Since 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny, the chief preoccupation of the Viceroys has been the internal development of the vast and varied continent, split up into so many distinct countries and peopled by races of extraordinary diversity. The terms "India) and are too often used with most misleading results, and it would be as safe to predicate anything of and the on any subject rang ing from politics to weather, as it would be to generalize on Europe and the Europeans. The only thing in India which is the same and uni versal is the system of government, and many are of opinion that in this sameness and uni formity there is danger. But uniformity on the whole tends to efficiency and is economical, and since India passed under the direct control of the Crown the exigencies of finances have ren dered strict economy essential. It would be dif ficult to find any part of the world where gov ernment is carried on so cheaply as in India. Some 1,000 officers of the Indian Civil Service manage the affairs of some 244,000,000 people in British India, and have occasionally an indirect influence on the welfare of the remaining 70,000,000 who live in the territories of the Indian Princes. British India is divided into large administrative areas known as Districts, and in the whole world there is no such work as that of the District Officer. Often isolated from his countrymen he toils day and night for the people committed to his charge. They look to him for everything and in their own lan guage he is their Mabip— their Mother and Father. His one idea is that they should not be harassed or worried whether it be by tyran nous neighbors, by exacting underlings, or by an overzealous government. The District Officer at his best is rarely seen except by the people away in the villages. Viceroys and distin guished travelers cannot see him at his real work, but for all that they quiikly learn that the good government of India ultimately de pends on the good District Officer. Perhaps the best critics of English administration in India are the French, and they have borne generous testimony to the system and wonder at the fewness of the civil servants. As it is in the Civil Service, so it is in the other many effi cient departments of official work: the British officers are few, and their work and respon sibilities are enormous. It is due perhaps to the responsible nature of the work that the strenuous life prevails in spite of climate and solitude.
Far away from the Districts, from the canals, railways and forests, where men live their solitary lives on salaries none too gener ous, there is a military cantonment with a mixed brigade of British and Indian troops. Strong as may be the District Officer and unquestioned as may be his authority among the people, the knowledge that there are soldiers of the fair faces and guns within a few hundred miles un doubtedly acts as a sanction and a steadying in fluence on the unruly spirits and latent forces of disorder, ready in every district to spring if there be the least sign of weakness.
The Oriental respects most of the respectable qualities, but to him the great quality is strength. There is a word in use throughout India — Ikbal. If the Ikbil of the Sirkar is good, that is if the prestige of government stands high, all is well. But if it is shaken all the splendid structure which the British have raised in India will also be sorely shaken. It is the knowledge of this prestige and its and the sense that it must be inviolate, that brings anxiety and pause to a Viceroy and his government, when some reform really touching the people or some military operation to quell a turbulent clan on the frontiers is under discussion. In India risks must be run, but caution is the characteristic of the Indian bureaucracy. It is this same knowl edge of prestige and of what is connoted by the loss of it, which has hitherto made for conti nuity of policy, and has kept India out of the arena of party strife in England. Authority, power, prestige are all summed up in the word Ikbal. That is the word on which the astonish ing miracle — the rule of 300,000,000 by a mere handful of men — rests. Justice, benevolence, an almost missionary zeal to improve the. con dition of the people are mere incidental at tributes. The student will be staggered when he learns the number of religions, languages, tribes and castes which exist in India. He will recognize that India is a vast conglomeration of innumerable differences. But he must see the people before he can realize the gulf which lies between the Sikh and Pathan, the Mahratta and the Bengali. Lord Curzon explained it in his speech at the Guild-Hall in 1904: We have to deal in India with races that are as different from each other as the Esquimau is from the Spaniard or the Irishman from the Turk; with creeds that range between the extreme points of the barest animalism on the one hand and the most exalted metaphysics on the other, and with standards of life that cover the whole space between barbarism and civilization.* It is no easy task to give equal justice to all these varieties of the human race, but the task is fairly faced, and the wise rule of religious tolerance, and the scrupulous respect which is paid to Indian customs, make possible the gov ernment of India. But though the differences are great there are solvent forces at work which may at no very distant date make for homogeneity in certain localities, and the close of one century and the beginning of another seems by some curious reason to be the signal for change. Some years ago it was the fashion to suppose that the people of the two great re ligions of India— the Hindus and the Mussul mans — would never work in harmony. It was similarly supposed that the manly races of the Punjab would never co-operate with the unwar like people of lower Bengal. Undoubtedly many of the propositions which used to be ac cepted without challenge must be modified. Railways, travel in Europe, education and a free press have worked important changes, and it is plain that the government of the future will have to reckon not with an homogeneous India, but with an increasing number of edu cated Indians scattered over the continent who are groping after ideals. It will be the problem of the Indian statesman to find them these ideals, and to give them some safe scope for their activities. The progressive Indian realizes that India depends on the British connection. He wishes to take part in the government of India, and to enable India to take her place among the self-respecting nations of the world. But the progressive Indian—like the ordinary Englishman—will not grasp the radical point, that there is no India and no nation of Indians. If political power is to come to the educated classes — the microscopic minority of the mil lions, it must first come from small beginnings, from the village and the town. They can not jump at once into the control of an empire. The progressive Indian is, so far as he can be judged by his conversation and his public speeches, loyal to the Crown, but unfortunately his organ — practically the whole of the native press — is undoubtedly preaching sedition and poisoning the mind of the rising generation against the government. Yet the leaders of
