PART IV

Interlude - MR. GANDHI

A small stone house, such as would pass unremarked in any small town in America. A wicket gate, a sunbaked garden, a bare and clean room flooded with light from a broadside of windows. In the room, sitting on a floor cushion with his back to a blank wall, a man. To his right two younger men, near a slant-topped desk perhaps eighteen inches high. To his left, a backless wooden bench for the use of western visitors. If there are other objects in the room, one does not see them for interest in the man with his back to the wall.

His head is close-shaven, and such hair as he has is turning gray. His eyes, small and dark, have a look of weariness, almost of renunciation, as of one who, having vainly striven, now withdraws from striving, unconvinced. Yet from time to time, as he talks, his eyes flash. His ears are large and conspicuously protruding. His costume, being merely a loin-cloth, exposes his hairy body, his thin, wiry arms, and his bare, thin, interlaced legs, upon which he sits like Buddha with the soles of his feet turned up. His hands are busy with a little wooden spinning-wheel planted on the ground before him. The right hand twirls the wheel while the left evolves a cotton thread.

"'What is my message to America?'" he repeated in his light, dispassionate, even voice. "My message to America is the hum of this spinning-wheel."

Then he speaks at length, slowly, with pauses. And as he speaks the two young men, his secretaries, lying over their slant-topped desk, write down every word he says.

The wheel hums steadily on. And the thread it spins for America appears and reappears in the pages of this book.

CHAPTER XVII - THE SIN OF THE SALVATION ARMY

"Why, after so many years of British rule, is India still so poor?" the Indian agitator tirelessly repeats.

If he could but take his eyes from the far horizon and direct them to things under his feet, he would find an answer on every side, crying aloud for honest thought and labor.

For example, the cattle question, by itself alone, might determine India's poverty.

India is being eaten up by its own cattle. And even at that the cattle are starving.

The Live-Stock Census taken over British India in 1919-20 showed a total of 146,055,859 head of bovine cattle. Of these, 50 per cent., at a flattering estimate, are reckoned unprofitable. Because of their uneconomic value, the food they consume, little as it is, is estimated to represent an annual loss to the country of $588,000,000, or over four times more than the total land revenue of British India.[1]

[l. See Proceedings of Board of Agriculture of India, at Bangalore, Jan. 21, 1924, and following days. Also see Round Table, No. 59, June, 1925]

The early Hindu leaders, it is surmised, seeing the importance of the cow to the country, adopted the expedient of deifying her, to save her from and for the people. Accordingly, Hindu India today venerates the cow as holy. In the Legislative Assembly of 1921, a learned Hindu member phrased the point in a way that, probably, no Hindu would dispute:[2]

[2. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1921, Rai Bahadur Pandit J. L. Bhargava, Vol. I, Part I, p. 530. See also Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, translation of Walter de Gray, London, Hak« îuyt Society, 1877. VoL II, p. 78.]

Call it prejudice, call it passion, call it the height of religion, but this is an undoubted fact, that in the Hindu mind nothing is so deep-rooted as the sanctity of the cow.

To kill a cow is one of the worst of sins--a deicide. His Highness, the late Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior, once had the misfortune to commit that sin. He was driving a locomotive engine on the opening run over a railway that he had just built. The cow leaped upon the track. The engine ran her down before the horrified Prince could forestall his fate. "I think," he told a friend, years after, "that I shall never finish paying for that disaster, in penances and purifications, and in gifts to the Brahmans."

Prince or peasant, the cow is his holy mother. She should be present when he dies, that he may hold her tail as he breathes his last. Were it only for this reason, she is often kept inside the house, to be in readiness. When the late Maharaja of Kashmir was close upon his end, the appointed cow, it is said, refused all inducements to mount to his chamber; wherefore it became necessary to carry the Prince to the cow, and with a swiftness that considered the comfort of his soul only.

Also, the five substances of the cow--milk, clarified butter (ghee), curds, dung, and urine, duly set in a row in five little pots, petitioned in prayer for forgiveness and assoilment and then mixed together and swallowed, surpass in potency all other means of purifying soul and body. This combination, known as pancha-gavia, is of grace sufficient to wipe out even the guilt of sin intentionally committed. Says the Abbé Dubois:[3]

[3. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, p. 43. See also pp. 152; 195 and 529.]

Urine is looked upon as the most efficacious for purifying any kind of uncleanness. I have often seen...Hindus following the cows to pasture, waiting for the moment when they could collect the precious liquid in vessels of brass, and carrying it away while still warm to their houses. I have also seen them waiting to catch it in the hollow of their hands, drinking some of it and rubbing their faces and heads with the rest. Rubbing it in this way is supposed to wash away all external uncleanness, and drinking it, to cleanse all internal impurity.

Very holy men, adds the Abbé, drink it daily. And orthodox India, in these fundamentals, has changed not a whit since the Abbe's time.

We of the West may reflect at our leisure that to this eventual expedient are we driving our orthodox Hindu acquaintances when, whether in India or in America, we, cow-eaters, insist on taking them in greeting by the hand. One orthodox Prince, at least, observes the precaution, when going into European society, always to wear gloves. But it is told of him that, at a certain London dinner party, when he had removed his gloves, the lady beside him chanced to observe a ring that he wore.

"What a beautiful stone, your Highness!" she remarked. "May I look at it?"

"Certainly," said he, and, removing the ring from his finger, laid it by her plate.

The lady, a person of rank, turned the jewel this way and that, held it up to the light, admired it as it deserved, and, with thanks, laid it beside the plate of the owner. The latter then, by a sidewise glance, indicated the ring to his own attendant who stood behind his chair.

"Wash it," ordered the Prince, and, undisturbed, resumed his conversation.

This seeming digression from the chapter's original text may help to make clear the nature of the cow's hold upon India. And, as you see them of mid-mornings, trooping in hundreds out from the cities and villages on their slow, docile way to jungle pasturage, you might well fancy they know and are glad of their place in the people's mind. Bright strings of beads--blue, coral, red--adorn their necks. And in their eyes and the eyes of the bullocks, their sons, lies a look of slumbrous tranquillity.

That tranquil, far-off gaze is, indeed, often remarked and acclaimed by the passing traveler as an outward sign of an inner sense of surrounding love. In Holland, in England, you may observe an extraordinary tranquillity, peacefulness, friendliness, even in pastured bulls, which may reasonably be attributed to the gentle handling to which they are accustomed, to good food and much grooming, and to the freedom they enjoy. But in India, after examining facts, one is driven to conclude that the expression in the eyes of the cows is due partly to low vitality, partly to the close quarters with humanity in which they live, and for the rest, simply to the curious cut of the outer corner of the lid, subtly beautiful like an Aubrey Beardsley woman's.

Fifty years ago, the political Indians say, India had pasturage enough for all her cattle. However that may have been, judged by a western definition of "enough," the facts today are otherwise. One of Mr. Gandhi's Indian writers, Mr. Desai, sees the matter in this way:[4]

[4. Young India, June 3, 1926, V. G. Desai, p. 200.]

In ancient times and even during the Musalman period, cattle enjoyed the benefit of common pastures and had also the free run of the forests. The maintenance of the cattle cost their owners practically nothing. But the British Government cast a greedy eye upon this time-honoured property of the cattle, which could not speak for themselves and which had none else to speak on their behalf, and confiscated it, sometimes with an increase in the land-revenue in view, and at other times in order to oblige their friends, such as the missionaries.

This writer then supports his last-quoted phrase by the statement that the Salvation Army was once allowed by Government to take up 560 acres of public grazing-ground in Gujarat for farm purposes. He continues:

The result of this encroachment upon grazing areas has been that at the present day in India the proportion of grazing grounds to the total area is the smallest of all countries...It is not therefore a matter for surprise that our cattle should have rapidly deteriorated under British rule.

And he cites figures for the United States as leading the list of happier peoples whose grazing areas are large.

But unfortunately, in choosing his American statistics, Mr. Desai omits those which carry most value for needy India. We have, it is true, great grazing areas--but we rotate them and protect them from over-grazing--a matter unconceived by the Indian. And even in the section where this area is widest, our semi-arid and arid western range country, we devote three-fifths of our total cultivated ground to raising feed for our cattle. Our cotton belt gives 53 per cent, of its crop area to live-stock feed, as corn, cow-peas, beans, peanuts, against 10 per cent, used to grow food for man; our corn and winter wheat belt uses 75 per cent, of its cultivated land to grow similar forage for its cattle; our corn belt gives 84 per cent, of its crop-land to forage-growing, and only 16 per cent, to man's food; and the North and East devote about 70 per cent, of their crops to fodder. Seven-tenths of our total crop area is devoted to harvested forage. We have 257,000,000 acres in crops for cattle's feed, against 76,000,000 acres in crops for human food, and we have one milking cow to every family of 5.[5]

[5. U. S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 895, "Our Forage Resources," Government Printing Office, 1923, pp. 312-26.]

These are figures that should concern the Indian sincerely interested in the welfare of his great agricultural country, and I confess to placing them here at such length in the hope that they may challenge his eye.

Still pursuing the question of India's cattle, Mr. Gandhi invoked the counsel of an Italian-trained specialist, domiciled in India. From him came the impatient reply of the practical man who sees small beauty in the spared rod where childish folly is wasting precious substance. If the Indian were not so callous, and so unintelligent as to the needs of his cattle--if he were only compelled to rotate crops and to grow fodder as Italians do in circumstances no better than the Indians', his troubles were done, says this witness, continuing:[6]

[6. Young India, May 13, 1926, Mr. Galletti-di-Cadilhac. "The Cattle Problem," p. 177.]

Rotated crops require no more expenditure of money than stable crops. In Java the Dutch forced paddy rotation on the people a century ago, by the sjambok [rhinoceros-hide whip]. The population of Java has increased from 2 million to 30 million during their rule, and the yield of the rice and sugar fields has increased prooortionately. The change was brought about not by capital expenditure but by an intelligent government using force. In India there is no question of using the sjambok. We wish to convince, not to compel.

The writer continues:[7]

[7. Young India, p. 109.]

Where the cow is a valuable possession [as in Italy], she is tended with care and love, and crops are grown for her and palaces are built for her. Here [where] she is merely an object of veneration, she is left to stand and starve in the public standing- and starving-grounds, which are miscalled grazing-grounds in India. India should abolish these places of torture and breeding-grounds of disease and abortion, and every Indian should devote three-fifths or two-thirds of his land to growing grass and fodder for his cattle.

No one who has seen the public pasturage will be likely to dispute the accuracy of the last-quoted witness. "Public standing- and starving-grounds" they are, nor is there the faintest reason, despite the celebrants of the past, for supposing that they were ever materially better. Bernier, the French traveler of the Mussalman period, testifies:[8]

[8. Travels in the Mogul Empire, p. 326.]

Owing to the great deficiency of pasture land in the Indies, it is impossible to maintain large numbers of cattle...The heat is so intense, and the ground so parched, during eight months of the year, that the beasts of the field, ready to die of hunger, feed on every kind of filth, like so many swine.

And one's own eyes and common sense, together with the history of men and forests, are enough to satisfy one's mind.

Further, the general conditions under which Indian animals have lived and propagated might have been specially devised for breeding down to the worst possible type.

Cattle experts know that if a hundred and twenty cows are put without other food on pasturage that will keep alive only one hundred, the twenty that perish will be the twenty best milkers; for the reason that a good milch cow throws her strength to her milk production, leaving herself a diminished maintenance reserve. The Indian practice of selection by starvation, therefore, works the breed downhill, through the survival of the least useful strain. Again, in India the bull runs with the herds, which may number three hundred cows. Though he were of the best, such extravagance; must exhaust him. But, on the consistent contrary, he is so far from the best as to be deliberately of the worst that can be found.

When a man needs specially to placate the gods, as upon the death of his father, he may vow a bull to the temple. And, since one bull will do as well as another, he naturally chooses his feeblest, his most misshapen. Or, if he buys the offering, he buys the cheapest and therefore the poorest to be had. The priests accept the animal, which, receiving the temple brand, thereupon becomes holy, goes where he pleases, and serves as sire to a neighborhood herd. Straying together, starving together, young and old, better and worse, the poor creatures mingle and transmit to each other and to their young their manifold flaws and diseases. Half of India's cattle,[9] if given the food consumed by the worse half, would produce, it is affirmed, more than India's present total milk supply.

[9. Samuel Higginbottom, Director of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, testimony before the Indian Taxation Enquiry Committee, 3924-25.]

In eastern Bengal, one of the most fertile countries of the world, pasturage scarcely exists, the country being entirely taken up with rice-paddy and jute. They grow no fodder crops for their cattle and feed a bit of chopped rice-straw or nothing. In western Bengal, some districts report the loss of 25 per cent, of the cultivated crops by depredations of hungry stock. The country being everywhere without fences qr hedges, a man may easily turn his cows into his sleeping neighbors' crops. The sin is small--the cows are holy as well as hungry, and the neighbor's distress is both his illusion and his fate.

I have seen the cow driven by starvation so far from her natural niceness as to become a scavenger of human excrement. The sight is common.

In certain districts some green fodder is grown, to be sure, and during the rains and the earlier cold weather a poor sort of grass exists on the grazing-grounds of all but the most desert sections. By January, however, the gray cracked earth is eaten bare, so to remain until the late spring rains set in--and starvation begins in earnest.

Mr. Gandhi's correspondent has shown us in the cow's hunger one of the evil effects of British rule.

And British rule is indeed largely responsible for the present disastrous condition.

