CORRESPONDENCE.
MR. KIPLING ON THE MANUFACTURE OF INDIAN ANARCHISTS.
[To TEE EDITOR ON THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—The following reprint of an early article by Mr. Rudyard Kipling will probably be of interest to your readers, for it shows that twenty-two years ago acute observers saw the beginnings of the unrest that is now bearing such evil fruit. We have been manufacturing Anarchists for the last thirty years and more. Would it not be well to stop P "A -Little Morality" was originally 'published anonymously in
the Pioneer on January 11th, 1888, and has not since been A LITTLE MORALITY.
Morality. heavenly link, It is to thee that I drink 1 I'm awfully fond Of that heavenly bond,
Morality, heavenly iink I—Bab Ballads.
The Government of India woke up with a start. The air was full of flippant language. " Bless our Souls," said the Government of India, " this is painful ! They are actually getting irreverent. We must do something." They called up all the Secretaries and took their opinions, and the Secretaries said with one voice that there was nothing like Morality. " Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control," murmured all the Secretaries, because they had read Tennyson in the six-shilling edition and had ideas on governing India. " The fact of the matter is," said the Government of India impressively, "something has gone wrong somewhere. We don't quite know what it is, but we are determined to set it right." And all the Secretaries murmured applausively :—" Set it right. By all means, set it right."
And really, the state of affairs demanded some sort of correction. The Government of India was in the habit of giving little boys four rupees a month to sit still and load themselves up with Spenser's Faery Queen, pp. 1 to 131 inclusive, and Kin,gsley's Westwood Ho ! and Colenso as far as Decimal Fractions, and Fawcett's Political Economy, and Hypatia, and the Elements of Logic, and whole pages of Chaucer, besides unlimited quantities of History, and things of that nature. On the strength of his four rupees a month, the boy took a wife, and by the time that his subsistence allowance came to an end he was usually the owner of two children, in addition to a mass of mixed information regarding Magna Charta, Deucalion, Empedocles on Etna, "Let us take a walk down Fleet Street," " Wilkes and Number 457 Colonel Oleott's lectures and the back-numbers of the Theosophist. Just as he was comfortably settling down, and had brought his wife's widowed sister and a younger brother or two to share his wealth, the Government was in the habit of withdrawing the subsistence allowance, and saying cheerfully :—" Now we've given you a first-class education. Please walk about a little and get a living. We regret to say that our offices are full." Then that boy would go away very sorrowfully, because he was a married man with an indifferent constitution and a large experience of life, and would curse the Government of India by all his own gods and a host of new ones borrowed from the Rape of the Lock, and the Logic books, and King Lear, and all Macaulay, including the Lays of Ancient Rome. At first the Government of India used to listen smirkfully and pat him on the head and say to every one :—" Hear him swear ! All those bad words are out of our primers. Isn't he fluent? That's intellectual activity, that is ! You wait a few years, and you'll see the poets and the novelists, and the historians and the eminent manufacturers, and the clear-headed engineers, just jostling each other through the length and breadth of the Empire." So the Universe lit a cheroot and waited for the procession of proficients. But the boy who was also a married man—the child who was a father, did not want to be a poet, or any of those unremunerative things. He had his children to look after, and, because he was an old man at thirty-five and generally died at forty-five, he wanted to do his work quickly. His fathers had an extensive literature of proverbs which said nothing about going away from home and carving out careers, but a good deal about the necessity of enjoying a great man's protection, and climbing over other men's shoulders to authority. Some of the proverbs said: "A mahout is as strong as the elephant when he is on its neck," and others that "It is better to be the foot- servant of a king than a chief of two villages." The boy believed these proverbs, because they were drilled into him in his home life, which was as entirely distinct from his school life as anything you could well conceive. At school he spoke one language ; at home another ; at school he dressed in one fashion ; at home in another ; at school he sat in one fashion; at home in another; at school he thought in one groove ; at home in another; and so on, because he came of a very, very old stock.
Later on he discovered how to print the thoughts that filled his poor brain, and he mixed up the teachings of the purohits with Fawcett and Mill, and tangled the Shatters with Spencer, and strung Kalidasa and Cleopatra in alternate lumps. The Govern- ment of India was immensely pleased, and said :—" Now you'll see! This is the beginning of a National Literature. Observe the fireworks !" But the National Literature had been written by the boy's forefathers ages and ages ago in their own way ; and ages and ages ago the clear-headed engineers had done the national monu- ments, also in their own way. The stock was an old, worn-out stock, and, as has been said, Death came early to the boy and those like him. Some of his writings were peculiar and not exactly what the Government of India has expected. They had sown Carlyle and there came up anything but Hero Worship. It rather resembled the French Revolution. But the Government of India said :—" For goodness' sake don't interfere with it. It will settle down and leave the National Literature and the Legitimate Political Aspiration." The German read a few pages of the stuff and said dreamily —"Mine Gott ! You haf missed der soul-life- drift of dese people. Dey haf der power of defining afrydings, but dey haf not de power of understanding what is der meaning of der definition. I tell you dey are de soul-mit-ancient-clouds- encumbered-double-life-bejointed people, and you haf dreated dem as dough dey was into-der-tendency-of-politic-seeing Teutons. Dere will be, as you Englanders say, Helltobay ! But nobody attended to the German, partly because no one could understand him, and partly because every one was so busy copying the pattern of his Piekelhaube. The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders and said :—" Hon Dieu! I have known you English for fools these eight hundred years. But you are to-day such fools as I have never seen. No, never." The Frenchman was volatile, and had made such a mess of a place called Tonquin that no one attended to him.
