1 M. A. M. Marks: The Treatment of Subject Races. Int. Jour, of Ethics, ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 7°3 ing prosperity of India are victims of misrepresentation, for at least 100,000,000 of the population are living in extreme poverty. In some provinces rents have been increased four and five hundred per cent, and the propertied classes been almost destroyed; the price of foods enormously increased; the natives more and more excluded from all official positions and influence; their leading classes especially dis- credited, impoverished, and incapacitated; and the pathos of it all is that the people, growing more and more helpless, often have a touch- ing faith in political and material redemption through Great Britain, despite their slow and systematic starvation.
Whatever be true of Digby's work, it must be admitted that his analysis of figures is extremely ingenious and effective; his command of the subject great; his quotations from the literature in the field show that he represents a large and old party of dissent that has hitherto been pretty effectively suppressed. The prices and products in detail are eloquent and contain the gist of the whole matter. In most places there is not even any appearance of prosperity, or even comfort. The peopje, all borrowing money and losing their lands, are in nameless dread of the tax-collectors; are utterly unable to store anything for emergencies; and everything is tending for the worse and not for the better.
R. C. Dutt 1 has forcefully drawn attention to the overassessment of agricultural holdings in India and gathered abundant testimonies indicating that the best remedies for famines there were more moderate rents, increased irrigation, and longer leases. In Bombay the land revenue now represents between twenty and thirty-three per cent of the gross produce; in Madras, from twelve to twenty per cent for dry lands and from sixteen to thirty-one per cent of the gross produce on wet lands; in the central provinces, the last assessment, soon after 1890, was very largely enhanced, often exceeding one hundred per cent. The expending party is permanently in power, the retrench- ment party without control, and yet retrenchment is a case of life and death. In Great Britain the public debt was reduced £160,000,000 within forty years after the Crimean War, but in India the public debt went on increasing. " A greater danger than the mutiny of 1857 not only threatens, but has actually overtaken India in the impoverishment of the people both in the frequency and intensity of recent famines, and the highest type of courage and statesman- ship, such as was evinced by a Canning and Lawrence in the past, will be needed once more to save the empire, to moderate rents and taxes, to reduce debt and expenditure, to deal with India as England deals with her other colonies in financial matters, and to associate the people in the control of their finances and in the administration of their own concerns/' " We hear constantly of the elasticity of the Indian revenues and of the recuperative power of the Indian people, 1 Famines and Land Assessments in India. London, 1900. See also his Eco- nomic History of British India. London, 1902.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE but the famines of 1897 and 1900 are a terrible answer to such con- soling but unsound and untrue representations."
This writer gives in detail the history of the various famines since that of 1770. A study of the death-rates shows that within the last generation deaths have been most numerous and famines most intense in those places where the cultivators are least protected against over- assessment. Most of the population of India depend upon the soil, and its peasantry is the most frugal perhaps on earth. " It is a sad but significant fact that the last famine of this century (1900) is also the most wide-spread and severest famine that has ever visited India." The rule in Madras is that assessments should not exceed one-third of the gross produce of the soil where the land is not irrigated at Government cost. There has been undue enhancement, with no judi- cial check in these assessments. The Madras famine of 1877 stirred the Government to levy a new famine tax and pledge that its pro- ceeds should be expended for no other purpose. The pledge was broken soon after it was given. Excluding that paid as interest on Indian railways, the total money spent in fifteen years fell short of the grant pledged and raised by over eight millions of tees of rupees. The protective railways have been mostly constructed and pro- ductive roads seem now in order. Over seventeen thousand acres of land are now irrigated, although many of the old irrigation works were constructed by Hindu and Mohammedan rulers. It is often pleaded that no agriculturists should be forced to use and pay for water from these works against their will, as is now the case.