Up to the advent of the British in India, raids great and small, thieving, banditry and endless internal broils and warfares kept the country in chronic distress; and a sure butt of every such activity was the cattle of the attacked. Consequently, with a spasmodic regularity whose beneficent effect is more easily appreciated today than can well have been possible at the time, the cattle of any given area were killed off or driven away, the grazing-grounds of that area, such as they were, got an interval of rest, and, for the moment, inbreeding stopped. For new animals had to be slowly accumulated.

Upon this order broke the British with their self-elected commitment, first of all, to stop banditry, warfare and destruction and to establish peace. The task was precisely the same that America set for herself in the Philippines. As we achieved it in the Philippines, so did the British achieve it in India--in a greater interval of time commensurate with the greater area and population to be pacified. About fifty years ago Britain's work in this respect, until then all-absorbing, stood at last almost accomplished. Life and property under her controlling hand had now become as nearly safe as is, perhaps, possible. Epidemics, also, were checked and famine largely forestalled. So that, shielded from enemies that had before kept down their numbers, men and cattle alike multiplied. And men must be fed. Therefore Government leased them land[10] in quantity according to their necessities, that they might raise food for themselves and not die.

[10. By ancient law all land ownership is vested in Government.]

They have raised food for themselves, but they will not raise food for their mother the cow. So the cow starves. And the fault--is the greed of Britain or of the Salvation Army.[11]

[11. Government has largely entrusted to the Salvation Army, because of its conspicuous success therewith, the reformation of the criminal tribes, nomads, whose first need is domestication in a fixed habitat where they may be trained to earn an honest and sufficient livelihood by agriculture, cattle-raising, and handiwork. For this purpose and to further its excellent work for the Untouchables in general, the Salvation Army has received from Government the use of certain small and scattered tracts of uncultivated land in Gujerat and elsewhere. It is to this step that Mr. Gandhi's organ objects. See ante, p. 227. See, further, Muktifauj, by Commissioner Booth-Tucker, Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, London.]

CHAPTER XVIII - THE SACRED COW

Turning from the people and the cattle within their gates to Government's experimental work on Government farms, we find one world-contribution. They have solved a main domestic problem of low latitudes--how to get milk for the babies.

Only those who have lived in the tropics are likely to appreciate what this means, in terms of family security, health and happiness. In the Philippines our own hopeful work was nipped in the bud by the Filipiniza-tion of the Agricultural Department. From that day, cattle-breeding became a farce, played out in office chairs by vague young men spinning webs of words learned by rote in one or another American college, while a few rough and neglected animals wearied out a beggar's existence in the corral. And so, as far as colonial America is concerned, the old notion still reigned--that the cow can neither be bred nor led to give real milk, in real quantity, in the tropics.

In other words, our work in that field is yet to do.

But the British in India have given us a tremendous lift and encouragement to effort. On the Imperial Dairy Farm at Bangalore their breeding experiments have conclusively proved that, with skill, care and persistence, a cow can be developed that will stand up against the tropical climate for fifteen lactations and still produce well, doing her duty as a human life-saver. In the Government Military Dairy Farm at Lucknow, I saw "Mongia," a half-bred cow. sired by an imported American Friesian on a native dam of the Punjab Hariana stock. Mongia, with her eighth calf, had given 16,000 pounds[1] of milk in a lactation period of 305 days. With her seventh calf she gave 14,800 pounds. "Edna," another of the herd, had reached a production of 15,324 in 305 days. Butter-fat, with these sturdy half-breeds, runs from 4.05 per cent, in full lactation to about 5.05 per cent, during hottest weather, which is beyond even our American home requirements.

[1. 2.15 pounds of milk make a quart]

Again, these cows' milk production drops scarcely at all in hot weather. Edna began her 1925 lactation in August, starting off at a steady seventy-pound daily yield. Edna and Mongia are, to be sure, admittedly stars; but the average daily production of the Lucknow herd of 105 milking cows of Indo-western crosses was twenty-one pounds per capita, and the work is yet young.

The best milch breed native to India is the Saniwal, of the Punjab, which averages only 3,000 pounds a lactation period, and is too small to be usefully crossbred with our big western milch stock. But Government within the last ten years have developed on their farm in Pusa a cross-breed of Saniwal with Montgomery, a second Punjabi strain, that has more than doubled the previous Saniwal record, while further interesting experiments, as of crossing native Sindi stock with imported Ayrshires, are in course of development at other Government breeding stations.

The significance of all this may be measured in part by the fact that over 90 per cent. of the cows in India give less than 600 pounds of milk a year, or less than a quart a day.[2]

[2. The Gospel and the Plow, London, 1921. Samuel Higginbottom, p. 69.]

Government began experiments in the year 1912, Then came the Great War, preventing the bringing of animals from abroad. Directly the war was over, Government imported from America, for the Lucknow farm, two more Friesian bulls, "Segis" and "Elmer." Other experimental stations were similarly supplied, and the work went on.

Enough has now been accomplished to prove that stamina goes with the half-breed, and that, beyond the fifty-fifty point, imported blood weakens the result, creating extra-susceptibility to the many diseases of the country. Every cow over half-blood, therefore, is now bred back to a native bull.

Thus, by selective breeding, by crossing, and by better feeding and housing, slowly and steadily the results of centuries of inbreeding, starvation, infection, and of breeding from the worst are being conquered; definite pedigree types are being fixed; and the foundations of distinct breeds are building.

The trail is opened, the possibilities revealed. When the people of India are ready to accept it, their profit is ready to their hand.

Cattle-lovers, at this point, will be interested in the fact that India demands a dual-purpose cow, but that "dual purpose," in India, signifies, not the combination upon which some of us in America look askance--milk and beef, but--milk and muscle!

The sale of cattle as beef is small; the price of beef in Lucknow in 1926 was two cents a pound. The Indians' use for a cow, aside from her religious contribution earlier described, is to produce, first, milk and butter; second, dung to be used as fuel or to coat the floors and walls of their dwellings; and, third, to produce draft animals for the cart and plow. To breed for milk and for draft might seem a self-canceling proposition. But such is the demand of the country, and the concern of Government is to get on with the job and strike the best possible compromise.

On the Government farms, foreign fodder crops, such as Egyptian clover, have also been introduced; much emphasis is laid on fodder developments; and the use of silage, economically stored in pits, is demonstrated. Men are sent out to deliver illustrated lectures and to install silage pits in the villages. And young pedigreed herd bulls, whether as loans, or as gifts, or to purchase, are offered to the people.

All the fine animals produced at Lucknow, Pusa, Bangalore and the other Government plants, are con-scientiously watched over by British breeders. In point of general competence, of cleanliness and order, and of simple practicality, the plants stand inspection. But all such matters are utterly foreign to the minds of the Indian peasant, and for those who might best and quickest teach the peasant--the Indian aristocrat, the Indian intelligentsia--rarely do peasant or cattle carry any appeal.

With the exception of certain princes of Indian states who have learned from England to take pride in their herds, and again with the exception of a mere handful of estate-holders scattered over the country, cattle-breeding is left entirely to a generally illiterate class known as gvalas, who lack enterprise, capital and intelligence to carry on the work.

I saw little, anywhere, to suggest a real appreciation of the importance of change and much of opposite import, such, for example, as the spectacle of a fine pedigreed herd bull, lent by Government for the improvement of the cattle of a village and returned a wreck from ill-usage. He was brought into a Government Veterinary Hospital during my visit in the place, and it needed no testimony other than one's eyes to see that he had been starved, cruelly beaten and crippled, while the wounds on one leg, obviously inflicted by blows, were so badly infected that healing seemed scarcely possible.

"What will you do?" I asked the British official in charge.

"Fine the head man of the village, probably. But it does little good. It is a human trait not to appreciate what one doesn't pay for. And they won't pay for bet • tering their cattle."

Further, to take at random another point, it is difficult to get intelligent selective breeding work out of a people who, for example, refuse to keep record of the milk-yield of a cow on the ground that to weigh or to measure the gift of God is impious. "We will not do it!" the milkers of the Punjab declare. "If we did, our children would die."

Meantime, aside from the selection of the worst, by starvation and by breeding from the worst through sacred runt bulls, a third force works to remove the best milch cows from a land whose supply of milk is already tragically short. Government, at Karnal, has amply demonstrated the feasibility of producing milk in the country and transporting it to the city in bulk, even as far as a thousand miles. And the Calcutta cooperative dairies have shown the possibilities of local service from suburb to town. But the Indian milk purveyor in general sees naught in that. His practice is to buy the best up-country young milch cows he can find, bring them to the city in calf, keep them during their current lactation, to prolong which he often removes their ovaries, and then to sell them to the butcher. This happens on the grand scale, kills off the best cows, and thereby constitutes a steady drain on the vital resources of the country.

The Indian holds that he cannot afford to maintain an animal in the city during her dry season, and he has no plan for keeping her elsewhere. Therefore he exterminates her after her lactation; most of the cost of her raising goes to waste, and her virtues die with her.[3]

[3. W. Smith, Imperial Dairy Expert, in Agricultural Journal of India, Vol. XVII, Part I, January, 1922.]

Government, all over India, have learned to prepare for trouble on the annual Muhammadan feast one of the features of which is the sacrificial killing of cows. Hindu feeling, at that period, rises to the danger pitch, and riots, bloodshed and destruction are always the likely outcome. For is not the embodied Sacrosanctity that lies at the root of Hinduism being done to der.cn by the infidel in the very arms of her adorers?

Given this preliminary reminder, nothing is more characteristic of the Indian mentality than the balancing facts pointed out in Mr. Gandhi's Young India of November 5, 1925:

We forget that a hundred times the number of cows killed for Kurbanl[4] by the Musalmans are killed for purposes of trade...The cows are almost all owned by Hindus, and the butchers would find their trade gone if the Hindus refused to sell the cows.

[4. The annual Muhammadan feast above mentioned.]

Four weeks after the publication of the leading article above quoted, Mr. Gandhi returns to the subject, citing what he describes as "illuminative extracts" from a report of the Indian Industrial Committee sitting in Bengal and the Central Provinces.[5] The hearing is on the commercial slaughter of cows for beef and hides. The investigating committee asks, concerning the attitude of the surrounding Hindu populace toward the industry:

[5. Young India, Nov. 26, 1925, p. 416.]

Have these slaughterhouses aroused any local feeling in the matter?

The witness replies:

They have aroused local feelings of greed and not of indig-nation. I think you will find that many of the municipal members are shareholders in these yards. Brahmans and Hindus are also found to be shareholders.

"If there is any such thing as a moral government in the universe, we must answer for it some day," Mr. Gandhi's commentor helplessly laments.

This example of the selling of the cow by the Hindu for slaughter--he who will rise in murdering riot if a Muhammadan, possibly not too averse to the result, kills a cow outside a Hindu temple door--opens a topic that should perhaps be examined for other than its face value.

We of the West are continually in danger of misunderstanding the Indian through supposing that the mental picture produced by a given word or idea is the same in weight and significance to him and to us. His facility in English helps us to this error. We assume that his thought is like his tongue. He says, for example, that he venerates all life and is filled with tenderness for all animals. Lecturing in America, he speaks of the Hindu's sensitive refinement in this direction and of his shrinking from our gross unspirituality, our incomprehension of the sacred unity of the vital spark.

But if you suppose, from these seemingly plain words, that the average Hindu in India shows what we would call common humaneness toward animal life, you go far astray.

To the highly intelligent Brahman foreman of the Goverment farm at Bangalore, I one day said: "I regret that all over India you torture most bullocks and some cows by the disjointing of their tails. Look at the draft bullocks in that cart over there. Every vertebra in their tails is dislocated. As you are aware, it causes exquisite pain. Often the tail is broken short off."

"Ah, yes," replied the young Brahman, indifferently, "it is perfectly true that we do it. But that, you see, is necessary. The animals would not travel fast enough unless their tail-nerves are wrenched."

You may stand for hours on the busy Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, watching the bullock carts pass, without discovering a dozen animals whose tails are not a zig-zag string of breaks. It is easier, you see, for the driver to walk with the animal's tail in his hand, twisting its joints from time to time, than it is to beat the creature with his stick. If you ride in the bullock cart, however, with the driver riding before you, you will discover that, from this position, he has another way of speeding the gait. With his stick or his long hard toe-nails he periodically prods his animals' genital glands.

And only the alien in the land will protest.

It is one of the puzzles of India that a man whose bullock is his best asset will deliberately overload his animal, and then, half starved as it is, will drive it till it drops dead. The steep hillsides of Madras are a. Calvary of draft bullocks. One sees them, branded from head to tail, almost raw from brands and blows, forced up-hill until they fall and die. If a British official sees this or any other deed of cruelty, he acts. But the British are few in the land. Yet far fewer are the Indians whose sensibilities are touched by the sufferings of dumb beasts, or whose wrath is aroused by pain and abuse inflicted upon defenseless creatures.

The practice of phúká is common in most parts of India. Its object is to increase and prolong the milk production of cows. It is committed in several ways, but usually consists in thrusting a stick on which is bound a bundle of rough straw into the vagina of the cow and twisting it about, to produce irritation. The thing gives intense pain to the cow, and also produces sterility--• a matter of indifference to the dairyman, since he will in any case sell her for slaughter when she dries. Mr. Gandhi cites authority[6] that out of ten thousand cows in Calcutta dairy sheds, five thousand are daily subjected to this process.

[6. Young India, May 6, 1926, pp. 166-7.]

Mr. Gandhi quotes another authority on the manufacture of a dye esteemed by Indians and known as peuri:[7]

[7. Ibid., p. 167.]

