong to by nature,” I said, giving him
a halfpenny, for which he had not asked.

“For you it would be easy and difficult,” he answered, in good
English, and led me up many steps and along galleries overhanging
a cliff of ruinous masonry to a cool courtyard, where Brahmans are
daily fed on boiled rice and salt, laid out upon a plate of stitched
banana leaves.

“Obviously it would be easy for you as for any one,” he went on as
we climbed up, after his meal, to the top of the flat roof where a
little shelter had been erected for shade and worship; “but for you
it would be difficult also, because you hang upon the world, and your
soul is entangled in illusions and desires. Like all your people, you
call the unreal things realities, and for reality you have no name.”

Having devoted himself for a while to prayer, he continued: “You see
this low parapet? Many years ago a boy was seated upon it reading
a Sanscrit book of wisdom, when, it is thought, a monkey, inspired
by the god, pushed him, and he fell. Look over and you will see
the projecting slab half way down which he broke as he fell. They
gathered up his shattered body, and laid it, almost alive, in the
Ganges. I cannot doubt that he attained at once to salvation, his
soul returning to the universal consciousness, as the space inside
a pot returns to universal space when the pot is broken. And in his
salvation I may claim a share, for I was his father.”

It was noon, and the sun blazed upon the roof. Green parrots flew
screaming among the trees of a garden far below us. The hum of the
city arose, pierced with loud cries, and over the far-off iron
bridge across the Ganges a train was slowly passing with prolonged
and shrieking whistle. But still the crowding pilgrims moved down
the steps to the water’s edge, and bathed and offered flowers, and
stretched up their hands in silent adoration, or recited ancient and
sacred words aloud.

[Illustration: THE BURNING PLACE.

THE RIVER WALLS.

  [_Face p. 266._
]

“It is possible for you,” I said, after a long time, “to desire
escape from the danger of rebirth, and to speak of being merged in
the universal consciousness as salvation. But how about these people
who come in millions to the river? All their lives they struggle
only to live. From day to day their thought is only to keep alight
their little glimmer of life, and hand it on to others who are
their children. How is it to be supposed that they come to the river
so wearied of existence as to pray only to be saved from being born
again? I myself, who am one of them, would walk in the opposite
direction if I thought the river was going to extinguish my life, and
for choice I should rather be born a mouse than nothing.”

“You remind me,” he answered, “of those worshippers of Vishnu, who
pray in great humility, ‘Let me be born a cat or dog, if only I may
love thee, O God.’ It is a great prayer, and you may join in it, for,
being a wanderer through the world, you can always hope to become a
religious man, avoiding the many-sided degradation of which people
tell me who have visited the West. I, too, was once engaged in common
business, managing large estates in this very city, and I know the
rich men in the streets, though they cannot now tell who passes
them so close. But each day I gave much time to contemplation, and
I took the vow of kindliness to every living thing, just as you see
those Jain monks there who are feeding ants with sugar, and would
not wittingly kill a cholera germ; or like those wandering Sisters
of the faith who wear a strip of white felt across their mouths lest
they should breathe a midge to death, and carry soft brooms in their
hands to sweep the place where they are about to sit, lest the weight
of their frail bodies should crush an irrecoverable life. By such
means, even in your present body, you may begin to penetrate the
illusions of existence, and at rare moments may perceive some gleam
from what one of your poets has called the white radiance of eternity.

“As for these pilgrims,” he went on, “they are like a woman who
lights her cow-dung fire at evening, not considering as she cooks
that the flame is composed of ten divisions, each symbolic of a
faculty of the soul. Or they are like a man who walks by the light
of sun and moon, not considering that sun and moon are nothing but
symbols of creative power, as are men and women, fire and water, heat
and cold. Or they are like the nautch girls who have a separate song
for every hour of the day and night, but do not know that their songs
are only the pulses of eternity. In cooking, in light, and in song,
each finds an ignorant joy, and in the same way these pilgrims have
a dim sense of righteousness and purification in the outward symbols
of truths that they will never learn in their present life. By such
means, for a few hours together, they may free themselves from the
illusions of existence, and in some cases even reach the state of
those highly religious men who devour putrid cats, to prove that in
their estimation all material things are alike, all being equally
unimportant.

[Illustration: A PLACE OF PRAYER.

  [_Face p. 268._
]

“But for people like you,” he continued with pity, “what can one say?
You are still ensnared by political anxieties, artistic interests,
and the desires of personality. You have far to go before, by
contemplation and hard discipline, you perceive how like happiness is
to its opposite—how accurately the joy of existence may be compared
to a fire-fly wandering in an unlimited vault of darkness, or to the
inch of cool shadow thrown by a snake’s head upon a burning desert.
Till you can reach that supreme state when birth, and life, and death
have no separate meaning, you have far to go. But there is always
hope for one who will begin by overcoming earthly desire. For, as you
may have heard, there has been one being and one alone who in this
flesh attained to salvation without death, and he was Janaka, the
father of Sita, Rama’s wife. He sat still, you remember, with one
hand in a blazing fire and the other upon a woman’s breast, showing
that to him the one was the same as the other, and both indifferent.”

We descended, and I went away in the rapid twilight, sorrowful
because I was not in the least like Janaka. But as I went, I came
to the courtyard of a temple to Shiva, the dissolver of existence,
and there in the darkness I found a lonely woman walking round and
round a sacred tree, driven by the blind desire to bear a child. So
untameable among the unlearned is the passion for life.

CHAPTER XV

THE PATIENT EARTH

“Cold!” I said, just for something to say, as I came out of the
dak-bungalow into the thin January air before sunrise, and met an
educated Indian, who said “Good morning!”

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “You’d have thought it cold if you had slept
where I did.” And he pointed to a dusty place, where he had evidently
been lying in front of the house.

“Why on earth did you sleep there?” I asked; “there was plenty of
room inside.”

“I’m a Famine official, and I have been living inside for some nights
past,” he answered. “But when I got back at nine o’clock last night,
I found you were reading in one room and your boy had gone to sleep
in the other, so I stayed out here.”

“My boy!” I said. “Why, he sleeps everywhere! On the floor of my
room, at the door—anywhere! Why didn’t you come in?”

“Well, you see,” he answered, with hesitation, “I saw you were an
Englishman, and I knew that if I had come in, you’d have kicked me
out, and I didn’t want to be kicked out. That’s why.”

As I had been three months in India, I was not surprised, but as a
patriot I found it hard to reply, so I turned the conversation to
Famine and Relief.

We were in the United Provinces, where that season’s famine was
particularly bad. Mr. Theodore Morison has explained that in India
the word “famine” is now equivalent only to a “suspension of
agricultural industry.”[53] “Now that the relief of the unemployed
is undertaken by Government,” he says, “it is not a fact that
any considerable proportion of the people die of hunger when the
agricultural industry is interrupted.” In the United Provinces, then,
agricultural industry was suspended, and the cause of the suspension
was obvious. For close on four and a half months not a drop of rain
had fallen, and day after day the sun rose and set in a sky as clear
and hard as steel. Rain ought to have lasted well into October, and
in December to have begun again, and here was the second week in
January without a drop since August. The December harvest was lost,
and the ground so hard that scarcely a quarter of the usual crops had
been sown for the greater harvest due in March. The horror of past
famines is easily obliterated in India, for what would you expect of
a people to whom history is but a sleep and a forgetting? But men who
had known the course of Indian famines since the seventies told me
that unless rain came within a fortnight that year’s famine would be
worse than any that India had ever suffered.[54]

[Illustration: A BULLOCK WELL.

  [_Face p. 272._
]

Coming twenty or thirty miles south of the Jumna from Allahabad,
where the Jumna and Ganges join, I had passed through a country
that became continually more desert. It was nearly flat, and rather
thickly covered with isolated thorns and the heavy mango trees, which
yield a fruit much sought after by the villagers, but now regarded as
a chief cause of cholera in famine time. So far, the trees had not
been stript bare for fodder, as I afterwards saw them round Delhi,
and the cattle were still kept from the unholy butcher’s hands by
a diet of chopped millet stalks, with linseed for the milkers. The
land was divided into tiny fields, about the size of one to four
tennis-courts, marked off by earthen banks, along the top of which
there is a right of way. Round the mud villages, wherever the wells
still held water, some of these fields were green with potatoes or
young wheat, or a tall bushy pulse with yellow flower, and all
day long the ryots were busy distributing the precious water through
little channels among the crops. I suppose no form of irrigation
surpasses the wells in value, though very many of them are sunk only
temporarily in times of drought, on account of the expense of sinking
a “pukka” or masonry shaft. As in most parts of India that I visited,
the water is usually drawn up in one or two large bags by bullocks
harnessed to the end of a rope and driven down a steep incline. But
many of the wells were dry, and so were many of the tanks or public
ponds, which, having originally supplied most of the mud for the
village habitations, afterwards become the social centres of village
life. In fact, the only tank I saw with a plentiful supply of water
left was one that three crocodiles had wisely selected for their
home. They were not so large as the dragonish monsters I had shot at
in West Africa, but large enough to disturb the social centre of any
English green. Two or three hundred yards away from the village wells
the little squares and oblongs of fields were absolutely bare, not a
weed showing. For miles on miles the drab surface of the earth was
hard and barren as a brick pavement.

The famine in Orissa was due to flood—an unforeseen calamity—and
though the area was small in comparison, the horror of the starvation
was much worse than anything in the United Provinces. The effect of
drought can be foreseen, and it is one of the Government’s recognized
functions to keep people alive in famine. Preparations for relief
had begun in October, and at the head of the administration stood
Sir John Hewett, the Lieutenant-Governor, in whom all Indians felt
a peculiar confidence. But apart from his special influence, it is
in famine time, as I have noticed before, that the zeal and sympathy
of our officials are seen at their best. Men who in ordinary seasons
would treat all Indians alike with habitual contumely, are perfectly
willing to die for them in their distress, and once I travelled in a
cabin with a high legal official in Allahabad, not connected in any
way with relief, whose voyage out was made more and more miserable,
because at every port came the news of continued drought in the
province. Such sympathy from above is a memory of our old land-owning
traditions, a relic of noblesse and its obligations, and, as long as
our superiority is as undisputed as a captain’s or a curate’s, we are
particularly successful in exercising this devoted patronage.

[Illustration: GOING TO WORK.]

[Illustration: RELIEF SHELTERS.]

As no rain fell, “test works” were established in December. On test
works heavy tasks like road-making are set, and no payment is given
unless the work is done. Nothing but real poverty and hunger will
drive people to work of this kind, and so, when two thousand men
were found to be labouring at each of the test works, it was assumed
that hunger was general, and “a state of famine” was officially
proclaimed. A state of famine implies relief works on which the
Government pays a fixed rate of wages to all workers, and assistance
of some kind is given to every one—women, children, babies, and the
old, as well as the able-bodied workers. The rate is decided by the
Famine Commissioner according to his estimate of the price of grain.
In this case he had calculated the price of grain for the time being
at 18 lb. (9 seers) to the rupee (1_s._ 4_d._). By the “Wages Table
for Public Works,” which is as easy to work with and as indisputable
as a table of logarithms, this price gave the rate of wages at 2_d._
a day for diggers, whether men or women (but hardly any women consent
to dig), 1½_d._ a day for carriers of earth (chiefly women), 1_d._
for children, and ½_d._ a day for babies.[55]

A few exceptional cases are specially treated. Any woman, for
instance, who presents the works with a new baby is rewarded with a
special donation of 1_s._ 4_d._ down. The wages were paid out of a
guarded treasure tent every afternoon, and the people bought their
own food from local merchants, who generally conveyed the grain on
the backs of bullocks from Allahabad. The women ground it themselves,
and made it into a sticky paste with a little salt, and that was what
the families lived upon. Drinking water was served from kerosene
tins by Brahmans so that none might be defiled.

Villagers in want of the wage looked round the plain at sunrise
for a red flag hoisted on a long pole. That showed the “recruiting
station,” and there the families congregated in long rows, waiting
to be allotted to gangers chosen from their own number. If any
were already too starved for labour, they were fed up to working
point; but there were none of the brown skeletons here that I saw in
Orissa, because, as the disaster was not sudden, the relief had begun
while the people were still in good condition. When the gangs were
arranged, they were led out to some allotted portion of the works,
the fellow-villagers remaining together for the stimulus of public
opinion. In other districts the relief works took the form of new
roads, but where I was the engineers had designed two great bunds
or dams to catch the monsoon rains over a large and gently sloping
area. For a few months each year shallow tanks would thus be formed,
which could be tapped as required for the fields at a lower level,
and, when dry, would leave a surface enriched with silt and moisture.
The dams were called Garhaiya Kalan and Telghana from neighbouring
villages, and one was seven miles long, the other a mile and a half.
If these were not sufficient for the winter’s relief work, many
more might be constructed, and the Government could always hope to
recover part of the outlay by the increased value of the land, for
which the landowners (zemindars) would as usual have to pay about
half their income as revenue. And as I thought of it, I sighed for
the orgy of battleships and old age pensions which we should enjoy
if only our Government at home could scoop up the unearned increment
like that!

[Illustration: ON THE RELIEF WORKS.

  [_Face p. 276._
]

The process of constructing the dams was simple. Engineers had fixed
the required levels and breadths by upright poles with strings
stretched between them, and all that the workers had to do was to
pile up earth till the strings were just covered and disappeared
from sight. The earth was cut from both sides of the dam, and each
digger’s daily task, with the help of a woman carrier, was to clear
a plot of earth 13 ft. by 8 ft., and 1 ft. deep. A pick and hoe were
supplied by Government, but the natives refused the new English-made
tools, not from any Swadeshi prejudice, but because they were rotten
and would not cut. Women carried the earth in baskets made in the
gaols and threw it on the dam. Weaker women, cripples and children
broke up the clods, patting them rather gently with wooden implements
till the surface was fairly smooth and solid. That was all the work.
If the allotted task fell short, the payment of the whole gang of
fellow-villagers was reduced, so that each worker had an interest
in keeping all his friends up to the mark, and I did not hear any
complaints about reductions. What I did hear were the common
complaints of humanity that bellies were not full, that dealers
gave short weight, and that some parts of the ground were harder to
dig than others. By that time there were twenty thousand workers
on relief in this small district alone, and the numbers were daily
increasing. When people have to be saved by averages of thousands
together, how can you stop to give complete satisfaction? It is not
so that heaven is filled.

