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CHARLES WILLIAM WASON
COLLECTION
CHINA AND THE CHINESE
THE GIFT OF CHARLES WILLIAM WASON CLASS OF 1876 1918
DS 508.C69"" """"""" '-'""'^
■"le West in the East from an American po
3 1924 023 271 442
Cornell University Library
The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023271442
BOOKS BY PRICE COLLIER
Pdblished by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
England and the English .... net $1.50 The West In the East . (postage extra) net l.SO
THE WEST IN THE EAST
FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
THE WEST IN THE EAST
FROM
AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
BY
PRICE COLLIER
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK : : : : 1911
Copyright, 1911, by Chaeies Soribnbr's Sons
Published May, 1911
Co MY WIFE, KATHARINE
TO WHOSE SOUND CEITICISM AND KINDLY PEEONG A
RECENT VOLUME OWES THE QUALITIES FOR
WHICH IT WAS CHIEFLY COMMENDED
INTRODUCTION
Much ridicule is dealt out to the author who writes of a people, and a country, which he has visited for only a short time. On the other hand, it is the universal and sound opinion that the history of an individual, or of a nation, can only be written impartially by one who stands apart, and at a distance, and whose impressions and opinions are not smothered by details or prejudices.
"My wanderings in the East have been spread over ten years, but what one gains in insight during a long stay one loses in the power of con- veying. The most illuminating books on India have been written by people who pass through seeing everything with a fresh eye," writes Ed- mund Candler; and what he writes of India might well be supported by the evidence of such writings as those of Ford, De Amicis, Dawson, Hammerton, and others.
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
This is not by way of being a defence of my own audacity in this and other volumes, but an explanation.
I imagine that a writer who knew the Rev. Mr. Skeat's dictionary by heart would cease to write, and die of verbal suffocation. He would know so much of words, that he would deem them too dangerous to handle. A little knowl- edge may be a dangerous thing, but too much knowledge is often exile from activity. They were right in the Garden of Eden.
A year's travel may mean many years of pre- liminary study, steadied and corrected by ob- servation. I permit myself to say as much for the following pages.
I regret that the list of the names of those who, by their friendliness and hospitality, have made even these slight sketches in the East either possible or profitable is too long to give. I might be accused, too, of gilding the frame of my picture over much. Edward Fitzgerald was much bored one evening in the smoking-room of a certain house in the country by the familiar talk about people of title. He said good-night and left the room. A few minutes later he put his head in at the door, holding his candle in his
INTRODUCTION ix
hand, and said in a solemn voice: "I knew a lord once, but he is dead now!" I should be sorry to offer such another opportunity at my study door.
Fortunately, those who gave me letters, and those who honored them, and many hosts be- sides, are not of a class who look to the mention of their names for the assurance of my feeling of gratitude and indebtedness. The book, such as it is, is theirs, and with it go my apologies to them for its un worthiness.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. On the Wat to the East . . l
II. The Gatewat to India ... 46
III. The Great Mughal .... 92
IV. From Mughal to Briton . . 135 V. Religion and Caste in India . 192
VI. His Highness the Maharaja . 240
VII. BuNiA— Pani 288
VIII. A Visitor's Diary 321
IX. John Chinaman and Others . 365
X. Japan 409
XI. Things Japanese, Korean, and
Manchurian 463
Conclusion 518
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I
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IT was less than a century ago that the sar- castic question, "Who reads an American book ? " was posed in the Edinburgh Review. The Review was young, light-hearted, and care- less of the feelings of others in those days. When it was about to be issued, Sydney Smith sug- gested as an appropriate motto the line from Virgil: Tenui Musam meditamur avena, trans- lating it: "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal!"
Nor Sydney Smith, nor any other Englishman at that time, dreamed that well within the cen- tury two books at any rate, by American au- thors, dealing directly with the British Empire, would be given a prominent place in the library of every serious-minded Englishman. Captain Mahan, of the United States Navy, and Mr. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard Univer- sity, have written volumes that no Englishman cares to neglect.
1
2 THE WEST IN THE EAST
What was playful condescension when the question, "Who reads an American book ?" was asked, has become a criticism of English patriot- ism to-day, for no Englishman may pass by these two books when he studies his own empire.
This marks a great change, but it is a change that is often misunderstood. These books were not written to instruct, or to counsel, the Eng- lishman about his own affairs, but to serve as commentaries for Americans, in the study of their own internal and external affairs. There is no suggestion of the smallest labial lapse in the grandmotherly method with eggs, on the contrary, it is a study of the old method, not a hint that there exists a better of which we are the inventors.
This newly awakened interest in the affairs of Great Britain is not an attempt on the part of the American to patronize the English. It is the direct result of our colossal wealth, of our new territorial responsibilities, and of our enforced in- terest in the policies, affairs, failures, and suc- cesses of the great empire. We can no longer avoid this concern in the empire's affairs if we would. It is not an impertinent nor an idle curi- ' osity and criticism, it is a new burden.
It is no longer a question of whether or no it is an impertinence for an American to deal with
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the British Empire; let me be frank, since I have been guilty, and explain that I, at least, consider it a necessity. It is our business, nowadays, to know as much of the internal and external con- ditions of the British Empire as possible, and to study these conditions from an American point of view for our own benefit, even if for no other reason. Next to our own affairs, the affairs of Great Britain are of most importance to us.
Should Great Britain lose India, lose the Suez Canal, lose the supremacy of the sea, become an- other Venice, Spain, Holland, or Denmark, the one hundred million inhabitants of the United States would find themselves with new and far heavier burdens. We are no longer troubling ourselves as to whether an American book will be read, since it has become a patriotic duty for the American who is blessed with the opportu- nity, to study the social, moral, and economical conditions of the very people who, less than a century ago, good-naturedly laughed out the question: "Who reads an American book?" Times have changed; we have changed.
An intelligent public opinion about foreign affairs needs fostering in America, for the time is not far distant when America will need the backing of knowledge, experience, and of the travelled information of her wisest men, to meet
4 THE WEST IN THE EAST
the problems that are even now preparing for her.
As an example, I might add, if I were not the friend and admirer of both Mr. President Taft and Mr. Ejiox, that uninformed diplomacy has "dished" us in the East. The suggestion com- ing from Washington, that the six great powers should control together the railway situation in northern and southern Manchuria, was received coldly in St. Petersburg and in Tokio, and with amused condescension in London, Paris, and Berlin. I was in the East at the time, and at more than one ambassadorial table it was not easy to explain our motives. It is the sane and the fair solution of a ticklish problem if we are to have an open door in China, but as diplomacy, as a means to an end, it was a lamentable failure. It drove Russia and Japan together, and on the fourth of July, 1910, an agreement was signed between them, which provides for "friendly co- operation with a view to the improvement of their respective railway lines in Manchuria and the perfecting of the connecting services of the said lines, and to abstain from all competition preju- dicial to the realization of this object."
In undiplomatic language this means hands off in Manchuria, a sign to other powers to keep of? the grass.
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The Japanese are building at great cost a rail- way bridge across the Yalu River, and a broad- gauge railway from thence to Mukden. The Russians control the Trans-Siberian Railway, with a branch line from Harbin to Mukden, which has thus far been operated at a loss.
This great valley, stretching up from the Gulf of Pechili and the Gulf of Liao-tung for hundreds of miles, only needs improved agricultural ma- chinery and cheap labor, which is at hand, to develop into a grain-growing territory equal to the feeding of all Japan.
If Mr. Knox had been with me on my tortuous and tiresome journey through this fair land, he would not have dreamed of suggesting that Japan and Russia should share these Chinese spoils with other countries, or admit a participating influence in a land watered by their blood, and into which they were pouring money.
A suggestion to us from France and Russia on the fourth of July, 1776, that they should share in our hardly won opportunity, would have been considered by us as fantastical as was the pro- posal of Mr. Knox by Russia and Japan.
We have by this agreement between Russia and Japan not only closed the door on ourselves, but we have put England in a difficult position. We have done even more than that. We have
6 THE WEST IN THE EAST
made it still easier for Japan to gobble Korea/ though she is pledged not to do so, and to turn her attention to the consolidation of her recent conquests and to the Pacific. Japan need no longer be uneasy in the East, and both Russia and Japan may now turn their eyes to matters of more serious import to them. Russia becomes free again to study the situation in India and the Persian Gulf; and Japan may become less suave in contemplating the exclusion of her citizens from Australia, the Philippines, San Francisco, and Vancouver.
As a diplomatic move this affair was as ill-con- sidered and as embarrassing in its consequences as can well be imagined. If Mr. Knox had been in the employ of the Japanese government he could not have aided them more successfully.
Our government was probably not kept in touch with the situation in the East. Our de- plorable system of choosing men to act as our diplomatic and sensitive antennae abroad, be- cause they have been successful in the manip- ulation of ward, city, or state voters at home, will ere long, and fortunately, bankrupt itself. Whether the reward-seeking politician likes it or
^ This was written before the recent annexation of Korea by the Japanese. When I was in Tokio and in Seoijl, I was told solemnly, by officials of high standing, that there was no intention of annex- ing Korea.
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not, we must soon begin to appoint men who are travellers, linguists, and more or less socially ac- complished, if we are to hold our own, or even to know what is going on in Europe and in the East.
Such commercial, industrial, and financial dis- turbances as are now our lot in America, are due to some extent to the fact that our productive powers along many lines are now greater than the demands of home consumption. Our agents abroad, whether ambassadors, ministers, or con- suls, have the new burden of blazing the way for an increase of our foreign trade. The best men that we can get for such posts will find compet- itors from Germany, Belgium, England, France, and Japan, well worthy of their steel.
I have not only spent a year in the Far East, but I have also been for a short visit to South America. I cannot say too much to my fellow- countrymen of the successful labors of the new type of men who are gradually, but all too slowly, being tempted into our diplomatic and civil ser- vice. I have seen many of them now all over the world, men who are making this work their profession, men who speak and write the lan- guage of the country they are sent to, and men who can speak and write their own, men who represent the United States worthily. I have also seen the less worthy and seen at close
8 THE WEST IN THE EAST
quarters the harm they do. I regret that I must forbear to mention names, but if the people of the United States knew what I know of the mere dollar and cents gained for them, to mention nothing else, by the better-class men of our new civil service, and by the men representing us these days in the great capitals, they would wreck the reputation of any man, or any party, which attempted to revert to the spoils system in the appointment of our civil servants abroad. It should be considered a misdemeanor to appoint men to these posts in payment of services ren- dered to persons or parties at home. I take it that the accomplished and scholarly Mr. Knox knows this already, and he could spare his fellow- countrymen unnecessary humiliation if he would always act upon it.
At the beginning of the last century the West Indies were responsible for one-fourth of all British commerce. The sugar of the West Ind- ian Islands, and the colonies of Spain, were in those days what the valleys of Manchuria and the Eastern question are to-day. Great Britain was our rival at our own doors. To-day she has practically withdrawn her fleet from the Carib- bean Sea.
It is acknowledged by everybody except per- haps Germany, that the Monroe doctrine is not
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 9
a theory, but a fact, with a fleet behind it. We have undertaken to do justice, to keep the peace, and to safeguard property in South America, largely through the good will of the various states there. We do this, for their benefit and for our own, lest any nation should make it an excuse for the use of force in that region, that order is not preserved there, and that therefore their citizens and their property need protec- tion. This method of opening the door to a for- eign military power has been so successful along these same lines elsewhere, that we cannot afford to give the smallest excuse for such an argument. Thai is the pith of the Monroe doctrine, and what foreign nation has not adopted it, and fought for it in some part of the world ? The actual words of President Monroe were: "As a principle in which the rights and interest of the United States are involved . . . the American continents . . . are henceforth not to be con- sidered as subject for future colonization by any European power. . . . We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing be- tween the United States and those powers to de- clare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety."
10 THE WEST IN THE EAST
Americans must accept the responsibilities of the new situation whether they like them or not. They may not shirk the trust imposed upon them, whether for the present or for posterity. By our control in Cuba and Porto Rico, by the building of the canal, by the assertion that the whole of the South American continent is more or less within our sphere of influence, and by the taking over of the Philippines, we have made ourselves, to some extent, responsible for what goes on in the East. The Washington dictum of "no entangling alliances" is a thing of the past. We cannot play the game single-handed. We must have a partner or partners, and we must look on at the game of Eastern politics and policies, not only with interest, but with a keen desire to know which partner to choose when the time of choosing comes. Above, all we should have diplomatic agents in the East com- petent to advise us in such matters.
One of the best-informed students of Asian questions. Sir William Hunter, wrote, just be- fore his death: "I hail the advent of the United States in the East as a new power for good, not alone for the island races that come under their care, but also in that great settlement of European spheres of influence in Asia, which, if we could see aright, forms the world problem of our day."
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 11
The inherited prejudices and quarrels of for- eign-born, or of parent-foreign-born Americans, must be swept up in the dust-pan of provin- cial national housewifery and thrown away, that America as a whole may profit. No man is truly naturalized as an American who persists in grafting his particular Old World enmities or prejudices upon his new citizenship. Now that we are taking part in the world game, no faction in the body politic ought to be permitted to im- pede our progress, to hamper our strength, or to confuse our judgment.
Let Irishmen send funds to back a political party in Great Britain; let Germans make pres- ents to the German emperor; let Italians send thousands in savings back to Italy ; let Poles hate both Czar and Kaiser ; but let none of these en- mities have the slightest bearing upon our foreign relations or our foreign alliances. In them the Irish must cease to be Irish, the Germans to be Germans, the Italians to be Italians, and the Poles to be Poles, and all must recognize their fundamental citizenship, which is American. America, with imperial tasks on her hands, can recognize no tribes within her own borders, among her own citizens.
It requires no long disquisition, and no argu- ments more convincing than the mere state-
12 THE WEST IN THE EAST
ment of the facts, to show America's changed position as regards the European and the East- ern powers. Manila is forty-eight hours' jour- ney from Hongkong, Japan's island of Formosa is fifteen hours steaming from our island of Luzon, and we have large sums invested in Eastern trade, in Japanese bonds, and we are preparing to assist in the building and in the con- trol of a railway which will parallel a portion of Russia's Trans-Siberian and Japan's Southern Manchurian railways. Seventy-five miles from Tokio, and at the extreme western point of Japan, is a wireless telegraphy station at Choshi. The steamer Korea when five hundred miles off Hawaii communicated with Choshi, and now in Japan they are planning to connect Choshi with Hawaii by wireless, by increasing the motor power at Choshi, which is now only fifty watts. This makes Japan indeed very much our neigh- bor. It may be added that Hawaii has, even now, three Japanese to one American, and Peru has a numerous colony of Japanese. Our great wealth, our energy, and our policy of an open door in China, force us to a participation in im- perial affairs, though there are those in America who, through geographical ignorance, or on ac- count of parochial notions as to international amenities, imagine that these enterprises can be
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undertaken without ample provisions for a force en sea and land to back up these pretensions.
The people of Oriental descent, and of Oriental customs of life, number between 800,000,000 and 900,000,000, or more than half the total population of the world. India and China alone furnish, India 300,000,000, and China 400,000,000, of this total popula- tion. Their imports are estimated at some $2,000,000,000 a year. The chief importers are:
India $450,000,000
China 300,000,000
Japan 250,000,000
Hongkong 200,000,000
Straits Settlements 200,000,000
East Indian Islands 150,000,000
About one-third of this trade is between them- selves, while roughly $1,400,000,000 comes chiefly from Europe and the United States. Sad to re- late, the American share is only about six per cent, practically all the remaining ninety-four per cent being supplied by Europe.
The chief imports of the Orient are cotton goods to the value of $400,000,000, manufact- ures of iron and steel, meat and dairy products, medicine, drugs, and dyes, tobacco, leather, ag- ricultural implements, vehicles for transporta-
14 THE WEST IN THE EAST
tion, and articles of household and domestic use. The most important item is cotton goods, of which Europe supplies ninety-seven per cent, though it buys its raw material from the chief cotton-producer of the world, the United States.
It is not our intention to neglect this commer- cial opportunity. We have reminded both Eu- rope and the East officially, on several occasions of late, that we must be considered as having a stake in the East, and that our claims and opin- ions must be respected. In certain quarters at home our assertion of claims and our assump- tion of responsibilities in the East are looked upon with dislike and with distrust. After many months of travel and study in Europe and in the East, an American looks upon this expansion of interest and responsibility, not only with com- placency, but with the feeling that it is unavoid- able. Even if we were not in control in the West Indies, and in the Philippine Islands, our posi- tion as guardians of the Panama Canal, and as sponsors for the safety from aggression of the South American republics, and our position on the Pacific Ocean, force us to play a part in the East.
A nation, like an individual, must grow or die. It is true that our first concern is with matters at home. How a man will run, how he will
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think, even, depends not a little upon the con- dition of his heart. Our progress and prowess in the East depend, as is the case with England, upon our moral fibre at home.
There are two respectable and useful influ- ences, of far-reaching importance in these days, both in England and America, falling under the general head of Social Reform, which are not without portents and promises of evil in this matter. One is a senseless and undiscriminat- ing charity, whether backed by individuals or ofiicially by the state; and the other is a weak- ening of the willingness to accept responsibility, to take charge, to govern, to work out along big lines the national destiny, the latter being in some sort a consequence of the former. The Little Englanders, and those who oppose the building of the canal, and a ship subsidy and a powerful navy, are types of those who hang back in England and in America. It is a symp- tom of the weakening of the very finest char- acteristics of the race.
The reader of the most elementary sketch of uni- versal history can tell of the cessation of growth, and then of the decay, of Bagdad, of Venice, of Bruges, of Spain, Portugal, and Holland. France is at the cross-roads now. Let the duties and re- sponsibilities, and the wealth and its problems.
16 THE WEST IN THE EAST
come, problems by no means easy of solution, and the individual and the nation which stands up to them lives, or, shirking them for ease and safety, dies! In spite of all that is preached by the uninformed provinciality of the day, even by respectable men such as Carnegie, a fierce fighter for his own hand in other days, nothing is more disastrous to civilization than purposeless Peace. War against environment is the essential con- dition of all life, whether animal, vegetable, indi- vidual, or national. The cow and the lap-dog are fruits of peace, useful and ornamental if you like, but not sufficient, not ideal. The cow is sacred in India, the lap-dog an idol in certain houses, but they are not a protection worth con- sidering.
"La guerre," wrote von Moltke, "est une in- stitution de Dieu. En elle les plus nobles vertus trouvent leur epanouissement. Sans la guerre le monde se perdrait dans le materialisme." Joseph de Maistre writes: "Lorsque I'ame humaine a perdu son ressort par la moUesse, I'incredulite, et les vices gangreneux qui sont I'exces de la civilisation, elle ne pent etre retrempee que dans le sang." I am not sure that both history and experience do not prove him to be right. I re- peat, I am not sure, but I am by no means an advocate of war for war's sake, and I am con-
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 17
vinced that defencelessness in face of the armed forces all about us is practically an invitation to war.
He travels with eyes and ears sealed, who does not become convinced that this century is not concerned, as were the sixteenth and seventeenth with religious struggles, as was the eighteenth with the rights of man, as was the nineteenth with questions of nationality. The twentieth century even now is characterized by a strug- gle for existence in the field of commerce and industry. Peripatetic philosophers in caps and blouses, or in white chokers, or deputations of journalists, merchants, and members of Par- liament, go and come, in the hope of deciding whether there is a German peril, or a Japanese peril. What could be more hopeless ? The rea- son they are at sea is the simple one, that the German peril and the Japanese peril are just as much a fact as the law of gravitation.