By feeding the cow only on mango leaves, with no other form of feed nor even water to drink, the animal passes in the form of urine a dye which is sold at high rates in the bazaar. The animal so treated does not last long and dies in agony.

The young milch cow is usually carrying her calf when she is brought to the city. The Hindu dairyman does not want the calf, and his religion forbids him to kill it. So he finds other means to avoid both sin and the costs of keeping. In some sections of the country he will allow it a daily quarter- to half-cup of its mother's milk, because of a religious teaching that he who keeps the calf from the cow will himself suffer in the next life. But the allowance that saves the owner's soul is too small to save the calf who staggers about after its mother on the door-to-door milk route as long as its trembling legs will carry it. When the end comes, the owner skins the little creature, sews the skin together, stuffs it crudely with straw, shoves four sticks up the legs, and, when he goes forth on the morrow driving his cow, carries his handiwork over his shoulder. Then, when he stops at a customer's door to milk, he will plant before the mother the thing that was her calf, to induce her to milk more freely. Or again, in large plants, the new-born calves may be simply tossed upon the morning garbage carts, at the dairy door, and carried away to the dumps where they breathe their last among other broken rubbish.

The water buffalo--the carabao of the Philippines--is in India an immensely useful creature. The best of the Delhi blood give yearly from six to ten thousand pounds of milk carrying from 7.5 to 9 per cent, butter-fat. The buffalo bull makes a powerful draft animal for cart and plow. But the species is large, and expensive to raise. Therefore it is usual for milk dealers to starve their buffalo calves outright. Young India[8] quotes testimonies showing various phases of this practice. One of these draws attention to

[8. May 6, 1926, p. 167.]

...the number of buffalo calves...being abandoned to die of starvation in public streets, and often when they fall down through sheer exhaustion, being mutilated by trams, motor-cars and carriages. These animals are generally driven out from, the cattle stables at night...simply to save all the milk the mother has, for sale.

Otherwise, the calf is tied to a stake anywhere about the place and left without food or water till it dies.

The water buffalo, having no sweat-glands, suffers severely in the hot sun and should never be compelled to endure it unprotected. Therefore, says another of Young India's authorities, "one finds that [the starving buffalo calves] are usually tied in the sunniest part of the yard. The dairymen appear systematically to use these methods to kill off the young stock."

And then, turning from city dairymen to country owners and country regions, Mr. Gandhi gives us this picture:[9]

[9. Young India, May 6, 1926, p. 167.]

In Gujarat [northern Bombay Presidency], the he-calf is simply starved off by withholding milk from him. In other parts he is driven away to the forests to become the prey of wild beasts. In Bengal he is often tied up in the forest and left without food, either to starve or be devoured. And yet the people who do this are those who would not allow an animal to be killed outright even if it were in extreme suffering!

In this, one is reminded of the fate of the villagers' cows, which, when they are too diseased or too old to give further service, are turned out of the village, to stand and starve till they are too weak to defend themselves with heel or horn and then are pulled down and devoured by the starving village dogs.

Surely no Westerner, even the most meteoric tourist, has passed through India without observing those dogs. They haunt every railway platform, skulking along under the car windows. Bad dreams out of purgatory they look, all bones and sores and grisly hollows, their great, undoglike eyes full of terror and furtive cunning, of misery and of hatred. All over the land they exist in hosts, forever multiplying. In the towns they dispute with the cows and goats for a scavenger's living among the stalls and gutters of the bazaars. Devoured with disease and vermin, they often go mad from bites received from mad jackals of the packs that roam even city parts by night.

And, according to the Hindu creed, nothing can be done for them. Their breeding may not be stopped, their number may not be reduced, and since a dog's touch defiles, their wounds and sores and broken bones may not be attended.

In this connection an interesting discussion has recently developed in the pages of Young India.[10] Ths incident that gave it birth was the destruction of sixty mad dogs, collected on the premises of an Ahmedabad mill-owner. The mill-owner himself, though a Hindu, had ordered their killing. This act aroused much ill feeling in the town, and the Hindu Humanitarian League referred the question to Mr. Gandhi, as a religious authority, asking:

[10. October and November, 1926. The issue of November il, 1926, gives the following figures for cases of hydrophobia treated in the Civil Hospital of the town of Ahmedabad: Jan. to Dec., 1925, 1117; Jan. to Sept., 1926, 990.]

When Hinduism forbids the taking of the life of any living being,...do you think it right to kill rabid dogs?...Are not the man who actually destroys the dogs, as also the man at whose instance he does so, both sinners?...The Ahmedabad Municipality...is soon going to have before it a resolution for the castration of stray dogs. Does religion sanction the castration of an animal?

Mr. Gandhi's reply is full of light on Hindu thinking:

There can be no two opinions on the fact that Hinduism regards killing a living being as sinful...Hinduism has laid down that killing for sacrifice is no himsa [violence]. This is only a half-truth...But what is inevitable is not regarded as a sin, so much so that the science of daily practice has not only declared the inevitable violence involved in killing for sacrifice as permissible but even regarded it as meritorious...[But the man] who is responsible for the protection of lives under his care and who does not possess the virtues of the recluse [to heal by spirit], but is capable of destroying a rabid dog, is faced with a conflict of duties. If he kills the dog he commits a sin. If he does not kill it, he commits a graver sin. So he prefers to commit the lesser one...It is therefore a thousand pities that the question of stray dogs, etc., assumes such a monstrous proportion in this sacred land of ahimsa [non-violence]. It may be a sin to destroy rabid dogs and such others as are liable to catch rabies. ...It is a sin, it should be a sin, to feed stray dogs.

In the land of ahimsa, the rarest of sins is that of allowing a crumb of food to a starving dog, or, equally, of putting him out of his misery. Mr. Gandhi's approval of the latter step, even as to animals gone mad, has brought down upon him such an avalanche of Hindu protest that he sighs aloud under its burden upon his time.

And since the only remaining resource, castration, lies under religious ban because it interrupts the ordained stages of life, the miseries of the dog, like many another misery of India, revolves in a circle.

CHAPTER XIX - THE QUALITY OF MERCY

"We will pose as protectors of the cow, and quarrel with Mussalmans in her sacred name, the net result being that her last condition is worse than the first,"[1] laments the faithful accuser on Mr. Gandhi's staff, and again:

[1. May 6, 1926, V. G. Desai, p. 167.]

"In spite of our boasted spirituality, we are still sadly backward in point of humanity and kindness to the lower animals."[2]

[2. August 26, 1926, p. 303.]

Legislation for the prevention of cruelty to animals was enacted in the early years of Crown rule in India. But such legislation, anywhere, must rest for effectiveness on public opinion, and the opinion of Mr. Gandhi's paper is, in this matter, as a voice crying in the wilderness, awakening but the faintest of echoes. If the people feel no compassion; if the police, themselves drawn from the people, privately consider the law a silly, perhaps an irreligious law, whose greatest virtue lies in the chance it gives them to fill their pockets; and if little or no leaven of another sentiment exists in the higher classes, Government's purpose, as far as it means immediate relief, is handicapped indeed.

Laws in India for the prevention of cruelty to animals have uniformly originated as Government bills. Whether of the Central or of the Provincial Adminis-trations, measures for the protection of animals frort. cruelty have been passed over the indifference, if not over the pronounced hostility, of the Indian representation.

Thus, a bill to limit the driving of water buffaloes, heavily laden, through the hottest hours of the day in the midst of the hottest season of the year, was introduced in the Bengal Legislative Council by Government, on March 16, 1926. In the streets of Calcutta the sufferings of buffaloes so driven had long been, to Western susceptibilities, a public scandal. But this proposal for the animals' relief was finally enacted into law despite the resistance of the leading Indian merchants, who saw in it merely a sentimentality inconvenient to their trade.

The practice of <>i>phúká, the deliberate daily torture of the cow in order that the worth of a few more pennies may be wrung from her pain, has been forbidden and heavily penalized by the Governor-General-in-Council and by successive provincial laws. Mr. Gandhi finds room, in the columns of Young India,[3] to print an Englishman's protest against phúká. But if any mass of Hindu feeling exists against it, the vitality of that feeling is insufficient to bring it forth into deeds.

[3. May 13, 1926, p. 174.]

In 1926, the Government of Bombay Presidency introduced in the Bombay Legislative Council a measure[4] amending the Police Act of the City of Bombay so that police officers should have power to kill any animal found in such a condition, whether from hurt or from disease, that it would be sheer cruelty to attempt to remove it to a dispensary. In order to safeguard the owner's interests in the matter, the amendment further provided that, if the owner is absent, or if he refuses to consent to the destruction of the suffering animal, the police officer must secure, before he can proceed under the law, a certificate from one of several veterinarians whom the Governor-in-Council should appoint.

[4. Bill No. V of 1926, "A Bill Further to Amend the City of Bombay Police Act, 1902."]

No small part of the necessity for a law such as this would arise from the Indians' habit, already described, of turning diseased and dying cows, and calves that he is in process of starving to death, into the streets to wander until they die what he calls "a natural death." As their strength fails, they become less and less able to guide their movements, and, in the end, are often caught and crushed by some vehicle against whose wheels they fall.

The debates evoked by the Bombay Government's proposal of relief throw so much general light on Indian modes of thought that their quotations at some length may be justified. On the introduction of the measure, a Hindu member, Mr. S. S. Dev, came at once to his feet with:[5]

[5. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, Official Report, 1926, Vol. XVII, Part VII, pp. 579-80.]

The principle of the bill is revolting to an Indian mind...If you will not shoot a man in similar circumstances, how can you shoot an animal, in the name of preventing cruelty to animals?...Further, the bill, if it becomes law, may in actual operation give rise to fracas in public streets.

Then follows Mr. Pahalajani, of Western Sind. Says he:[6]

[6. Ibid., 580.]

This section makes no exception whatever whether the animal is a cow or a horse or a dog. The policeman with the certificate of the veterinary practitioner can destroy any animal. The official [British] members of the Council ought to know--some of them have remained here for over 30 years--that no Hindu would allow a cow to be destroyed in whatsoever condition it is. There are pinjrapoles[7] in which the worst diseased animals are nursed and fed...[This measure] proceeds on the assumption that animals have no soul, and they deserve to be shot if they are not in a condition to live. The Hindu idea of soul is quite different from that held by Westerners...A measure of this kind would wound the religious susceptibilities of Hindus.

[7. Animal asylums, later to be described.]

To this declaration Mr. Montgomerie, Secretary to Government, responds, with a picture from the daily life of the city:[8]

[8. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, p. 581.]

I can hardly think that the honourable member means what he says. Is it a decent sight to see some poor animal disembowelled, legs broken and bleeding, in the streets of Bombay? The only humane thing...is to put the beast out of misery. It is inhumanity to allow this animal to suffer and remove it with the probability that it may break to pieces while being so moved.

But Hindu after Hindu decries the measure, and on grounds of offended sentiment alone, save that one of their number, Mr. Soman, takes thought that a question of expense is involved. For the bill empowers Government to appoint a few area veterinarians, to be locally handy to the police. This charge upon public funds, Mr. Soman feels, goes beyond any suffering animal's proper claim. As he puts it:[9]

[9. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, March 2, 1926, p. 583.]

If any generous minded practitioners come forward to help the police officers, so much the better. But if any new posts are to be created, which are to be maintained at public expense, I would like certainly to oppose the bill.

And the debate, for the day, closes on the note of fate. Says Rao Sahib D. P. Desai, member from Kaira.[10]

[10. Ibid., p. 585.]

All the trouble arises from having two conflicting ideals of mercy. The f ramers of the bill think that shooting an animal which is diseased and which could not be cured is much better. We on the other hand think that God himself has ordained what is to come about.

On the resumption of the reading of the bill, over three months later,[11] the Honorable Mr. Hotson, Chief Secretary to Government, assumes the labor of trying to win Indian support. He pleads:[12]

[11. July 26, 1926.]

[12. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, Vol. XVIII, Part I, pp. 70-1.]

The one object of this bill is to make it possible to deal with injured animals which are lying in the street or in any other public place in a state of suffering and pain, for which there is no relief for them. It is open to the owners of such animals to remove them, [or] to have them taken away by other charitable persons to a pinjrapole or to any other place where animals are received and cared for. It is only in cases where the animal is neglected in its misery, where, as things are now, the animal has to lie in the public streets of Bombay for many hours, perhaps until death brings relief, that the power...will be exercised. That such an animal should be in such a condition in a public place where there are many passers-by in a great city like Bombay...causes pain to observers of all classes and it is desirable not only that the animal should be relieved...but that the feelings of the passers-by should be saved from the extreme discomfort caused by such sights. That is all that this bill seeks to attain.

But the Hindu position remains unshaken. The old arguments[13] come forward until, presently, they arouse the Honorable All Mahomed Khan Dehlavi, Muham-madan, Minister of Agriculture in the Bombay Government. Says he, expressing himself as "rather anxious in the interests of agriculturists":[14]

[13. Ibid., pp. 72-3.]

[14. Ibid., p. 73.]

It was argued at the last session that every animal having a soul should not be destroyed. I have been tackled severely in this House by honourable members on the opposite benches for not taking sufficient precaution and for not spending sufficient money to kill elephants, [wild] pigs and rats in the interests of agriculturists. And if this is a question of killing a soul, I think an elephant has a bigger soul than a pig, and the latter a bigger soul than a rat. If that principle were applied to the agricultural department, I shall be asked to stop killing the animals I have mentioned. The result will be that the agriculturists in the country will suffer very much. I say, Sir, there is absolutely no difference at all between the case of an animal in the streets of cities like Bombay, or in the jungles or fields in the country outside.

