Let us now consider the Government and its ideas; that is to say, the men and the laws by which they govern.
First, take the personnel, for there is no complaint more insistent on all sides than that the officers of to-day are not the same as those of fifty or more years ago. They are out of touch with the people.
It was for some time supposed by Government that this was only partially true. That government itself, that is, the Secretariats, was out of touch, was felt and avowed. But it was supposed that this arose from the specialising of function. The work of secretaries had become so difficult, so special, so different from district work, that instead of there being interchange of officers, the secretaries usually passed all their official lives away from actual contact with the realities of the people. There were orders passed that in future this was not to occur, men were to come and go, to do district work for a while, and then secretariat work, bringing to the latter knowledge gained in the former.
But it was quickly seen that this had little or no result. If the secretaries were out of touch, the district officers were hardly less so. Government, as a whole, had separated from the people. English and Indian were divided; nothing was gained.
What, then, was the difference between the men of the past and those of the present? Let us consider.
They went out younger in those days; sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, were the usual ages. The usual age for Haileybury cadets was twenty. Clive, Warren Hastings, Nicholson and John Lawrence went out at eighteen, Henry Lawrence at seventeen, Meadows Taylor at fifteen. Many of the administrators were soldiers first, and they too went out young. Lord Roberts, for instance, landed in India when he was sixteen. Addiscombe cadets joined at sixteen or seventeen. When Haileybury was abolished the average age was raised to twenty-three or more, and at that age it now remains.
Thus, as the first year in India is also spent in training out there, a man is now not far from twenty-five before he is allowed to act independently; he used to be twenty-one or less. This is a great difference.
In England the age when a boy attains his majority and has full freedom before the law is twenty-one, and in order to elucidate this question I have tried to discover why the law of England fixed twenty-one. In Rome a boy was legally of age as regards his person at fourteen though he had a curator over his property till he was twenty-five. Therefore this age of twenty-one does not come from Roman law. It seems to have arisen from a general consensus of observation that at twenty-one the average young man is fit to be free and should be free. There seems to be about that age a critical mental stage of adolescence corresponding to the physical stage at fourteen. However this may be, there seems to be no doubt that to keep a young man in tutelage till he is twenty-four or twenty-five is bad for him. The powers of initiative and the sense of responsibility which mature at twenty-one atrophy thereafter if not fully used. And no book learning can replace this. Thus nowadays tutelage is too long continued.
Again, education began later in those days than now, and there was less of it. Boys ran wild far more than now, when they are cramped up in schools and conventions at a very early age.
Thus the men of old had individualities; they had not been steam-rollered flat by public school and university; their boyish enthusiasm and friendliness were still in them. They had no prejudices, had never heard of the Oriental mind, were not convinced beforehand that every Oriental was a liar and a thief, but were prepared to take men as they found them. They were willing and eager to learn. Their minds were open as yet to new impressions. They had not been "fortified by fixed principles" to "safeguard them" against acquiring any sympathy with Eastern peoples. Therefore they did so understand and sympathise.
If you will read the records of the past you will see this in a most marked degree. Englishmen had Indian friends; how rarely do they have such now! They knew the people's talk, their folk-lore and their tales. They looked on them as fellow-humans. And the feeling was reciprocated. Look, for instance, at how they kept the same servants all their service. Nowadays there is a general howl of the badness of Indian servants and their untrustworthiness. It was not so then. One of the most pleasing features of that old life was the affection often shown between masters and servants. Dickens has noted it. How much of that do you find now? Not much. A little still there is—who should know better than I? And if now it is so rare, where is the fault? Good masters make good servants. And it requires so little goodness in the master—only a little consideration, a friendly word sometimes. They give back far more than they receive. If there are many bad servants, who makes them bad? Their masters; those with whom they began their service, who did not know how to treat them, how to help them, how to keep them. At Arcot the Sepoys gave the rice to their officers and took the conjee themselves; how many regiments would do that now?
I do not say that there was ever close personal intercourse between English and Indian; there was not, and in the nature of things there could not be. But there were mutual consideration and mutual respect. "We have different ways and different customs; we have different skins. But underneath it all we are both men." So they thought in the old days.
Thus in the old days the embryo official came out young, free from prejudices, full of enthusiasms, ready to learn, to read, to mark, learn, and inwardly digest all phases of Oriental life about him. Even thirty years ago when I first went to India there were many of this type still left. They thought it their duty, as it was their pleasure, to study the people in order to understand what lay beneath their customs. It must be thirty years ago that an old civilian turned on me sharply when I made some ignorant remark about some Malabar custom and said: "The custom has arisen out of the circumstances of life and no peculiarity of nature in the people. All peoples are much alike in fundamentals, and great apparent differences are but superficial, and arise from environment."
