Francis Edward Younghusband

“ Our relationship with the people of India should not be that of conqueror and conquered, and it cannot strictly be paternal or fraternal, but it can be, and it should be, that of manly comradeship. When we talk of having conquered India, it would be ungenerous of us to forget that it was with the aid of Indian soldiers, and it is with their aid that we now hold it, while we furnish the cohesive power which enables the Indian people to hold together and hold India, not only for us, but for themselves. On many a hard-fought battle-field Indian soldiers have proved themselves true comrades. ”

“ Let the Persian, or the Greek, or the Roman, or the Arab, or the Englishman march his battalions and conquer the world, and link the different nations together, and the philosophy and spirituality of India is ready to flow along the new-made channels into the veins of the nations of the world. The calm Hindu's brain must pour its own quota to give to the sum total of human progress. ”

“ No officer who has served with Indian troops in time of war looks upon the native officers as anything else but comrades. There is no civil official who, at the end of his period of service, does not look back upon his time in India without recollections of many an affectionate friendship formed with a chief, a great landholder, or a high native official. Even those faithful Indian servants we get to look upon as real companions. They have stood by us in many a difficulty, and sympathized with us in many a private trouble. The hospitality of the people of India is unbounded and never failing. ”

“ On the death of the late Queen the grief of the people was quite poignant, and throughout India was expressed with an intensity of feeling not surpassed, perhaps not even equalled, in our own country. How the Indian soldiers, on hearing of the illness of our King, straight-way knelt down and prayed in the Bishop of London's garden, is well known. And as in times of sorrow, so in times of joy, Indian people are equally sympathetic. ”

“ And in working, as we must, towards greater efficiency in our civil and military administration, we must be careful not to blight in the bud this delicate flower now just slowly developing, lest, when the race is run, we find in our hands the mere stalk only, while the fair petals have withered away. Efficiency is most necessary, but it is not an end in itself. ”

“ He was an uncompromising champion of justice and equality, yet he was equally uncompromising in maintaining the highest standard of loyalty to the Imperial throne.' So wrote Mazoomdar, his biographer, and Keshub himself, in his injunctions to his followers, wrote of Her Majesty: 'She represents law, order, and justice, and is appointed by Providence to rule over us as a mother is appointed to look after her children. Therefore we love her and honour her. A man who hates his Sovereign is morally as culpable as he who abhors and maltreats his father and mother. ”

“ To benefit the people is the inspiring thought of every British Administrator in India.
But in working out this idea we must be careful not to let our old virility evaporate into washy sentimentality. Really to help the people is a difficult, anxious, and often thankless task, and requires deep study, wide experience, and delicate sympathy. I have already said that the noble ideal of teaching Indians to govern themselves, which men like Sir John Malcolm held a century ago, is not one which nowadays would be either practicable or beneficial. ”

“ Those who have had any experience of the Government of India know that nothing is less congenial to them than spending their hard-earned savings in costly military expeditions. Government will go on for years—often to what we agents, who have to bear the brunt of the injury, think an exasperating degree—putting up with affronts from the weaker peoples on our border, hoping against hope to settle a question without resorting to force. ”

“ Contact with the warm-hearted people of India brings sympathy with them. From one cause or another—international rivalry and the weakness of the native Governments surrounding our original factories—we were driven into using force against them; and though a commonly accepted theory is that those who use force become brutal and tyrannical, much actual experience leads me to form a precisely opposite conclusion. There were no more sympathetic Anglo-Indian administrators than those of a century ago, who had been engaged in actual war with the people. ”

“ And if to attain it we sacrifice the feeling of comradship, we shall find India only loosely bound to us in the day of trouble; the zest and spring in the life of the people will be gone, and the fairest blooms of intellectual and spiritual development will never unfold themselves. ”

“ We hear it is true of men who very rightly advocate giving the people a greater share in the government of the country. But I know of no one with such an intimate knowledge of present India as Sir John Malcolm possessed of India a century ago, even advocating, as he did, that we should deliberately work towards setting up an independent India ruled by Indians. And, as a matter of hard fact, we find that the tie between India and England, instead of loosening during the last century, has year by year become closer. ”

“ And this is the feeling which evidently animated those soldier-administrators who, a century ago, had been engaged in actual fighting with the people whom they afterwards so successfully governed. In the development of the human race the use of force seems inevitable. But the fact that we have had in the past to use force in India will make us all the more ready and determined in the present and future to insure that the good the Indians will receive from us will in the end far outweigh the injury done. ”

“ I do not think anyone who is conversant with the conditions at present prevailing in India could conceive that, even if we were to leave, the people would be able to hold themselves together. Three hundred millions is a large number for such cohesion. These three hundred millions are composed of races of various religions, and more different from one another than Spaniards are from Highlanders. We cannot imagine the Hindu majority consenting to be ruled by the Mohammedan minority, and still less can we imagine the masterful Mohammedans sitting down peacefully under Hindu rulers. ”

“ In many a European country, if there had been plague and famine as severe as they were in that year in India, serious riots would have broken out every-where; and if the Government were at the same time weakened by the despatch of its forces on two distant expeditions, the people would have dangerously shaken the fabric of Government. To satisfy ourselves on this point, we have only to look at what is happening in a European country at the present moment But the people of India, far from seeking to cause the Government embarrassment, sought in many ways to strengthen their hands. ”