The man who jumps out of a window falls to the ground. No man who lives in the three di- mensions of space, with which we are familiar, can escape that law. No man who lives in Eng- land and America can escape the vital necessity of Germany and Japan to expand or to go to the wall.
The trouble has been and is, that we are looking at the question as one of malice, of di-
18 THE WEST IN THE EAST
plomacy, of choice. It is nothing of the kind. There is no blame, no right or wrong in the matter. It is life or death, For Great Britain and the United States, two nations already enor- mously rich, it is simply a question of more wealth. For Germany, for all Europe indeed, and for Japan, it is a matter of life and death.
The phrase "Yellow peril," "German peril," "Japanese peril," is unfortunate, for the word "peril" implies something terrible and immi- nent. The situation exists, but, as I hope to show later on in these pages, neither the "Yel- low peril" nor the "Japanese peril" is imminent nor of war-threatening danger to us in America, unless we provoke it by exaggerated sentimen- tality. I use the phrase because it is a familiar one, but I disassociate myself from any advocacy of nervous and self-conscious talk or action.
To talk of friendly Japan, or of friendly Ger- many, however, is childish. No commercial rival armed to the teeth is friendly.
Who knew in 1860 that Germany was soon to be the dominant power in Europe ? Who knew that she would defeat Austria in 1866 ? Who dreamed in 1868 that in two years she would crown her empei'or at Versailles ? Who dreamed in 1888 that she was to be Great Britain's rival on the sea .'' Certainly no Englishman cried
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 19
"Wolf" at the appropriate time. What Eng- lishman to-day explains why Germany smashed Denmark, humiliated Austria, ruined France, defies England on the sea, squeezes Holland commercially, and. backs Austria in tearing up a treaty in order to make a grab in the Bal- kans ? What childish nonsense to call this cry- ing "Wolf"! It is an insult to that great power not to admit that it is a very fine, full-grown wolf, and just now very much on the prowl. That is the fundamental factor to be remem- bered in any discussion of this much-discussed question. It is not to be wondered at that the nations whose lives are at stake consider the matter more seriously than nations which have only pounds or dollars at stake.
Germany has a territory smaller than the State of Texas, and a population of over 60,000,000, and Germany can no longer feed herself. She can feed herself for about two hundred and fifty days of the year. What about the other one hundred and fifteen days } That is the German peril, and that, on a smaller scale, is the Japanese peril, and to discuss the question as to whether it exists or not, is mere beating the air. It is not in the least an ethical problem, it is German policy, it is Japanese policy, and in both cases forced upon them, and war is sometimes an in-
20 THE WEST IN THE EAST
strument of policy. You can no more wall in a nation, cramp it, confine it, threaten it with star- vation, without a protest and a struggle, than you can do the same to an individual. Whether a man will fight for his life or not is not a ques- tion, it is a fact. Japan has already given the lie to our advocates of peace at any price in this country by annexing Korea and occupying Manchuria by force and in spite of our treaty with Korea, one article of which reads: "If other Powers deal unjustly with either govern- ment, the one will exert its good oflBces, on be- ing informed of the case, to bring about an amicable arrangement, thus showing its friendly feeling."
The reader will understand the situation bet- ter with these comparisons at hand. The United States has a population of about 28 persons per square mile, Japan has a population of 317 to the square mile, while Europe, with an area in square miles not much larger than the United States, has a population of 390,000,000, or a density of 101 to the square mile. Great Britain has a smaller area than Colorado and a density of 470, while England alone has a density of 605. Belgium is less than one and a half times as large as Massachusetts, and has a density of 616. Canada has a density of only 1.75. Italy is not
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 21
much larger than Nevada, but Nevada has less than one person to the square mile, and Italy 293. Rhode Island, our most densely populated State, has a population of 407 to the square mile; next comes Massachusetts with 348.
Neither Germany nor Japan has created or fostered this situation. The mischief and the malice begin when they are accused of what they cannot help. But to say the situation does not exist is ignorant, silly, or sentimental, de- pending upon the person who speaks. Nor am I putting words into the mouth of Germany or Japan when I say that both Germany and Japan must find outlets for their surplus popu- lation ; I am only quoting such authorities as the Prime Minister of Japan, and the distinguished German historian Professor Hans Delbriick.
The interesting problem to put to oneself is, how is the hydra-headed democracy in England and America, easy-going and money-making, to face Germany, governed by its wise men, and Japan, now as much as a century ago, governed by a group of feudal nobles, with the mikado, who is not merely obeyed but worshipped by the great mass of the Japanese, at their back.
I made bold, not long ago, to publish a serious study of the internal and domestic situation in England; and the following pages attempt to
22 THE WEST IN THE EAST
deal with the external and imperial relations of Great Britain, because as Americans we are vitally interested to know how soon, and to what extent, we are to be involved in imperial mat- ters in an even graver measure than now.
Great Britain, with its 11,500,000 square miles of territory to protect, with its 400,000,000 of people to govern, must necessarily invite the scrutiny of Americans interested in the welfare of their own country. One need hardly pay heed to those foolish or sensitive persons who look upon such scrutiny as an impertinence.
In 1907 the official figures show that the United Kingdom purchased $900,000,000 of food, drink, and tobacco in foreign countries; $850,000,000 of raw materials and partly manu- factured articles; $650,000,000 of manufactured articles. Great Britain, with its population of some 45,000,000 odd, is supporting foreign in- dustries, and enriching foreign nations, ourselves among the number, to the extent of $2,400,- 000,000 annually. Her self-governing colonies bought foreign goods to the amount of $500,000,- 000, and her crown colonies to the amount of $125,000,000. Plere is a customer who buys over $3,000,000,000 worth of goods annually, and yet cannot find sufficient employment at home for her own people, who are emigrating
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to other countries. Here is a customer who per- sists in fooling himself with the behef that he is a free trader, when his net receipts from customs are $1,402,500,000 a year, and his net receipts from excise are $1,514,000,000, or a total taxation of food and drink amounting to $2,916,500,000. In addition to this he has the highest, the most costly, and the most pernicious tariff in the world in his trades-unions, which put a tax on every laborer's time and every laborer's hand and arm. Men are only allowed to work so many hours, and to produce so much. This is the tariff which is ruining England slowly but surely. America is really a free-trade country as compared with my delightfully dull friend John Bull, who goes to the extreme length of taxing time and taxing energy, thus adding enormously to the cost price of everything he sells, and thus building a tariff wall against his own workmen in their attempts to compete with the foreigner. It is the most cruel of all forms of taxation.
British railways also add to this burdensome tariff by declining to quote, as do German and American railways, low rates for goods destined for export. There is much criticism of Ameri- can railway finance, but what should we think of such a situation as the following ? A German manufacturer can send goods from Hamburg
U THE WEST IN THE EAST
to Birmingham via London at a much less rate than a London manufacturer can send goods di- rect to Birmingham. Goods can be dehvered in Birmingham from New York at a less price than from Liverpool. The British manufact- urer pays from twenty to thirty per cent higher freight rates on goods sent to West Africa, South Africa, Australia, and in many cases New Zea- land, than do German or American shippers. At any rate, this was the case as late as April, 1909. It is worth noting in this connection that the railway rates in the United States are much lower than anywhere else in the world. The average railway rate per ton per mile in this country in 1909, was 7.63 mills; and the rates on the roads having great density of traffic, or handling mainly cheap and bulky commodities, are even lower. The, average rate per ton per mile on all traffic of the Pennsylvania Railroad is 6.3 mills; of the Illinois Central, 5.8 mills; of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, 5.27 miUs; and of the Chesapeake and Ohio, 4.33 mills ; while the average rate per ton per mile on the railways of France is 14 mills; and on those of Germany, 13 mills.
The cost per mUe of American railways av- erages $54,421; of the railways of the United Kingdom, $273,438; of the German Empire,
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$102,435; of France, $133,871; of Belgium, $162,236; and the present capitalization of Amer- ican railroads on a mileage basis is shown to be, by the most recent investigations of the Inter- state Commerce Commission, only slightly more to-day than it was twenty or thirty years ago/
As I write, in June, 1910, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is presenting his year's budget in the House of Commons, and I have just heard that House cheering the statement that Great Britain's next year's expenses will amount to nearly $1,000,000,000, or £198,000,000; that between 1899 and 1909 the expenditure on the navy increased from $120,000,000 to $200,000,- 000; on the army from $100,000,000 to $140,- 000,000; on the civil service from $185,000,000 to the enormous sum of $330,000,000, or an in- crease of seventy-eight per cent. Great Britain's expenditures on army, navy, civil service, pau- pers, old-age pensioners, the insane, the feeble- minded, are a tribute to her wealth indeed.
No other country could drive her workingmen to emigrate, could tax her productive power by trades-unions regulations, see her birth-rate di- minishing, and cheer her Chancellor of the Ex-
' " Waterways — ^Their Limitations and Possibilities." An address before the National Rivera and Harbors Congress of the United States, 1910, by Frederic A. Delano. " Cost, Capitalization and Estimated Value of American Railways," by Slason Thompson.
26 THE WEST IN THE EAST
chequer as he cracks jokes on the subject of these figures. Nothing is put back into the sinking fund, nothing is taken off the income tax, ex- penditure has almost exactly doubled between 1890 and 1910, and the national debt stands at $3,800,000,000, or $86 per head of the popula- tion. I may add that the gross national debt of the United States in the same year stood at $2,735,815,000, or $32 per head of the popula- tion; the national debt of Germany at $1,078,- 375,000, or $16.50 per head of the population; the national debt of Japan at $1,162,074,850, or $25 per head of the population; the colossal national debt of France at $6,032,344,000, or $153 per head of the population.
As an admirer of John Bull, I wish to call attention to the good health and good spirits, to the cheery, damn-the-consequences optimism, which this situation illustrates.
Other countries are being taxed; we in the United States are being taxed, but we are bor- rowing on our motor-cars, our aeroplanes, our pianos, our jewelry, our luxuries, in short. To phrase it differently, and perhaps to some people more cogently, we are merely pawning our easily- done- without toys; but Great Britain, with her income tax at war figures, and her wine and spirits tax larger than ever, is pawning John
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Bull's coat and shoes! In the United States we have not even scratched the surface of our tax- able possibilities, while in Great Britain it looks as if Mrs. Bull's shawl will have to go next, and they have dreary weather for coatless men and shawUess women in Great Britain.
To the American who has heard overmuch of the extravagance of America and of Americans of late years, it is a relief to hear Great Britain's present Chancellor of the Exchequer expounding jauntily an expenditure of a thousand million dollars. He and his followers evidently regard thrift as a dreary virtue.
If an American returns from nearly a year's journey through the Far East, where Germany, Russia, Japan, China, India, Egypt, and Amer- ica are all keenly interested in this condition of the British Empire, and finds the Imperial Parlia- ment apparently oblivious of these matters, but engrossed in playing a game on the steps of the throne, with a handful of Irishmen who represent four million people only, he may be pardoned for thinking it is business to tell his countrymen what he can of the situation. If your neigh- bor's house is on fire, it would be silly indeed not to study the way the chimneys were built, dis- cover if possible how the fire started, and who was careless or who mischievous. He would be
28 THE WEST IN THE EAST
a sensitive householder indeed if he considered such an investigation impertinent. If the Brit- ish Empire is not on fire, no one will deny that there is much smoke and smouldering both at home and in India, in Egypt, in Persia, in South Africa, and elsewhere.
Oh, we have heard this cry of " Wolf " so often ! reply a certain class of Englishmen. Yes, they heard it in Spain, in Holland, they heard it in France shortly before 1870, and heeded it not. That fable of the cry of "Wolf" has done much harm, because it is misinterpreted. He who cries "Wolf" continually may be silly, but what of him who does not listen when the real wolf appears ? Better listen every time the cry is heard than lose all one's sheep.
Colonels Stoppel and Lewal cried "Wolf" about the French army before 1870, and were met with the reply from the Minister of War Le Boeuf: "Nous sommes archipret — jusqu' au dernier bouton!" and shortly after, Germany crowned her emperor in Versailles.
There are several hungry wolves about now, and one can almost see the ironical grin when they hear those martial heroes, Stead, and Car- negie, and William Jennings Bryan, telling the sheep: "Oh, it is only the old cry of Wolf!" One is tempted at times to agree with Herbert
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Spencer that "the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools," but he lacks virility and pa- triotism who succumbs to that Capuan tempta- tion. Sir Frederick Maurice writes that of the one hundred and seventeen wars fought by Eu- ropean nations, or the United States, against civ- ilized powers from 1700 to 1870, there are only ten where hostilities were preceded by a declara- tion of war.
Three hundred millions of Great Britain's pop- ulation are in India; let us go there and have a look at her biggest problem, and at the neighbors of India in China, Japan, Manchuria, Siberia, and Russia.
"The true fulcrum of Asiatic dominion seems to me increasingly to lie in the Empire of Hin- dustan. The secret of the mastery of the world is, if they only knew it, in the possession of the British people." So writes Lord Curzon. When one has travelled the length of the Mediterranean Sea, and then across it from Marseilles to Port Said, through the Suez Canal and across the Arabian Sea to Bombay from Aden, one needs no convincing and would listen to no arguments to the contrary that Great Britain, with India, is the greatest empire the world has seen, but that Great Britain without India, and the military
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and trade route to India, would soon be a negli- gible quantity, a Spain, or Portugal, or Holland.
To read through a geography is dull business, but to travel through your geography is enlight- ening indeed.
The first thing that excites one's curiosity is, that there seems to be little free trade in this journey to Bombay. The Peninsular and Ori- ental Steamship Company practically monopo- lizes the passenger traffic. I was informed that there was some arrangement with other com- panies which left the P. and O. Company a mo- nopoly. As a consequence of this, British gas- tronomies have full play.
I have eaten stewed dog with the Sioux Ind- ians in our Northwest; I have eaten indescrib- able stuff in Mexico; I have lived for weeks in the middle of summer on a war-ship off the coasts of Cuba and Porto Rico on canned food; I have, I believe, eaten rats in Manchuria; I have, alas! overeaten in Paris; I have labored with the stodgy, heavy food of English country inns, and no harm has resulted; but when I landed from that P. and O. steamer at Bombay my stomach was in tears. My fellow country- men will find it hard to believe, but it is a fact, that on that same steamer on her way to some of the hottest weather in the world, in the Suez
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Canal and the Red Sea, there was only one kind of mineral water to be had, and that only in pints ! Can pig-headed stupidity go further ? The linen on my breakfast tray in the morning was, for the first two mornings, so besmeared and spotted with egg and coffee stains that I threatened to go to the captain. Remember, too, that the fares on these steamers are high, and that we were travelling as comfortably as the accommodations of the ship permitted. No wonder they are losing their trade. But what business is it of mine.? Why not go by some other line ? I will be frank, also, in my admira- tion, and say that when I travel with my women folk on the water, I am happier to think that Americans or Englishmen are in command. Both they and I will have a fair chance, and the American or the English captain will not be found among the saved if their passengers are not saved too. I am bound in honor to add that the agent of this same P. and O. line in Cal- cutta rendered me every service in his power, for which I shall never cease to be grateful, when I sought his good offices to help me in getting an invalid home. What do food and drink matter, after all, if one may count upon efficiency and kindness in the hour of distress and danger .'' But even then, if it is not my business, and perhaps
32 THE WEST IN THE EAST
it is not, to criticise, this is no answer to the hordes of houseless, hungry men that one sees any night on the Embankment in London, nor to the rapidly increasing hundreds of thousands supported by the state there, nor to the hundreds of thousands who are emigrating because there is no work for them. They have a right to ques- tion the muddling, unenterprising methods of those in control, whose sole gauge of food, drink, and dirt is a thirteen per cent dividend.
Even as we leave the quay at Marseilles the three races — the English, the Indian, and the French — are exploiting themselves. The Ind- ians, three of them doing one man's work, and physically awkward, are loading and unloading under the governing finger of a silent English officer. Half a dozen French girls between the ages of seven and twelve are dancing the can-can, as though they were in the Jardin de Paris, and soliciting the pennies of the passengers.
A distinguished French physician has ex- plained the attitude of France toward con- scription and race suicide by saying that France is hundreds of years in advance of the rest of the world in civilization, and that the imruliness and selfishness and, as I should term it, their ma- tured frivolity, are marks of a higher civilization. Some of us call it decadence. In India we are
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to see a civilization, old when the French were in skins. There too ambition is dead, and three hundred millions are powerless in the hands of a few Englishmen. Perhaps civilization always ends by giving up the problem of life as insolu- ble, and settles down to the studied frivolity of Paris, or to the calm despair of India.
Our fellow passengers are almost all English, with here and there a returning Parsi merchant, or a French, German, or American globe-trotter. There are also a number of women, some young, some of an uncertain, twilight age, who are go- ing out to be married. It was one of the features of travel all through the East, I found. On al- most every ship, under the wing of the captain, one met one or more of these women going out to marry men whose duties did not permit them to go in search of their brides. So far as I could see, the protection of the captain was altogether unnecessary. If one may judge of the loneliness of the bachelors in the East by the brides who go out to marry them, it must be distressing. There are more than a million more women than men in England alone; the women outnumber the men in Scotland also; only in Ireland is there anything like an equality of numbers. Such wealth of choice would lead, one would suppose, to a certain aesthetic discrimination, but
34 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST
apparently in these matters the East has the ef- fect of hurrying the white man, though in turn the East is not hurried by him.
"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle
the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he
weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the
name of the late deceased. And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to
hustle the East.'"
So writes Mr. Rudyard KipHng, who easily sur- passes any man of our breed, in his power of im- aginative analysis.
Tell me no more of the American twang! It is distressing, if you please, but having travelled many days in the atmosphere of the English voice, I much prefer the rank infidelity of the American whining twang to the guttural, not to say catarrhal, sing-song of Anglican vocal con- formity. Some of the more piercing English voices may be likened unto diminutive steam- whistles suffering from bronchitis.
He is a fussy traveller indeed who pays much attention to such matters as these when he is sailing through the Mediterranean to the land of the Great Mughal for the first time. These are mere comments to put away in the card-
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catalogue of one's brain for possible future reference.
What an embroidered sea it is! Fringed by Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Arabia. We see the land of the Phar- aohs, of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Alexander, Csesar, Hannibal, Napoleon. We sail through the religions, the law, the literature, the art, the traditions that ruled, and rule, the world. Here are the Pentateuch, the Psalms, Job, the Gospels, the Greek drama and comedy, the Koran, the Epic of Antar, the literature and law of the Latins and the Italians, and the greatest of comedies, Don Quixote. If the Avon emp- tied into this sea, it could claim all the greatest names in literature. And what a literary gamut it is from Don Quixote to the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians!
We saU past Rome, Athens, Carthage, Alex- andria, Jerusalem, Mecca, and through that nar- row blue ribbon of the Suez Canal, which binds together the greatest empire of them all, the Brit- ish Empire. It is the sea of all the most poig- nant associations of the world. No one's mem- ories are complete without it. Not to know the Mediterranean and its associations is not to be educated, is not to be a man of the real world, is not to know the history of the world, for the
36 THE WEST IN THE EAST
tides of this sea are the pulse-beats of the heart of history. We Americans are merely ethnologi- cal mushrooms in a grove of palms and cedars.