The concern of the Minister of Agriculture for the cultivators, his special charges, again uncovers the usual attitude of the Indian politician toward that body of humanity which constitutes over 72 per cent, of the people of India. Says Rao Sahib D. P. Desai, frankly tossing off their case:[15]

[15. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, p. 76.]

The agriculturists should not be taken as the whole of Indian society...But even if the agriculturist thinks that it is desirable that any animals that are dangerous to agriculture should be destroyed, it should not be taken that the whole Hindu society agrees with that view of the agriculturists, and I think that no weight should be given such views in this House.

Out of the remainder of the day's debate emerge much sterile criticism and accusation of Government's effort and no fresh thought excepting that of the old Muhammadan member from the Central Division, Moulvi Rafiuddin Ahmad, who counsels, Nestor-wise:[16]

[16. Ibid., pp. 77-8.]

It is not the intention in the remotest degree of the Government to injure the susceptibilities of any classes of His Majesty's subjects in India...If [anything] can be done by any other means than by the provisions of this bill, I think Government will be only too pleased to adopt them, and as far as I know--and I have been in this house long enough--there has never been any question of sentiment which Government have not taken into consideration, and I do admire them for that...In this House Hindus and Muhamma-dans have joined to oppose Government if in any remote degree they thought that Government were mistaken and on many occasions Government have conceded...It is no use coming here with empty heads, there must be some suggestions offered, it is easy to criticise, but it is at the same time our duty also to suggest better measures. I appeal to all those persons that have raised objections...Government is quite open to reason.

"Are you authorized to speak on behalf of Government?" a Hindu hotly interrupts.

"I am authorized to speak on behalf of every person with whom this Council is concerned. I do say this, this objection is altogether unreasonable," the other returns.

But his appeal wins no response. On the contrary, a Hindu member grimly suggests that if by chance a Muhammadan were to be appointed veterinary and were to approve the killing of a sick cow, the peace of the city as between Hindus and Muhammadans would go up in smoke.

And the discussion ends by the referring of the bill to a select committee of the House, composed of nine Indians--Hindu, Muhammadan, and Parsi, and of two Britons.

In the second reading of this bill,[17] we find the Chief Secretary of Government, Mr. Hotson, presenting the select committee's report with the comment that the committee "has gone so far m the desire to avoid giving offense to any of our brethren" that the usefulness of the bill has been impaired--a mild and diplomatic phrasing of the emasculation that has taken place.

[17. August 5, 1926.]

Cows and bulls are now excepted from the proposed law, and temple precincts are put beyond its reach; anything may happen there. Yet, without a single constructive proposal of any sort, the Hindu opposition keeps up. Members urge that legislation be delayed if not abandoned, that Government are indiscreet in urging any action; that "the agonies of the animals" are not so great that sympathy need pass the point of theory; that, in any event, Hindu policemen should be exempt from the duty of shooting animals, since to do so is contrary to their religion; that to avoid invidious distinctions Muhammadan officers may likewise claim exemption; that, because Indian officers bungle with firearms, British police sergeants "whose marksmanship is perfect" be charged with the duty. Says Mr. Surve, Hindu member from Bombay City, advocating the last suggestion:

"To kill a disabled animal which is just about to die, that kind of butchery we are incapable of...that is not our chivalry."[18]

[18. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, August S 1926, p. 716.]

So failed, for this time at least. Government's attempt to defend the cow from her worshipers. With its intended chief beneficiary left out, the bill passed. Yet, Government's argument, so patiently and courteously pursued, did, as it continued, educe a certain amount of Indian support. And in view of the fact that the principle involved is a complete exotic in minds committed to the expiatory journey of the soul, each bit of ground so gained speaks of reward, however distant.

It was in 1890 that the Governor-General-in-CounciJ passed the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of which Act the fifth section prohibited the killing of any animal in an unnecessarily cruel manner. In 1917 it was found necessary to clarify the intentions of Section V, expressly directing it upon persons cruelly killing a goat, or having in their possession the skin of a goat so killed. Provincial Governments have enacted the same laws. And yet the offense against which these measures are aimed continues in the land.

It is the skinning of goats alive.

The skin stripped from a living goat can be stretched a little larger, and therefore brings a little higher price, than one removed after killing.

It will scarcely be necessary to amplify this point. In the Province of Behar and Orissa in the year 1925, thirty-four cases of the flaying alive of goats were brought to court by the police. But light fines, meted out by Indian judges whose sentiment is not shocked, are soon worked off in the extra price fetched by the next batch of flayed-alive skins. The risk of prosecution is small; and "there is every reason," concludes the Provincial Police Administration report, "to suppose that the number of reported cases is no criterion of the prevalence of this outrage." Many skins so stripped have been shipped to America.

Britain, by example and by teaching, has been working for nearly three-quarters of a century to implant her own ideas of mercy on an alien soil. In this and in uncounted other directions she might perhaps have produced more visible results, in her areas of direct contact, by the use of force. But her administrative theory has been that small constructive value lies in the use of force to bring about surface compliance where the underlying principle is not yet grasped. And, given a people still barbarian in their handling of their own I women, it is scarcely to be expected that they should yet have taken on a mentality responsive to the appeal of dumb creatures.

Unhappily for the helpless animal world, Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is, under the current Indi-anization movement, a "transferred subject" of Government. That is to say: in each province working the "Reforms" the administration of this branch has been transferred by the British Parliament into the hands of an Indian minister. Dumb creation pays with its body the costs of the experiment.

CHAPTER XX - IN THE HOUSE OF HER FRIENDS

"This country is the crudest in the world, to animals," said an old veterinarian, long practicing in India. It would perhaps be fairer to repeat that the people of India follow their religions, which, save with the small sect called Jains, produce no mercy either to man or to beast, in the sense that we of the West know mercy.

Mr. Gandhi himself writes:[1]

[1. Young India, Feb. 26, 1925.]

In a country where the cow is an object of worship there should be no cattle problems at all. But our cow-worship has resolved itself into an ignorant fanaticism. The fact that we have more cattle than we can support is a matter for urgent treatment, I have already suggested the taking over of the question by cow protection societies.

Cow Protection Societies maintain gaushalas, or cow asylums. These asylums, like the pinjrapoles, or asylums for all animals, are maintained by gifts, and have access, through rich Hindu merchants, to almost unlimited funds. "Let Government of India promise to stop the killing of cows in India and they can have all the money they can use--plus a war with the Muhammadan," an experienced old Hindu official once told me.

A strong claim to the bounty of the gods is believed to be established through saving the life of a cow. Yet as a Hindu, you are not disturbed in conscience by selling your good cow to a butcher, because it is he, not you, who will kill the cow. Then, taking the money he gives you, you may buy of him, for a fraction of that sum, the worst cow in his shambles, turn her over to the gaushala to care for, and thereby acquire religious merit, profiting your soul and your purse in one transaction.

Having personally visited a number of gaushalas and pinjrapoles, I cannot but wonder whether those who support them so lavishly, those who commit animals to their care, and those who, like Mr. Gandhi, so strongly advocate their maintenance and increase, ever look inside their gates. I first heard of them through a western animal lover long domiciled in India. He said:

"The Hindu who, as an act of piety, buys a cow of the butcher and places her in the gaushala, always buys a poor diseased animal because he gets her cheap. When he places her in the gaushala he does not give money with her, or, at best, not money enough for her decent keep. And even if he did, the keeper would pocket most of it. The suffering in these places is terrible. In one of them I recently saw an old cow lying helpless, being consumed by maggots which had begun at her hind quarters. It would take them ten days to eat up to her heart and kill her. Till then she must lie as she lay.

"'Can't you do something for her?' I asked the keeper.

"'Why?' he replied, honestly enough. 'Why should I? What for?"'

My second informant was an American cattle specialist living in India, a highly-qualified practical man. He said:

"I was asked to visit some of these gaushalas and give advice. And because the political unrest since the War has inclined many of these people to shut their minds to the council of British officials, I hoped that, as an American and an outsider, I could be of use. But I found in every place that I visited either intentional dishonesty or gross mismanagement. In all cases the animals imprisoned there were the least of anybody's concern. My advice was not welcome. When they found I would not give them a rubber-stamp approval, they had no use for me at all."

I next consulted a notable religious leader, the Guru[2] of Dial Bagh. His words were:

[2. Religious master.]

"I have visited two of these places, both times taking them by surprise. The sights that I saw there were so horrible that for two days afterward I could not take food."

Finally, I recorded the testimony of an Indian trained in the western school of cattle-breeding and dairying and now occupying a position of considerable responsibility in that line. Describing the pinjrapole as "a lane or square full of animal's pens," he went on?

"Religious sentiment puts the creatures there, but there it stops. They are much neglected and suffer torments through neglect. Rich merchants and bankers subscribe annually tons of money for their care, but the money all goes to graft and waste. The creatures in most of the asylums are far worse off than they were when they scavenged in the gutters for a living, with a happy chance of getting killed by passing cars. They are miserable, dying skeletons. The caretakers have no knowledge of the care of animals and no previous training or experience. The money spent in such big sums is not spent on them! There are good animal asylums in India, but they are few!"

The first gaushala that I saw for myself was in the suburbs of a central Indian city. Over the entrance gate was a charming painting of the blue god Krishna in the forest, piping to white cows.

Inside the high walls at a distance lay a large pleasant garden of fruit-trees and vegetable beds encircling a pleasant bungalow--the keeper's house. On the hither side of the garden was the place of the cows. This was a treeless, shrubless, shelterless yard of hard-trodden, cracked, bare clay, which, in the rains, would be a wallow of foul mud, inhabited by animals whose bones, in some cases, were literally cutting through their skins. Some lay gasping, too weak to stand. Some had great open sores at which the birds, perched on their hipbones or their staring ribs, picked and tore. Some had broken legs that dangled and flopped as they stirred. Many were diseased. All were obviously starved.

Bulls as wretched as the cows stood among them, and in a little pen at the side were packed some 250 small calves. From these last arose a pitiful outcry, at the sound of approaching steps; and as I looked down over the pen-wall at their great brown eyes, their hollow sides and their shaking legs, it occurred to me to ask what they were fed. The answer, frankly given by the gaushala attendant, was that each calf gets the equivalent of one small tea-cupful of milk a day, until it dies--which as a rule, and happily, it shortly does--the rest of the milk being sold in the bazaar by the keeper of the gaushala.

Asking next to see the daily ration of a cow, I was shown the granary--a bin measuring perhaps five by three by two feet, containing small seeds heavily mixed with husks. Of this each full-grown animal got one half-pound daily. Nothing else whatever was fed, excepting a little dry chopped straw. Straw contains no food values, but would serve for a time to keep the creatures' two sides from touching. No paddock was provided, and no grazing of any sort. The animals merely stood or lay as I saw them until the relief of death.

One cow had but three legs, the hind leg having been amputated below the knee, "because she kicked when they milked her."

In other gaushalas I saw cripples who had been made so in the process of creating monsters. For this purpose they cut a leg from one calf and graft it anywhere on the body of another, to exhibit the result for money as a natural portent. The maimed calf, if it does not bleed or starve or rot to death, may be bought for a song and sent to a gaushala. No dissatisfaction seemed to be felt as to this history.

In the heart of the city of Ahmedabad, within a few miles of Mr. Gandhi's pleasant and comfortable home in which he writes his earnest pleas for the support of cow shelters and pinjrapoles, I visited a large pinjra-pole whose description, after what has already been said, need not be inflicted upon the reader's sensibilities. I hope that every animal that I saw in it is safely dead.

But from such memories it is a pleasure to turn to the one exception that my personal experience revealed, an establishment maintained by "The Association for Saving Milch Cattle from Going to the Bombay Slaughter House."

This society is composed practically entirely of rich Indian merchants and merchants' associations. Its latest report[3] affords some interesting reading. It begins with a statement incorporating the estimate that, during the five years from April 1, 1919, to March 31, 1924, 229,257 cows were slaughtered in Bombay City, and that 97,583 calves and young buffaloes were "tortured to death in the stables."

[3. An Appeal by Shree Ghatkopar Sarvajanika Jivadaya Khata, 75 Mahabir Building, Bombay.]

The report proceeds with an appeal against all slaughter, even of bullocks, sheep and goats, for which the figures are also given. Then it concerns itself with the question of the shortage of milk:

We Hindus claim to protect the cow. If this claim were just, India should be a land flowing with milk. But as a matter of fact this is not the case. Milk in cow-protecting Bombay, for instance, is nearly as dear as in cow-killing London or New York. Good milk cannot be had for love or money and the direct consequence of this state of things is a really terrible mortality among infants and a heavy death rate among adults...

The "dairy" plant that the Association itself maintains in the country on the outskirts of Bombay consists of a decent set of cowsheds, substantially and practically built for shelter, air and sanitation, and reasonably clean. The superintendent said he was feeding fifteen pounds of hay, with eight pounds of grain and oil cake, per head, daily. And the cattle, such as they were, did not look hungry. The herd consisted of 277 head, whose aggregate milking came to about 130 quarts a day, which, sold to some 130 families, gave a daily income of about $22.50 to the establishment. Fresh cows were sold out of the plant on condition that the purchaser should never sell them to be killed.