The hope was that, as the famine had been taken in time, the cholera,
which comes in the rearward of famine, might be avoided; and it was.
The only definite disease I noticed was a very common paralysis of
the knees, which crippled both men and women, but was not directly
due to famine. The people themselves attributed it to a kind of
pea they eat, and the pea had lately been forbidden to be sold on
Government works. I had seen the same kind of paralysis in the stone
quarries at Les Baux in Provence, where it was attributed to the
dust; but it seems hard to connect the two cases. Otherwise, the
people were as healthy as one can be on an average of 1½_d._ a day.
Most of them went back to their own villages in the evening. For
those who lived too far away tiny huts or coverts of bamboo frames
thatched with straw were provided. When the dams were finished, they
were to be “departmentally watched and maintained.”

When I saw Sir John Hewett a short time afterwards at Agra, he
told me he had over 150,000 workers on the relief works, and over
310,000 receiving relief of one kind or another. Owing to the famine
the yield of grain in his province was 3,500,000 tons below the
normal; rice yielded only a quarter of the average; and £4,000,000
had been lost on the sugar and cotton crops combined. To meet the
scarcity, Government had already suspended 120 lakhs (£800,000) of
land revenue, a large part of which would be permanently remitted,
and had advanced about £1,000,000 for relief, the purchase of seed,
and sinking of temporary wells. Speaking at Lucknow a few days later
(January 25, 1908) Sir John Hewett said:—

  “These measures have given heart to the people, provided occupation
  in the villages at remunerative rates of wages, and prevented the
  occurrence of crime. The people themselves have met the crisis in
  the most commendable spirit. Never was there a famine in which the
  people and the Government and its officers showed a more united
  front than the present one. The ryots have toiled early and late to
  prepare and sow their fields for the spring harvest, and they have
  not toiled in vain.”

That speech was made, however, after blessed rain had fallen. When
I was at Agra, one inch of rain suddenly fell in one night, and I
shall not forget the joyful change upon the faces of the officials.
It must be remembered also that, excellent as the administration of
the famine relief was, and fully as the Lieutenant-Governor deserves
his popularity, the United Provinces is probably a district all the
easier to govern just because it is comparatively backward, and
out of its population of nearly 50,000,000 about 70 per cent. are
directly dependent upon agriculture for their living.[56]

In his Financial Statement to the Viceroy’s Council (March 20, 1908),
Mr. E. N. Baker, now Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, calculated that
the famine of the year had affected an area with a population of
about 49 millions. It had raised the price of wheat so high that
the export from India had almost wholly stopped, while the Burma
rice crop had been diverted to India to take the place of what was
lost. He estimated the amount of takavi advances, or village loans
for wells, seed, etc., for the preceding and present years together
at 4 crores of rupees (about £2,650,000), and the amount of revenue
suspended for the two years at nearly 360 lakhs (nearly £2,400,000),
of which a large proportion must be permanently remitted. The total
loss to the State by loss of revenue and increase of expenditure
combined he estimated at 985 lakhs (about £6,633,000) for the two
years. He added the significant comment:—

  “The distress caused by high prices has undoubtedly affected
  all classes, and has pressed with great severity on the urban
  populations, and on all who are dependent on small fixed incomes.
  But the more painful conditions which we associate with widespread
  famine in India—the emaciation, the aimless wandering, the
  disruption of social ties, and the increase of crime—are as yet
  so rare and exceptional as to be scarcely noticeable. The energy
  and determination with which the people have themselves faced the
  calamity have been observed on all hands, and we may reasonably
  hope that if the coming season is favourable the progress of the
  country will resume its normal course, without any such check as a
  famine on a similar scale would have caused in bygone times.”[57]

That sounds fairly simple, and, of course, its hopefulness was
justified; but the whole question of the famine brought one up short
against problems that may be common to all countries, but are perhaps
more difficult in India, because under our rule the economic stages
are becoming mixed together. What Mr. Baker, for instance, says about
the pressure upon urban populations and small fixed incomes owing to
the famine is true; but then the pressure appears to be permanent,
famine or no famine. The rise in price of ordinary provisions seems
to be continuous and general. I heard the same complaint in the
Deccan, in Eastern Bengal, Calcutta, Benares, Allahabad, Delhi, and
Lahore. Within twenty years wages may have doubled, but the cost
of common food has quadrupled. In Bengal, for example, Mr. Chunder
Nath Bose, Fellow of the Calcutta University, who knew the prices
as a boy, says they have gone up fourfold or even tenfold for the
staples of Bengal diet, such as rice, wheat, potatoes, brinjal, dal,
fish, and, what is worst, for milk and ghi (clarified butter).[58]
Many explanations were given me by English and Indian alike—the
export of grain, the growth of jute, the fixing of the rupee, the
increased circulation of rupees before 1893, and the transition from
payment in kind to payment in cash. Some of these explanations are
contradictory, and all of them have been vehemently contradicted. But
as to the result, there appeared to be no doubt: life is becoming
harder for all working people, especially for all workers on fixed
incomes, and the only people who do not notice the increasing burden
are the few with “rapidly expanding business” and those who could not
possibly eat up to their incomes if they tried.

It was still more difficult to discover the real condition of the
peasants and labourers in the country compared to the workpeople in
the towns. In villages near the relief works, the cultivators (ryots)
told me they paid sometimes one and sometimes ten rupees a bigha
(rather over half an acre) to the zemindar, but their average rent
appeared to be about two rupees a bigha (say 5_s._ 6_d._ an acre).
Some said they thought they made or saved ten or even twenty rupees
a year for marriages, births, funerals, ceremonies, and pilgrimages.
But nearly all of them said they saved nothing. They admitted,
however, that for a daughter’s marriage a ryot would sometimes
spend as much as two hundred rupees, borrowed from the zemindar
or banya (money-lender), and when I asked one of them what he
borrowed on if he had no savings, he replied that he borrowed on his
“respectability,” which is, I suppose, what most people borrow on.
At the back of the borrower’s mind, I think, is the continual hope
for a “bumper” crop that will start him free again, but as the rate
of interest without solid security was anything from 25 to 36 per
cent. both here and in the Punjab, the ryot often became little more
than a labourer in the employment of the money-lender, who advanced
him seed and stock and took the crop. In a village outside Lahore I
found the cultivators had agreed among themselves not to spend money
on marriages in future, though these village festivals had been their
only joy, and now, unless a juggler or reciter came round, they had
nothing whatever to break the monotony of toil upon the land—not even
a school. Neither were there any schools in the villages I visited
near Allahabad, nor in those near Delhi.

But though in many cases the ryot had become little better than a
labourer in the employment of a landowner or money-lender, there was
still a recognized class of landless labourers below him. In the
villages near the relief works the labourer (who is always paid in
kind) got 2½ lbs. of grain for a day’s work from dawn to dark with
two hours off, and he could count on work most of the year if the
rains were good. He also received one pair of shoes, one cloth, and
ground for his hut, which he built himself. Some of the labourers
told me of a further gift of three rupees a year (4_s._) which seemed
to be a kind of Christmas-box. If the wife worked she got 1⅛ lb.
of grain a day. Turned into money, at the village price of grain,
the labourer’s wage would thus be about 2_d._ a day, apart from his
wife’s earnings (say 1_d._) and the extras I have mentioned.[59]

[Illustration: SWADESHI WEAVERS, BOMBAY MILLS.

SWADESHI WEAVERS, MADRAS HAND-LOOMS.

  [_Face p. 284._
]

Beside the money-lender, the landowner, the cultivator, and the
labourer, I found in every village one or two artisans, though the
division of industry was not exact, and some of the artisans did
a little agriculture as well. Nearly all villages seem to have a
barber, a potter, a carpenter, “sweepers” or scavengers, and one or
two priestly families to perform the common rites that mankind wants,
to bless the harvest, foretell the weather, and control the local
ghosts. In some villages I also found the hand-loom weaver, and in a
Mohammedan village near Lahore the weaver told me he could make ten
yards a day, which he valued at five annas, his wife spinning the
yarn by walking to and fro as on a rope-walk. In the same village
the carpenter was specially employed on making water-wheels. But the
village artisans, as a rule, are not paid by the job but are allowed
a fairly regular income by the village, each family contributing so
many measures of grain at each of the two harvests for their support.
For instance, the village priest gets about 5 lb. of grain per plough
at harvest, but the potter gets 20 lb. per plough and the carpenter
50 lb.[60]

As far as mere money-value goes, it is not very hard to compare the
earnings of village labourers and artisans with the earnings of
workpeople in the towns. In the eighty or ninety cotton mills of
Bombay, for instance, the average man’s wages are 18 rupees a month,
or a little over 10_d._ a day; a woman’s highest wage is a fraction
under 7_d._ a day, and half-time children, nominally over nine years
old and under fourteen, get 2¾_d._ a day, which is more than the
average labourer’s wage in the village. At a mill in Delhi I found
the wages were less—12 rupees a month instead of 18 for men, and 6
rupees instead of 8 for boys; but the hours of labour were twelve
with one hour off instead of thirteen with (nominally) only half an
hour off. In reality, I think it would be quite impossible to get
Indians to do what Lancashire people would call work for twelve or
thirteen hours at a stretch, with only those little breaks. At all
events, it is not done.

By the measure of money, then, the Bombay mill-hand would seem to
be about five times better off than the village labourer of the
United Provinces. In so far as most people enjoy living in swarms
rather than in isolation, he is better off; but otherwise the lot
of both is perhaps almost equally unenviable. The hours in a Bombay
mill are spent in monotonous labour, among hideous noise, and in a
fluffy atmosphere, where there are no fans to decrease the dust, the
heat, or the smell. All round the factories, workmen’s dwellings, or
“chawls,” have sprung up, usually in galleries of single rooms along
the first floor above a row of open shops. The average rent is one
rupee (1_s._ 4_d._) a week for a room, and the whole family lives
in one room, in which, as a rule, there is no window but the door.
Most families are saved a lot of dusting and breakages by having no
furniture except a metal cooking-pot for the rice and dal—a sort of
split pea. These are cooked in cocoanut oil, and form the almost
invariable food, though in one black hole I did see a woman
cooking something that smelt like the ghost of a fish, and sometimes
a family launched out into a maize pancake. In one or two rooms there
were real decorations—portraits of Rama, of Krishna, or the King—and
for a week every doorway was hung with a string of dry leaves, ears
of rice, and little crimson flowers like knapweed, in memory, I
suppose, of some old village festival. All night long, under a waning
moon, the mill hands sat in the verandahs of these wretched homes,
beating drums, and chanting their barbaric scales—“praising God,”
as they said when we asked them; but what form of God, or for what
reason they praised Him, they could not explain.

[Illustration: WORKMEN’S DWELLINGS, BOMBAY.

  [_Face p. 286._
]

Villagers, of course, retained the usual advantages of country
life—fresh air, purer food, and greater bodily freedom and variety
in labour. But the inner conditions of life were otherwise much
the same. In furniture, even the fairly well-to-do cultivators
seldom went beyond a fireplace (usually outside), a grain store,
a plank bed, some rags, some brass pots and dishes, and in rare
cases a few silver ornaments on the legs and arms of the women as
the most convenient bank. All necessary architecture, even in mud
hovels, is beautiful, and so are all implements for human use,
but I never saw any attempt at decoration or conscious beauty. It
would be absurd to call the Indian peasants ignorant, for they
understand their own business quite as well as we understand ours,
and in their own knowledge they have little to learn. But in most
villages the isolation and absence of schools make them unnecessarily
superstitious and apprehensive of unreal dangers. Almost within sight
of Lahore, the women rushed away to the flat roof-tops with their
children for fear I should blight their souls, and the men could not
imagine what I might be, except a revenue collector, a pill doctor,
or an official come to poison the wells with plague. Near Delhi the
women turned their faces sharply to the wall at my shadow, and lived
in perpetual terror of “soldiers,” though for no definite reason. At
the foot of the Himalaya up from Hardwar, no one in the village had
heard of the Viceroy, or of the Congress, or of Lajpat Rai, though
it was little more than twenty-four hours’ journey from Lahore. Only
one man knew what a newspaper was, or had ever seen one, and neither
he nor any one else could have read a word of it. One old man said he
knew they were governed by England, but he had no notion what sort of
a thing England was. Another old man in a village within ten miles of
Delhi told me that, although he knew nothing about England, he was
grateful to the English because when he was a boy his grandfather
used to tell him of horrible murders and lootings, but there were
hardly any of such terrors now. And as that was one of the few nice
things I heard about ourselves in India, I will conclude with it.

[Illustration: BOMBAY MILL-HANDS.

  [_Face p. 288._
]

But the central problems remain untouched—the problems of the
famines, the rise in prices, and of the poverty, which is probably
increasing. Is the rainfall permanently growing less, and, if so,
have the alterations in the Nile anything to do with it? Is the
distress more terrible because the cultivators sell their grain,
largely for export, instead of hoarding some proportion of it? Or is
it true that they ever hoarded it? Is it want of money rather than
want of grain that is bringing ruin on the people? All these things
are said.[61] But I would point out one simple and obvious thing
about the famine district that I visited in the United Provinces. The
land there by its direct and immediate yield was expected to support,
in the first place, the Government, with its expensive army and civil
service; in the second place, the landowners (zemindars) who usually
did the same kind of work as our landowners at home—collecting rents;
in the third place, the farmers (ryots), who sold the crops, paid
the rent, and worked themselves when poverty compelled them; in the
fourth place, the labourers, who worked in good years and starved in
bad; in the fifth place, the artisans, who worked for civilization
and decency; in the sixth place, the priests, who worked for
religion and the soul; and in the seventh place, the money-lenders,
who scooped up an interest of about 30 per cent. when they could get
it. Patient as this old earth is, it seems to me that in parts of
India her patience is a little overburdened.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” p. 241. The
whole of that most interesting book on village life in the United
Provinces might be read in connection with this chapter.

