Part 14 (1/2)
It is true that the education has not gone far. The Government spends less than twopence per head upon it; less than a tenth of what it spends on the army. Only ten per cent. of the males in India can write or read; only seven per thousand of the females. But, thanks chiefly to Macaulay's conviction that if everyone were like himself the world would be happy and glorious, there are now about a million Indians (or one in three hundred) who can to some extent communicate with each other in English as a common tongue, and there are some thousands who have become acquainted with the history of English liberties, and the writings of a few political thinkers. Together with railways, the new common language has increased the sense of unity; the study of our political thinkers has created the sense of freedom, and the knowledge of our history has shown how stern and prolonged a struggle may be required to win that possession which our thinkers have usually regarded as priceless. ”The one great contribution of the West to the Indian Nationalist movement,”
writes Mr. Ramsay Macdonald with emphasis, ”is its theory of political liberty.”
It is a contribution of which we may well be proud--we of whom Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die. Whatever the failures of unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay's spirit could point to this contribution as sufficient counterbalance. From the works of such teachers as Mill, Cobbett, Bagehot, and Morley, the mind of India has for the first time derived the principles of free government. But of all its teachers, I suppose the greatest and most influential has been Burke. Since we wished to encourage the love of freedom and the knowledge of const.i.tutional government, no choice could have been happier than that which placed the writings and speeches of Burke upon the curriculum of the five Indian universities. Fortunately for India, the value of Burke has been eloquently defined by Lord Morley, who has himself contributed more to the future const.i.tutional freedom of India than any other Secretary of State. In one pa.s.sage in his well-known volume on Burke, he has spoken of his ”vigorous grasp of ma.s.ses of compressed detail, his wide illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, his large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, the n.o.ble temper.” Writing of Burke's three speeches on the American War, Lord Morley declares:
”It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for one who approaches the study of public affairs, whether for knowledge or for practice. They are an example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an actor, of great political situations should strive by night and day to possess.”
For political education, one could hardly go further than that. ”The most perfect manual in any literature”--let us remember that decisive praise. Or if it be said that students require style rather than politics, let us recall what Lord Morley has written of Burke's style:
”A magnificence and elevation of expression place him among the highest masters of literature, in one of its highest and most commanding senses.”
But it is frequently a.s.serted that what Indian students require is, not political knowledge, or literary power, but a strengthening of character, an austerity both of language and life, such as might counteract the natural softness, effeminacy, and the tendency to deception which Macaulay and Lord Curzon so freely informed them of. For such strengthening and austerity, on Lord Morley's showing, no teacher could be more serviceable than Burke:
”The reader is speedily conscious,” he writes, ”of the precedence in Burke of the facts of morality and conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human affection and historical relation, over the unreal necessities of mere abstract logic....
Besides thus diffusing a strong light over the awful tides of human circ.u.mstance, Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave diligence in caring for high things, and in making their lives at once rich and austere.”
Here are the considered judgments of a man who, by political experience, by literary power, and the study of conduct, has made himself an unquestioned judge in the affairs of State, in letters, and in morality.
As examples of the justice of his eulogy let me quote a few sentences from those very speeches which Lord Morley thus extols--the speeches on the American War of Independence. Speaking on Conciliation with the Colonies in 1775, Burke said:
”Permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.... Terror is not always the effect of force, and an armament is not a victory.”
Speaking of the resistance of a subject race to the predominant power, Burke ironically suggested:
”Perhaps a more smooth and accommodating spirit of freedom in them would be more acceptable to us. Perhaps ideas of liberty might be desired more reconcilable with an arbitrary and boundless authority. Perhaps we might wish the colonists to be persuaded that their liberty is more secure when held in trust for them by us (as their guardians during a perpetual minority) than with any part of it in their own hands.”
And, finally, speaking of self-taxation as the very basis of all our liberties, Burke exclaimed:
”They (British statesmen) took infinite pains to inculcate as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist.”
It was the second of these n.o.ble pa.s.sages that I once heard declaimed on the sea-beach at Madras to an Indian crowd by an Indian speaker, who, following the precepts of Lord Morley, then Secretary of State for India, had made Burke's speeches his study by day and night. That phrase describing the ruling Power as the guardians of a subject race during a perpetual minority has stuck in my mind, and it recurred to me when I read that Burke's writings and speeches had been removed from the University curriculum in India. Carlyle's _Heroes_ and Cowper's _Letters_ have been subst.i.tuted--excellent books, the one giving the Indians in rather portentous language very dubious information about Odin, Luther, Rousseau, and other conspicuous people; the other telling them, with a slightly self-conscious simplicity, about a melancholy invalid's neckcloths, hares, dog, and health. Such subjects are all very well, but where in them do we find the magnificence and elevation of expression, the sacred gift of inspiring men to make their lives at once rich and austere, and the other high qualities that Lord Morley found in ”the most perfect manual in any literature”? Reflecting on this new decision of the Indian University Council, or whoever has taken on himself to cut Burke out of the curriculum, some of us may find two pa.s.sages coming into the memory. One is a pa.s.sage from those very speeches of Burke, where he said, ”To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself.”
The other is Biglow's familiar verse, beginning ”I du believe in Freedom's cause, Ez fur away ez Payris is,” and ending:
”It's wal enough agin a king To dror resolves an' triggers,-- But libbaty's a kind o' thing Thet don't agree with n.i.g.g.e.rs.”
XXI
UNDER THE YOKE
If ever there was a nation which ought to have a fellow-feeling with subject races it is the inhabitants of England. I have heard of no land so frequently subjected, unless, perhaps, it were northern India.
Long-headed builders of long tombs were subjected by round-headed builders of round tombs; and round-headed builders of tombs were subjected by builders of Stonehenge; for five hundred years the builders of Stonehenge were a subject race to Rome; Roman-British civilisation was subjected to barbarous Jutes and heavy Saxons; Britons, Jutes and Saxons became the subjects of Danes; Britons, Jutes, Saxons and Danes lay as one subject race at the feet of the Normans. As far as subjection goes, English history is like a house that Jack built:
”This is the Norman n.o.bly born, Who conquered the Dane that drank from a horn.
Who harried the Saxon's kine and corn, Who banished the Roman all forlorn, Who tidied the Celt so tattered and torn,”
and so on, back to the prehistoric Jack who built the long house of the dead.
Our later subjections to the French, the Scots, the Dutch and the Germans, who have in turn ruled our courts and fattened on their favours, have not been so violent or so complete; but for some centuries they depressed our people with a sense of humiliation, and they have left their mark upon our national character and language.
Indeed, our language is a synopsis of conquests, a stratification of subjections. We can hardly speak a sentence without recording a certain number of the subject races from which we have sprung. The only one ever left out is the British, and that survives in the names of our most beautiful rivers and mountains. It is true that all of our conquerors have come to stay--all with the one exception of Rome. We have never formed part of a distant and foreign empire except the Roman. Even our Norman invaders soon regarded our country as the centre of their power and not as a province. Nevertheless, nearly every strand of our interwoven ancestry has at one time or other suffered as a subject race, and perhaps from that source we derive the quality that Mark Twain perceived when at the Jubilee Procession of our Empire he observed, ”Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Perhaps also for this reason we raise the Recessional prayer for a humble and contrite heart, lest we forget our history--lest we forget.