THE ORIENTAL HERALD.

No. 67.-JULY, 1829.-VOL. 22.

DEFENCE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY-INDIAN REVENUEINDIAN JUSTICE-AND COLONIZATION.

We are glad to perceive that the seed we have sown is beginning to promise an abundant harvest. For a long period our duty has been somewhat monotonous, from the difficulty of rousing the advocates of that Monopoly against which our labours have been, for nearly six years directed, in England, into any thing like tangible opposition. These labours are now likely to become more varied as well as more vigorous, since we find the advocates of the 'existing system' have been, at length, induced to gird on their armour. Repose and silence were the two great bulwarks of the East India Company and its Chartered Monopoly. As long as any agitation of the question,' respecting the benefits or evils, arising from their continuance, could be postponed or prevented, so long was there food for hope to be sustained upon. But if this agitation' can only be effected so as to bring them fairly into the field, and to put them on their defence, however high or able their advocates, they are lost beyond all hope of redemption. That consummation, so devoutly to be wished,' appears then to be on the eve of being realized. The Directors of the East India Company themselves, made, it is true, but a very poor stand against their assailants in the late Debate in the House of Commons; but some friendly advocates have started up on their behalf in other quarters, and, actuated with that zeal which seems so becoming, when well-paid servants eulogize their honorable masters, they have sent no less than three pioneers into the field. The first has written an article in the East India Company's especially patronized and protected periodical, The Asiatic Journal,' published by the Company's booksellers in Leadenhall Street: the second has written a pamphlet under the attractive cognomen of Playfair;' and the third has put forth his production as one courting investigation, by giving his name and rank at length, as Mr. Thomas Campbell Robertson, of the Bengal Civil Service.*

The intention of all these writers, is to refute the arguments which have been recently advanced against the East India Company,

* Remarks on several recent publications, regarding the Civil Government and Foreign Policy of British India. By Thomas Campbell Robertson, Bengal Civil Service. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1829. Oriental Herald, Vol. 22.

B

and more especially those adduced by Mr. Rickards, and the anonymous authors of the two works entitled,- View of the Present State and Future Prospects of Free Trade and Colonization in India,' and Reflections on the Present State of British India.' We shall examine them each in his turn; but as we think the place of honor justly due to him who comes before the world without concealment or disguise, and who, therefore, evinces his willingness to incur all the responsibility that may attach to his party or opinions, we shall give Mr. Robertson, in this case, precedence. In adverting to the scruples of others as to this point, this gentleman himself avows his belief, that those most capable of commenting effectually upon the publications hostile to the East India Company, are deterred from coming forward by 'official delicacy;' and so he himself must play the part of the mighty Ajax, and shelter all the little Telamons of the Monopoly under his shield. Our author would apparently have us to understand by this, that there is a battery of great guns in reserve, which has only to open out to demolish us; and that he himself is little better than a kind of pocket pistol, as compared with the heavy artillery alluded to. This, however, is underrating his own power: Mr. Robertson is, in fact, a man of talent, but upon this occasion he has taken up a weak cause; he is in a false position, and consequently makes a very indifferent appearance. Belial himself, indeed, would have made but poor work with a cause so outrageously wrong as the Monopoly of the East India Company in trade, power, and patronage. The Deputy Chairman of the East India Company, for example, who, whoever else he may be, is certainly not Belial, if we are to judge from his exhibition in the Commons House of Parliament, on the 12th and 14th days of May last, can make nothing at all of the subject. Can he be one of the great guns 'reserving its fire from official delicacy?'

There is one assertion of our author, made at the very outset, which we think is unwarranted by the course pursued by his opponents. He tells us roundly that these opponents, one and all, are 'animated by a common feeling of hostility towards the East India Company and its servants.' It is his mistake, to imagine that hostility to a system is the same thing as hostility to men: in conformity with this error, he seems to have persuaded himself that if the men be right, so must the system be also. Now, the agents, in this case, are English gentlemen, equal to any of their class. Even a bad system has not deprived them of national feeling and national honour. They are, in fact, no more answerable for all the evils of that system, than the sheriff and his officers are answerable for the crime of the malefactor, at whose execution they are called upon by the law to assist. In not one of the works to which our author alludes, can we discover a shade of personality or vituperation of persons, as unconnected with measures and principles. Mr. Rickards especially takes various opportunities of doing justice

to the good intentions and abilities of the home authorities, of the local governments, and of the public servants in general, at the very moment, too, that he is exposing, with irresistible skill and success, their blundering and pernicious system.*

Before analysing the work now under review, it is necessary that we should examine the author's own qualifications, for the task he has undertaken. The subjects treated of by his opponents are pretty extensive. They embrace the manners, habits, and history of all the Indian races subject to the dominion of Great Britain. They embrace the agriculture of India, the trade of India, and especially its commercial relations with Great Britain. They embrace all the revenue systems of India from the earliest to the latest time: they treat of certain monopolies, not of a very benevolent description, exercised by the East India Company, and finally they discuss the merits and demerits of European Colonization in India.

The author's qualifications, according to his own statement, are these; he was one year Judge and Magistrate in the lower provinces of the Bengal Presidency, and seven years in the upper provinces in the same capacity, and he passed three years with the armies in Ava in a diplomatic situation. Moreover, he is a civil servant of the East India Company. With all the rest of India, except the places just named, he professes to be unacquainted; he knows nothing of Madras, he knows nothing of Bombay. With the subject of commerce he is, by his own account, wholly unacquainted. Of his knowledge of the state of Indian husbandry, there are no indications whatever; he seems never to have been employed in the revenue department, and to have given very little of his attention to it; and as to monopolies, there is nothing in his work to shew whether the Hindoos eat dear and dirty, or cheap and clean saltwhether dysenteries or alligators be most efficient in carrying off the manufacturers; or whether the Company derives a profit of 8 or of 800 per cent. from the exclusive sale of its opium †.

