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"Only that is good for a nation which comes from its own core and from its own seed, without aping of another. For what is beneficial to one people at a certain historical stage, may perhaps show itself as poison to another. All attempts to introduce foreign novelty to a people in whom a need for the same is not deep within its heart are foolish, and all devices with this revolutionary intention are without success; for they are without God, who holds Himself aloof from such blundering."

 Goethe's Talks with Eckermann, January 4th, 1824.

As a living being, man's first object is to preserve himself, and therefore he intuitively values his accustomed means to that end more highly than he does the means by which differing peoples strive for a like aim. This is his subjectivity. His good is the good. His customs are better than those of others. His country is better than others. His laws and his outlook generally are sound. The framework in which his own particular life is set is made admirable in his eyes because it is his life that is set in it.

   Hence, when his capacity leads him to dominate other peoples, he carries with him this subjectivity. He believes that what is attached to himself is superior to that which he meets in the strange country. Then, if he is a man of good intentions, he feels it incumbent on him to give to those other peoples his good, which, compared to their superstitions and habits, is the good. More particularly must this be so at a time when scientific invention has, in many respects, tremendously enriched the world and he belongs himself to the nation which has taken the lead in this invention.

   His good then takes takes on proportions which are almost superhuman, certainly superhuman compared to the human achievements of primitive peoples and previous centuries. So there comes to be one settled purpose to his life upon its earnest side of good intent, the furthering of progress, to give such practical help as he can to the rapid transition of a people from the old to the new. The speed of progress has been and is so prodigious, the material successes are so stupendous, that he forgets to note the trail of uprooted customs and wrecked lives that is left. Only when these begin to clog the wheels of progress, when they accumulate upon the ways, when they in their wastage begin to threaten a breakdown, does he feel the impinging of doubt upon his buttressed faith. Only when wars, revolutions, slumps, failures, bankruptcies, and other disasters are recorded in his daily press, does his mood of faith change, and he begins to wonder if, after all, what he bestowed upon other peoples in the intoxication of his strength, will really prove in the course of time for their ultimate good. Such questions must have arisen time and again in the minds of many Englishmen--and especially in the recent years of Reform--when concerned actually or imaginatively with the teeming peoples of India.

   Fortunately such questions have forced themselves upon many great Englishmen throughout the period of their close connection with India, and so one is able to gather, as the generations pass, the opinions of men of objectivity, that is, men who were able to form opinions as little influenced as possible by their own desires and their own prejudices.

   One of the greatest objective minds amongst public men of the last century was that of Lord Salisbury. Lord Salisbury did not believe that imposing things on others for their good was necessarily good. He believed that there was something deeper, something more personal and more related to time in a people's good, and so on occasions, from his objective recess, so to speak, he flung questions like bombs into the proud procession of progress.

   One of these was on May 24th, 1867, in the House of Commons. He was then Lord Cranborne and in the last year of his membership of the Lower House. At the time when he asked the question, he had but recently resigned from being Secretary of State for India in Lord Derby's Cabinet. He was, he wrote to a friend, near to abandoning public life for the reason that "his opinions were of the past." I do not think that, with the one exception of Disraeli, such an obstinate questioning would have occurred to any other member of the House of Commons, which then lodged the uttermost success of an unparalleled period in its midmost career. Lord Salisbury felt himself forced to ask it, and it led to one of the most valuable and interesting self-searchings in the history of the Government of India.

   The question he put to the House was whether a number of small, well-governed Native States in India would not be more conducive to the political and moral advancement of the people than the British Government. He did not deny the British mission to civilize, but he certainly demurred to the wholesale condemnation of that native system, which, though it would be intolerable to a people of British habit, nevertheless, having grown up amongst the people subjected to it, had a fitness and geniality which compensated in some degree for the material evils which its rudeness often induced.

   The question of the recent Secretary of State for India was sent to the first Viceroy, as the head of the government of British India was termed after the Mutiny, Sir John Lawrence, who instituted an enquiry to thirty leading British officials in India. The result of the enquiry was printed by order of the House of Commons, 25th February, 1868, under the title of "Correspondence respecting British and Native Systems of Government in India."

   This correspondence must be almost unique amongst state papers on India. The setting of one system against another constitutes its exceptional character. It should exhibit a valuable consideration of the first principles which inspire the systems. Actually such a consideration is implied rather than stated in the correspondence. British officials were not then, nor are they now, given to the discussion of first principles, but are rather concerned to limit their answers to questionnaires to the facts and practical conclusions of their own experience. Nevertheless this correspondence does mark a halt in the course of official routine and action. It is unique in that is causes the officials, like artists standing back from their pictures to view them as a whole, to stand back from their multitudinous duties and view their picture as a whole.

   The time of Lord Salisbury's question, it must be noted, was the post-Mutiny period. The immediate pre-Mutiny period had been one of the rapid westernization of India, as seen in the spread of railways, telegraphs, education. It was also a time of such continued annexations and spread of the British "Chakravartin" or supreme monarchy, more particularly under Lord Dalhousie, that it must have seemed as if the whole of India was destined to a form of rapid anglicization. In the belief that the Mutiny was a revolt against a foreign civilization, British post-Mutiny policy became cautious and moderate; particularly no further annexation of the territory of Native States was allowed; only a general supervision of their governments was maintained, and carried out by such officials as those selected to reply to the Viceroy's questionnaire.

