HELPING TO GOVERN INDIA.

BY CHARLES JOHNSTON,

(BENGAL CIVIL SERVICE, RETIRED.)

The other day I read an article on India, in one of our popular magazines, in which the writer gave the British Indian Government much severe advice, asking why they did not abolish caste, why they did not introduce democracy, and so forth, and summing up the whole venture as a huge failure. The writer headed his article with “Fighting for the Common Cause," or some such phrase; and as I read, a former occasion on which I had heard the same words came back suddenly into my mind.

It was at the junction of the Nalhati State railway, amid the illimitable rice fields of Lower Bengal, where I was waiting, far on in the night, for a train that was to take me to my first post. The engine driver had some doubt as to his skill, so he spent an hour or two practicing, running his little train back and forward a hundred yards or so, and whistling shrilly till the jackals barked back at him. I was in the only first-class compartment, some six feet square, and as I dozed uneasily, I was conscious of high-pitched voices in the next compartment, talking the Bengali tongue, which I had studied industriously at home for the last two years. Finally, with magnificent rhetoric, one of the speakers cried "Amra fightingfor-the-common-cause hoilam!" And all the others applauded vehemently. They were on their way home from the Indian National Congress.

We started after midnight, and I fell asleep. The glistening sun of the early morning showed the vast rice-fields all about us, scrubby with brown stubble, as the winter rice had just been cut. Here and there and everywhere were villages, brown thatched huts clustering under groups of cocoa-nut palms and mangoes; and, though it was still chilly morning, hundreds and thousands of natives were at work everywhere in the fields, toiling, as they toil perpetually, on the verge of

starvation. As I had come by way of Bombay, crossed the Deckan to Madras, and come up the Bay of Bengal, I had gained some idea of the vastness of India-nearly two million square miles, and its still vaster population, of three hundred millions. Here, in Bengal, they were packed terribly close, for you can travel for hundreds of miles through districts with more than a thousand to the square mile, and almost wholly an agricultural population. There is the true cause of the perpetual presence of hunger, and child-marriages are universal throughout the greater part of India.

I was ferried across the Bhagirathi, and found a native driver with a ramshackle carriage, and two ponies of skin and bone tied to it with ropes. The sun had already gained strength, and one felt the sting in the sunlight so peculiar to India. The only word of my painfully learned Bengali he readily understood was the English word "Collector," and after three hours of hot and dusty driving along red roads fringed with palm-fronds, he brought me safe to the Collector's bungalow on one side of the great grass square of the Civil Station.

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The Collector gave me charge of a police-court, in which I presently found myself face to face with a plaintiff, a prisoner, numbers of dusky witnesses, some sleek policemen, and a row of glib, grinning native lawyers, come to look over the new Sahib." Seated in the chair of state amid this waiting throng, keenly conscious of the unfamiliar tongue, I felt greatly embarrassed, especially when it became evident that I must deliver some kind of judgment. I forget what I decided. I think I fined the plaintiff and dismissed the case, but am not certain.

While unusual this would not have been illegal; for the Indian Procedure Code contains a provision, whereby the plaintiff may be punished for “frivolous and vexatious prosecution." This is far from superfluous; for a Bengali who has made a moderate fortune, does not think of buying yachts and automobiles, but looks about for a nice estate with a score of pending lawsuits on it, and settles down to enjoy these to the end of his days.

In that dingy court I dispensed indifferent justice for a year, six months under a swinging punka that made eddies in the hot air. During that time I gradually realized what it is the British Government does for India, in one important field. The government confers on India the assured possession of civil rights, security of person and security of property. This is something India never enjoyed under the many forms of native and foreign Asiatic rule which preceded the British Government; and it is an inestimable boon, far more vital than the franchise or the forms of democracy. The extent to which the secure possession of civil rights benefits India came home to me gradually, as I sat there day after day in the police-court, receiving crowds of dusky litigants, trying petty assaults and small theft cases, and seeking, as far as the inventive faculty of the witnesses made it possible, to render equal justice. The courts were open to all. Justice was rapid and cheap, and, as everywhere throughout the Indian Empire, wholly impartial and impersonal.

