India may be regained. How could that be done?
The first point is the personnel of the Indian Civil Service, which holds all important offices in India, forms the Government, and fills most of the places on the Indian Council at home.
It depends, as I have said, for its success not upon the ability, but on the personality of its members. India was achieved by personality and successfully governed by personality. It is personality alone that humanises rule and makes it tolerable, that stands between the people and rigid law, and can create that sentiment which alone binds ruler and ruled together.
How can that necessary personality be restored to it?
That this lack of personality does not affect only the Indian Civil Service is a matter of notoriety. It is exactly what our generals deplored after the Boer War—that the ordinary officer had no personality. It is a matter of common remark nowadays how exactly alike all the young men are, echoing sentiments that are not theirs. It is what the Germans say of us and the Americans, who especially admire and try to cultivate personality. We once stood before the world as a nation of personalities. We do so no longer.
To what is this due? Not to natural deficiency, because all children abound in personality. It is due to what is called "education." That too is no new discovery of mine, but a matter of common knowledge and publicity. Read, for instance, Harold Gorst's The Curse of Education. In Paine's Life of Mark Twain, systematic training is called "a blight." Neither is it a new thing. The Duke of Wellington said Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton—not in the schools, be it noted. Yet in those days education was nothing like so rigid as it is now. Then take the notable Englishmen of the last fifty years; how few have been University men—many not public school men. Cobden and Bright, Chamberlain, Beaconsfield, Dickens and Kipling, Stanley, Captain Scott, and other pioneers of Empire, Huxley and Kelvin, all the great captains of industry. The two most prominent members of the Government to-day are not University men. Even where notable men were University men they did not attain their stature till they had thrown off its bonds. Gladstone was, for instance, the hope of the stern, unbending Tories till he had achieved his liberty, when he could think for himself. Yet even then he only achieved political, and never spiritual, freedom. Cecil Rhodes said that University dons were as children in some matters; meaning, however, ignorant and not ready to learn, which is not a child's attitude.
Therefore the fault lies with the "education."
What is Education?
There are two things that go to the proper upbringing of a child, and though they overlap in places they are distinct and even sometimes contradictory; one is Instruction, and the other is Education.
Reading and writing, arithmetic, and all information obtained from books or lectures or teachers is instruction; the bringing out of the powers of the child's own mind is education. The object of instruction is to enable the child to better his education. In itself it has no value. The mere acquirements of reading and writing—the mere accumulation of book knowledge—are in themselves worthless. "The learned fool is the biggest fool." They are only good insomuch as they help education.
What is education? It is the drawing out of a child's mind so that it can see life as it is, not a mere mass of phenomena, but a consequence of underlying causes; it is the exercising of his faculties of right judgment to meet events as they arise; it is an ability to gauge himself and others. Education is the cultivation of personality. It is to the child what careful gardening is to the tree—a help to growth so that it can develop its potentiality. The gardener helps each tree to put forth that essential quality of its own that differentiates it from all other trees and makes it a thing of use and beauty to the world. It is not a reduction to a common type or the standardisation of growth, because while the tree must harmonise with the rest of the garden it must have an individuality of its own.
That is education, and that alone is education. Instruction is simply providing the necessary food for growth, or giving the necessary weapons or implements to obtain that food. All instruction that does not directly tend to nourish personality is worse than waste—it occupies nerve and energy that are wanted for better things.
This is simple enough, yet the world is full of fallacies on the subject. Here is one from a well-known writer: "How can you draw out of a child a love for clean collars, Greek accents, the date of Bannockburn, or how to eat asparagus."
Well, you can only draw out a child's love for these things by helping him to see that the acquisition of them is a step towards a result the child desires to reach. Now Greek accents are only useful to a child who wishes to become a Greek tutor, and the date of Bannockburn is useful to no one because it can always be looked up if necessary; therefore no children have a taste for the latter, and not one in a thousand for the former. They are not education at all, and even as instruction they are worthless. A love of clean collars and how to eat asparagus can be drawn out of children by simply making them realise that unless they have their love for these things they will expose themselves to ridicule or contempt for no good purpose. For be it noted that until you do awaken this self-respect you will not get a child to put on clean collars enthusiastically, or be careful about asparagus. Instruction in such matters is useless—you must have education.
