Part 14

The Registers used to have the trial of civil suits for property, if not more than five hundred rupees (£50) in value. The abolitionists urged the injustice of letting raw youths experimentalise upon small suits, to the supposed detriment of poor suitors. There was a show of reason in this mode of arguing; but those who used it did not give due weight to the consideration that these youths were to become the dispensers of justice to all classes, and that it was better for the country to suffer a little from their blunders at the outset, than to have them at last advanced to the highest posts on the judgment-seat without any judicial training whatsoever. But, in fact, the whole argument was based upon a mere assumption. The young Registers certainly committed occasional blunders, as old Justices and Aldermen, if we are to believe the daily papers, constantly commit them in England; but, on the whole, their courts were generally popular and in good repute among the natives. The young civilian had often a pride in his own little court of record, liked to know that it was well thought of, and was sometimes pleased to find parties shaping their plaints so as to bring them within the limits of his cognisance.

They thus often acquired a personal regard for the people, whom it was their pride, as well as their duty, to protect—a feeling which has since, we fear, been too much weakened. The young civilians of the present day, though excellent men of business, and accomplished linguists, have seldom any individual feeling for the natives, whom they regard in a light for which no word occurs to us so happily expressive as the French term, “les administrés.” Thus it happened that the abolition of Registerships proved almost the death-blow to the Cornwallis system, and shook, not merely the framework, but the very principles of judicial administration throughout the country. It was followed up by a series of measures, all calculated to lower the judicial department of the service, and to prove to the natives that the protection of the law, promised in the still unrepealed regulations, was thenceforward to prove illusory, wherever it was required to shield them from the encroachments of any new scheme or theory finding favour for the moment with an executive government ruling avowedly upon principles of expediency, and seeking every occasion to shake off the trammels imposed upon its freedom of action by the cautious provisions of the Cornwallis code.

The people soon found in their rulers under the new system a scrupulous discharge of all positive duties, combined with a diminished consideration for native prejudices, a neglect of many punctilios of etiquette, and a stern hostility to every exceptional privilege exempting an individual in any degree from the operation of the rules of general administration. This last-mentioned tendency showed itself particularly in the case of the rent-free tenures, which had for some ten years previously been undergoing revision.

These landed tenures were held under grants from former rulers, exempting the grantee and his heirs from all payment on the score of revenue, though sometimes, as in our own feudal tenures, imposing upon him obligations of suit and service in some form or other.

When the framers of the Cornwallis code, in 1793, determined on recognising the validity of every such tenure as was held under an authentic and sufficient grant, a provision was at the same time made for their being carefully recorded and registered.

This duty of registration was, however, either totally neglected or very imperfectly performed, and the consequence was, that by collusive extensions of their limits, and other means, such as it would be tedious to explain, the rent-free tenures were gradually eating into the rent-paying lands forming the main source of the revenues of the state. Careful revision, therefore, became necessary, and was in fact commenced so far back as the year 1819. The inquiry was intrusted to the officers of the revenue department; but for some time permission was left to those discontented with their award, to bring the question at issue between them and the Government before the regular courts of justice for final decision. This process proving too tardy, in about ten years afterwards a sort of exchequer court, called a Special Commission, was erected for the trial of appeals from the decisions of the revenue authorities on the validity of rent-free grants. This commission was filled by officers of the judicial branch of the service, and their proceedings, carried on in strict conformity with the practice of the courts of civil justice, gave no offence, and created no alarm, notwithstanding that extensive tracts were brought by their decisions under the liability of paying revenue to the state. But not long after the country had entered into the third period of its administration, the revenue authorities got impatient of all restraint, and sought to break through the impediments of judicial procedure and rules. The primary proceedings, being intrusted to young deputy-collectors, were carried on with a rapidity which rendered due investigation utterly impossible, and all real inquiry must have been deemed superfluous by juniors, who saw their superiors gravely pronounce, even in official documents, that the very existence of a rent-free tenure was an abuse, and ought to be abated.

