India and Self-Government

I

THE VILLAGE

OF all the errors of Indian Government none is so serious as the destruction of the village organism throughout India; none has had such a serious effect in the past; none is likely to have such bad consequences in the future.

It is the village policy of Government which has created for it the most difficulties, and which is at the bottom of the most serious unrest, for it touches not merely a few as criminal law, but practically all the population; it not only affects a part of the life of India, but it has injured it in its most vital point. In the whole history of administration there is nothing I think so demonstrative of the ignorance of Government as the village policy.

The foundation on which not only all government, but all civilization, rests throughout the world is the village. As this is contrary to the usual idea that civilization rests on the family, it will be convenient shortly to show how this is so. The village is the microcosm of the State because it includes within it divers trades and occupations and races and religions and castes in one community. A family does not do so. A family is by its nature of one blood, it is almost always of one occupation. There are families of cultivators, merchants, priests, lawyers, smiths, and so on. The family is of one religion, of one caste, of one habit of thought. A family is narrow, and a village is broad. Families divide; villages combine. Societies organized on the family, or clan, or tribe principle have always failed — by the very nature of things they must so fail.

The Jews are a race, or tribe, and not a nation. They have no civilization of their own, but adopt that in which they live. The Highland clans had to be broken before the Highlands could be civilized. The caste system in India ruined its old civilization, and is the bar to any new civilization. The Turkish Empire is dying because it was based on a religious caste divided from all others by a mutilation, and its people could never amalgamate with others. There is a continual flow of peoples to and fro upon the earth, and village communities absorb the new-comers and thereby acquire new blood and, what is far more important, new ideas, to add to the old and leaven them. Families, classes and tribes cannot do this. They become stereotyped and dissolve or die. Thus the basis of all civilization has been the village, or in later times the town.

The decay and death of all civilizations has been preceded by the death of the local unit. Thus imperial Rome was itself doomed to death when it destroyed local life, and a new civilization could not be built up till the local communities had at tained a fresh life. Florence, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Venice, and many others, made the civilization of the Renaissance. So in England a free Parliament was made up of representatives from free cities and counties. These have been destroyed, and the present constituencies are merely so many voters. Policies are no longer decided in Parliament, but in secret party conclave. Members are the nominees of that conclave, not of free local organisms, and Parliament has become a machine to register its decrees. So are free institutions passing away.

There is no lesson of history more true than this, or more certain,— that the village or town is the unit of all free life and civilization. It contains all classes, different races, religions, castes and forms of thought, and is therefore a real unit.

Now these units have existed all over the world, and when civilizations and governments have disappeared they have been built up anew from the villages. In India the village system was the one organism that survived the long years of anarchy and invasion, and it was in full vigor when we conquered India.

In Upper Burma on its annexation in 1885 the village community was strong and healthy; it alone survived the fall of King Thibaw’s government. Then we deliberately destroyed it, as we had destroyed it before all through India.

Now this is an instructive and interesting fact, for it was destroyed in ignorance, not by malice prepense.

Throughout India, and especially in Burma, you will find Government reiterating its conviction of the importance of preserving the village organism, repeating its conviction of its absolute necessity, and at the same time killing it. This is but an instance of much of the action of Government. It means well; it does actually see the end to be attained— it has no idea how to attain that end, but instead it renders it impossible.

If I explain what happened in Burma, the history, mutatis mutandis, of what has occurred throughout India will be clear.

In the first place, a village does not mean only one collection of houses; it is a territorial unit of from one to a hundred square miles. Originally, of course, there was in each unit one hamlet, but as population grew, daughter hamlets were thrown off. They still, however, remained under the jurisdiction of the mother hamlet, and they all together formed one village. In each village there was a headman and a council of elders. The headman was appointed, or rather approved, by the Burmese government for life or good behavior; the council was not recognized by law. Notwithstanding this the council was the real power. It was not formally elected, it had no legal standing, but it was the real power. The headman was only its representative, and not its master; he was but primus inter pares.

This headman and council ruled all village matters. They settled house sites, rights of way, marriages of boys and girls, divorces, public manners; they got up such public works as were undertaken, they divided the tax among the inhabitants according to their means, and were collectively responsible for the whole. There was hardly any appeal from their decision, but the power not being localized in an individual but in a council of all the elders, things went well. The village was a real living organism, within which people learned to act together, to bear and forbear; there was a local patriotism and a local pride. Within it lay the germ of unlimited progress.

