How British East India Company Governed India? Part-6

British East India Company Governing India

When justice to India has been proclaimed and acted on as the basis of our future government, we may direct our thoughts to the relation in which we stand to our idolatrous fellow-subjects, and to the responsibilities of our position in reference to their religion. Our policy in this particular will probably, before long, undergo some modification. The task of governing India has hitherto been relegated to as clique of superannuated and often effete officials, with no views beyond the interests and exigencies of the hour. Nor has the legislature bestowed more than a passing thought on Indian affairs, because the public itself evinced a profound indifference to the subject. All this has now passed away, we believe, for ever, and the most fearful shock that the sensibilities of a nation ever received has recalled it to a sense of its duty. The religious question seems to have been more generally dwelt on than others, and the government will have at least to reconsider its policy on this momentous subject. A higher tone will be required to be taken both as regards Christianity and the popular superstitions. The degree of government interference will be a problem to solve of great difficulty and delicacy. It cannot, in this age, follow the example of Spain, and all modern theories of government are opposed to direct religious action by the state. It will be difficult to resist the popular demand for a government interposition, but it will be more perilous to yield to it. No government can, in the nineteenth century, undertake the propagation of  religious truth without departing from its first principles; nor can the legislature, of this country at least, invest any religious body with an exclusive commission for the conversion of the heathen. A general support and encouragement of missionary enterprise appears to be all that can be reasonably expected from it. State assistance may, perhaps, be afforded to every religious denomination supporting a missionary establishment; more, we think, cannot be demanded. A strong sense of public duty and responsibility will probably show itself in a vast augmentation of the means of missionary labour, to bear, we trust, at no distant day, abundant fruit.

However great may have been the anomalies and shortcomings of the imperial government of India, the affairs of no country were ever administered by a more able class of public servants than those selected for ministerial offices in the East. The local administration of India has been distinguished by an amount of ability of which this nation may well be proud. Let us do justice, too, in the hour of its inevitable dissolution, to the merits and services even of the East India Company. If it perpetrated great crimes it performed great actions. It governed India with energy, and generally with success. It sent into the East, as the representatives of its power and the instruments of its will, some of the most extraordinary men that ever took upon themselves the direction of public affairs or wielded the terrible energies of war, and the circumstances by which they were surrounded often developed the characters of these men into heroic proportions. Whether their actions were always regulated by the principles of street justice, may be unhappily questioned. The vigour of their policy, and possibly the necessities of their position, have undoubtedly, even of late years, tempted them to the commission or approval of acts both shocking to humanity and derogatory to a Christian people. We must here quote from a speech but recently delivered by Sir John Pakington at a provincial public meeting:"After the victory should have been gained, let them bear in mind that their own hands were not clean; India had not been governed as it ought. It was only yesterday that he had submitted to the astonished eyes of a large party in a country house official proof that in collecting the revenues of India there had been practised in the name of England—he would not say by the authority, but, he feared, not without the knowledge of Englishment—there had been practised tortures little less horrible than those which we now deplore."In conclusion, we have only to make a few remarks on the recent revolt in our great Indian Empire. It appears to be now accepted as a fact that it was the result of a vast Mahomedan conspiracy long organised, and having for its object the re-establishment of its ancient dominion. The Brah-minical element in Indian society combined with the Mahomedan for one common purpose, namely, the extermination of the British race. The rapid progress which European civilisation has made of late has been viewed by the Brahmin, indeed, with more alarm than by the Mahomedan. The one may have been actuated by ambition, but the other was impelled by the instinct of self-preservation.His traditional faith had received several severe shocks, some of its oldest customs had been authoritatively suppressed, and the diffusion of secular knowledge, and improvised education, and an active press threatened to undermine the very basis of the religious edifice. Both races probably viewed the extension and consolidation of British power with dismay. The fears of both for the future must naturally have been great. The progress of railways and the mysterious electric wire aroused undefined apprehensions, and it must have appeared that the alien race had, indeed, resolved to establish itself permanently in the land. A conspiracy at such a crisis, among such a people, and for a common object, cannot be considered an unnatural, if it was an unexpected, event. Advantage was taken of a period of supposed weakness of the British government to bring it to maturity. The well-known spirit of insubordination existing in the Bengal army was an excellent instrument for revolt, and an unintentional shock given to its religious prejudices afforded the wished-for opportunity. Such we conceive to be the rationale of the Indian rebellion.

The great minister who personifies the good sense and practical earnestness, not less than the spirit, of the British people, will not, we are confident, neglect the great opportunity which now offers itself for remodelling the Indian government. He may accomplish that for which other statesmen, less favoured by circumstances, have toiled and striven in vain. Immortalised in European history, he may now earn an imperishable name in the future annals of India as the statesman who first conferred on that long-neglected country the blessing of a stable and uniform government. This great act of justice and policy will throw all his former services and diplomatic triumphs into the shade, and light up the evening of his life with all the "sunset glories" of a prolonged and brilliant career. His countrymen have unbounded confidence in his firmness and virtue, and he may rely upon their sympathy and support. He may rest assured that this great convulsion has been fraught with much instruction, and that it has taught many lessons which they are not likely to forget. It has taught us the necessity of a radical change in our whole system of government, and the propriety of an immediate assertion, throughout India, of the sovereignty of the British Crown. It has taught us the fatuity and wickedness of our former indifference to the interests of the vast territories committed to our care, and may it teach us, in the words of that great man to whose capacious mind the affairs of British India were almost as intimately present as those of his own country or parish, that "it is not a predilection for mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will aver the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean reparations upon mighty ruins!"