And so, with fourteen millions in their treasuries, and their income of twenty-six millions, they let things go on. The towns were filled with poor starvelings routing at night by hundreds among the garbage. The coolies, where there were any public works in hand, had to be fed before a stroke of work could be got out of them. In places where there was no "famine," but only "scarcity" was reported, water had to be scraped up from the bottom of the wells in cocoa-nut shells; happy a man thought himself if he could fill his chatty with sludge in twenty minutes. Cattle dying; ryots' lands all lying waste, not a green leaf except close by a well; " without disastrous pressure they won't be able to pay their tax." That is the way in which really observant collectors write. And then come the rains, and burst the cracked bunds, and the last hope is gone. And then at last the public and the papers, and even the Bengal officials, waken up; the latter, alas! only to throw dust in the eyes of those who are not there to see. "Government acts," says the Hurkaru of August 27th, "as if it wished the world to believe the famine was confined to Orissa, and that the rest of the Presidency was rolling in vast supplies. This is not so. Even in the famous eastern districts prices have gone up to an unheard-of amount. . . Skipping the delta of the Krishna (the water there being somewhat under control), it has fastened on the fairest parts of Madras. But here there is this grand difference,the Madras officials have not acted on the Bengal policy of keeping the public in the dark. . . They have formed committees. Lord Napier does not hold out false hopes of speedy relief, or wrap the districts in Cimmerian darkness. He remembers he is an Englishman, and goes to see and to help for himself. It is a shame that the Bengal press should so truckle to the state of things here as to shun drawing the contrast. The tale must be told in England, and then surely this selfish hugging of the hills will be put a stop to." And the Friend of India of November 1st says, "The famine still continues without abatement in Cuttack and Maunbhoom. . . As regards the official proceedings in connection with the famine, they are as unsatisfactory as ever." The tale is told now, but too late for those two millions whose carcases will have brought pestilence to thin still further the population of devoted Orissa. Too late; and Sir C. Beadon will come home byand-bye and enjoy his pension, and by his quiet grandeur will spur on ambitious youths to compete for Indian appointments. We examine them in high mathematics and Greek plays and German literature; let us at least teach them what the old heathen did to "utilize" God's gifts of rain and rivers. We can discuss glibly whether there ever was such a person as Semiramis. We forget that Herodotus saw that Mesopotamian valley bearing three crops a year, well watered even in the greatest droughts, because "Semiramis" or some of them had made "lakes"-vast tanks-wherein to store up the freshes as they came down from Ararat. So it was in Egypt; so it was in Persia. What does Zoroaster say about the man who made a channel and about him who neglected to keep one up? Plague follows famine. "All the gentlemen in Balasore are ill, even the doctor. The ladies are being sent off to Calcutta. The stench is fearful." No wonder, when we read accounts like that of the Rev. J. Buckley, of Cuttack, which went the round of our papers last October, and is substantially repeated by another eye-witness, in the Hurkaru of the beginning of November. In Calcutta, too, they fear the south-west monsoon will blow the pestilence up to them. Already (this was in mid-August) Baboo Rajendro Mullick places his large "godowns" at the disposal "of the Relief Committee to form a pauper hospital. Sumbhoonauth gives ground at Chitpore for a camp. The splendid offer of the Tivoli Gardens by their native owner has been accepted." Yet not until the middle of October is past does Sir J. Lawrence touch the State money-reserve; and then Lord Cranbourne has to urge him to do it. In mid-June. the Calcutta Chamber wrote to say things were as bad as they could be; they got no reply till the first week in July. Then more delays and meagre help. And then, on 11th October, Sir C. Beadon says that no English subscription is necessary, while, two days after, Sir J. Lawrence and the Calcutta meeting send to beg money from the Lord Mayor. "Harvest reports comparatively favourable" is the telegram from Simla on the 15th Oct. What a self-condemnation many will find in those few words!" harvest reports, as I hear them up at quiet, healthy Simla." Then on the 17th goes back Lord Cranbourne's message, "Spare no money; you have plenty." Surely it will be said that the man who, with fourteen millions in his treasuries, waited for this order has imitated too well the fool who hid his talent in a napkin. Better to have faced charges of lavish expenditure, impeachment, death itself, than to have shown such a want of the commonest foresight. But we may quote and quote, and the sickening tale will always be the same. Thank God, one set of men have done their best,-not at their own work, mind, but at that of the highly paid officials who did not do theirs. The mission-loving British and Yankee public will have the satisfaction of having paid direct for a great deal of the help given at the worst time and in the worst districts. The sixpences and pennies gathered (as the scorners tell us) after more or less foolish speeches by more or less ill-informed men, in dingy schoolrooms and little steaming chapels, They have done more than the forty-six But for the missionaries we should not even have told at last. millions of revenue. know what has happened. But what a comment on the doctrine which they come to teach! One governor at Simla, the other at Darjeeling. Why, a native ruler-" tyrant," " voluptuary," deserving perhaps all the bad names we call him-would at least have done something, hanged a few regraters, cropped the ears of local magistrates, would have done all sorts of foolish and wicked things, but would have proved, at any rate, to his afflicted people that he was flesh and blood, and not a mighty abstraction, a monstrous old man of the sea, which the wretched native accepts as a malignant Fate set over him, he knows not why, and to be endured