The boy went on his wonderful way, his poor head swimming with the things he had picked up in the days of his subsistence allowance, and at last created the " New English." Everybody laughed at it, but it was all his own—unique and unapproachable. And the Government of India shook its head, for the "New English " seemed a poor distillation from the strong wine poured out so lavishly. Then the boy found his métier, poor fellow. You must understand that his mother-tongue was almost incon- ceivably rich in terms of abuse, and the language of his home life bristled with peculiar terms and strange twists of expression which would have deeply shocked the Government of India had it heard them. But, as the Government of India was nervously anxious not to penetrate into the sacredness of his domestic life or to upset his religious prejudices, it missed the wonderful language which the boy would use towards his wife, or his mother, when the one had been misbehaving herself or the other had slapped one of his children. When to the immense natural resources of the country were added some Emerson, Carlyle, Swift and Johnson, the result even in temperate hands would have been fine. But the boy was, by heredity and national temperament, devoid of any sense of proportion, and constitution- ally prone to exaggeration. The style and composition of the old- time histories might have convinced the Government of India of this ; but they never cared to look.
So the boy found his metier, which was to abuse the Government of India ; and here everything was in his favour. By the irony of Destiny he abused it, not for half-poisoning him and giving him indigestion, but for not poisoning him half quickly enough. The New English was a flexible tongue and the boy was an apt copyist ; albeit ho had no notion of the value of words. This was curious, because for generations and generations words had been things to his people. He turned up his books and abused it as the French peasantry abused the aristocracy before the Revolution ; then he abused it in the Ciceronian style beginning :—Quousque tandem, Ac. ; then he cursed it in the Swiftian manner, which was rather more vitriolic than the others ; then he pulverised it on paper in Macaulay periods, and, when he was nearly exhausted, a cynical Fate put the Pall Mall Gazette and some American papers in his way. He copied everything and made no doubt but that he was doing well ; and tha cry of his torment, for he was nearly dead with the terrible indigestion of half-bolted studies, was heart- rending. But over and above, and through and under, the Swiftian, Cieeronian, and Steadish invective could be heard the winged words of the bazars in which he had been brought up. It was a pitiful, a pathetic thing ; and the worst of it was that the boy did not know what was the matter with him, any more than does a baby suffering from colic. To its eternal credit be it written, the Government of India did not add a fresh mistake to its original sin. Any other Government on hearing the language the boy used would have imprisoned him. One Government would have hanged him as high as Haman. The Indian Government felt dimly that it had done him a great wrong, and appointed a Commission to soothe him. But his trouble was not curable by Commissions, though he himself said it was. He had mixed up the proverbs about climbing over other men's shoulders to employment, with Smiles on Self-Help and the curious teachings he had learnt at his mother's knee. He drank, so to speak, brandy and curds, heady port and arrack, together, and the natural indigestive result was extreme discomfort Then said the Government of India who had been lavishing lakhs and lakhs and lakbs on subsistence allowances in order to make him what he was :—"He is irreverent ! We must seriously consider the matter. His language is really shocking." And so it was !
The Conference of the Secretaries held itself, and unanimously resolved that Morality was what he lacked. The boy had three hundred and thirty-three million, three hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three Gods of his own ; but the Secretaries thought that he might endure yet one more—a colourless and abstract sort of God, carefully arranged so as not to hurt his religious feelings. When they were all settled down, the Military Secretary drifted in, booted and spurred, on his way to the race-course. "Irreverence is it ?" said he. " Morality be dashed. When I did anything wrong at school I was flogged to bring me to my bearings, and so were you." He departed tempestuously, while a Secretary murmured:—" You can't flog a married man—boy—what is it ?' A Lieutenant-Governor said:— "Hang it, no. They'd make a Dacca schoolboys case out of it !" And that was the stumbling-block. The boy was not only a married man, but also claimed to be the People of the country. In England a future Prime Minister can be !birched till he bleeds and no one says anything. In India a future anybody cannot be touched without serious discussion ; and this, too, is the fault of the Government of India. " Make prefects," said a Secretary. " No end of good in prefects. I was a prefect once." Another Secretary exploded with a cackle and said :—" They'd take bribes." But the recommendation was written down. Then a brilliant genius said :--" Give 'em a primer to teach 'em Morality," and Lord Cross, seven thousand miles away, in a London fog and all among the Societies for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, the Protection of Aborigines, the Lying-in Hospitals and the Missions to Fallen Women, sent some sample primers across the sea to the boy who was, on one side, as old as all Asia, as wise as all Asia, and, on the other, younger than the youngest puppy that was ever born, dying of indigestion in the spirit, and dead in the flesh before its fiftieth year. He knew rather more about Morality than any of his praminers, for many, many years ago his forefathers had walked through Morality and come out on the other side. His complaint was indigestion—acute mental dyspepsia, and for that the Government of India gave him a fresh book to swallow.
Just as the Great Morality Manifesto had been drafted, the Secretary in the Revenue and Agricultural Department entered. He had lost his way to his office in a fit of absence of mind, and there was the light of deep thought in his far-away eyes. "Oh ! you here!" said he. " By the way, what's the best thing for a cow that has gorged herself with clover?" The question had nothing to do with the Educational Department, and it remained for the Military Secretary, fresh from his morning gallop, to answer it. " You can't do anything," he said, "but if she recovers keep her on dry diet"
The Great Morality Manifesto went forth to the World.
And the World laughed.
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