The English Government on taking over Upper Burma recognized the extreme value of this organization. In Lower Burma much of our difficulty arose from the fact that the organization was wanting, and that between Government and the individual there was no one. So one of the first efforts of Government in Upper Burma was to preserve and strengthen this local self-government. Unfortunately every effort that, it made tended to destroy it rather than to consolidate it. A wrong view was taken from the beginning.

The council was ignored. How this happened I do not know. I can only suppose that it arose from ignorance. The only man recognized by the Burmese Government we replaced was the headman. They dealt directly with him and not with the council. They did not appoint the council or regulate it in any way. In law no council existed. Therefore, when we took over, the law was mistaken for the fact, — a common mistake due to seeking for knowledge in papers and not in life, — and the council was ignored. The following seems to have been the argument: Government appointed the headman, therefore he was an official. Government did not appoint or recognize any council, therefore there was no council. At all events that was the decision arrived at and enforced.

There is on record a circular of the local government in which the headman of a village is described as a government official — to be to his village what the district officer is to his district. That is disastrous. A headman is not an official of the government. His whole value and meaning is that he is a representative of the people before Government. He expresses the collective views of the village, and receives the orders of Government for them as a whole. He is their head, not a finger of Government. He corresponds almost exactly to the mayor of an English town, who would be insulted if you called him a government official. Yet this mistaken view was taken of the village headman, and this error has vitiated all the dealings of Government with the village organization and its headman. He is appointed by Government instead of being appointed by the people and approved by Government. He is responsible to Government, not to his village, as he ought to be, for the use and abuse of his powers. He is punished by Government for laxity. By the village regulation he can be fined by the district officer.

There has grown up among Europeans in the East a custom of imposing fines. They fine their servants for breakages and innumerable other small matters, and then complain how scarce good servants are. The clerks in Government offices used to be subject to continual fines until Lord Curzon stopped it. Now headmen of villages can be fined by the district officer; and they are fined; the proviso is no dead letter. It is a mark of the ‘energetic’ officer to use it. Can there be anything more destructive? Imagine the headman, the mayor of a community of three or four thousand people, fined five shillings for the delay of a return, or set like a school-boy to learn a code with the clerks. I have seen this done often. What respect for Government, what from his own people, what selfrespect, can he retain after such treatment?

Again, by ignoring the council and making the headman an official, Government set up a number of petty tyrants in the villages, free from all control but its own; consequently it has been forced to allow great latitude of appeal. This still further destroys his authority. He is, under old custom, legalized by the village regulation, empowered to punish his villagers who disobey him in certain matters. The punishments are, of course, trivial. When approved by the council as in old days they were final; but now they can be appealed against, and are. A headman who endeavors to enforce his authority runs the risk of being complained against and forced to attend headquarters, to waste days of valuable time and considerable sums of money to defend himself for having fined a villager a shilling for not mending his fence. One or two experiences of this sort and the headman lets things slide in future.

Thus, interference with the village is constant and disastrous. Headmen are bullied, fined, set to learn lessons like children, all in the name of efficiency. And Government wonders why the village-system decays. A continual complaint of Government is that headmen are no longer the men they used to be, that they have lost authority. The best men will not take the appointment, and who can wonder? Here is a story in illustration.

There was a small village in my district, on a main road, and the headman died. It was necessary to appoint a new one; but no one would take the appointment. The elders were asked to nominate a man, but no one would take the nomination. I sent the township officer to try to arrange it; he failed.

Now, a village cannot get along without a headman. Government is at an end: no taxes can be collected, for instance; therefore it was necessary that a headman be appointed at once. I went to the village myself and called the elders and gave them an order that they must nominate some one. So next morning, after stormy meetings in the village, a man was brought to me and introduced as the headman elect. He was dirty, ill-clad, and not at all the sort of man I should have cared to appoint, nor one whom it would be supposed the villagers would care to accept. Yet he was the only nominee.

‘What is your occupation?’ I asked.

He said he had none.

‘What tax did you pay last year?’ I asked him this in order to discover his standing, for men are rated according to their means.

He told me that he had paid five shillings, — less than a third of the average.

‘You are willing to be headman?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said frankly. ‘But no one would take the place and the elders told me I must. They said they would prosecute me under the bad livelihood section if I did n’t. I could take my choice between being headman or a term in prison.’