T. Morrison * has written a work of great value. He assumes that in the background of the English mind is the belief that India should be so governed that one day she may govern herself and take her place in a British confederacy. No statesman would dare to advocate perpetual vassalage. He does not believe, however, that the present policy is tending to give India this power, but rather the reverse. She lacks all sense of nationality. Morrison asserts universal discontent of the Indian people and the resentment of all the educated young Indians. " The people do not acknowledge that our rule has been beneficial to them." Especially in late years the Government has been " losing the confidence of the people." "The educated classes now denounce the English and all their works in India with ferocity." He describes a growing interest in political questions, and with it says that the " unpopularity of the British Government is rising at an accelerated pace." As another observer recently said, " every educated Hindu is a rebel." " We have not based our dominion upon principles which commend themselves to the political instincts of the people, and hence our Government has failed to take root in the country; it rests upon the top of the people, and by its massive weight keeps them in their places and prevents 1 Imperial Rule in India, being an examination proper to the government of dependencies Westminster, 1899, p. 147.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 7°5 commotion, but it draws no nourishment from the soil, and the people have not come to look upon it as a part of themselves." The Moham- medans and Hindus especially could never subordinate their religions and racial jealousies for the common good unless under the strongest provocation of danger. The Pax Britannica is really increasing the antagonism of the races, especially these two, and the higher English education, as well as the principle of popular government, is doing the same. Free institutions mean growth of parties, and these formed along preexisting lines of cleavage, which in India are race and religion. Thus the very antipathies and jealousies which are the greatest obstacle to India's ever becoming a nation would be in- creased. The English and Mohammedans are both beef-eaters, and the Hindu papers often arouse a wide-spread horror by statistics of the murder of cows. These have caused riots, and the leaflet entitled " The Cry of the Cow " has been widely circulated and is very in- flammable. In a hot country, it is said, beef-eating can suit no one, and it is done out of spite. An impartial observer would say that England had acted gn the principle divide et impera. The natives often say that no Englishman has ever yet been hanged for the murder of a native, while no jury fails to convict.where the reverse occurs. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy has found liberalism and parlia- mentarism to only aggravate the differences between Germans, Mag- yars, Bohemians, Poles, Croatians, and Italians. Diaz in Mexico was wiser, although all who worship formulae will condemn every step though they praise the result. He even suppressed newspapers, as Crispi did in Italy, because they tended to disruption. Is anarchy growing underneath in India? Will a foreign yoke be increasingly necessary to save her from it? Switzerland is free, yet a nation, though perhaps not, as Renan says, " from communitive historic ante- cedents." The Ottoman Empire has fused without it. Only in the oligarchic classic world were patriotism and religion fused by epon- ymous ancestors. Tamerlane founded the great Mogul Empire, as did Akbar his in Hindustan, although both were foreign conquerors; but they so identified themselves with the people they subjugated that they came to take their glories as their own. Forcible conversion to Christianity will not eliminate religious strife. The English are too haughty. They will not allow a native to carry an umbrella over his head in their presence, insist on salaams which they will not re- turn, and in general the English have failed to identify. East of Suez, where Kipling says there are no Ten Commandments, the heart and soul of order means honoring and worshiping the ruler. There must be monarchy, power, centralization. There have been few polit- ical ideas in India because the one elevating conception which gives pathetic interest to all the sad story of bloodshed called Indian history is the devotion of the followers to their head. Imperialism casts a spell upon them. They still glory in the traditions of the Empire of Delhi. One can still see this in their intense delight at the very sight of their local ruler princes as they pass. The people's saluta- 706 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE tion shows joy and rapture. Morrison thinks this might have been centered in Queen Victoria had she gone to India and addressed the rulers in the terms he suggests. As it is, however, he believes that the Government has been of late losing in the esteem of the upper classes until now they have only a cold, unsympathetic criticism for the Government, which is often hostile, and for all of which the pseudo-liberal policy is directly responsible. The most successful In- dian administrators, like Henry Lawrence, Nicholas, Sir Henry Ram- say, whose names were a spell over half a province, were all soldiers, unsophisticated, and with fresh minds and no sectarian ideals.
The native press rarely supports the British. Many native gradu- ates are turned out of school who can find no post, and so write their discontent in the press. Some would have the colleges turned over to natives, and let the principal enforce the Hindu religion and pro- hibit what Brahminical law forbids. Thus morals would be more effectively taught than by eclectic systems of ethics made in England, because in India no moral code can stand without the sanction of religion.
Meredith Townsend,1 after fifty years of observation, thinks Eu- rope has never materially, influenced Asia, and that if the spell of English invincibility were broken in India the best native friends of Great Britain would spring at her throat as did the Sepoys, and soon no trace but impoverishment would be left for all her years of do- minion. Here and in China, all that Europe has effected is " to create an impression that the whites are intolerably fierce and cruel, and that they understand nothing but making money." The Asiatics dis- like Christianity, and even in India take more naturally to Islam. To be a Christian, a native must leave caste and become a man with- out a country, but he can become a Mussulman without doing so. The former is too individualistic. To Europeanize the Hindu would be like flinging an aged nun upon the world to earn her bread. The missionary is divided from the native by a Chinese wall as great as that which separates a Chinaman, with his dress, color, and thought, from a New Yorker. He never becomes anything like an Indian. He starts all manner of useful industries, is schoolmaster as well, and aims at the total Europeanization of the natives. He can not resist the desire to make them English in language, literature, and science, and wishes to saturate the East with the West, so that those with whom he succeeds are a hybrid class, neither one nor the other, with originality destroyed, self-reliance weakened, aspiration wrenched in a new direction, as if Chinamen should attempt to convert us, not only to accept Confucius, but to become Chinese.
