When the last curtain does finally fall, however, whether it be on a new nation or on a new self-governing colony of the British Empire, it will be the finale of one of the most colossal missionary undertakings in history, an attempt by a nation to impose its civilization on a continent teeming with a population seven fold its own in numbers, thousands of miles distant, and already equipped with highly developed, complex civilizations which were hoary with antiquity before the dawn of history rose upon its own existence.

The development and continuance of the political dominion over India which alone has made the experiment possible has been on the whole a purblind process, made up of opportunism, mingled with an occasional stroke of audacious genius. Its motives have been predominantly commercial, colored by the impulses characteristic of imperialism and blended at times with lofty idealism.

It is not the purpose of this thesis to trace the growth of the British power in India, but certain of its broad features may well be brought to mind. It began with the operations of the British East India Company, a typical chartered trading company, which received its first charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600. Steady and strong support from the English government and people, in its rivalries with the Portuguese, Dutch, and later with the French, eventually enabled it to drive them from the field.

The Company secured its first territorial foothold in 1639 at Madras, where Francis Day built Fort St. George. In 1662 Bombay came to England as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, of Portugal. Charles II turned it over to the Company, which for safety against the Mahrattas made it the west coast base. The third leg of the tripod on which England has built up its supremacy in India was obtained in 1765, when the Company secured the diwani of Bengal.

From these three centers, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in Bengal, England spread her power out over the country in the years of the dissolution of the Mughal Empire of Delhi, engaging in a death struggle with the French, the Mahrattas, and the Sikhs for the estate. Bit by bit as necessity required or opportunity offered, Clive and his coadjutors and successors added to the English territory.

The Ganges Valley, which proved the easiest prey, was the first and most persistently exploited field. Consequently, most of the annexations were made to Bengal. Madras took very nearly its present shape as a province at the fall of Tipu Sultan in 1799. Bombay secured practically all of its provincial territory at the close of the third Mahratta

war in 1818. With these exceptions most of the rest of the acquired areas went to Bengal and resulted in its governor being elevated to a position of supremacy over Bombay, Madras, and the rest of India. The unwieldiness of its bulk necessitated the erection of parts of its territory into new provinces, and the creation of the governor-generalship dimmed the glory of its governor, but Bengal retained its political pre-eminence until 1911 when the capital was removed to "Delhi of the Great Mughal."

The process was not uniform, however. In all the provinces large enclaves and bits of territory have continued under their native rulers who acknowledged the suzerainty of England, and who are controlled entirely by her in their foreign relations, and whose internal administration is supervised to a varying extent by her officials. These native states lie beyond the scope of a study of the development of selfgovernment in British India. Each has its own history, and for the great progress which, in certain instances like Baroda, has been made, England has been only secondarily responsible through advice and example.

Within her own territories it has been otherwise. The problems of government have been innumerable, and the difficulties enormous, perhaps insurmountable, but in meeting them, England has had a free hand. Her work is her own. She is entitled to the credit for her successes, but must, on the other hand, bear the blame for mistakes. Particularly is this true since 1858, when the political dominion of the East India Company was abolished and the British government itself took charge. It is with that date, then, that we begin our study.

The development of self-government has until very recently been only one insignificant aspect of the administrative phase of the work of England in India. To get it in its proper setting and perspective, and to appreciate how great even that part of the work has been, some realization of the problem is necessary even at the risk of platitudes.

The India' which confronted England was a continent as large as Europe west of the Vistula, and with thirty millions more people, full of ancient nations, of great cities, of varieties of civilization, of armies, nobilities, priesthoods, and organizations for every conceivable purpose from the spread of great religions down to systematic murder. It was the birthplace of two of the great religions of the world and the battle ground of three, or, counting Christianity, of perhaps four. Among its peoples religious animosity still smoldered with a fury and fanaticism never

'Meredith Townsend, "Will England Retain India?" Contemporary Review, LIII (1888), 795-96.

equaled in the West. No practice seemed too cruel or degrading according to occidental standards to be jealously cherished by some Indian sect as an all-essential to be defended and preserved even in certain instances at the cost of life itself.

Within its confines were twice as many Bengalis as there were Frenchmen in Europe. The Hindostanees, properly so called, outnumbered the whites in the United States in 1888. The Mahrattas would have filled Spain. The people of the Punjab with Scinde would have doubled the population of Turkey. These were but four of the more salient divisions. As for the whole population, one modern agitator said, "If every native were to spit in a tank, there would be enough to drown every European in India"; or in the words of Lord Curzon, "The English in India are indeed little more than a little foam on a dark unfathomed ocean."

The people were of all imaginable types. Some were the fighting races of the north, whose males were as big, as brave, and more reckless of death than those of the white races, and numbered in 1888 at least one hundred and twenty million. At the other extreme were the docile, depressed, servile millions of outcasts, and the timid aboriginals of the jungles. On the one hand were the intellectual and cultured Brahmins, on the other, the Ghonds and Bhils.