We have said that the forgeries practised by some, and the extension of their privileges by others of the holders, rendered strict investigation of rent-free tenures an immediate necessity and a duty. Still, it was to be borne in mind, that our faith was pledged to the recognition of all _genuine_ grants, and that, in the larger of these tenures, the fallen nobility and gentry of the land found their solace for the loss of power, place, station, hope of advancement, and all that gives a zest to the life of the upper classes in every part of the globe; while the smaller tenures of the kind constituted, in many instances, the sole support of well-descended but indigent families. There was something to move the compassion even of a universal philanthropist, in the thought of the humble individuals of both sexes to whom a sweeping resumption of all such tenures was in fact the extinction of almost every earthly hope. The Indian government itself, though at that period described by Mr F. H. Robinson (p. 12) as “a despotism administered upon radical principles,” became startled at the havoc which the zeal of its subordinates was committing among this class of sufferers, and interfered to mitigate the severity of their proceedings. Many of the “soft-hearted” seniors of the Civil Service rejoiced at a resolution which relieved them from an odious and painful duty. But thus reasons a strong-minded junior on what he regards as a feeble concession:—

“Unfortunately the long delay in making the investigations had established in their seats the fraudulent appropriators of the revenue; and when it came to be taken from them, the measure caused great change and apparent hardship to individuals in comfortable circumstances; hence arose a great cry of hardship and injustice. We were still most apt to view with sympathy the misfortunes of the higher classes; many soft-hearted officers of Government exclaimed against the sudden deprivation; and some of the seditious Europeans, who find their profit in professional attacks on Government, raised the cry much louder. But the worst of the storm had expended itself; a little firmness, a little voluntary beneficence to individual cases, and it would have ceased; and the temporary inconvenience to fraudulent individuals would have resulted in great permanent addition to the means of the state; but the Bengal Government is pusillanimous. Since Warren Hastings was persecuted in doing his duty, and Lord Cornwallis praised for sacrificing the interests of Government, and of the body of the people, it has always erred on the side of abandoning its rights to any sufficiently strong interested cry. It wavered about these resumptions. It let off first one kind of holding, then another, then all holdings under one hundred beegas (about seventy acres), whether one man possessed several such or not: life-tenures were granted where no right existed. Finally, _all_ resumed lands were settled at _half_ rates in perpetuity, and the Board of Revenue intimated that they ‘would be happy to see all operations discontinued.’ The result therefore is, that the Government have incurred all the odium and abuse of the measure, have given the cry more colour by so much yielding, and in the end have got not half so much revenue as they ought to have had. There has been an addition of about £300,000 to the annual revenue, at an expense of £800,000.”[36]

According to Mr Campbell’s calculation, a stricter enforcement of the resumption laws might have doubled the above sum; but as only the smaller tenures were let off, it is scarcely possible that more than half as much again as was actually realised could have been wrung out of the remnants to which the Government so timidly, as he asserts, abandoned its rights. An addition, therefore, of about £450,000 to our annual income would have been all that we should have gained by a measure violating the most solemn pledge given to the people that every VALID grant should be respected, reducing many families to ruin, and shaking the general confidence in our honesty and good faith. Though the passage cited is open to many objections on the score of arbitrary assumption and false reasoning, it is to its hardness of tone that we would chiefly draw our readers’ attention, as strongly confirmatory of the following remark, taken from Mr F. H. Robinson’s pamphlet:—

“I have said enough, I think, to demonstrate that the disaffection which exists is traceable to the despotic character our administration has of late years assumed, simultaneously with its sedulous diffusion of liberal doctrines; to the unhappy dislike of natives, as natives, which has crept in among the servants of Government; to the many acts of abuse, oppression, and arbitrary misgovernment, arising as much from misguided zeal as from evil intention, which, on the part of the administrative officers, harass and vex the people.”—(P. 31).

We have already recorded our assent to Mr Marshman’s remark on the thoroughly English character of our Indian empire and its administration; but we have, moreover, to observe, that, in the application of new principles even of European growth, India often outstrips the mother country. That which in England is still theory has in India become practice. There are not wanting in England people to maintain that all grants of olden times ought to be forfeited, and their proceeds applied to the purposes of general government. If these people had their way, they would certainly resume the lands of the deans and chapters, probably those of the schools and colleges, and possibly such also as are devoted to the support of almshouses, and other charitable institutions scattered over the face of the country. These speculations in England evaporate in pamphlets, and cannot for a long time assume any more positive form than that of a speech in the House of Commons. But the following passage in Mr F. H. Robinson’s pamphlet shows us how differently such matters are ordered in India:—

“The Government have systematically resumed, of late years, all religious endowments; an extensive inquiry has been going on into all endowments, grants, and pensions; and in almost every one in which the continuance of religious endowments has been recommended by subordinate revenue authorities, backed by the Board of Revenue, the fiat of confiscation has been issued by the Government.”—(P. 17).

Again, there are many in England who would gladly reduce the landed possessions of great proprietors, like the Duke of Buccleuch and others, to more moderate dimensions; but they hardly venture to put forth speculations upon a measure which, in India, has been carried into positive and extensive execution.