The absurd doctrine of the "Oriental mind" had not then arisen to be an excuse for ignorance and want of understanding. Nowadays it is supposed to be the mark of culture to talk of it; to the old officials it would have been the mark of a fool; they thought it their duty to study the people.
But it is not so now. Young civilians come out with their minds already closed, and, as a rule, closed they remain. The harm is done in England before they start. Let me give instances.
It is a custom when a young civilian joins to send him to a district head-quarters for six months first, to learn his way about before posting him to any specified work. One such was sent to me ten years ago, and if I give an account of him it will do for all. For nowadays they are all turned out of the same mill, have all the same habits of mind and thought, and their personalities are submerged. If anything, he of whom I speak was above the average in all ways.
He was a very nice young fellow, with charming manners, and I greatly liked him.
He became an officer of great promise, and would have risen high, but he is dead now, and therefore what I say now cannot offend anyone. Besides, I have nothing to say that would offend. He was, I think, twenty-three years of age, of good people, educated at a public school and Oxford, and was as nice a boy as could be found. He had passed high in the examinations. He was said to be clever, and as regards assimilating paper knowledge, he was able, but his mind was an old curiosity shop. He had fixed ideas in nearly everything. He was full of prejudices he called principles, of "facts" that were not true. He had learnt a great deal, he knew nothing; and worse—he did not know how to obtain knowledge. He wanted his opinions ready-made and absolute first, and only sought for such facts as would support those principles. He had no notion how to make knowledge by himself. He wanted authority before he would think. Give him "authority," and he would disregard or deny fact in order to cling to it. I will take a concrete instance.
There is amongst Englishmen in Burma a superstition that the Burmese do not and cannot work. They are "lazy." The men never work if they can help it, and all the work that is done is done by women. How this idea arose is an interesting study in the psychology of ignorance, but I need not enter into that now. The idea obtains universally, and is an acknowledged shibboleth. My young assistant was not with me many days before he brought it up.
"Oh," he said, "the Burman is so lazy."
"You are sure of that?" I asked.
He stared at me. "Why, everyone says so."
"Everyone said four hundred years ago that the sun went round the earth," I answered; "were they right?"
"You don't mean to tell me," he said, "that the Burmese can work."
"I don't mean to tell you anything," I answered. "Here are a quarter of a million Burmese in this district. Find out the facts for yourself."
The necessity of having to support his theories with facts seemed to him unreasonable. "But," he objected, "I can see they are lazy." The Burman is lazy. That is enough said. What have facts to do with it? He did not say this, but undoubtedly he was thinking it. However, at last he did find what he considered a fact.
"You remember, when we rode into that village the other day about noon, the number of men we saw sleeping in the veranda?"
"True," I said.
"Does not that show it?"
"Suppose," I said, "you had got up at four o'clock in the morning and worked till ten, in the fields, would you not require a rest before going out at three o'clock again?"
"Do they do that?" he asked.
"You can find out for yourself if they do or not," I answered.
He looked at me doubtfully.
"But," he objected, "it is notorious."
"So is the fact that the standard of living in Burma is very high. How do you reconcile the two? Laziness and comfort. The comfort is evident and real, perhaps the laziness is only apparent."
"A rich country," he said.
"Is it?" I asked. "Look at the dry, bare land, of which nearly all this district and most of Upper Burma are composed. Is it rich? You have eyes to see. You know it is not rich; why do you say it is?"
He shook his head almost as if I had hurt him and searched about for a defence.
"But Lower Burma is rich."
"Certainly; and if you look at the export returns you will see the enormous amount of rice it grows and exports. Is that rice the product of laziness?"
"But," he said at last in despair, "if this laziness of the Burman is untrue, how did the idea become general?"
"Ah," I answered, "that is another matter. Let us stick to one thing at a time. We are concerned now with whether it is true or not. Decide that first. See for yourself. Find out an ordinary man's work and I think you will find it is sufficient. You have the opportunity of judging, and unless you use that opportunity you have no right to an opinion at all."
He said no more at the time, but a few days later he returned to the subject. A High Official had been opening a public work in Mandalay and had made a speech. Much of the labour for the work had been Burmese, where usually such labour is imported Indian, and he referred with satisfaction to the fact. "I am glad to see," said the High Official, "that the Burmese are taking to hard work." My assistant brought this up. "Here is authority," he said.