A very competent authority 2 states that the administration of criminal law in India among the Mohammedans had until recently 1 Asia and Europe. Westminster, 1901.
* Sir James Fitzjames Stephens: History of Criminal Law in England, 1883 vol. iii, ch. xxxiii.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 7° 7 many advantages over the English system. The penal code is always one of the most delicate of all the problems of colonial administra- tion, and is indeed a " grim present for one people to make to another, and little calculated to excite affection." The code now adopted is not only an immense improvement upon the attempted revival of the old institutions by Warren Hastings in 1774, which had to be abol- ished seven years later, but also upon the English home code, in that it is far simpler, made by young men often not lawyers, well cal- culated to be administered by simple magistrates, and just as good and as hard to evade as if more explicitly, elaborately, and politely phrased.
Thus, after eighty years, no great missionary of the Church with distinct independent vitality has arisen, and if all retired the work might soon be undone. We have produced bahoos passing excellent examinations but limp, when to produce permanent results they should be Christian fanatics, wondering, arguing, and commanding. These races can accumulate experience for practical purposes; they have built great cities, perfected agriculture, invented letters and many arts, reconciled masses to a hard destiny, and meditated eternal prob- lems, so that every creed save fetishism is Asiatic and was first preached by a brown man. But his progress is easily exhausted, his society stereotyped, his brain paralyzed with conceit, he stagnates, is polygamous, he lacks real pity. The chasm between the brown and white has always existed, and intermarriages are rare, and always with a sense of wrong. " There is no corner of Asia where the life of a white man, unprotected by force either actual or potential, is safe for an hour; nor is there an Asiatic state which, if it were pru- dent, would not expel him for once and forever." The Europeans distrust native power. Their bruskness, inaccessibility, and econ- omy of time and lack of ceremony is intensely disliked.1 1 Very typical is the description by a well-informed Englishman of an event he witnessed that seemed to him not comic, but simply bewildering and strange. The Rana of Oodeypore is the highest Hindu, not a Pope, but his fiat is necessary to consecrate any Hindu sovereign. Neither is he a Mikado, for he is not a Son of God. To insult him would shock every Hindu, and the extinction of his race would be felt as that of the house of Othman would be by all the Turks. Practi- cally, the line of Ranas has been unbroken since perhaps about 1200 B. c., although some think it 600. Thus Popes and Bourbons are parvenus. The death of this ruler is an event to all Hindus and an appalling woe to the 1,500,000 people, whom he immediately rules. They can not think ilis death natural, and the whole com- munity gives itself up to the wildest emotion. Nobles beat their breasts; priests flock in; frenzied women insist on their right to the funeral pyre; the whole popu- lation, among whom to insult the beard brings instant murderous vengeance, sub- mit for woe to the last earthly humiliation of shaving. This Englishman, Yate. describes all this as a spectacular tragedy with no trace of unkindness, but simply says the men "were howling and beating their breasts"; the women jumped about; the men looked " funny " without their hair, as did the red umbrellas. He 708 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Graham Sandberg x describes, as one fruit of European conquest, the Eurasians as mostly descended from English men and Indian women, often speaking English and calling themselves Christian; sometimes so white that it is hard to detect the Oriental taint in their blood. Like most mixed races, they bear the disabilities of both. Their religion and social system debars them from native industries, while their color and antecedents disqualify them from European industries, so that they are often despised by both races. The Por- tuguese founded the Eurasian community, although many have been reabsorbed. Pride of European birth is generally strong, although it has not developed that respect and prosperity found in the half Dutch Singalese of Ceylon. Toward the latter half of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century British civilians could set up a harem, if they chose, here, and schools were established for their children; but latterly soldiers, sailors, and low conditions of men have been chiefly fathers of modern accessions. It should not be forgotten that some Eurasians are legitimate children of honest parents, but the richest and most polished of them are nevertheless under a taboo, although it is far less rigorous than in the southern part of our own country. For in the Presidency many a well-edu- cated lady with a splash of purple in her blood is met in society, and there are all grades of mixture, from half white to " four cents in the dollar." What to do with the festering hordes of low-class Eura- sians, mostly the fruits of sin, the very sediment of pagan Asia, the best of them constantly roving, often begging with effrontery from Englishmen as if they had claims upon them, often with hereditary languor and constitutional laziness, is a burning question.
