THE INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE.
ONE of the most dangerous features in the present Con- stitution of the United Kingdom is this. With the partial exception of the Army, the House of Commons, as the representative Council of the people, has gradually mastered every department of the State. Its votes make legislation, and its resolutions, though legally of no avail, are held in practice to be binding on every branch of the Executive. That is unavoidable ; and, as absolute power must reside somewhere, is as a rule unobjectionable; but it involves a chance of very serious mischief. As there is no rule demanding for important votes an absolute majority, it is open to any Member who knows that he has a group behind him, to snatch from a thin House, or an ignorant House, a vote which, though seemingly a trifle, embarrasses the whole course of affairs. The evil is seldom felt in home politics, because the Mem- bers understand them—though we remember one occa- sion on which the House was within an ace of giving up the sugar revenue, under the idea that it was abolishing a trumpery duty on comfits—and not often felt in foreign politics, because they are left to the Depart- ment ; but it is apparent sometimes in Colonial affairs, and very often indeed in matters of Indian administration. Mr. Bright was once deceived by erroneous figures into a successful motion abolishing the Salt-duty ; Colonel Sykes burdened the Indian revenue for years by a foolish vote providing that no military officer should suffer pecuniarily by the transfer of India to the Crown ; Sir Joseph Pease recently carried a vote against the opium monopoly which would have made the Empire bankrupt, without reducing the consumption of opium by one ounce ; and last week Mr. Paull, a man of ability and philanthropy who does not know India, nearly destroyed, by a snap-vote, the foundation of the Indian Empire,—the European Civil Service. He was indignant, in our judg- ment righteously indignant, at an administrative trick, and to punish and expose it, he smashed a machine without which India cannot be held or administered for the benefit of her people. The fifteen hundred gentlemen—roughly speaking, a thousand civilians and five hundred soldiers—who together make up the Imperial Service, are not only essential to the Indian Empire, but they are the Empire. Apart from them, there is, and can be, no agency for governing, taxing„ judging, and protecting the two hundred and fifty millions of people whom Providence, acting chiefly through unbar tentional conquest, has submitted to our rule. Their character and capacity determine the goodness or badness of our sovereignty in India, whether, to speak plainly, it shall be a vivifying sway, or a gigantic dacoity under legal forms. No conceivable vigilance at the centre can enable a Viceroy to watch the daily life of the vast expanses of " India," which is not a Kingdom, but a congeries of Kingdoms greater and more populous than Western Europe ; and consequently, if the Service were oppressive, security would die out ; if it were corrupt, the population would be plundered,—as they were in the beginning of our reign ; if it were stupid, anarchy would supervene; and if it were non-European in ideals, the very object of our presence in India, which is to guide, and if necessary compel, semi-civilised races to adopt the higher ideas of civilisation, would be hopelessly defeated. The India House, therefore, whether ruled in the name of the Company or of the Queen, has always sought to keep the morale of the Imperial Service up to a lofty standard. Nobody hero knows how intense the watchfulness has been, how rigorous the Service laws really are, or how powerful and good is the opinion which has gradually formed within the Service, and is now so strong that a " bad lot " had better shoot himself than remain to face inevitable detec- tion. On the whole, the success has been extraordinary, Bribery, the grand temptation because the rich Indians would so willingly bribe, is absolutely extinct, as is the old relation to native mistresses, which Orientalised the rulers, but made of every great office the centre of a gang of cor- rupt hangers-on. Of wilful oppression there is none ; of stupidity, since the examinations were introduced, there is exceedingly little ; and of cowardice—a grave matter, for every man in the Service must occasionally face bodily risks —we can remember but two indisputable instances, and one of these occurred under circumstances so exceptional that even the Government of India, which, under other forms, is as severe as the Hohenzollern dynasty, overlooked the offence. The machine works perfectly, so perfectly that, as the Maharaja of Kupurthala recently admitted, no shot has been fired within India for five-and-thirty years ; insurrec- tion is unknown, the national wealth increases till India is " the sink of the precious metals," and the whole upper class is vitalised till its political awakening, misdirected into a wish for representation, has become in two Presi- dencies a difficulty of the first order.