This was, of course, an extreme case, but it illustrates the position. The headman is degraded, and all administration suffers.

It is the same in municipalities. The work is done by the district officer because it is easier for him to do it than to instruct and allow others to do it.

The people one and all hate this. The headman hates it because, though he is given much greater power nominally than he used to have, he dare not use this power. He is isolated from his villagers, and so often becomes an object of dislike to them. Through him orders are enforced which are not liked by the people, and he has to bear all the brunt. His dignity is gone.

The elders hate it. They have been ignored. They are placed under a headman who may or may not attend to what they say. They have lost all interest because all power in their village affairs. They have no responsibility.

The villagers hate it. A council of their own elders they could respect and submit to; a one-man rule they detest. Their appeal to the council on the spot they know has been lost, and in place of it they have an appeal to a distant officer who, with the best will in the world, cannot know. An appeal costs money, and even to win may be to lose. They all want to manage their affairs; they can do it far better than we can, and there is nothing they so much appreciate as being allowed to do so. Here is how I learned this.

Some eighteen years ago I was leaving a station where I had been for a year as subordinate officer, and had to cross the river by launch to the steamer station on the other shore. I went down to the bank to get the launch, but it was late. I saw it three miles away and so sat down under a tree to wait.

Presently two or three elderly Burmans came and sat down near me. Then came others, till perhaps twenty elderly men were there. I recognized two or three vaguely, but none clearly. I wondered at their being there and asked,—

‘Are you crossing over too?’

They shook their heads.

‘What are you here for then?’

They looked embarrassed and at last one spoke. ‘We came to say good-bye to you.’

I stared. ‘But I do not know you, except that I suppose you are elders of the town.’

‘We are,’ they said, ‘and you do not know us because you have not ever worried us in any way. When we had business together you did it quickly and decisively; otherwise you left us alone. You did not treat us as children. Therefore we are sorry you are going.’

I laughed. I could not help it. To come and express regret at a man’s leaving, on the ground that they knew next to nothing of him and did not want to know more, seemed unusual.

But it was true. And often, after, did I think over that ‘send-off’ and take the lesson to heart.

Now, what is true in Burma is true over all India. The local circumstances of course vary. All organized life is dead. Government, by means of its official, the headman, interferes with almost every detail of life, regulating his conduct by rules drawn up in Secretariats by men who never knew what a village was; and the appeal is to another alien officer. Further, all morality and all conduct are the outcome of corporate life, that is to say of the village or of a larger unit. Morality is in fact, where it is useful and true, the knowledge of how to get along with your fellow men and women, what conduct offends them and leads to the injury of society, what pleases them and tends to harmony and mutual happiness. It is not fixed, but adapts itself to changing circumstances of the society, and it is enforced by the opinion of that society.

But injure the society and both manners and morals are shaken. It is a common complaint of India to-day that the bonds of morality have greatly slackened, and that manners have almost disappeared. This is attributed to the waning influence of religions. But, generally speaking, religions have not waned in India — on the contrary, their influence has increased. The people have fallen more and more into the power of religious systems. Therefore the cause given is absurd and untrue. It does not exist. Further, neither morality nor manners are the outcome of religion. Manners and morals may be said to be the gravity which binds individuals into a community. It makes the community, and is itself the result of the community. Destroy the community and you have destroyed the source from which manners and morals arise.

That has been done all through India. The village organization will have to be resuscitated before India can cease to be India Irridenta.

II

SELF-GOVERNMENT

When a start is made with selfgovernment in India, it must begin with the village, which is the germ from which all self-government that is of any value has always begun, and on the health and vitality of which it must always depend. The whole of the present conception of the village as an appanage of the headman, and of the headman as an official of Government, must be swept away, and a new and true conception must be arrived at.

The village is a self-contained organism, and the headman is its representative before Government and its executive head, the real power being in the council. Powers and responsibility reside in the village as a whole, and in no individual. The people must not be ruled, but must rule themselves.

Now, as to the exact way in which this conception should be carried out, it is impossible to say. In each province, in distinct parts of the same province, the village-system assumed different forms to meet different circumstances. In Madras the village community was in many details different from that in Burma, and in the Northwest still more so. Therefore the particular way in which the conception should be realized would vary greatly. And only by experience could a satisfactory form for each province be evolved. Neither would it be possible, even in Burma, to go back to the old form exactly. Events have marched since then, and what was satisfactory thirty or more years ago would not be so now. The villages must not be reconstituted by copying the past; they must be constituted anew, maintaining however the spirit of the past and giving scope for evolution in the future.