[54] Mr. Theodore Morison thinks there is no evidence that famines
are more frequent now than in the past, and he gives a summary of the
very meagre records that have come down to us of eighteenth-century
famines: _ibid._ chap. x.

[55] If paid in grain the ration is 2 lb. 4 oz. for a man, 1 lb. 12
oz. for a woman, 1 lb. 4 oz. for a child.

[56] For the figures at the last census and the division of
occupations, see “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,”
chap. i.

[57] Indian Financial Statement, 1908-9, p. 4.

[58] “England’s Administration of India” (1907); the author, besides
describing minutely the growing poverty of small officials, etc.,
with fixed incomes, dwells on the dyspepsia and ill-health from
overstrain and unwholesome hours introduced by English habits, but
especially on the increasing devastation of malaria.

[59] For the condition of the landless class, see “The Industrial
Organization, etc.,” p. 191, where Mr. Morison, commenting on Mr.
Crooke’s Report of 1888, also comes to the conclusion that the
average value of a labourer’s wage is now about 2 annas (2_d._).

[60] William Crooke’s “Enquiry into the Economic Condition of the
Agricultural and Labouring Classes in the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh,” 1888: quoted by Mr. Morison, _ibid._, p. 179.

[61] Sir William Wedderburn has discussed these and similar problems
in his “Note on Sir Antony MacDonnell’s Famine Report of 1901,” and
in many other pamphlets.

CHAPTER XVI

THE ARYA SAMAJ

It was evening service, at the hour when sunset is still bright, but
if you stare into the sky, you suddenly see the stars. A few score
of boys and young men were gathered round a small square pit, in
which a fire of dry sticks was burning with a yellow flame. They were
dressed in long cotton cloths of yellow or white, and, sitting in
rows, they chanted the ancient Vedic hymns in praise of God, with the
peculiar intervals and nasal quaverings of the East. In their midst,
by the edge of the pit, sat their Guru, or teacher, and from time
to time he ladled clarified butter into the fire, while youths from
each of the other sides of the square threw in handfuls of rice and
fragrant woods or herbs. Meantime the chanting never ceased, but with
a concentrated vehemence all raised to the air the eternal Sanscrit
words, revealed to the Aryan race before recorded history, so that
they might never be devoid of the holiest wisdom, but bear it with
them across mountains of ice and over sunburnt plains to the furthest
world. At the end, all stood up for the final evening hymn, and then
dispersed, leaving the fire burning as a symbol of man’s soul, and of
the divine power, and of the transfiguration of the spirit by flame
and purity.

That form of worship is celebrated every morning and evening by all
Vedic believers, whether assembled or alone. But I saw it first at
one of the students’ homes in Lahore, where a branch of the Arya
Samaj, or Aryan Society, has a school and an “Anglo-Vedic College,”
numbering about 1800 members together. Lala Lajpat Rai sat next
me, for it was to this branch that he had devoted all his labours
for social and religious reform, till injustice drove him to turn
aside into politics from the true objects of the Samaj. I speak of
a branch because, like most vital movements, the Samaj is divided
into parties, one holding its services inside the crowded old city
itself, the other just outside the ancient walls. As usually happens,
the two parties in the religion have split on unessential points,
for which they are prepared to die, though not to kill. But both
claim to follow the doctrines of their founder, Dayananda Saraswati,
who quitted this stage of existence at Ajmere in 1883, after a
wandering life of holy poverty given up entirely to the denunciation
of idols, caste restrictions, animal sacrifices, licentious rites,
the multiplicity of deities, and other accretions with which frail
humanity has surrounded the stern purity of the Vedic revelation.

Leaving his home as an outcast rather than submit to the carnal
marriage tie, Dayananda spent sixteen years of youth and early
manhood in walking from one holy place of Northern India to
another. Sometimes he passed into Kashmir, thrice he crossed the
snow mountains into Thibet, and, hungry for wisdom, he sought
everywhere for the teacher at whose feet he might enjoy it. At
last he found wisdom near at hand, in those very scriptures on
which he had meditated day and night, and full of reforming zeal he
turned to Benares and other seats of religious learning where he
might confute the Pundits, whose obscure minds darkened the hard
radiance of God’s Sanscrit word. In city after city public debates
were held before immense audiences, Dayananda in solitary knowledge
opposing the priestly hostility of all the teachers combined, while
as a rule, the local representative of the British Empire was
invited to take the chair and see fair play, or award the prize in
subtleties of theological controversy. The latter was a task for
which our public-school education does not specially adapt us, but
as a rule the British representative was spared the difficulty of
metaphysical decision by the Pundits themselves, who violently broke
up the meeting under consciousness of defeat. Perhaps unhappily
for his cause, Dayananda did not confine himself to the purgation
of Hindu superstitions and social abuses, but was equally vehement
in his attacks upon the unworthy additions and compromises that
have gathered round Christianity and Islam; and to his success in
interrupting the process of conversion among Hindus we may trace the
marked hostility with which Christian and Mohammedan missionaries
have always regarded the Samaj.[62]

The first branch of the society was established in Bombay by
Dayananda himself in 1875, but its real strength now lies in the
Punjab and United Provinces, in both of which together it numbers
about 250,000 members. The two parties into which the Samaj in Lahore
is to some extent divided, as I said, both unite in rejecting idols,
and in condemning the seclusion or “purdah” of women, the dangerous
prerogatives of the priesthood, and all restrictions of caste,
except such rights and obligations as are the due of character or
intellect. Both unite in maintaining the unity of God, the eternal
trinity of God, Soul, and Matter, and the universal wisdom revealed
for all races in the Vedas. The differences that divide them are,
perhaps, rather of temperament than of doctrine. The party that
worships in the city claims to be more democratic in its appeal,
to be stricter in life and discipline, but at the same time freer
from “purdah”; and, indeed, its women are allowed to attend divine
service in a gallery unveiled, while the women of the other party
have a service to themselves, with a woman preacher, whose sermons I
was, unhappily, unable to attend. The city party has been called the
Culture Section, in which name, I think, there lies a covert sneer.
But it briskly retaliated by calling the suburban party the Vulture
Section, in which the sneer is not covert at all, but palpably due to
a backsliding from vegetarianism.

Not that the extra-mural party itself dreams of backsliding. It
only aims at progress and increasing freedom in social life; for,
like other great movements of religious reform, it maintains that
the kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink. The differences, in
fact, have never been serious, though a few years ago there was the
same tender hostility as used to prevail between Newton Hall and
Lamb’s Conduit Street, when Positivists turned their criticism from
Christians to each other. But of late persecution, which makes all
its victims friends, has brought them together again, and few of the
outside world are now aware of any division. It was the deportation
of Lajpat Rai that gave the final touch to reconcilement. That a man
of austere and generous life, one who had given up great worldly
success for the service of the poor and unlearned, should be spirited
away without warning and without trial for venturing to criticize
official injustice—that was the touch to kindle the indignant fire
which welds men into one.

Lajpat Rai was one of those men into whose soul the wrongs of their
people enter. By nature averse from politics, he devoted himself to
those deeper questions which lie beyond the touch of governments
good or bad, and it was not till he was forty that the decisive
change came. It is true that he joined the Congress movement in 1888,
within two or three years of its beginning; but no one has more
severely criticized the Congress and its methods—its unwieldy size,
its holiday aspect, its failure to touch the poverty and ignorance
of India, and its mistaken confidence in the power of speeches and
resolutions for the redress of political wrongs.[63]

It was significant of his strength of character and indifference to
popularity, that after the breach in the Surat Congress, he gave
his immense influence to the Moderate party, and declared he would
fight under the old banner, as I have described. But it was still
more characteristic that, when the Congress had vanished, he remained
in Surat for the Social and Swadeshi Conferences, and organized a
famine-relief fund there, just as if nothing had happened.

Deeper things than can be reached by Government or speeches have
occupied his life. Born at Jaguran, in the district of Ludhiana,
where his father taught Persian and Urdu, he became a student at the
Government College in Lahore, and a Pleader in the Courts there
just at the time when the Arya Samaj was engaged in its earliest
struggle for religious and social reform.

[Illustration: LALA LAJPAT RAI.

_Photo by P. Girdhar Roy & Sons, Lahore._

  [_Face p. 296._
]

Under the influence of Hans Raj, now the Principal of the Anglo-Vedic
College, a direct and silent man of similar austerity and devotion of
life, he joined the Samaj and threw himself into its conflict against
idol-worship, child-marriage, girl-widowhood, caste subdivisions, and
the other abuses of orthodox Hinduism. Poverty, ignorance, and famine
appeared to him the chief outward and visible evils of his country,
and for many years, in the intervals of heavy professional work,
he lived the life of what one would call a philanthropist, if the
word had not gathered round it the inhuman associations of charity.
He directed orphanages, superintended education, helped to found
Swadeshi banks and mills long before Swadeshi became a political
weapon; he administered famine funds—with a side-glance at the
unhappy “famine Christians,” the Samajists say he rescued thousands
of souls from famine and conversion—and one of his great achievements
was the relief of the destitute in the Kangra valley after the
terrible earthquake of 1905.

But I think that year marked a change. So far, beyond attending the
Congress and publishing two vernacular pamphlets on Mazzini and
Garibaldi—dangerous themes, I admit, for a member of any subject
race—his action had not been political. In that year he went to
England, like Mr. Gokhale, to represent the cause of Indian reform,
and he also visited America. It so happened that he found England
on the verge of the greatest Liberal revival. She appeared to have
awakened from the ten years’ incubus of reaction and Imperialistic
misgovernment. Hopes of reform went hand in hand with hatred of
oppression. He noticed the movements of the unemployed, the devotion
of passive resisters, the sympathies with oppressed nationalities,
the rapid recovery from the fever of the Boer war. He noticed that
even on such a question as bringing the trams across the bridges
the Lords were threatened with a revolution in the ordering of the
State.[64] The same spirit of freedom appeared to be at work in other
parts of the world—in Ireland, Japan, Egypt, Persia, and especially
in Russia. It was natural that the ideal of winning for his own
people a true share in the government of their country should be
strengthened.

Unhappily, Lajpat Rai also observed in England that the people
were too much occupied with the overwhelming problems confronting
themselves to pay close attention to a subject so distant and
abstruse as Indian reform. He observed that in English politics
the cause of justice had no chance unless it were made a party
question, and the Liberal Party refused to make Indian reform a party
question, because, while it did not move the people at large, it
touched too many important interests. As to the upper classes, he
found, as Ruskin had found long before, that “every mutiny, every
danger, every crime occurring under our Indian legislation arose
directly out of our native desire to live on the loot of India.” Only
from the Irish and Labour Parties did his mission receive any real
encouragement, and, owing to the executive weakness of those two
parties, he concluded—one may still hope too hastily—that any appeal
to the justice and benevolence of Great Britain as represented by her
Parliament was vain:—

  “You can at times,” he wrote, “successfully appeal to the
  humanity and benevolence of individuals, but to hope for justice
  and benevolence from a nation is hoping against hope. The rule
  of a foreign democracy is, in this respect the most dangerous.
  The democracy is swayed by so many diverse interests that it
  is impossible to expect anything like unanimity or even a
  preponderance of opinion in dealing justly with a subject race,
  because justice to a subject race often clashes with the interest
  of some class of the ruling democracy. Whenever an attempt is made
  to do justice to the subject race, that class rises up, raises a
  storm, and prevents the Government from doing the right thing. Look
  at the history of the cotton duties in India, and every one will
  see the truth of this. How many times has the Government of India
  been overruled in the matter, simply because the Home Government
  cannot afford to risk the opposition of Lancashire and incur its
  displeasure!”[65]

He returned to India convinced that the political as well as the
social salvation of the country rested only with the Indian peoples
themselves. As to means, he looked to anything that would promote
political knowledge, courage, and self-reliance. At one time he seems
to have contemplated a kind of Teaching Order, something like Mr.
Gokhale’s “Servants of India.”

  “Where are the political thinkers of the country,” he cried, “whose
  sole thought by day and night, sleeping or waking, would be how
  to initiate and carry on the struggle for freedom? Where are the
  political Sanyasis (wandering friars) whose sole work in life would
  be the preaching of the gospel of freedom? Were are the Vaishyas
  of the movement who will make money only for the struggle: who
  will live poorly and modestly and save every farthing for the
  sacred cause?... Where are the people who will raise agitation for
  political rights and liberty to the dignity of a Church and will
  live and die for the same?”[66]

He believed that the only way to win the consideration of England
for reforms was to prove the determination and self-reliance of the
Indians themselves.

  “The British are not a spiritual people,” he said. “They are either
  a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls
  before swine to appeal to them in the name of the higher morality
  or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant, haughty
  people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in
  their opponents.”[67]

In a yielding disposition, a false prudence, a distrust of enthusiasm
and energy, he found the real dangers of the Indian temperament.

  “Our whole life from top to bottom smacks of fear,” he wrote,
  “deadly fear of losing in the estimation of those whom we in our
  heart of hearts believe to be only usurpers; fear of losing the
  sunshine of the smile of those whom we believe to be day and night
  engaged in the exploitation of our country and the spoliation of
  our people, fear of offending the false gods that have by fraud or
  force taken possessions of our bodies and souls, fear of being shut
  up in a dungeon or prison house, as if the freedom that we enjoy
  were not by its own nature one to be abhorred.”[68]

He was soon in his own person to prove the sincerity of his creed.
The condition of the Punjab during 1907 was particularly deplorable.
For thirteen years scarcity had prevailed almost without intermission
in the south of the province, and the increasing poverty was only
relieved by the hideous mortality of the plague. Just before Lajpat
Rai’s deportation, the official record of deaths from plague in the
Punjab alone rose to nearly 65,000 in one week, and the real number
was almost certainly higher. On the top of hunger and plague, which
we piously call the visitations of God, came the visitations of the
Government in a largely increased revenue assessment, increased
irrigation rates, the Colonization Bill threatening to break a
solemn promise made by Government to the Chenab settlers fifteen
years before, and the refusal of the Lieutenant-Governor to take
any steps against the leading Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore for a
series of abusive articles against Indians, whilst Indian papers
were prosecuted and condemned for articles containing certainly no
greater incitement to racial animosity.[69] The feeling in the Punjab
became intensely embittered. Local riots occurred at Lahore and Rawal
Pindi. Anglo-Indian journalists remembered that it was the fiftieth
anniversary of the Mutiny. Strange precautions were taken. English
people took refuge in the forts. In the haggard element of fear
anything may assume a terrifying shape, and without trial or charge
or warning, the most prominent member of the Arya Samaj was seized,
and sent to Mandalay.[70]

It was all a little ironic, this treatment of a sad, retiring,
clear-minded man, seeking neither advantage nor fame—one who had
freely given up his possessions, and worked for many years unknown
at the humblest duties. When I was at Peshawar, I ventured to ask
one in authority why a man of such high reputation as Lajpat Rai
should have been selected for attack, and in defence of the Punjab
Government, he said: “You see, it was just because he was so good
that they fired him. If he had been a rotter, they could have left
him alone.” I think it was as fine a compliment as any political
offender could hope for.

