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Chapter 19 – The British Dominion in Asia

At the present time, therefore, his Majesty the king-emperor surveys all India united under his sovereignty, whether directly administered, or through allied and friendly princes. And since upper Burma came under British rule in 1886, an Indo-Chinese dependency, side by side with the Indian empire, has been formed by the incorporation of a wide region that extends along the Irawadi and Salwin Rivers, and touches at certain points the western bank of the upper Mekong, the stream which was taken by the French in 1896 as the present boundary of their advance upward from the southeast.

But it must always be remembered that in India the political jurisdiction of the English has at no time been commensurate with the districts under their administration. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, at any rate, the empire has been composed partly of provinces and partly of states under British protection and paramount influence. With this composite formation its position and character have latterly been undergoing an extensive and significant development. And

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since this remarkable change of situation must be ascribed largely to the consistent operation of the policy of protectorates, some account of the origin and effects of that policy may serve to explain the expansion of the British dominion in Asia.

The system of protectorates has been practised from time immemorial as a method whereby the great conquering and commercial peoples have masked, so to speak, their irresistible advance, and have regulated the centripetal attraction of greater over lesser masses of territory. It was much used by the Romans, whose earlier relations with Asia and Africa were not -unlike the British attitude, in that they acknowledged no frontier power with equal rights. The motives have been different, sometimes political, sometimes military, some-times commercial; the consequences have been invariably the same. It is used politically as a convenient method of extending various degrees of power and of appropriating certain attributes of sovereignty without affirming full jurisdiction. It has become the particular device whereby one powerful state forestalls another in the occupation of some position, or scientific frontier line, or intermediate tract that has a strategical and particularly a defensive value. It is employed to secure command of routes, coaling stations, or trading posts whenever one nation desires to be beforehand with an enterprising competitor. Under this system, applied in these various manners, the extra-territorial liabilities of England all over the world are rapidly increasing, and our frontiers are rapidly expanding.

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Submission of the Maharaja Dhulip Singh to Sir Henry Hardinge, at Kanha Cushwa, Feb. 19, 1846

Now, the origin and extension of British protectorates on the Asiatic mainland follow a clear and almost uniform process of development. Just as a fortress or a line of entrenchments requires an open space around or in front of it, so it is manifestly advantageous for the security of an outlying frontier province to keep the foreign territory adjoining it free from the intrusion or occupation of powerful neighbours. There is no great objection to neighbours who are merely troublesome, such as tribes who may be turbulent and predatory, or even petty states that may be

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occasionally unfriendly, if they are not strong enough to be seriously dangerous.

It is always a question whether the most unruly barbarian is not, on the whole, a much better neighbour than a highly civilized but heavily armed state of equal calibre. In the case of the free tribe or the petty despot, although the tranquillity of the common border may suffer, it is possible to bring them gradually into pacific habits and closer subordination. In the case of the civilized state, its neighbour undoubtedly obtains a well-defined and properly controlled frontier on both sides of it; but it will be also a frontier that needs a vigilant patrol, and that will probably require fortifications, garrisons, and constant watching of all movements, diplomatic and military, beyond the exact line that divides the contiguous territories.

It is probably due to England’s insular traditions that in Asia we are very susceptible to the distrust and danger inseparable from a frontier that is a mere geographical line across which a man may step. Having no such border-line in Europe, except perhaps at Gibraltar, England has always been naturally reluctant to come to such close quarters with any formidable Asiatic rival. Upon this principle it has long been the policy of the Anglo-Indian government to bring under its protective influence, whether they desired it or not, the native states, or chiefships, or tribes, whose territory has marched with its own boundaries; the reciprocal understanding being that the British undertake to safeguard them from foreign aggression on condition

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that they shall have no dealings with any foreign power other than the English. England surrounds herself, in this manner, with a zone of land, sometimes narrow, sometimes very broad, which is placed under political taboo so far as concerns rival powers whose hostility may be serious; and thus her political influence radiates beyond the line of her actual possession, spreading its skirts widely and loosely over the adjacent country.