At Port Said we are in the anteroom of the East. I do not intend to write a guide-book. Messrs. Murray and Baedeker have too many literary parasites already, but I must let the ink bubble occasionally with my personal delight, and perhaps to old travellers my naif enjoyment of every day of those many months spent in the East. I gazed at those Arabs at Port Said, I studied their sensual, and in many cases dia- bolical, faces with awe and interest. In Europe other white men are different, to be sure, but it is possible to account for the differences, to ana- lyze the differences in a superficially satisfactory way. But these human beings are not merely different, they are something else.
That tall, naked, black man, with his head shaven, sitting in this broiling sun, which would knock me over in half an hour were my head not covered with cork and linen, and protected be- sides by a white umbrella; this man, with his prognathic Jaw, his shining teeth, his legs and shoulders looking as though they had been re- cently polished, his eyes with that clearness and sheen in them, as though they were swimming in some liquid, like a compass, he may be common-
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place to these other travellers, but I lean over the side and gloat over him.
This is the blood that slashed through Europe and the East, crying that theirs was the one true God, and that Muhammad was his one true prophet; this is the fellow I looked at in my illustrated geography many, many years ago in- stead of committing the text that framed him to memory. I can see those vignettes now. I can see the Malay with his pagoda hat, the Indian prince with his bejewelled turban, the Japanese with his straw coat, the Burmese lady with her huge cigar, the Chinese with his shaven forehead, and his pigtail. Those baby lessons in eth- nology, how I should have devoured the text had I dreamed that one day I was actually to eat, and talk, and shoot, and ride, and visit with these people, and even take photographs of them with a machine that was not even invented in those days.
I make no apology for gazing at that boat-load of Arabs, huddled together waiting to coal, or floating away having done their day's work. It is my first real sip of the East, and I am far more excited even than when I played my first game of base-ball in a real uniform, made in the sewing- room; or when I marched up to take a painfully attenuated degree at Harvard; or when I made my first speech in public. These are all exciting
38 THE WEST IN THE EAST
episodes, but now I am voyaging into the world from whence we all came. I am actually getting near the country where they invented Adam, and Eve, and Noah. In a few hours I shall see the place where Moses made a reputation as an am- phibious commissariat which in my boyhood im- pressed me far more than his unequalled ability as a law-giver. Moses, and Jesus, and Muham- mad were all born in this region, in this climate, in this atmosphere, yes, I am bound to confess that it was exciting.
The best books on the East, as every one knows, are the Bible and the Arabian Nights, and yet I found most travellers were saturating themselves with snippity descriptions of monu- ments and places, with tabloids of history, with technical paragraphs on architecture and the ethnic religions, with figures about the height of this and the length of that, or condensed statis- tics of exports and imports, and the tonnage through the Suez Canal, and dates about the Pharaohs, and the Mughals. No wonder they see nothing, know nothing, enjoy nothing, and come home bringing a few expletives, adjectives, and photographs, which can be had for a small price either in New York or in London.
The first thing to do in going to the East is to turn your education out on your desk so that
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 39
you can get at the bottom of it, and there you will find the Bible, and the Arabian Nights, and the Odyssey, and the Iliad, and Virgil, and Herod- otus, and Xenophon, and you will realize what a fool you were not to have devoted more time to them when you were asked to do so. Guide- books can get you to the East, but they do not get you inside. It is temperament, that counts, not trains.
It must be about as amusing to visit the East with a dimly informed courier, as to be taken through the Louvre by a page-boy from the hotel ; or to visit the British Museum, with the driver of the cab whom you happen to hail to take you there. Having been in the East, I can only say to other travellers that I would not waste even a week's time in all the East, with only the re- sources of the average tourist at my command. It was the unstinted, and instructed, and expe- rienced hospitality of the English in India and China, and of the Japanese in Japan, Korea, and Manchuria, that made my visit profitable and immensely enjoyable. Through them, and the native princes of India, I was given a universal passport, and welcomed as a chartered and priv- ileged guest, and the burden of my debt to them for that glorious year is beyond lightening by any poor words of mine.
40 THE WEST IN THE EAST
Even these first Orientals out here on the fringe seem to say to me: Beware of the men who are ever itching to be doing something, who cannot wait. They must be cowards at bottom, afraid of themselves or of the world ! And after these many months I realize that this is, to the Westerner, the disturbing message of the whole East, and I wonder if they are right. Perhaps there are two forms of fatalism, the fatalism of despair, and the fatalism of confidence, and there you have the East and the West, never to be rec- onciled.
The first thing one notices on going ashore for a few hours at Port Said, is an illustration of the methods of that British race, whose most notable and admirable characteristic is their ability in the governing of alien peoples. An English po- liceman, in the uniform of the Khedive, protects me from the yelping boatmen, with the same im- perturbable good humor with which I am so familiar in Piccadilly or the Strand. His coun- tenance changes slightly under different circum- stances. When he marches alongside the ten thousand suffragettes on their way to the Albert Hail he wears the amused expression, as of one who feels that he impersonates there and then an unanswerable reply to all their shrillness, both physical and vocal. When he convoys
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 41
thousands from the East End to Hyde Park he is more serious, but there again he looks, in his steady, patient manhood, an answer, even to them. On the boat-landing at Port Said he seems more bored, as of a man tired of brushing aside flies, but his behavior is ever the same.
The journey through the Suez Canal, a dis- tance of about one hundred miles, is a slow one, as we may not wash away these banks, which cost eighty million dollars to build, with the swash of a too-rapid progress. Watchmen, crouching about their small fires at night, dot the shores on both sides. For the first time I see camels actually at work, own brothers to those Bamum & Bailey loafers of my boyhood. In the glare of the searchlight, the sandy desert on both sides of the canal is so bright that every now and again one catches a glimpse of a fox, jackal, or hyena, and all through the night one hears their cries. The sunsets, the light, and the stillness are all different, all new to me. The sunsets are sunsets of shade, rather than colors, and De Tocqueville is right when he says : "Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent, non les couleurs." There is a kaleidoscope brilliancy about these cloudless sunsets, a stabbing at your ■ eyes with vivid shafts and shades, with plenty of orange and purple and brown in them, that
42 THE WEST IN THE EAST
make me wish I were an artist, and which con- vert me at once to the truthfulness which I had disbeheved of many Eastern sketches. The light seems to be something you are looking through ; and the stillness makes you lonely even with some one sitting beside you. The darkness comes down all through the East with incredi- ble quickness. You can read your book, and then of a sudden you need a lantern to see your way. The sun does not come up, or go down, it shoots up and down. These people live mentally in a perpetual twilight, but physically they are always in a blaze of light or in pitch- darkness. Perhaps they enjoy keeping their minds in a state of dawn, or twilight, as a protest.
After the Suez Canal comes the Red Sea, and on the Arabian coast, about eight hundred miles south, is Jiddah. I have no interest in Jiddah, but Jiddah is the seaport of Mecca, and somehow the word Mecca reverberates in my brain. I have been wont to mention Seringa- patam, Kamchatka, Timbuctoo, and Mecca and Seoul, as far-away, fairy sort of places, that I was no more likely to be near, much less to visit, than, say. Mars. That comes of living in the West. But here I am, and I cannot get quite awake to the fact.
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Jiddah, too, actually has the tomb of Eve. That impresses my imagination very much. Not that this first languor of the East devitalizes my rather unorthodox upbringing, tempting me to the historical acceptance of Eve. My theology is unshattered, but I am bound to say I have a friendly feeling for the imaginative proficiency of the man who, perhaps, left his money to build a tomb for Eve! It is at least a good schooling in cosmopolitan charity, to be near people who repair to the tomb of Eve as to a sanctuary; people so calm and so unflurried by the welter of the world, that they ignore the inextricable moral confusion into which that lady is accused, by many, of having plunged us.
Later on I am to be the guest of a charming Eastern lady. Her Highness the Begum of Bho- pal, and she is to present me with a volume of her travels. She is a Muhammadan, and has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In this volume she writes of Jiddah, and mentions the tomb of Eve and writes: "Eve was the wife of Adam." It is paralyzing to Western orthodoxy and to Western conceit to realize that this lady feels called upon to tell her readers, that Eve was the wife of Adam. It clears the mind of a lot of underbrush when one realizes that in the East, among the eight or nine hundred millions of
44 THE WEST IN THE EAST
people we are to visit, one must introduce Eve as the wife of Adam, and even then be asked, in all probability. Who was Adam? How differ- ent must the standards be in a covmtry, and among peoples, where Eve is distant, dim, un- known! It is true that even among ourselves Eve wears but a scanty garment even of tradi- tion, but now I am to travel in lands where she has not even a figment of the imagination to clothe her.
I begin to understand that all of us Occidentals are provincial, that we have overestimated our importance, our influence, and the effect of our impact upon the Orientals. I shall try to re- member, as I study these people, that Eve is introduced, in this other world as the wife of Adam. It is already becoming evident that many things that I have considered as of funda- mental importance have no significance here at all. All the clocks, and yardsticks, and weights and measures are different, or do not exist at all. We are going into a world where the best of us, no matter what our education and experience, can only grope about. We may have conquered the Eastern world, but, apparently, we have changed it very little. Our much-vaunted civ- ilization does not impress them, as we think it should. They look upon our civilization, ap-
ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 45
parently, as an attempt to make men comfort- able, in a life which men ought not to love.
"The brooding East with awe beheld Her impious younger world. The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd And on her head was hurl'd.
"The East bow'd low before the blast In patient, deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again."
II
THE GATEWAY TO INDIA
IT is because they are very sophisticated, or because they know the wonders beyond, that certain travellers tell you that Bombay is only the entrance to India, and not interesting. One can make some very accurate guesses about the people inside the house from the condition of the front steps, the cleanliness of the bell- handle or knocker, and the manners and appear- ance of the servant who opens the door. At least I am almost unconsciously in the habit of doing so, and one is apt to be more cheerful at the drawing-room entrance if the guardian of the outer door gives you a pleasant greeting. The British front door to India, or Govern- ment House Bombay, gave us such a pleasant greeting that we were cheerful throughout the rest of our stay, despite hardships and illness here and there.
First we went to the new hotel, considered the best in India, but we were there for a very short time, for after delivering various letters of intro-
46
THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 47
duction we were promptly invited to become the guests of His Excellency the Governor of Bom- bay. But already at the hotel I saw many things. Along the halls outside the guest-rooms I saw little knots of native servants, in groups of from two to half a dozen, according to the size of the master's family. How little an Indian needs, even with the good pay of a servant, was plainly evident. They had their beds and cooking uten- sils with them, and at certain hours one saw them eating, or sleeping, huddled together out- side their master's door.
Our rooms were large and airy. There was only the necessary furniture, no hangings, and our own bedding was used on the beds. Every- body carries his own bedding in India, and out- side the large establishments of the government officials, everywhere it is needed. You are sup- posed to carry your own bedding with you just as you carry your own tooth-brush. In the trains, and there are very long train journeys, by slow trains, in India, in the guest-houses of the native princes, in camp of course always, and in the hotels and inns, your own bedding is a neces- sity. Indeed you can scarcely carry too much in India if you wish to be comfortable. All sorts of clothing, from fur coats to the thinnest linen, all sorts of hats from a cap to a pith-helmet, a
48 THE WEST IN THE EAST
spirit-lamp, a folding table and chair, a small amount of tinned or bottled food and a supply of mineral water for the train, a large supply of linen and underclothing, for one changes often, and the laundry work is done by beating on flat stones. The changes of temperature from noon till midnight are startling. One must give up cold baths and take to tepid or hot water, and be careful, indeed, what, and how much, one eats and drinks. No alcohol before sunset, and very little then, and the plainest and most nourishing food.
In this land, as large almost as the whole of Europe, there are only a few large cities where one can buy any of the luxuries or comforts of life outside the obvious, and what you need you must carry with you. On a large scale you do what the native does, you carry your household gods and goods about with you.
How differently "pick up your bed and walk" sounds in your ears when you see a whole popu- lation of hundreds of millions actually carrying their beds with them whenever they move. Why should one take heed as to what one shall eat, or drink, or wear, when a handful of rice, a thimble- ful of water, and a loin-cloth suffice. The group of servants in front of their master's door at the hotel, or the hundreds of families I have seen travelling by train, by bullock-cart, or even on
THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 49
foot, have squeezed and sifted life's necessities down to the vanishing-point.
I can see why the gentle Prince of Peace ap- pealed to the Roman, the German, the Scandi- navian, the Briton. Those heavy-eating, hard- drinking, hard-fighting peoples, who must have skins, and furs, and huts, and fires, or die, saw in Him and His teachings the very antipodes of all they were, or strove to be. Not so the gentle Hindu. These are not miracles to him ; indeed along material lines, he and his ancestors, so far as any man can recall history, have lived in that way.
India has sixty-two million Muhammadans to-day, and but very few Christians, and most of these Muhammadans are converts. The Mu- hammadan conquerors brought few women with them, and their direct descendants are few in number to-day compared with their converts. To slay the idolater and the heretic, and to be recompensed in another world of fascinating material, not to say sensual gratifications, for so doing, and in this world to be received at once on conversion into the great Muhammadan brotherhood, where there is no caste and no irre- movable inequalities, this has appealed to the Indian far more than the doctrines or promises of Christianity.
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Muhammadanism is purely democratic. There is no cas.te even of priests. He who mounts the pulpit and prays, preaches, or reads from the Koran is only an equal among equals, and not set apart or considered above others. It is much like the democratic ways of early Puritan Congre- gationalism, when the sages would have snorted indeed at the thought that their religious leader, was in the least tainted with any such doctrine as the indelibility of the priesthood, or powers of confession or absolution, other than those of any father at his own fireside. Congregational ministers of the old type were leaders in politics, were sent to Congress, and abroad as ambassa- dors, and took a conspicuous part in town meet- ings, and would have scoffed at any insinuation that they were priests, or not as other men, in the homely duties and responsibilities of daily life. Alas, as society becomes more complicated, it demands easy and simple classifications and no- menclature, and thus a priest is a priest, a banker a banker, a professor a professor, with- out much time or thought given to shades and differences.
This feature of the Muhammadan creed appeals strongly to the caste-bound and neg- lected Hindu, who must be born again, and born again in no metaphorical sense, to move
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an inch above the social status allotted to him by his own religion. Besides this, the Christian brotherliness and love in India are names, not facts. The low-caste Hindu may become what his abilities lead to amongst the Muhammadans, he may become a great man among them, and marry into the proudest family. Their wel- come is a real one. But what Christian mission- ary even, let alone the layman, offers his daugh- ters or sisters to the Hindu convert .? There is not even a Christian club in India of which he can become a member. The proudest native prince in India is not allowed inside the doors of the Bombay Yacht Club, even as a guest.
One often hears Protestantism and Catholi- cism compared, to the disadvantage of the latter, because the Protestant countries are more pros- perous, wealthier, more powerful. This same reasoning is used when comparing Christianity with Brahmanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, but the argument does not lie, as the lawyers say. To the Hindu mind it is no argument at all. His ideal is to get out of the world, not to get what he can out of it, and stay in it. That one's beliefs should be scientifically true, or that they should produce in an individual or in a nation powers of wealth-getting or comfort-making, is not only not required of his faith by the Orien-
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tal, but he looks upon such tests as preposterous. If plague or famine come to a whole province, or loss or illness come to him individually, or the will of a ruler, whom he believes to be divinely guided, brings disgrace upon him, all these are accepted as inevitable. It is part of the mys- terious and incomprehensible divine plan, and leads to no questioning, criticism, or even com- plaint of the ways of God with man. We recog- nize self-sacrifice and unselfishness as spiritual graces to be cultivated, but the great majority of Christians look upon an unsuccessful Chris- tian as lacking in some essential manner the full dower of his faith. If the Hindu believed that his faith forbade working on Sunday, or forbade divorce for example, he would sacrifice himself rather than disobey. We on the contrary have allowed laws of economics, and laws of health and freedom to over-ride the dicta of the priest.
I am not deciding between the two, though I believe we are right; I am merely noting differ- ences, which must be kept in mind by the stu- dent of the East, if he wishes to gain something more of an understanding of the situation, than the mere superficial contempt, and cobwebby ex- periences, of a self-satisfied traveller.
The conversion of the thousand million brown and yellovi^ men of Asia, by the five hundred mill-
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ion Christians, is so far away in the distance that no eye, even of the imagination, can see so far down the aisles of time.
Far be it from me, a Christian, to discourage the attempt. On the contrary, Christianity has become so clogged with materialistic misinter- pretations of its messages; the tent-making and fishing apostles have been so lost in cardinals and bishops living in palaces with the revenues of princes, that the Christian missionary seems almost the one fine and genuine thing left. Just because there is no hope of visible success for him, he is the more admirable and the more Christian.
It is true that the East moves slowly, but even if we count by centuries, the Muhammadan has much the best of it. One Oriental race, the Jews, who live among us, who have been perse- cuted in every country of the world save America, have not been converted to Christianity. The Parsis in Bombay, there are some fifty thousand of them out of a total population of some eight hundred thousand, are the most prominent and the most powerful people, financially and polit- ically there, and come most in contact with the British politically and commercially; but they are as much Zoroastrians to-day as when they fled to India from Persia. The Parsis all over
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India still retain the head-gear which was forced upon them as a humiliation in the early days of their coming to India, just as the Chinese retain the pig-tail, which was forced upon them as a mark of bondage, by their conquerors the Tartars, two hundred and fifty years ago. The Parsis, rich and poor alike, though like the Jews there are few poor amongst them, maintain their religious tenets amongst this mass of Hindus and Muhammadans, and despite the influence of their friends the Christian British.
The towers of silence are one of the sights of Bombay. The Parsis will not defile the three elements, water, fire, and earth, with the re- mains of their dead. They refuse to dispose of bodies after death in the water, in the ground, or by burning.
It happened that we arrived at the towers of silence on Malabar Hill just as a funeral pro- cession was marching in. Shortly after we were escorted to the top by a courteous attendant, whose brother was the chief ofiicial. Once there he explained in detail the procedure. In the midst of our talk another procession wended its way up the hill, and we saw at close quarters what was at the moment being described.
The corpse is borne up the hill, followed by relatives and friends in white, walking two by
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two, and hand in hand, the joining of hands sym- bolizing the perpetual prayer between the two thus linked together. The procession halts, and the body is then carried to a raised platform where the covering is taken off, A swarm of vultures from the surrounding trees flop heavily down, and soon nothing is left but the bones. The bones of all alike are then thrown into a common pit, where they are converted to ashes by chemicals.
The mourners sit about in the quiet grove pro- vided with seats and flowers and fountains, say- ing their prayers, while the filthy birds have their orgies. Tales are told of a finger, or some other portion of a body, being dropped upon the pas- sers-by in the street below by the gorged and greedy birds. It is a grewsome spectacle to those unaccustomed to it, but the Parsis I saw there seemed serene and peaceful mourners, quite undisturbed by the quarrelling birds flapping their wings lazily in over-fed contentment.
Here was a notable example indeed of differ- ence of custom and its results. My friend the Parsi could hardly refrain from the expression of disgust at our method of delivering our dead to the earth and the worms.
Because we of the West have succeeded be- yond measure in material things, as compared
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with the East, we are apt to assume that our methods in spiritual things are for that reason superior. As I have said elsewhere, this is faulty reasoning. I doubt if we have any right to assert ourselves along these lines. These Parsis are as confident in their faith, their creed, their methods, horrible though this particular rite seems to us, as are we. It is this hands-off policy in such matters on the part of the British which deserves the highest encomiums for their rule.