The fourth chapter of Mr Kaye’s work contains a clear and admirable account of the recent settlement of the provinces of the Upper Ganges, in the course of which the reader will meet with the following passage:—

“There was a class of large landed proprietors, known as Talookdars, the territorial aristocracy of the country. The settlement officers seem to have treated these men as usurpers and monopolists, and to have sought every opportunity of reducing their tenures. It was not denied that such reduction was, on the whole, desirable, inasmuch as these large tenures interfered with the rights of the village proprietors. But the reduction was undertaken in too precipitate and arbitrary a manner; and the Court of Directors acknowledged that it had caused great practical embarrassment to Government, against whom numerous suits were instituted in the civil courts by the ousted talookdars, and many decided in their favour.”—(P. 265).

The redress afforded by these decisions of the civil courts has not, we fear, been sufficient to avert the ruin of such members of the “territorial aristocracy” as had the hardihood to withhold their adhesion to a scheme for their own extinction. The principle of that scheme was to grant, in the form of a per-centage on the revenue realised from the village communities of what had been his domain, a pension to the talookdar who was willing, for such a consideration, to give up all the other advantages of his hereditary position. Many of these men, or their immediate predecessors, had rendered us great service in the war by which we acquired the country; but they stood in the way of a favourite scheme, and before its irresistible advance they were compelled to retire. The provision made for their future wants may have been a liberal one; but how would the Duke of Buccleuch or the Marquess of Westminster like to be thus pensioned off?

The truth had better be frankly avowed; the object aimed at is, to get rid of the old territorial aristocracy altogether,—indeed, it is so stated by Mr Campbell in the following sentences:—

“It is, I think, a remarkable distinction between the manners of the natives and ours, and one which much affects our dealings with them, that there does not exist that difference of tone between the higher and lower classes—the distinction, in fact, of a gentleman. The lower classes are to the full as good and intelligent as with us; indeed, they are much more versed in the affairs of life, plead their causes better, make more intelligent witnesses, and have many virtues.

“But these good qualities are not in the same proportion in the higher classes; they cannot bear prosperity; it causes them to degenerate, especially if they are born to greatness. The only efficient men of rank (with, of course, a few exceptions) are those who have risen to greatness. The lowest of the people, if fate raise him to be an emperor, makes himself quite at home in his new situation, and shows an aptitude of manner and conduct unknown to Europeans similarly situated; but his son is altogether degenerate. Hence the impossibility of adapting to anything useful most of the higher classes found by us, and for all fresh requirements it is necessary to _create_ a fresh class. From the acuteness and aptness to learn of the inferior classes, this can be done as is done in other countries.”—(Pp. 63, 64).

We fully subscribe to all that is here said in commendation of the lower classes of our Indian subjects, but we demur to the author’s very disparaging estimate of the capacity of the higher orders. Doubtless there are, or rather were, many dull men of rank on the banks of the Ganges; but are there none on those of the Thames?—no squires of cramped and confused notions, no fortunate inheritors of wealth content to wallow through life in utter disregard of the duties attaching to property, while fiercely jealous of its rights? It would be a sad day for our own landed aristocracy if Mr Campbell were to obtain sway in England, and try to rule that country upon the principles of which he approves in the East. But if he could, would our peasantry be _permanently_ bettered by a change tending towards a destruction of all the gradations of society? If the reply to this query should be in the affirmative, we may contemplate with unalloyed satisfaction the progress of a system the description and defence of which is the main object of Mr Campbell’s work; but if we feel any hesitation as to the future effects of such a change in England, then, human nature being much the same in every clime, we ought to have some misgivings as to its eventual results in the East. We say _eventual_, because the _immediate_ fruits of the measures described by Mr Campbell have, we are assured by him, and have heard from other quarters, been satisfactory and cheering. But is it probable that a whole nation should rest satisfied for ever in this state of flat and tame sufficiency? and can we wonder to find alongside of Mr Campbell’s picture of what ought to be the feelings towards the English of the present day on the banks of the Ganges, Mr F. H. Robinson’s gloomy account of what, in his opinion, those feelings really are? Having been compelled, as a member of the Board of Revenue, to make a communication to an old retired officer of Gardiner’s Irregular Horse, and to a Mussulman of rank, calculated to hurt the feelings of both, Mr Robinson thus describes what followed:—

“I shall never forget the looks of mortification, anger, and at first of incredulity, with which this announcement was received by both, nor the bitter irony with which the old Russuldar remarked, that no doubt the wisdom of the _new-gentlemen_ (Sahiblogue, so they designate the English) had shown them the folly and ignorance of the gentlemen of the old time, on whom it had pleased God, nevertheless, to bestow the government of India.”—(P. 17).

