CHAP. XX - INDIA

Summary

“All general observations upon India are necessarily absurd,” said to me at Simla a distinguished officer of the Viceroy's government; but, although this is true enough of theories that bear upon the customs, social or religious, of the forty or fifty peoples which make up what in England we style the “Hindoo race,” it has no bearing on the consideration of the policy which should guide our actual administration of the Empire.

England in the East is not the England that we know. Elousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship, becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives' own good, and certainly for no one else's, by laws and in a manner opposed to every tradition and every prejudice of the whole of the various tribes of which this vast population is composed—scheming, annexing, out-manoeuvering Russia, and sometimes, it is to be feared, out-lying Persia herself.

In our island home, we plume ourselves upon our hatred of political extraditions: we would scorn to ask the surrender of a political criminal of our own, we would die in the last ditch sooner than surrender those of another crown. What a contrast we find to this when we look at our conduct in the East. During the mutiny of 1857, some of our rebel subjects escaped into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We demanded their extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We insisted.