But it was not entirely for his personal excellence that the Punjab
Government struck at Lajpat Rai, nor for the wide influence of his
decisive eloquence. It was because they hoped to strike the Arya
Samaj at the same time. The authorities in Northern India, always
timid and suspicious owing to the neighbourhood of the Frontier
and the more warlike character of the peoples, had long regarded
the Samaj with special enmity. I have known a soldier, with papers
of the highest character, turned out of a Sikh regiment admittedly
for belonging to the Samaj. Much of this suspicion arises from
false information, such as is always supplied to officials who
remain isolated from the surrounding people. The editor of the
_Hindustan_, for instance, who had recently been sentenced to two
years’ imprisonment, was described as a graduate of the Anglo-Vedic
College, though he had hardly been there a month, and owed the rest
of his training to a Christian Mission School. In the same way
young Ajit Singh, who was deported on suspicion of tampering with
the native troops, was described as a prominent Samajist, though he
had never belonged to the Samaj at all. Some members of the Society
have turned to politics, because for the moment the attraction is
irresistible for many generous minds, and at such a time, as Disraeli
said in “Sybil,” “to be young and to be indifferent are no longer
synonymous.” But the Samaj as such has no concern with politics.

[Illustration: AN ARYA SAMAJ TEACHER.

  [_Face p. 304._
]

It is a religious body—a Universal Church—bent only on religious
purification and the training of youth in accordance with Vedic
rules. One can understand the opposition of orthodox Hindus,
Mohammedans, and Christian missionaries, for in its religious
propaganda the Samaj is distinctly militant and gathers in many
converts. But the Indian Government is mistaken in regarding it
as a centre of sedition. The leaders of both sections—such men
as Hans Raj, Principal of the Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore, and
Lala Munshi Rama, Governor of the Gurukula, near Hardwar—have
steadily set their faces against political work of any sort, and
they discourage political discussion among the students as strictly
as the Risley Circular. It is useless, they say, to look for the
political regeneration of India while the character and intellect of
the people are unregenerate. I do not agree with them, believing, as
I do, that political freedom is essential for any regeneration
of the national spirit. But to accuse the Samaj of political aims,
to grasp at any forgery or lie which seeks to implicate the Society
in sedition, are only signs of ignorance fixed in its isolation
among a subject race. In the summer of 1907, Lala Munshi Rama wrote
a detailed defence of the Samaj on this point in the _Civil and
Military Gazette_ of Lahore—a defence so just and reasonable that
even the _Gazette_, conspicuous among Anglo-Indian papers for the
virulence of its anti-Indian feeling, described the “dignity of this
deeply pondered vindication” as commanding respect. In one passage he
said:—

  “It is an awful responsibility which these people undertake who
  try to set the Government against the Arya Samaj, a Society which
  is trying its best to uproot some of the evils of intemperance, of
  impurity, of child-marriage, of polygamy, of gambling, and a host
  of other vices—why, it is the Arya Samajists whom you find in the
  foremost rank of workers in the field.”

Six or seven years ago—in 1901 or early 1902—the writer of that
protest cleared a large open space in a pleasant jungle where in a
single day I have still seen many deer and monkeys, many wild boars
and jackals, the bone-strewn home of a tigress with cubs, the spoor
of a huge elephant, wild peacocks perching in the trees, and nearly
all the other delights of Eden, except Eve. A few miles away the
holy Ganges issues from the foot of the Himalayas into the great
Indian plain, and there stands the holy town of Hardwar, goal of
great pilgrimages and pitch of many religious beggars, who keep with
them deformed cows and other holy monsters to move the hearts of
worshippers to pity. On the open space in the jungle a quadrangle of
tin-roofed buildings has been raised to be a Vedic school and future
college. Over its gateway floats a red banner, inscribed with the
sacred symbol of “Om,” and its Brahmacharya, or holy discipline,
follows the lines laid down by primeval revelation.

Those lines are Spartan, or, at least, Platonic. The boys are
admitted at eight, and their parents take a solemn pledge not to
remove them or allow their marriage till they are twenty-five, the
lowest age fixed for a man’s marriage by the Vedic Scriptures.
During these sixteen years the Brahmacharies, or disciples, do not
go home, nor are they allowed to write letters or receive them; but
their parents may visit them once a month, and do, in fact, visit
them about twice a year. The great occasion for these visits is the
school anniversary, which happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, when over
sixty thousand Samajists come, including many thousands of women,
and encamp on the edge of the jungle in grass and wicker huts,
which were being prepared for them during my stay in the school.
Unlike the parents who come to see their sons on speech-days at our
public-schools, the pilgrim visitors bring their own supplies, and
they generally stay three days, that being all of family life the
boys ever know. And that is all they know of woman’s society, too,
for it is, as I said, an Eveless Paradise.

[Illustration: A STREET IN HARDWAR.

HARDWAR STRAND.

  [_Face p. 306._
]

Such isolation in the midst of our common and intermingled world
is, perhaps, dangerous. It comes too near the inhuman monotony
of workhouse schools. It is likely to exaggerate the desires and
curiosity of growing men, or to produce the hesitation of bashful and
secluded lives when confronted with the need for action. The entire
removal of home influence might appear harsh if we did not remember
the scores of men whom we have known ruined by their parents’
vulgarity or their mothers’ indulgence. But even if we grant that
most parents are quite unfit to bring up children, sixteen years
seems too long for any boy to remain in the same place, with the
same teachers and the same companions. Even the holiday excursions
to historic cities of India, which are arranged by the Governor,
and usually conducted by him, do not sufficiently break up the
one-sidedness of such a life; and think of the boy who is genuinely
unfitted for school and is compelled to remain unhappy for a quarter
of man’s existence!

Mr. Rama Deva, the young and highly educated head-master of the
school, and the other masters as well, met my scruples by urging
that in India the home influence is almost invariably dangerous
or softening. They said their only hope of preserving the boys
from child-marriage, maternal ignorance, and the evil of cities
lay in this monastic seclusion. In place of parents they have a
few Superintendents—about one to every twenty-five of the 220 boys
then in the school—who live with each class day and night, except
during school hours. The greatest difficulty of the school is to
find Superintendents worthy and willing, and I should have thought
it impossible. The three oldest boys in the top form have rooms to
themselves and no Superintendent. All sleep on plank beds, but are
allowed a warm covering in winter. All dress in yellow “dhotis”
(long cotton cloths) for schooltime, and in white “dhotis” for play.
They are allowed wooden sandals, held on by a peg between the toes,
but nearly all go barefoot, and with feet and legs bare they ride
bareback and play cricket, football, and an Indian form of prisoners’
base. The school belongs to the Culture Section of the Arya Samaj,
and is so violently vegetarian that I was not allowed to approach the
buildings in boots of murdered leather.

The boys get up at four in the morning, and attend Divine service
round the symbolic fire. Having taken the vows of obedience, poverty,
and chastity for sixteen years at their entrance, when two of those
vows can mean very little to them, they are further taught to speak
the truth, to practise concentrated contemplation for a period of
every day, and to subdue passion by the “yoga” of deep breathing
and holding the breath. They bathe in cold water before sunrise,
they climb the steep jungle mountains near, and all learn swimming
in the Ganges. Almost the only form of punishment is exclusion from
the games. The school hours run to about seven, divided into two
parts, and the chief subject taught is Sanscrit. There are the other
ordinary subjects—arithmetic and mathematics, history, science, and
English—and, unlike the Government schools, all teaching is given
in the vernacular Hindi, so that the boys understand the subjects
better, and can cover more ground, whereas in ordinary schools the
learning is continually hampered by the foreign tongue. But the
chief means of education is Sanscrit, just as in my old school it
was Greek. At least seven years are spent in getting that amazing
Sanscrit grammar off by heart, and in learning to read the Vedas.
Whether the Sanscrit literature is worth all that, I cannot say; we
spent much the same time over Greek, and it was well worth it to
about one in twenty. But in all the upper forms, though none of the
boys had yet approached the full age, they could already read and
write Sanscrit as fluently as a mother tongue, and that is more than
any of us ever did with Greek.

But the subject taught never matters much. The thing that does
matter is the manner of teaching, and nearly all the schools and
colleges I visited in India had the one common fault, that they tried
to force knowledge into the mind by giving information. They treated
the mind as a passive vessel to be filled through the channel of the
ears. The method was by lecture, not by dialectic, and I at least
have never learnt anything by being lectured. If the officials wish
to reform our system of education in India, here, at the very basis
of teaching, is where they might begin. They will find they are far
too late if they hope to stifle the national aspiration for liberty
by excluding the study of our own history and the works of Western
thinkers. Those are plants that we ourselves have generously set
in India, and they are too deep-rooted to be pulled up now. But to
transform the ordinary teaching into real education would be a change
indeed.

The Gurukula (the word means The Master’s Home) that I have been
describing takes no Government grant, and submits to no Government
inspection; nor is it affiliated to a Government University, like
the Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore. In the boarding houses of the
Anglo-Vedic School and College a pupil’s total expenses come to 20
or 25 rupees a month. In the Gurukula the parents pay 10 rupees a
month (£8 a year) for the complete education, including clothes,
food, games, and all. But the cost for each boy is really
about £15 a year, and the deficit is made up by the subscriptions
of the Samajists. Fifteen pounds a year is a great deal for a
poverty-stricken country like India, but I wish our public schools
did not cost ten times as much. In the great Government school and
college for Mohammedans at Aligarh the Principal told me the parents
paid from 20 to 40 rupees a month according to the boy’s room (£16 to
£32 a year). But that is a home of luxury, and I believe the money
required to keep a son there often amounts to £45 or even £50 a year,
as much as a third of the payment at one of our own public schools.

[Illustration: IN THE GURUKULA.

  [_Face p. 310._
]

FOOTNOTES:

[62] “Life and Teachings of Dayananda Saraswati,” by Bawa Chaju Singh
(Lahore, 1903).

[63] Speech at Lahore before the meeting of the Calcutta Congress,
1906.

[64] “Our Struggle for Freedom: How to Carry it on”; see “Lala Lajpat
Rai, the Man in his Word” (Madras, Ganesh and Co., 1907), p. 134-145.

[65] _Ibid._, p. 197, “Indian Patriotism towards the Empire,” being
an answer to a circular order from the Director of Public Instruction
in the Punjab (May, 1906) requiring all schools to celebrate Empire
Day in a certain manner.

[66] _Ibid._, p. 141, “Our Struggle for Freedom.”

[67] _Ibid._, p. 184, “The Swadeshi Movement.”

[68] _Ibid._, p. 209, “The National Outlook.”

[69] See Introduction, p. 17 ff.

[70] For a full account of these events, see “The Story of My
Deportation,” by Lajpat Rai (The Punjabi Press, Lahore, 1908).

CHAPTER XVII

A FESTIVAL OF SPRING

The mango trees were all in bloom, and the air full of their smell.
It has just the touch of turpentine in it that makes the mango fruit
so pleasant, and is so refreshing in an English room that has been
spring-cleaned with furniture polish. The mango bloom is the Indian
“may,”—the sign that spring has come indeed, and that was why all
the great Sirdars, or landowners, of Baroda were gathered in the
palace hall at nine o’clock one morning, and sat in thick rows of
white-clad figures, with Mahratta turbans of red and gold on their
heads, and curved swords glittering across their knees. The Maharajah
had summoned them in durbar, to celebrate the festival of Vasantha,
or the Spring, and on the inlaid pavement below their seats a
nautch-girl from Madras danced without ceasing, to the inspiriting
noise of three or four pipes and a little drum. All the instruments
sounded their peculiar notes together, but apparently with random
independence, though the girl seemed to know what varied emotions
they would express. For she danced forward with gestures that she
felt to be suited to some imperceptible motive, her jewels flashing,
and the heavy gold of her sash swinging over her knees. Then, having
reached her limit of advance towards the empty throne, she walked
quietly backwards, softly clapping her little brown hands to some
imperceptible time.

Suddenly from the palace garden came the sound of the tiny old
guns which the British Government allows Native Rulers to retain
for saluting purposes, or to batter the mud walls of an occasional
village, as evidence of their regal power. To the roar of this
artillery the Maharajah entered, and, keeping step at his side, came
the British Resident, conspicuous in civilization’s clothing. Behind
them, stiff with scarlet and gold, stalked the British officers
of a regiment quartered upon the State by the terms of an ancient
treaty. Passing up the pavement between the rows of Sirdars, the
Maharajah took his seat upon the purple velvet sofa, having the
British Resident side by side upon his right, while the British
officers settled into the topmost chairs, like a patch of poppies
in a daisy field. All the time the pipes and drum never ceased,
and the dancing-girl continued to advance and retire with various
embellishments.

Attendants appeared, bearing garlands and silver sprinklers, and
trim little bunches of flowers tightly tied up. The heaviest garland
was selected for the British Resident, and he bent his comely head
submissively to receive it on his neck. It was made of white jasmine,
picked out with silver “fairy rain,” which I have mentioned before
as beautifying our Christmas-trees. He was also presented with a
tight bunch of flowers, and lavishly sprinkled with scent from the
silver vessels. Similar but smaller garlands were then placed round
the necks of the British officers; similar but smaller bunches were
presented to them, and they were sprinkled with scent, but less
lavishly, as became their inferior position in the representation of
Britain’s might. When the most junior subaltern had been sprinkled,
the Maharajah and the Resident rose, and the British contingent
marched out of the hall, the garlands flopping against their thighs,
as when of old Greek bulls went adorned for sacrifice.

