THE REVOLUTION IN OUDE.
SIR JOHN LAWRENCE, it is clear, has determined to- work another social revolution in Oude, and Sir Charles.
Wood, though disapproving, flees not see his way to prevent him. How any person who has read the admirable blue-book on the subject just presented to Parliament, and who knows the history and the polities of the gentlemen who sign the different despatches therein contained, can come to any different conclusion we are unable to conceive. Indeed the papers set out the story so clearly that it must be plain even to men not familiar with Indian terms or tenures ; and but.
that members of Parliament entertain a well-founded terror of Indian long-windedness, the Viceroy would even now be arrested in his dangerous course. We have told the story once, but we are about to tell it again, the papers throwing light upon points—one of them of immense importance— which had been previously left obscure. Our readers are- aware that Lord Canning, convinced that the tenant-right settlement which followed annexation had been one cause of the revolt in Oude, resolved on a measure of revolutionary width. Availing himself of the universality of the insur- rection, which embraced every class and nearly every indi- vidual in Oude, he issued a proclamation solemnly confiscating every right of property throughout the province. So terrible was the sweep of this document that, as the Foreign Secre- tary of the day explained to his questioners, " the right of the pauper to his waist-cloth had legally ended in Oude." There was a complete tabula rasa, and on it Lord Can- ning proceeded to build up a new society, which should be based as far as possible upon the English model. He granted the whole of Oude away to its old proprietors
and certain new men, giving them all rights of ownership on payment of a quit-rent fixed for ever to the State. That he- intended to make this grant absolute, to create a tenure iden- tical with that by which the Earl of Abergavenny holds his. lands, is evident, not only from the words of his grants, not only from the distinct language employed in his despatches, in which he avows his intention not to repeat the mistake of the North-West, but still more clearly from his subsequent. proceedings. He broke through Hindoo law to make his arrangement perfect, passing an Act to make the estates• descend on the principle of primogeniture and undivided, and he broke through Indian tradition to make the-
landlords magistrates upon their own estates. How utterly this innovation was opposed to every precedent of our rule may be guessed from the terms in which Sir Bartle Frere supported and praised the change. " It often afterwards occurred to me as a fact of almost portentous significance, that from the borders of Oude back to Calcutta, in a journey of between 600 and 700 miles, I might travel for a whole day through many an estate of princely extent, yielding a vast income and immense influence to its owner, but that no one of those owners could exercise the legal authority of a parish constable, nor, except by indirect, sordid, and often illegal means, apply the power he possessed to influence the admi- nistration of the country, unless indeed he happened to be a stipendiary servant of Government, a situation which he could only fill in some of the lower grades of the Government. service, or unless he happened to be one of the few dozen of honorary magistrates who have, within the last few months,. and at the instance of the Government of India, been ap- pointed in Bengal. I must say that to one unaccustomed to
this absolute severance between property and the influence it confers on the one hand, and the authority of Government on the other, such a condition of a country appears full of danger social and political, and quite incompatible with stability of ad- ministration, or security from some of the worst forms of mis- government." The scheme as it stood was complete, but pressed by the old civilians around him, who, though their rule of a hundred years ended in a national massacre, still believe that wisdom begins and ends with them, Lord Canning introduced one qualification of the absolute proprietary right, and out of this arises all the subsequent mischief. All rights in pro- perty ended, but the rights of occupancy existing n 1855 were to be respected. Now there were no rights of occupancy. Nothing can be more certain than that during the long misrule of the native sovereigns the landholders had succeeded in breaking up all subordinate tenures, in placing every tenant throughout the country in the position of a tenant-at-will. At page 106 of this blue book commences a report on this point from the Chief Commissioner, which will, we think, carry conviction to every mind not trained under the Indian revenue system. Mr. Wingfield shows that even the ryots had never questioned the right of the landlord to oust them ; that the village com- mittees, though deciding all other claims to land, never inter- posed between the landlord and the tenant ; and that " in the innumerable sepoys' petitions sent through the Residents at Lucknow, complaining of every manner of injustice, none but proprietary rights in land were laid claim to." And he sums up his opinion thus:—" The light that has been thrown on this subject by personal inquiry, the reports of the district and settlement officers, by perusal of other correspondence, and by the dis- cussion that has arisen out of the Hill's appeal case, has in: duced the Chief Commissioner to believe that, under the in- fluence of prepossessions acquired in the North-Western Pro- vinces, he made too hasty an admission, and has forced on him the conviction that a right of occupancy in non-proprietary cultivators has never, in theory or practice, existed in Oude." It is quite possible that the unprecedented rights of the talookdars had been acquired either by force or fraud, just as all English tenures begun either with the great act of force called the Conquest or the colossal fraud called Sequestration, but rights once acknowledged by both landlord and tenant can be modified only by themselves. Upon this belief he acted for three years, and the talookdars assumed their position as great peers. The change which came over them was ex- traordinary. " I could only," wrote Sir B. Frere, " contrast the talookdars as I saw them lately assembled at Lucknow with the few who visited Calcutta several months ago. But even in these few the improvement in appearance, manner, and confidence was sufficiently marked for me to understand the surprise expressed by all the older residents of Lucknow, and those visitors who had been there in 1859, at the mar- vellous change which had taken place, and which had con- verted the sullen, suspicious, self-condemned rebels of 1858 into certainly the finest, most intelligent, and cheerful body of native country gentlemen I have ever seen in India. My general impression was that we might do anything with such men by treating them properly." And Mr. Ritchie—person with eyes, well known here as well as in India as one of the keenest of mankind,—" cordially concurred." The land- lords even stepped forward to perform supererogatory work, undertaking to put down female infanticide, working in fact with the Government like English gentlemen.