Therefore the scheme that I am about to unfold must be taken to be merely tentative, and to apply only to Burma. The principles are, I think, right, the details must of course be only tentative. Practice alone would show how far they realized the objective that is to be aimed at — the constitution of a village organism on natural lines, that would govern itself without any need for interference, and would be able to grow and evolve.

My scheme is as follows: —

In every village a council should be constituted and the headman should be its executive head.

How this council should be constituted I do not know. I think there should be wards, each of which should have an elder, representative of the people, but no rigid system of election should be laid down. I have found that villages and wards can very often appoint a representative man by general consent , which is much better than by election. That should only occur in case of a deadlock. The council should itself define the wards, and it should be allowed to coöpt additional members. All representation by class or religion should be prohibited. The unit is not so many people, but a section of a village, neighbors dwelling together whose interests are thereby united. Appointment to the council should be indefinite, that is to say, an elder should remain an elder until he resigned or until the ward turned him out. I don’t think they would like continual elections. An election is a bad means to the desired end, that of obtaining the best representative. And in small communities the sense is usually apparent without it.

The headman should be chosen by the council from among its members, and his election confirmed by Government. His appointment should be according to the wish of the council, that is to say, for life, unless he resigned or the council turned him out. He should be responsible to the council. The council as representing the village should be responsible to Government, and it would always be possible for the deputy commissioner to bring pressure on a recalcitrant council by threatening to suspend the constitution and place the village under an appointed headman for a time if they did not carry out their duties properly.

To this village community should be handed over certain duties, rights, and responsibilities, much what the headman has now, the collection of revenue, and the like. All civil, criminal, and revenue cases under certain values and of certain denominations should be handed over to them to try. That is to say, that cognizance should be refused by our police and our courts, so that the parties could go to the village council if they liked. There should be no appeal from the decisions of the council, no advocates should be allowed, and no record should be required. All penalties imposed should be paid into the village fund.

This fund should exist for all villages and its nucleus should be, say, half an anna in the rupee of the revenue collections, to which should be added fines, special rates which the council should be empowered to impose for specific purposes, and other forms of revenue which would vary from place to place. I think a percentage of the district fund should be given to them. A rate on inhabited houses — a rent on house-sites — would be a good way of raising money. The purposes for which the fund could be used would be water-supply, sanitation, roads, lighting, watchmen, and so forth. Simple account books would have to be kept, and these accounts would have to be audited once a year.

Model schemes for sanitation, village roads, etcetera, could be made out for each village to live up to as fast as it could.

Further, villages should have the power to carry out irrigation works on their own initiative, and under their own control. I consider this a most important proviso, because I know many villages where this could be done by the village, whereas it is not possible to individuals. I also know one recent case in my district where it was done with great success by the headman and council. I got them a small grant and I often went to see how the work was getting on, but I never interfered in any way and the result, was most satisfactory. There was at first a difficulty about collecting the rates because there was no legal system under which a man who used the water could be made to pay. However this also settled itself.

Irrigation works, roads, and bridges are most necessary to many villages, but now, unless Government carries out the work, there is no one to do it. And Government will not carry out small works.

It is by the execution of such works that the village would prosper, and the village fund grow. Loans should be granted for these purposes by Government, to be repaid out of the profits.

Before our annexation all works were executed by the villages, and the considerable irrigation works in many places are evidence of their ability. All this initiative has now been killed. Yet it is a most valuable asset, not only materially but morally.

As regards this fund it will, I know, be objected by many people that it will be simply an excuse for peculation. ‘Orientals,’ they say, ‘cannot be honest, and the funds would be misappropriated right and left.’

Exactly this same charge was made when the coöperative credit banks were started. Their history will sufficiently refute such an absurdity. Orientals are just as honest as any other people; and given a good system, village funds will no more be stolen in India or Burma than municipal funds are in England.

In organizing these villages there is another point to be borne in mind. In that desperate struggle after rigid uniformity which distinguishes the Indian Government, every separate hamlet in Burma was put under a separate headman, and thus made a separate organism.