   The replies of the officials have a general resemblance to each other, as would be expected. The writers were a body of Civil Servants trained to certain principles of duty and conduct, to which standards they were expected to adhere. It was by these standards that they tended to measure the rulers of the Native States, who, within certain limits of established custom, were free to rule according to their personal wills. Consequently the officials found that, in comparison with British India, the Indian-governed States exhibited religious intolerance, financial confusion and corruption, intrigue and distrust amongst ministers, and sometimes outrages by those in authority upon the people such as seizure of women or of personal property. The facts were definite and the officials drew the conclusion that British methods of governing were definitely more equitable than those of the Native States.

   That the native system of that time "would be intolerable to people of British habit," Lord Salisbury already knew. It was even intolerable to many of its subjects as was shown by their migrations into British territories. Indeed, Lord Salisbury would have received no answer that justified his question, had it not been that Sir Richard Temple, of Hyderabad, Deccan, was one of the officials who were questioned. Sir Richard replied to Lord Salisbury as one objective man replies to another, as rare men, that is, who understand one another.

   Lord Salisbury had suggested that the native system of government, in spite of defects obvious to the British, might, nevertheless, be more suitable and congenial to the natives than that of the British. Yes, replied Sir Richard, in many ways that is so. To start with, however, it had to be made clear that, after the fall of the Moghul Empire, native rule had deteriorated and in many parts of India had become absolutely bad. But, in course of time, improvement had set in, and, at the time of the enquiry, in better ruled Native States, such as Bhopal, Scindia, Mysore and others, the native system of rule was more pleasing and genial, on the whole, to the Indians than was that of the British. Further, it must be remembered that the feeling and attitude of the natives to the British rule was relative; they liked or disliked it according to what they were in life.

   The classes which were partial to British rule were those who suffered most from capricious native rulers and got fair treatment under the British. In Native States, for example, in the neighbourhood of the powerful and avaricious, rich commoners had to be very careful not to display their wealth, for to display wealth was to invite plundering. Under the observation of such men of power, it was, indeed, advisable to follow the example of the weaker animals of the adjacent jungle and be as much twilight animals as possible, so as to avoid conspicuity. Anything conspicuous was like an ermine's fur, one might be skinned for it.

   In British India it was different. There it was safe to enjoy the wealth one had. So the more urban classes, the business men, the large and small merchants, the bankers and capitalists, the traders and carriers "do greatly prefer our rule to any other they have known." Similarly, the newer, mainly urban, intellectual classes, though they carped at and criticised the British, were in favour of their rule; indeed, in Native States they did not exist at all. Large landowners and even certain independent princes liked the British rule because it brought peace and security. These same qualities of peace and security also provoked hatred. The adventurers, men of restless ambition and capacity, to whom the disorder of the post-Moghul period brought opportunities of attaining power through boldness and courage, as well as their hangers-on, felt cooped up, cramped, and shut out from all chance of advancement under the British rule, so they hated it. So also did the priests, who rightly saw religion endangered by the British paramountcy and the introduction of foreign ways of thought.

   Lastly, the mob, the canaille, not partial to any government, hated in particular the disciplinary severity of the British to their type.

   What of the great mass of the people, the agriculturists and village craftsmen? Sir Richard testified that "the members of the village communities of all Northern India, the village proprietors of all central India, and the ryots of all Southern and Western India (residing) in our territories, on the whole, and with certain and occasional exceptions, decidedly and undoubtedly prefer our rule to any other."

   Such, then, was the attitude, according to Sir Richard Temple, of the mass of the Indian people, the people on the land, towards British rule in the early post-Mutiny period. It was definitely favourable. The reason was greater protection and certainty. For example, the official who replied from Kandeish stated that the peasant's taxes were not only "heavy, but they were uncertain, varying from year to year, and composed of many different items, and were nearly equalled by additional illicit exactions." Moreover, the taxes generally flowed only one way, from the peasants to the ruler. Except that the peasants were exempted from military duty, little or nothing was returned to them in the way of public benefits, such as roads and bridges, which now began to appear under the British. Similar uncertainty with regard to their holding of the land in Native States was, under the British, changed to security by the grant of fixed tenures of land for a definite period of years.

   The outlook for the peasants, under the widening British influence and rule, was, therefore, apparently favourable and full of hope at the time of this enquiry. It could be said that it was definitely favourable, provided always that there was a dominant objectivity on the part of the British rulers through which they understood and valued not only the habits and values of the Indian peasants, but also their own British habits and values.

   But objectivity is unfortunately rare amongst men, even such picked men as were the British officials in India. As is the case with any body of nationals, to the majority of the British that which was national or British was unquestionably the best. To them, therefore, the improvement of the Indian peoples consisted of an advance upon British lines. Very few realised the truth, which Goethe announced and which I have made my preliminary quotation, that "what is beneficial to one people at a certain historical stage, may perhaps show itself as poison to another." Very few meditated upon and grasped the profound difference of the Indian and English life-outlook, the conflict of dominant ideas, one of those conflicts which makes what is wisdom to the occidental folly to the oriental, and what is wisdom to the oriental folly to the occidental.