It is a pity that in matters of education they have not adopted the same policy, a pity too that they are playing into the hands of a minute minority both in India and in Egypt by pushing to the front the theory of representative govern- ment, which the vast majority, at any rate in India, do not understand, cannot reconcile with their traditions, and do not want. I should be sorry to appear bumptious in making this cate- gorical statement. It is true that I have not talked with all these three hundred millions of people, nor has any one else, but I venture to say, modestly, that I have 'talked with a greater variety than most travellers, and with a far greater variety than most officials, whose work precludes the possibility of much travel, and the consensus of those I met bears me out in this statement.
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It is not, and this is the crux of the confusion in most Western minds, that they are not ready for representative government, and for Chris- tianity, but that they have no wish to get ready. They do not want them at all. We Westerners are exaggeratedly impressed with the superi- ority of our institutions, both secular and eccle- siastical. We believe that if only other peoples understood them they would adopt them. We spend millions, and many lives, in making them understand, and my personal opinion is that the more they understand, the further they are from adopting our institutions. Our points of view, our traditions, our moral and mental freezing and boiling points, are worlds apart. The Ind- ians who have seen most of England and the English appreciate them least, and have no over- powering wish to copy English institutions, or to become English. The Parsis of Bombay, with no caste prejudices, who are on the friendliest footing with the English, who are an intelligent and intellectually superior people, are as much Zoroastrians to-day as though the New Testa- ment were non-existent. The ideals of Chris- tianity do not appeal to the great mass of the Eastern races, or not to be too didactic, have not appealed to them thus far successfully.
With the complaint and criticism of the trav-
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eller from the West that everything moves too slowly in the East, from missionary enterprise to the means of locomotion, I have no sympathy. I have ridden ponies, elephants, and camels, and driven in ox-carts and camel-carriages, and trav- elled nearly fifty-five thousand miles during the last year, in trains and ships, and I find them all too rapid. Even the eight miles an hour on General Kuroki's old military railway through Manchuria was too fast. There is so much to see on every hand that even an ox-cart may go too fast. When I think that this whole volume contains about two words for every mile I have travelled, I realize that I am right in saying that one goes too fast, rather than too slow, in the East.
The Strand, Broadway, and even the boule- vards of Paris, with the grotesque eccentricities of the male attire, and the present-day unbifur- cated trouser gowns of the women, are tame, and brown, and dull, compared with the kaleido- scope of moving color in the streets of Bombay.
At the races one day I turned my back on the horses and counted fifty-eight different kinds of head-gear amongst the men in the grandstand, and no doubt there were others I did not see. The Parsi, with his lacquered cow's hoof, the Arab, the Persian, the Hindu, the Muhamma-
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dan, from north, south, east, and west, were there, and how many more I know not, and when it is remembered that the Maharaja of Gwalior's head-gear is as different from that of his neighbor at Indore as is the cowboy's som- brero from the tile of a Beau Brummel, and that these differences exist all over the East, it is easy to realize that the streets of Bombay, to a new-comer, seem to be a waving, moving mass of form and color.
The British in India in spite of the universal dislike of ostentation amongst the best of them, either here or at home, have been obliged to assume, officially at least, an air of state and cer- emony. The crimson and gold liveries of the Viceroy, and of the Governors of Bombay and Madras; the splendid body-guard of mounted Sikhs, well horsed, proud in bearing, all of them over six feet in height, with their turbans and lances; the crimson-lined state carriages, with two men in scarlet and gold on the box, and two standing on the foot-board behind, and always splendidly horsed, all this makes for the dignity and splendor that the Asiatic demands of his ruler. It may be absurd to the American, but there is no doubt whatever that a Viceroy in a cloth cap, on a bicycle, would ruin India in a month. We have prejudices the Oriental thinks
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silly; they have prejudices that we had best in charity and for safety's sake let alone.
The administration of India in England is in the hands of a Secretary of State for India, as- sisted by a council of not less than ten mem- bers appointed for ten years by the Secretary of State.
The executive authority in India itself is vested in the Governor-General in Council. The Governor-General, or, as he is more gen- erally called, the Viceroy, is appointed by the Crown, and holds office for five years ; this term is sometimes extended. The salary of the Vice- roy is 250,800 rupees a year. The rupee is now worth one shilling and fourpence, or roughly thirty-four cents; the salary amounts therefore to about $84,000 a year; but I should be sorry to undertake the job and to pay my expenses out of that sum.
The Council of the Viceroy consists of six ordinary members besides the Commander-in- chief of the army, and they are appointed by the Crown and hold office for five years. This Council is enlarged into a legislative council by the addition of sixteen other members appointed by the Viceroy under certain restrictions.
Further, India is divided into nine provinces: Bombay, Madras, Bengal, Eastern Bengal,
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United Provinces, The Punjab, Central Prov- inces, North West Frontier Provinces, and Burma. The Governors of Bombay and Ma- dras are the most important officials after the Viceroy, and are appointed by the Crown, and each carries a salary of $40,000 a year. The Governors of Bombay and Madras have an executive council of two members of the Ind- ian Civil Service appointed by the Crown. The Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal, Eastern Ben- gal, United Provinces, the Punjab, and Bur- ma are appointed by the Viceroy with the ap- proval of the Crown; the Chief Commissioners of the Central Provinces and the Agent to the Governor-General who governs the North West Frontier Provinces are appointed by the Viceroy in Council. Of these divisions I visited seven, and in each I was impressed by the enormous amount of work being done, by the conscientious, often I thought too conscientious, way in which it was done, and by the dignity and fearlessness of the men who were doing it. If it were not for the too frequent interferences from the India Office, and the criticism from ignorant politi- cians, who shamelessly play India off for votes at home, it would be the most ideally managed, as it is the most successfully administered, de- pendency in the world.
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It is curious to note that an agnostic even in office is apt to be more sentimental in his deal- ings with men than the believer. As an avowed heretic he may wish to prove that he is even more merciful than the orthodox; or he may salve his conscience by assuming an exaggerated love for humanity as his love of God dwindles. To worship the God of the multitude must be a hard thing for the intelligent man, either in the West or in the East; but to turn from that to the flattery and adulation of the multitude itself is to proclaim oneself to all intelligent men, no matter what rewards and prizes are gained there- by, as a scoffer among scoffers, as scornful in the seats of the scorners. Conscience is so piti- less, that even to be a prince in an ochlocracy can hardly recompense the intellectual traitor; and surely a trained mind, laughing in its sleeve, will find a peculiarly painful punishment await- ing it somewhere.
The misfortune of a dangerous illness brought us the good fortune to spend some two weeks as the guest of the Governor of Bombay. Here we saw housekeeping, as I saw it again later as the guest of the Viceroy at Calcutta, on the mag- nificent and dignified scale made necessary by the climate, the social demands, the high posi- tion of the host, and his unceasing and unending
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procession of guests. Very few of them are of his own choosing or inviting, few of them indeed his personal friends, but Bombay is the door to India, and England has many friends all over the world, and for reasons of state, or courtesy, or of frank hospitality. Government House Bombay receives them all, some to stay a night or two, and all to lunch or to dine. Dinners of a dozen, or of twenty, or of seventy, night after night, and the dinner of seventy as well and as noiselessly served as the tete-a-tete dinner in our own sitting-room. At the head of this establish- ment the Governor of Bombay, with a besetting sin of toiling when he should be at play, at exer- cise, or in bed.
The steward, or manager of an establishment as well conducted as this must be a housewifeic jewel of the Koh-i-noor variety. But that is behind the scenes. I can only speak of the re- sults.
A man who has a province of 75,000 square miles and a population of over 15,000,000 to govern, including a city the size of Bombay, must have his hands full, and can spare little time for his guests and their entertainment.
I had heard of the institution called an aide- de-camp before, and I have met them in other parts of the world; but just as there are peaches
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outside of Jersey, strawberries elsewhere than in Maryland, clam-bakes elsewhere than in Fair Haven, Massachusetts, soft-shell crabs, oysters, terrapin, canvas-back ducks elsewhere than in America, but none quite so good, so if you would know the fine flower of aide-de-campship you must needs go to India.
A man with as many strings to his bow as a governor of one of these great provinces must have many servants, capable, willing, and effi- cient, or the business would soon be in a tangle. These men must not only be capable, willing and efficient, they must be loyal, and if in ad- dition they like their chief, you have a corps of assistants approaching perfection. There is the Military Secretary, the Private Secretary, the Physician, and others, each with his duties. But besides their specific duties they are the hosts by proxy of their chief, and everywhere and at all times they are there to save him trouble and to make his work easy.
Every day in your dressing-room before din- ner you find a type-written list of the guests you are to meet that night, and the name of the lady assigned to you to take in to dinner. Austrian and Polish nobles, Russian and French princes, German diplomats, members of Parliament, offi- cials, British and Indian, Royal Highnesses, all
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must be properly placed, and all must know who their neighbors are, and as a result what subjects of conversation may cause friction and are to be avoided. When all are assembled in the draw- ing-room, the aide on duty for that day appears with the Governor, whom he announces: His Excellency! That gentleman makes the round of the room, shaking hands with each, offers his arm to the lady entitled to that honor, and we go in to dinner where a score or more of turbaned servants, in crimson and gold liveries and barefooted, serve the meal.
It is noticeable that the other Europeans are impressed by the stately and dignified way things are done by the British officials in India. The Governor is easily king, no matter who is there, and during my stay he entertained all sorts, in- cluding royalty and high diplomacy, renowned travellers, sportsmen, journalists, and statesmen. One gets an impression of the sturdy self-con- trol, of the patient mental power, which are the driving force behind the handful of Englishmen who hold this country. They have it in their blood, the best of these people, and these highly placed Englishmen almost without exception — I only met one exception, and the harm he does, although negatively, makes one gasp to think what would happen were there more like
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him — take the throne with an air of authority and a lack of self -consciousness, as of men sitting down for a chat with a friend.
In these democratic days much ceremony and formality, a semblance of pomp, makes the ob- server uneasy very often lest something, so to speak, should come unstarched, or go wrong, lest the procession should be marred by a sense of unreality, and tempt one to titter. Not so here. Even after the novelty wears off, one is not impressed by the artificiality so much as more and more impressed by a growing feeling that this is not the simulacrum, but the reality of power. But it takes a big man to carry it off, England, by one of her blunders, still has a knot of them here in India.
I have always thought that if I were not myself, or as Mr. Choate gallantly and wittily phrased it, could not be my wife's next husband, I should like above all things to have been the secretary to a great man, Cromwell, Hampden, Washington, Lincoln, Bismarck, and had a hand in the chosen doings of the picked giants of earth.
It must be some such feeling as this which stirs in the breast of the ideal aide-de-camp. The aides of the Viceroy, of the Governor of Bombay, and of the Governor of Madras who
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in distinction from other officials in India re- ceive their commissions from the Crown, wear their aiguillettes of gold over the right shoulder, as representatives of royalty; other A. D. C.'s wear them over the left shoulder. A witty gen- tleman eating honey in the country turned from the dish and remarked meditatively: "If I lived in the country I should certainly keep a bee!" If I lived in officialdom I would make any sac- rifice to keep an aide-de-camp!
An aide-de-camp is a person whose business it is to be agreeable. His task is one requiring unceasing vigilance, good health, good looks, a kindly disposition, and not only manners, but what is the finer flower of manners, manner. His duties are so multifarious, his accomplish- ments necessarily so varied, that it seems at first glance a preposterous joke to propose to any one mortal that he should perform them, combine them, conceal them deftly, and not die of megalomania.
He begins his day, let us say, at Government House, by taking a guest to ride at 7 a. m. — it is too hot to ride at any other hour. He cares no more for that particular guest than for the grand- sire of the horse he is riding, but he is a very clever and a very observant guest if he discovers it. As the clock strikes seven he appears, smil-
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ing, shaven, clean, with a "I hope I have not kept you waiting!" He is full of such phrases as that by the way. Indeed he is an anthology of colorless and comforting phrases, not quite flattering, not quite humble, but partaking of both, which steep the unsuspecting in an aroma of superiority and security. He has listened to your banalities about horses and horseflesh, in the smoking-room the night before, with a cer- tain worshipful awe in his eyes, and you now find that he rides as though he were in a cradle, and you perhaps as though you were on a ship's deck. He modestly defers to you as to whether we trot, or walk, or canter, and he is ready to go on or stop, as best pleases you. He has a thousand things to do that day, and you nothing, but he is positively reckless as to time if only you are happy. If you will only waste his time, nothing apparently will give him greater pleas- ure. He leaves you at the door of your bungalow on your return with thanks for your company, and hope in his eyes and on his tongue, that you will favor him with your company again. You make what you consider a remarkably quick change and arrive at the breakfast-room. Apparently he has been there for hours. All in white, booted and spurred, with aiguUlettes over his shoulder, ribbons on his breast, for he is
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on duty to-day, no heat, no wilted collar, no single hair in disarray, he awaits you, and even his smile is cool and inviting. If there are many guests at breakfast or at luncheon he gently insinuates you into the room, but by his manner alone he transforms you into feeling like a whole procession, and you swell with satisfaction as he hands you to the best place vacant. He takes his place, with an expression, conveyed wholly by his corporeal attitude, as though to say: "As for me, what matters it where I sit!" He succeeds by some curious personal magnetism, born I suppose of long practice, in giving you the im- pression that you are riding upon a very tall elephant, magnificently caparisoned, while he is standing in the street admiring you.
After he has seen that you have your cigar or cigarette, and asked solicitously if you have seen the last Renter telegrams and the newspaper, he leaves you, but he leaves you in a delicious at- mosphere not of mere comfort, but of comfort that you begin to feel you have deserved by some effort of your own. There is a marked difference between common or garden comfort and A. D. C. comfort. The latter is lighted and scented with a certain subtle something that makes you feel that your state of languorous ease has been won by you after long and arduous toil; while as a
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matter of scientific fact, it is only the A. D. C. wand which has played upon your egotism, and made it seem for the nonce noble.
If you wish to do an errand in the town before luncheon, he will either accompany you himself, or provide you with a companion. If he goes himself he instals you in the right-hand corner of the carriage or motor, in the place of honor, and you sail away, soldiers and policemen salut- ing, and others salaaming as you pass. He does not say it, but his air implies that these marks of respect are due to your imposing personal- ity, and not to the royal liveries.
If a member of your party is ill, he never for- gets to send her flowers, to inquire for her health, and to suggest other comforts.
He has done an hour's work before the morn- ing ride, and despite the air of idleness and the apparent contempt for time, he has done two hours' more work before the drive.
This almost feminine regard for your com- fort, and the sight of him modestly curled up on a sofa at tea-time, like a stretching house cat, may lead you astray. Take him on at billiards, at racquets, at real tennis or lawn tennis, at polo or cricket or a day's shooting, or go through a day's hard ride in camp or at manoeuvres with him, and you find that he plays all the games
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you know and many more, and he beats you at all of them easily and apologetically. Among this knot of embroidered and decorative young gentlemen you may find a distinguished per- former upon the piano-forte, who will play you his own compositions; another who publishes fugitive poems; another who could easily make his living as a caricaturist; but none of these accomplishments is foisted upon you, rather are they dragged forth, or discovered by accident. None of them will speak of himself, or his do- ings, experiences, or successes, and one and all abhor lime-light upon themselves or their deeds. What an education a little of their companion- ship would be for many of my countrymen, who after half an hour's acquaintance seem to fill the atmosphere with exclamation points, and repetitions of the ninth letter of the alphabet.
On all official occasions, after dinner, or at dances, the A. D. C.'s attentions to the forlorn, the scraggy, the three-cornered, the convex- backed, the concave-chested, the self-conscious, the awkward, the acidulous of the opposite sex, would put the most fanatical Salvation Army captain to shame.
I have grown to look upon A. D. Cship at its best, as one of the healing professions. It min- isters to the social soul diseased. It deals with
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the more hidden maladies of vanity, self-con- sciousness, social awkwardness, non-appreciated virtues, hypothetical prowesses, and soothes them unobtrusively, gently, and successfully. Chatterton, and Byron, and Poe might all have been saved by the ministrations of an accom- plished A. D. C.
As for his relations with his chief, he sur- rounds him with a purring adulation which soothes irritation, and lays the dust of the small attritions and futilities of the daily task. He gives spiritual subcutaneous injections of con- fidence and courage; waves aside the phantoms of discouragement; lights up the dark places of dull duties ; and helps to fulfil the deeds in hours of insight willed, which must be done, like most severe tasks, in hours of gloom.
If he really likes and respects his chief, his voice and mien are a veritable paean and halle- lujah of praise, when he appears before the guests and announces: His Excellency! You are at once prejudiced in the great man's favor, prone to believe that he is indeed Excellent.
There is nothing mawkish about this loyalty, nothing effeminate. It is like the tenderness with which an engineer oils his great ship-pro- pelling machinery, or the gentleness and care of a sportsman for his guns.
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In a climate where the greatest discomforts come from the heat, and the entomological off- spring of the heat, the houses are built for cool- ness and for shade. At Government House Bombay, there is a large central bungalow con- taining the drawing-rooms, dining-room, billiard- room, ballroom, smoking-room, the entertain- ing-rooms in short, and surrounding it are the bungalows containing the living apartments of the Governor, his staff, and his guests. We were royally housed in a bungalow overlooking the bay, with reception-hall, sitting-rooms, bath- rooms, and bedrooms, and with separate en- trances and outer halls. The service is at first uncanny, so noiseless are the barefooted attend- ants. You wash your hands in your dressing- room, and almost before you are out of the room a silent brown man has slipped in to change the water.
Servants are of course cheap as measured by our standards, though by no means as cheap as they were twenty-five years ago; but they are also so bound, partly by caste rules, partly by lethargy, partly by centuries of habit, that it re- quires many of them to keep the household ma- chine going, even when it is of modest propor- tions. In the case of the Governor of a great province or more particularly in the case of the
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Viceroy, the number required is legion. No one of them will undertake another's task, and the social and religious differences between them are so great that there are no illustrations from American life that will serve to mark them. Between the low-caste sweeper of the garden walks and the Sikh soldier on guard at the front door, for example, there is a social difference not of degrees but of latitudes. It is criminal to think of associating together.
We must not forget that we are among people here in India who though starving will throw away the meal with contempt upon which even the shadow of a low-caste man has fallen. We should remember too that these peculiarities of caste are not uncommon even among ourselves. The writer of Genesis recalls that the custom existed in Egypt "because the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an abomination unto the Egyptians." When Joseph entertained his brethren in the house of Pharaoh the Egyptians ate apart, the Hebrews ate apart, and Joseph ate apart, much as the Maharana of Udaipur would do to-day did he entertain strangers and inferiors. I know more than one continental Catholic who has never to his knowl- edge sat at table with a Jew; and we all of us eat, and drink, and are friendly with people
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whom we do not ask to break bread with us at our own tables. These Indians have their caste prejudices, so have we, and when analyzed the differences are of degree rather than funda- mental, and so likewise are the eccentricities of housekeeping in the East or the West; there are difficulties to contend with on both sides of the world.
