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OUR POSITION IN INDIA, WITH A GLANCE AT OUR
RECENT OPERATIONS.

THE success of our military operations throughout the recent outbreak in India, easily achieved and almost unvarying as they have been, seem, after all, to be only the commencement of our most serious difficulties, and the question how to treat those who have given us such bitter evidences of their animosity, as well as how to reconstruct our authority on a more just and useful basis, so as to make our mission in the east, as we are pleased to term it, one of benevolence and civilization, are matters far less easy of solution than anything the world has had to do with. Our intentions may be good and amiable, and in the main, have most probably all along been so, but there is one great stumbling block in our way to their leading to any great results, and that is, that they are inconsistent with the arrogance of the task which we assume to belong to us, or which we affect to feel ourselves bound to undertake. We choose to look upon the natives of India as a child that wants physic, and we are puzzled how to prevent the probability of kicking and struggling against the hand that proffers it. It is evident enough whatever our acts or motives may have been hitherto, that they have not been at all appreciated, and what has occurred gives us little in the shape of encouragement in our efforts for the future. We are somewhat in the dilemma of a man who has taken a house in a strange country, and who finds himself at a loss for suitable material wherewith to furnish it. We have recovered our Indian Empire out of a conflagration, and the problem is how to settle ourselves again in it, so that those to whom we must trust for our security will be so benefitted as to be enlisted in our favor. The anxiety we are displaying on the subject now would seem to be indicative of our having been neglectful in the past; as if we were only awakened to the beneficent portion of our obligations by the peril we have just escaped from. We have held India for an hundred years, and it is rather unfortunate that we should have gone on pocketing the rupees or other advantages derived from it, and have only discovered the blots in our administration by means of a national outburst. It is perhaps idle to enquire how it is we did not see before some portion of what is required to be done now, and that we should not have discovered its necessity until so much blood has been shed, and so many horrors perpetrated to open our eyes to it. One thing we have at least learnt at last, for we have had practical evidence of it, that whether we have governed rightly or wrongly, according to our own ideas of it; whether our intentions have been good, and we have acted up to the best of our abilities in carrying them out, or whether we have only been liberal in words and apathetic in deeds, we have not carried the hearts or the good-will of those we ruled with us. There are some who deny that the people of India have had anything to do with the recent state of things, U. S. MAG., No. 355, JUNE, 1858.

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and who assert that the revolt has been nothing more than a military mutiny. Those who say so are bound to prove the grievances of which the latter had to complain, and to show that in those grievances and the stress they placed upon them they stood apart from the rest of their fellow countrymen. Those who take the view we have mentioned moreover contradict themselves by the assertion of the kindness and liberality with which the Sepoys above all others were treated. If this was the case why were they the first to turn against us? It is easy to explain-it was because there was something they valued even more than our kindness, and that they were influenced by the wide and universal desire to get rid of us altogether.

It would be strange, indeed, if in a country like India, where the military caste is so dominant, a movement in which the national emancipation was intended should not have been initiated and led by them, and we may rest assured we are only deceiving ourselves if we suppose that the sympathy of every native, if not his more active feelings, as far as his fear of us would permit his shewing them, were not with them in their struggle. Can anything be more absurd than to suppose that men, who, if our rule was satisfactory had the most reason to be satisfied with it, should be the first to raise their hands against us if all the rest were contented? Our embarrassments and difficulties such as they are, are not likely to be overcome by this narrow view of the antagonistic elements opposed to us. We are not on the road to making things better in future, if we flatter ourselves that in the recent occurrences the people were indifferent or inclined in our favour. Their conduct may have been passive, and their fear of us may have been misconstrued in some instance into good-will towards, but every fact below the surface, everything that is not judged by mere appearances, shows them to have been altogether against us. We should have fared infinitely worse than we have done, and most likely have lost our empire if the native character had been a bolder one, and they had possessed the courage to act in anything like open hostility; but the ease with which we have won everything even against those trained and organized by our. selves, shows how little they are capable of this.

The seeds of our ultimate discomfiture however, may even in this outbreak have been sown; and between their own efforts thus feebly commenced, and our errors, the day may come when the game we shall have to play in some future insurrection, will be a more difficult one than it has yet been. We have gained nothing if we are led to think because we have seen no overt act of the natives against us, and have suffered nothing from them, that, therefore, they are not opposed to us. Why if we are so convinced of this should we alter anything that has been? Where is the necessity for the anxiety that oppresses us for new and different measures? If the people of India sympathised with us in the outbreak that has just been put down and not with their own countrymen, they must needs be well affected towards us, and we have only to leave well alone and to go on with regard to them as we did before. Battle and the

executioner will soon exterminate the Sepoy, and, except as regards him, what is it, if the people are so fond of us, that we can possibly want more ? Unfortunately we are not likely to get off so easily as all this implies; we cannot compound for a mere military revolt when we must know, if we are not wilfully blind and stupid, that we have the hatred and discontent of a whole people on our hands. Recognizing this, we must enquire what are our objects in our future government, and how can we hope to attain them. According to theorists, we must enter upon the task of reducing the country, especially the more recently acquired portion of it, to order, and laying the foundation of a permanent peace; by showing that we are strong yet merciful; resolute, yet tolerant. We must demand this, that, and the other of the Oude nation, destroy their forts, possess ourselves of their guns, utterly strip them of the means of resistance to our authority (all of which is justice to a people ten thousand miles away from us), and having thus deprived the native wolf of his fangs we are to encourage him and all connected with him to look favourably on the British rule, by engrafting habits to which he has never been accustomed, and which, however kindly we may offer them to him, he will have no inclination to receive. This is the benign task drawn out for us. We are to make the lion change his skin, and to teach the chieftains of Oude how much better it is to plough and reap on such a soil as they possess, and under such a government as ours, than to live in a state of incessant warfare with the state and one another. It is a pity we cannot invert the picture and apply it to ourselves. How should we receive a handful of foreigners amongst us with similar views upon our institutions? Disarmed and helpless as they are likely soon to be, we should only bide our time and the probability is they will do the same. We may reasonably expect it, and if we are wise we shall always be on our guard against it.

To

conquer a people, and to expect by any possible means to conciliate them into a grateful reception of their loss of self-respect, not to speak of anything else, is more than we are likely to have realised; it is more than we would yield ourselves, and more than in justice we have a right to expect from others. Theoretically, in the closet, such miracles are always feasible, but practically, there has been no instance yet in the history of the world of any numerous and distinct people, totally different from their conquerors in habits and prejudices, in their laws and religion, being so gently disposed of. The tide of annexation and of conquest may go on smoothly enough for years, but the ebb will come at last, and the further it has to retire, the more fatal to us must it be.

Men will brood over their insults if they have no wrongs to complain of, and sooner or later our weak moment will come.

To be consistent, and to carry out all that we speak of, our measures must be to hold India, not as a permanent appendage to our empire, but in order to retire from it as soon as possible, in favour of those who have a better right to it. But when was a nation ever heard of to be so sentimental; and yet if we ignore this, what is our presence in the East but a vulgar craving after dominion, an aggression for our