The staff, entirely Indian, impressed me as being eager and interested as to their work. Said the chief:

"If this place were merely commercial there would not be so many non-commercial cattle here. We have to buy out of the slaughter house; but where once we bought the poorest and cheapest, now we have learned to buy the best. And besides, the idea of any sort of commercial element, in a gaushala, is new to India. Up to the present we have not put any private milkmen out of business, or appreciably reduced the city's slaughter. But we hope to do so, in the long run. On my staff here I have two or three Bachelors of Agriculture--young men trained on the Government Breeding and Dairy farms to understand cattle. And that you will never find in any other gaushala or pinjrapole in all India. We, here, believe in scientific care."

Looked at from the point of view of an American farmer, the whole thing was too primitive to discuss. Looked at from the Indian background, it was a shining light, and one felt almost guilty in noticing that all the staff were cousins, nephews, or close relatives of the superintendent.

But, it was a British-trained Indian in Government employ under the direction of a British chief, who rescued this gaushala. from a bad start, devised the present advanced scheme and pursuaded the Association to adopt it.

Meantime, the Indian politicians, at home and abroad, curse "the criminal negligence of the Government," [4] beat the air with words, spurn agriculture and the agriculturalist, and, when publicity dictates, send small contributions to the other kind of gaushala.

[4. Young India, May 13, 1926, p. 174.]

CHAPTER XXI - HOME OF STARK WANT

One hears a great deal from the new Indian intelligentsia about the glories of the "Golden Age"--a period in the shadowy past when the land smiled with health and plenty, wisdom, beauty and peace and when all went well with India. This happy natural condition was done to death, one is given to understand, by the mephitic influence of the present Government.

The argument for the Golden Age is wont to take typical forms, such as this:

"You admit that the Emperor Chandragupta lived? And that he was the man who fought Seleucus, who fought Alexander? Very well: In Chandragupta's day a girl of fourteen, beautiful and loaded with jewels, could walk abroad in perfect safety. And there was perfect peace, no poverty, no famine, no plague. But Britain ruined our Golden Age."

Or again, the accuser first paints a picture of an idyllic land, distinguished by science, philosophy and pastoral grace, then suddenly confronts his hearer with the challenge: "Can you show me, in all India, any remnant of that life? No? Exactly. Then, if it exists nowhere, does it not follow that Britain must have destroyed it?"

But the period of Chandragupta, whatever its quality, was removed from that of England's first acquisition of foothold in India by over nineteen hundred years.[1] Chandragupta's dynasty having disappeared into mists of legend out of which the one great figure of Asoka dimly looms, the Scythians and the Turks rode through the northern mountain passes, helped themselves to northern India and set up their kingdoms there. And the native Hindu mass, as years rolled by, merged its conquerors, both Scythian and Turk, into its own body.

[1. Chandragupta reigned B.C. 322-298.]

The fourth and fifth centuries, A.D., comprised the great period of Hindu art and history--the age of the Gupta Kings. Then again the hand grew lax that held the northern passes; and again down out of Central Asia poured wave after wave of wild humanity, this time the terrible nomad White Huns, brothers to the forces of Attila. Ravenous for the wealth of the land, they had watched the frontier for their hour. When it struck, leaping through like a loosened torrent, they swept the country bare of all that had been its socia] fabric.

By the beginning of the sixth century the northern half of the territory we call India had become one of the provinces of the Huns. And the impact of successive Hun hordes, striking down through the mountain barrier, had again so thoroughly wiped out the past that no authentic family or clan tradition of today can go behind that point.

The Huns, like the Scythians and the Turks before them, were gradually absorbed in the native stock. Hinduism, for a time disputed by Buddhism, regained possession of the land. Its disintegrating tenets and its cumulative millions of terrifying gods did their work. Henceforth, save during a few years in the seventh century, no successful attempt was made, north or south, to establish political unity or a permanent state, while forces of disunion multiplied and grew strong.

The history of northern India from the middle of the seventh century through the next five hundred years is a tangled web of the warfare of little clans and states, constantly changing in size and in number with the changing fortunes of battle and intrigue. Small chiefs march and countermarch, raid, seize, annex, destroy, slay and are slain, each jealous of each, each for himself alone, embroiling the entire northern and central part of the country in their constant feuds.

Meantime, peninsular India remained always a place apart, untouched by the currents of the north and defended therefrom by the buttress of her hills and jungles. Here lived the dark-skinned aboriginals, Tamils, without infusion of Aryan blood, fighting their own fights and worshiping the demons of their faith. And when at last Hindu missionaries sallied south along the coast, these recommended their creed, it would seem, by the familiar process of adding the local demons to the number of their own gods.

The Tamils had developed a rich native art; and in one at least of their many and ever-changing little kingdoms they had brought forth an elaborate and interesting system of village government. By the end of the twelfth century, however, this feature had utterly perished, crushed out. And it is well to observe that, north or south, a history made up of endless wars and changes of dynasty developed no municipal institutions, no free cities, no republics, no political consciousness in the people. Each region lay forever prostrate, supine, under the heel of a despot who in his brief hour did as he pleased with his human herds until some other despot pulled him down to destruction.

For a rapid survey of the next era in India's history one cannot do better than turn to Sir T. W. Holder-ness's Peoples and Problems of India:[2]

[2. Williams & Norgate, London, 1920, pp. 48-50.]

The first comers were Arabs, who founded dynasties in Sind and Multan as early as [A.D.] 800...About [the year] 1000 the terror came. By that time the Tartar races had been brought into the fold of Islam, and the Turks, the most capable of these races, had started on the career which in the West ended in their establishment at Constantinople...In 997, Mahmud [a Turkish chieftain] descended upon India. His title, "the Idol-breaker," describes the man. Year by year he swept over the plains of India, capturing cities and castles, throwing down idols and temples, slaughtering the heathen and proclaiming the faith of Muhammad. Each year he returned with vast spoils [to his home in Afghanistan].

For five hundred years, reckoning from A.D. 1000, successive hosts of fierce and greedy Turks, Afghans and Mongols trod upon one another's heels and fought for mastery in India. At the end of that time, Babar the Turk founded in 1526 the Mughal Empire; thenceforward for two hundred years the passes into India were closed and in the keeping of his capable successors.

Says Holderness on another page:[3]

[3. Peoples and Problems of India, p. 53.]

The Mughal Empire...was of the ordinary type of Asiatic despotisms. It was irresponsible personal government. For India it meant the substitution of a new set of conquerors for those already in occupation. But the new comers brought with them the vigour of the north--they came from the plains of the Oxus beyond the Kabul hills--and they drew an unlimited supply of recruits from the finest fighting races of Asia. In physical strength and hardihood they were like the Norsemen and Normans of Europe.

To check the Islamic tide in its flood toward the south, a Hindu power, known as the Empire of Vi-jayanagar, sprang up among the Tamils. Its rulers built a gorgeous city and lived in unbounded luxury. But here, as elsewhere all over India, the common people's misery provided the kings' and nobles' wealth, and only their abject submission made possible the existence of the state. Yet the glories of the Hindu stronghold soon eclipsed. In the year 1565 one blow of Muslim arms, delivered by the sultans of small surrounding states, slaughtered its people and reduced the splendid city to a heap of carven stones.

Yet the earlier of the great Mughal Emperors tolerated the old religion. Their chief exponent, Akbar, even married a native lady, and admitted Rajput chiefs and Brahman scholars to place and posts. But the Mug-hals administered always as conqueror strangers; and though they made use of the talents or learning of individuals among the Hindus, they took care constantly to strengthen the Muslim hand from their own trans-montane source.

Then, in 1659, the Emperor Aurangzeb again brought to the Mughal throne an Islamism that would not countenance the idolatry of the Hindu mass. His heavy hand, destroying temples and images, broke the Rajput's fealty and roused the Hindu low-caste peasantry of the Deccan--the Mahrattas--in common wrath. So that when Aurangzeb, in his ambition for more power, more wealth, attacked even the little Mu-hammadan kings of the Deccan, the Mahrattas rose up as guerilla bands, and, under cover of the general embroilment, robbed, slew and destroyed on their own account, wasting the land. A half-century of Aurang-zeb's disjointing rule so weakened the Mughal Empire that, at his death, it fell asunder, leaving the Mahratta hordes, now trained in raids and killings under their bandit chiefs, to play a brief rôle as the strong hand in India.

Then again happened the historic inevitable, as happen it will whenever the guard of the north is down. The Mughal Empire fallen, the door open to Central Asia, Central Asia poured in. First came the Persian, then the fierce Afghan, who, in a final battle delivered in 1761, drove the Mahrattas with wholesale slaughter back to their Deccan hills.

Now, in the scanty official records of all these troubled centuries, little indeed is said of the common people. The histories are histories of little kings and tribal chiefs, their personal lives, ambitions, riches, intrigues, fights and downfalls. Such glimpses as appear, however, show the populace generally as the unconsidered victims of their master's greed, be that master Hindu or Muhammadan. Hungry, naked, poverty-stricken, constantly overridden by undisciplined mobs of soldiers, bled of their scanty produce, swept by exterminating famines and epidemics, our clearest knowledge of them comes from the chronicles of strangers who from time to time visited the country.

Many western travelers--French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish--have left records of the country, north and south, as it was during and after Akbar's day. All agree in the main points.

The poor, they say, were everywhere desperately poor, the rich forever insecure in their riches. Between common robbers and the levies of the throne, no man dared count on the morrow. The Hindu peoples constituted the prostrate masses. The nobles and governing officials, few in numbers, were almost all foreigners, whether Turks or Persians. Their luxury and ostentation arose, on the one hand, from an insatiable hunger for sensual pleasure, and, on the other, from the necessity not to be outshone at court. All places and favors were bought by costly bribes, and the extravagance of life was increased by the fact that, in northern India at least, whatever a rich man possessed at the time of his death reverted to the royal treasury.

To acquire means to keep up their gorgeous state the officials, from the pro-consuls down, had but one method--to squeeze the peasantry. They squeezed.

In Madras, wrote van Linschoten, who saw the country in the decade between 1580 to 1590, the peasants [4]

[4. The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies, edited for the Hakluyt Society, 1884.]

...are so miserable that for a penny they would endure to be whipped, and they eat so little that it seemeth they live by the air; they are likewise most of them small and weak of limbs.

When the rains failed, they fell into still deeper distress, wandered like wild animals in vain search of food and sold their children for "less than a rupee apiece," while the slave-market was abundantly recruited from those who sold their own bodies to escape starvation, of which cannibalism, an ordinary feature of famine, was the alternative.

The Bádsháh Námah of 'Abd Ai Hamïd Láhawri bears witness that in the Deccan during the famine of 1631, "pounded bones of the dead were mixed with flour and sold...Destitution at length reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love. The number of the dying caused obstruction in the roads." The Dutch East India Company's representative, in the same year, recorded that in Surat the dearth was so great that "menschen en vee van honger sturven...moeders tegen natuer haere kinderkens wt hongers-noot op gegeten hebben." Two years later Christopher Read reported to the British East India Company that Mesulapatam and Armagon were "sorely oppressed with famine, the liveinge eating up the dead and men durst scarcely travel in the country for feare they should be kild and eaten." And Peter Mundy wrote from Gujerat during the same period that "the famine it selfe swept away more than a million of the Comon or poorer Sort. After which, the mortallitie succeeding did as much more among rich and poore. Weomen were scene to rost their Children...A man or woman noe sooner dead but they were Cutt in pieces to be eaten." These testimonies will be found, and at greater length, in the text and Appendix of the Hakluyt Society's edition of the Travels of Peter Mundy, Other old chronicles corroborate them.

Slaves cost practically nothing to keep and were therefore numerous in each noble's household, where their little value insured their wretched state. The elephants of the nobles wore trappings of silver and gold, while "the people," says the contemporaneous observer, de Laet,[5] "have not sufficient covering to keep warm in winter."

[5. De Imperio Magni Mogolis, J. de Laet, Leyden, 1631.]

Merchants, if prosperous, dared not live comfortably, dared not eat good food, and buried their silver deep under ground; for the smallest show of means brought the torturers to wring from them the hiding-place of their wealth.

The village masses constituted practically the only productive element in the land. All their production, save their bare subsistence, was absorbed by the State. As to its redistribution, that took a single route, into the pockets of the extremely small body of foreigners constituting the ruling class. None of it returned to the people. No communal benefits existed.

A very few bridges and such roads as are made by the plodding of bullocks' feet through dust and mud comprised the communication lines of the land. No system of popular education or of medical relief wa? worked, and none of legal defense. Fine schemes were sometimes set on paper by rulers and their ministers, but practically nothing was actually done toward the economic development of the country; for if any one ruler began a work, his successor destroyed it or let it decay.[6]

[6. India at the Death of Akbar, by W. H. Moreland, Macmillan & Co., London, 1920, gives an elaborate and heavily documented digest of contemporaneous authority on this general subject.]

Fifteen years after the death of Akbar, or in the year 1620, the Hollander, Francisco Pelsaert, began that seven years' residence in India of which he left so valuable and so curious a record. In the course of his narrative Pelsaert writes:[7]

[7. The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, translated from the Dutch by W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl Heffers, Cambridge, 1925, pp. 47-59.]

The land would give a plentiful, or even an extraordinary yield, if the peasants were not so cruelly and pitilessly oppressed; for villages which, owing to some small shortage of produce, are unable to pay the full amount of the revenue-farm, are made prize, so to speak, by their masters or governors, and wives and children sold on pretext of a charge of rebellion. Some peasants abscond to escape their tyranny...and consequently the fields lie empty and unsown and grow into wildernesses.