Mr Robinson goes too far when he taxes the rulers of the present day with dislike to the natives generally; but it is evident, from Mr Campbell’s own admission, that there is a strong prepossession in the minds of the young men of his school against all natives with any pretensions to rank. This feeling extending to those beyond the limits of our own dominions, has stamped on our foreign policy the character of our internal administration, and found its full development in the late Afghan war. Thirty or forty years ago, when natives, if excluded from office, were more often admitted to familiar intercourse with their European rulers, a mere regard for our own character in the eyes of our subjects would have withheld us from making an unprovoked attack upon an unoffending neighbour, and thus incurring a certain loss of reputation for a very uncertain amount of gain. This view of the case does not of course even occur to Mr Campbell as one likely to be taken by any reasonable being, and he sums up his account of the Afghan war with the following remarks, suggestive to our minds of little beyond a most earnest hope that the future advancement, doubtless in store for one of his abilities, may lead him far away from meddling with matters either political or military:—

“Such it was—a grievous military catastrophe and misfortune to us, both then and in our subsequent relations with the country; but in no way attributable to our policy, from which no such result necessarily or probably flowed. To the policy is due the expense, but not the disaster.”—(P. 136).

Mr Campbell has evidently not made very minute inquiry into the facts of the war, or he would never have hazarded the assertion contained in the following passage, that Sir George Pollock literally paid his way through the Khyber Pass:—

“Through the Western mountains only has India been invaded; for beyond them are all the great nations of Central India, and they are penetrable to enemies through one or two difficult passes. But these passes are so narrow, difficult, and easily defended, that _it is believed_ that no army, from Alexander’s down to General Pollock’s, has ever passed without bribing the mountain tribes. In the face of regular troops and an organised defence, all the armies in the world could not force an entrance; but in the absence of such a defence, experience proves that the local tribes are always accessible to moderate bribes.”—(P. 27).

The absolute impracticability of any mountain barrier is, we believe, disputed; but, without offering any opinion on that point, we are happy to have it in our power to correct the mistake into which the author has fallen, in supposing that it was by bribing that Sir George Pollock carried his army through the Khyber Pass. It is true that, in the anxious time preceding our army’s movement from Peshawar, negotiations had been entered into with the local tribes; but we have the most unquestionable authority for asserting that, before the march towards Cabool began, the sum advanced to their chiefs, being 20,000 rupees or £2000, was demanded back from them by the political agent on the frontier, and actually repaid; so that the mountaineers had not only the clearest warning of the British general’s intention, but the strongest possible inducement to oppose him, as they did to the utmost of their power.

But our chief motive for alluding to the Afghan war is, that we may show how the spirit of the two schools, under which, according to our theory, those engaged in the work of Indian government may now be classed, showed itself even in the direction of our armies in the field. Sir George Pollock was there the representative of what would be called by us the considerate and moderate, by Mr Campbell the soft-hearted and over-cautious school; while Sir William Nott was at the head of that which, going straight to its object, tramples under foot, without compunction, every consideration that might hamper its freedom of movement. We select but a few instances in proof of our position, choosing such as, from their notoriety, can be cited without injury or offence.

As the two avenging armies, the one from Candahar on the south, the other from Peshawar on the east, drew nigh to Cabool, a powerful party, consisting chiefly of the Kuzzilbashes or Persians, who had never taken part against us, prayed earnestly that the citadel, the Bala Hissar, might be spared to serve as a place of refuge to themselves amid the troubles likely to ensue on our again evacuating the country.

This prayer General Nott would have rejected, and in so doing would have gained the applause of every member of that school by which concession to the feelings of natives in opposition to the requirements of expediency, or the sternest justice, is regarded as a proof of weakness. With this prayer General Pollock complied; and to his doing so may the safety of the ladies and other prisoners, in whose fate the whole civilised world took so deep an interest, be ascribed; for it was through the co-operation of those thus conciliated that the Afghan chief, charged with the custody of the captives, was won over to assist in their escape. General Nott was fortunately the inferior in rank; for had he commanded in chief, we have his own words for the fact, that he would have destroyed the Bala Hissar and the City of Cabool, and marched on with the least possible delay to Jellabad, of course leaving the poor captives to their fate; or, in words which, from the manner of their insertion in the pages of the historian, it is to be feared he must have used, “throwing them overboard.”—(KAYE’S _History of the Afghan War_, vol. i. pp. 617, 631).