Now it may be that occasionally the village was too large and a division was needed, but in many other cases the disintegration of long-established units was severely felt. Several hamlets may have one interest in common. They may be grouped round a small irrigation work, or along a stream, or have a fishery in common, or be in other matters of great use to one another. If they are run as separate organisms there is bound to be strife, each striving for its own benefit. If allowed to remain one organism they will be not only more peaceful, but stronger and better able to manage their affairs. Thus the rigid formulæ of government in this matter, as in others, should give place to common sense.

Further, in future villages should be allowed to coalesce if mutual interests attract them. Two or three villages if allowed to combine would carry out works that one could not do.

I see no great difficulty in Burma in thus restoring the organism of village life. It would require mainly tact on the part of the district officer and ability to let alone. His tendency now is always to interfere if he can. His rule should be never to interfere if he can help it. When things go wrong persistently it will probably be found that there is something amiss with the way the village is organized, and that it requires some slight modification.

Once the village communities are strong and healthy a further step could be made by instituting a township or subdivisional council, and later a district council.

For these I am not prepared to offer any suggestions. I think, however, a sound analogy might be obtained from a study of English counties, not so much perhaps as they are now, but as they were, in spirit not in law.

After the village organism is established, — perhaps even prior to its proper establishment, — a local government board must be organized. In time, this would have to be entirely native to the province. It is, I think, essential that it should be so. What its relations would be with the district officer I do not know. All this, however, is not a matter which can be thought out. It will have to be worked out, and a correct system can only come little by little, experience showing how modifications should be made. I do not see any great difficulty, provided there is common sense and unity of aim on both sides.

And from districts, when they had settled down into distinct organisms more or less self-governing, representatives — not delegates — could be sent to a provincial council. Then you would have a real council, one representative of the people because proceeding from the people, not less surely because not directly. I am not sure that direct election such as is practiced in England and America, for instance, does cause representation of the people. In England at all events it is not so now. The only power the people have now is to choose between the delegates of two or more parties. Beyond this they have no voice or choice. They have no means of expressing their own wishes. Their member may be, probably is, a man they never heard of before the ‘party’ sent him to contest the seat. There is in fact in England to-day no real representation of the people at all. By people of course I mean the people as a whole, including all classes. But under some such scheme as I have sketched out for Burma there would be real representation of the people, of localities as a whole, units; local men acquainted with the local conditions would be chosen, and not pleaders, and the locality would hold them responsible. Thus the opinion of such a council would represent the wishes of the people; it could be depended on, and to it considerable powers could be delegated permanently. It would in fact in time constitute a provincial government in federal relations with the other provincial governments. That is the only possible way that a real government can be built up.

And it must always be remembered that the basis is the village. On the health of the village all other things depend; from the healthy working of the village all things may proceed. It is the first and last word in local selfgovernment.

A very integral part of any selfgovernment is education, and to that I now come.

III

EDUCATION

To the success of any form of selfgovernment a good education is absolutely essential; that a people should be able to exercise self-government, it is necessary that they be educated to self-government, for this capacity no more comes by itself than ability to build a ship or steer it when built. And as the government must be self-government, so the education must be a national education and not an imported one.

Education is necessary to every one, man or woman, peasant or prince, merchant or artisan, and that man is best educated who can make the best of his life whatever his station may be.

Thus it will be seen that education is mainly relative. A man who would be well educated if in one station of life would be hopelessly ignorant if in another. I doubt if Whewell would have been considered educated had fate suddenly made him a soldier, a political officer on a frontier, or a cultivator. There are certain foundation principles necessary to any success in life, to being able to live it, in whatever station, with dignity and with prosperity. What are those principles?

I think that the Indian Education Department would say that they are reading, writing, and arithmetic, that is to say, acquirements. I should say they are qualities of character.

What are these qualities?

First and foremost is belief in his own people, — not his caste or his creed, but in the people who inhabit his province, who will eventually make up his nationality. If the man is to do good work for his people, the boy must desire to do good work, he must have a certainty in the unlimited possibilities of his people, that though they may be young now they will grow to a worldstature. Therefore that it is his duty to help them. He must be sure that this world is good, to be made better by him and his fellows and his descendants. He has inherited much, he must hand on more. He has no right to live unless he does his duty to life and in life. That is to say, he must have a purpose in life, for without a purpose life cannot be lived.