...As regards the laws, they are scarcely observed at all, for the administration is absolutely autocratic...Their laws contain such provisions as hand for hand, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; but who will ex-communicate the Pope? And who would dare to ask a Governor "Why do you rule us this way or that? Our Law orders thus."...In every city there is a...royal court of Justice...[but] one must indeed be sorry for the man who has to come to judgment before these godless "un-judges"; their eyes are bleared with greed, their mouths gape like wolves for covetousness, and their bellies hunger for the bread of the poor; every one stands with hands open to receive, for no mercy or compassion can be had except on payment of cash. This fault should not be attributed to judges or officers alone, for the evil is a universal plague; from the least to the greatest, right up to the King himself, every one is infected with insatiable greed.

...It is important to recognise that [the King, Jahangir] is to be regarded as king of the plains or the open roads only; for in many places you can travel only with a strong body of men, or on payment of heavy tolls to rebels...[and] there are nearly as many rebels as subjects. Taking the chief cities, for example, at Surat the forces of Raja Piepel come pillaging up to, or inside the city, murdering the people and burning: the villages, and in the same way, near Ahmedabad, Burhanpur, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and many other cities, thieves and robbers come in force by night or day like open enemies. The Governors are usually bribed by the thieves to remain inactive, for avarice dominates manly honour, and, instead of maintaining troops, they fill and adorn their mahals with beautiful women, and seem to have the pleasure-house of the whole world within their walls.

The observant Dutchman[8] repeatedly dwells on the disastrous contrast between

the manner of life of the rich in their great superfluity and absolute power, and the utter subjection and poverty of the common people--poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted...only as the home of stark want and the dwelling-place of bitter woe.

[8. The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, p. 60.]

Nevertheless, he says, having discovered the numbing influence of the doctrines of fate and caste:[9]

[9. Ibid.]

The people endure patiently, professing that they do not deserve anything better; and scarcely any one will make an effort, for a ladder by which to climb higher is hard to find, because a workman's children can follow no occupation other than that of their father, nor can they inter-marry with other castes...For the workman there are two scourges, the first of which is low wages...The second is [the oppression by] the Governor, the nobles, the Diwan...and other royal officers. If any of these wants a workman, the man is not asked if he is willing to come, but is seized in the house or in the street, well beaten if he should dare to raise any objection, and in the evening paid half his wages or nothing at all.

Forty years after Pelsaert's departure from India came a French traveler, François Bernier. His stay covered the period from 1656 to 1668. His chronicle perfectly agrees with that of other foreign visitors, and gives a vivid picture of men, women and things as he found them in the reigns of Shahjahan and Aurangzeb--the climax of the Mughal Empire. Speaking on the subject of land-tenure and taxation, this observer writes:[10]

[10. Travels in the Mogul Empire, François Bernier, Oxford University Press, 1916, p. 224.]

The King, as proprietor of the land, makes over a certain quantity to military men, as an equivalent for their pay...Similar grants are made to governors, in lieu of their salary, and also for the support of their troops, on condition that they pay a certain sum annually to the King...The lands not so granted are retained by the King as the peculiar domains of his house...and upon these domains he keeps contractors, who are also bound to pay him an annual rent.

Bengal, he thinks probably "the finest and most fruitful country in the world." But of the other regions he writes:[11]

[11. Ibid., pp. 226-7, 230.]

As the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion, and as no person is found willing and able to repair the ditches and canals for the conveyance of water, it happens that the whole country is badly cultivated, and a great part rendered unproductive from the want of irrigation»...The peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: "Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and value?"...The Governors and revenue contractors, on their part reason in this manner: "Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness in our minds? and why should we expend our own money and time to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment and our exertion would benefit neither ourselves nor our children. Let us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the peasant should starve or abscond, and we should leave it, when commanded to quit, a dreary wilderness."...It is owing to this miserable system of government...that there is no city or town which, if it be not already ruined and deserted, does not bear evident marks of approaching decay.

The country is ruined by the necessity of defraying the enormous charges required to maintain the splendour of a numerous court, and to pay a large army maintained for the purpose of keeping the people in subjection.

Now, to touch as briefly as possible on the history of European powers in India: At the time of Akbar's accession--1556--the Portuguese were already rooted and fortified on the western coast of the Peninsula, at Goa, which, with its environing territory, they had taken from the Muhammadan kinglets of the Deccan. Thence they controlled the merchant traffic of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. No other European power had yet secured a base in the land, and no Englishman had yet set foot on the soil of India.[12]

The Portuguese hand in India soon weakened, on lines of debauchery and cruelty. Thus came the decay that, in the early sixteen hundreds, let fall all the Portuguese settlements, save only Goa itself, into the hands of the Dutch.

Dutch and English merchants, at that period, were equally keen for the trade of the East. The Dutchmen's main interest, however, lying with Java and the Spice Islands, their English rivals soon stood in India practically alone.

British merchant adventurers, by charter and concessions granted by Queen Elizabeth and by the Mug-hal Emperor, now from time to time established trading stations along the West coast. Their post in the Bay of Bengal antedated by five years the settlement of Boston by the Puritans. Nine years later the first English proprietary holding in India was secured, by agreement between the local Hindu ruler and the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading with the East Indies." By this treaty the latter were allowed to rent and fortify as a trading post a bit of rough shoreland now the site of the city of Madras. Here, presently, was to come Elihu Yale, once of Boston in Massachusetts, as Governor in the Company's behalf. Here was earned the means to benefit the Connecticut University that bears his name today. And here, in the old house where British Governors of Madras still dwell, hangs Elihu Yale's portrait, looking placidly out upon the scene of his labors.

French merchants, they also desirous of the trade of India, during the latter half of the seventeenth century secured several small points d'appui along the southern coasts. Their commerce never equaled that of the English; but their aspirations and the national clashes in Europe alike led them into a series of anti-English intrigues with small Indian rulers, resulting in hostilities of varying result. So that while the English colonists of New England and New York, with the aid of Indian allies, were fighting "French and Indian Wars" for control of the future, English colonists on the other side of the world, with the aid of Indian allies, were fighting French and Indian wars for the same purpose. And with a comparable outcome.[13]

[13. As Americans we may here draw our critics' shot by admitting that while we have done much to exterminate our Indians and only in 1924 granted them citizenship though retaining guardianship over them (United States v. Nice, 241 U. S. 598, 1916), our British cousins have multiplied theirs, and have led them into a large and increasing measure of self-government.]

The struggle which began, openly, in 1746, when the French took Madras, came to its close in 1761, when the French unconditionally surrendered Pondi-cherry, their own headquarters, thus ending their effective career in India.

Until well into the eighteenth century, English holdings in India were limited to a few square miles in Madras, in the Island of Bombay, and at three or four other points; during this period the English representatives in India occupied themselves with trade alone, taking no hand in local wars or politics. But with the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb, the collapse of the Mughal Empire, and the chaos of freebooting wars that then broke over the land, the Company set up for the protection of its settlements a force of European troops, supplemented by Indian auxiliaries.

Thenceforward it grew toward the status of a governing corporation. In 1784 the British Government, by Act of Parliament, assumed a degree of control over the Company's procedure. With such authority behind it, the Company could enlarge its activities and proceed toward establishing peace in a country teeming with anarchy.

This meant reducing to order a host of robber gangs, of marauding chieftains, of captains of the old Mughai régime now out of a job and swarming like migrating bees looking for new kingdoms and new plunder. It also meant dissuading small reigning princes from their hereditary vocation of enlisting gangs of mercenaries and campaigning against their neighbors. And if these movements, which the princes themselves often requested, usually resulted in annexing more territory to the sphere of British influence or control, they also brought an increasing semblance of unity to the country.

Once the work of pacification was well in hand, began the attempt to build up civil institutions and public privileges and to introduce law, justice and order, a thousand years and more unknown in the land. The Company was still a trading company, with a trader's chief preoccupation. But it accepted the responsibility for the people's welfare implied in the authority it now held.

A human enterprise covering two centuries of human progress, the name of the East India Company was sometimes dimmed by mistaken judgment or by unfit agents. Some of these were overbearing, some tactless, some wavering, one or two were base and a few succumbed to the temptation to graft. Of their defects, however, not a little nonsense is spun.

The Company, on the whole, was honored in the quality of its officers. As time passed, a more sensitive public conscience at home made it increasingly alive to critical observation. Its affairs were reviewed by Parliament. And, with the general rise in world-standards, rose its standards of administration. Its inclusive achievement was courageous, arduous and essential towards the redemption of the country. Whatever its faults, it cleared and broke the ground for progress. And it lighted the first ray of hope that had ever dawned for the wretched masses of the Indian peoples.

The abolition of ancient indigenous horrors, such as the flourishing trade of the professional strangler tribes, the Thugs; the burning alive of widows; the burying alive of lepers, lie to the credit of the Company. And no briefest summary of the epoch-making elements of its concerns could be forgiven a failure to cite the gist of Section 87 of the Parliamentary Act of 1784, which reads:

No native of the said territories, nor any natural-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office or employment under the Company.

A bomb, indeed, to drop into caste-fettered, feud-filled, tyrant-crushed India! Nor was this shock of free western ideas without its definitely unsettling influence. The Sikh Rebellion in 1845, the Indian Mutiny in 1857, were in no small degree direct fruits of that influence. And with the conclusion of the latter England felt that the time had come to do away with the awkward Company-Parliament form of government, to end the control of a great territory by commercial interest, however safeguarded, and to bring the administration of India directly under the Crown.

In the year 1858 this step was taken. Shabby, threadbare, sick and poor, old Mother India stood at last on the brink of another world and turned blind eyes toward the strange new flag above her head. It carried then, as it carries today, a pledge that is, to her, incredible. How can she, the victim and slave of all recorded time, either hope or believe that her latest master brings her the gift of constructive service, democracy and the weal of the common people?

CHAPTER XXII - THE REFORMS

The roots of the form of government now gradually working out in British India ramify into past centuries and are visible through continuous growth. For the purpose of this book they may be passed over, to reach the briefest outline of the present evolutionary phase.

The supreme power over India, today, is the people of Great Britain represented by the British Crown and Parliament, acting through the Secretary of State in Council of India, sitting in India Office, in London. The supreme government in India is that of the Gov-ernor-General-in-Council, commonly called the Government of India. The Governor-General, or Viceroy, is appointed by the Crown. His Council, similarly appointed, consists of seven Departmental heads--the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, the Home Member, the Finance Member, the Member for Railways and Commerce, and the Members for Education, Health and Lands, for Industries and Labor, and for Law. Of this cabinet of seven members the three last named are Indians.

Next in the structure of the Central Government comes the "Indian Legislature," with its Upper Chamber or "Council of State," and its Lower Chamber or "Legislative Assembly."

The Council of State comprises sixty members, of whom thirty-four are elected, while twenty-six, of whom not over twenty may be government officials, are nominated by the Viceroy.

The Legislative Assembly consists of one hundred and forty-four members, of whom one hundred and three are elected. Of the remaining forty-one, all nominated by the Viceroy, twenty-six must be members of Government, while the rest are named to represent the minor interests in the country, as, the Christian Indian population, etc. Both chambers are heavily Indian, and both are constituted with a view to due representation of the several provinces into which, for purposes of administration, the country is divided.

British India is thus divided into fifteen provinces, each with its separate administration. Of the nine major divisions--Madras, Bengal, and Bombay Presidencies, the United Provinces, the Punjab, Behar and Orissa, the Central Provinces, Burma, and Assam--each is controlled by a Governor with his Executive Council. These act in conjunction with a Provincial Legislative Council, a legislature of which 70 per cent, (in Burma, 60 per cent.) at least must be elected by the people.

The electorate is intended to give fairly balanced separate representation to the various races, communities and special interests. The scale varies from province to province, with varying local conditions. In Madras, for example, it stands as follows:

Number of Members Returned

Class of Constituency

Non-Muhammadans (meaning
Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, etc.) 65

Muhammadans                     13

Indian Christian                 5

Europeans (including British)    1

Anglo-Indian                     1

Landholders [zemindars]          6

University                       1

Commerce Industry                6

The qualifications for voters also varies in the several provinces. In general, however, the franchise rests on a minimum property qualification. The law, thus far, has given the vote to some seven-and-a-half million persons[1] and has conferred upon all the major provinces the right to enfranchise their women.[2]

[1.The India Office, Sir Malcolm C. C. Seton, Putnam, London, 1926, p. 59.]

[2. See Appendix II.]

The effort to decentralize--to magnify the responsibilities of provincial governments for the purpose of training and stimulating Indians to handle their own affairs, stands out preeminent in the present scheme. In part and as applied to the nine major divisions, this makes of the provincial government a two-branched machine operated from the office of the Governor. The Governor and his Executive Council, all Crown appointees, form one branch. Council membership is commonly divided between British and Indians. The Governor and his Ministers of Departments form the second branch. These are appointed by the Governor from the elected members of the legislature and are themselves responsible to that body. All ministers are Indian. Between the two branches the various functions of government formerly handled by a single arm are now divided, under the heads of "reserved" and "transferred" subjects.

Reserved subjects, save for the ultimate power of the Central Government, lie in the hands of the Provincial Governor in Council. Transferred subjects are assigned to the provincial legislatures, and are operated by the Ministers.

The list of transferred subjects represents authority resigned by the British people in favor of the peoples of India. The intention of the plan is, if the experiment succeeds, to enlarge the list of subjects transferred. On the other hand, where the Ministerial machine fails to work, Governors-in-Council may resume control of a subject already transferred. Transferred subjects at present comprise Education, Public Health, Management of Public Works other than irrigation and railways, Development of Industries, Excise, Agriculture, Local Self-government and others. Reserved subjects include Maintenance of Law and Order, Defense of India, Finance, the Land Revenue system, etc.