The Anglo-Indians live with the natives, know their language, and come into all kinds of external relations with them; " and yet they know next to nothing about them. In the whole century of intercourse no Anglo-Indian, whether official or adventurer, has ever written a book which in the least degree revealed to his countrymen the inner character, or wishes, or motives of any considerable section or any great single class of this immensely numerous people." Nobody has explained their unique ideas of society, property, right, for Europeans are by nature and the will of God stupid. Such a book would give to its author fame and fortune, but believes the Rana's reign began 1500 years or so ago (when his ancestors were tat- tooed savages loving human sacrifices like the Maoris). There is nothing for him pathetic or suggestive. It is a big crowd in a very lovely region with preposterous rites, and it seems especially strange that two claimants to the throne should await Colonel Wright's decision between them. Yate is in an unknown world. 1 Our Outcast Cousins in India. Contemporary Review, vol. Ixi, 1892, p. 880.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 7°9 it will never be written, for the English do not understand the people they govern so well.1 It is simply one race fitting its ideas to those of another whose hearts the European does not in the least degree comprehend, and knows and admits that he does not. He only knows justice, mercy, tolerance, and firmness, and applies them, and the native in a way approves. Clive knew nothing of any native tongue, and the examina- tion Wallah who speaks the language so well understands no better. There is an invisible but impassable wall like that which separates the coach dog from the horse he lives and runs with. The Indian erects this wall, deliberately secluding his mind which he never unlocks. A few cultivated Euro- peans have married and lived happily with native wives, but they are on different sides of this wall. The caste spirit is involutive and separative, and has led to self-shrouding as if revelation were bla'sphemy. The loneliness and isolation of the mind is great, and all Englishmen go home as soon as their work is done.
Yet now R. J. Wilkinson 2 urges that the English methods of edu- cating in the East are unpractical, make people litigious, arrogant, averse to manual and technical work, and develop a class of literary malcontents. Western training weakens by disuse the very acute powers of observation they inherit. They often lose the very names of plants and animals; the old literature perishes, and there is nothing to take its place that strikes root. Many vernacular teachers have 1 Since this was written one such book has appeared, not of the Hindu, but of the cognate Burmese Buddhists,3 which should mark an epoch in understanding a subject people and should be the vade mecwn of the administration, and especially of the missionary. It shows how new creeds are embroidered on older, and these on yet older ones, and so on below what we popularly call mind down into the depths of the soul. It shows how all religion sprung from pain and want, and how Buddha found the great place by renunciation and opened a way for thronging millions. It makes this old faith glow again in the hearts of its own disciples, as well as of foreigners, and all who feel a gospel mission to these lands should first ask themselves the challenging question how to restore, and then how to improve on, this ideal of life. One such sympathetic masterpiece for all other races and faiths would be the first step, for all I plead for in behalf of undeveloped races is what I have striven to write for youth.
a Education of Asiatics Special Reports on Educational Subjects, vol viii, p.
•The Soul of a People, by J. Fielding Hall. London, 1899.
7 10 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE but a very limited vocabulary, and know little but the books they teach. Scientific instruction does not efface superstitions.
Conquest will not vivify Asia. Grant Duff complains that the graduates of Madras University do not know how to use their alien attainments. One of the most interesting efforts to develop indigenous talent was made by Dr. Leitner,1 who undertook to revive native schools in the Punjab in place of the inferior and hated English Government schools. He arrived in India in 1864 and found that under the influence of the policy of their conquerors to force upon them a foreign culture based on physical science, industry, and trade, which they thought fit only for the older classes, under inspectors who banished privacy, even placing boys and girls side by side, teaching the children a strange tongue and a still more obnoxious creed, it was no wonder that in a few years their own schools had declined from one to every 1,440 inhabitants to one in 9,028. The Punjab is classical, teeming with noble and ancient memories, where the priest was professor and poet, and where education was both a religious and a social duty. Fakirs, yogis, minstrels, genealogists, astrologists, almanac makers, pundits, and even Brahmans teach, but with no classes which reduce intellect to a dull common level, in huts, markets, homes, on ship, and every male child save the outcast alone was taught not only to read and write in a difficult language and to compute, but a mass of traditional literature and morals. Teaching made the Brahman caste, which Leitner thinks is still maintained only by their monop- oly of learning. It is a sacred duty for those who know to teach, and by virtue and education in four stages ending in asceticism and meditation, it is possible to reach the gods. Elementary teaching often began with a form of contract with God; the alphabet is sacred and new letters have almost upset religious belief. In so subtle and complicated a language, grammar is philosophy, and as the sage passes on in the cur- riculum and progresses correspondingly in virtue, he may attain a point whence he studies downward and backward till his knowledge culminates in being focused upon the child whom