The particular point, therefore, that is here to be emphasized is that the true. frontier of the British dominion in Asia, the line which we are more or less pledged to guard, and from which we have warned off trespassers, does not tally by any means with the outer edge of the immense territory over which we exercise administrative jurisdiction, and in which all the people are British subjects for whom the Anglo-Indian governments make laws. The true frontier includes not only this territory, but also large regions over which the English crown has established protectorates of different kinds and grades, varying according to circum-stances and specific conditions. This protectorate may involve the maintenance of internal order, or it may amount only to a vague sovereignty, or it may rest on a bare promise to ward off unprovoked foreign aggression. But, whatever may be the particular class to which the protectorate belongs, and however faint may be the shadow of authority that the British choose to throw over the land, its object is to affirm the right of excluding a rival influence, and the right of exclusion carries with it the duty of defence. The outer limits

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of the country which we are prepared to defend is what must be called our frontier.

In order to apply this principle to England’s Asiatic frontiers, and to explain why they have been so movable, we must now run rapidly along the line which demarcates them at this moment. Passing over the very complicated case of Egypt, we may begin the British Asiatic protectorates with Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. From time immemorial the movement of the sea-borne trade between India and Egypt has pivoted, so to speak, upon Aden. It is now the first steppingstone across the Asiatic waters toward the Anglo-Indian Empire and the westernmost point of English occupation on the Asiatic mainland; and it furnishes a good example in miniature of the manner in which protectorates are formed. We have taken and fortified Aden for the command of the water-passage into the Red Sea; but our actual possession is only a projecting rock like Gibraltar, and so we have established a protective border all round it, within which the Arab tribes are bound by engagements to accept English political ascendency and to admit no other. Not far from Aden lies the protected island of Sokotra, a name in which one can barely recognize the old Greek Dioskorides; and from Aden eastward, round Arabia by Oman to Muscat and the Persian Gulf, the whole coast-line is under British protectorate; the policing of these waters is done by British vessels, and the Arab chiefships along the seaboard defer to England’s arbitration in their disputes and acquiesce in her external supremacy.

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View of Muscat from the Housetops

From Edwin Lord Weeks’s Through Persia and India.

But these scattered protectorates in Western Asia are merely isolated points of vantage or long strips of seashore; they depend entirely on Britain’s naval superiority in those waters; they are all subordinate and supplementary to her main position in Asia, by which, of course, India is meant. It is there that we can study with the greatest diversity of illustration, and on the largest scale, the curious political situations presented by the system of maintaining a double line of frontiers; the inner line marking the limits of British territory, the outer line marking the extent of the foreign territory that the English undertake to protect, to the exclusion, at any rate, of foreign aggression.

The long maritime frontiers of India furnish a kind of analogy between the principle upon which a seashore

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is defended and the system of protectorates as applied to the defence of a land frontier. In both cases the main object is to keep clear an open space beyond and in front of the actual border-line. England does this for the land frontier by a belt of protected land which she throws forward in front of a weak border; and her assertion of exclusive jurisdiction over the belt of waters immediately surrounding her seacoasts is founded upon the same principle. We English are accustomed to consider ourselves secure under the guardianship of the sea; although, in fact, the safety comes not from the broad girdle of blue water, but from the strength and skill of the English navy that rides upon it. And for a nation that has not learnt the noble art of seamanship, no frontier is more exposed to attack, or harder to defend, than the seashore.

The principle of defence, therefore, for both land and sea frontiers, is to stave off an enemy’s advance by interposing a protected zone. If a stranger enters that zone he is at once challenged. If he persists, it is a hostile demonstration.

It would thus be a mistake to suppose that England’s Asiatic land frontier is conterminous with her Asiatic possessions, that is, with the limits of the territory which she administers, and which is within the range of her Acts of Parliament. It is not, like the Canadian border, or the boundary between France and Germany, a mere geographical line over which an Englishman can step at once out of his own country into the jurisdiction of another sovereign state. The frontier

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of the British Asiatic dominion is the outmost political boundary projected, as one might say, beyond the administrative border; and it must be particularly observed that the outmost boundary is here specified, because British India – the territory under the government of India – has interior as well as exterior boundaries. In such countries as France or Spain, and indeed in almost all modern kingdoms, the government exercises a level and consolidated rulership over a compact national estate, with a frontier surrounding it like a ring fence.

But the Indian Empire sweeps within the circle of its dominion a number of native states, which are en-closed and landlocked in the midst of British territory. We have seen that many of these states were built up out of the dilapidated provinces of the Moghul Empire by rebellious governors or military’ leaders, who began by pretending to rule as delegates or representatives of the emperor, and ended by openly assuming independence, as soon as the paralysis of central government permitted them to throw aside the pretext. With the fall of the Moghul Empire came the rise of the British dominion, and in the course of a century some of the imperial provinces were again absorbed by conquest or cession into British India; while others were left as self-governing states under the English protectorate. There is also an important group of Rajput chiefships which have always been independent under the suzerainty of the paramount power.