Secondly, he must see that for the accomplishment of his purpose, which is but part of the world’s purpose, he must cultivate two qualities: obedience in act, and freedom of thought. He must learn to obey, because he must see for himself that only by men acting together under authority can anything be achieved. His obedience will then be a willing and cheerful obedience, because necessary to his own purpose. He must obey, that later he may be obeyed. He must keep his mind free, because to admit authority in thought is to kill thought. He must see things for himself and judge for himself, that when he is able to act for himself he may do so on truth and not on hearsay. He must learn to respect the opinions of others, which they have founded also on experience, while not necessarily adopting them, because he may see things differently.

He must learn self-knowledge, to recognize what he can do and what he cannot. He should cultivate self-command; that must not mean self-extinction.

On a base like this all other things come naturally.

Is there any such ideal in elementary education in India? I can safely say that there is no such ideal. All that the department seeks to do is to stuff a child with reading, writing, and arithmetic, and other learning, regardless of his character or his objective in life.

Therefore elementary education is not popular in Burma, because it seems to have no good purpose.

That was true of education before we took the country. It was then mainly, for boys, in the hands of monks, and I do not think that education when controlled by religion has been popular anywhere in the world. It has been accepted because there was no other means of education available, but it was not admired. Our government has accepted the monastery schools and it has also encouraged lay schools, but neither seem to give much satisfaction.

Now this is not the place to discuss religion of any kind, and I have no intention of entering into such a vexed question. There are good things in all religions — borrowed from humanity; there are doubtful things; there are bad things. But the foundation of every religion is a declaration that this world is evil and that we should despise it. Now the objective of all education is to fit a boy for his life, and he cannot be so fit if he despise life. He must love it, admire it, desire in all ways to help it, to increase it, to beautify it. His objective must be in this life. Further, the tendency of all faiths is to raise barriers between races and castes. But it is an essential part of any true education that a boy understand that in striving for the good of the community he must ignore all differences. Humanity is one, and the God of Humanity is One, whatever faiths may say.

Thus religions when mixed with education have a paralyzing effect. I have often heard this said in Burma. Here is a conversation I once had at a village I knew very well. It occurred, as did most of the talks I had with the people, just after sunset, when I had my chair set outside my rest-house, and the people came dropping in to gossip. There were a number of people — the headman, elders, their wives and children, and two monks from a neighboring monastery. They talked quite freely because they knew that after office hours I forgot I was an official, or even an Englishman, and just talked to them as one human being to another. I may add that I had been inspecting the village school where little boys and girls learned together. I had also been to a monastery where the elder boys went.

‘Well,’I said, ‘what is the news?’

There was an expectant silence. Evidently there was some news; the question was—who should tell it?

‘What is it, headman?' I asked.

The headman rubbed an ankle reflectively. ‘The fact is,’ he answered, ‘there is no news that would interest your honor, only just village doings, foolish things.’

‘Hum,’ I said, ’that sounds to me as if a young man had been doing something.’ Several of the men smiled. — ‘Possibly with the assistance of a girl’

— and I glanced at some girls.

They giggled, and the headman said

briefly, —

‘Maung Ka’s son has run off with a girl.’

‘Oh!’ I said, turning to Maung Ka, whom I knew well enough, a tall finelooking man, who was looking very gloomy. ‘ It’s a way boys have. There’s no harm in it.’

‘Not if he can support her afterwards,’ said Maung Ka gruffly.

‘Can’t he do that?’ I asked.

It appeared that he could not. He had spent all his boyhood in a monastery ‘learning’ till his father took him out. Then he went to the other extreme and levanted with a girl. ‘He does n’t know one end of a bullock from the other,’ said the father. ‘He can’t plough or sow; he can’t teach; he has no common sense. That’s what schooling does for a boy.’

Most of the other men agreed with him, and we had a discussion on education in which every one took part.

The general opinion was that schooling should be to fit you for life. The monks said for eternity, but the villagers, though out of respect for the monks they said little, evidently did n’t make any such distinction. What was not fit for time was not fit for eternity. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were good because a boy needed these. Beyond that they seemed to think schooling did harm. A boy learned more from his father and the other villagers than from school. As to a girl, ‘What,’ asked an elder indignantly, ‘is the use of a girl learning to write? What will she write? Love letters only.’

‘Well,’ I asked, ‘and is n’t that good

— for the boy who gets them?’

The fact is the villagers are plain common-sense men and women; they judge by results, and the results are not good, they say.

In fact, except as to the actual acquisition of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which may or may not be of much use, the teaching and, still more than the teaching, the influence, is bad. It unfits for life, it gives wrong ideals, or it kills all ideals. It is not national in any way.