So the rulers departed, and again the feeble old guns did their
utmost to voice the honours due to Imperial grandeur. Then the
Maharajah returned to his sofa, and a sigh of relief appeared to
pass through the hall. I thought I could even hear it from behind
the carved shutters of the gallery, where ladies stood watching in
seclusion, like the ladies behind the grill of our House of Commons.
The attendants again bore garlands, bouquets, and sprinklers into
the hall. The Maharajah was garlanded first, and then his son, the
heir to the sofa, who received his honours with a superior smile
that told of Oxford’s contamination. The most peculiar part of the
ceremony came next, when silver plates were brought in, heaped high
with vermillion powder and with yellow, to represent the fertilizing
dust of flowers in spring, and this dust was thrown in handfuls over
the Maharajah and his heir, and then over each Sirdar in turn.

Suddenly the white chests of all those loyal counsellors blazed with
patches of scarlet and gamboge, while pipes and drum pursued their
own wild will, and the dancing-girl danced up seductively. Then
the Maharajah rose, and the whole assembly followed him from the
hall. The climax had been reached, and the ceremony of spring was
over, except that for the rest of the day the street boys rejoiced
in “all the fun of the fair,” throwing red and yellow powder over
the passers-by. And if they mixed a little oil with the powder, the
passer-by would recall the flowers that bloom in the spring whenever
he put those clothes on again.

You would suppose that such a ceremony was but the childish
consolation of some wretched prince, whom we allow to retain on
sufferance the pomps and vanities of barbaric splendour, just as
an idiot heir is allowed a rocking-horse and wooden sword by his
trustees. And that is partly true. It is in the spirit of interested
trustees for idiot children that the British Government gives the
Maharajah that artillery to play with, and arms his handful of
troops with ancient muzzle-loaders that I had despaired of ever
seeing in use. An ordinary and enfeebled ruler might thus solace
himself with pretty shows for a life of miserable impotence, just
as Napoleon’s son played at soldiers in the Austrian palaces. Such
is the end of most of those who are born to rule our Native States.
Fantastic palaces in every street, marble courts where fountains play
all the summer, bedizened elephants in lordly rows, bejewelled girls
beyond the dreams of Solomon, studs of horses ceaselessly neighing,
changes of golden clothes for every hour of the day and night, heaps
of golden coins piled high in treasuries, drink deep as wells,
exquisite foods selected from Paris to Siam—oh, but to be weak is
miserable!

But the ruler of Baroda has the strength that conquers power out of
weakness. Brought up among the temptations of princes, cheated with
the mockeries of authority, distrusted as seditious for the very
excellence of his reforms, he has raised his little State of some
two million souls to become the most advanced and best administered
district of India, with the possible exception of Mysore. I know the
worst that can be said against him. His land-tax is rather above the
average of British India, but at all events his entire income of just
under £1,000,000 a year is spent in the country itself, and does not
go to cherish the annuitants in Cheltenham or Whitehall. Like the
English aristocracy, he is fond of building more houses than one man
needs to live in. Like the late Lord Salisbury and Mr. Kruger, he
displays an exaggerated solicitude in providing for members of his
family, beyond the requirements of laudable thrift. And, worst fault
of all, he has been sometimes suspected of imitating the Anglo-Indian
authorities in favouring Europeans at the cost of fully qualified
Indians. On one occasion also, I believe, he conducted a punitive
expedition, on almost British lines, against some troublesome
villagers. I know all this is said, and much of it is very likely
true, for even in a hovel it is difficult to live above reproach.
But I have also heard that in the foolish Durbar at Delhi, when
other native rulers salaamed and prostrated themselves to earth, the
Maharajah of Baroda went up to Lord Curzon like a man, and shook him
heartily by the hand; and I think that story as likely to be true as
the others.

It is now over twenty-five years since he entered upon his power,
after a few years of tutelage under the British Government, which
had deposed his predecessor for overstepping the latitude granted to
native rulers in everything but politics. In that quarter-century,
by the help of carefully chosen Ministers, such as Mr. Romesh
Chandra Dutt, he has realized reforms in government and daily life
that are continually called impossible by ourselves. Throughout
his whole State he has absolutely separated the judicial from the
executive functions—a reform that we have acknowledged for years
to be essential for India, but are boggling over still. He has
restored the ancient village Panchayat, or parish council, by the
men whom villagers can trust, whereas, in our passion for rigid and
centralized power, we have almost destroyed the last vestige of this
national training in self-government.

After a careful experiment for fourteen years in one district, he
has now made primary education compulsory and universal throughout
his State. Whereas in British India the Government expenditure
upon primary education still stood in 1906-7 at about £200,000, or
considerably less than £1 per thousand of the population, in Baroda
the proportion was about £1 to every fifty-five, and the State counts
more educated girls, for its size, than any other part of India.
The latest step in constitutional reform has been the admission of
genuinely elected members into the Legislative Council, which was to
meet that year (1908) for the first time in its more democratic form.
Such reforms as the Indian Government had at that time proposed for
its Legislative Council, were only intended to frustrate what shadow
of democratic principle then existed in them.

[Illustration: MAKING YARN.]

[Illustration: A VILLAGE PANCHAYAT.]

But it is much harder to change a social custom than to legislate,
and the Maharajah’s greatest triumphs lay in the prevention of
child-marriages, the emancipation of ladies from the “purdah,” or
curtained life, and the breaking-down of caste barriers. In all
this he had been aided by the encouragement and example of his
Maharani, who had stood by his side like one of the heroic queens
of Mahratta history. In all India I suppose there was not another
man and woman who had done more for the happiness and advancement of
their people, or done more to disprove the common Anglo-Indian charge
that Indians are incapable of carrying out even their own reforms.
For their very success they were suspected and maligned by officials,
who had not the courage to imitate their methods. But when official
torpor and private malignity had said their worst, the Maharajah and
his queen remained among the royal souls of India. They had once
more established the old Roman paradox that it is possible to follow
virtue even in a palace, and there was something almost Aurelian in
their proud service to the Commonwealth.[71]

FOOTNOTES:

[71] For the development of Baroda, see the admirable series of
annual Administration Reports prepared up to 1907 by Mr. Romesh C.
Dutt, C.I.E., Revenue Minister of Baroda, and since then by his
successor, Mr. Kersasp Rustamji.

CHAPTER XVIII

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Let it be granted, as a matter of bare fact, quite apart from any
wishes or opinions, that for many years to come we shall retain
military and administrative command in India. Rightly or wrongly, we
shall retain it, unless we are so overwhelmingly defeated at home
that we almost cease to be not only an empire but a nation. Probably
it is to our own advantage to retain it, because to withdraw before
India is strong enough to stand alone would degrade our national life
with a cowardly sense of failure. Personally I think it is to India’s
advantage also, because her peoples are so unarmed, undrilled, and
unorganized under our rule that if we withdrew our place would easily
be taken within a year by Russia, Germany, or Japan; perhaps by all
three in conflict. When the very worst that can be said against our
rule has been said, the substitution of Russia’s rule for ours would
be an incalculable disaster from which India might recover only after
many generations, just as Poland, the Caucasus, and Persia may. Nor
have Germany and Japan yet given proof of governing subject races
with success, much less with humanity. Till India is sufficiently
advanced in arms, unity, and knowledge to hold her own (which used to
be the hope of our statesmen), it is probably to her advantage that
we should retain the ultimate supremacy in government and war. We may
not do it particularly well, but the chances are that others would do
it incomparably worse. Let it be granted, anyhow, that nothing but
overwhelming national defeat will deter us from doing it.

But whilst we shall continue, as far as politics can foresee, to
superintend the administration of India and to protect her from
external attack, the danger is that our bureaucracy, always the
slowest form of government to realize change, should ignore the new
spirit arising in the country, or should seek to stifle rather than
guide it. It is the conviction of many that India is now standing on
the verge of a national renaissance—a new birth in intellect, social
life, and the affairs of state. There are unmistakable evidences of
this, not only among educated Hindus, but among educated Mohammedans;
not only among the educated classes, but throughout the masses of the
people. Many things have combined to create a new spirit, and we have
ourselves contributed much. The long peace that has made development
possible, the easy communication by railways, the wide distribution
of newspapers, the visits of highly educated Indians to England,
the use of English as a common tongue among educated people of all
races and religions, the increasing knowledge of our history and
our hard-won liberties, the increasing study of our great Liberal
thinkers—all these admirable advantages we have ourselves contributed
to the new spirit, and it is useless for startled reactionaries to
think of withdrawing them now. We must also take into account the
example set to all Oriental nationalities by Japan, and the awakened
stirring of Liberalism in England herself, and, no matter how feeble
its efforts and how bitter its failure, in Russia, Egypt, Persia, and
Turkey.

Most of these beneficent influences move slowly, with a deep and
gradual force, and, whatever happens, they will continue to move,
though to move slowly. But the outburst of the new spirit which we
call the unrest in India was occasioned by a different order of
things, for the most part, sudden, external, and pernicious. Such
things were the contemptuous disregard of Indian feeling in the
Partition of Bengal and Lord Curzon’s University speech upon Indian
mendacity; the exclusion of fully qualified Indians from public
positions, in contradiction to Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858;
several notorious cases of injustice in the law courts, where English
criminals were involved; numerous instances of petty persecution
for political opinions since 1905; the well-known measures for
the suppression of personal liberty and freedom of speech in 1907
and 1908; the espionage of police and postal officials; and the
increasing insolence of the vulgar among Anglo-Indians, as shown in
ordinary behaviour and in the newspapers which represent their views.

All these obvious and external causes of complaint, crowded into the
space of very few years, have been sapping India’s confidence in
the justice of our rule and the benevolence of our people. Indians
have, no doubt, exaggerated both the injustice and the malevolence.
They have taken a few flagrant cases of injustice as typical of our
Courts; they have mistaken for malevolence what is only our reckless
indifference to far-off responsibilities. But we cannot wonder at
their mistakes. Nearly every one generalizes about foreign nations
from the one or two specimens he knows; and we, as foreigners in
India, must not hope to escape generalizations rapidly founded on
the behaviour of every man or woman who may represent us there
unworthily. As to our national indifference, I wish we could say that
this charge also was founded only on special and notorious instances.
But it is not. Our indifference to the Indian peoples, from whom
we are continually sucking so much of our wealth, is universal and
invariable. Or it is varied only at long intervals after outbreaks of
bloodshed and threatenings of revolt. No wonder that a growing party
in India believes that only by such means can England’s attention be
roused, and any permanent advantage for their country obtained.

Of course, they are inconsiderate. In spite of the ill-manners of
a certain type of Anglo-Indian, we are as a whole rather a polite
and kind-hearted people, and the mere shadow of injustice makes
us seethe with indignation, so long as it is not too far away. If
they charge us with indifference, they ought to consider that we
are faced with almost insoluble problems of our own; that we are a
very busy people, and that our knowledge of what goes on in India
is generally limited to one or two speeches which attract little
attention, a few Parliamentary questions, and the reports of official
or other journalists whose very existence depends on standing
well with the Anglo-Indian community. Indians are too apt not to
consider these mitigating circumstances. But it does not tend to
make people considerate when men, women, and children are dying of a
comparatively recent plague by hundreds of thousands every year; when
for fifteen years in succession famines have been almost regularly
recurrent; when increasing malaria is rotting the population away in
body and mind, and when thousands, or probably millions, of people
who used to have two meals a day can now afford only one. I do not
say these disasters are the fault of the Indian Government or the
British people. But it is obvious that they do not tend to make the
sufferers under them considerate towards the difficulties of rulers
who hardly suffer from them at all. They are likely to be the less
considerate because they know that, out of a revenue over which they
have no control, at least £20,000,000 a year is withdrawn from their
country to be spent in England, partly in the shape of interest on
serviceable loans, but largely in incomes, pensions, and other more
questionable forms; while, even against the better judgment of the
highest Anglo-Indian authorities themselves, the greatest Indian
industry is kept depressed by the countervailing excise of 3½ per
cent. imposed by the Cotton Duties Act of 1896 on cottons made and
sold in India, simply for the benefit of our Lancashire mills.

Considerate or not, the new spirit—the section of it that has time
and youth on its side—has begun to despair of further appeals and
petitions for English justice or assistance. In spite of the splendid
traditions of many noble Englishmen from Sir Thomas Munro down to
Lord Ripon, I suppose few representatives of our rule have been
popular among the Indian races. That was not usually the fault of
our representatives; their position made genuine popularity very
difficult, and it is impossible for one race to deny freedom to
another and rule it to the true advantage of either. But I think that
till lately the verdict of most Indians upon us would have been the
same as the schoolboy’s who called Dr. Temple “a beast, but a just
beast.” In their verdict to-day the compliment of that saving clause
would generally be omitted, and that loss of our high reputation for
justice, if it is to be permanent, is the worst loss we could ever
suffer—worst for ourselves as patriots who honour our country for
her justice, and worst for the Indians, whose position a sense of
permanent injustice will render intolerable.

The belief that petitions for the redress of grievances, whether
presented to the Indian Government or to the British people, are
equally vain, is not so serious a matter for us as the distrust of
our justice, but it contributed very strongly to the new spirit in
its extreme form. Our disregard of all the public protests against
the Partition of Bengal and all the persistent appeals for its
withdrawal; our disregard of the reasonable pleading of such men as
Mr. Gokhale and Dr. Rash Behari Ghose in the Viceroy’s Council, have
perhaps done more than anything else to discredit the methods of the
old Congress. I do not mean that the Congress has been useless. It
served as a training ground for political knowledge. It afforded a
centre for the growing unity of India, and without it the leaders
of Indian reform could hardly have formulated their own programme.
But in two avowed objects it has failed; it has had no influence
upon the action of the Indian Government, and no influence upon
English opinion at home. For twenty-two years it was a model of order
and constitutional propriety. It passed excellent resolutions, it
demanded the redress of acknowledged grievances, in trustful loyalty
it arranged deputations to the representatives of the Crown. By the
Anglo-Indians its constitutional propriety was called cowardice, its
resolutions remained unnoticed, its grievances unredressed, and the
representative of the Crown refused to receive its deputation. In
England, outside the half-dozen who take some interest in India, no
one knew where the Congress met, what language it spoke, what were
its demands, or what its object; no one knew, and no one cared.