till, after more "mutinies," the times of refreshing shall at last have come for him. Yes, the missionaries did, as far as they could, what the official personages were paid to do. As the "Costermonger" says, these feared for their retiring pensions if they should do anything out of rule, or "prefer Indian blacks to English sovereigns." The blacks were not (as they were in Jamaica) clamouring for squatters' rights; they were simply dying silently and so they might safely be left alone. After this, we had surely better do what the Rajah of Sundoor did some years ago to Mr. Macartney of the London Mission,-take the men who alone stood in the gap at Balasore and elsewhere, and make them viziers and "collectors" for us. Anyhow, do not let us, for a long time to come, venture on any more flabby talk about our influence leavening the whole inert mass of Hindooism. Whom worth deceiving does such talk deceive? Who that reads foreign literature does not blush at what is said and written about "our Indian Empire" abroad? Not to quote Jacquemont and other travellers, look at the Revue des deux Mondes, a thorough "Anglo-phile" periodical, written in part by voluntary exiles like Esquiros, and see the quietly scathing articles wherein every now and then they point out our shortcomings. One used to think Ida Pfeiffer, in her "Woman's Voyage round the World," talked wildly but no; she said far less than the humiliating truth. We must mend or go. This English nation must rise as one man and demand a change in Indian arrangements-more power, and more responsibility along with it, to the governors, if that is wanted. We must not let future Beadons have the poor rag of an excuse that had they done as they ought, they would have been overstepping their powers, and that Sir C. Trevelyan's case had taught them how we deal with Indian officials who presume to act for themselves. Let us, too, give up that ruinous system of crushing all, great and little, except the merchant and the usurer, down to the "dead level." If we cannot trust native gentlemen it speaks ill for us; we can hardly be doing what is right by the country. A country wholly managed by a foreign bureaucracy cannot be properly progressive; and things have been coming to this among a race the most aristocratic in feeling of any on the face of the earth. We relieve native princes of the cares of government; and then, when, in sheer despair, they take to loose living, we make their recklessness a reason for putting an end to them altogether. We leave nothing open to the native gentleman except the lower branches of the law; and then we complain that he is listless and apathetic, and that, at a terrible time like this, there is no one but ourselves to whom we can look. We have so willed it; and we must make provision accordingly; until, under a better system, the native gentry are trained to take such a part in public matters as shall warrant us in speaking of the country as really progressive. And now the past is past. The future is before us. Sir Cecil has sent down his Commissioner to report; the Supreme Government has ordered an inquiry. Better still, we read (December 17) that Government has authorized a public works loan of six millions sterling for Bombay. More will be wanted in other parts; and it must not be jobbed away, nor frittered away. England is at last awake to her duties and her responsibilities. The great thing is to keep her awake; and so to bring, not a spasmodic impulse, but a constant pressure to bear on the people out there. The work is well begun: will it be carried on energetically? We have for some time been trying to make amends for long years of Indian misrule. We have made mistakes: the rock on which we constantly split is that we try to fix English notions on people who care not for them, and cannot even understand them. Here, however, is a matter on which all, native and European, are agreed. Let it never again have to be said of us that in India "the hand soon grows stiff and the heart cold; and the newest philanthropist finds he must not only tread in the footsteps, but also do over again the work of his predecessor" (Mead, p. 206). Here, then, is the plain statement of the case, set forth with as little sensation writing as is compatible with the effort to bring it before English eyes. And for us the resulting duty is plain. We must insist on it, in and out of Parliament, that such a change is made as shall guard us against any more Orissa famines. If India is to be governed from Westminster Palace Hotel, it must be efficiently governed. But whatever we do, do not let us go whining into our churches, and piously say of those whom our mismanagement has killed by the hundred thousand, that they died by the visitation of God. HENRY STUART FAGAN. 9000 STANDING BEFORE THE LORD'S TABLE. The Rubrical Determination of the Celebrant's Position. A Letter to the The North-Side of the Altar. By R. F. LITTLEDALE, M.A., LL.D., Priest The Priest at the Altar. By an English Priest. Parkers. 1865. WANT of space cut short our examination of Dr. Littledale's Essay, and prevented our entering upon the further question whether the rubric of 1662 intended the priest to stand "before the table" during the prayer of consecration. Meanwhile we have another plea for the western "position of the celebrant" by Mr. Walton, in a letter to Mr. Carter, who announced its appearance in the most recommendatory terms. Mr. Walton himself explains the reasons of its publication (p. 1): "The importance which many persons attribute to a right understanding of our Eucharistic Rubrics, as bearing upon the Celebrant's position, and the evidence which has reached me from several quarters that certain existing "The North Side of the Lord's Table,". Contemporary Review, October, 1866, vol. iii., p. 256. The reader is requested to correct "outward conformity" (second line, second paragraph), p. 257, and to read "conformity in externals." Dr. Littledale has announced a sixth edition, "revised and expanded, and containing answers to the ingenious arguments of Mr. Droop and Mr. Elliott." Both of these pamphlets are well worth the attention of those who take an interest in this subject. We should have found them very valuable if they had been published when we undertook to examine the question of the north side. Guardian, October 10, 1866, p. 1048. |