The

A little later, I made the acquaintance of another of the great blessings conferred on India by its present government: security of contract. The general idea of a contract in India was something vague and entangling. The party of the first part immediately tried to put in phrases and figures favorable to himself. The party of the second part did the same. result was, that the two copies never agreed, and the little alterations were so skillfully made, that it was not easy to detect them. The art of forgery was carried to a high degree of perfection, and one could procure documents looking centuries old, within a few days. One expedient was to put the document on the floor of a cage in which mice were kept, with the result that in a week or two the parchment looked a hundred years old. This elasticity has all been done away with, and contracts have acquired a rigidity quite foreign to the former ideas of India. The contract is brought to the court, a copy is made in a huge ledger, which is duly signed by a court officer, and the two parties; and, in all disputes, this official copy, which is kept in the court safe, is taken as the standard. In this way the principle is introduced that "a

bargain is a bargain," and a degree of finality hitherto never known in India is assured to the written agreement.

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Security of contract is thus added to security of the person and property; and in both cases any native can learn his exact legal position without the slightest difficulty. For the Penal Code, which defines the rights and duties of the individual, and the Contracts Act are translated into every one of the scores of languages recognized by the government of India, and anyone can buy a copy for a few annas in the native bazars. The Penal Code is uniform all over British India, and it makes no distinction of race, creed, caste, color or sex, dealing even-handed justice to all alike. Each person, as a person, has his or her defined civil rights; and the whole authority of the government is available, and rapidly available, to secure them. Justice is denied or delayed to no one." When we come to the laws of property, this uniformity disappears. Property in India is inextricably bound up with religious usages, because the great religious reformers of past ages almost always drew up a code of laws for the people, such as Moses is believed to have drawn up for the Israelites. In the East, these religious law-codes remain for ages, and become inextricably blended with beliefs and rites. So it is in India. The Hindus, the largest section of the population, still regulate their family affairs by the Laws of Manu, while the Muhammadans, who come next to them in number, found their family life on the precepts of the Koran. And so with the Buddhists, the Jainas, and a dozen other religious communities.

In every case, the British Indian government has followed the principle of conservation. The religious code belonging to each community has been confirmed, and family affairs, questions of marriage and succession and so forth, are regulated for each community according to its own religious laws. Thus we dispense to Hindus the precepts of Manu; Moslems have their inheritance cases decided according to the doctors of the Koran; for Parsees, the Zoroastrian regulations are put in force; and perfect justice is thus secured throughout the whole field of life in which religious considerations are domi

nant. Here again is a tremendous achievement in statesmanship; something the like of which the world has hardly seen in past ages. Here are a score of nations to whom perfect equality of civil rights is secured; a score of religions, each of which is protected and conserved in a spirit of perfect toleration; each is at liberty to follow its own precepts in its special field, and is at the same time compelled to extend to its rivals the same toleration which it enjoys for itself. Here is a very

real liberty, such as might by no means be secured by uniform democratic government.

For uniform democratic government presupposes a certain uniformity in the citizens of the democracy, a uniformity of race, a common tongue, or at least some easy mode of intercommunication, and a fairly uniform culture and public opinion. Without this uniformity, democratic institutions will mean a perpetual oppression of minorities, and will result in anything but freedom. But the principle put in force in India does result in a very large measure of real freedom. There is, first, as we saw, the securing of universal and inviolable civil rights, with open and equal justice to all. Then there is the sympathetic and systematic study of each community, to learn its religious, moral and social tradition, its mental atmosphere, its ideals and usages. And, as a result, there is the wise and uniform application of these religious usages. within that community, in the way which best suits its own genius and temper.

There has also been a systematic cultivation of the hundreds of languages and dialects spoken by India's three hundred millions. Already in the eighteenth century Sanskrit type had been cast, and the great work begun of getting the priceless literature of Ancient India into print. Warren Hastings is chiefly remembered, perhaps, by Macaulay's essay, and Sheridan's denunciation. But it should also be recorded of him, that he was the first patron of Sanskrit literature, and helped to publish the first edition of the Bhagavad Gita. Sir William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and thus the father of Orientalists, was an Indian judge; and his translation of Manu's Law Code was undertaken for the