Bells and mechanical appliances are not nec- essary, for at any hour of the day or night you clap your hands, and there glides noiselessly into your presence a brown phantom to do your bid- ding. All the work of every kind is done by men, except the sweeping of the leaves by one or two women in the garden. They all seem, if one may judge from appearances, not only contented but proud. Good behavior means fixity of tenure, and ultimately a pension. Tipping fairly, when there are so many, is impossible. The visitor finds a notice in his apartments asking him not to fee the servants, but calling attention to a box, into which he may put a contribution if he wishes. This contribution is added to the Pension Fund. The same justice, and honesty, and impartiality which hold all India, hold even more effectively here, because in the case of servants they come into closer contact with their masters, and in many cases like them as
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well as respect them. John Nicholson was not only a hero among his white fellows but a hero too, to his soldiers and servants. His great height, his flowing beard, his dignity of bearing, and audacious courage so delighted the Sikhs that a sect of them called themselves by his name, and established him as their Guru, or priest.
Among other letters, I had a letter to a dis- tinguished Hindu, who has won high rank in the judiciary of India. I spent a long day in the courts with him, and on one occasion I sat through a scene which I shall never forget. The buildings used by the court in Bombay are larger and finer than those in New York, and the judges better paid than even our judges of the Supreme Court of the United States. The case was one of appeal from a decision of the lower court con- demning two Hindus to death for murder. It was a disgusting story, and most of the evidence was circumstantial, except that of a lad of six- teen, a decadent, who claimed that he had been forced by the others to take part in the crime. There sat a Hindu judge, and beside him an English colleague; the case was argued for the appeal by an English barrister. Many hours, much money, much investigation and sifting of evidence had gone into this dull matter of the
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guilt or innocence of these three Hindus of the very lowest caste. The British machine was working as carefully, as minutely, as though great personages, or important matters of state were at stake. It was an object-lesson of the slow, ponderous English way of being just. It was a sledge-hammer to crack an egg, but it was justice for those cow-herds, who possibly earned two or three cents a day, and justice as nice, and care- ful, and impartial as for a prince. In the old days their ruler would have had their heads off, or their brains and bellies crushed to a jelly be- neath an elephant's feet and knees, or sent them about their business in five minutes, and nor the victims, nor their friends, nor any one else would have thought anything more about it.
In a country where lying and deceiving are looked upon as an intellectual employment as worthy as any other; in a country where a man will murder his own child and bury it in his neigh- bor's garden to fasten suspicion upon him, it is easy to realize how difficult is justice, and how experience alone can weigh evidence and get the truth from witnesses. It is sciolism worse confounded to write letters and pamphlets from cosy chambers in London or New York on the subject of justice in India, the tyranny of the police, the haughty English official, and kindred
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criticisms. I have visited courts and prisons, I have sat in the highest court, and also in front of the deputy-commissioner's tent pitched on the plains of the Punjab, on a hot day, and thus seen justice meted out to the high and low, and to all conditions of men and women, and now that I am far away from it all, I marvel even more than I did then at the patience, forbearance, kindli- ness, and impartiality that I saw.
My distinguished Hindu friend was of the Brahman class, who had been educated in Eng- land and thereby, by crossing the black water, outcasted. He belonged to the intellectuals of his creed, and told me he was what we should call a Unitarian. He praised the virtues of the Hin- dus, said they were peaceable, gentle, mild, but also suspicious, envious, and jealous, and easily excited by playing upon their religious fears, when they lost all sense of the justice and honesty of their rulers, or of anybody else, and became cruel. The Hindus, he said, have as a rule but one wife, taking another only in case the first one bears no children, or, among the lower classes, that there may be more people to work the land, and this in spite of the fact that their religion does not forbid polygamy.
He maintained, as did every Indian of the scores I talked with, that caste is the curse of
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the country, keeping people apart, setting them against one another, and that so long as caste exists there is no hope of self-government.
He thought the British did not see enough of the people, were socially exclusive, and thereby barred from understanding the people they lived among. I said that all Englishmen made the same remark, that the Indians are inscrutable, mysterious. He denied this, and said that they were quite understandable, and would talk freely and frankly, but that they were not allowed to be on such terms with the English as permitted free- dom and frankness of intercourse, and that there- fore they were dubbed inscrutable. He said the feeling between Hindus and Muhammadans was as strong, and in some places as bitter, as ever.
He thought some protection would be good for India, for of course with free-trade, India was at the mercy of Lancashire.
He was in favor of as much participation in the government by natives as was possible, and held that education was making progress even among the women. He showed the same feeling, though very guardedly expressed, that other in- telligent Indians show wherever one meets them, that much of the distrust and dread of the Ind- ian for the English are due in great part to the unsympathetic attitude of the majority of the
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English, and claimed that confidence and sympa- thy would be repaid by loyalty and frankness.
We discussed the curious contradictoriness of the English, who insist upon the unearned in- crement theory as applicable to land in India, though they fight it at home; and who support the theory of native princes in India, with their patriarchal influence and methods of govern- ment, while denouncing dukes and great land- lords at home. We agreed upon one thing, that the subtilties of British compromise were be- yond us.
I quote this gentleman, as I shall quote others, not because I agree or disagree with all their views, but that my readers may grind each his own axe. As for me, I beg to emphasize the fact that I have no axe to grind other than to call the attention of my countrymen to problems and situations that they are marching toward, and that rapidly.
At a dinner given for me by the Chief- Justice, we dined at a new club where both Indians and British meet. Indeed, it was formed for that pur- pose, and certain already hard-worked English- men whom I met make it a point to go there. At the dinner in question only men were present, and there were as many Indians present as Eu- ropeans, and it seemed to me that problems
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of government and politics were discussed as freely as they would have been in New York or in London.
But when one leaves this atmosphere of the high-placed, to spend many hours in the part of the town inhabited by the Indians themselves, the practical situation seems to swamp the the- ory completely. What sympathy, what kind- liness, what understanding of their needs or of their defects can permeate this mass .'' Even my Hindu friend, when pressed for an opinion, admitted that he saw no solution except British domination for centuries to come. Just what your eyes see, just what your ears hear, make you almost contemptuous of the most intelligent man's opinion who has not actually been in In- dia. These streets swarming with people; these shops, which are merely large-sized goods boxes with one end taken off, in which are huddled merchants and their families and their wares, in a cubic space perhaps twice that occupied by a deer-hound when travelling in his huge basket to a show; the variety of costumes, head -gear, and physiognomy, I was told that forty different dialects are spoken in the bazaars of Bombay, distinctions of class apparent even to my untu- tored eyes, from the man in a loin-cloth to some petty raja in a gilded coach, with servants
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swarming over it and around it, or dainty Parsi women taking their airing in well-turned-out carriages, with footmen clearing the way for them; beggars covered with dust and ashes; Arabs and students, what a mixture it is!
Nor democracy, nor any other form of govern- ment, has done away with social differences, for the form of government is yet to be even dreamt of that can endow men with equal patience, equal industry, equal good judgment, and until that time comes, society will be as little level as the troughs and crests of the ocean. Even in the West, where religion and politics have assumed the livery of Equality, little has been done; but in the East religion and politics for thousands of years have insisted that justice demands inequal- ity, and from Quetta to Calcutta, and from Ma- dras to the Khaibar Pass, there is no sign that the old ways are passing.
A journalist whom I met in Bombay, who, though he was not an anarchist, was nonethe- less voluble in his criticisms of the British meth- ods of rule, was discussing the recent visit of Mr. Keir Hardie to India, and I remarked that he was a curious leader for a Brahman to foUow. "We do not follow him," he replied, "we are only using him as we should use anybody else who will follow us! The men he influences," he
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continued, "are of little use to us, but they are a nuisance to the British."
There are over a thousand newspapers pub- lished in the vernacular in India in over twenty- two dialects or languages. In the large cities like Bombay, and to some extent in the outlying districts, they have a certain influence, not al- ways, I fear, for good.
But if the East is buried deep in its own su- perstitions, we are obsessed by ours. Education and teaching are two of ours. The misty talk about teaching people to respect themselves is a very loose phrase. To teach Lincoln to respect himself was to increase his respect for patience, for humility, for good-humor; to teach John Nicholson to respect himself was to increase his respect for truth, courage, and duty; on the other hand, to teach a forger to respect himself is to make his next forgery more daring; to teach a thief to respect himself is to make his next loot larger; to teach certain firebrand politicians to respect themselves, either in India or in Eng- land, is to increase their respect for jaunty om- niscience, for second-hand scholarship, and for the sly sedition of the bomb, the pistol, and the vernacular press.
To teach a man to read, or to write, or to count does not teach him to think, or to know.
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We tried teaching our Indians ; England teaches in India — under the segis, by the way, of the most absurd Macaulayan and antiquated system, the system of a man as contemptuous and ig- norant of Eastern literature, religions, and phi- losophy as he was accomplished as a maker of historical phrases and liter'ary antitheses — but to little avail, for the reason that few of us as yet re- alize the limitations of education. The Indian senior wrangler is no more morally an Englishman than he was before he knew the English alphabet. You cannot teach character, no matter how much else you teach, and character is the only thing worth while. Men are only of the same class, of the same moral aristocracy, when their blood boils and freezes at the same moral temperature, and in all the world there is no text-book on that subject, and but few teachers.
Much of the confusion in this matter arises from the fact that we confound training and edu- cation. The majority of men who go through schools and universities get no training at all, and fail and are forgotten; the men who do get the training in schools and universities make it appear that it was altogether due to school and college, which is not the case at all. It was train- ing that produced Washington, Hamilton, Lin- coln, Grant, Sheridan, "Stonewall" Jackson,
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and Lee, and not education in any academic sense, though Hamilton, Jackson, and Lee were students. It is not the learning that makes the man, but the man who uses his learning as a gymnasium in which to train his powers. We go on crowding men into state and philanthropy- supported institutions of learning as though they were magical receptacles for the production of trained men. Years of failure have taught us nothing.
I agree that the state ought to supply the op- portunity for elementary study, and that it is wise and generous charity which offers oppor- tunity for high and costly experiment and in- vestigation, but only those who earn their way ought to have the path beyond made easy. Luther, and Erasmus, and Bacon, and the lesser breed of intellect, will blaze their own paths through the forest of difficulties; the others should not be pampered into intellectual daw- dling, but left, and even forced if necessary, to fell the forest and plough the plain.
America has had free education from the be- ginning, an unequalled test, and yet the men who have made America are without university degrees, with such few exceptions that the aca- demically educated are lost in the overwhelm- ing majority who have trained themselves. Even
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those who have academic degrees owe their places in the world to other training than the training received from books and professors.
The world wonders at the decadence of school- beridden France, where the boys are effemina- tized, the youths secularized, and the men ster- ilized, morally and patriotically; France with its police without power, its army without pa- triotism, and its people without influence; dis- orderly at home and cringing abroad; a nation owing its autonomy even, to the fact that it is ser- viceable as a buffer-state. When I write "disor- derly at home," it is not the off-hand rhetoric of the hasty writer. Monsieur Emile Massard made a report to the Paris Municipal Coun- cil on the subject of the encumberment of the Paris streets. He says there are nearly half a million vehicles of all kinds in Paris to-day, with twenty thousand hand-carts and nine thousand barrows. In 1909, sixty-five thousand eight hun- dred and seventy accidents were caused in the Paris streets by eighty-one thousand eight hun- dred and sixty-eight vehicles, or about three ac- cidents for every four vehicles, and there was one summons for every seventy-seven motor taxi- cabs. I am unorthodox, I might even be dubbed a heretic by the narrow, but I am bound to con- fess if ever a nation suffered from physical and
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moral dry-rot, as a direct result of secular ed- ucation, it is France.
America and Germany have been saved from this by faith and reverence. In France reverence has been knocked on the head and faith smoth- ered in ridicule, and she has produced a school- bred hooligan, in Paris at any rate, whose lack of the human traits of decency, honesty, gentle- ness, and manliness are unequalled outside of a menagerie. Heretic I may be, but I would rather suffer a Mass even, than mock at my mother country.
Education without moral training is simply a diabolical misfortune. But the fallacy re- mains, and with it a terrible waste of human material, and an increase of that uneasy unhap- piness which is the curse of modern society; for men and women are naturally discontented who feel dimly that they are developed along wrong lines, and yet are loath to admit that they should exchange the black coat for the blouse, the pen for the plough, and the anaemia of mediocre men- tal accomplishment for the health of rude toil.
There is a multitude of failures at these Ind- ian examinations. It takes twenty-four thousand candidates for matriculation to secure eleven thousand passes, and of these eleven thousand only one thousand nine hundred survive to take
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the B. A. degree. At Oxford, for example, and as a means of comparison, the number of those who fail to matriculate is negligible, and of the nine hundred who annually matriculate, about six hundred and fifty proceed to their degree. In the long run, God himself readjusts matters. Development along false lines ends in disgrace and failure. We to-day may see Turks and Italians, the descendants of the Mughals and the Caesars, working as day-laborers in the far-off West of the Argentine Republic, and five hundred years hence a Chinese official will ponder over the fact that the descendants of English lords and American millionaires are tilling his fields. By instinct we say "Mother Earth" and "Mother Nature," and we are right; all the others are step-mothers, or mothers-in-law.
It is curious that England, which has won so great an empire, and which has been ruled and served by an uneducated but trained aristocracy, should of all nations turn to books and profes- sors to solve its Indian problems. In the House of Commons, July, 1910, there were one hundred and eleven Etonians, the great majority of whom are far better fitted to lead a squadron of cavalry, or to govern a foreign province, than to pass an examination in competition with Frenchmen or Germans of their own age. I hope I am not as-
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suming too much when I say that these same Etonians would agree with me.
India needs engineers, agricultural chemists, archaeologists, mining engineers, architects, stat- isticians, students of hygiene, political econ- omists, scientific farmers, but how many such men have her schools and colleges produced ? Practically none. All this work is done by Eu- ropeans, while the Indian student has but one aim : to become an employee of the government, a cog in the wheel of bureaucracy, with a little power over his fellows, and a pension in store for him. The supply of these students is exceeding the demand, and those left over are like badly cooked food, neither good as a fertilizer nor to eat ; they are spoiled for the fields and too feeble for useful mental labor. I mean no insult. I am saying of the East what I have first said of the West. England has transferred the West- ern fetich of secular education to India, with the result that might have been expected. The Indian seditionist is no worse than the Parisian hooligan, and both, with certain differences, are the result of the same system.
The sun is blazing down on the garden in which lives a saint, so-called, whom I visited one day in Bombay. He has not spoken for twenty- three years, and his neighbors look upon him
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with awe. He permits me to take his photo- graph, and I wonder whether it is for peace or as a penance that he has made this law for himself. We question him, and he by signs tells us that he is quite happy, quite indifferent whether he lives or dies, and quite sure that all is for the best in the world, if one only takes a perspective of, say, a thousand years or so. We are too close to things to know much about them, he maintains, and gets as far away as he can.
Some months later, I visit at Davos Platz a man who for nearly thirty years has been study- ing drops of blood under a microscope. He is getting as close to life as he can, but admits that he knows little more than the sage in his hot gar- den at Bombay. Both the W^estern scientist and the Eastern sage smile indulgently at the fussi- ness of modern life. My own experience of men in many lands has taught me that the most ac- tive are the least valuable. It is a notable sur- vival of the simian in man, that so many people think that constant mental and physical activity is a measure of value. Busy people seldom ac- complish anything. The statue, the poem, the painting, the solution of the economic, financial, or social problem, the courage and steadfastness for war even, are all born in seclusion and appear mysteriously from nowhere. Cromwell, Wash-
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ington, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Dante, and Cer- vantes all appear from nowhere, and promptly take command of the busybodies. What a crowd of men we all recall who were so busy making themselves remembered that they are already forgotten! It is said that some ninety-five per cent of business men, brokers, and bankers fail. It is busyness that does it. We must give the Eastern philosophy its due. We are none of us infallible, not even the most modern of us, and I am not sure that the proud flesh of the social sore is not as visible in the Tweed Ring, in the State-House scandals in Pennsylvania, in the Sugar scales of certain millionaire merchants, in the Poplar Union revelations in England, or in the crowd at a race-meeting in Paris, as any- where in India or in China.
I regret, for the sake of my Western readers who are accustomed to the proclamatory cock- sureness of irritable activity, that I am leaving Bombay with so little ability to provide them with any essence of omniscience of my own man- ufacture. Having no claims social, political, or financial to make upon my fellow-countrymen, I am satisfied to serve them with food for thought, rather than to denounce them for the benefit of their enemies, or to flatter them for their own undoing, that I may have their approval.
Ill
THE GREAT MUGHAL
IT is much like trying to sop up the Gan- ges with a bath sponge, to attempt to give briefly, and yet satisfactorily, an outline of the history of India. If I were telling some one else how to thread the beads of such an historical sketch, I should suggest a series of names, names of men who have stood as corners around which the current of events has swirled. Buddha 500 B. C; Asoka 257 B. C; Alexander 327 B. C; Kanishka 40 A. D.; Timur 1398 A. D.; Babar 1482-1530; Akbar 1556-1605; Shah Jahan 1628-1658; Sivaji 1627-80; Clive 1751-1767; Hastings 1773-1784; Ranjit Singh 1780-1839; Dalhousie 1848-1856; John Nicholson 1857.
There are many omissions here, but from the time when India rises above the horizon of legit- imate history down to that Sir Galahad of the Mutiny, John Nicholson, who was shot through the heart at Delhi, with the words: "Forward, Fusiliers! Officers to the front!" on his lips, one can grasp the main features by a study of
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these biographies. Those last words of Nichol- son, too, leave one with a tingle in the blood, and a fine flavor of the nobility of English man- hood, which was never more wanted in India, and in England, than to-day. Some such thing must be done, however, to make any sketch of British rule, or of present conditions in India, in the least comprehensible. This is the more nec- essary when one hears, not only from those who have never visited India, but from those who have been there, suggestions and discussions which might lead one to believe that India had always been, and is to-day, a national entity like France, or Germany, or Italy. India is not in the least like Poland, battling for national ex- istence against Russia and Germany; not in the least like Italy delivering herself from Austria.
India has never had any national existence whatsoever. India is even now, and always has been, as much divided into nations, states, races, religions, languages, as is Europe, or Asia, or Africa. The Sentimentalist, who, Meredith tells us, is "a perfectly natural growth of a fat soil. Wealthy communities must engender them," speaks, and writes of India, as though it had been enslaved by the British, robbed of its personality, starved in its natural national growth, shorn of
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its liberties, and deprived of any representation in its own government.
It comes as a surprise therefore, particularly to the American, who must always listen sym- pathetically to tales of tyranny, particularly if the Briton be the tyrant, to find that India has never had a national personality, nor any natural national growth, nor anything approaching na- tional liberty, nor anything even dimly shadow- ing forth representative institutions, nor has she ever dreamt of individual liberty as we know it. Moreover, out of the three hundred millions of the population, two hundred and ninety millions at least do not know what these things mean, and do not care. The average Indian does not know that America has been discovered, he has no idea of the British constitution, or of the cabi- net, he does not know that there is a British Secretary of State for India. Such loyalty and knowledge as he may have, centre in three Lords: the "Bara Lat" or Viceroy, " Chota Lat" Provincial Governor, directly over him, and the "Jangi Lat" or Commander-in-Chief in In- dia. Most of them, however, only know the word Sarkar or the government. He lacks even an equivalent for the word "vote" in his language. He recognizes power, position, but has not the vaguest notion of "majorities." A change of
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government to him means merely a change of ruler, another man in place of the old one. He knows nothing of changes of principle, of eco- nomic differences, of party cries. Government to him has always meant, and means to-day, au- tocratic power expressed in the person of a man. Only a tiny minority in India know anything of the whys and wherefores of the party govern- ment in England, by which they are ruled.