The new spirit perceived that it was useless addressing pious
resolutions to the official waste-paper basket. The cry of
“self-reliance, not mendicancy” spread through the country. One
last effort to attract British attention to the grievance of India
was made by the Swadeshi movement and the boycott on British goods.
“Touch the pockets of our rulers, and they will listen”—that was the
hope. And the hope was partly realized, for owing to Swadeshi and
the local disturbances in Eastern Bengal, Calcutta, and the Punjab,
England during 1907 and 1908 has probably paid more attention to
India than at any time since the Mutiny.

But the principle of Swadeshi has now been developed by the new
spirit for purposes far beyond the immediate object proposed.
Swadeshi in manufacture and commerce is now followed for the great
economic purpose of restoring the Indian industries, threatened or
already ruined by England’s favoured competition. And even this
economic Swadeshi is seen to be only a part of a much wider movement
in self-reliance. On every side societies and orders are growing up
for the promotion of Indian ideals and the development of Indian
character, quite independently of our influence, and their members
are sometimes inspired by an uncalculating devotion like that of
the early Christians. Such are the Arya Samaj in the Punjab and
United Provinces; the Servants of India in Poona; the Brahmo Samaj
of highly educated Theists in Calcutta; the Order of Ramakrishna
on the Ganges above Calcutta; the Hindu College in Benares, with
which Mrs. Annie Besant’s name is so closely connected; the Order
of the Gangrath Institute near Baroda; to say nothing of the
whole Volunteer movement, the object of which is the renewal of
organization, courage, and physical power among the youth. None of
these movements is political in aim. Their work as societies lies in
social and theological reform. But both in aim and method all are
distinctly Swadeshi. They take little account of Government or of
the Anglo-Indian community. In some of them there is even a tendency
to react against reform, lest some taint of Western civilization
should be introduced into Indian life. But religious and social as
these movements are in origin and object, it is no longer possible
to exclude their keener members from politics; for, among educated
people, the events of the last few years have given to national
politics the place once held by theology, and even social reform
cannot now be entirely separated from political reform, since the
result of educational and other advance is inevitably an increased
demand for self-government.

The question immediately before India now is, which of two courses
with regard to ourselves the new spirit as a whole will take. On the
one hand, it may follow the line of most resistance. It may proclaim
throughout the whole country: “It is useless to trouble about any
reforms that these intruding foreigners will give us. Let them go
on their way with their Advisory Councils, their Notables, their
extended Legislative Councils, and other deceits. They have never
paid the smallest attention to our real demands. In Mill’s words,
they keep us as a warren or preserve for their own use, a place to
make money in, a human farm to be worked for their own profit. It
is for us to pursue our own course, disregarding their presence.
Beyond paying their taxes, we need have little concern with them.
If they imprison us, we will go to gaol silently; if they deport us
without trial, we will endure without protest; if they execute us,
we know that our souls will be at once re-incarnated to continue the
struggle. But we will not notice their Government either by sharing
in it or denouncing it. In religion, in education, in industries and
common life, we will follow our own national lines just as though no
foreigners were pretending to rule us. If enough of us combine, we
shall embarrass their position; perhaps we shall make it untenable
as well as ridiculous. But whether it is untenable or not, we do not
greatly care, till a common Indian nationality has the strength to
take freedom into its own hands.”

That is the line of most resistance, always a tempting line to take,
and many Indians are taking it now. The temptation must be almost
irresistible in a vast population like India’s, where a handful of
people from a distant country maintain a predominance unmitigated
by social intercourse, marriage, or permanent residence. All the
more because this predominance rests on so narrow a basis that for
its own maintenance it is inclined to deter the subject race from
all initiative, enterprise, or leadership, and so to reduce it to
what Dadabhai Naoroji has described as “moral poverty.” Any movement
to check this national deterioration must be welcomed on behalf of
the Indian peoples, except by those who openly desire those races
to remain as flocks of sheep, dependent on the good nature or
interested bounty of their appointed shepherds. But that is not
the ideal that the best of our statesmen in India have set before
themselves, nor is it an ideal that can any longer be maintained. The
new spirit has already overthrown it.[72]

But besides this tempting line of most resistance there is another
way, and, considering the external dangers that threaten India and
her own existing difficulties of race, religion, and inexperience,
this other way is probably the way of wisdom. The new spirit may
still endeavour to act in harmony with us for the common good,
acquiescing in our presence as on the whole tending to justice and
advancement, acknowledging the material advantages we have brought,
but at the same time persistently pressing for extensions of
liberty, taking every opportunity that offers, and never hesitating
to grasp at any chance of progress because it falls short of the
perfect ideal. I admit that to follow this course requires a sweet
reasonableness and a strength of character which few men in any
nation possess. But after the defeats of many years, Mr. Gokhale
still retains his hope; and after the outrage upon his own freedom
and the very basis of our liberties, Lajpat Rai still classes himself
with the Moderates. It depends almost entirely on ourselves whether
those who, in spite of recent disappointments, still believe in an
English feeling for justice and freedom shall be able to make their
voices heard. If only the more reasonable and hopeful party had
something to point to—some generous and ungrudging act of justice on
England’s part—they might still silence the counsels of despair. It
is not yet too late. Only, it is no good juggling with sham reforms
and half-hearted concessions. Our measures, as Burke said, must be
remedial.

The nature of such measures is well known. They should include
a modification of the Partition of Bengal, by which the central
province would be united under one Governor, having the same status
as the Governors of Bombay and Madras, while the contiguous western
districts were collected into a new province, and Assam remained
isolated as it is by nature and race, under a Chief Commissioner
responsible either to the Viceroy or to the Governor of Bengal.[73]
They should include the appointment of at least one Indian on each
of the Executive Councils (a concession which in the case of the
Viceroy’s Council seems likely to be fulfilled), and an enlargement
of the Viceroy’s and other Legislative Councils by genuinely elected
members up to the number of half the Council. This would leave to
the officials a steady but narrow majority, the right of absolute
veto remaining with the Viceroy, Governor, or Lieutenant-Governor.
It might then be laid down that if a large proportion of the elected
members—say, two-thirds—were opposed to a certain measure, it
should be suspended for further consideration. Some similar control
should be granted over the expenditure of money, for at present
the representative members have no voice in the revenue that is
scraped off their people year by year, and the papers of protest
or suggestion, which they read as they sit round the Viceroy’s
council-table, might almost as well remain unread for any effect they
have upon the official policy.

These reforms could be followed by a gradual extension of primary
education, which might in the end cost us £5,000,000 a year, but
would be well worth the price, even if we had to save something off
the £20,000,000 now spent on the Army, and something off the other
public services. Owing to our present parsimony in education, the
census of 1901 reported that there were 104,500,000 males in India
who could not read, 826 boys out of every 1000 of school age who had
no school to go to, and only 1 in 10 males literate, and 7 in 1000
females. Further, we could be loyal to the late Queen’s Proclamation
and admit Indians without prejudice to the positions they had fitted
themselves for. We could make the position of the police such that
they would be no longer compelled to help out their livelihood by
corruption and false evidence. We could resolutely extinguish the
system of Begar or forced labour for the benefit of Civilians and
other Europeans. And we could make it illegal for any representative
of our Government to condescend to the baseness of opening other
people’s letters, even on the off-chance of spying upon sedition.

[Illustration: A DESERTED CITY.

  _[Face p. 334._
]

Such measures as these would be remedial. They would serve as an
earnest of our country’s goodwill, and of our determination to
maintain the principles of freedom and justice in our government.
They would cut the ground under the feet of those who, by proclaiming
perpetual distrust of our intentions, are fostering a fanatical
hatred against us. But I am aware that measures by themselves are
insufficient. What is wanted is the difficult thing that our fathers
called a “change of heart,” and no legislation can effect that. We
need a change that would transform our people’s arrogance towards
“natives”; a change that would prevent the ladies and gentlemen whom
we send out from degenerating into “bounders” where Indians are
concerned, and would make it impossible for an Englishman to display
towards Indians the outrageous manners that would exclude him from
decent society at home. Such a change must be extremely difficult
among ourselves of the upper and middle classes, for we are not
born very imaginative or sympathetic, we are educated on a plane
of patronizing superiority, and outside our class and nation any
claim to equality staggers us like a sudden blow. But there are one
or two quite simple points on which we might begin to practise for
the change. Except among the baser sort of Anglo-Indians, the word
“nigger” has died out, and I would suggest that the word “native”
might follow it. If the phrase “rulers and ruled” died too, and
if our social philosophers would cease to drone out their weary
ineptitude that “East is East, and West is West,” the situation would
be much eased. I have sometimes thought also that our reputation
would stand higher if English people who insist, quite rightly, on
the importance of our prestige, were to abstain now and then, for the
sake of our prestige, from games that develop neither courage nor
strength, and are regarded by Indians with contemptuous astonishment,
and from a mode of dancing which is regarded by Indians as an
indescribable abomination.

But the present crisis is too acute to allow of waiting for a change
of heart. Upon our immediate action will depend the terms under
which we must maintain our position in India: whether we are to hold
the new spirit fairly on our side, and to cooperate with it for
the progress of the country in enlightenment and self-government;
or whether we are to have our rule confronted by impenetrable
resentment, and our best efforts thwarted by indifference or
suspicion. In any case, India has a long and bitter road to travel.
The gulf between her educated and uneducated classes is wider
even than in our own country. She has many divisions of thought,
and caste, and race to overcome. But, as to the growth of her new
spirit, we need have no fear. It is one of the most hopeful signs
of our hopeful time. Every act of injustice on our part, and every
attempt at political suppression, have only promoted India’s sense of
unity and hastened her progress in self-reliance. If injustice and
suppression continue, their effect will be the same. Whatever course
our action may now take, the new spirit has already breathed a fresh
life into large classes of the Indian peoples, and it will continue
to afford a high motive for self-devotion, and for the moral courage
and love of freedom in which the Indian character has hitherto been
lacking. For India herself the present unrest holds out a promise
of the highest possibilities, no matter how much she may suffer in
realizing them.

But for us the brief interval left for decision is momentous. On our
decision it will depend whether, in contempt of the freedom we have
with such obstinate labour secured for ourselves, we shall sink, step
by step, from suppression into persecution, and from persecution
into atrocities that now we should shudder at; or whether we
shall display strength enough to welcome the spirit of freedom and
nationality which we have done so much to create, and strength enough
to advance with it hand-in-hand for the furtherance of India’s
welfare as a self-respecting country, and so to redeem our reputation
for the love of a freedom which others may enjoy, as we enjoy it.

FOOTNOTES:

[72] This subject of “moral poverty” was treated in a paper Prof.
C. F. Andrews of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, read before the
Pan-Anglican Congress in London (1908), and published in “The Indian
Review” for June. The success of Prof. Rudra, a Bengali economist and
historian, as Principal of that College, with a staff that includes
First Class Cambridge men, one of them a Fellow of his College, is
one of the many disproofs of the theory that Indians are incapable of
initiative and leadership. Even Mohammedan men of learning are glad
to serve under him gratuitously.

[73] See Introduction, p. 10.

INDEX

  Abkari, excise, 121

  Act, Land Alienation, 2;
    Official Secrets, 4;
    Universities, 4

  Adamson, Sir Harvey, 119-171

  Afghanistan, agreement with Russia about, 24

  Agnew, Mr., Deputy Commissioner, 18

  Agra, land question in, 83;
    effect of rain at, 279

  Agreement with China and Russia about Afghanistan, Lhassa, and
        Persia, 24

  Agricultural banks, 89

  Ahmedabad (Congress, 1902), 215

  Ajit Singh, founds “Indian Patriots,” 18;
    speaks at Lyallpur, 18;
    deported, 19, 304;
    released, 126

  Akbar, inheritors of, 189;
    land of, 236

  Aligarh, college at, 199, 321

  Allahabad, press of, 230

  Allen, Mr., Collector of Dacca, shot, 238;
    regrets for assault, 254

  _Amrita Bazar Patrika_, M. L. and S. K. Chore, editors of, 211-214

  Amritsar, deportations from, 20

  “Anandamath,” the Abbey of Joy, 127

  Anchorite in cage, 189-190

  Andrews, Prof. C. F., on “Moral Poverty,” 331

  Anglo-Indians, attitude towards Indians and Lord Curzon, 2, 187,
       261, 323, 327;
    outrages by, 3;
    in journalism, 17, 102, 171;
    protected, 17, 102, 171, 229;
    courtesy of, 30;
    exclusiveness, 42;
    lack of sympathy, 42;
    deterioration of, 43;
    Christianity of, 82;
    against education, 102;
    manners of, 115 _et seq._, 234, 335;
    under criticism, 132;
    oppose Partition of Bengal, 167;
    tone of press, 171, 230-231, 302;
    system, 223;
    unrepresentative, 324

  Anglo-Russian agreement, 24

  Arbitration _v._ law, 223

  Artisans, condition of, 284

  Arya Samaj, 18, 210, 291;
    founder of, 292 _et seq._;
    two sections of, 295, 308;
    leaders of, 304;
    struck at, 303;
    defence of, 305

  _Asian_, incites to manslaughter, 229

  Assam, included in E. Bengal, 11, 16, 166;
    backwardness of, 175

  Assamese, object to Partition of Bengal, 175

  Assessment, land, speeches on, 18 (_v._ land assessment)

  Athavale, K. K. (editor, _Punjabee_), fined and imprisoned, 17

  Ayerst, Lieut., shot, 35

  Baidianath, shrine of, 211

  Baker, Sir E. N., Lieut.-Governor, Bengal, financial statement of,
        280-281