In all these states the rulers are debarred from making

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war and peace; but they make their own laws and levy their own taxes; and the British treat their territory as foreign, although the dividing border-line can hardly be called a frontier, since most of these states are entirely surrounded and shut in by British India. Nevertheless, their history serves to illustrate at every turn the bearing of this system of protectorates on the Anglo-Indian frontier; and what is now going on is chiefly the continuation of what went on from the beginning.

It will be found. that from the time when the English became a power on the mainland of India, that is, from their acquisition of Bengal in 1765, they have constantly adopted the policy of interposing a border of protected country between their actual possessions and the possessions of formidable neighbours whom they desire to keep at arm’s length. In the eighteenth century we supported and protected Oudh as a barrier against the Marathas; and early in the nineteenth century we preserved the Rajput states in Central India for the same reason. The feudatory states on the Sutlaj were originally maintained and strengthened by us, before we took the Panjab, as outworks and barricades against the formidable power of the Sikhs. The device has been likened to the invention of buffers; for a buffer is a mechanical contrivance for breaking or graduating the force of impact between two heavy bodies; and in the same way the political buffer checked the violence of political collisions, though it rarely prevented them altogether.

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Reception of General Outram and Staff at the Durbar of the Raja of Travancore

It may even be suspected that the system rather accelerated than retarded the rapid extension of the English frontier; because, whereas we annexed fresh territory after each collision with our rivals, so we constantly advanced their protective border beyond the actual line of annexation, and thus have always made a double step forward, keeping the strategic or political boundary well in advance of the limit of our administrative occupation.

The lines of earlier British frontiers, now left far behind in the interior of India, may often be traced by the survival of some petty principalities, that escaped being swallowed up by a powerful

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neighbour because it was originally the English policy to protect them.

Upon this system of pushing forward protective outworks until the British were ready to march beyond them, the Anglo-Indian dominion advanced across India. But as soon as we had reached the geographical limits of India – the range of mountains which separate it from Central Asia, and which form, perhaps, the strongest natural barriers in the world – one might have thought that the protectorates, which are artificial fortifications of an exposed border, would no longer be needed. On the contrary, they have grown with the expansion and rounding off of Anglo-Indian dominion; and the empire in its plenitude seems to find them more necessary than ever.

We have run our administrative border up to the slopes of the hills that fringe the great Indian plains; but on the north-west we are not content with the guardianship of a mountain wall. We look over and beyond it to the Oxus, and we see Russia advancing across the Central Asian steppes by a process very like our own. She conquers and consolidates, she absorbs and annexes, up to an inner line; and beyond that line, in the direction of India, she maintains a protected state. The Oxus divides Bokhara from Afghanistan, the Russian from the English protectorate. Here is a rival and, possible enemy far more formidable than any of those whom we have hitherto discerned on our political horizon; and consequently our protective border has taken a wider cast than ever. Two countries whose broad

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extent and physical conformations adapt them admirably to be strong natural outworks, Baluchistan and Afghanistan, lie beyond her western border, full of deserts and mountains, hard to traverse and easy to defend, inhabited by free and warlike races, to whom liberty is, as to ourselves, the noblest of possessions. Both these countries have been brought by England within the range of our political ascendency, and thus we have assumed a virtual protectorate over that vast tract of country which stretches from the confines of India to Persia and the Oxus River.

Taking as the central point of departure the Victoria Lake, whose shores are the high mountain cradle of the Oxus, the line separating Russian from English spheres of influence runs eastward to the Chinese frontier, and westward along the course of the river. Turning southward from the Oxus to the Indian Ocean, the whole western boundary-line which separates Afghanistan and Baluchistan from Russia and Persia has been marked out under English supervision, and secured by treaty or agreement. It must not be supposed that this line is secured upon any formal international compact with the states inside it, although their rulers have agreed to the arrangement which it represents; it has been fixed by negotiations with the states beyond, with Russia and Persia, who have promised and are pledged to respect it.

