BOOKS.
INDIA, CHINA, AND JAPAN.*
MR. PRICE COLLIER, after telling us with cheerful exuber- ance of candour what he thinks of "England and the English," has spent a year in Asiatic travel, and now, with an equally cheerful desire to continue telling the truth as it appears to him, gives us the frank record of the resulting opinions and impressions. As might be expected by readers of his previous book, Mr. Collier's opinions, the opinions of a well-informed and well-bred American who is not afraid to be frankly out- spoken, are more important than his statements of fact. His travel was nowhere off beaten tracks, and what he saw has been described over and over again. But his active and ingenious mind was hard at work throughout his journey, and consequently his book is at once one of the most amusing, suggestive, and thoughtful works of travel that has been written in our time. He would probably be disappointed were any of his readers to agree with all he says, since it is plain that be himself disagreed, cheerfully but candidly, from the • The West in the East from an American Point of View. By Price Collier. London: Duckworth and Co. [7a. 6d. net.]
views and opinions of the men and women of many races, sorts, and conditions whom he met on his desultory way through India, China, and Japan. He makes no secret of the fact that, like most men with strongly original minds, he has his prejudices. He does not share, for instance, the common American admiration for French men and institutions, although, like many clever Americans, he has the French faculty for making swift and sweeping generalizations. He likes the Japanese, but seemingly distrusts them, and certainly doubts if they have the staying power which can alone enable them to hold their own in what seems to him the rash com- petition into which they have entered with Western races. For the more stolid and sturdy Chinese he expresses a warmer and less unmixed admiration, since he cannot believe—and surely only doctrinaire and stay-at-home politicians can believe—that the great Asiatic races have any power or desire of developing on European lines. In India he smiles indulgently at the facile good nature and joie de vivre of the Burmese, but feels that they have even less of the vigorously lasting competitive element in them than the Japanese. "The Japanese are great nibblers intellectually," he says, an imitative race, many of whose most conspicuous successes have been due to causes, social and historical, which are already ceasing to exist. Of the Bengali politician, shallow and noisy, a mis- chief-maker without much sense of proportion and respon- sibility, he can hardly trust himself to speak.
His frankest admiration and respect are reserved for H.H. the Maharaja of Udaipur. "Udaipur," he says emphatically, "is farther from the Bowery than any other place in the world," and Mr. Collier likes to be as far from the Bowery as any patriotic American dare travel, physically and mentally. He keenly relished the old-world insouciance of the little Court of Udaipur, and the quaint medhevalism of its hospitality. Of its ruler he says, "As I look back and remember India, he stands out easily as the first gentleman there, and upon the whole the most impressive figure I saw in all the East." It is with something of an awe-struck respect that he remembers the Maharaja as "a man whose only constituency is his own soul," the very antipodes of the Western demagogue and place-man, the flatterer and courtier of ignorant and prejudiced voters, for whom Mr. Collier has an even franker scorn than for certain ill-bred and ill-mannered Japanese he encountered. Of British administration in India he speaks in terms of the warmest praise, based on an intuitive comprehension of the methods and aims of the Englishman in the East. We are sure that Mr. Collier would regard it as a compliment if he were told that, had fate so allotted it, he would have made a first-rate Panjab Deputy- Commissioner. He has a scornful dislike of the facile equali- tarianism which has found its worst excesses in France. "England's greatness," he says, "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." After many months spent in India in the company of all classes, and after carefully scrutinizing the conduct of all ranks, high and low, of Indian officials, " now that I am far away from it all, I marvel even more than I did then at the patience, forbearance, kindliness, and impartiality that I saw." Not that Mr. Collier is at all an undiscriminating praiser of British rule in India. He sees plainly that its present methods, due chiefly to pres- sure from sentimentalists at home, are playing into the hands of a knot of interested politicians who aim at place and personal profit rather than progress, men who would be the first to suffer were they to lose the protection of the power they vilipend and obstruct. He sees, too, that the theory of representative government, a thing of historical growth in the West, is being put to absurd and premature uses in the East, " a theory which the vast majority, at any rate in India, do not understand, cannot reconcile with their institutions, and do not want." " India," he says elsewhere, " is not in the least like Poland, struggling for national existence against Russia and Germany : not in the least like Italy delivering herself from Austria."