Sir John Lawrence has broken up that unity. Shortly after his appointment he began to assert the Claims of the under- tenants, whom in the Punjaub he has made the ultimate owners of the soil, and finding Mr. Wingfield refractory, offered him in words more plain than courteous the alternative of surrendering his principles or being superseded in all questions having any relation to land. Mr. Wingfield requested leave to ascertain the impression of the talookdars as to the promises made to them, and found them to a man convinced of their own right of ouster, and resolved not to give it up. This he reported, refusing to further his QW11 interests by what seemed to him a breach of faitb, but the Viceroy, who, as Mr. Grey—person whom the late Mr. James Wilson declared to be " the only financial head he had met in India"—says in his minute, " has decided opinions in one direction," refused to yield, and appointed a Financial Commissioner for Oude to supersede Mr. Wingfield in all revenue matters. This gentleman, Mr. Davies, is a devotee of tenant right as it is understood in India, i. e., of the right of every occupant to declare himself a feuar as they call it in Scotland, or irremoveable tenant, and his first step, knowing well the secret intention of his chief, was to divide the villages into groups and send a settle- ment officer into each group, "to proceed to each village for the purpose of judicially deciding on any claims that might be preferred by the ryots, to a permanent beneficial interest superior to that of tenants-at-will, an officer having preceded him in order to prepare a list of such claimants. The settle- ment officer having decided judicially each of these claims is to form at once the permanent record." This is what the Viceroy calls an " inquiry," it being really a proceeding as finally judicial as a decree of the Lord Chancellor defining different claims upon a great estate. Of course the villagers, well aware that all over the North-West the Government has made deliberate war on the landlords,—a war not so wicked, but quite as effective, as that waged by the Austrian Government in Galicia,—and also aware of Mr. Wingfield's desperate struggle to save the talookdars, jumped to the conclusion,—quite justifiable as far as we can see,—that Government, having pacified the country through the talook- dars, now intended to throw them over. Any amount of claims, and oaths, and forged papers, and old men's evidence was therefore of course forthcoming. It would be forth- coming even in. England under similar circumstances, and the dread of the talookdars that " they would be left owners of a fixed rent-charge and nothing else " would in a few months have been realized. Nay, it will be ; for Sir Charles Wood, though evidently profoundly struck with the iniquity of this arrangement, does not venture to cancel it, but only orders it to be suspended " unless these inquiries have already been carried on to a great extent," which of course the Viceroy will report they have been ; and the revolution will go on, and Lord Canning's grand experiment finally succumb to a doctrinaire theory worked by absolute power with logically merciless severity. It will not, however, succumb peacefully. Once before we broke up the power of these men, broke it utterly and fairly without violating pro- mises, and they hurled the population which had " es- caped their tyranny " at our heads, and cost us two cam- paigns, ten thousand European lives, and General Havelock. They will do it again infallibly sooner than sink from their proud position into annuitants despised by the settlement officers, who now complain so bitterly of their independence, and Sir Charles Wood will have the satisfaction of paying the bill for a great war caused by a breach of faith which he evi- dently perceives, but is too weak to arrest.
One word more. It is just possible that among the three or four hundred landed gentry in the House of Commons there may be one who cares to see that the honour of England is not stained even for reasons of benevolence. He will not of course read this blue-book, that would be too much to ask of member nature, but if he opens it he will find at page 249 a minute by Sir James Hogg dissenting from the orders of the Secretary of State. It is only four pages long, it contains all the original extracts necessary to the subject, and it is, to our minds at least, about as open to an answer as a proposi- tion of Euclid.
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