BY H. FIELDING-HALL AUTHOR OF "THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE" "THE HEARTS OF MEN," ETC. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"—that is to say by ideas LONDON HURST & BLACKETT, LTD. PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C. 1913...

Most people when they talk of India, most books when they treat of India, are concerned with its differences from the rest of the world. It is the appearance and the dress of its peoples, their customs and habits, their superstitions and religions, that are explained and wondered at. That is not so here. In this book little or nothing is said of any of these matters; they do not interest me; they are superficial, and I do not care for surface things; they are what divide, and truth is what unite

We do not hear so much of the discontent in India now as we did three or four years ago. There are no reports of seditious meetings, incendiary propaganda, or disloyal tendencies. The attempt upon the Viceroy is declared to be an isolated act, springing from no general cause; a sporadic outbreak of crime which has no importance. No special measures have to be taken, nor special legislation passed, though the old repressive legislation is not repealed. In the English daily papers there is little

Let us first take the people as a whole. I am aware in the first place that there are some who will object that the Indian peoples are not a whole. "There is no Indian people," they will say. "There are innumerable races, tribes, castes, diffused over a continent. They have nothing in common, neither language nor religion, nor habits nor ideals. You cannot talk of the people as a whole." Yet they have one thing in common; they have a common humanity. Religions, castes and races are but clothes.

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 sup

Therefore there is a wide difference between the men as they came out in the old days and as they come out now. Then they were young, not very well instructed but capable of seeing, understanding, and learning; nowadays they are so drilled and instructed that they can deal only with books, papers, and records; life has been closed to them; they can enforce laws, but not temper them. After they come out the difference of life and work is still greater. In the old days, for instance, they picked u

Let us turn now from the personnel of government to its methods, from its men to its laws, from the motive power to the machine it works, or which more often now works government. The first subject that comes naturally to our view is the prevention and suppression of crime, for in point of time that precedes all else. When you are conquering a country, after the soldiers have partly done their work and the civil power comes in, its first care is to create and maintain peace. It organises a polic

There is a further difference in their view of crime, between Englishmen as they are made by education and Orientals who in some ways remain the natural man, which greatly affects the Courts, that is the punishment due for crime. In England we have had the most cruel penal laws ever known. It is not a hundred years ago that there were two hundred and twenty-three different offences for which the capital punishment was awarded. I wonder if people nowadays ever realise their horrors. I have an acc

We come now to the Civil Courts, wherein all suits relating to property, to inheritance, and to money are tried. I have already referred to the archaic state in which, all over India, matters of marriage and inheritance remain; no change has taken place during our rule, nor could do so. Except in Burma, all these matters are connected with religion, and although people when in a progressive state will themselves not hesitate to break through fetters of religion and custom, they will never allow

But of all the errors of Indian government, none is so serious as their destruction of the Village organism throughout India; none has had such an effect in the past; none is likely to have such bad consequences in the future. 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

I will begin what I have to say about this by telling a little story about what happened to me when I was a Subordinate Magistrate—some sixteen years ago now. A Burman was brought up before me charged with possessing opium. A Sergeant of Police had met him at a rest-house in the jungle the day before, and had entered into conversation. The man was sickly and told the Sergeant that he was on his way down from the Shan States, where he had gone to trade. But he had caught the prevalent fever, had

The first step that has been taken with the hope of allaying the discontent in India has been the increase in the Councils of the Government of India and of the Local Governments of Madras and Bombay, with the creation of Councils in the other Provinces which did not have them before. And as these Councils have been in certain quarters greatly praised as being not only good in themselves now but as containing the germs of great possibilities, it is necessary to consider them carefully. Councils

The next measure which has insistently been pressed on the Government is that far more Indians should be admitted to the Civil Service. It is now composed almost exclusively of Englishmen, and the conditions are such that it is difficult for Indians to enter. This, it is claimed, should be altered, and the Civil Service should be to a great extent Indianised. Well, as I have said, the Government of India is not Indian, it is English. It is essentially English, the more so and the more necessaril

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 betw

Having got the young civilian out to his province he should be thoroughly trained before being put to work, not given six or nine months to look round and then put to do work he cannot understand. If he came out to India at twenty, he could well afford eighteen months or two years of real training. During the cold weather he should be with some District Officer, accompanying him in camp, observing how he works, getting an insight into the mechanism of Government; during the hot weather he should

The Indian Civil Service is the principal service in India; it furnishes men for the executive, the magistracy, and judicature, the revenue administration; and its members constitute not only the Local Government, but, excepting for the Law member and one or two others, the Council of the Government of India. Therefore it is in every way the most important service to have in harmony with the people. It is not, however, the only service manned by Englishmen, and it is very necessary that the othe

When the personnel of the Government of India from the bottom to the top has been reorganised on a basis of understanding of the people, it will begin to revise its laws, and the first will be its Penal Law, its Criminal Courts and Procedure. To do this with any success it will be necessary first to study the causation of crime, because until you know how it is caused you cannot possibly frame any system of prevention that is likely to do less harm than good. This is a subject that many men have

But, pending any such great change as must come in all penal law when the subject has been carefully studied, there are many smaller amendments that might be made both in Civil and Revenue Courts and Law. The pressing need in Criminal Procedure is, I think, a change in the treatment of an accused person when he is arrested. The first instinct of an offender is, as I have said, to confess, even if an understanding person is not available to confess to. He has offended the Law; he wants to make al

And thus the sheltering Government of India having been reformed both in its personnel and in its laws, brought into touch and sympathy with its people, a start would be made with self-government. That, of course, must begin with the village, which is the germ from which all self-government that is of any value has always begun, and on the health and vitality of which it must always depend. The village organism must be restored to the state in which we found it, and from that be helped and encou

To the success of any form of self-government a good education is absolutely essential; that a people should be able to exercise self-government it is necessary that they be educated to self-government; for this capacity no more comes by itself than ability to build a ship or steer it when built. And as the government must be self-government, so the education must be a national education and not an imported one. I have already had something to say on this subject in former chapters when writing

There are many other subjects connected with the renaissance of India that I should like to enter into, but I cannot do so here. This book is already too full of matter that is never easy, and is sometimes controversial. Such subjects are the real ideals and ideas that underlay the religions of India, Hindu, and Mohammedan, and which gave them life until they were hidden under priest-made ritual and killed; the early history of India as a history of ideas and civilisations, and not a stupid aggl