India, as he shows incidentally in a rapid panoramic survey of its history, is one huge administration of many races, tongues, religions, compacted into unity by the political genius of Mussulman invaders and foreigners, and maintained now by British officials with success, solely because, unlike the Mussulmans, they refuse to settle permanently in the country and yield themselves victims to the degeneration, due to climate and environ- ment, which has been the fate of a long series of predecessors. Candid in his praise, Mr. Collier is not less outspoken in his criticism of the tolerably obvious dangers of Indian administration. The people of India have always been drastically governed, and know as well as any- body that they are now governed both kindly and well. "But England has, however unwillingly, let it be known that the unlearned, the untravelled, the superficial are in control at home." The carefully trained experts in Asiatic administra- tion whom India has the good fortune to possess are overruled by voters whose powers of comprehending alien races are absolutely nil. One passage in Mr. Collier's book is a curiously significant commentary on Sir Henry Cotton's queer belief, as expressed in his New India, that Indian administration, far from requiring vigorous personal initiative, is a matter of routine nowadays, so that keranis and office- clerks could run an Indian district for an indefinite period on the basis of mere dastur or custom. " The mere machinery of government," says Mr. Collier, " may suffice at home, where all men by centuries of conformity have adjusted themselves, but no machinery is enough to make the governing of alien races easy." Mr. Collier has been in camp in the Panjab. Sir Henry Cotton's official experience was chiefly of the clerkly kind in secretariats, and he had a larger knowledge of office files and pen and ink than of living men and women. No doubt the sober, matter-of-fact truth lies somewhere between the views of these eminent generalizers. The machine is necessary, but it takes a man, and a trained man, to run it.
Perhaps the most impressive, because the most sober, part of Mr. Collier's defence of British rule in India is the paragraph where he sets down actual facts and figures. Here, however, he is guilty of one palpable omission, and of what he must permit us to regard as one gross blunder. He points out, with just congratulation, that in less than fifty years the export and import trade of India has increased from forty millions to two hundred millions of pounds. This result is due not merely to the improvement of means of communica- tion, and therefore of commerce, but also to the courageously persistent abolition of internal customs barriers. India, internally, is as admirable an example of free trade as the United States itself. Externally, she has the advantage over the States of free trade with the rest of the world. Here it is that Mr. Collier has, for once, blundered, and blundered badly. " One accusation against the English," he says,
" carries weight The poor Indian weaver, earning his six or eight cents a day, was ruined for the benefit of the English manufacturer. Lancashire mills are protected to this day by duties on Indian goods. This is indefensible and contemptible." Mr. Collier's indignation would be more than just if his fats were correct. But the excise duty of 3i per cent. paid on cotton goods woven in India is merely a counterpoise to the similar customs duty paid on imported cotton cloth. Neither Lancashire factories nor the local mills are protected in India. Mr. Collier has not studied, nor is this the place to investigate, the question how the once famous domestic industries of India, as of other countries, have been ruined by the com- petition of machinery. But, under existing natural conditions, India holds her own fairly well with the skill and plant of Lancashire, and cotton mills are springing up wherever local conditions of labour and power make spinning and weaving a profitable industry. No doubt Mr. Collier, in spite of the hard things he says about the vulgar plutocracy bred of American protection, would wish the Indian Government to tax the Indian consumer in order to favour a more rapid increase of the milling industry. But is it not possible that the organized manufacturing methods of the West are as alien to the Eastern temperament as our political device of popular representation P The experience of the Indian tea-gardens would seem to be apposite. Here is an agricul- tural industry, specially suited, one would think, to the aptitudes of an agricultural population. It opens up the waste places,the tiger-infested jungles of the most richly-watered and fertile quarters of India. It would gladly avail itself of the surplus population of regions where the uncertain seasons render the overcrowded cultivators easy victims to plague and famine. It brings a huge capital and good wages to the very
classes who need this help, and its result is a trade which is almost wholly one of export. Yet the supply of labour is de- ficient and inefficient, and that in spite of an attempt to protect the industry by means of Labour Laws intended to encourage immigration into the planting districts.
