THE EUROPEANIZATION OF THE INDIAN RACES.

In some remarks elsewhere on the principles that ought to guide the relationship of civilised races to those inferior and subject to them, we ventured to say that the ethics of ethnology would become the most important practical science of the day, for those Englishmen who find themselves charged with the great duty of regulating and influencing the position of their countrymen towards the natives of India. At present the feeling reflected by the Indian papers is one of intense and, in some instances, of indiscriminating detestation of the natives, and in an earlier age it would have taken the shape of a cry to place them all in an inferior social condition, and to give the individual European privileges that would everywhere mark him as a member of the rulers caste. At home the indignation has been equally deep, but the arrogant and offensive tone which some of the Indian newspapers have assumed towards the natives as a body has found no echo. The predominant feeling there is a painful conviction of the fact that the savage element in the eastern races is not extinct but latent, and that English influence on the people of India has hitherto been exceedingly slight and superficial.

A very important portion of the public have decided for themselves that this has resulted not so much from over toleration of the native religions as from intolerance of Christianity, and they demand that it should be openly and consistently professed by the State as the one true religion. The Government is to be at once thoroughly Christian and thoroughly tolerant, and it is hoped that false religion and the false morality assumed to be founded on it, will gradually perish in the presence of the truer and stronger creed.

Another party have little reliance on the influence of a few Europeans scattered among millions, and occupying a station which separates them socially from the natives. Their alien faith,

when it takes a narrow and bigoted form, which it too often does in India as at home, helps to repel and offend. With tribes

whose superstitions hang lightly on them, missionaries may succeed single handed. But most of the Indian nations have all the pride and corruption of a very ancient and degenerate civilisation. They have a complex form of society with which religion and all the national traditions are interwoven, and it can only be changed by introducing a new social element,-the presence of the dominant race as a portion of the permanent population.

We agree with those who point to European colonisation as the only practicable means of slowly and partially Europeanising the native races of India. But the European colonists must not bring with them an arrogant sense of their own superiority and an offensive intolerance of the native religions. Conciliation is perfectly compatible with the maintenance of right, and without it the colonists will not obtain that social standing towards the natives on which their improvement depends. Every encouragement must be given to those who are willing to separate themselves from their creed and caste and adopt that of the ruling race. They must be assured not only of protection and cordial welcome, but of support, from the Christian community. Europeans must make common cause with those who thus aid their cause. The class of native converts will continue for a time to be hated and scorned as renegades by their countrymen, and many of them by their character will justify this feeling. But if their association with Europeans be conducted liberally and with forbearance on our side, they will gradually rise, not in character and knowledge only, but in social station. They will, in time, be most trusted and most enployed by the State and by private Europeans, because they will be better educated and more loyal than their pagan countrymen. They will join Europeans on less unequal terms in business and in society. They will virtually come to belong to the highest class in the land. A caste that is open to all like Budhism and that embraces the ruling race, cannot remain for many generations an object of general hostility. The lower native classes will probably be first drawn into it; but the old dominant and exclusive castes cannot continue to maintain their superiority and their faith in themselves, when they find that power, knowledge and position are slowly and surely passing away from them. Hindu zemindars and Mahomedan amlah do more to maintain the native creeds than priests and temples. Our aim must be to replace them by degrees with Europeanised and European landholders and European and Europeanised officials. When it begins to be seen that it is more respectable and advantageous to be a Christian than a Hindu the social revolution will have been accomplished, and not till then. This may appear a very mean and worldly mode of serving Christianity and civilisation.

But it is one which appears to be favoured by Providence, for it has generally been followed by dominant races and it has succeeded. The superior race must make its superiority practically and universally felt. This has often been done by the sword. "Apostatise or die" has been the terse edict of Christian as well as of Moslem conquerors. But this short and simple fashion of legislating creeds is out of date, and we must adopt more common and Christian methods of winning the natives to our faith. Those who cherish the chimera of making an Indian Christian people more Christian than any nation of Europe will condemn a policy based on any appeal to worldly motives. We have no expectation of the kind. When the average Bengali is as Christian in feeling and conduct as the average Englishman or Frenchman, we shall have accomplished as much as universal ethnic experience justifies. us in anticipating. In Bengal as in Europe the intensely devotional will be a minority. The majority will devote themselves to worldly pursuits with worldly aims, but, some centuries hence, in a spirit reformed by Christian faith or Christian morality, and at all events with a practice disciplined into honesty by European judges and a larger and closer intercourse with Europeans.