Of the provincial legislatures, known as Legislative Councils, a recent authority[3] says:

[3. The India Office, pp. 59-60.]

The Councils have very wide powers of legislation and the annual provincial budgets are submitted to them. In Transferred subjects they possess the power of the purse, but the Governor may restore grants for purposes of the Reserved side of the administration if he considers it essential to the discharge of his responsibility that money refused by the Council should be provided. He can disallow an Act or reserve it for the Governor-General's consideration, and has the exceptional right to enact on his own authority a measure (provided that it deals with a Reserved subject only) the passage of which he certifies to be essential to the discharge of his responsibility. This special power has hitherto been exercised only once.

Turning from provincial legislatures to that of the Central Government, the same authority summarizes:[4]

[4. Ibid., pp. 60-2.]

The Indian legislature, subject to the preservation of the powers of Parliament, has power to make laws "for all persons, for all courts, and for all places and things, within British India," for British officials and subjects in Indian States, for "native Indian subjects of His Majesty" beyond British India, and for officers, soldiers and followers of the Indian Army wherever serving. But it requires the sanction of the Governor-General for the introduction of measures affecting the public debt or revenues, religion, military discipline, foreign relations, or for measures treating on matters relegated to provincial governments...

The power of the purse has been very largely entrusted to the Legislative Assembly...The annual budget is laid before both Chambers, and the consent of the Legislative Assembly is sought for the grants required on most matters, though certain heads of expenditure are classed as "non» valable."

The Viceroy and the Crown hold the power of veto; and the former may enact a bill into law, subject to disallowance by the Crown, without the consent of either Chamber. An emergency measure, such a step would be taken only in extreme cases.

It will scarcely be necessary, in this place, to go further into the machinery of the present government of British India.

Commonly known as "Dyarchy," or "The Reforms," it is in essence no new thing, but merely an accelerated unfolding of the original British theme whose motif is the drawing of Indians into responsible participation in Government. India's outburst of loyalty in the World War, her whole-hearted contribution of men and means from every province and state save Bengal, prompted a responsive flood of feeling in Britain and a desire to requite one demonstration of confidence and sympathy with another in kind. But Parliament was, in reality, only re-phrasing the original principle embodied in the Proclamation of Queen Victoria in 1858, was only pursuing the line of the Indian Councils Act of 1909, when, in the Preamble of the Act of 1919, the Act now functioning, it declared its policy[5]

[5. Cf. pp. 193-4 and 287, ante.]

...to provide for the increasing association of Indians in every branch of Indian Administration, and for the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the empire.

The scheme in its shape of today has not the stability of the slow-growing oak, root for branch, balanced and anchored. Rather, it is a hothouse exotic, weedy, a stranger in its soil, forced forward beyond its inherent strength by the heat of a generous and hasty emotion. An outsider sitting today through sessions of Indian legislatures, Central or Provincial, somehow comes to feel like one observing a roomful of small and rather mischievous children who by accident have got hold of a magnificent watch. They fight and scramble to thrust their fingers into it, to pull off a wheel or two, to play with the mainspring; to pick out the jewels. They have no apparent understanding of the worth of the mechanism, still less of the value of time. And when the teacher tries to explain to them how to wind their toy up, they shriek and grimace in fretful impatience and stuff their butterscotch into the works.

As to the relation of these people to their supposed job, its most conspicuous quality, today, is its artificiality. Adepts in the phraseology of democratic representation, they are, in fact, profoundly innocent of the thought behind the phrase. Despotisms induce no growth of civic spirit, and the peoples of India, up to the coming of Britain, had known no rule but that of despots. Britain, by her educational effort, has gradually raised up an element before unknown in India--a middle class. But this middle class--these lawyers and professional men--are in the main as much dominated today as were their ancestors five hundred years ago by the law of caste and of transmigration--com-pletest denial of democracy. They talk of "the people" simply because the word bulks large in the vocabulary of that western-born representative government which they now essay.

A village headman knows and feels infinitely more than do these elected "representatives" as to the duties and responsibilities of government. An Indian prince has the inherited habit of ruling, and, whatever his failings, whatever his purpose, keeps his people somewhere in mind. And an American unconscious of his own civic debt to his spiritual or blood-lineal ancestors, from Plymouth Rock to Runnymede, may be brought to a wholesome state of humility by a few days' watching of the anchorless legislators of India.

Off and on, during the winter session of 1926, in Delhi, I listened to Assembly debates. Hour after hour, day after day, the Swarajist bench spent their energies in sterile, obstructionist tactics, while for the most part the rest of the House sat apathetic save for an occasional expression of weary contempt from some plain fighting man out of the north. Little or nothing constructive emanated from party benches. The simplest piece of essential legislation proposed by Government evoked from the Swarajist orators fantastic interpretations as to sinister intent. The gravest concerns elicited from them only a bedlam of frivolous and abusive chatter. "We do not trust you," they would repeat in effect; "we know your motives are bad." "We believe nothing good of your thrice-damned alien government." And, coming down to specific arraignments, they could solemnly produce such theories as that the Supreme Court of the United States obeys, in its decisions, the will of the British Crown.[6]

[6. Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. VII, p. 278.]

Patient, unruffled, always courteous, the Government members answered back. Not once was there a sign of irritation or annoyance or fatigue, much less of despair of the situation thrust upon them.

One day I took up this subject with one of the most notable members of the Assembly, an Indian of superior abilities, whose dislike of Britain is probably as sincere as that of any of those who attack her on this floor.

"Your fellow-legislators of the opposition make terrible accusations against the good faith of Government," I said. "They impugn its honesty; they accuse it of trying to set Hindus and Muhammadans by the ears, on the principle of 'divide and rule'; they allege that it tramples Indian interests under foot, that it treats Indians themselves with disrespect, and that it sucks or cripples the resources of the country for its own selfish interests."

"Yes," he replied, "they say all that, and more."

"Do they mean it?" I asked.

"How could they?" he replied. "Not a man in the House believes anything of the sort."

To an American having America's Philippine experience fresh in mind, this repetition of history was infinitely saddening. One remembered the words of the King-Emperor's Message to the Indian Legislature and Councils at the opening of the first Sessions held under the Reforms Act:

On you, the first representatives of the people on the new Councils, there rests a very special responsibility. For on you it lies, by the conduct of your business and the justice of your judgment to convince the world of the wisdom of this great constitutional change. But on you it also lies to remember the many millions of your fellow-countrymen who are not yet qualified for a share in political life, to work for their uplift-ment and to cherish their interests as your own.

What meaning had such language in the ears of those to whom it was addressed? What relation did they feel, between themselves and poor old Mother India? What duty toward their own cause, to exhibit capacity and thereby to command further concessions?

The history of British administration of India shows that reactionary disorders follow attempts at speeded progress. The East resents being hustled, even in reforms. It was perhaps specially unfortunate for "Dyarchy" that its birthday should fall in the season of Mr. Gandhi's ill-starred adventure into politics, when he could turn upon it the full fire of his non-cooperative guns. His influence in Bengal and the Central Provinces was enough at the time to stop the experiment completely, and although that influence has now everywhere lapsed into negligibility as a political factor, its crippling and embittering after-effects still drag upon the wheels of progress.

Without presuming to offer a criticism of the Reforms Act, it would seem that its chief obstacle lies deeper in the roots of things than any enmity can reach. The whole structure of the Reforms is planned to rest on the foundation of a general electorate which, through its directly elected legislators, controls in each province the Ministers who handle the people's affairs. And the difficulty is that while the structure hangs waiting in midair, the foundation designed to sustain it yet lingers in the blue-print stage--does not in fact exist. India has no electorate, in any workable sense of the word, nor can have on the present basis for many generations to come. And of this statement the natural complement is also true: India's elected representatives are as yet profoundly unaware of the nature of the duties incumbent upon their office.

Reasons for the non-existence of an electorate will have been gathered in the foregoing pages of this book. One of the chief among them is, that while less than 8 per cent, of the peoples can read at all, that literate fraction is concentrated almost entirely in the large towns and cities, leaving the great masses spread over the great spaces of the land, unreached and un-reachable by the printed word.

This illiterate peasantry, these illiterate landholders, have no access to and no interest in the political game, nor in any horizon beyond that which daily meets their physical eyes. The town politician, the legislator actual or aspirant, rarely comes near them unless it be at election time or, as in the period of the "non-violence" agitations, to stir them with some report of evil to rise in blind revolt. When, recently, Swarajist members of the legislative councils decided to try to block the wheels of government by walking out, not one of them, as far as I was able to learn, took the previous step of consulting his constituents. The constituency is as yet too gauzy a figment, too abstract a theory, too non-oriental a conception, to figure as an influence in their minds.

No one who has studied the course of events in the Central and Provincial governments during the last six years can escape the conclusion that the British government officials charged with administering the new law have striven with honesty, sincerity and devotion, to make it a success. They work against great difficulties, straining their faith and power and patience to bridge wide voids of experience and development. Their success sometimes seems dim and slight. But one of the finest executives of them all used, in my hearing, these words:

"I would ask only this: 'Leave us alone. Don't always be resurveying, reinvestigating, pulling up the plant to look at its root. Each year that we get through is a gain, one year more of peace for the people, of public works protected and advanced, of justice given. The longer we can go on, now, without any great storm, the better the chance of Councils and Ministers discovering that when we oppose them it is in obedience to our conception of a law higher than that of personal ambition or clan advantage.'"

In the last clause of the paragraph just quoted lies half hidden one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way to sympathy and just judgment between India and the West. To us it seems radically obvious that personal advantage and nepotism, as motives of the acts of public officials, can but mean, the world over, shame and disgrace. Therefore the suggestion that Indians find difficulty in sharing that view carries, to our ears, the taint of moral snobbery; and so we search our own minds for other explanations of certain phenomena that follow India's autonomization of Government.

But we should be fairer to the Indian as well as wiser ourselves if we looked in his mind, rather than in ours, for light on causes. Then we should see that no white man in office ever labors under such a handicap as does the average Indian official, or ever is so largely foredoomed to defeat, in effort toward disinterested public service.

With the Hindu comes, first, the ancient religious law of the family-clan; because of this system the public office-holder who fails to feather the nest of his kin will be branded by all his world not only a fool but a renegade, and will find neither peace at home nor honor abroad. No public opinion sustains him.

Second, beyond the family line comes the circle of caste. The Hindu office-holder who should forget his caste's interests for interests lying outside that circle would bring down upon his head the opprobrium, perhaps the discipline, of his orthodox fellow caste men. And this, be it remembered, means not only temporal discomfort, but also dire penalties inflicted upon his soul, determining the miseries of future incarnations.

Third, the political struggle between Hindu and Muslim, as will be seen in later chapters, brings tremendous pressure to bear upon the official from either camp, practically compelling him to dispense such patronage as he enjoys among his co-religionists only.

With these points in mind, one views with more charity and understanding the breakdown of allegiance to western ideals that generally occurs in even the staunchest of Indian public officials when the British superior officer who has backed him through thick and thin in free work for general good, is replaced by an Indian, himself subject to the ancient code.

It is stiff work to maintain, alone and accursed, an alien standard among one's own people.

Yet with all its increased expense and diminished efficiency, the new constitution is, somehow, turning the wheels. Taking the shorter view, it has improved the position of Indians in the services. It has opened to them the height of office along many lines. It has made Government more directly responsive to the sentiment of vocal India, to such an extent indeed that the onlooker is tempted to wonder whether Government's sense of proportion is not impaired, whether it has not been nervously stifling its conscience to save its ears, whether it is not paying more attention to the spoiled baby's shrieks for the matches than it is to the vital concerns of its whole big, dumb, helpless and infinitely needy family.

A "hard-headed American" long resident in India, himself a person of excellent standing, told me this incident:

One of the principal Swaraj politicians had just delivered himself of a ferocious public diatribe against the Viceroy.

"Now tell me, Pundit," said the American, privately, "how can you shout like that in view of the fact that only a few weeks ago this very Vicero) went far out of his way to be courteous and accommodating to you and to get you what you wanted?"

"How can I shout like that?" laughed the Indian. "Why shouldn't I shout? Of course I shout, when every time I shout he gives me something."

Thus in taking information from the Indian, at home or abroad, a vital preliminary step is to appreciate and keep always in mind the definition and value that he assigns to "truth."

The Indian may be a devoted "seeker after truth" in the sense of metaphysical speculation; he may be of a splendid candor in dealing with most parts of most subjects of which you speak together. And yet he may from time to time embed in the midst of his frank speech statements easily susceptible of proof and totally at variance with the facts.

Having repeatedly come across this trait, I took it up for examination with a distinguished Bengali, one of the most broad-minded of Indian public men. Said he:

"Our Mahabharata preaches truth above all. If we have deviated it is because of the adverse circumstances under which we long lived. If we lie it is because we are afraid to face the consequences."

Then I laid it before a great mystic, spiritual teacher of multitudes, who had favored me with a classic and noble metaphysical discourse. His reply was:

"What is truth? Right and wrong are relative terms. You have a certain standard; if things help you, you call them good. It is not a lie to say that which is necessary to produce good. I do not distinguish virtues. Everything is good. Nothing is in itself bad. Not acts, but motives, count."

Finally, I carried the matter to a European long resident in India, and of great sympathy with the Indian mind.

"Why," I asked, "do men of high position make false statements, and then name in support documents which, when I dig them out, either fail to touch the subject at all or else prove the statement to be false?"