Here, then, beyond the extreme north-west of India, we may survey the system of protectorates operating on a grand scale; and we may find the strongest illustration

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Major-General Sir Henry Havelock

of the principle that the true frontier delineates not only the land that is administered, but the lands that are protected. On that side we are not content with fencing ourselves round by a belt of free tribal lands or a row of petty chiefships; we have barricaded the roads leading from Central Asia into India by two huge blocks of independent territory, Afghanistan and Baluchistan.

Up to the end of the seventeenth century the kingdom of Persia and the Moghul Empire of India were nominally conterminous; for Kabul and Kandahar were held by the Moghul. But in the great political convulsions of the eighteenth century the highland country interposed between Persia and India was rent away and formed into the separate chiefships which we now uphold as our barriers; they are the boulders or isolated masses that remain to attest the latest period of territorial disruption.

Now, as both Russia and England have been employing the same political tactics in their advance toward each other, throwing forward protectorates, and occupying points of vantage, it has long been certain that Afghanistan, which lies right between the two camps, must fall into one or another of these spheres of influence.

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If England did not protect Afghanistan, that country would undoubtedly be brought under the wardship of Russia, which has already taken under strict tutelage Bokhara, just across the Oxus. For the Afghan mountains dominate the Indian plains and command the roads from the Oxus to the Indus; and a country of such natural strength, a weak and barbarous kingdom overhanging the frontiers of two powerful military states, must always fall, by the law of political gravitation, on one side or the other.

It may perhaps be asked why this must be – why England does not adopt the European method of dealing with a country that is too weak to stand by itself – why she does not neutralize Afghanistan, as Belgium and Switzerland are neutralized, by a joint agreement to respect its integrity and independence. The answer is that neutralization has never been a practical method of statecraft in Asia. An ill-governed Oriental kingdom left as neutral ground between two European powers, neither of which could interfere with its internal affairs, would rapidly fall into intolerable disorder, and probably into dilapidation. The native ruler would be distracted by the conflicting demands and admonitions of two formidable and jealous neighbours; he would listen alternately to one or the other, and would be constantly giving cause of offence to both; he would find himself between the upper and nether millstone; and his end would probably be as the end of Poland, which became a focus of intrigue and anarchy, and was finally broken up by partition.

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A very curious historic parallel might be drawn, if space allowed, by comparing the existing position of Afghanistan between the Anglo-Indian and the Russian empires with the position of Armenia between the Roman and the Parthian empires during the first two centuries of the Christian era. The Armenian ruler held the mountainous country and the passes between Europe and Asia; his kingdom was the barrier between the territories of two great military states; it was an essential point in the frontier policy of Rome to maintain her influence over the ruler, and her protection over his country. The Armenian chiefs leant alternately toward Rome and toward Parthia; they tried to save their independence by maintaining the balance; but whenever they allied themselves with Parthia, they were attacked by Rome, precisely as the Afghan Amir was attacked by England in 1879, when he made a treaty with Russia. Armenia, like Afghanistan, owed all its importance, not to its intrinsic strength, for it was weak and barbarous, but to its geographical situation; and the history of its relations with Rome – of the setting up and pulling down of client kings, and of the efforts of the Romans to maintain exclusive control over its government without occupying its territory – must remind one very forcibly of the English connection with Afghanistan.

That connection represents the broadest development of the protectorate system; and its efficacy may before long be brought to a decisive test. The demarcation of the western Afghan frontier by a joint commission

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A Pillar at Tirumala Nayaka, Madura

of Russians and English in 1886 is plain evidence that the spheres of Russian and English influence, which have long been approaching, have at last touched each other. It will be recollected, as an example of the delicate handling required by modern political machinery, that the first contact very nearly produced a collision and was felt in a vibration that reverberated through all the Cabinets of Europe.

A slight difference in regard to the laying down of the boundary across the slopes of the Hindu Kush brought on a skirmish between Afghans and Russians at Panjah in 1885 and filled all Europe with rumours of war between England and Russia. Lord Dufferin, a diplomatist of great skill and invaluable experience, was then Viceroy of India, and the affair was compromised; but it showed the English, as by a sudden flash, where their true frontier lay, and what kind of possibilities were involved by its demarcation. The fact that for a breadth of some hundred miles between the disputed

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boundary-line and the border of India proper the territory is ruled by the Afghan Amir, went for nothing; the Anglo-Indian frontier is always commensurate with its responsibilities for protection.