“ Indians believe—and I would challenge anyone who has studied not merely the evolution of plants and animals till man arose, but also the evolution of man from the primitive savage packs and hordes to the most civilized races of the present day, to show that they are wrong in their belief—that our Sovereign has been divinely appointed to rule them. The great preacher Keshub Chunder Sen, who created such a powerful impression in England some thirty years ago, and became the leader of the most advanced section of Indian religious thinkers, was profoundly impressed by our late revered Sovereign. ”

“ We may, then, give the contemplative Hindus high, living examples, acted out in the flesh, of ideals as admirable to them as to us. The history of the British in India furnishes many a bright example of Englishmen honestly striving to practically work out in their lives the high ideals which were in them, and contact with such men may prove of more effective aid to a contemplative people than many a well-reasoned-out page of argument. Already the effect upon native Indian officials in Government employ, where they are brought much in contact with Englishmen, is very marked. ”

“ In both India and Egypt we have to take account of great forces operating on the whole of mankind, and cannot regard the question as simply between us and the Indians, or between us and the Egyptians. India has need of some strong outside influence to give it cohesion. To train to stand by themselves a people who would almost certainly fall to pieces directly they were left alone is an altogether unreasonable proceeding. ”

“ When viewed over a long period, a vast amount has then been done towards admitting the natives of India to a share in the government of their own country. But the main service we can do them may, after all, prove to lie, not so much in training them for Government offices, and fitting them to take a part in political life, nor yet in carrying out material improvements in the country, intersecting it with irrigation canals, threading it with roads and railways, tying it together with telegraph lines, fostering its industrial development, and yearly increasing the volume of its trade ”

“ Most of those who work in India have this faith, and because we believe in ourselves the people believe in us, and I cannot bring myself to think that among the masses of the population there exists any general desire to rid themselves of the British. Even if in a momentary ebullition we were evicted from India, I would still believe the people would, after their mad freak was over, be only too thankful to welcome us back. In the Mutiny many officers were shot dead by their men because, relying on their loyalty, they still went down among them. ”

“ The people of India, with their warm, responsive natures, are essentially a people who may be so regarded. Who that has met that fine old Rajput Chief, Sir Pertab Singh, would ever think of treating him in any other way? Who that has served with Indian troops in time of war would look upon them in any different light? ”

“ The great chiefs have always shown themselves ready to stand by us, even in the dark days of the Mutiny, and whenever there has been a scare of a Russian invasion, trouble in China, or disaster in South Africa, they have come forward with generous offers of assistance; while in times of great national sorrow both chiefs and people have shown a depth of sympathy such as could only come from a people having in them the essence of real comradeship. ”

“ Spurred on, too, by the frank criticisms which in the rôle of candid friends we are often too free in offering, the Indians have during the last three-quarters of a century—since the time of Raja Ram Mohun Roy—shown a remarkable tendency to purify their religious ideals, to cast out the dross which their religion has accumulated in the centuries, and to get back to the true, pure ideas of the original founders. India is now quickening into an altogether fresh religious life. The materialism, which is already being discounted in the West, has never satisfied the Indian ”

“ Provincial services for sub-judges, deputy-magistrates, sub-engineers, etc., were, in consequence, formed, and almost entirely manned by natives of India. So that now the number of Britons in the Civil Service is so small that, as Sir John Strachey remarks, it is not the least extraordinary fact connected with our Indian Dominion that we should be able, with such a handful of men, to control the administration of so vast an Empire. Roughly speaking, less than 1,000 Englishmen are employed in the civil government of 230,000,000 of people, and in the partial control of 70,000,000 more. ”

“ At the beginning of the last century there were among the great founders of our Indian Empire many who had the most intimate knowledge of the people, and had been most successful in dealing with them, who conceived that our part was so to train and educate the people of India that they would eventually be able to rule themselves. ”

“ By their religion Hindus are taught to be loyal and obedient to their chief as appointed by Heaven, and of the strength of their attachment to the chief few who have not actually lived in a Native State can fully realize. A chief may be indolent, oppressive, and cruel to a degree which would shock outsiders, but the patient loyalty and simple affection of the people remain unshaken. Attempts on the lives of rulers in Europe and America are frequent. In India they are almost unknown. Through evil report and good report the people remain touchingly and immovably loyal to their chiefs. ”

“ It is a wonderful trait in their character, and what is equally remarkable is that this same loyal attachment to their own chiefs is given to the chief of their chiefs—our Sovereign. Even if our Sovereigns had been rough, careless, and unsympathetic, I think this feeling of loyalty would still have existed to a very considerable degree. But when they have been thoughtful of the interests of the people, sympathetic, kindly, and dignified, they have a hundredfold increased this feeling of attachment ”

“ There seems, then, little prospect of our voluntarily leaving India, and little wisdom in contemplating such a step. But there are among those who have most profoundly studied Asiatic problems some who hold that as we won India in a day we shall lose it in a night; that there will be some kind of combination among Asiatics generally to spew Europeans out of Asia. Great latent forces now surging beneath the surface will suddenly burst forth, and Europe will be rolled back from Asia. Asiatics do not fear death as do Europeans, and will sacrifice any numbers to drive them away. ”