Unless this profound ignorance of modern po- litical methods in India is clearly understood, and kept ever in the back of the brain in all dis- cussions of India and its peoples, misapprehen- sions and misunderstandings are sure to follow.
The discussions, experiments, and agitations at the present time in regard to India, are lead- ing many people, both in England, where it is their duty to know better, and all over the Western world, to suppose that India as a whole is perhaps almost ready for representative gov- ernment. Those who know the actual condi- tions in India are trying to disabuse the minds of people of this error, but strange to say it is diflScult.
Lord Cromer said not long ago: "If they considered the immense diversity of race, re- ligion, and language in India, and also that they would be endeavoring to transplant to
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India a plant entirely of exotic growth and plac- ing it in very uncongenial soil, he must confess for his own part that he should be very much surprised if the legislative experiment did suc- ceed." Other experienced governors of alien races have said the same.
Lord Curzon, whose opinion upon all matters relating either to the Near or to the Far East, must be received with respect, says: " The bulk of the peoples of India want, not representative government, but good government, and look to the British officers for protection from the rapacious money-lender and landlord, from the local vakeel (attorney), and all the other sharks in human disguise which prey upon these un- happy people."
My own opinion as an observer from the out- side is, that the peoples of India are no more fit for representative government than are the inmates of a menagerie, and that were the Brit- ish to leave India for three months, India would resemble a circus tent in the dark, with the me- nagerie let loose inside. There would be no safety except for the cruel, and those who could hide; and there would be no security because there would be no shame. Tooth and nail and fang would have full play again, and that callous cruelty, which, more than any other quality.
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stamps the Oriental as different from the Oc- cidental, would slaughter the strong, enslave the weak, and market the women for the harem or the plough.
The very men who study chemistry in Lon- don, under the protection of British law, in or- der to learn how to make bombs, to hurl at an English Viceroy and his wife, and who are the most vociferous pleaders for representative gov- ernment, would be the first to hide, and the first to suffer; aside from that I can see no advantage in opening the doors of the cages for many years to come.
One of their stanchest friends, and one of their most brilliant British rulers, and a scholar in all matters pertaining to the politics of the East, writes out of his almost unequalled expe- rience as traveller and ruler: "in character a gen- eral indifference to truth and respect for suc- cessful guile, in deportment, dignity, in society the rigid maintenance of the family union, in government the mute acquiescence of the gov- erned, in administration and justice the open corruption of administrators and judges, and in every-day life a statuesque and inexhaustible patience, which attaches no value to time, and wages unappeasable warfare against hurry."
It is idle for the Westerner to attempt to form
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political or social opinions about these people till he has dwelt among them, watched them, studied them. Their clumsy inefficiency physi- cally, their depressed mental attitude, their shiv- ering timidity, their suUen solemnity, I am writ- ing, of course, of the mass of the people, are beyond anything the Western imagination can picture. It is not only idle to attempt to form opinions, let me go further, and say that I hold it cruel to the people themselves, to attempt to irritate them into the belief that they can, for scores of years to come, undertake to take care of themselves politically, socially, or morally. Every man of humane instincts ought to be grateful that they have at last a guardian who is honest, just, self -controlled, and lacking some- what in sentiment and imagination.
Two hundred and fifty millions of this popu- lation are entirely dependent upon agriculture for a living, and Lord Curzon himself has esti- mated the total annual income of the Indian peasantry at a trifle over five dollars a head!
India has an area of more than one and a half million of square miles, and a population of, roughly, three hundred millions. Her area in square miles is equal to the total area of Europe less Russia, and her population is greater than that of all Europe, less Russia. The great di-
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versity of climate in India, the extremes of heat and cold, of drought and wet, of fierce winds and calms, and the consequent plagues, famines and crop failures, are the result of a peculiar geo- graphical position. If one could stand India up on end, the Himalaya mountains, with one peak, Mt. Everest, twenty-nine thousand feet high, would hang over the pear-shaped peninsula like a great, broad-brimmed hat. If you look at a raised map of India, you will see the resemblance, for the Himalaya mountains, which separate In- dia on the north-east from the great, barren plateau of Tibet, seem to hang over India like a huge, curling parapet. It looks as though the bare backbone of the world had protruded here. One hundred and fifty miles from the gulf of Bengal, where the Assam range of hills runs out into the plain, the rain-clouds bursting against these, give a rainfall of four hundred and fifty inches ! While to the west, in the plains of Raj- putana, there is scarcely water enough for a blade of grass.
When camping out with the troops on ma- noeuvres, north of Lucknow, riding in the middle of the day was oppressively hot, but at eleven o'clock at night all the blankets and fur coats one could pile on, were not too much for com- fort.
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The English have done much to bring about a certain regularity of water supply. Taking the country as a whole, one acre in seven is irrigated. Thirteen million acres are watered by wells, fif- teen million acres are watered from tanks, or small private canals, and seventeen million acres are watered by canals, built and maintained by the government. I am not an authority on such matters, but I am told that these irrigation works in India are not only triumphs of engineering skill, but the most beneficent works of the kind in the world. It is easy to believe this, when one realizes that the failure of the year's rain in India means that two-thirds of the population are out of employment for a year, with of course a consequent rise in the prices of necessary commodities.
There are now in India over thirty thousand miles of railway, more miles of railway than has France, three times more than Italy, as much as Austro-Hungary, and only six thousand miles less than Germany. In 1857 there were only three hundred miles of railway. What must have been the helplessness of India in famine years, when there were no means of transporta- tion! If England had done nothing more, one must go slow in criticising her, when these canals and railways are remembered.
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She alone has fought grim Nature in India with the resources of science, with the result of a saving of millions of lives. No other conqueror spent his time, energy, money, and the lives of his own people, in such enterprises. Nadir Shah rode off with millions. Other conquerors did the same. England has poured millions into India, and the malcontents are grumbling be- cause she exacts in interest far fewer sovereigns than she has saved lives. Human beings at five dollars a head seem cheap enough!
When we recall that crowded France has only a population of under two hundred to the square mile, and that even in overcrowded England wherever the density of the population is over two hundred to the square mile, the population ceases to be rural and must live by manufactures, mining, or city industries; what is the picture presented by India, where many millions of peasants are struggling to live off half an acre apiece. So wholly is this population agricult- ural, their one interest the tilling of the soil, that less than one fifteenth of them live in towns with more than twenty thousand inhabitants.
India is a continent, and not in any sense a nation. Travel from Bombay, let us say, to Peshawar, and from there drive into the Khai- bar Pass, and as you travel you see people as
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different from one another as though you trav- elled from Seville to Moscow, or from the City of Mexico to Vancouver, and yet this is all India.
The error lies in confusing the idea of India, in talking of, or discussing India, as though In- dia were like Spain or Germany, like Mexico or Canada. She not only has layer after layer of races, but also layer after layer of religions, of forms of government, of customs and of ideals, and prejudices. You are not dealing with one nation, nor with one religion, nor with one ethical code, nor with one language, nor with one gen- eral trend of social custom, but with scores and scores of them. There are half a dozen different languages, and over five hundred different dia- lects.
Not to know something of all this, and some- thing of India's previous history, is to read of India, and to travel in India, with the mind blindfolded.
Social as well as all other phenomena have two aspects, the dynamic and the static; the former dealing with the forces which brought the phe- nomena into existence, the latter dealing with them as they exist. A sketch of the history of India will help with the former, and travel in India itself ought to tell us something of the lat-
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ter. But either alone avails little to understand the problem.
India has been the great jousting-ground of the world. Whoever would break a lance during the last twenty-five hundred years or more, was tempted by the tales of fabulous wealth, of con- cealed treasure, of rivers whose sands ran gold, to arm himself and set out for India. Greeks, Persians, Turks, Tartars, Mongols, Scythians, Afghans, Arabs, the Dutch, the French, the Por- tuguese and the English, and odd tribes besides, have sallied into India at one time or another, to conquer, to pillage, or to slaughter. Some of these left traces of their blood, some of them their buildings, and others their colonies. Till the British came, they brought, and they took away everything, except peace.
The British, whatever may be said of their motives for coming, or of their methods of tak- ing and keeping territory, were the first conquer- ors who brought peace and administered equal justice to all. Both justice and peace are so new to India, that their very novelty is the foster- mother of many of the problems which confront England in India to-day. Alexander the Great, Asoka, Tamerlane or Timur the Lame, Mah- mud of Ghanzi, Babar, Akbar the Great, Nadir Shah, and many more, are of those who have
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tested themselves and their followers, by a plunge ■ into India. Some of the greatest names in Eng- lish history won their first distinction in India, and Napoleon would have followed Alexander, and landed in India after Egypt, had not his plans gone awry. As soon as a soldier suc- ceeded in consolidating his power, anywhere from China on the East, to Persia on the west, of the northern frontier of India, he swooped down upon India, penetrated as far into the interior as he dared, and made off with as much booty as he could carry.
After the Greeks under Alexander, who en- tered India in 327 B. C, and who, by the way, left traces of their art in the various vases, coins, caskets, and other ornaments found since, and also in the fine Greek features of many of the images of Buddha, came a people from Central Asia, whom the historians, for want of a better name, call Scythians. They are said to have driven out the Greek dynasty from the Bactrian Kingdom on the northwest of the Himalayas, and at about the beginning of the Christian era they founded a strong monarchy in Northern India, and just beyond. Their most famous king was named Kanishka, and we shall hear of him later on as an enthusiastic disciple of Buddha. These Scythians continued to swarm across the Him-
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alayas, and into Northern India for several cen- turies, meeting and defeating, or being driven back by one after another of the Indian kings.
As early as the middle of the seventh century, began the invasions of a people who left their mark upon India as no other people have done. Muhammad, who was born in 570 A. D., left to the world a fiery faith, with which the world is not done yet. The Bombay coast was near enough to tempt these religious soldiers, and on one pretext or another they began their inva- sions of India, which were to result finally in a series of Muhammadan rulers in India, such as India had not had before, nor will ever have again.
Mahmud of Ghanzi invaded India no less than seventeen times. After a quarter of a cen- tury of fighting his small kingdom of Afghanis- tan was increased to include the Punjab. These Muhammadan conquerors, who one after an- other down to the time of Babar 1482-1530 A. D., fought their way into more and more territory in India, were of the same religion, and the same fanatical enthusiasm as those who had fought their way through Asia, Africa, Spain, and into southern France, and whose capital at Bagdad was at one time the commercial, artis- tic, scholarly, and political centre of the world.
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Stopped at last in France, the fury of conquest expended itself upon India. Names, dates, de- tails of their gradual occupation of, and sover- eignty over, almost the whole of India, will not be necessary to the readers of these papers. I have not the slightest intention of writing more than the scantiest outline of history, merely trust- ing thereby to give a setting for the rough picture which I am painting. But of six of these Mu- hammadan invaders, Babar, Hamayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, it is necessary to know something to understand the India of to-day, even though one be only a trav- eller looking at monuments, and nervously trying to keep his finger on the right page of his guide- book as he goes along.
Their influence, their monuments, their sys- tem of land tenure, revenue, and taxation, their customs and habits, and even their social moral- ity, remain visible to-day. Lucknow, Delhi, Agra, Benares, Lahore, Peshawar, and the Khai- bar Pass, are still all alive with their wealth, their devotion, and their daintiness and daring as builders.
Timur, better known as Tamerlane, at the head of a united body of Tartars, came down through the Afghan passes about 1400 A. D., entered Delhi, massacred the inhabitants for five
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days, held a feast in honor of his victory, and returned again to Central Asia, Sixth in de- scent from him was the Mughal, Babar, who in- vaded India in 1526. He writes in that remark- able Diary of his: "Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing to- gether, or of familiar intercourse. They have no genius, no politeness of manner, no kindness or fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical in- vention in planning or executing their handi- craft works, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture, they have no good horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not even a candlestick." When Babar arrived he found India fought over by native Indian rulers, and by numerous Muhammadan rulers, fighting each for his own land, or joining forces here and there in an effort to found a state which should insure breathing space.
These kingdoms exhausted themselves in quarrels amongst themselves, to such an extent, that when the Mughal emperors appeared they found them an easy prey. Changiz IChan and Timur were both ancestors of Babar. His
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grandfather the Khan of the Mongols, though seventy years old at the time, came without thought of age or distance, to bear his congratu- lations on the news of his birth. The grand- mother was likewise a woman of spirit. Her husband was defeated in battle and she was handed over as part of the booty to one of the oflBcers of the conqueror. She raised no objec- tions, but once her new master was in her apart- ments, the door was locked, she and her maids stabbed him to death and flung his body into the street. Then to the conqueror she sent the message: "Contrary to law you gave me an- other man, and I slew him. Come and slay me if you choose!" Babar had forebears of spirit. Babar kept a diary. He lived in the time of Henry VII and Michelangelo and Copernicus. He tells us in much detail the story of his life. Only from 1519 till 1530 was he in India. His early days were days of hardship, adventure, war, and sport. He took them as they came. He never whined, he never explained, and he loved life in a most unoriental way, and was the most romantic figure of his day. He was more the type of the adventurous sailors of Queen Elizabeth's day, than any Oriental we know. He was a great sportsman, a bold horseman and swimmer, and of abounding vitality and good
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humor. He loved life, even the eating and drinking part of it, and as is always the case with such suitors, life loved him. From Babar's coming in 1526 to the death of Aurangzeb in 1706, India was to a larger extent than ever be- fore, under one ruler. It should be added that at no time even then was India entirely con- quered, or completely under the sway of one Government, as it is to-day under the English.
Babar defeated the Delhi sovereign, entered Delhi, received the allegiance of the Muhamma- dans, was attacked by the Rajputs, defeated them near Agra, and when he died his power extended as far south as lower Bengal. His son Humayun, who succeeded him, was obliged to divide his inheritance with his brother, handing over to him Kabul. It was from Afghanistan that Babar had drawn his fighting men, and Humayun deprived of this, the main recruiting ground of his army, was attacked by the descend- ants of those earlier Afghan invaders, who hated the new Muhammadan rulers as much as they hated the Hindus. Finally, after years of fight- ing to hold his place, he was driven out of India by the famous Sher Shah, the governor of Bengal.
In 1556 the son of Humayun, then only four- teen years old, and in many ways the greatest of
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all the Mughal rulers, and the real founder of the Mughal Empire in India, defeated the army of the Sher Shah ruler, and his father Humayun re- turned again to India, but only to reign for a few months at Delhi, and to die in 1556.
Akbar succeeded his father, and reigned for close upon fifty years, from 1556 until 1605, his reign corresponding almost exactly to that of Queen Elizabeth, 1558-1603. He was the great- est ruler India has ever had. He welded a chaos of nations, tribes, religions, and petty chiefs and kings, into an empire. His great finance min- ister Raja Todar Mall, who was a Hindu, made the first survey and the first regular land settle- ment of India, and adjusted the taxation. Ak- bar gave the Hindus equal place and power, and played off the Hindus against the Mughal chiefs. He married the daughter of the Maharaja of Jaipur, and his son married the granddaughter of the Maharaja of Jodhpur. His careful system of police, judges, and rulers of provinces helped to make his rule both just and effective. He did away with the tax on non-Mussulmans, and he and his son and grandson were the builders of practically all the monuments which remain to make India famous to-day.
This line of princes are as well-known in In- dia as are the names of Elizabeth, Henry the
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Eighth, Charles the First, and Cromwell in Eng- land. They introduced Persian poets and print- ers, and men of letters from foreign lands. They were the Medici of India. The last of this great line of Timur died in Rangoon, as a prisoner of the British, in 1862. Their connection with India lasted, therefore, for more than four hun- dred and fifty years, or from nearly a hundred years before America was discovered, until with- in two years of the close of the war of secession. The only time that India has come near being India was under their rule.
It is along the lines laid down by Akbar that the British have worked, in the matter of land tenure and taxation. The total revenue of Ak- bar was estimated at forty-two million sterling, or about three times the amount demanded at the present time from the land. He built the tomb of his father Humayun near Delhi, the town of Fatehpur-Sikri, near Agra, in many ways the most interesting ruins in India, the fort at Allahabad, the palace at Lahore, and the red palace in the fort at Agra.
It was the Europeans who visited India at this time who brought back the expression, which still endures as a description of human splen- dor: "The Great Mughal!" Toward the end of his life, his tolerance drifted into scepticism.
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and he promulgated a new state religion, which was supposed to combine the best from all re- ligions, with Akbar as its prophet, or the head of the church. He was accused finally of even per- mitting worship of himself, a crime, be it said, of which great politicals are accused to this day, and we all know with how little reason ! Akbar died in 1605, and is buried in the splendid tomb at Sikandra, some five miles from Agra canton- ment.
It was during his reign that three Englishmen arrived with a letter from their Queen, Eliza- beth. They were John Newbery, Ralph Fitch, and William Leedes. John Newbery was lost somewhere on his travels, Leedes, who was a jeweller, remained as court stone-cutter, and Fitch returned to England. It was through his reports of the opportunities awaiting the trader in India, that the first commercial ventures from England were started. He it was in short who gave the signal for the formation of commercial companies to exploit India, with the result that India is governed by England to-day.
Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir, who reigned from 1605 till 1627. He carried on a series of wars in southern India, and lost the province of Kandahar to the Persians. Jahan- gir turned from his father's new-fangled faith.
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and personally conducted ritual, to the orthodox observances of Islam. He must have been a wag of terrifying prowess, since it is told of him that after a night of drunken revelry with some of his courtiers, one of them reminded him the next morning of what had happened. Jahangir asked the man who his companions had been in such a disgraceful debauch, then called them before him and had them beaten so severely that one of them died. He himself died in the midst of a rebellion against him, led by his son Shah Jahan. Jahangir built the tomb of Anar Kali at Lahore, and the tomb of Itimad-ud-daulah at Agra, who was a Persian named Ghiyas Beg, Jahangir's father-in-law, and the grandfather of the wife of Shah Jahan, whose tomb is the most wonderful in the world. The mightiest factor for good in Jahangir's life was his wife, Nun Jahan. He loved her twenty years and then killed her husband to get her, and, what is per- haps more astonishing still, he never regretted it. In 1603 Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to India, presented his letters to Ja- hangir from James I.
Shah Jahan was emperor of Delhi from 1628 till 1658, just about the time the Pilgrims and Puri- tans were making their first settlements in Ameri- ca. While they were building schools and
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churches of logs hewn into shape with the axe; at about the time indeed when the oldest meeting- house in America, which has been used consecu- tively for public worship, was building, now known as the "Old Meeting-House," in Hingham, Massachusetts, this Indian Emperor was plan- ning the building of the most magnificent capital in the world. No courtier in Delhi, or in Agra, and no citizen of Hingham at that time, imagined that the simple slate grave-stones in the cemetery at Hingham would mark the beginnings of a more lasting state than the jewelled tombs of Agra and Delhi.