Taking, therefore, this view of the operation of the British system of protectorates, it is worthwhile to survey the immense sweep of the radius which describes the outer circumference of England’s Asiatic frontier. For those who may apprehend that it has been pushed too far and too fast, there is, at any rate, the reassuring condition that it can hardly go farther; after more than a century’s continuous expansion it must now come to a standstill, because it has at last struck westward and eastward against hard ground; that is, it has met in both directions the solid resistance of another well-organized state. When this point is reached, the moving and fluctuating border-lines at once begin to fix and harden; the protectorates settle down into orderly dependencies; disputes fall under the cognizance of regular diplomacy; and questions of war or peace become the concern of civilized governments.

The Indian Empire and its allies or feudatories now occupy virtually the whole area of southern Asia that lies between Russia and China, on a line drawn from the Oxus in the north-west down to the Mekong River in the southeast. On the north-west, where the proximity of Russia inevitably suggests special precautions, the line of advance from Central Asia into India is barricaded by protectorates, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and the petty states beyond Kashmir up to

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the skirts of the Hindu Kush. Along the main northern line of the Himalayas we have few protectorates because we have no need of them; we have there a triple chain of almost impassable mountains, backed by the high table-land of Central Asia; and on the other side is the Mongolian desert. But it is only upon this section of England’s outer line – between Kashmir and Nepal – that she is satisfied even with the stupendous mountain barriers of the Himalayas. She can allow no interference with Nepal from the north, and further eastward the encroachment of the Tibetans upon the protected state of Sikkim produced a little war of recent memory.

As on our north-western frontier the British are very sensitive to the vicinity of Russia, so on our border-line in the northeast of Burma we begin to feel distinctly, beyond the mountains and untravelled highlands, the presence of that great organized state, the most ancient upon earth, which has so long dominated the eastern side of Asia – the Chinese Empire. Here, as toward the north-west, England is filling up the vacant spaces on the map; she is enlarging her dominion and setting forward landmarks. And here, also, her method of political exploration and reconnaissance is the protectorate in advance of the administrative boundary. In 1885 she made a great and important stride eastward when she was compelled to annex Burma, whose ruler not only showed symptoms of open hostility, but was bargaining for the protectorate of France.

Here, again, the acquisition of that kingdom carried

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The Tilo-Milo Pagoda at Pagan, Burma

us far beyond its limits, for at once the double line began to form; and our real eastward frontier has been thrown forward up to the Mekong River, enclosing a line of semi-independent chieftainships, which serve as buffers between Burma proper and China.

At this moment we are engaged in framing our relations with these chieftainships, and in extending our influence over the border tribes; we are, in fact, planning out and consolidating the intermediate zone, which, as has been said, is invariably left between the two lines, the inner limit of actual jurisdiction and the outer political line of protection and defence.

And thus, on the east as on the west, England is slowly drawing into contact with rival powers of equal political magnitude; her extreme boundary-line reaches up to China and Siam; and at one point the political

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outposts of English exploration from Burma and of French pioneers from Tonkin are almost within hail. When all these boundaries are finally determined and ratified by the conventions of civilized diplomacy, the ground-plan of the future political settlement of Asia will have been laid out; and it is hardly too much to say that the whole of the Asiatic continent, outside the Chinese Empire, may eventually be either in the pos-session or under the protectorate of some European state.

It has been thought possible that this brief account of the manner in which the Anglo-Indian Empire has spread and been shaped out might be made interesting, because no process of the kind is now observable in Western Europe, although the same principles, with the same practical result, are plainly discernible in the gradual growth of the Roman Empire, and especially in the formation of that power’s political and military frontier. The European continent has long ago been parcelled out into compact nationalities which afford no room for the system of intermediate protectorates, so that here the political and administrative frontiers always coincide. And where, as in the case of Belgium or Switzerland, a small country holds an important position on the political chess-board because it covers the vulnerable frontier of powerful neighbouring states, such a country is kept clear of intruders, not by a protectorate, but by neutralization.

With regard to the future of the British protect-orates in Asia, one thing seems to be abundantly clear,

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that the system of protectorates – the practice of throwing out a line of frontier round a wide tract of unsettled country in order to exclude rivals – which was mainly invented in modern times by England for the building up of her Asiatic empire, is no longer her monopoly. So long as the English, like their predecessors the Romans, had the continent of Asia before them and had come into contact with no other substantial rivals, the expansion of their dominion went on as steadily and easily as the Asiatic extension of the Roman Empire, which was rapidly pushed eastward until it met the Parthians, by whom it was fiercely resisted and finally driven back. Britain’s great naval superiority enabled her to beat off rivals in the distant seas, and on land she had only ill-organized native states to deal with. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the last twenty years of unbroken peace in Western Europe, there has sprung up a keen competition for territory and trade in Asia and in Africa, which has led to the wholesale imitation of the English system of protectorates, either direct or through chartered companies.

