THE GRIEVANCE OF THE BENGAL CIVILIANS.

THE complaint of the Bengal Civil Service, or rather of that section of it which governs the Punjab, Oude, and Hin- dostan Proper, which Mr. Lowe is to bring on Monday before the House of Commons, is a very serious one. We have not, as a rule, much sympathy with the complaints of " Services," believing with Lord Palmerston that the State never can com- pete in cash payments with private employers, and must pay in other coin ; but this particular complaint is well founded, so well, that until its cause is removed we should advise the educated class to reject Bengal as a career for their sons. They will do better and be happier in England. Public faith has not been kept with the candidates who have fancied Bengal the best career, and the Service is now so poorly paid

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to be no longer attractive, and to create a serious danger that as the high tradition of the old Nominee Service dies away pecuniary corruption may creep in. The Government, to put the matter in its broadest form, is keeping the majority of the men who administer, judge, and govern fifty millions of people —and the special fifty who can fight best—men any one of whom could obtain £5,000 a year in bribes without detection, who have to live in the tropics, and to send their children home for education, on wages not larger than men of the stamp selected could earn by much easier lives in London. The candidates who entered the Service in 1856 and following years entered, as we all know, on three impressions,—that Bengal was the best Presidency, that they were to be paid at about the rates then current, and that they were protected from outside competition for office ; and under this written assurance,—that they were to have all the higher appointments in the "Regulation Provinces," i.e., the provinces governed by laws, and half the appoint- ments in the Non-Regulation Provinces, that is, the provinces governed, or rather liable to be governed, by administrative de- crees. This promise has been directly broken. Not only have military officers been selected in preference to Civilians, which is only a breach of contract, but Englishmen -who have never competed or served in the Indian Army, but are backed by home interest, have been thrust into appointments, which is the very abuse to guard against which the Civil Services were created. It is one of the most dangerous kind, and will, if not checked by a severe example—the public dismissal, for instance, of a Governor convicted of wholesale nepotism—bring the whole fabric of Indian Administration to the ground. The result is shown in the following table, the accuracy of which is admitted by the officials :—

PUNJAB. OUDU.

Appointment. Civilians.

Military and Uwe- venanted.

Civilians.

Military and Mice- veninted.

Deputy Commissioners- 1st Grade... ... ... 1 10 ... 4

3

8 1 3

3 8 I 3 Total Deputy Commissioners ...

26 2 10

Assistant-Commissioners-

1st Grade... ... ... ... ... 4 17 ... 6 2nd „ ... ... ... 7 10 3 3

31 14 21 Total Assistant-Commissioners... 54 58 17 30 Grand Total ... ... ... 61 84 19 40

The Civilians of the North-West, instead of having half the higher appointments of the first-class Deputy Commissionerships—say, Prefectures—had in the Punjab only one-eleventh, and in Oude none of them ; and of the higher appointments of the second grade, the Assistant-Commissionerships--:-say, Sous- Prefectures—had in the Punjab less than a fifth, and in Oude again none, soldiers and non-competing men having six. This extraordinary neglect, mainly produced, no doubt, by the natural desire to absorb the superfluous officers of the army which mutinied, coincided with an unexplained re- duction in pay and posts within the Regulation Pro- vinces, and an inexplicable loss of all appointments in the "Political "—i.e., diplomatic—department, till the un- happy Civilians found themselves docked of nearly half their average salaries. The figures, to those who remember what the Service was even in 1860, are perfectly amazing :— Qair.quennial Group.

AVERAGI PAY IN

1872 1862 1867

1 to 5 Years' Service

466 438 492 6 to 10 „ 827 702 537 11 to 15 1,639 1,561 879

The figures represent rupees a month, and mean this,—that a Civilian who between his tenth and sixteenth year of service used to get £1,966 a year, now gets £1,040. To say the latter sum is enough for a man of thirty-five is nothing to the question, which is one of faith, but we may add that it is dangerously too little. A man of thirty-five in India has the experience of a man of forty-five in England, and is within eight years of the period fixed by the State for his retirement. These men are occupying offices like French Prefectures and English Judge- ships ; they have the happiness of millions in their hands ; they are exposed to excessive pecuniary temp..

This position of affairs it will be seen, is not temporary, but permanent ; and it will become worse, because a number of officers now employed on " Settlement " work—i.e., in fixing the rates of land tax to be hereafter paid, which is done only at in- tervals of a generation—within a year or two must revert to the regular line, and will, we may add, be pretty sure of exceptional promotion, an efficient Settlement officer being of all officers the one Government not unwisely most admires. It comes, therefore, to this,—that the head men appointed by competition since 1860 who selected the North-West Provinces, believing them to afford, as they used to do the highest careers, earn positively too little for their work, relatively about five-eighths the salaries of Madras, and according to their contract about half their due.