The man or woman properly educated will desire the right things, and will seek the right way of attaining these things. His actions will spring from a real living force within him. But if you teach him to do things because he is told or because it is the custom, you injure his personality; and as there is no driving force in a law or a custom, which are bonds, you confine him, whereas you should free him. It is an admission that he must not or cannot think for himself, but must blindly follow custom. It is true that he must, not only in boyhood but all through his life, yield obedience in act to persons, governments, or rules; but he must not do so blindly. It is a principal part of education to make the boy see for himself that such subordination of act is necessary to the progress of the world, because as individuals we can accomplish no great thing; then he will do it willingly, knowing its necessity. But it is equally necessary that the boy never subordinate his judgment to others, because any rule made absolute is death to progress, and there is no authority, nor rule, nor convention that should not be broken sometimes; and as time goes on all must be modified, changed, and relaxed; the ideal of education being that all authority will become unnecessary, as people will desire what is right, and do it proprio moto. The truth will have made them free.
Now seeing this difference, how much education is there in school or college? In the classrooms there is none. All that is given in classes is instruction, which may be useful or detrimental inasmuch as it helps personality or not. Usually it is detrimental, because it substitutes "authority" for insight. The child must accept something, not because he is helped to see that it is true, but because "somebody says so." Thus his personality is destroyed.
The only education he gets is in the playing-fields. There he learns to keep his temper, play the game, and co-operate, of his volition, with others to a desired end.
That is a valuable training, but it does not go very far. He is never taught to see life as it is for himself. On the contrary, he is forbidden to do so.
And this continues now till the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, so that by the time it is over the most receptive period of life is past. Bacon went to the University at thirteen, and left it at sixteen as he found it had no more to teach him.
Further, until some thirty or forty years ago a father considered that he owed some duty to his son—to help him, to lead him, to initiate him into life.
No one can do this but a father. No one can understand his son like a father and know what it is necessary for him to learn; to no one will the son listen, or confide in, as his father. But nowadays I notice that fathers have abdicated. They consider their duty fulfilled if they pay for the boy's schooling, and everything is left to the schoolmaster. Many fathers that I know are quite stranger to their sons. Mothers, on the contrary, strive more and more to obtain influence over their sons and bring them up in the principles of women. But a man must be a man or be nothing.
There is another and very considerable difference between schools now and the schools of sixty years ago and before. In the earlier period the schoolmasters were rarely clergymen; now they are practically always so; and not only that, but boys nowadays are far more under control and influence of their masters than they were.
Now whatever good points may be claimed for Church teaching by those who believe in it, there will, I think, be no difficulty about the admission that the frame of mind, the outlook on the world, of ecclesiastics is not suitable for men who have to lead an active life. It is, in fact, the very reverse of what a man requires whose first duty it is to understand the world and to lead the world. For to the ecclesiastic the world is a bad place, it has to be borne as best it can, to be condemned not understood, and all effort is directed not to this world but to some other. Moreover, the habit of thought of ecclesiastics is fixed. They believe that not only is truth absolute, but that they possess it or some of it; the very foundation-rock of their belief is authority, and freedom of thought is disliked by them as subversive of their tenets. Their principal qualities are those of submission, patience and obedience, not merely in act but in thought.
Now boys are apt to imitate their masters, and however secular a course of education may be, if it be given by ecclesiastics the boys are certain to be a great deal influenced by their master's outlook on life. That accounts for much of the pessimism that is observable, for the "unnatural mildness" of the modern young man. If you keep a boy under ecclesiastical habits of thought till he is twenty-three, how can he ever escape into the fresh air of free inquiry? How will he ever love the world instead of despising it? And no good work was ever done except by men who loved the world; and love comes from understanding, not from aloofness.
A boy's education should be directed from an early age towards the work he is to perform in life. What department of the public service is now held to be the best served? Is it not the Navy? And naval officers are caught young and trained ad hoc; not a narrow professional training, but none the less a training with an object. The present training of Indian civilians up till twenty-three is objectless, and therefore inefficient. That in the Army the special training is begun much later may account for the complaints of army officers wanting personality compared with naval officers.
With engineers and all specialised work the training begins young.
But the Indian civilian is ecclesiastically trained till he is twenty-three. Then he has to learn his work. Could there be a greater absurdity?
What then should be done?
In the first place he should be caught young. The work of the Indian civilian is as important to England as that of the sailor; it is even more specialised and difficult. He should be trained for it from fourteen or thereabouts, not from twenty-three.
It should be determined what special qualities are necessary for a good Indian civilian. I think some of them are obvious enough.
A good physique and a liking for sport.
Good manners and a knowledge of etiquette.
Discipline in act.
Freedom and courage in thought.
Knowledge of life and humanity as they are round him.
Let us consider these.
That physical fitness is the first necessity all will allow. The climate is severe and takes a great deal out of him, especially in the hot weather; there must be exposure in the districts; the work is hard and difficult, and makes great demands upon the physique. Therefore the physique must be good.