Under the pressure and competition of France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, protectorates are rapidly multiplying in all the outlying quarters of the old world – over Tunis, Egypt, Abyssinia, Zanzibar, and countless tribes and chiefships in the interior of the African continent; and in Asia over Cochin China, the Annamite kingdom, Tonkin, and various half-explored borderlands.

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What is the chief and manifest consequence of this renewed approximation of the European powers in Asia? The effect has been to demonstrate more clearly than ever the revival of an intimate connection between European and Asiatic affairs. The points of contact are multiplying with the different points of view, and with the recurrence of international apprehensions and rivalries. Political and commercial interests again begin to act and react upon each other; the expansion of Europe presses upon Asia by land and sea, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, from the Persian Gulf to the seaboard of China; and the antique kingdoms and societies are sustaining with difficulty the inroad of European arms and enterprise. The old conquering races of Asia, the Turkish dynasties at Stamboul and Teheran, the Uzbek of Bokhara, the Afghan of Kabul, and the rulers of Annam and Siam, are recognizing in different forms and degrees the predominant influence of the Western nations.

And since England still plays the leading part upon this vast stage of action and holds India as the central position, it is manifest that the isolation of India from the winds and currents of European politics must soon cease altogether and finally. She is rapidly drifting within the recognized sphere of European diplomacy; the enlargement of her borders has become a matter of European concern; and henceforward her external policy and her military establishment must necessarily be regulated upon European rather than upon Asiatic considerations. In the place of the jealousies

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A sacred pool at Tiruparngkundram near Madura

of commercial companies, and instead of desultory wars between rival settlements or against native princes, we have the greatest military powers of the world – Russia, France, and England – feeling their way toward each other across wide deserts, difficult mountain ranges, and the debatable lands that skirt the Oxus in the north or the Mekong River on the far southeast of the Anglo-Indian Empire.

To those, indeed, who demand permanency for territorial borders in Asia, it may have been instructive to follow, throughout the events and transactions rapidly sketched in the foregoing pages, the adventures of successive Anglo-Indian governments in search of a stable and scientifically defensible land frontier. The English have usually begun by projecting a political

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border-line, that is, by interposing some protected state between real territories and the power beyond them whose approach seemed to threaten our security. But the result of this manoeuvre has too often been to accelerate our own extension, because we have eventually found ourselves forced to advance up to any line that rivals could not be permitted to overstep. Nor can anything illustrate more signally the radical and inherent mutability, and the accidental and elastic character of all territorial and political settlements in Asia, than the fact that at this moment England’s statesmen are still in quest of that promised borderland whose margin seems to fade for ever as we follow it.

The object of this short and inadequate survey of the steps by which the English have mounted to ascendency in India has been to explain the combination of determining causes and events, in Europe as well as in Asia, that have placed England in possession of her Asiatic dominion. The explanation is, in. the present writer’s opinion, not difficult; it can be elicited from an attentive comparative study of the course of history in Asia and Europe during the last three centuries. The dominant fact as regards England may be said to be this – that as she has been preserved by the surrounding sea from the invasions, foreign wars, and revolutions that have interrupted the commercial and colonial enterprises of the Continental nations, she has been able to develop a vast mercantile system and to maintain a preponderance of naval power.

Yet although we can trace backward the sequence

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of events and influences, their result is none the less singular. One remarkable characteristic of the history of the British dominion in Asia is that it affords an entire and connected view of the germination, growth, and expansion of a first-class territorial sovereignty. The ancient world has left us an unbroken record of the life of the Roman state, from its birth to its full strength and stature; but the phenomenon of an empire’s complete evolution is most rare in modern times, and it may be said that India is the only example now existing. The Spanish dominion in America grew to vast dimensions out of the conquest of Hispaniola by Columbus, but the nineteenth century witnessed its disintegration, until at the present day Spain retains only a fragment of her former possessions.