Mr. Collier states frankly his conviction that Indian administration is benevolent, efficient, and sympathetic, with- out the weak sentimentalism which has sometimes led to deplorable revulsions elsewhere. He admits, however, and more than once, that our system is not popular—at all events among the educated classes. One of his Indian acquaintances, for example, "agreed, as did every intelligent man I met in India for that matter, that India needs British rule, and respects British rule, but dislikes the arrogance, selfishness, and coldness of the Englishman." The fact is that our system of selecting our mandarins by a literary and scientific examination sends to India men of very varying breeding and temperament. Some, no doubt, are harsh, domineering, and offensive, just as some run into the opposite extreme of weak concession, often to the worst and least amiable features of Indian life and character. That is, probably, inevitable under any conceivable system of selection. We do not doubt that any fair-minded Indian would admit that the bulk of the Services is composed of gentlemen (Indian as well as English) who strive, not merely to do their duty, but to do it in such away as to cause as little friction and trouble as possible. Some friction and trouble there must needs be when disparate civilizations meet, as even the most irresponsible and amiable of travellers will discover in his own person in the course of his Oriental wanderings.
We are not sure that an implied compliment addressed to our Indian officials at the expense of our Japanese allies is wholly deserved. "In all the months I was in India," he says, "I never saw a white man ill-use a brown one. I did not visit Formosa, but the Japanese are burning villages and shooting down the natives there as I write." That is much too sweeping a statement of a difficult and thorny question. Mr. Collier quotes St. Augustine to the effect that " to extend rulership over subdued natives is to bad men a felicity, but to good men a necessity." The necessity in each case is a question of fact to be seriously considered. There is a difference between a Squeers who loves flogging because he is a brute and a. headmaster of whom even a recently flogged school-boy can say that "he is a beast, but a just beast." Schoolmasters are more often loved in after-life than during the school-days of those who often owe to them all that makes life worth living, and British rule in India will probably never be fully appreciated till it has done its complete work and has been replaced by something better suited to altered conditions. But Mr. Collier does see that under existing conditions there is no conceivable substitute that could be anything else than a curse and a misfortune.
Of the lighter side of Mr. Collier's book we have left our- selves no room to speak, and yet this is a very important and characteristic part of his method of bringing facts vividly before his readers. A whimsical use of paradox is one of his most effective and amusing traits. Such, for instance, are the smiling assurance that "I am not sure that any of us really care for justice" and his daring suggestion that the much talked-of "inscrutability" of the East is nothing else than vagueness and indefiniteness of mind and aspiration. But, perhaps, the pleasantest effort of Mr. Collier's humour is his excellent portrait of " the Aide-de-camp." Less brilliant in style, perhaps, than Aberigh Mackay's famous sketch, it is more humorous, because more sympathetic. We laugh, but we are proud that English public schools should turn out lads espable of rendering such deft and tactful social aid to over- worked and over-worried governors and commanders-in-chief.
There are one or two obvious misprints, such as " Gbanzi " for Ghazni and " Nun Jahan" for Nur Jahan, and a few other unimportant slips excusable in a traveller who makes no pretence of being a specialist in Indian matters. John Nicholson lingered for nine days after he fell at Ike gates of Delhi, and was not shot through the heart. The rainfall at Cherrapunji in 1861 was over 25 yard.. Mr. Collier says that " there are half a dozen different languages " in India. There are 147 distinct languages belonging to no fewer than seven wholly separate families of speech. Chaudhuri Raghu-oath Singh would hardly recognise his name as it is spelt on p. 303, and the very pleasant and natural appreciation of the archmo- logical exploits of a Harvard Doctor of Philosophy at p. 330 would have had an even more agreeable flavour had they been coupled with the admission that the discoveries near Peshawar were due to the remarkable intuition and happy suggestion of M. A. Foucher, who, to be sure, has the misfortune of being a Frenchman. But these are very slight blemishes in one of the brightest, cleverest, most amusing, and most suggestive books ever written about the East and its problems.
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