  Bakerganj, proclaimed, 186

  Balasore, 140

  “Bande Mataram” (Hail to the Motherland) forbidden, 15;
    prosecuted, 24;
    boy beaten for cry of, 29;
    at Vishnu’s Temple, 113;
    cigarettes, 122;
    heard in Madras, 126;
    national song, 127 _et seq._;
    at Surat, 237, 249

  _Bande Mataram_ newspaper, policy of, 219, 223;
    article in, 224-226

  Banerjea, Surendra Nath, honoured, 15;
    draws up Swadeshi oath, 179;
    sketch of, 215 _et seq._;
    position of, 216;
    as orator, 217, 218, 234;
    at National Congress, 243, 255-256

  Banerjee, Sir Guru Das, writes Note of Dissent, 3

  Banks, agricultural, 89

  Bankura, Manchester goods in, 179

  Banya, _v._ Money-lenders

  Bari-Doab Canal, rates increased on, 17

  Barisal, police disperse conference at, 14;
    Swadeshi suppressed, 184;
    Little Brothers of the Poor, 185-186;
    vernacular press at, 288-289

  Baroda, D. Naoroji at, 29;
    progress under Gaekwar, 221;
    Maharajah of, 313-316;
    reforms under, 316-318;
    policy of, 317;
    emancipation of women and education in, 318;
    courageous Maharani of, 319;
    administration reports of, 319

  Batty, Mr., Justice, released Mr. Tilak, 68

  “Begar” (forced labour), 17;
    abolition of, 334

  Behar, 10, 11, 166, 213

  Benares, National Congress at, 36

  Bengal, Partition of, 10, 11, 36, 44, 160-167;
    petitions against, 167, 168, 184;
    protests against, 167, 326;
    results of, 169-170, 178;
    “a settled fact,” 175;
    Lord Curzon’s influence on, 191-192;
      his letters to _Times_, 193;
    nominal excuse for, 213;
    turning-point in, 242;
    modification of, 332

  Bengal, population of, 10;
    Mohammedans in, 11;
    civil servants in, 11-12;
    public meetings in, 11-12;
    fast day in, 12;
    disturbances in, 14-17;
    proclaimed, 21;
    Morley on, 26;
    Extremists in, 44;
    permanent settlement of, 135;
    formation of, 160;
    richness of, 161;
    jute growing in, 163;
    war with Manchester and Liverpool, 166;
    Chamber of Commerce in, 176;
    High Court in, 176;
    spread of Swadeshi in, 178;
    Legislative Council of, 215;
    revival of, 227

  _Bengalee_ 9;
    editor of, 159, 215

  Bengali songs and poets, 127

  Bengalis taunted, 224;
    duty of, 227

  Besant, Mrs. Annie, 328

  Bilgrami, S. H. of India Council, 22

  Boer war, influence of, 43

  Bombay, 6, 10, 46, 68, 70, 77, 236;
    death rate in presidency of, 52-53;
    social customs in, 62-64;
    rates and taxes in, 83;
    Swadeshi in, 122;
    cotton mills, 182;
    corporation, 240;
    Moderates, 240, 242, 261

  Bomb-throwing, 229-230

  Bose, Chunder Nath, on prices, 281-282

  “Bounders,” Governor of Bombay on, 116;
    manufacture of, 334

  Boycott, K. K. Mitra on, 178;
    women’s part in, 181;
    justification of, 183;
    gives impetus to Swadeshi, 184;
    with destruction, 185;
    penalties for, 185;
    _v._ Hindu merchants, 188;
    _v._ national industry, 223;
    exclusion of, 242;
    legitimacy of, 252;
    limitation of, 253;
    a last effort, 327

  Brahmani, sacred river, 135;
    in flood, 136;
    after flood, 141

  Brahmaputra, 205;
    source of, 160

  Brahmo Samaj, 210, 219

  Brailsford, H. N., “Macedonia” by, 110

  Braja Mohun Institution, 186

  British prejudice and justice, 19;
    connection, benefit of, 42;
    policy in India, 45;
    rule, excuses for, 5-6;
    responsibility of, 6;
    Mr. Tilak on, 72-73;
    levies under, 83;
    officials, deterioration of, 72;
    domination, uses of, 74-75;
    officials criticized, 145;
    goods boycotted, 178;
    Government, promises of, 261;
    people criticized, 301

  Brodrick (Lord Midleton) and Partition, 11, 13;
    (Secretary of State), 167-168

  Buddha, 258

  Budget (1907-8), 22;
    control of, 45

  Buffalo, importance of, 97

  Bunds (_vide_ Dams), 276 _et seq._

  Burdwan, Commissioner of, 179

  Bureaucracy, slowness of, 321

  Burke, teaching of, 28, 131;
    on remedial measures, 332

  Burma, contributes to Exchequer, 96;
    rice crop of, 280

  Byturni, sacred river, 135

  Calcutta, municipality of, 2;
    correspondents, 15-16;
    disturbances in, 23;
    Congress, 30;
    High Court respected, 68, 175 _et seq._;
    meeting in, 75;
    extent of Lieut.-Governor’s authority in, 134;
    importance of, 173;
    Corporation, 215;
    papers, 229, 230;
    resolutions of, 239

  Canada contrasted with India, 26

  Canning, Lord, proposal of, 92

  _Capital_, 230

  Central Provinces, famine and cholera in, 2, 146

  Cesses, application of, 165

  Chaitanya, Bengali saint, 211

  Chapekar, Demodur, 35

  Chatterji, B. C., poet and novelist, 127

  Chaudhuri, 234

  “Chaukidari,” police tax, 145

  Chenab Colony, 17;
    a settler promise to, 302

  Chief Court, Lahore, _Punjabee_, appeal to, 18

  China, agreement with, 24

  Cholera, causes of, 2, 140, 186, 272

  Chota Nagpur, 10, 166

  _Civil and Military Gazette_, 17, 43, 230

  Clarke, Sir G., Governor of Bombay, 25, 57-58;
    prepares relief works, 95

  Clive, 103

  Cocanada, 29

  Collector and relief problem, 137

  Collectors (C. S.), 134

  College, Elphinstone, 34;
    Fergusson, 35, 37, 42;
    Ripon, 179, 215;
    at Aligarh, 199;
    Presidency (Calcutta), 221, 234;
    Anglo-Vedic (at Lahore), 292, 310;
    at Benares, 328;
    Delhi, St. Stephens, 331

  Colonists, 17

  Colonization Bill refused, 17

  Comilla, riots in, 16

  Commerce, Chambers of, 23, 45

  Commission, Lord Welby’s, 2;
    Education, 3;
    on famine, irrigation, plague, police, and universities, 3, 14;
    Decentralization, 24, 104;
    of inquiry, 120

  Commissioners, powers of, 25;
    Civil Service, 134;
    solicitude of, 138-139

  Committee of Imperial Defence, 25

  Congress, National, 34, 43, 79, 185;
    at Bombay (1885), 7, 30;
    at Benares (1905), 36;
    at Calcutta (1906), 182-183;
    at Surat (1907), 233 _et seq._;
    Reception Committee of, 235, 241;
    rift in, 239-240;
    Subjects’ Committee of, 243;
    “printer’s error,” 250;
    vital differences, 252;
    first principles, 253;
    adjournment of, 255;
    “note of discord,” 255;
    dissolution, 259;
    police at, 259;
    “a training ground,” 326;
    ignored by authorities, 326-327

  Congress, Bengal Provincial, dispersed, 14

  Constitutional agitation, 44;
    Reform Party, 12

  Convention of Extremists, 260;
    Moderates, 260

  “Coronation” of S. N. Banerjea, 16

  Cotton, Sir Henry, presides at National Congress, 7;
    refused hearing by Lord Curzon, 7

  Cotton and Swadeshi, 122;
    industry, 179;
    trade, _Times_ on, 181;
    mills, 182;
    failure of, 279

  Cotton Duties Act, 325

  Council, Viceroy’s, new members on, 13;
    held in Simla, 25-26;
    Mohammedan represents Hindus on, 104;
    of India (Whitehall), additions to, 22;
    Imperial Advisory, constitution of, 22;
    condemned, 44;
    Provincial Advisory, use of, 44

  Councils, Executive, reform of, 332;
    Legislative, reform of, 332-333

  Cromer, Lord, on India, 74

  Crops, valuation of, 83;
    holdings of, 135;
    failure of, 271

  Cultivators, pressure on, 87;
    persistence of, 88;
    resources of, 88;
    protection of, 91

  Currency, change in, 1-2

  Curzon, Lord, political career of, 1;
    policy of, 2;
    unpopularity of, 2, 3, 4;
    office renewed, 4;
    attitude towards educated Indians, 5;
    Budget speech (1904), 5;
    addresses convocation of Calcutta University, 7;
    refuses to see Sir H. Cotton, 7;
    explains nationality, 8-10;
    “Problems of the Far East,” 9;
    advocates “efficiency,” 10;
    divides Bengal, 10-12;
    proclamation of (October, 1905), 12;
    cause of resignation, 13;
    farewell speech, 13;
    resigns, 13;
    irritation under, 43;
    replies to Mr. Dutt, 83;
    grievances under, 132;
    his Partition policy, 167;
    dislike of Bengalis, 170;
    Government of, 176;
    promise to Mohammedans, 191;
    letter to _Times_, 198;
    Calcutta Corporation, 215;
    criticized by Anglo-Indian press, 230;
    at Durbar, 317

  Customs, Imperial, organization of, 14

  Cuttack, 135, 136

  Dacca, new capital of E. Bengal, 11, 166;
    Mohammedan encouraged in, 16;
    Lieut.-Governor isolated in, 160;
    muslins of, 162;
    ruinous condition of, 173;
    boycott in, 180;
    description of, 189 _et seq._

  Dalhousie, Lord, promise of (1853), 167

  Dams, construction of, 276

  Darjeeling, distance from Calcutta, 160

  Datta, Bupendra Nath imprisoned, 219

  Datta, Norendra Nath (Vivekananda), 209

  Davar, Mr., Justice, tries Mr. Tilak (July 22, 1908), 77

  Deccan Club, 48

  Deccan, The, rain in, 94

  Decentralization Committee, 24, 104

  Delhi, mill hands in, 285;
    terror in, 288

  Deportation Statute, 131

  Desai, D.B.A.S. (Chief Justice of Baroda), 241

  Deva, _vide_ Ramakrishna

  Deva, Rama (Vedic Schoolmaster), 307

  Disraeli on youth, 304

  District Boards, 165;
    powers of, 25;
    magistrates, functions of, 118-120

  Diwali, festival of, 31

  Drink question, 121;
    in Madras, 121;
    sale of licences, increase in Excise Revenue, 121;
    in Poona, 122;
    Swadeshi and, 122;
    traffic, 122

  “Dualist,” 106

  Dundee, jute trade with, 163-166

  Durga, temple of, 32

  Dutt, Aswini Kumar, notable Nationalist, 186-234, 243

  Dutt, Romesh Chandra, books on India, 82-83, 86;
    as economist, 104;
    minister of Baroda, 317

  Eden, Sir Ashley, Lieut.-Governor Bengal, 212

  Education Commission (1901), 3;
    raising standard of, 4;
    opposition to, 45;
    dangers of, 72-94;
    expenditure on, 82

  Education, national, 223;
    exclusion of, 242;
    system of, 251;
    defects of, 310;
    extension of, 333

  Elphinstone, Lord, 72

  _Empire_ (newspaper), 230

  _Englishman_ (newspaper), 43, 230

  Espionage, police and postal, 203, 323

  Excise (“abkari”), 121;
    privileges of, 334

  Extremists, 28, 42, 70;
    in Bengal and Poona, 44;
    leader of, 62;
    meeting of, 127;
    at Congress, 183;
    courage of, 225;
    warning to, 254;
    conflict with Moderates, 259

  Expenditure, Indian report of, 2;
    increase of, 173-174

  Factories, increase of, 180

  Factory Labour Commission, 24

  Famine (1900), terrible season of, 2;
    and finger-prints, 93;
    preparations for, 94 _et seq._;
    in Orissa, 136;
    effects of, 142-143, 278, 280, 281;
    cause of, 271-273 _et seq._;
    statistics of, 275;
    recurrency of, 324;
    official, 270;
    Commissioners, duty of, 275;
    district, 289

  Finger-print Bureau, 93

  Floods in Orissa, 134 _et seq._;
    statistics of, 139

  Food, increased cost of, 281-282

  Forests, Communal, importance of, 95;
    denudation and appropriation of, 96;
    Laws, 95;
    hardships of, 97;
    absurdities of, 97-98;
    Department, absorbs Communal lands, 96, 97, 99;
    Revenue, profit on, 96

  France, factories of, 236

  Fraser, Sir Andrew, Lieut.-Governor Bengal, 3;
    presides over Police Commission, 3;
    Lieut.-Governor Calcutta, 12;
    over Commission of Inquiry, 120;
    providence of, 140;
    on relief works, 146-147;
    on Partition of Bengal, 175;
    attempt on, 238

  Freedom, Library of, 39;
    claims for, 130;
    of speech suppressed, 323

  Frontier Province (North-West) created (1901), 3;
    Policy, revolution of, 14

  Fuel, scarcity of, 97, 99

  Fuller, Sir Bampfylde (Lieut.-Governor, Dacca), 12;
    difficulties of, 14;
    with Mohammedans, 15;
    resignation of, 15, 203;
    represses Swadeshi, 184;
    jest of, 192

  Ganges, source of, 160;
    description of, 263 _et seq._

  Ganjam, part of Madras Presidency, 134

  Garlands, use of, 112, 130, 313-314

  Gauranga, Bengali saint, 211

  Germany, rule of, 320-321

  Ghose, Arabindo, sketch of, 220 _et seq._;
    plan of campaign of, 223;
    on courage and nationality, 225-227;
    devotion of, 228;
    arrest of, 228;
    at National Congress, 238;
    as mediator, 242-243;
    presides at Extremist Convention, 260