And a medical certificate of soundness is no guarantee of this. A man may be medically quite sound and yet so prostrated by the heat as to find his temper and his work affected. His physique lies at the base of all his work, and must be good. Nothing is now done to secure this; no investigation has ever been made as to the type that endures heat the best. Yet undoubtedly there is such a type. In that extraordinary book, A Modern Legionary, it is pointed out that in Tonquin, amongst the men of the Legion, a certain type stood the climate better than the others. Whenever any special service had to be performed it was men of a certain sanguine type that were chosen. Not that they were physically stronger or braver than the others, but because even in the greatest heat they retained a certain buoyancy of temperament which the darker types lost.
I have myself noticed something of the sort in Burma and India. Of course mere personal observation of this sort proves nothing, but the subject seems to deserve investigation. That all people do not bear heat and cold alike is undoubted. In the Russian campaign of 1812 it was the Italians who stood the cold best of all Napoleon's troops.
Anyhow, the cadet should have not merely a sound physique but a buoyant physique, and that cannot be ensured under the present system.
Then he should be made a good sportsman; for the Indian civilian no training is more necessary than this. I do not mean only a cricketer or football player; neither of these games is of much use out in the East. I mean a rider who is also fond of horses; a shot who is also interested in birds and animals.
There is in all sportsmen of this kind a quality which no one else has. I cannot define it. It comes, I think, from association with people out of his own rank in one pursuit, from having to go to them for knowledge he has not got himself and thereby recognising their value, from a subtle sympathy with nature as not apart from man, nor a setting for man, but another manifestation of the same Life that is in man. Nothing is more valuable in enabling a District Officer to keep his mind sweet. Official work is all concerned with the faults and shortcomings of others, wherein you are judge and they are culprits. Official work divides; it insensibly leads you to believe that all men are liars and robbers, and are trying to deceive you. Throw it aside, and go out to shoot, stopping in the villages talking of sport and village affairs, and the whole aspect of life changes. You wash off your priggishness; you cease to imagine yourself first cousin to the Deity; you return to your humanity, and with the first snipe you miss to your extreme fallibility.
Then there is ability at languages. Now although some men may develop an excess of ability to learn languages, all people have that ability to a certain extent when young or they could not learn their own language.
But it is an ability that quickly departs unless kept alive. The way Greek and Latin are taught is a sure way to destroy any ability for learning a language a boy may retain. Grammar should never be taught. No child learns its own language by grammar, and, in fact, grammar only applies to dead languages, not to living. That has to some extent dawned on modern educators, but I see that French grammar and regular and irregular verbs are taught to those learning French. Did Loti and Maupassant learn French grammar? I wonder. If not, why should anyone else? But schoolmasters are a hard lot, and there is no one who so absolutely refuses to learn as he who makes a profession of teaching. Why should not Hindustani be made the school language for Indian cadets?
Then come good manners. I do not mean only good English manners—those manners which enable you to pass in a meeting of cultivated English men and women—but much better manners than those. They are concerned with your conduct to your equals; but the only good manners that will be of much use to you in the East are those deeper manners which are equal to all occasions and can show an equal courtesy to a ploughman as to a peer, to an old Subadar hero of a hundred fights, to a headman and to a coolie. Some of it is, of course, convention and must be learned, like the right thing to do when an old soldier offers you the hilt of his sword, or a Burman lady brings you some fruit; but most of it, I think, simply comes from a frame of mind. If you recognise that the common humanity that binds you is eternal and that the difference of rank or race or age is a temporary difference that will pass, I do not think you will quite want for good manners. Orientals are particular about manners, and they do not respect a man who has none, or who has his own and not theirs.
Discipline in act is, I think, enough taught now, but freedom of thought is woefully to seek. It is banned by theology, and ecclesiastics naturally do not teach it.
As to knowledge of life, that can only come in the living. But it will not come unless you find the world worth studying and your own life worth living. If this world is bad, then it is not worth study, and if the only object of your life here is to fit you or unfit you for life in some spirit world, then you will not care much to fit yourself for this world.
Finally, it would appear too as if civilians should go out to India much younger than they do now. Twenty-three is far too old to begin a totally new life. For it must be remembered that life in India is a totally new life to which men have to get accustomed. No matter how you are trained in England, nothing will enable you to know India but being in India. The real education cannot begin until the student lands in the country in which he is to do his life's work. Everything he may learn at home is preliminary only. Language, people, work have all to be learned after arriving. However good the material provided may be, it is, when it lands, simply so much raw material. It has to learn everything. I do not think the age of twenty is at all too young to begin such a training; in fact I think nineteen would be better.
But we are now come to what should be done after arrival in India, and that will require a new chapter.