The Government, however, in managing the Imperial Service, is hampered by an obstacle. The great bulk of that Service, and especially its chiefs, must be European, or the whole object of its existence and of our presence in India is at once defeated. If we cannot govern better than Indians we have no business in India, and if it is not necessary that the Administration should be European, what is the source of our marvellous success ? Three European officials supersede a great Native establishment, and in six weeks a province which was an Alsatia becomes as safe as Cornwall, and two millions, say, of people, relieved of endless terrors, begin growing rich. This is admitted by all who know India, but still there is a difficulty in the way. It is neither wise nor just to arrest all Indian careers, to prevent a competent Indian from rising to the top, or to deprive the able and ambitious of fair opportunities for displaying capacity and gratify- ing the desire for distinction. It is harsh enough to be exclusive in the Native Army, as we are, in our judgment, to a needless degree, but in civil life it is indefensible. The Home Government therefore set itself to remove the difficulty, but found itself faced by one of those insoluble problems of national character which every now and then reduce statesmen to imbecility. It wanted, for obvious reasons, not only to be fair, but to seem fair, and therefore adopted the expedient of abolishing all dis- tinctions between Indian and English candidates for the Imperial Service. Candidates, however, enter that Service by competitive examination ; and in a competitive examina- tion at an early age the Asiatic mind is more than the equal of the European mind. The Hindoo, again, is the superior of the Mussulman, the Marotta, of the Rajpoot, the Hindostanee of the Sikh, and the Bengalee far and away of all put together. Why this should be the case has never been reasonably explained ; but it is never doubted by Indian experts, and is, in fact, one of the fixed data of Indian life. If a hundred appointments are thrown open all over India, the Bengalee will win all that are assigned to Calcutta, three-fourths of those given to Allahabad and Lahore, and half those allotted to Bombay and Madras, in which latter places he has in the Ma,hratta, Brahmin, and the Chetty fairly equal rivals. The total result, therefore, of the system, if fairly applied, would be that within a generation nearly the whole Imperial Service would be Indian, and three-fourths of it filled by n aives of Bengal. That would mean the loss of India within ten years. Not only has not the Bengalee the morale or even the physique to do the work required, but the Indians of other provinces will not endure to be governed by him. The contempt of a Roman for a Greek, of a Turk for an Armenian, of an English sailor for a cockney counter-jumper, is a feeble feeling compared with the scorn of the fighting native of India for a Bengalee. He regards him as the old giants did the old dwarfs,—that is, he detests him as a coward, and is all the while afraid of his superior craft. He simply will not put up with his rule, whatever happens ; and the Bengalee is therefore, outside his own province, disqualified by plebiscite. This was understood from the first by the Indian experts, and provided for ; but in their fear of the House of Com- mons and dread of seeming illiberal, it was provided for by a trick. On the plea that a visit to England was essen- tial to an Indian administrator—which is entirely false, the best Indians never coming, and those who do only 'losing touch with their own community—London was selected as the only place for examination. The effect of this was that comparatively few Indian candidates could come, and those not of the best sort, and that the Indians, as Mr. Paull justly argues, think themselves deceived. The House of Commons is quite right in putting an end to that deception ; but it should have had the wisdom to see that the matter was serious, and that it could only express a general wish, leaving the Govern- ment of India to reconcile that wish with the interests of the Empire. As it was, its vote gives half the Imperial Service straight away to the Bengalees, and involves a principle which would in the end secure to them the remainder.
In an odd, indirect, and confused way, the Government has overridden the vote by remitting the whole question to the Government of India, with the vote of the House of Commons as only one of the documents to be carefully considered. It was carefully explained on Tuesday to the House of Lords, where five passed Viceroys were all of one mind, that the Government of India had been left free to report ; and there is, therefore, no doubt that the vote will be rejected, and some hope that the report, which must discuss some alternative, will be at once decisive and original. The problem placed before Lord Lansdowne and his col- leagues can be very simply stated,—how to reconcile the European character of the Imperial Service which cannot be given up, and to preserve which would justify a contest as dangerous as the Great Mutiny, with the opening to natives of all careers. For ourselves, we believe there are only two solutions, both practicable, though both diffi- vult to work ; but statesmen may find a third. One is to empower and instruct the Viceroy to place any Indian he deems worthy in any position he chooses, whether pre- viously held by an Englishman or not ; and the other is to assign certain districts, or even provinces, to a native Civil Service, chosen by examination on the spot from candidates born within their confines. That would fbe a really great experiment, would open a door for cultivated Indians to reach the very highest posts, and would enable us all to judge fairly what the result of a Native Administration under European fetters, as regards the laws, would actually be. It might turn out better than any of us imagine, the Indian having always the advan- tage of understanding his countrymen and their aspira- tions ; and if it turned out badly, the new system could be swept away by the stroke of a pen and the march of a couple of regiments into the district selected. We would, we confess, much rather wait a century or two before trying the experiment, or any other, till the new civilisation, which the present regime is developing so rapidly, had time to grow, and Indian education had ceased to be a purely imitative process ; but if we must, under Radical pressure, hurry all things, that is the route least strewn with social and political dangers. The Sikh would not be placed under the Baboo, or the Baboo under the Sikh ; and both would remain under the general supervision of the English civilian, while no native of India would have control of the general Government, or anything to say to the employment of the British Army. Make a few Native States with English Rajas, pledged to employ the English rather than the Native laws and methods, but working through Native civilians,—that is, in brief, the substance of our suggestion.
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