CHAPTER X

Titanic features of India-Education in India-The Indian codes-Indian magnate in retirement-The mysterious chupatties-A wonderful telegram-Palmerston and Suez Canal-Average illness in a decade -Balaam Box-Astrologer and king-Horace and Milton-Disraeli in 1832--Puns in Shakespeare-Parricide in China-Thomas Atkins v. Lall Sing―Jackass purring-Zouaves and Spahis-Warfare with savage races.

If anybody wants to know of a book on India which, between the boards of a single moderate-sized volume, would tell him pretty nearly all he needs to know on that subject, and will moreover tell it in a very pleasant way, let him ask his bookseller for Sir John Strachey's work entitled India. I will not here enlarge on the many weighty political and economic questions embraced in that volume, but shall cite one or two facts illustrative of the magnitude of India, and the vast scale on which Indian things are constituted, a subject which the British intellect usually fails to grasp.

Take, for example, the Himalaya Mountains-the Himálaya, or abode of snow.' Sir John tells us that this vast region of mountains extends from east to west some two thousand miles; and that, from its southern to its northern margin, its average breadth is over five hundred miles. It would extend from England to the Caspian Sea. It covers a million of square miles, being an area equal to that of Great Britain, the German and Austrian empires, France, Spain, and European Turkey, all put together. He adds that the whole of the Bernese Alps might be deposited in a single Himalayan valley. In further

illustration of the subject, a writer in Blackwood's Magazine some time ago stated that while the largest of the Alpine glaciers, the Aletsch, is only some twenty miles long, the Biafo glacier in the Himalayas extends for sixty-four miles, a continuous mass of ice.

Till the year 1879, when it was abolished, there existed in India a material barrier erected in order to prevent the introduction of contraband salt into certain parts of the country. This barrier, which was called the Salt Customs Line, used to extend across India from a point north of Attock on the Indus to the banks of the Mahanuddee river on the borders of the Presidency of Madras, being a distance of 2500 miles. It was an actual fence of colossal proportions, consisting of an impenetrable congeries of thorny plants and prickly bushes, supplemented by masonry, and flanked by deep ditches, in so effectual a manner that it was impassable to man, beast, or vehicle. This titanic obstacle might fitly have been compared to the Great Wall of China. It would have extended from Moscow to Gibraltar. It was guarded by a preventive police force of twelve thousand armed men, who patrolled its vast length incessantly by day and night; and were lodged in no less than seventeen hundred block-houses erected at intervals throughout its course.

The mention of this stupendous barrier calls for a passing remark on that impost which from time to time excites so much passionate sympathy in philanthropic bosoms, but which, after all, is not such a hardship to the people of India as it is often supposed to be, and which, whether a hardship or not, is indispensable to the Indian Chancellor. I refer to the salt tax. At the time when Sir John Strachey wrote, it appears that this impost fell at the rate of about fivepence per annum per head of the population; a rate which even the poorest population is well able to bear; and it should always be remembered that it constitutes the only obligatory tax which is exacted from them, since the tax on intoxicating liquors it is in their power to avoid,

simply by not consuming such; and the so-called land tax is in fact not a tax at all, but is the rent of land.

Next, as to the proportions of the ancient literary monuments of India, it is sufficient to note that the great Sanscrit epic poem called the Mahabharat,' which was written before the time of Moses, is seven times as large as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey taken together, for while the Iliad contains only 15,693 lines, and the Odyssey 12,100 lines, the 'Mahabharat' contains no less than 220,000 verses, and it has in consequence been aptly called 'an epic ocean.' The other great Indian epic poem, the Ramayana,' is constructed on a similar enormous scale; but, as was remarked some years ago by a writer in the Quarterly Review, while the admiring scholars of Europe discovered in India vast epic poems, exquisite dramas and refined systems of jurisprudence and metaphysics, couched in the Sanscrit tongue, "itself one of the most marvellous products of the human intellect," they could nowhere find a single composition in the nature of history.

It is obvious that a society which could create and supply a demand for epic poetry on so grand a scale, for the drama in its most polished forms, and for a great mass of juridical and philosophic literature, must have been a society of advanced refinement and cultured leisure. It is mournful to reflect that all that condition of things disappeared many ages ago, submerged and obliterated by successive waves of invasion, and lengthened cycles of devastating war. Writing a few years ago, Sir Henry Sumner Maine estimated that in the 250,000,000 which may be assumed as the population of India, not 25,000 were then even educated at all, or only one in 10,000; and that of the 123,000,000 of women in the country, not so many as 500 could read or write. Doubtless these matters have improved considerably since that time, and are steadily, though slowly, on the mend; but it is certain that many generations must come

and go before the teeming masses of India's people will attain to even a moderate standard of educated intelligence.

But although education in India necessarily advances with what may be called geologic slowness, there are other boons which it is in the power of legislation to confer on the people of that country with instantaneous effect. One of these, and one of the most valuable that could be conceived, is a body of sound and luminous law, and Sir Henry Maine has assured us that "British India is now in possession of a set of codes which approach the highest standard of excellence which this species of legislation has reached; and that in form, intelligibility, and comprehensiveness, the Indian codes stand against all competition." On this subject we have also the testimony of the late Sir Fitzjames Stephen, than whom no higher authority can be imagined. His verdict is to the following effect:

"The Indian Penal Code is by far the best system of criminal law in the world. It may be described as the criminal law of England freed from all technicalities and superfluities, systematically arranged, and modified in some few particulars to suit the circumstances of British India. . . . It is practically impossible to misunderstand, and though it has been in force for more than twenty years, and is in daily use in every part of India by all sorts of courts, and among communities of every degree of civilisation, and has given rise to countless decisions, no obscurity or ambiguity worth speaking of has been discovered in it. . . . Since its enactment it has been substantially the only body of criminal law in force in India, though a few other statutes contain penal provisions on various special subjects. . . . It has been triumphantly successful. The rigorous administration of justice, of which it forms an essential part, has beaten down crime throughout the whole of India to such an extent that the greater part of that vast country would compare favourably, as far as the absence of crime goes, with any part of the United

Kingdom, except perhaps Ireland in quiet times and apart from political and agrarian offences. Besides this, it has met with another kind of success. Till I had been in India I could not have believed it to be possible that so extensive a body of law could be made so generally known to all whom it concerned, in its minutest details. I do not believe that any English lawyer or judge has anything like so accurate, and comprehensive, and distinct a knowledge of the criminal law of England as average Indian civilians have of the Penal Code; nor has all the ingenuity of commentators been able to introduce any serious difficulty into the subject. After twenty years' use it is still true that any one who wants to know what the criminal law of India is, has only to read the Penal Code with a common use of memory and attention."

As to the acumen and uprightness of the native judges of India, the Lord Chancellor stated in the House of Lords, in 1883, as the result of his experience of Indian cases appealed to the Privy Council, that in respect of integrity, of learning, of knowledge, of the soundness and satisfactory character of the judgments arrived at, the decisions of the native judges were quite as good as those of the judges in England.

It is commonly alleged that in India the great bulk of public employment is monopolised by British officials. But this is erroneous. Sir John Strachey tells us that, of the total number of civil employés in India, no less than ninety per cent. are natives of the country; though he admits that, for obvious and adequate reasons, the highest posts in the public service are filled by Europeans. At the time when he wrote, it seems that 765 high posts were held by British civil servants; while 2600 posts, also of a high character, but not usually so high as those held by British officials, and certainly exclusive of the highest, were held by natives.

It is curious to consider the august imperial position now held by the British in India, and to contrast it with the humble