Toward the end of his father's reign, Shah Jahan was a refugee and a rebel, conspiring against his own father. After coming to the throne he murdered his brother, Shahriyar, and all the other members of the house of Akbar who might become rivals to the throne. Dur- ing the whole of his reign his armies were at work defending, attacking, and losing or winning territory. He is said to have been just to his people, blameless in his habits, a good financier, and by far the greatest man of his day in all the East. He built the Great Mosque or Jama Masjid, at Delhi, the Palace — what is now the Fort — also at Delhi, which contains the Court of Private Audience or Diwan-i-Khas, and the
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Pearl Mosque or Moti-Masjid. The famous Peacock Throne in his Audience Hall in the Fort at Delhi, with its tail shimmering in the natural colors of rubies, diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds, was valued by the jeweller Tav- ernier at thirty-five million dollars. If he had done nothing else, his name would have been re- rnembered in India, but he did more than this. He stamped the whole world of architectural beauty with his private seal when he built the Taj Mahal.
Elsewhere one may read of the vivid incon- gruities of India, but what of this : I have just been the guest, at a splendid camp, where some seven hundred people were entertained for four days by one of the most enlightened native rulers in India. This ruler is a woman. Her Highness Sultan Begum of Bhopal. Here in India one finds a woman ruling with tact, with force, and with success. Here in India I have seen women actually catching in their hands the dung as it fell from the cattle, pressing it into cakes, car- rying it off on their heads, to dry it at home for fuel. Here in India too is the most marvel- lous memorial to a woman ever built by hu- man hands. Woman at her highest, woman at her lowest, woman immortalized, and all here in India.
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The Taj Mahal is the exquisite mausoleum built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his favorite wife Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, or "Light of the Palace." It stands on a platform of marble, twenty feet high, and three hundred feet square. The tomb itself measures one hun- dred and eighty-six feet on each side, and the dome over the centre is two hundred feet high. It is one of the most wonderful things I have seen in the world. I saw it for the first time just as the sun was setting, leaving it with the purple curtain of the horizon all about it. It looked as though a Titan had taken a huge piece of ivory satin, embroidered it, encrusted it with jewels, stiffened it into shape, and set it in the sky. It seemed quite as though it might fade, or float, away. The first clod of dry earth that falls upon a coffin must seem like the weight of a planet to some one, but here are tons of marble and not an ounce of weight. If you could blow bubbles of mother-of-pearl they would not shine more softly, or float more lightly, than the minarets and domes of this tomb. Here is a tomb that might float away with the spirit of the body to which it gives a home. It looks as though you might hold it up on your outstretched hand.
It is the only building in the world that makes one wish to pat it, smooth it, touch it, as though
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it had the soft skin of a woman. It is not something you see; you feel it, hear it, taste it. I put my hand against the marble. It was warm, it seemed to have texture and quality, as though it were the covering of something alive. I have never seen any other building that re- sembled it, or reminded me of it — and only one woman.
Inside, underneath the great marble dome, are the two marble tombs of Shah Jahan and his wife, and there the marble is like lace, so cun- ningly is it carved, with flowers inlaid in color, the colors being made of precious stones, agate, cornelian, lapis-lazuli. One can readily believe that it cost ten millions of dollars and twenty-two years of labor to make this casket.
No other woman in the world has been praised in marble and jewels as is this woman, and no other woman ever can be. There have been greater men, and lovelier women, doubtless, and countless men who have loved as much, and many, no doubt, who have loved more, but every man who has loved a woman must envy this man for having done what he would wish to, but may not do !
Around the two tombs is a screen of marble. You can look through it, as you can look through a cobweb. There are scrolls and flowers, and
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the petals and leaves of each flower are of col- ored precious stones, inlaid in the marble.
We Occidentals use urns and crosses and broken columns. This man put a diadem of brilliants on the brow of memory, as if to say: This is not something buried or broken or to be forgotten, but rather something complete and never to be forgotten, and it never will be! He was right. When a man has really loved once, he has been eaten up by it. After that it does not matter how often, or how soon, he dies. "Home is not a hearth but a woman."
Poor Shah Jahan, as he had rebelled against his father Jahangir, so he in his turn suffered from the intrigues and rebellion of his family. He fell ill. His son Aurangzeb murdered his broth- ers, and proclaimed himself emperor in 1658. He imprisoned his father and kept him in close con- finement in the Fort at Agra till he died in 1666.
I am sitting now, as I write, where Shah Jahan used to sit as a prisoner in his own palace. I can see the Taj Mahal, as he used to see it two hun- dred and fifty years ago.
As he looked across at those minarets and at that dome, he probably thought his life a fail- ure, and yet every man who sits where I am sit- ting must envy him such a success. All that the world of his generation had to give had been
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poured into a cup and lifted to his lips every day, and he had probably envied the man who was genuinely thirsty, that he might enjoy it. Now he is deserted and alone, and his cup, full of success and adulation, is in the hands of his rebellious son, who carries the key of his prison-house in his girdle, and mocks him. All he has left is his daily vision of the tomb of his wife, the Taj Ma- hal. One can pay this building no higher hom- age than to say that one envies Shah Jahan even then!
There are other buildings in Agra. There is the great Fort, with its circuit of nearly a mile, and its huge sandstone walls nearly seventy feet high, built by Akbar. Within these walls is a mosque, also built by Shah Jahan, called the Pearl Mosque, the Hall of Public Audience, the Gem Mosque, used by the ladies of the court, the Hall of Private Audience, and the miniature mosque, called the Mina Masjid, in which the Emperor made his devotions, and the splendid sandstone palace, and so on.
He must have revelled in building, and for- tunately there were eyes that dreamed beauty, and sure hands to make buildings of the dreams to do his bidding. No one before, and no one after, till the British took possession, was more completely master of India than Shah Jahan.
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The Mughal Emperors culminated in Shah Ja- han, and their pinnacle is the Taj Mahal.
As long ago as 1398 Timur, or Tamerlane, as he is better known to us, poured his hordes of followers through the Afghan passes from Tar- tary. Shah Jahan's grandfather Akbar, was the sixth in descent from this barbarian warrior. One wonders who and what our first ances- tors could have been, who drifted over the world from Central Asia, and whose descendants built the Acropolis, the Forum, the cathedrals and churches of Italy and France, Germany, and England, and the Taj Mahal in India. At any rate one is proud to be of that Aryan stock.
The last of this great line of Mughal emper- ors, who really held India together, was Aurang- zeb, who proclaimed himself emperor while his father Shah Jahan was still living. He ruled from 1658 till 1707. His reign began in rebellion against his father, and ended in the rebellion of his own sons against him. He devoted practi- cally his whole forty-nine "years as a ruler to the conquest of southern India, and for the last half of the time he was in the field himself at the head of a huge, and what proved to be an unwieldy, army.
A new power had sprung up in the south, known as the Maratha Confederacy, and Au-
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rangzeb, who had become a bitter and partisan Muhammadan, lost the friendly co-operation of Hindu generals and Hindu viceroys, who had helped to consolidate the Mughal power under Akbar.
The religious sect of the Hindus, the Sikhs in the north, the Marathas in the south, and the Rajputs in the west, now hemmed in, and grad- ually dismembered, the great Mughal Empire in India. As we shall see later, it was from the Marathas and the Sikhs and not from the Mug- hals, that the British took control of India. Au- rangzeb by his stubborn policy put India again into the hands of bigoted Hinduism and big- oted Islamism, from which Akbar had wrenched it clear.
While this great empire was falling to pieces in the hands of the feeble successors of these six great emperors, other enemies appeared.
The Persian king, Nadir Shah, held a carni- val of slaughter and debauchery in 1739, last- ing nearly two months, in and around Delhi, and is said to have carried away with him booty, in- cluding the peacock throne, to the value of one hundred and fifty millions of dollars.
The Afghans, time and time again, poured through the now unprotected passes, and burned, and sacked, and slew. The whole borderland
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between northern India and Afghanistan was swept bare of wealth and of people, and lay bar- ren for years. It was during this time of an- archy, and internecine fighting, if fighting be- tween such diversified inhabitants of the same country may be described as internecine, that the British began patching together piece by piece, what is to-day their Indian Empire. While the others were quarrelling and fighting over re- ligious, social, political, and hereditary shadows, the British bull-dog walked off with the bone. He was not permitted to enjoy it in peace for years. The last war with the Marathas was not ended till 1818, and the Sikhs were not con- quered by the British till 1849.
That eminent and satisfactory historian of the Indian peoples. Sir William WUson Hunter, writes: "Akbar had rendered a great empire possible in India by conciliating the native Hindu races. He thus raised up a powerful third party, consisting of the native military peoples of In- dia, which enabled him alike to prevent new Muhammadan invasions from Central Asia, and to keep in subjection his own Muhammadan governors of provinces. Under Aurangzeb and his miserable successors, this wise policy of conciliation was given up. Accordingly, new Muhammadan hordes soon swept down from
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Afghanistan; the Muhammadan Governors of Indian provinces set themselves up as indepen- dent potentates; and the warHke Hindu races, who had helped Akbar to create the Mughal Empire, became, under his foolish posterity the chief agents of its ruin."
When Columbus discovered America, he was trying to find a sea -passage to India. He car- ried in his pocket a letter from his sovereign to the Khan of Tartary !
When Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa, and discovered the sea route to India in 1498, he turned the whole current of power and com- merce. The Arabs had made Bagdad the centre of trade between the East and the Mediterranean nations. As early as the year 931 A. D., exam- inations of candidates for permission to practise medicine were held at Bagdad, which was already then a centre not only of commerce, but of culture. The Crusaders made certain Italian cities, Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, rich, because it was through them that these multi- tudes poured on their way to the East. They did the transporting of men and stores and horses. At the height of their power the Tabula Amalfitana were the sea laws for the whole Medi- terranean. When Pisa, Amalfi, and finally Genoa were subjugated by their rivals, Venice became
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the world's great sea-power, and also the centre of the world's commerce and the world's art and culture. Her ships covered the sea, and she numbered her sailors in tens of thousands. Find- ing that the through journey was too long, the Venetians arranged with the northern towns of Europe to make one town, lying between Italy and the traders of the north, a centre or store- house, where exchange of goods might be con- veniently effected. They agreed to make Bruges that centre, and thereafter Bruges in the north, and Venice in the south, handled the trade of the world.
Vasco da Gama's discovery came like a magic wand to change all this. It was cheaper to trade by way of the newly discovered sea-route, and Lisbon, lying half-way between East and West, became the great market of the world, and by far the most potent Western factor in the East. There followed the tremendous war between Spain, which had conquered Portugal in 1580, and those great trading towns of the north then centred in Holland. For nearly a hundred years the war raged between Spain and HoUand, and at the end of it, or the beginning of the sev- enteenth century, the Dutch were masters of the world. New York was Dutch, Brazil was Dutch, India was Dutch, and the Cape of Good
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Hope was Dutch, and of course the Eastern trade was Dutch. The Thirty Years' War and the civil war in England only made them stronger, till one wonders why the Dutch rather than the British did not become a great empire.
But a "fat soil," a "wealthy community," bred a race of what would now be 9alled "Lit- tle Hollanders." No one, they thought, would dare attack the world-power which had swept Spain oflf the seas. No doubt there were poli- ticians to tell the people that the huge navy was an incubus, that more money was wanted for the poor, where so many were rich, and that the era of peace had come at last. Certainly that psalm- singing, devout Protestant across the North Sea, Cromwell, who was training an army and build- ing a navy, merely of course to protect the com- merce of England, was the last man to be sus- pected of designs upon Holland. Was he not continually saying that his army and his navy were merely brought into existence to preserve peace! When all was ready, and the Dutch pol- iticians had succeeded in rendering Holland fully unprepared for war, this man of prayer, and psalm, and Bible, struck his blow in 1652, and Holland lost her empire, lost her mastery of the sea, lost her commercial supremacy, and all be- cause she was fat and rich.
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Cromwell's navigation laws were what are now known, and reviled, as high tariff laws. By Cromwell's Navigation Act all goods of every description, wherever grown or manufactured, were to be imported into Great Britain only in ships belonging to British subjects, of which the master and a majority of the crew were British bom ; and all goods produced in Europe must be brought into Great Britain either in British bot- toms, or in ships belonging to that country in which they were actually produced. The Dutch were exporters of cheese, but had been carrying the trade of the world in their ships!
It is easy to see against whom the new Navi- gation Act was aimed. There followed an enor- mous expansion in British foreign trade, which has never ceased to grow from that day until within the last few years.
When a man arms himself with the Bible, and clothes himself in the shining armor of scripture, look out for him! One seems to be able to strike more suddenly, more unexpectedly, and more fiercely with that weapon than with any other.
England's greatness began and grew under Protection. France on land, and England on the sea, destroyed utterly the Dutch commercial supremacy, and then for a century England and
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France fought for the mastery of the sea, for the trade of the East, for commercial supremacy. Finally at Waterloo the mastery was gained, and the British Empire has had plain sailing from that day till within the last few years.
There are few more exciting stories than this history of the fight for the commercial empire of the world, which ended in England's becoming the trader, the manufacturer, the ship-builder, the ship-owner, the banker, and the policeman of the world. It is a tempting task to fit in illus- trations, to make comparisons, to point to the beginnings of similar weaknesses, and parallel examples of rottenness here and there in the social and political fabric of other great imperial powers, which seem to unfold prophecies for the future, but I leave that to the Englishman. I am not his Cassandra. This whisp of the history of commerce is given here merely to introduce "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies," better known as the English East India Company, or the "John Company," who started business with one hun- dred and twenty-five shareholders, and a capital of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The man with that amount of capital is not considered a rich man in London or New York to-day. Nonetheless it was this trading com-
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pany who won, and held, and turned over to the British crown, the empire of India.
The Portuguese and the Dutch fought them in the beginning, the French fought them later, and one power after another succumbed to them in India itself. By the middle of the eighteenth century all European opposition was at an end, and by the middle of the nineteenth century India itself was practically in their hands and under their control. To be quite accurate, 1783, and the peace of Versailles, marks the date when the maritime powers of Europe withdrew from all serious rivalry in conquest or commerce with England in India. After that date the contest is wholly between England and the native rulers for ascendancy in India.
The first territorial possession of the East In- dia Company was Madras, and the site upon which Fort St. George was built was bought from the Raja of Chandragiri in 1639. In 1661 Bombay was turned over to the English crown by the Portuguese, as part of the dowry of Cath- erine of Braganza, the queen of Charles II., and in 1668 King Charles sold his rights to the East India Company for an annual payment of fifty dollars! In 1700, the company bought from a son of the Emperor Aurangzeb certain villages, which were united to form what is now Calcutta.
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Two men whose names are seldom mentioned, and rarely seen, gained for English commerce al- most the first legal foothold in India, The ship surgeon, Gabriel Broughton, who cured Shah Jahan's daughter when she was badly burned; when asked to name his fee, requested that the East India Company might be allowed to trade in Bengal free of all duty.
The staff surgeon, William Hamilton, who when the court physicians had failed, cured the Emperor Farokshir of a tumor in the back in 1715, asked for the thirty odd villages surround- ing the Company's factory near Calcutta, and for some villages near Madras, which gave the English control of both these ports. British commerce leaves Hamilton's tombstone neg- lected in Calcutta, and nobody even knows where Broughton's bones lie!
The transfer of the supreme power of India from the grasp of the Great Mughal to this little company of English traders, makes a story as brilliant and adventurous as any story in history.
The rise of British power in India virtually be- gins in 1745, and the two great names are those of Clive and Hastings. One died a suicide, and the other after an impeachment lasting seven years was completely impoverished. There are men in India to-day, and fine fellows they are.
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risking their health and their lives, and those of their families, to keep India for England, and there are almost as many voluble orators at home making it as diflScult as they can for them. There are so many people nowadays who think this a topsy-turvy world because they are underneath, not realizing that the world would be upside- down indeed if they were not, that governing, particularly the governing of alien peoples, has become increasingly difficult.
In the days of Clive and Hastings, and for about one hundred years after, there was no rail- way, nor cable, nor Suez Canal. The man on the spot was authoritative and responsible. The Oriental is still unable to understand divided au- thority, authority dictated from an unseen source. It may be safely said that had the present govern- mental machinery been in existence in 1745, In- dia might never have become a fief of the British Crown. It is sometimes fatal to interfere even when a man is making mistakes. Interference may poison the mistakes with lack of confidence, tUl they wilt into abject and costly failure. While mistakes may teach a man, interference always bewilders him and those under him.
After the death of Aurangzeb, a new power, the Marathas, though of Hindu origin, with their home in the plains east of Bombay, overran, and
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practically took possession of, northern and cen- tral India. Sivaji, their great leader, began his pillaging crusades even before the death of Au- rangzeb. After his death a Brahman family, whose head took the title of Peshwa, led these people, and carried on for a hundred years a contest with the British. The great principali- ties of Baroda, Gwalior, Indore and Nagpur, the rulers of three of which I am shortly to visit, were the centres of this power.
The Sikhs, now some of the best soldiers in the Indian army, also maintained for nearly seventy- five years a sovereignty of their own in the Pun- jab, and were only finally disposed of as rivals to the British in 1849.
Of the Europeans, who from the beginning of the seventeenth century had attempted the ex- ploitation of the commerce of India, the Portu- guese, the Dutch, the Danes had disappeared, and when Clive appeared upon the scene, only the French remained as formidable rivals. The battles of Wandiwash, of the famous Plassey, of Buxar, all fought between 1757 and 1764, ended the French rivalry, and the British were left to deal with the problem of subduing what remained of opposition in India itself.
Another quarter of a century passed before Wellesley, later the great Duke of Wellington,
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finally disposed of the Maratha confederacy; and it was not till 1856, when Lord Dalhousie, prob- ably the greatest of all the governor-generals of India, having annexed the Punjab in 1849, took over control of the kingdom of Oudh, roughly the territory about Lucknow, that the map of India became what it is to-day. It was Dal- housie who wrote just before taking this grave step: "With this feeling on my mind, and in humble reliance on the blessing of the Almighty (for millions of His creatures will draw freedom and happiness from the change) , I approach the execution of this duty gravely and not without solicitude, but calmly and without doubt." The next year, 1857, was the year of the Mutiny!
I quote this passage because I wish to call at- tention to what I believe to have been the secret of England's success in India. This success has been accounted for in many ways. It was com- mercial greed, say some critics ; it was brute force ; it was the leverage of power that Great Brit- ain had gained first in Europe, write the histori- ans. The first steps were, if you please, along the path of commercial greed, but later when the severe work of administration, pacification, and consolidation was done, it was quite another force that crowned the work. The civil service was recruited by examination from the Bible-
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reading upper and middle-class of Great Britain; game-playing, adventurous and healthy, but at bottom duty-loving young barbarians, who be- lieved that India was delivered into their hands to be saved from itself.
The first and foremost of them was Clive, a tall, silent, rather morose English lad, who began his career by accusing an officer of cheating at cards. There followed a duel. Clive missed, his adversary held his pistol to Clive's head and bade him beg for his life and retract his accusa- tion. "Fire and be damned to you! I said you cheated and you did. I'll never pay you!" was the reply.
There have been hundreds of lesser Clives in India since that day, and to them is due the con- quest and peaceful government of India, more than to any other one force.
Imagine the United States of America peopled by Sioux, Apaches, Mexicans, and Negroes. Im- agine some Mughal conqueror arriving by the Behring Straits, and after centuries subduing this conglomeration of fighters, factions, religions, and languages. Pampered and rich, the conquer- ors lose control. The land is covered with small principalities. There is a king in Florida, an- other in Mexico, another in Massachusetts, and there are armed bands of Mexican bandits, of
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Apache raiders, of Sioux freebooters. Imagine the country filled with jewels, brocades, silks, gold, silver, stored up for centuries by an indus- trious, uncommercial people, who had never learned to spend, and whose rich lived almost as simply as the poor. Something like that state of affairs is what the British had to deal with when Clive saw that merely to win a battle here and there was not enough, but that if the British were to stay in safety, they must have sovereign rights over the land itself. They now control the whole million and a half square miles.