The best immediate remedy would probably be to give each of the men thus unfairly treated for the convenience of the State five years' rank, to count towards pension, and then, reducing the admissions of candidates for Bengal for a few years, gradually to work the evil out. That would provide individual com- pensation to the sufferers, without disturbing the regular course of affairs, while it would tempt the oldest among them by early retirements to take away the block. The immediate con- cession of a full half of the higher appointments in the Non- Regulation Provinces, would be most unjust to the soldiers who have worked in hope for years, and who are not to blame because they ought not to have been selected in such numbers ; and the remedy suggested by the Civilians them- selves, an increase in the number of Magistrates of the most highly paid grades, would, as the Government re- mark, permanently increase the costliness of the machine. We may, however, safely leave the remedy to the India Office, our business being to point out the impolicy of the present method of treating the Service from the strictly political point of view. The Indian Civil Service is one of the best and strongest administrative machines ever devised by man, and we question whether, if it is broken up, it could ever be replaced. We have to perform in India an almost im- possible task—to secure just government to 200,000,000 foreigners, divided from us by race, creed, and civilisation, dwelling in the tropics, and apt to resent, though inapt to re- sist, official oppression. To secure them good government, we must have at least five Englishmen per million who are able to govern, who can be trusted not to take bribes, and who will devote their early maturity to the task before them, in an un- pleasant climate and the most wearisome society in the world. How are we to secure them ? By selecting the most competent men we can find in England, either through'painstaking patro- nage or competition, by paying them well, and by binding them into a corporation so close that it can keep up for itself a tradi- tion of honour and public spirit more severe than any that Government could enforce. No other plan so efficient as this has ever been so much as suggested. It looks more just to administer through natives, and we are far from denying the native claim to high office, but if they are as competent as Englishmen for the ultimate administration of their country we have clearly no moral standing there, and the first datum of the whole problem is that we have such standing. It looks

tations—the native secretary of one Judge in Bengal who happened in 1852 to be incompetent was believed to make a steady income of £10,000 a year, and we may add, was a most able judge besides, always suggesting the right decree, and taking his bribes from the side entitled to a verdict —and they receive, climate for climate, and expense for expense, pay averaging two-thirds the pay of a London stipendiary Magistrate, while from the third year of service they have more power and more independence than he has. An Assistant-Commissioner can disorganise a sub-district, and a sub-district may have the population of Liverpool or Glasgow. As if this were not enough to make a Service discontented, the unlucky Civilian in the North-West, the fighting section of the Bengal Presidency, has actually only two-thirds the pay of his brother in the Delta, and a little more than half that of his cousin in Madras,—where, we may add, the death-rate is very-much lower, and where resistance is unknown :—

Quinquennial Period. AVERAGE PAY IN

Bengal. Madras. Bombay. N. W. P.

1871 to 1867 512 528 606 491 1866 to 1862 790 939 878 537 1861 to 1857 1,393 1,985 1,316 964 Average Pay of 15 years 906 1,103 902 673

more wise to allow the Governors to select ability where they will, but the effect of that permission is to tempt them to import their own friends, esurient cadets of good families, who regard the people as a spoil, and the country as a place where money is to be made. It looks more economical to pay the lowest sum for which candidates can be obtained, but if a few men are to administer India, the few must be trusted with power ; power will never remain permanently poor ; and one rogue in the Civil Service robs the people of a thousand times his pay. We cannot govern India by elaborate checks, for we cannot secure the number of checking officers, and if we give power without comfort we must have checks. The experi ment,remember, has been tried, and it is barely 110 years since Clive's second administration,—since, that is, the Civil Service of Bengal was an associated gang of the most competent, cruel, and deliberate plunderers that ever disgraced the reputation of a European State. Since Clive's reform, since he gave the Civilians decent pay, there have not been ten cases of corruption on a large scale, and of late years the offence has been unknown, though the temptations have certainly not diminished. Take these twenty-five civilians now engaged on Settlement duties. We venture to say there is not one of them who could not return to England three years hence with £100,000, obtained in ways Government could never trace, and amid the blessings of the people, who would have purchased ease for a generation at the cost of three months' income. To starve men so placed, to deny them reasonable promotion, to inspire them with the conviction that they have been cheated, is an injury to the millions whom we compel to submit to their authority. It is nonsense to Say the soldiers are worse paid than the Civilians. Can a sepoy bribe his colonel, or can a Civilian win a V.C., or send down his name on one lucky day through five centuries of history ? If we mean the Civil Service of India to govern, we must pay it decently—twice, at least, what it is now paid in the North-West—and if we do not mean it to govern, we must find, what we have hitherto failed to find, a body of a thousand men more or less who can administer a continent of strangers, and be trusted everywhere by those strangers as the men who stand impartial and immovable between them and their conquerors' tyranny and greed. Better, far better, govern India through its natives, with a new discipline such as an Akbar would enforce, than govern it through hungry adventurers, or through a caste invested with all power, and made wretched by all pecuniary discomfort.