Over five hundred languages were spoken within its limits, comprising fourteen major groups. There were tens of millions of peasants whose hoarding had made of India for ages the great absorbent of the precious metals; tens of millions of peasants beside whose poverty fellahs were rich, for when all is said, India has long been, as far as the masses are concerned, the poorest of the great countries of the world. Its millions of artisans, ranging from the men who have built its wonderful palaces to those who, nearly naked and almost without tools, do the humblest work, have toiled unceasingly in vain efforts to escape the famine which has continued to stalk through the land.

Such were some of the material aspects of the situation that has confronted the English. On the political side and more specifically bearing on the development of self-government, Lord Lytton put the problem thus:

It must, however, be remembered that the problem undertaken by the British rulers of India [a political problem more perplexing in its conditions Erroll, "The Recent Crisis in India," Nineteenth Century Review, LXII (1907), 202.

2 Georg Wegener, "A German's Impressions of India," ibid., LXXIII (1913), 961.

and as regards the results of its solution more far-reaching than any which since the dissolution of the Pax Romana, has been undertaken by a conquering race] is the application of the most refined principles of European government and some of the most artificial institutions of European society to a vast oriental population, in whose history, habits, and traditions they had had no previous existence. Such phrases as "Religious Toleration," "Liberty of the Press," "Personal Freedom of the Subject," "Social Supremacy of the Law," and others, which in England have long been the mere catchwords of ideas common to the whole race and deeply impressed upon its character by all the events of its history and all the most cherished recollections of its earlier life are, here in India, to the vast mass of our native subjects the mysterious formulas of a foreign and more or less uncongenial system of administration, which is scarcely if at all intelligible to the greater number of those for whose benefit it is maintained. It is a fact which when I first came to India was strongly impressed on my attention by one of India's wisest and most thoughtful administrators. It is a fact which there is no disguising, and it is also one which cannot be too constantly or too anxiously recognized, that by enforcing these institutions we have placed and must permanently maintain ourselves at the head of a gradual but gigantic revolution, the greatest and most momentous social, moral, and religious, as well as political revolution which perhaps the world has ever witnessed.'

Added to all this was a climate which, even when unmixed with alcohol and modified so far as medical science is yet able, makes permanent settlement forever impossible for a northern white race. The race problem in its narrow social sense of racial antipathy was not of particular importance until the last half-century, but it is now steadily becoming an increasing and more menacing difficulty.

Such were the conditions with which England was confronted. What was the goal which England set up to guide her in dealing with the situation, and what were the motives which impelled her to seek to imprint her civilization on the millions of India? No aim was ever held very clearly or steadily in mind, but there seems to have been a conviction. that things English were the best in the world and must be carried wherever Englishmen went in their quest for wealth or power. To this major premise was added the minor, that what was good for the Englishman must be good for the natives and therefore must be given them. As Fraser's Magazine put it in 1873:

1 Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Governor-General of India, XVII (1878), 176.

2

Sidney Jones Owen, "The Stability of Our Indian Empire," Contemporary Review, XXXI (1877), 495.

We have been induced to act thus from the conviction, which is so strong among us that it almost amounts to a mania, that because these are English institutions, and have conduced to make England great and prosperous, therefore they must inevitably have the same effect in India.1

Still farther in the background were the impelling motives that brought England into India in the first place and still keep her there. Originally it was the desire for commercial gain that lured the ships of the East India Company to Surat and the Malabar Coast. When the disorder consequent on the crumbling of the Mughal Empire reduced the profits of legitimate trade, the opportunity for deriving even greater returns by participating in the wars of the country and jealous rivalry with the French impelled the Company to embark on a career of territorial aggrandizement that lasted until the Crown assumed control, and may be said to have been continued by it down to the present day. Under the Crown, however, it has been rather more of a question of staying and retaining India in perpetuum as part of the British Empire than of advancing the frontiers.

In regard to this there have been, broadly speaking, two general classes of arguments and theories as to the proper policy to pursue. The first has been that of the Liberals: that England, since she was in India as the governing power, must act as a species of patron saint to guide the natives in the paths of progress, and that her policy should be framed primarily for the good of India. The other contention has been that the English were in India first of all for the same reason which brought their forefathers there in the first place the good of Englandand that Indian interests were but secondary, and to be considered only when convenient.

The justification of the one attitude was its altruism and idealism. The reasons advanced to support the other view were: the anarchy and horrors which would follow leaving India to the "natives," and for the prevention of which England was entitled to remuneration; the great commercial profits to be derived from the commercial exploitation of the country; the financial gains to be drawn from its government in the form of salaries and pensions for officials and soldiers; its value as an outlet for the activity of England's surplus youth; its military value as a training ground for England's army; and lastly its political worth as an important element in England's political and international prestige. To secure and maintain these advantages India must be held in close "S," "The Functions of Government in India," Fraser's Magazine, LXXXVIII (1873), 208.