IV
FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON
ON landing at Bombay one discovers that no experience of travel elsewhere has prepared the way. The luxuries are dif- ferent, the hardships are different, the whole set- ting of life is different. I am greeted on the landing-stage by a lean, chocolate-colored Indian, in flowing robes and a huge white turban, who presents a letter from a soldier friend in Luck- now, who has engaged him as servant or "bear- er" for our tour. He is solemnity personified, and his eyes are brown depths of unfathomable impenetrability. During the many weeks he was with us, I saw him smile but once. We were driving at Delhi, he was sitting on the box with the coachman. One of the ponies became frac- tious and landed one of his heels on the shin of the driver, who howled with pain, Heera Tall smiled, but even then there was no light, no keen- ness of joy or sorrow in his eyes. What he thought about this incident, or what he thought about anybody or anything else, I shall never
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know, but I conclude that it was not of much importance.
It is the easy habit both of those who have lived long in India, and of those who merely trot through India, to describe the people as inscru- table, and to assume that there are depths of thought and feeling behind the unknown tongue, and the unchanging eyes, which are too subtle for the Western mind. It occurs to the traveller sometimes that this is a mistake. There is a great difference between the indefinite and the in- definable. It is possible that India is not so much inscrutable as faded. This old, old civiliza- tion may have been printed so often from the same type that the lettering is now blurred and indecipherable. It may be illegible, too, be- cause the font of type conveys nothing very in- telligent or profound even to the users thereof.
Because there was a great literature in India two thousand years B. C; a well-authenticated philosophy worked out into a considered system five hundred years B, C; a Sanskrit grammar compiled about 350 B. C, which is still the foundation for all study of the Aryan language; an astronomy which had succeeded in making a fairly correct calculation of the solar year, 2000 B. C; the discoveries of notation both by frac- tions and algebra; a system of medicine, with
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hospitals and dissecting-rooms; an art of music, with its seven notes, invented 500 B. C; a code of law, the Code of Manu, put into its present form about 400 A. D.; and a vast collection of legends and stories in verse, the Mahabharata, the main story dealing with a period not later than 1200 B. C, because all this is the fruit of the soil of India, one is perhaps tempted to overrate what exists of intellectual prowess to-day. The inscrutability may be emptiness rather than depth.
My singular opinion on this subject was not derived from a study of the bearer, Heera Tall, alone, for his patient inscrutability was, I am now convinced, merely a veil of depravity. He knew that what he knew and thought about was best left to the idealism of the cloudiest possible haziness.
I was honored with the opportunity to know barristers, journalists, soldiers, native officials and judges, teachers, holy men, small landhold- ers, peasants, monks, princes, and educated wo- men, while in India, and I conclude that indefi- niteness, rather than profundity, describes their education and their philosophy of life. It is not only in India, and at this present time, that easy- going and rather flabby intellects have been will- ing to accept the high-flown, the turgid, and the indefinite as wonderful and weighty.
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The bluster of the demagogue appeals to the many, and the mental gyrations of the transcen- dental lecturer to fashionable women appeal to them, at any rate so long as they do not under- stand him. Ignotum fro magnifico, applies in the West as well as in the East. It is almost incredible, as an example of this, that Emerson should have said of Bronson Alcott and his silly "all things are spiral," that Alcott's was the greatest philosophic mind since Plato. There are even fewer men who have minds of their own than have fortunes of their own. We are all directly descended intellectually from Animism, and the clouds and mists, the distortions and noises of the mind are accepted with awe by most of us, as mysteries too deep for us, when as a matter of fact what is not clear is generally the result of lazy thinking, rather than the exploit of an intellect dealing with matters too high for us.
Of the religion and ideals of the overwhelm- ing majority of the people, I have written, and it seems to be a fatigued philosophy, and a blurred idealism, which animate even the leaders. The climate, and the habits which necessarily follow, tend to drowsiness, rather than to alertness and well-defined wants and wishes.
Even the progressive men and women of In- dia are still steeped in the atmosphere of autoc-
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racy. They fumble badly with the new scheme of government, brought to them by their pres- ent rulers, the English. England's greatness is due in no small degree to the fact that she has held stubbornly to the belief, despite republics and revolutions, that all men are not equal, nor all entitled to an equal degree of liberty, but all entitled to an equal degree of justice. France substituted a sham equality for constitutional liberty, and the results are seen in that country to-day in the hateful and hampering tyrannies of bureaucracy. England goes so far as to de- clare by law that her people are not equal, but she administers justice to all alike, with an im- partiality and a rigidity unknown anywhere else in the world. Equality is a sham, justice is a reality. Equality has never been realized, jus- tice has been done. One is purely theoretical, the other practical. England thus far has pre- ferred the possible reality to the impossible sham, with the result that her citizens have more per- sonal liberty, and are more unfettered in their activities, than the citizens of any other country. I found few, even among the educated in In- dia, who wanted justice. What they called jus- tice I found meant nearly always preference. The unrest and sedition in India are entangled in this mesh of misunderstanding, and their
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Western sympathizers are unwittingly making matters worse, by using words which mean one thing to them, and another thing to those to whom they are addressed. It should not be forgotten in studying them that their attitude toward the science of government is as old and as deeply bedded in their brains as their lit- erature, their astronomy, and their religion. Thousands of years of dampening of individual effort, of trusting to cunning, to bribery, to in- sidious influence, have distorted all notions of justice. They suffer from what Lord Curzon admirably phrases as the "immemorial curse of Oriental nations, the trail of the serpent that is found everywhere from Stamboul to Peking — the vicious incubus of officialism, paramount, selfish, domineering, and corrupt. Distrust of private enterprise is rooted in the mind trained up to believe that the government is everything and the individual nothing."
One's boyhood notions of Clive and Hastings, and of the " John Company," are at once modi- fied. An hour on shore in Bombay is enough. Even the light is diflferent. It is like that white light, so purely artificial, in which you are placed by the photographer when he asks you to as- sume a natural expression. The effect upon you at the photographer's, and upon everybody in
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India, is the same: in defending yourself from the light you assume a concealing expression. Thousands of years of this light have done more than we think, probably, to produce the inscruta- bility so much talked of, and which may after all be mainly physical.
Another consequence of this hot white light is that one's clothes are piled on the head to pro- tect the brain. Most of the natives in the streets have more yards of stuff on their heads than on their bodies. Color runs riot. Pinks, blues, vermilion, orange, brown, yellow, red, saffron, and many shades of all of them, are worn by men and women ; even the bullock-carts, and the horns of the bullocks themselves, are daubed with glaring colors. Bare legs, breasts, and arms become so soon familiar that the most scrupu- lously pantalooned puritanism soon ceases to notice anything unusual.
The short journey to the hotel reveals the teeming millions, for where else could nine men be spared to walk through the streets with a grand-piano balanced on their heads ; reveals the disdain of time, for where else is a trotting bul- lock a standard of speed, except in Madeira where the oxen draw sledges; reveals the una- shamed duplicity, for within an hour after our meeting Heera Tall has announced his wages per
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month as just twice the amount that my friend in Lucknow has written me I ought to pay; re- veals the supremacy of the white race, for where else in this democratic world may the white man walk straight, unconscious and unmenacing, and yet find a lane made for him, as though he were a locomotive running on a pair of rails through a town of prairie dogs ?
An official of importance tells me that the first thing he does on his holiday visits to England is to walk down the Strand, that he may recover from the place-giving, salaaming natives whom he governs, and be jostled and elbowed back into the equitable pedestrianism of the West. One might infer from this that the Englishman likes it, that the white traveller likes it. I can only say for myself, and for the scores of English of- ficials high and low that I met, and some of whom I knew well, that it is not a situation that the white man produces or wishes; rather is it wholly and entirely what the native has evolved as a penetrating and all-embracing legal atmosphere. This is his notion of justice, and order, and equality. He created it ages ago for his own defence, and he perpetuates it to-day for his own security. Palpable power he must have, or there is anarchy. No one knows better than the rich Parsi, or the intriguing Bengali, or
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the peasant proprietor, or the head-men, or the money-lenders and laborers, that the white man's unimpeded march straight through city or vil- lage streets is the symbol for them all, of their life, and fire, and property insurance.
If this is modern Bombay, what must have been the Calcutta and the Madras of one hun- dred and fifty years ago, when Clive and Hast- ings laid the foundation-stones of British India ? What indeed was the England of those days, the England of George I, who could not read Eng- lish and "who loved nothing but punch and fat women"; the England of George II, who "had been a bad son, a worse father, an unfaithful husband, and an ungraceful lover"; the Eng- land over whose political life was the soiling smear of Walpolean corruption; the England whose cabinet ministers fought for the control of the secret-service fund used for the bribery of the members of the House of Commons; the England which protested not a word that Fox, as paymaster of the forces, should have a hun- dred thousand pounds of the nation's money out at interest for his own account, and who at one time made a mart of his office, and paid away as much as twenty-five thousand pounds in one morning, in the purchase of votes to buy sup- port for a timorous government?
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When one stops to think of the political con- ditions of government in the country from which Clive and Hastings came, and of the conditions in the land to which they went, one is surprised at their guiltlessness. Clive fought like an Eng- lishman, but he bribed, deceived, and on one oc- casion actually forged a name to a treaty, like an Oriental. Both he and Hastings grew to look upon the getting and keeping of wealth, in a fash- ion that ruins men, whether in Calcutta in the eighteenth, or in New York in the twentieth cen- tury. Such rupees, and such dollars, can only buy the clothing of a convict, though their wear- ers and their descendants live in palaces.
Clive, who was bom in 1725, went out to In- dia as a clerk in the service of the East India Company at the age of eighteen. He was a whole year getting from London to Madras, one can go from London to Bombay now in fourteen days, and the territory of the company he was to serve consisted of a few square miles, and even for that, rent was paid to the native govern- ments. Here is a picture of an uncouth and morbid young man, destined to mope in an office chair. The French and the English go to war. A French governor of Mauritius captures Ma- dras. Clive joins the army, but peace is declared and he returns to his desk. Peace in Europe did
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not impose peace in India. A Frenchman of great ability, Dupleix, by name, saw the oppor- tunity to tie together the scattered fagots of power left in India after the death of Aurangzeb, the last of the Mughals, and began to do so. He played one Indian state against another, and backed by a small, but vastly superior force in point of efficiency, he put, and kept in power the native ruler or rulers he favored, and he soon became himself the supreme influence in south- ern India. Clive is now twenty-five. He urged his superiors to strike a blow to save India, and the English trading company, from complete French supremacy. He marched to Arcot, and took it without a blow. He was besieged there, he was offered large bribes to surrender, held out for fifty days, was attacked, defeated the enemy, and marched back to Madras as the first suc- cessful English soldier in India. There he found Major Stringer Lawrence just arrived from Eng- land, and his superior in command. The Law- rences could make a frieze of their names around India's temple of fame. This first Lawrence won Clive's friendship, and between them in two years they broke the power of the French in India. The "fierce equality" of the Republic to be, of the French Revolution, could brook no superior men then, as now. Dupleix was stripped of his
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fortune and his fame, and died in obscurity; La- bourdonnais was sent to the Bastille, and Lally was dragged to his execution with a gag between his lips. No wonder the French are not col- onists !
Clive returned to England, still a boy, to be toasted as "General" Clive, and to receive a diamond-hilted sword from the company which he had saved. In 1755 he sailed for India with a commission of lieutenant-colonel, and the ap- pointment of governor of Fort St. David at Madras.
The province of Bengal was governed by a native prince of eighteen, who, becoming jealous of the growing power of the English, found an excuse for attacking Calcutta. Most of the Eng- lish fled down the river, but one hundred and forty-six remained. Surajah Dowlah or Siraj- ud-daula — his name deserves to be remembered — ordered these prisoners to be confined in the jaU at Fort William, a room eighteen feet square. It was June. I know the heat of Calcutta in March, what must it be in June .'' The na- tives prodded these English men, women, and children into the jail, and laughed at them and ridiculed them as they suffocated. In the morn- ing twenty-three were taken out alive. The one Englishwoman who survived was sent oflf to the
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harem of the young prince. This is the Black Hole of Calcutta story.
Truly the English are a phlegmatic race. In the year 1910, in Calcutta again, they screen the motor-car of their viceroy, of the representa- tive of their king, with heavy wire netting, be- cause the descendants of the people of Surajah Dowlah throw stones at him. It seems a slow method of teaching self-government in India, and somewhat expensive in the lives of men and chil- dren, and the purity of women, but no doubt they know best.
On hearing of this outrage, Clive and a squad- ron under Admiral Watson sailed for Calcutta. Calcutta was recovered with little fighting, and much to Clive's regret the Nawab Surajah Dow- lah consented to a peace, and made compensa- tion to the company for their money losses — the men, women, and children were not paid for ! This might have been the end of the story, but again there was war between England and France. Clive took up the gauntlet in India. Surajah Dowlah sided with the French. Clive marched out to Plassey, about seventy miles north of Calcutta, with 1,000 Europeans, 2,000 Sepoys, and 8 pieces of artillery. The Nawab's army numbered 35,000 foot and 15,000 horse. Clive attacked while the enemy were at dinner,
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and scattered the Nawab's army to the winds. This was June 23, 1757, just a hundred years before the Mutiny.
Clive demanded over 2,000,000 pounds ster- ling as an indemnity, and was paid a little more than half that sum, of which Rs. 200,000 went to Clive as commander-in-chief, and Rs. 1,600,- 000 as a private donation. A sum equal to about one million dollars of our money at that time. The rupee has since declined very much in value. At the same time the landholders' rights of the 882 square miles around Calcutta were granted to the company. Later, the land tax was given to Clive personally, and he thus became the land- lord of the company he served.
Following the fashion of the day, Clive schemed to put his own candidate, Mir Jafar, in the place of Surajah Dowlah. While prepar- ing to oust him, he plotted against him and used, amongst others, a wily Hindu named Omichund. The Hindu, knowing the secrets of the plot, threatened to inform Surajah Dowlah, unless he were promised a bribe of three hundred thou- sand pounds. He further demanded that this payment to himself should figure in the treaty. Clive prepared two treaties, one shown to the Hindu blackmailer with the promise of payment included, the other without it. Fearing that
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Admiral Watson would disapprove, he forged Watson's name to the treaty. When all was over, the Hindu was informed that he had been out-Orientalized by Clive, and later went mad.
Mir Jafar began to fear the very power that upheld him, and secretly intrigued with a Dutch force which arrived from Java. Clive routed these. Their ships were destroyed, their troops scattered, and three months later Clive sailed for England. He was a great man now, and be it said he had great expectations of the honors to be awarded him at home. Who has not been disappointed in such expectations ? Clive was. He was a rich man now. He had sent home more than two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and he had besides the spendid income from the land rents given him by the grateful Indian prince he had supported. Praise has a parasite, one steady and constant companion, malice. Clive was attacked in Parliament, and he was attacked even by the shareholders of the East India Company.
Five years after leaving India for the second time, he was besought, even by those who had attacked him, to go back to save India again, to save her from the bribe-taking and personal ped- dling of the company's own servants. Stories of repeated revolutions, of a disorganized, pillag-
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ing, and corrupt administration reached Lon- don. Clive alone could save the situation.
He was made governor and commander-in- chief of the British possessions in Bengal, and as Baron Clive of Plassey in the peerage of Ire- land, he arrived in Calcutta in May, 1765, and remained a year and a half. He had now to fight the corruption, both military and civilian, of his own people. Even British officers threat- ened to resign if they were not allowed to steal. He forbade the receiving of gifts from natives, he prohibited private trade, he increased the sal- aries of the company's servants, he set the house of India in order, declined any reward, and re- turned to England poorer than when he left it.
These were the days of the nabob, and Clive was pointed to as the chief nabob of all. Eng- lishmen of little education, training, or taste, returned from India with swiftly made fortunes. They out-housed, out-carriaged, out-entertained, out-spent, and outraged the feelings of their home-keeping neighbors. Like many of the present-day American millionaires, they rode rough-shod mounted on Money. India in those days was far away from England. People did not go there for a winter's jaunt as now they go. Officers, military and civil, did not go and come, and send their wives and daughters home
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during the hot season. Men went to India, even the servants of the East India Company went, to exploit India not to serve her, to bring back a fortune as speedily as possible for themselves, not to protect the wealth, and to increase the wealth, and to conserve the resources of India for the people of India.
They formed connections that were degrading, they made themselves as comfortable as a horde of cheap and obsequious servants could make them, and they became a race apart, bom of unlettered and irresponsible prosperity. When they returned to their native land they had other moral habits, tyrannous and irritable manners, ways of vulgar self-assertion, and the belief that mouthfuls of oaths and fistfuls of gold were the proper and most eflScient weapons of civilization. They bound books that they did not read, they bought pictures they did not appreciate, they housed themselves as territorial magnates, who were but social pygmies, and substituted a gilded self -consciousness for family tradition. It is doubtful whether the manners and morals of the majority of their enemies, either then or now, oflPered security of standing, for the criticisms passed upon either the nabob of the eighteenth or the nabob of the twentieth century. There is a crowd of social as of political urchins always
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with leisure, and always ready to join in the pur- suit of the unfortunate and the unpopular.
" I've rings on my fingers, I've bells on my toes, I've elephants to ride upon My little Irish Rose.
So come to your Nabob," &c. &c.
was one of the jingles of the general ridicule of the time. When virtue, righteously indignant, sounded the horn for the chase, malice, envy, jealousy, and their cur-companions joined the pack, delighted to have the opportunity to yelp, and snarl, and snap, and bite if possible, in such distinguished company, and under auspices which made their jackal impudence look leonine. One may admire the Burke of those days, or of this, but the pack of muck-rakers which yelps the chorus is as contemptible now as then. One is tempted to defend the nabob merely because the majority of his accusers and assailants are actuated by such mean motives.
I sometimes shock my dilettante and prema- turely effete American friends, by expressing my hearty enjojmaent of the horde of Occidental na- bobs from my own country, who nowadays pour through Europe. Their naif test of what is pre- cious by its price ; their sentimental longing and
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reverence for what is old; the clothing of their women, imitated from the only models they are privileged to see at close quarters, the cocottes of Paris ; their reiterated nasal narration of the his- tory of their dollars, and their glowing enumera- tion of those to come ; their swiftly acquired and confidential comradeship with hotel clerks, cou- riers, and shop-keepers; their confident views, boldly expressed, upon subjects with the element- ary aspects of which they are totally unfamiliar; their chief occupations, which seem to be spend- ing money, advertising their wives and daughters in the newspapers, and explaining their ances- try, in all these symptoms I rejoice. Such peo- ple are the signal and sonorous heralds of the power of mere money, and at the same time ominous examples of the graces it destroys; they are hard-featured and soft-handed; they are cultivated by those who would prey upon them, and shunned almost with loathing by the aris- tocracy of simplicity, sincerity, and responsi- bility; they are the modern barbarians of the Rome of modem civilization; they are of those who must define the word "gentleman" them- selves in order to be included in the definition, and no body of men spend so much time at the task ; and even now against their brutal and con- scienceless methods the state is arming itself.
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Every one knows the names of these leaders of the Goths and Vandals