The higher education is, I think, worse. It follow’s an imported system, and in the importation all the good is left out. In England a boy’s real education comes from association with the other boys. It is there he learns whatever he does learn of conduct, of ambition to true ends, of acting in concert, of ability to judge for himself and stick up for himself.

In India a wrong ideal has been conceived from the beginning. It has been assumed, tacitly perhaps, that an Englishman is the final and completely perfected work of God and man, and that all nations should copy him and try to become, if not a sterling Englishman, at least an electroplate one.

That is disastrous. It depresses the pupils by depreciating their own races and holding up an objective which is impossible, and if possible would be wrong.

There are in the hearts of nearly all Oriental people ideals which are quite as good as ours, and far better fitted for them. Are these ever taught to them? India once led the civilization of the world. Is that past ever brought up and explained and realized for them? Never I think.

Further, higher education to be of any use must be objective. You must know what you want the boy to be. What does Government want the products of its higher education to be? I have no idea.

Of what use are these products of the higher education in India? They are useful but for one thing, to be lawyers or pleaders, or to be clerks. They are dealing in words, and not in facts or in humanity.

Government accepts a certain number into its service because the first ideal of Government is a man who can fill up forms and returns, speedily, accurately, and punctually. They can do that. When they have district work to do they fail because they have no personality, no freedom of thought, and because the people despise them. The old officials whom we took over from the Burmese Government, whatever their defects, had auza — personality. It is a commonplace to say that the Burmese have deteriorated. That is not true. They have as much potentiality as before, but this potentiality is wiped out by ‘education.’

Personally, if I had to administer a difficult district, I would choose my Burmese assistants from men who had never been to school, and to satisfy Government I would engage some B.A.’s to be their clerks and fill up the forms. I should be sorry for the B.A.’s, because I think they have as good stuff in them as the others, but their want of education has unfitted them for work requiring auza.

That is really what it amounts to; the school-trained boy is not educated, whereas the boy brought up in contact with the world is perforce educated. The first is a hot-house plant; the second a useful field plant.

I am aware that current opinion puts down the failure of the educated young Indian to his want of religion. He has been educated out of his own faith and has not been accepted into any other; hence his want of character. Of all the wild shibboleths about India and the Indians, this is I think the wildest. That a man is injured by being brought to see the foolishness of caste, of infant marriage, of harems and zenanas, of all the forms and ceremonies with which all religions are covered, seems to me a triumph of foolishness. Only the ‘occidental mind’ at its best could conceive such an idea. In so far as education destroys these ideas it does good. Wherein it harms him is by taking him apart from his people, rendering him not desirous to help them but to disown them. He is taught that to be an Englishman should be his ideal, that he ‘should cultivate English habits of thought,’—as if true thought had any habits, — so that finally he can’t think at all. He is directed to wrong ideals, he is rendered unhappy, he is dépaysé, he is useless for any work except being a clerk or lawyer, he has no more character than a jelly-fish. Instead of wishing to lead his people he wishes to identify himself with the English Government, be a civilian, and rule his people. He should be filled with a boundless confidence in the future of his people, and believe that it is his duty to help that future to be realized. He is discouraged and rendered hopeless. Instead of being a help he is the greatest danger his own people will have to meet when they move forward.

The education department of the Government of India is the new Frankenstein, and the higher education is its monster. These men have sunk under their ‘education,’ and in consequence they are unhappy. Who wonders? But in fact an alien power cannot introduce or work any real system of education. It must be indigenous, something of the soil and not exotic. It, like self-government, must begin with small things in the village and gradually rise.

Like all things, if it is to live and prosper and extend, it must have a soul. And the soul of education, like the soul of life, is an emotion tending toward a desired end. The desired end of education is the rise and progress, not merely of the individual, but of the nation. That has been the soul of the progress of Japan; it must be the soul of the progress of any people; and education will be enthusiastically taken up only when it is seen to be a means to that end.

Such an education cannot be given by Englishmen. Any education department must be provincial and draw its vigor from below. It must not be a machine governed from Simla with textbooks as thumbscrews and manuals as beds of Procrustes.

Before there can be a real education department it must be entirely native of the province, responsible to the province for its success. Can we create such a department? I think we can, slowly, by handing our village schools to district councils, and the university to the head provincial assembly when it comes into being. They will have to think out what result they want, and then how to attain that result.

But all must begin with the village; within it alone is the germ-cell of all future progress.