"Certainly," I said; "there is authority on one side; now let us look at fact on the other; whether is it better to be a peasant-proprietor on your own land or a day-labourer?"
"The proprietor, of course," he said.
"This has been a bad year in some districts. Crops have failed. You can read that from the weekly reports in my office. Many cultivators have had to abandon their holdings and turn to day labour. Is that good? Are they to be congratulated on it?"
The boy looked downcast.
"No," he admitted.
"Well, then," I asked, "what will they think of a Government who says such things?"
He reflected for some time. "But," he said at length, "when one authority (the High Official) says one thing and another authority (you) says the reverse, what am I to believe?"
Then came my opportunity. "You are to believe nothing," I said. "You have eyes, you have ears, you have common sense. They are given you to use and see facts for yourself. The facts are all round you. You will never do any good work if you refuse to face facts and understand them. If you are to be worth your salt as an official you will have to work by sight, not by faith."
He laughed. At first he seemed puzzled; then he was pleased. He had been educated to accept what he was told and never to question. His mind had been stunted and the idea of exercising it again delighted him. To judge by himself was a new idea to him entirely and he welcomed it. He began to do so. For the first time since childhood he was encouraged to use that which is the only thing worth cultivating—his common sense. But even yet he could not emancipate himself.
Some time later a new subject came up. This time it was the disappearance of the Burman. He is supposed to be dying out. The Indian is "ousting" him. Before long there will be none left. My assistant had read it in the paper and heard it almost universally, therefore it must be true. I said nothing at the time, but that day when I went to office I sent him the volumes of the last two Census tables with a short note. "Will you kindly," I wrote, "make out for me:
the Burmese population in 1891
the same in 1901
district by district, and let me know where there have been decreases, also increases, and the percentage of increase."
The next day he came to me with an amused expression on his face and a paper of figures in his hand.
"I have made them all out," he said, "as you wished. Here they are."
"Then," I said, "let us take the districts with the decreases first. Please show me them."
"There are none," he answered. "They all show increases."
"Large?" I asked.
"Yes, large," he said; "from a population of about nine million to ten million in ten years is a good increase. The Burmese are prolific."
"But," I remarked also, "I thought the Burman was disappearing? You said so on authority. How is that?"
He laughed; he had taken his lesson.
And again, another point. I had received an order from Government which I thought was mistaken, and I said so. He was a Government official too, and I could say to him what I could not say to others.
"Then you won't carry it out?" he asked, surprised.
"I am here to carry out orders," I answered, "and of course I shall carry it out."
"But why then do you criticise it, if it must be carried out?"
"Look here," I said, "before very long you will be sent to a subdivision of my district to govern it. I shall send you many orders, and shall expect you to carry them out."
"Right or wrong?"
"Right or—as you may think—wrong. You must do as I say. Without this, government is impossible. But I do not want you to think as I do. I want you to think for yourself. If an order appears to you issued from a misconception on my part, you must not refuse to obey; but I should expect you to tell me any facts that would lead me to better knowledge. Your business is not merely to carry out orders, but to furnish me with correct information how to better those orders. You are not merely to be part of the district hand, but of its brain too. I should want you to criticise every order in your mind, try to understand it, and if you disagree with it to examine your reasons for disagreement and see if they are good."
"And let you know?"
"Whenever you are certain that I am wrong, and the matter is important."
"But would not criticism be cheek?"
"Not if it is true and valuable. You would be doing me a valuable service. It is what I want. How do you suppose we are ever to get on if opinions are to be stereotyped? Thought must be free. But don't give me opinions or 'authority.' I don't care for either. Give me facts, and be sure of your facts."
"I see," he said.
"You can be quite kind about it, you know," I suggested.
"Is that what you are to Government," he asked, "when you disagree with them?"
"I try to be," I said. "I put myself as far as I can in their position, and give them what I would like to receive myself."
Again it was quite a new idea to him that anyone should want criticism. He had been educated to believe that any doubt of what authority said was a sin, perhaps inevitable sometimes, but anyhow always to be concealed; and he had been told that everyone, from the Creator down, resented criticisms and would annihilate the critic. That anyone should prefer knowing the truth even if it prove him wrong seemed to him impossible. He did not like ever to admit he had been wrong. He thought truth was absolute and fixed, whereas it is relative and always growing. He had, unconsciously, the mind of the Pharisee in the Temple.