The situation of the Indian Empire is thus unique in many respects; the annals of modern sovereignties show no parallel; and people still ask whether good or ill will come of it. When Sir James Mackintosh remarked that England had lost a great dominion in North America in 1783 and had won another in India by 1805, he added that it was still uncertain whether the former was any real loss, or the latter any permanent gain. Mr. Spencer Walpole, a much later authority, inclines toward the view that in the end nothing will have been gained. “Centuries hence,” he writes in his “History of England,” “some philosophic historian ... will relate the history of the British in India as a romantic episode which has had no appreciable effect upon the progress of the human family.”

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Upon this it may be observed that, whatever may be the eventual advantage to England from her possession of India (for of the immediate advantage there can be little doubt), it already seems plain that the effect upon man’s general progress must be very great.

That one of the foremost nations of Western Europe – foremost as a harbinger of light and liberty – should have established a vast empire in Asia is an accomplished fact which must necessarily give an enormous impulse and a totally new direction to the civilization of that continent. It will be remembered that since the Roman Empire began to decline, civilization has not been spreading eastward; on the contrary, it has distinctly receded in Asia; it was driven out and so fundamentally uprooted by the Turkish Sultans that the long dominion of Rome in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor has left very little beyond names and ruins. On the other hand, the exceedingly slow advance of new ideas and social changes among the Oriental races proves the strength of resistance possessed by barbarism entrenched behind the unchanging conditions of Asiatic existence. The only important ground in Asia recovered for centuries by civilization has been won in India by the English.

But although civilization has hitherto gone forward very slowly in Asia, the spread of European power is now clearing the ground for rapid movement upon a very extensive line of advance. Notwithstanding all risks and obstacles, the process of sweeping wide territories within new border-lines, under the form of protecting

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The Ganesa Temple at Tiruvenamalai in south Arkot

them, for reasons political, strategical, and commercial, is in constant use; the English, in particular, make almost annual additions to the ethnology of their empire. Undoubtedly an increasing border of territorial responsibilities must weigh on the minds of reflective men in all times and countries. St. Augustine, looking out from his City of God over the still vast domain of Rome, debates the question whether it is fitting for good men to rejoice in the expansion of empires, even when the victors are more civilized than the vanquished, and the wars just and unprovoked. His conclusion is that to carry on war and extend ruler-ship over subdued nations seems to bad men felicity, but to good men a necessity.

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It is doubtful whether Englishmen can adopt a better conclusion. Continual expansion seems to have become part of their national habits and modes of growth. For good or for ill, England has become what she is in the world by the result of adventurous pioneering, by seeking her fortunes in the outlying regions of the earth, and by taking a vigorous part in the un-ending struggle out of which the settlement of the political world is evolved, as the material world is shaped out of the jarring forces of nature. It is this incessant opening of new markets, exploration of further countries, organization of fresh enterprises, the alternate contest with and pacification of rude tribes and unstable rulers, and the necessity of guarding her possessions and staving off her rivals that has caused, and is still causing, the steady enlargement of her borders.

Against an advance of this strength and magnitude the Asiatic nations have at present little power of resistance. The forces which in earlier times broke up the higher political organizations, and which thrust back the higher religion, no longer exist; neither the fighting power of Asia, nor her fanatic enthusiasm, is now in the least formidable to Europe. Not only is it certain that much of Asia lies at the mercy of the military power and resources of Europe, but in all the departments of thought and action she is still inferior. In these circumstances European progress is never likely to suffer another great repulse at the hands of Oriental reaction; and the English dominion, once

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firmly planted in Asia, is not likely to be shaken unless it is supplanted by a stronger European rival.

Henceforward the struggle will be, not between the Eastern and Western races, but between the great commercial and conquering nations of the West for predominance in Asia. From this contest England has now little to fear; and in the meantime she has undertaken the intellectual emancipation of the Indian people; she is changing the habits of thought, the religious ideas, and the moral level of the whole country. No one can as yet venture upon any prognostic of the course which the subtle and searching mind of India will mark out for itself amid the cross-currents of Eastern and Western influences. But we may be sure that the diffusion of knowledge and the changes of material environment are acting steadily on mental habits, and that future historians will have a second remarkable illustration of the force with which a powerful and highly organized civilization can mould the character and shape the destinies of many millions of people. And whatever may be the ultimate destiny of our Indian Empire, England will have conferred upon the Indians great and permanent benefits, and will have left for herself a good name in history.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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