"Because," he replied, "to the Hindu nothing is false that he wants to believe. Or, all materiality being nothingness, all statements concerning it are lies. Therefore he may blamelessly choose the lie that serves his purpose. Also, when he presents to you the picture that it suits him to offer, it never occurs to him that you might go to the pains of checking up his words at the source."

In the same line, a well-informed New York journalist, in the winter of 1926-27, asked certain Indians who had been publicly talking in the city: "Why do you make such egregiously false allegations about conditions in India?"

"Because," said one of them, speaking for the rest, "you Americans know nothing of India. And your missionaries, when they come back for more money, tell too much truth, and hurt our pride. So we have tc tell lies, to balance up."

As his metaphysics work out, it is no shame to a Hindu to be "caught in a lie." You do not embarrass or annoy him by so catching him. His morality is no more involved in the matter than in a move in a game of chess.

Now, in the name of fair play, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that this characteristic, this point of view, this different evaluation, constitutes not necessarily an inferiority, but certainly a difference, like the color of the skin. Yet as a difference involved in the heart of human intercourse, it must constantly be reckoned with and understood; else that intercourse will often and needlessly crash. [305]

CHAPTER XXIII - PRINCES OF INDIA

Thus far we have been dealing mainly with British India, as distinct from the Indian Empire composed of British India and the Indian States. Of the total area of the Indian Empire -- 1,805,332 square miles -- 39%, belongs to the Indian States. Of the total population of the Empire -- 318,942,480 -- the Indian States hold 23%, or about 72,000,000 persons [as of 1924]. Individually, the states vary in size from properties of twenty square miles or less to a domain as large as Italy. Each is governed by its own prince, or, if the prince be a minor, by his regent or administrator. Some of the ruling houses are Hindu, some Muhammadan, some Sikh, or, in accordance with their history.

The territorial integrity, as well as the sovereign rights of the princes within their territories, was made the subject of special pledge in Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1858 on assumption of the Paramount Power. Laying down the principle that Britain not only desired no extension of territory for herself, but would permit no aggression from any quarter upon the domains of the Indian States, the Queen added:

We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of the Native Princes as our own; and we desire that they, as well as our own subjects, should enjoy that prosperity and that social advancement which can only be secured by internal peace and good government.

The relation between the British Government and the ruling chiefs is a treaty relation, not that of conqueror and conquered. It leaves the princes free to determine their own types of government, to levy their own taxes, and to wield the power of life and death within their territories. The basis of the relation, on the part of Britain, is (a) non-interference in the states' internal affairs, excepting in cases of grave need, while exercising such progressive influence as may be tactfully possible; and (b) the safeguarding of the interests of the country as a whole, in matters of an Imperial character. Foreign relations and negotiations between state and state, must, however, be conducted through the Paramount Power. A British political officer, called Resident, is stationed in each of the larger states, to advise the Ruling Chief. The small states, by groups similarly, have their British advisers, members of the political branch of the Viceregal Government.

Once a year the Chamber of Princes, under the chairmanship of the Viceroy, convenes at Delhi for discussion of common policies. This assembly is a brilliant, stately and dignified function. And if, in ordinary times, no great weight of business confronts it, owing to the self-contained nature of the elements represented, its convocation nevertheless serves a wise purpose. For it tends, through personal acquaintance under favorable auspices, to harmonize relations between the ruling houses, while affording a medium for rapid common action in case of need. Nevertheless to this meeting two or three of the greatest of the princes have never yet been persuaded to come, on the ground, it is said, that occasions would arise on which for mechanical reasons some one of their number must cede precedence.

In visiting Indian States it is extremely difficult to arrive at an idea of the actual nature of the administration. One is the guest of the prince, enjoying a lavish hospitality. Like any private host, the prince is showing off the estate, exhibiting those parts that are, to him, most noteworthy. From ancient palaces to modern improvements, there is much of great beauty and interest to occupy one's eyes. And one scarcely demands of one's host, East or West: "Now, where are the defects of the picture?"

Nevertheless, it is definitely visible that several states are well-governed, that most are fairly governed, including some that are backward, and that a few are governed badly. These last exhibit the famous "Golden Age," preserved like a fly in amber. Their court life and the life of the people are sections from the unexpurgated Arabian Nights. On the one side strange outbreaks of rage, jealousy, violence, the sudden and final disappearance over night of a favorite minister, lurid punishments and poisonings, and the endless mortal intrigues of the zenana. On the other side a populace too lifeless even to complain of the burden that crushes it.

The old normal relation of the prince to the people was the relation of a huge-topped plant to a poor, exhausted, over-taxed root. He squeezed his people dry, giving little or nothing in return. And under such a prince, unless he be too outrageous, the people may today be fairly content. For their whole historic experience tells them little or nothing of a possible other mode of existence. And they dearly love the parade, the great ceremonies and brilliant spectacles of birthdays, marriages and religious fêtes, that their princes so regularly provide but which, because of the tax burdens involved, are rarely afforded under British rule.

On the whole, however, it is obvious that the tendency of state government is to level up. This is largely due to the growing ambition of the chiefs for the condition of their properties. Or again, progress is effected when the removal of an unfit ruler leaves the administration of the state in the hands of the Resident, with, it may be, a regent, during the minority of the heir. A measure of comparison is thereby established, favoring the birth of active discontent if a retrograde government follows and tending gradually to force up its quality from below.

As a particular instance, one may cite the case of a certain prince whose minority lasted twenty years. During this period the British Resident administered the state, and, for the first time in its history, its revenues went to the service of the people. Good roads and bridges were built, schools were opened, a modern hospital was established and endowed with a competent staff; order was secured; trade and manufactures were fostered; the exchequer made solvent, the reserve funds built up, justice was put within the reach of all. And, all the years of this pleasant novelty, the people sighed for the day when their prince, not only dearly beloved but also ritualistically half-divine in their eyes, should come home and rule over them as his fathers had done over their fathers.

The day dawned. The boy took over. The wives and the concubines, the court officials, the dancing girls and the ambitious relatives at once laid hold on him, plying him with every soft temptation that could dissolve his energy and will-power, sap his manhood and make him easy to control. In three years' time he had ruined the work of the preceding twenty. The treasury reserves were gone. Taxes shot up. Public services went flat. The excellent doctor, who cost $500 a month, had been replaced by a sixteen-dollar dealer in charms and potions. The competent hospital staff was replaced by useless hangers-on. The hospital itself had turned into a kennel; and so on, through the departments, shab-biness and decay overwhelming them all. No justice was to be had and no appeal could be taken against bought decisions, for there was none who cared to hear, except at a price. Graft did everything, and the people were bled to provide money for their young ruler's extravagances and vices.

At last they came to their old friend, the Resident, pleading:

"We did long to have him come to live among us and rule over us. But we knew not how it would be. We can bear no more. Let the Sahib return and give us peace and justice and the good life we had before."

The people had begun to think.

Scandalous tales are told of the cruelties and monstrous deeds of certain princes, and a measure of ground work probably underlies many such tales. But none of them can be accepted without specific proof, for the reason that the Indian anti-government press seizes upon every suggestion of such material, spreading it broadcast, elaborated and magnified without regard to facts. It provides a text to attack Government for laxness in permitting such things to be; although where Government intervenes the same elements are often quick to raise the cry of "alien despot."

The boy born to the throne comes into the world with a fearful handicap. All want his favor, and the ancient highroad thereto is the ministration to unbridled sensuality, arrogance and extravagance. But sometimes there is a strong and intelligent Queen-mother who defends her son. And sometimes the heir is sent to a public school in England; or, he may spend some years in one of the four Chiefs' Colleges in India, where, also, wholesome influences are brought to bear.

One of these influences is the give-and-take of life among his peers. In his home he has no equal within reach, and is, therefore, always with inferiors or elders. A second influence for good is the constant effort to rouse him from physical and mental sloth and to get him to work and to play active games, especially games such as tennis, which he can carry back to his home. Not the least factor that the school wields in his favor is the understanding friendship of the British headmaster, his appreciation of the boy's difficulties, present and to come, and his quiet instillation of that active ideal of princely pride which is the pride to serve.

In some cases the work of education seems completely lost in the boy's later life. But the development of character in others is definitely lifting the whole standard of government in the Indian States.

An outstanding example is that of the State of Mysore, a principality of size nearly equal to that of Scotland, with some six million inhabitants. The father of the present prince was carefully trained for his duties under British guidance. Acceding to a government which, during his minority, had been set in order by British supervision, he proceeded, with the aid of a good Dewan,[2] to administer well and faithfully to the interest of his people. Dying in 1894, he left a minor heir, so that again the state, in the hands of the Queen-regent, came under British guidance, while again a young prince went into training for coming responsibilities. In 1907 this prince was enthroned. Since that time he has given a high example of unselfish and intelligent devotion to his duties.

[2. Premier.]

A devout orthodox Hindu, his recent choice of a Muhammadan Persian, Mr. Mirza Ismail, C.I.E., O.B.E., as Dewan, may be taken as a proof of his single-eyed desire for the good of his state. The cit) of Mysore, with its wide, shaded avenues, its fine modern public buildings, its parks and gardens, and its floods of electric light, is a model town, clean and bright. A large technical college, a large University building with its separate library, an extensive hospital, are among the many conspicuous and handsome edifices. A big irrigation scheme is nearing completion. The state's rich mineral resources, its agriculture and its peasant industries and manufactures are being developed on progressive lines. Wages of both skilled and unskilled labor have doubled in late years. A system of bringing the people, through elected representatives, into periodic communication with the head of the state on the state's affairs, is in successful operation. And finally, to dismiss so pleasant a subject too briefly, two blots on the picture are being removed.

First; An Edict has gone forth that, as between two candidates for administrative office, the office shall go to the better qualified man rather than to the man of higher caste. And, second, the state's health record being too low, the prince, through his Dewan, has not stopped short of reaching for the best the world affords. He has asked the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation to help him make Mysore the cynosure of India.

The request, the second of its sort to come from any part of the Indian Empire, has been gladly honored. The outcome will be of extraordinary interest.
(The first request to the Rockefeller Foundation to advise a government in India came from that of the Madras Presidency. An officer of the Foundation is now stationed there.)
All of the princes keep armies, according to the needs of their domains. Thus the Nizam of Hyderabad, with his state of nearly 83,000 square miles maintains an army of about twenty thousand men, while the Maharaja of Datia, with but 911 square miles, commands a full company of Infantry and a battery of seven field guns. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, and transport corps compose the larger commands.

Here is a story, from the lips of one whose veracity has never, I believe, been questioned. The time was that stormy period in 1920 when the new Reforms Act was casting doubt over the land and giving rise to the persistent rumor that Britain was about to quit India. My informant, an American of long Indian experience, was visiting one of the most important of the princes--a man of great charm, cultivation and force, whose work for his state was of the first order. The prince's Dewan was also present, and the three gentlemen had been talking at ease, as became the old friends that they were.

"His Highness does not believe," said the Dewan, "that Britain is going to leave India. But still, under this new régime in England, they may be so ill-advised. So, His Highness is getting his troops in shape, accumulating munitions and coining silver. And if the English do go, three months afterward not a rupee or a Virgin will be left in all Bengal."

To this His Highness, sitting in his capital distant from Bengal by half the breadth of India, cordially agreed. His ancestors through the ages had been predatory Mahratta chiefs.

The Swarajists, it would appear, forget that, the moment government were placed in their hands, the princes would flash into the picture as powers in the land, severally to be reckoned with exactly as they were a century ago; and that the Indian Army, if it hung together at all, might be more likely to follow one of the outstanding princes rather than the commands of a Legislative Assembly composed of a type that India has never known or obeyed.

The Indian mind is cast in the mould of autocratic aristocracy. A natural war means a princely leader and unlimited loot. If His Highness above had set out for Bengal, the manpower of the countrysides, barring Britain's presence, would surely have romped after him.

But the princes know well that if Britain were to withdraw from India, they themselves, each for himself, would at once begin annexing territory; that all would be obliged to live under arms, each defending his own borders; and that the present-day politician would in the first onset finally disappear like a whiff of chaff before flame.

The princes, however, want no such issue. They frankly say that they enjoy the pax Britannica, which not only relieves them from the necessity of sustaining larger military establishments, but which gives them the enjoyment of public utilities, as railroads, good highroads, ports, markets, mail, and wires, while permitting them to develop their properties in peace. Their attitude during the War was wholly loyal, and they contributed munificently of money, men and goods to the Empire's cause. In a word, they are a company of high-spirited, militant aristocrats strongly interested that the British Crown shall remain suzerain in India, but absolutely refusing to carry their complaisance so far as to admit the Indian politician of the Reforms Government as an agent to their courts.

Their supreme contempt of that class is not un-mingled with distinct irritation that the Power to which they acknowledge fealty stoops to parley with what seems to them an impudent and ridiculous canaille.

"Our treaties are with the Crown of England," one of them said to me, with incisive calm. "The princes of India made no treaty with a Government that included Bengali babus. We shall never deal with this new lot of Jacks-in-office. While Britain stays, Britain will send us English gentlemen to speak for the King-Emperor, and all will be as it should be between friends. If Britain leaves, we, the princes, will know how to straighten out India, even as princes should."

Then I recall a little party given in Delhi by an Indian friend in order that I might privately hear the opinions of certain Home Rule politicians. Most of the guests were, like my host, Bengali Hindus belonging to the western-educated professional class. They had spoken at length on the coming expulsion of Britain from India and on the future in which they themselves would rule the land.

"And what," I asked, "is your plan for the princes?" "We shall wipe them out!" exclaimed one with conviction. And all the rest nodded assent.

PART III

PART V