Now these three instances will point out what seems to me to be wrong in the previous training of young men sent to India, and in fact in all training. Their minds instead of being cultivated are stifled. They are taught to disregard fact and to accept authority in place of it. They are not only to do what they are told, which is right; but to think what they are told, which is wrong. And they do. They are taught to repeat in parrot manner stock phrases and imagine they are thinking. And this habit once acquired is difficult to get rid of. With most it never is got rid of. You will, for instance, find these shibboleths of the "disappearing Burman" and his "laziness" repeated by the highest officials who have been longest in the country, all of whom have facts in their office disproving them. And these are not the only prejudices nor even the principal. They are innumerable and serious. You will in consequence find that administration and even legislation are affected by them. The whole attitude of Government to the people it governs is vitiated in this way. There is a want of knowledge and understanding. In place of it are fixed opinions based usually on prejudice or on faulty observation, or on circumstances which have changed, and they are never corrected. Young secretaries read up back circulars, and repeat their errors indefinitely. That is "following precedent." They will quote you complacently:
"Freedom broadening slowly down
From precedent to precedent"
and never see the absurdity of the lines. Freedom is the disregard of precedent where the precedent is wrong or out of date.
There is throughout nearly all English officials (and non-officials) in India not only a disregard of facts about them, but a want of any real sympathy with the people among whom they live, which is astonishing. They often like the "natives," they often are kind to them, wish them well, and do their best for them, but that is not sympathy. Sympathy is understanding. It is being able to put yourself in another's place.
I could tell many stories illustrating this want of understanding. One will suffice. An official I knew well, an excellent fellow, kind-hearted, humorous, and able, holding a good position then and a high one now, with a charming wife, living amongst the Burmese and ruling them, with Burmese servants, clerks, and peons, and continual Burmese visitors of all classes, called his dog "Alaung." Now "Alaung" means something very similar to "Messiah," and is a sacred word. A parallel would be if, say, a Parsee in England called his dog "Christ." I have seen this official's servants wince when he called out to his dog. Yet I am sure it never struck him that there was anything out of the way in this nomenclature. I am sure he never dreamed he would hurt anyone's feelings by it, or he would not have done it. He certainly intended no jeer at the religion of his subordinates. It was simply that he wanted understanding.
Now sympathy is inherent in all children, and is the means whereby they acquire all the real knowledge they have. A girl being a mother to her doll, a boy being a soldier or hunter, is exercising and training the most valuable of all gifts—imaginative sympathy. It is the only emotion which brings real knowledge of the world about you. Without it you never understand anything.
It should be incessantly cultivated and fed with real facts to enable it to grow, and to turn what your sympathy leads you to suspect into what knowledge confirms. In all young men nowadays it is destroyed by their education. Their minds are fitted up with obsolete and mistaken prejudices, which are called principles, and then the door is locked. They all talk the same, act the same, have the same ideas in their heads. None of them ever think over what is all about them. They do their work by paper knowledge and paper principles; the great book of humanity has been sealed for them. When they try to think they cannot do so. They have lost the power their childhood had. They argue in the most extraordinary way. They will make a statement, and if it is disproved say, "Well, if it is not true it ought to be," and go on as if that made it true. They will resort to prophecy, and say, "If not true to-day it will be to-morrow," and so settle it.
Now if brighter days are to be in store for India official or non-official, English or native, all this must be altered. The whole principles of education must be revised or abandoned. The less educated a man is now the more real understanding he is likely to have. The educated man is a mental automaton. He has sold his soul and got in its place some maxims, with the aid of which he seeks to govern the world. He thinks knowledge is got from books. It is not. Books are most valuable helps, showing you new views of life, giving you new facts, showing you how to think; but they never give you knowledge of life. Only experience can do that. But the young man now does not want to know what is, but what other people say. He is afraid of himself and yearns for authority.
This has been evident to all who have looked into the matter. Here is what a modern writer says:
"No English schoolboy is ever taught to speak the truth for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless as to whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the 'fact' can be used on his side when he is engaged in 'playing the game.'"
Nothing could be more true than this. He is provided with fixed ideas, and he will welcome any fact that supports them, while deliberately refusing all facts which are opposed to his ideas. He thinks and argues to prove his preconceived point, never to elicit truth regardless of whether that truth agrees with his preconceptions or not. In fact, he is taught not to think. The Inward Light which is in all children has been put out. He has become a spiritual coward; he dare not look the whole truth in the face. He thinks that patriotism consists in supporting his country or his class through thick and thin. It does not occur to him that the higher patriotism is to try to help his country or his class not to go wrong, or if wrong to get right. He would rather bolster up a mistake, shut his eyes to the fact that it is a mistake, and go on doing it, than admit his wrong. It is better in his eyes to be consistently wrong than by admitting mistakes and correcting them to be inconsistent. He cannot learn.