H. Fielding

“ 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. ”

“ No such wicked fallacy was ever foisted upon a credulous world as this. Nobody at any period of the world ever wished to be criminal. Everyone instinctively hates and fears crime; everyone is honest by nature; it is inherent in the soul. I have never met a criminal that did not hate his crime even more than his condemners hate it. The apparent exceptions are when a man does not consider his act a crime; he has killed because his victim exasperated him to it; he has robbed society because society made war on him. The offender hates his crime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No Government has ever had so little help from intelligent criticism as the Indian Government; none ever needed it more. No Government in the world is more sincerely desirous of the good of the people it governs; none knows so little how to secure it.
You cannot have any work done efficiently unless there is honest and understanding criticism. No sensible person objects to it if it is given sincerely and fairly. But that is not so in India. Considering how unfair most criticism of the Indian Government is, it shows great self-restraint in the consideration it accords to it. ”

“ It is the Village policy of government that has created for it the most difficulties, and which is at the bottom of the most serious unrest. For it touches not merely a few as criminal law, but practically all the population; it affects not only a part of the life of India, but it has injured it in its most vital point. In the whole history of administration there is nothing I think so demonstrative of the ignorance of government as the Village policy.
The foundation on which not only all government but all civilisation rests throughout the world is the village. ”

“ They must be friends. The rubs of official intercourse must be effaced over the mess-table, the card-table, the camp fire; must be forgotten in talks of home, of mutual friends. How often has it not happened that it has been the mutual appreciation of a poet, the remembrance of a charming woman, the admiration of an opera, that has rendered possible that co-operation which is the soul of work. ”

“ No one can truly diagnose his own illness nor prescribe his remedy. India feels uncomfortable, and clamours for anything she can get. The Indian Government gives her what it can, offering profusest condolence, which is sincere; and for the rest sitting upon her chest.
But that will avail nothing—how can it? The fever is deep-seated, it is remittent, it affects the whole system. It is becoming dangerous both to the patient and her physician. For their lots are bound together. India cannot yet do without us. She has not got the organism to govern herself yet. ”

“ The first secret of our success in India was the personality of our officers. Other things helped—the state of the country, the discipline of our English troops, the ability of the Home Government to help; but it was the personality of our officers that gave us India. Read all their records, right from Clive and Warren Hastings to Havelock, Lawrence and Nicholson. It was their personality that won. For personality alone can make bad laws bearable, can make mistakes forgiven and forgotten, can lead and draw men. ”

“ He must feel himself part of ever greater organisms, the village first, the district and the nation—finally of humanity.
But in India all this is impossible. Except the village there is no community that exists even in name, and we have injured, almost destroyed, even that. Thus an Indian has no means of growth. He cannot be a citizen of anything at all. Half his sympathies and abilities lie entirely fallow, therefore he cannot fully develop the other half. A man is a complete organism, and if you keep half in inaction you affect the other half too. ”

“ He knows and sees that witnesses are lying. He knows the reason, because it is a duel, and they are, on one side or another, fighting for vengeance, fighting for liberty. He knows that though they are a singularly truthful people outside, yet inside, their consciences absolve them from the necessity of truth because the Court is so constituted as not to be a place for an inquiry into truth, but the arena of a duel.
He sees cases bought and sold. A clever barrister or advocate will secure an acquittal where a cheaper man would fail. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every principle that experience shows must go to the making of a successful Assembly has been scorned. The representation, even such as it is, is by class, by race, and by religion. No assembly where such a method of representation has been adopted has ever been known. Wherever, even in a small degree, such differences have existed it has paralysed all action. Take, for instance, the French National Assembly before the Revolution. Imagine a House of Commons with members for landowners, for the merchants of London and Glasgow, and special members for the Catholic Irish in England and Scotland. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So in England, a free Parliament was made up of representatives from free cities and counties. These have been destroyed, and the present constituencies are merely so many voters. Policies are no longer decided in Parliament, but in secret party conclave. Members are the nominees of that conclave, not of free local organisms, and Parliament has become a machine to register its decrees. So are free institutions passing away.
There is no lesson of history more true—more certain—than this, that the village or town is the unit of all free life and civilisation. ”

“ He does not understand the criminal. He has never tried to understand him as I have tried. What the criminal feels towards his crime is what the sick man feels towards the delirium that seizes him—what the "possessed of devils" feels towards the possession when it comes. It terrifies him; he knows he must succumb; he fears not the mere penalty, but the crime. But he is not ashamed, because he knows he cannot help it. And punishment exasperates him because he has not deserved it, and it will do him harm, not good. He wants to be cured—not made a fit dwelling for still worse devils. ”

“ It is of one religion, of one caste, of one habit of thought. A family is narrow and a village is broad. Families divide; villages combine. Societies organised on the family, or clan, or tribe principle have always failed—by the very nature of things they must so fail. The Jews are a race, or tribe, and not a nation. They have no civilisation of their own, but adopt that in which they live. The Highland clans had to be broken before the Highlands could be civilised. The caste system in India ruined its old civilisation, and is the bar to any new civilisation. ”

“ Ability is the product of communities, of men formed into organisms, not of individuals. Each man in himself has no duty but to himself; to own a duty to a community he must be part of the community; to a government he must have a place in the government; to a nation he must be part of the nation. But in India there is no nation, no community at all, save very weakened village communities. As far as the Indian is concerned no larger community exists. And I have already pointed out that India has no place in the organism of government. ”

“ Of what use are these products of the higher education in India? They are useful but for two things, to be lawyers or pleaders, or to be clerks. They are dealers in words, and not in facts or in humanity.
Government accepts a certain number into its service, because the first ideal of Government is a man who can fill up forms and returns, speedily, accurately, and punctually. They can do that. When they have district work to do they fail, because they have no personality, no freedom of thought, and because the people despise them. ”

“ And as to England, what would we be were India reft from us?
Further, there is this: you cannot hold India by force alone. Force has its place, but it cannot stand alone. We conquered and have governed India by the consent of the people. In fact, she conquered herself and gave herself to us. We never had to fight peoples, except in Upper Burma, but only Governments—effete, discredited and weak. ”

“ He does it to try to get justice, or what he thinks is justice, in place of law, which otherwise is all he would get. I have often been told this, and I notice the same in England. Truth is a relationship of persons; in a Court now the only persons are the two opponents; the judge is only a sort of machine to weigh evidence. As man to man I have found Orientals as truthful as Englishmen. In twenty-six years' experience I do not remember ever having been told a deliberate lie as man to man. But in the Courts you are not a man, you are an official, and even as an official your hands are tied. ”

“ Like all things, if it is to live and prosper and extend it must have a soul. And the soul of education, like the soul of life, is an emotion tending towards a desired end. The desired end of education is the rise and progress not merely of the individual but of the nation. That has been the soul of the progress of Japan; that must be the soul of the progress of any people; and education will only be enthusiastically taken up when it is seen to be a means to that end.
Such an education cannot be given by Englishmen. Any Education Department must be Provincial and draw its vigour from below. ”