British East India Company Governing India
It is a necessary condition of our parliamentary government that an Indian council should be presided over by a minister of the Crown, and be thus directly connected with the administration of the day. An elective or independent council for Indian affairs is an impossibility with our form of government. An imperium in imperio would be created of a most anomalous and dangerous description. The disadvantages of a frequent change in presidentship of the council are obvious enough, but they are unavoidable. But the minister for Indian affairs would, we may assume, always be a statesman of the first rank, possessing the confidence of the cabinet, representing their views, and instructed to carry out their measures. For minute and accurate knowledge he must rely on his council, and to it may be safely entrusted the general administration of details. It may, however be objected, that a council for Indian affairs would be found impracticable in its working, that its time would be occupied in constant discussion, to the obstruction of business and derangement of the machinery of government. We would give the President of the Indian Council a power of overruling the decisions of his colleagues in every instance, and he would, in the rare occurrence of a collision, be obliged to defend his policy in parliament. Nor do we discover any reason why an India board more than a cabinet, or any other council, should be exposed to the inconvenience of frequent differences of opinion; and we have never heard it objected to our government that a cabinet council is a focus of political dissension.
In framing a new government for India, and ministry must be prepared to encounter the old objection of a design to accumulate power in its own hands. The danger of vesting the patronage of India in the ministers of the Crown will of course be urged by political opponents, whether sitting on one side of the Speaker's chair or the other. Mr Fox was assailed by a similar cry, although he proposed to rule India by a parliamentary commission. His reply was decisive. "If," he said, "the reform of the government of India is to be postponed until a scheme be devised against which ingenuity, ignorance, caprice, or faction shall not raise objections, the government will never be reformed at all." And a yet greater man said, on the same occasion, "If we are not able to contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that country to their constitution." The system of open competition for civil and military appointments has already done much, and will do more, to check the abuses of patronage. Indian appointments may be largely distributed among our best public and private schools as prizes for merit; and the test of a rigid examination be in all cases enforced upon candidates nominated by the council, in the hands of which a large portion of the patronage may, we should hope, be safely lodged. An increase of the patronage of administration must, however, be accepted as one of the necessary conditions of parliamentary government. It is not an addition to the power of the Crown so much as an augmentation of the means of influence which must always be possessed by a minister. We must accept our free institutions with their necessary and inevitable drawbacks. The disadvantages of parliamentary government may be considerable; a certain amount of corruption must always be one of the greatest, but we look for its correction not to any impracticable abnegation of patronage, but to the increased and increasing power of public opinion, the free criticism of the press, and an improved tone of political morality among all orders and descriptions of public men.
It may be instructive, in the present transition state of our Indian government, to cast a retrospective glance upon the policy of other states, but more particularly that of Spain in the government of her distant dependencies. It may appear extraordinary to refer to that country in her state of decadence of degradation, but there was much in the colonial administration of Spain that is worthy of our attention. Making due allowance for the difference in the character of the two nations, they had much in common during certain periods of their history. The same spirit of enterprise, and the same indomitable perseverance, marked the Spanish as it did the English conquests. Both nations exhibited the same marked ascendancy over the subject races, and those races both possessed a very ancient civilization. But it is to the policy of the Spanish government when it was under the necessity of constituting an administration for its colonial empire that we wish to direct attention. There is one peculiarity in the Spanish conception of government, as applied to its dependencies, that, in a most important particular, distinguishes it from our own. Zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith was with that country more than an ostensible motive for encouraging the spirit of enterprise and discovery in the New World. A missionary establishment was an institution of the state. The success in diffusing Christianity was great in proportion to the means employed, and if the benevolent intentions of the supreme government had not been counteracted by the iniquitous conduct of delegated power, the noble efforts of missionary enterprise would have been crowned with success, and a Pagan would perhaps have been converted into a Christian community. Widely different has been the policy of England towards her distant and idolatrous dependency. There the light of Christianity was for a long period studiously hidden from the native mind, or was seen, if at all, only as a thin veil thrown over the general profligacy. There was never even a pretence to any higher motive than mercantile gain in our original connexion with India, and a Christian missionary who had dared to set his foot in the land dedicated to the worship of Vishnu and Mammon was expelled with contumely from the soil. Here the policy of Spain stands out in bright contrast to that of England, for, however unsuccessful in results, and inapplicable as a precedent, her noble effort to christianise her subjects by imparting to them the light, such as it was, that she herself possessed, must for ever give her a claim to respect.A fundamental maxim of the Spanish jurisprudence with respect to America was to consider whatever had been acquired there as vested in the Crown. That state never committed the preposterous mistake of perpetuating a gigantic monopoly, bartering its territorial rights for money to a company of merchants, and delegating to them the awful and almost incommunicable attributes of peace and war. The Spanish government became instantly, in fact as well as in theory, the absolute proprietors of whatever soil had been conquered by the arms of its adventurous subjects. The colonists who established infant settlements were entrusted with no privileges independent of their sovereign, or that could serve as a barrier against the power of the Crown.When the conquests of Spain in America were completed, she divided her enormous territories into three distinct and independent viceroyalties, which may suggest a comparison with our three Indian presidencies. Each viceroy possessed almost regal prerogatives. The civil business of the various provinces and districts was committed to magistrates of various orders and denominations, and the administration of justice was entrusted to tribunals formed after the model of those of Spain and to judges of Spanish blood; and a power of appeal was given first to the viceroy, and in the last resort to the Great Council of the Indies.
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