the Progressive party would deplore a con flagration, for they and theirs would be the first to be overwhelmed. It needed no prophet to point out as did Mountstuart Elpinstone years ago that bureaucracy and a free press were in compatible, but the problems of finding the ideal for the intellect of India must he grappled with and the good humored indifference of a strong government toward a virulent and hos tile press is no longer safe. This somewhat lengthy but still incomplete preface to the sub ject of °Foreign Policy in India* is necessary since it is impossible to deal with the Foreign Policy of India as a thing separate and apart from India. Up to the end of the 19th century Indian foreign policy was treated with great ret icence. There may have been some policy, but it was known to few. But at the beginning of the present century Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, who believed in taking the people into his confidence, departed from the old-fashioned reticence, and in several memorable speeches formulated the problems of the defence of India. No one was ever more qualified to ex pound these problems. He had made them his life study, and his intimate knowledge of the countries beyond the frontier, acquired by travel, coupled with his wonderful grasp of every detail of Indian affairs, enabled him to co-ordinate isolated facts and events, and to establish India's position on the board of British foreign policy. He pointed out that up to recent years the foreign relations of India were practically confined to her dealings with Afghanistan and to the designs or movements of the great Power beyond, and the Foreign Policy of India had little to do with any other foreign nation. °Now all that is changed and events are passing which are gradually draw ing this country, once so isolated and remote, into the vortex of the world's policy, and that will materially affect its future.* Consolidation on the frontiers involved more direct relations with the countries beyond, but more than that. °Europe has wakened up, and is beginning to take a revived interest in Asia. Russia with her vast territories, her great ambitions, apd her unarrested advance, has been the pioneer in this movement, and with her or after her have come her competitors, rivals and allies. Thus, as all those foreigners arrive upon the scene and push forward into the vacant spots, we are slowly having a European situation re created in Asia, with the same figures upon the stage. The great European Powers are also becoming the great Asiatic Powers. Already we have Great Britain, Russia France, Ger many and Turkey; and then, in place of all the smaller European kingdoms, and princi palities, we have the empires and states of the east— Japan, China, Tibet, Siam, Afghanistan, Persia,— only a few of them strong and ro bust, the majority containing the seeds of in evitable decay. There lie in these events and in this renewed contact or collision, as the case may be, between the East and the West, omens of the greatest significance to this country.* Again, °A land frontier 5,700 miles in length, peopled by hundreds of different tribes, most of them inured to religious fanaticism and heredi tary rapine,— a single outbreak at a single point may set entire sections of that frontier ablaze. Then, beyond it, we are brought into direct con tact with the picturesque but perilous debility of independent, or quasi-independent, Asiatic states, some of them incurably diseased and hastening to their fall; and behind them, again, are the muffled figures of great European Powers, advancing nearer and nearer and sometimes finding in these conditions tempta tions to action that is not in strict accordance with the interests which we are bound to de-. fend." But after all English foreign policy in India is largely a matter of finance, for it must be based on the contentment of the people. It can be asserted with deliberation that the system of taxation in India is fair and considerate, but there are millions who live on a very slender margin. In normal years when the rains are favorable there is plenty in the land; but when the rain fails, and when, later, famine is declared, the numbers who flock to the famine camps are proof that among the poorer classes there is little or no reserve. It is, therefore, incumbent on the Viceroy — whose duty is to keep India safe and contented — to ensure peace on his long land frontier of 5,700 miles. He can engage in no policy of adventure and he cannot lightly undertake even a small expedition, for he never knows whether a local disturbance may not set the frontier in a blaze for hundreds of miles. He has to consider the revenues and the economic requirements of India, the policing of the provinces, and the obligatory garrisons, and he knows that if his calculations are correct that he has only a certain amount of force for the extended defence of the Indian Empire. Those fierce critics of government — the editors of the native press— who write at the safe harbors where shots have not been fired for generations, maintain that the military forces of India are excessive, and they point with some justice to the fact that during the war in South Africa and the operations in China the garrison of India was seriously depleted. It was a risk, but no Viceroy can hesitate when the British Empire calls, and the splendid conduct of the people and princes of India justified the con fidence reposed in them. The army of India is composed of British and native troops. Ex perience demands that the proportion shall be one British soldier to two Indian sepoys, and that the artillery shall be entirely British. The British soldier to India is expensive, the Indian sepoy cheap, perhaps the cheapest and for his pay the best and most efficient soldier in the world. On the frontier Lord Curzon, chiefly from political reasons,— the policy of concilia tion instead of exasperation,— offered to the wild youth of the frontier service in militia regiments, while many of the greater princes have voluntarily contributed highly trained troops for the defence of the empire. These forces are trained by British officers, and have won high praise on service. But in spite of i India's resources n man power, in spite of the loyal co-operation of the great Feudatories, the Indian government cannot be expected, single-handed, to provide for the defence of what has been truly called the °strategical frontier° of the British Empire. India must look to Great Britain in times of supreme danger, and in the matter of foreign policy India is merely an agent of the British govern ment. The Viceroy and his government are responsible as local agents for Indian territory where it marches with Turkey, Russia, China and France, for the Persian Gulf, and for re lations with Afghanistan. It is always difficult for men who have been brought up in a school of great tradition to abandon the faith, and among the traditions which have made this splendid Indian Empire have been courage, a belief in the British mission in the East, and undaunted advance. (For Bibliography see INDIA, BURMA, AFGHANISTAN, etc.).