At this dawn of, we hope, a new relationship between the English and the natives of India, it is interesting to recur to the social revolutions through which the various races have previously passed and the means by which they were accomplished. We may glance at some of these hereafter. We believe that in every case of voluntary civilisation the change has been effected by the gradual progress of the opinion that the reforming race was superior, and that it was an honor and advantage to be assimilated to it. The natives must learn to respect the English and feel a desire to be like them before their Europeanisation becomes a possibility. At present appeals to higher motives are, in general, nugatory. The average Indian cannot understand, and hence cannot credit, virtues he does not possess. We must make our first appeal to lower motives and he will in time discover that the power and prosperity of the English race are but the outward symbols of that sturdy force and sincerity of character which gives them insight to discern the right and the will to make it prevail.

Conciliation is not concealment or compromise. Its very object is to bring over others to our way of thinking, and in order that European ideas may have their full sway they must stand out from the Indian in bold relief. There ought to be no reserve in proclaiming our belief and our aims. Englishmen detest the subtleties of Jesuit propagandists and Machiavellian civilisers. The British Government of India cannot, if it would, imitate the secrecy and cunning of Russian policy. It cannot profess one set of

principles in the face of the world, while slowly and surreptitiously working out another confided from minister to minister and from reign to reign.

To many the notion of assimilating Hindus to Englishmen appears a delusion. Race, it has been said, places an eternal barrier between them. Our reply is that morals are conventional, not physical. The Christian are the truest and must be accepted, for the same reason that European science and arts must be accepted. Ignorance of true morality, like ignorance of true physics, will. sink those Indian communities that reject the light lower and lower as the European and the Europeanised communities advance; and the natives are far too intelligent and ambitious not to cast off Mahomedanism and Brahmanism when they practically feel into what depths of material degradation they are dragging them.

But the essential difference of race is a mistake. The dominant native race of India is our own, and we have elsewhere and in other times risen from as foul a slough of depravity and cruelty. If the most brutal tribes of Europe received a pure Asiatic faith, and by the slow growth of new habits and the example of their truthloving Germanic brethren, raised sincerity and self denial into virtues, why should not the Eastern wing of their race undergo a similar purification and transformation? What shape the Indian societies may hereafter take is beyond the reach of speculation. The English-that is, the progressive class, the leaders of national thought are themselves gradually changing, becoming clearer in their views of nature and advancing to truer and better conceptions of their faith and duty. Europe is changing. The race is swarming over all the temperate regions of the globe, and a century now suffices for movements that one took a millenium. We cannot foresee what England may be, and what our position in India may be, a hundred years hence, but the universal ferment and progress of the western branch of the race must ere long be communicated to the eastern. We have led the Indians in many a battle in which their pulses beat with our own, and we shall yet do so in the war_of civilisation against barbarism. The first step is to increase the European ingredient in the population by every means in our power.-March 1858.]

THE AFFILIATION OF THE THREE CLASSES OF THE TRIBES OF THE VINDHYAS-THE KHOND AND GOND; THE MALE AND URAON; AND THE KOL.

The Indian Government appear to be testing the military capabilities of the numerous half barbarous tribes, who are scattered over the highlands that rise behind the areas occupied by the civilised races. Several companies of the Gonds have been enrolled in the Saugor territory as a military police. This people have sometimes been confounded with the Khonds, and even well informed writers in the Indian journals associate the latter with the Kols, some portions of whom are now in insurrection. The Sonthals again are spoken of as if they were distinct from the Kols. To enable our readers to avoid falling into these mistakes, we propose to lay before them some details respecting the affiliation and distribution of the highland tribes between the valley of the Ganges and the most northern of the civilised Dravirian nations, the Kalingas and the Canarese.

We may remind them that the oldest Indian race was the Dravirian, which appears to have passed through various stages of a purely Scythoid development, beginning with one which has now no unmixed representative in India, but which has been well preserved in Australia. The earlier migrations into India appear to have been from the north westward, because the Dravirian and Australian languages have strong affinities with the Scythic and Caucasian tongues of Western Asia. If linguistic indications do not mislead in this instance, the primitive land of the Draviro-Australians lay between that of the Scythians and that of the ChinoHimalaic race. After the Dravirians had been long separated from the latter, an ethnic movement began at some remote periodprobably not less than five thousand years ago-from Tibet into northern India, by the Himalayan passes, which has continued ever since. During this long cycle of man's history Tibet has itself undergone many changes in its population. Although it is one of the most secluded portions of southern Asia its tribes have