  Ghose, Moti Lai, 211 _et seq._, 243

  Ghose, Prasad Hemendra, writer of “Swadeshi-cum-Boycott,” 181

  Ghose, Dr. Rash Behari, opposes Seditious Meeting Bill, 25;
    chosen President of National Congress, 70, 247;
    sketch of, 233 _et seq._;
    at National Congress, 256;
    attacks Extremists, 254-255;
    presides at Moderates Convention, 260;
    disregarded by Government, 326

  Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, and Curzon Budget, 6;
    in England as delegate, 12;
    opposes Seditious Meetings Act, 25;
    founder of “Servants of India,” 34 _et seq._;
    at Diwali, 46;
    in London, 46;
    denounces Sedition Bill, 236;
    position at Congress, 243-244;
    letter in Bengalee, 250-251;
    peacemaker, 257;
    unpopularity of, 262;
    reasonableness, 331-332;
    disregarded by Government, 326

  Government, excludes Indians from higher Civil Service, 6;
    posts reserved for Mohammedans, 15;
    intervention, 21-22;
    scheme of reform, 22;
    loans unpopular, 89-90;
    as protector of poor, 95, 142;
    discontent under, 100;
    exactions under, 164;
    buildings at Dacca, 173;
    “Court of Wards,” 191;
    responsibilities of, 214;
    independence of, 223;
    pressure under, 235;
    difficulty of, 325

  Grand Trunk Road, pilgrims on, 135, 152

  Grazing lands, 95;
    scarcity of, 97

  Gupta, Mr. K. G., on Indian Council, 22

  Gurkhas quartered in villages, 14-15, 202

  Gurukula (the Master’s Home), 310

  _Habeas corpus_, breaches of, 20, 131

  Hand-looms, dying out of, 162-163

  Hardie, Mr. Keir, misrepresented, 25;
    Morley on, 26;
    insulted, 230-232

  Hardwar, ignorance at, 288;
    goal of pilgrims, 306

  Hare, Sir Lancelot, succeeds Sir B. Fuller, 15

  Hastings, Warren, 127

  Hewett, Sir John, relief statistics by, 279

  High Courts, respect for, 68

  _Hindu Spiritual Magazine_, 211

  Hinduism, 108-109

  Hindus rejected, 15;
    shops looted, 16;
    rioting of, 16-17;
    outrages on, 16, 29;
    workshops damaged, 18;
    in Bengal, 166;
    exclusion of, 322

  _Hindustan_ prosecuted, 303

  Hitaishi (Friend), violence of, 228

  Hobhouse, Mr. Charles, Under-Secretary for India, 24, 104

  Holland, factories of, 236

  Hooghly magistrate on weavers, 179-180

  Hunter, Sir William, famine statistics of, 94

  Ibbetson, Sir Denzil (Lieut.-Governor of Punjab), refuses petitions,
        17-18

  Imperialism and reaction, 43

  Imports, decrease in, 180

  _India_ (Lahore paper) prosecuted, 17

  India, reduction of expenditure in, 25;
    compared with Canada, 26;
    Morley’s vision of, 26-28;
    impoverishment of, 73;
    domestic life in, 78 _et seq._;
    education of, 129;
    limited knowledge of, 324;
    crushed, 325;
    unity of, 326;
    unrest in, 326

  “India in the Victorian Age,” by R. C. Dutt, 86

  India, Southern, disturbances in, 29

  India Office, expenses of, 3;
    Council, additions to, 22

  Indian, position in British Empire, 9;
    tendency to deceit, 9;
    Patriots Association, 17;
    defence of policy of idealists, 27;
    editors in, 43;
    economics, 73;
    unity promoted, 74;
    “Problems,” by S. M. Mitra, 83;
    “Ryot,” the, Sir William Wedderburn, 83;
    ignorance of, 88;
    Empire, basis of, 93;
    disabilities of, 119;
    _Trade Journal_ on weavers, 179;
    Parliament, 223;
    _Daily News_, 230;
    people insulted, 230;
    Province, industrial organization in, 271;
    “Patriotism towards the Empire,” by Lajpah Rai, 300;
    temperament, 301;
    _Review_ on “Moral Poverty,” 331

  Indians, exclusion of, 7, 322;
    irritated by Press, 17;
    educated, 30;
    occupations of, 161;
    degeneration of, 222;
    in Transvaal, 260;
    determination of, 281;
    in England, 322;
    exaggeration by, 323;
    incapability disproved, 331;
    contempt for Anglo-Indians, 335

  “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” by Mr. Theodore
        Morison, 280, 284

  Industries, ancient, 162

  Industry, organization of, 14

  Irish Home Rulers, comparison with, 238;
    Party, encouragement from, 299

  Irrigation, question of dues postponed, 17;
    rates increased, 17;
    results of, 214;
    methods of, 273

  James, Prof. William, 106

  Janaka, austerity of, 269

  Japan, rule of, 320-321;
    example of, 322

  Japanese War, effect of, 170

  Jaswant Rai, Lala, proprietor of Punjabee, 17

  Jemalpur, disturbances at, 17

  Jenapur, floods near, 136, 141

  Jenkins, Sir Lawrence, Chief Justice, 68

  Jessore, district of, 212

  Judicial and Executive functions, separation of, 46

  Juggernath, Temples of, 134 _et seq._;
    _v._ sanitation, 154;
    worship of, 155 _et seq._;
    equality before, 155;
    brother and sister of, 156

  Jute in Bengal, 163;
    prices of, 164;
    export of, 165

  Kali, worship of, 207 _et seq._;
    Temple of, 206, 209

  Kalighat, description of, 206, 208 _et seq._

  Kangra Valley, earthquake in, 297

  Karma, influence of, 107

  Kelkar, Mr., editor of _Maharatta_, 42, 62, 249

  _Kesari_ (Lion), Mr. Tilak’s paper, 62;
    attacks Government, 67, 77

  Khaparde, Mr., of Nagpur, chosen representative, 242

  Kingsford, Mr., judgment of, 24;
    incited to manslaughter, 229

  Kitchener, Commander-in-Chief, 3;
    differs from Lord Curzon, 13;
    reviews in Poona, 92

  Kolhapur, Gohkale’s birthplace, 34

  Krishna, adventures of, 92

  Labour Party, leader of, 25;
    (English), encouragement from, 299

  Lahore, press abuse and prosecutions in, 17-18;
    crime in, 29;
    injustice in, 118;
    poverty, 283;
    superstition, 288

  Lajpat Rai (Lala), in England and America as delegate, 12;
    speech at Lyallpur, deportation of, 19;
    as mediator, 70, 242, 243;
    release of, 126;
    lament for, 129;
    tribute to, 133, 233;
    popularity of, 246;
    and Arya Samaj, 292;
    influence of deportation, 295;
    addresses Moderates, 296;
    criticizes Congress, 296;
    nature of, 296;
    sketch of, 296 _et seq._;
    pamphlets by, 297-301;
    in England, 298;
    “Lala Rajpat Rai, the Man in his Word,” 298;
    “Story of my Deportation,” by, 302;
    reason for deportation, 303;
    with Moderates, 332

  Lakshmi, goddess of family prosperity, 31

  Lancers, 9th, punished, 3

  Land Act, 17;
    assessment, attempted reform of, 14;
      increase in, 17;
    remission of, 95;
      in Bombay, 85;
      limitation of, 85;
      increase in, 86, 99;
    reclaimed, 17;
    Revenue, books on, 82;
      Administration Report, 180;
    Question in Oude, 83;
    Tax, period of, 135;
    titles, revision of, 140;
    settlement,
    scenes at, 140-141;
    burden on, 289-290

  Landowners on Viceroy’s Council, 45;
    ruin of, 45. _See_ Zemindars

  Languages in India, 11, 130

  Lawrence, Sir H., good influence of, 28

  Layard on Mohammedan ignorance, 200-201

  Lee, W. H., translation by, 127

  Lefroy, Dr. (Bishop of Lahore), 117

  Legislative Councils (_see_ Councils);
    enlargement of, 23;
    disbelief in, 222

  Lely, Sir F., on drink traffic, 122

  Lhassa, neutralized, 24

  Liberal Party disappoints India, 43;
    Government satirized, 132

  Liverpool boycott in Bengal, 166;
    salt, decrease in, 180;
    destroyed, 185

  Local Government, functions of, 23;
    proclaimed districts, 25

  Low, Mr. Sidney, “Vision of India,” 83

  Lyallpur, meeting at, 17-18

  Lytton, Lord, passes Vernacular Press Act, 212

  Macaulay, influence of, 234-235

  MacDonnell, Sir Antony, Famine Report by, 289

  Madhu Sudan Das, 147-149

  Madras, standing of, 10;
    disturbances in, 29;
    High Court, 68;
    rates and taxes in, 83;
    petition to Governor of, 99-100;
    reformers and freedom in, 103;
    municipality of, 104;
    representation of, 104-105;
    religion in, 110;
    drink question in, 121;
    Swadeshi in, 122 _et seq._;
    meeting on beach, 125;
    languages in, 130;
    presidency, drought in, 141

  Magistrates, powers of, 25;
    manners of, 147 _et seq._

  Mahanadi, The, in flood, 135

  _Mahratta_ (Mr. Tilak’s paper), 42;
    reports in, 62, 76

  Mahratta Nobility, 32;
    Shoe, effects of, 233

  Mailapur, temple at, 105

  Malaria, inroads of, 213-214

  Malvi, Tribhovandas, 244-255

  Manchester at war with Bengal, 166;
    goods in Bankura, 179

  _Manchester Guardian_, author correspondent of, 30

  Mango fruit the cause of cholera, 272;
    blossom, the Indian May, 312

  Manu, laws of, 83

  Martineau, Mr. A. E., Sessions Judge at Delhi, 19

  Maruta, Indian Hercules, 93

  Mehta, Sir Pherozeshah, services of, 240-241;
    at National Congress, 257-258

  Midleton, Lord (Mr. Brodrick), on Partition, 13;
    favours devolution, 167

  Mill, J. S., 131, 329

  Mill hands in Delhi, 285;
    in Bombay, 286

  Milton, 131

  Minto, Lord, succeeds Lord Curzon, 13;
    refuses Colonization Bill, 17, 21;
    Proclamation of, 21;
    Indian opinion of, 43;
    Press Act of, 220

  Mitra, K. K., starts Swadeshi, 178;
    S. M., “Indian Problems” by, 83

  Moderates, J. Morley on, 27-28;
    G. K. Gokhale on, 44;
    conflict with Extremists, 257-259;
    unpopularity of, 262

  Mohammedan Revival, 192;
    Riots, 202

  Mohammedans favoured by Sir B. Fuller and Government, 15-16;
    and Hindus, 16, 17;
    nominated on Indian Council, 22,
    on Viceroy’s Council, 23, 45;
    in Bengal, 166;
    against Partition, 175;
    after Partition, 186;
    gentility of, 199

  Money-lenders (Banya), restriction of, 2;
    importance of, 87;
    speculations of, 89;
    opportunities of, 90;
    expelled from Deccan, 91;
    indebtedness to, 283

  Monist, faith of, 106

  Monsoon rains, importance of, 276

  Morison, Mr. Theodore, “Industrial Organization of an Indian
        Province,” 83, 92, 271-272, 281-284

  Morley, Lord, in India Office (Dec. 14, 1905), 14;
    Secretary of State, 12;
    on Partition of Bengal, 12, 175;
    defends deportation, 20;
    Budget speech and scheme of reforms, 22;
    speech to constituents, 26-27;
    on bad manners, 28, 118;
    criticized, 36-37;
    invites criticism, 44;
    complaints of, 46;
    satire on, 129;
    influence of, 131, 132;
    misrepresentations to, 163;
    study of, 170;
    misleading of, 193;
    policy of, 254

  Morrison, W. J. (Special Commissioner), 24

  Moti Lai Ghose (_see_ Ghose, description of), 212;
    petition of, 213;
    opinions of, 214

  Mourning customs, 109;
    in Macedonia, 110

  Mulkowal, serum poisoning in, 58

  Mullahs revive Islamism, 192

  Munro, Sir Thomas, popularity of, 325

  Mutiny, anniversary of, 19, 29

  Mysore, advancement of, 103;
    good government in, 316

  Nagpur, meeting at, 70, 233;
    Chota, 166

  Naoroji, Dadabhai (ex-M.P. Finsbury), sketch of, 29-30;
    presides at Calcutta Congress (1906), 183, 235;
    on “Moral Poverty,” 330

  Nash, Mr. Vaughan, “The Great Famine,” etc., by, 85-86, 90, 96-97

  Nath, Dina, imprisonment of, 18

  National Congress (_see_ Congress);
    unity, Curzon’s sympathy with, 5-6;
    renascence, 159, 222;
    education, 223;
    outlook, 301;
    societies, 328;
    deterioration, check on, 330

  Nationalism, definition of, 225-226

  Nationalist Cause, repression good for, 222

  Nationalists separate from Moderates, 238

  Nationality, Curzon’s explanation of, 8-9

  Nautch girl, dancing of, 313 _et seq._

  Nawab Salimulla of Dacca, 189 _et seq._

  Nawab Syed Mohammed on Viceroy’s Council, 104-105

  Nehru, Motilal at National Congress, 256

  Newspapers, restricted information of, 4;
    Anglo-Indian, protest against Partition, 11;
    English, misrepresentations in, 16, 25;
    unscrupulousness of correspondents, 37;
    Hindu, 215, 219;
    advantages of, 321-322

  North-West Provinces, 285

  Nurses, Indian, in hospitals, 56

  Officials, bribery of, 100;
    object to change, 138;
    remedies of, 166;
    zeal and sympathy of, 274

  Opium, regulation of traffic, 24

  Ordinance, Lord Minto’s, 21

  Orissa, in Partition, 10-11, 166;
    floods in, 134 _et seq._;
    peasantry of, 135;
    description of, 135;
    famine and drought in, 136, 142, 273 _et seq._;
    villages, 144;
    “Volunteers” at, 185

  Oxford Brethren, 186

  Pabna, district of, schools disaffiliated, 15

  Pal, B. Chandra, prosecution of, 24

  Panchayat (village council) restored, 318

  Paralysis from famine, 278

  Paranjbye, Mr. (head of Fergusson College), 41