Take the following sample:- In these principles every one must applaud the intention of the original projector of the scheme; and it is but justice to the Court of Directors to add, that the whole of their printed correspondence, on this head, indicates an anxious desire to see these principles carried into full effect. Their letters abound with excellent instruction, sound philosophical views, a constant desire to promote the general welfare, and more especially to guard the lower classes against oppression; but the system of land taxation which we had adopted from our predecessors, the amount of that tax, and the machinery by which it was realized, opposed insurmountable obstacles to the accomplishment of the Court's benevolent views.'-Rickards's India, p. 570.

'As I intend to confine my remarks to those topics with which I have had opportunities of becoming conversant, it is not my design to touch upon the subject of trade, or to question any assertion connected with the two sister presidencies of Madras or Bombay.'-'I know nothing of Southern India &c.' pages 2 and 40.

B 2

The first point upon which our author touches, is the prejudice of caste among the Hindoos, as far as these relate to their capacity of becoming consumers of European products. Upon the whole he allows that the Hindoos have no prejudices of such a nature as to make them unprofitable customers; he does not even deny that the prejudices of caste are giving way in Calcutta and its vicinity.

Eventually,' says he, 'perhaps the disappearance of this ancient body (the old chiefs of Bengal) will not be much to be deplored, as the race now rising to fill their place are likely to be less deeply imbued with the prejudices of their superstition, and better fitted in consequence, to receive and communicate that knowledge which Europeans alone can impart. The rising class alluded to is composed of the debris of the ancient gentry blended with numerous families whom commerce and speculation have, during the last half century of tranquillity, raised to opulence. It is in Calcutta, and its vicinity, that individuals of this class are most frequently to be found, who evince a taste for European science and general literature. The progress that some of them have made is said, by those best qualified to judge, to be amazing; while the disposition evinced by them to aid establishments for the promotion of education, justifies a hope, that much may be effected through their agency, towards diffusing that general information by which alone any real change can be operated in the religious or moral condition of their countrymen.' This is good and liberal, but our author is not satisfied to rest here; he fears that virtue has not kept pace with knowledge, and considers that the effect of the relaxed Hindooism, very discernible in Calcutta, is questionable on the moral conduct of the people.

Touching the carnivorous propensities of the Hindoos, there is some information about their not being reluctant to partake of venison and the flesh of the wild boar-a minute matter which it was superfluous to rehearse, after Bishop Heber had already informed us that a Raja of high rank and great power slaughtered 60,000 animals in a fortnight, and that Bramins themselves not only eat flesh, but with a versatility of character worthy of the heroic ages, play at once the part of butchers, cooks and priests. On this point our author is of opinion that had Bishop Heber consulted young men who were in the habit of going out on hunting parties, he could not have sailed from England in such ignorance as he appears to have done.' This is followed by a piece of very good advice, which we wish had been given effectually about the year 1813, viz. to put no reliance on the fading recollections of some superannuated servants of the Company.'

nue.

The next subject which our author takes up is the land reveMr. Rickards, by laboured researches, carried on through 355 pages, has shewn that the land revenue system in India, is one of the most barbarous and oppressive institutions, in every form and modification of it, which the world has ever known. He has shewn

that in one part of the country, and that, too, where the system is least oppressive, the government tax was assumed at half the gross produce of the land on a clumsy and conjectural estimate of it. He has shewn that the British Government attempted to create a Hindoo aristocracy, by flinging to the alleged proprietor a tithe of its own moiety, which is nearly the same thing as if the Government of this country were to annihilate all existing proprietory rights,reduce the tithes to one half their present amount,-declare that the clergy who received these tithes were the proprietors of the land, and would answer every useful purpose of a natural aristrocracy, and then taking to itself forty per cent. of the gross produce as tax, call upon the world to admire its justice and its liberality, but above all its moderation! He has shewn, and our author acknowledges it, that nearly all the native gentry of the country were ruined by this effort to elevate them.-He has exhibited the government in another part of India assuming fifty, fifty-five, and even sixty per cent. of the gross produce of the soil as its inherent right*. He has exhibited it attempting to make a yearly survey of every field in a territory of 154,000 square miles,-keeping an account current with every peasant of an agricultural population of thirteen millions and a half; in short, endeavouring to do that for an empire which no proprietor of common sense in this part of the world would attempt to do for an estate of 500 acres. Doing all this, Mr. Rickards has exhibited the same government praising and be-praising itself for its tender and humane attention to Hindoo usages-deprecating unhallowed change, and aiming, but happily aiming in vain, to fill its pockets in strict conformity to native custom.' Mr. Robertson reads all this, and without any examination of the merits, or demerits, of the system, only says quietly, that the government must have money to pay their civil and military disbursements. With respect to the most exquisite branch of the case, the special darling of the Directors, as above depicted, our author covers himself and his employers with the broad shield of his ignorance, and when he speaks of the effects of the system upon the condition of the people within the circle of his peculiar knowledge, the scope of his argument is to the following effect.

The peasantry of Bahar are better off than the peasantry of Ireland; the peasantry of the North-western provinces are not so well off as the peasantry of Bahar, and the peasantry of Bengal are the most miserable of the three. He does not state what propor

'But this cannot be considered to be a fair comparison, as the calculation of the expected revenue has been made after allowing the cultivators a share of only forty per cent. of the produce, whereas the proposed field assessment has been formed after allowing them forty-five per cent. of the produce, which the collector states to be the usual rate throughout that part of the country.'-—Revenue Selections, vol. 3, p. 514.