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Henry Mayers Hyndman

The Record of an Adventurous Life

Chapter X
India

Shortly afterwards I began my studies of India seriously. I had met James Geddes, the hero of the famine in Orissa, in 1866, two or three years before, and had read his pamphlet The Logic of Indian Deficit, being a reprint of his evidence before the committee of the House of Commons. But this had, for the time being, passed out of my mind, and I approached the economics and politics of India by quite another route. At this period, though I was a thorough Radical and democrat in home and colonial affairs, I held the profound conviction that British rule in India was beneficial to its peoples; that the suppression of the Mutiny, though disfigured by hideous English crimes, was on the whole justifiable; and that it was desirable to take the strongest possible measures to ward off from Hindustan the menace of Russian aggression. Even Geddes’ arguments failed to shake my belief in the beneficence of our rule.

And this perhaps was natural enough. I had been brought up in an atmosphere of imperialism, so far as India was concerned. My family on both sides had been closely connected with that great country for several generations. Colonel Hyndman disarmed M. Raymond’s force at the Nizam’s Court in 1802, close relatives of mine had held posts under the old East India Company, one of my uncles, General Prescott, had spent forty years of his life in the Company’s service in the Madras Presidency, and another uncle, Colonel Mayers, had gone up Central India with Sir Hugh Rose’s (Lord Strathnairn’s) column in its famous march during the Mutiny, in command of the 86th. So it was natural, as I say, that I should have the common opinion of the educated well-to-do class about our dominance in Hindustan.

Through my old college friend Robert Dobbs I made the acquaintance of one of the most remarkable men I ever encountered, though few appreciated the great faculties which I believe were latent in him, and with the exception of Sir John Gorst none, I think, remain in active life who were intimate with Tom Palmer of Hyderabad. He was a son of the head of the great banking house of Palmer & Co. of Hyderabad, ruined by Sir Charles Metcalfe; his mother was one of the princesses or Begums of the Moguls of Delhi. He looked it. Tall, powerful, and dark-complexioned, with keen eyes, a strong nose, magnificent teeth and a firm mouth and chin, his whole appearance was that of one who, in a stirring time, would be a capable and ruthless leader of men. He was far more proud of his Indian than of his English blood, though this was apparent rather from what he did not, than from what he did, say.

Strange stories were told of him which, though I never accepted them as true, could scarcely be regarded as impossible when studying his face in repose. One was that the incident related by Sir William Russell of a man of his blood, on the British side, left in charge of Allahabad during the Mutiny, applied to him. He had, so it was said, many creditors in that city when he entered upon his duties. There were none left when he gave up control. It had been necessary to hang them all for nefarious dealings with the enemy. I have never myself believed this of Palmer at all. When some one in London recounted it to him as laid to his charge, all he said was: “I heard that tale myself as I went up from Allahabad to Delhi.” But Apocryphal as the tale undoubtedly was, what Palmer actually did on one occasion here in London gives some idea of his determined character. He used to have chambers on the very top floor at 5 Paper Buildings, Temple. A certain Colonel of his acquaintance had contrived by misrepresentation and a long skilfully-laid plot to cozen Palmer out of £800. Palmer later learnt that this Colonel had come into possession of a considerable sum in ready money, which was lying at his bank. Palmer somehow contrived to inveigle this gentleman to his chambers. Once there the astonished colonel found himself looking into the muzzle of a .45 Colt revolver, with Palmer’s relentless eyes taking careful aim at the other end of the weapon. “Now,” quoth Palmer, “it took you, Colonel, eighteen months to rob me of that £800; it won’t take you five minutes to pay me back.” A cheque on the Colonel’s bank was ready drawn; within the five minutes, after some bootless expostulation, the Colonel duly signed it; a few seconds thereafter he was comfortably disposed of in the chambers, incapable temporarily of utterance or motion, and carefully locked in, while Palmer went out and cashed the cheque. Primitive in method, but effective in result.

Such was the man who, acting as confidential agent in London for the Nizam, led me to consider more carefully than I had considered hitherto our relations to the peoples of India. The matter in which he was interested was to obtain the restoration of the provinces known as the Berars to the ruler of Hyderabad. The grounds upon which such restoration was thought to be probable were:

1. The justice of the case itself;
2. the invaluable services rendered by Sir Salar Jung, the then Dewan or Prime Minister of Hyderabad, to the British Government during the Mutiny;
3. the fact that only a few years before, in 1868, Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote had returned Mysore to native rule;
4. the very favourable disposition of the Queen herself, who was kept privately informed as to the whole affair.

The justice of the case ought alone to have been sufficient to ensure success. The Government had indeed no answer whatever to the claim put forward. The facts and the correspondence were marshalled and summarised by Mr. Seymour Keay, whose pamphlet on Spoiling the Egyptians afterwards made so great a stir, and a more masterly presentment of a political demand was never made. But it was exceedingly voluminous and practically unreadable. Palmer asked me to go through the statements, and, if I were convinced of the soundness of the Nizam’s position, that I should put the whole thing into the form of a pamphlet. I read it all in detail, looked up the references, mastered the official arguments, and in the end I wrote a pamphlet on the subject entitled Indian Policy and English Justice.

There were some interesting and even amusing episodes in the course of the campaign which followed. Palmer, for example, was anxious to have a high legal opinion upon the whole case. So it was laid before a leading QC of the period, Karslake, I think, was his name. He gave his views on the matter in somewhat rhetorical form and wound up with the phrase, “But in State affairs of this kind the ultimate appeal, when all is said, must lie with the God of Battles.” Palmer, who chanced to be a little deaf, did not hear this last sentence; so, putting his hand to his ear, he leant forward, and addressing Karslake gravely asked, “To whom, sir, did you say the ultimate appeal in this important cause would lie?” And Karslake seemed a little annoyed that the others present all laughed. Meanwhile, as I say, not only the Government of the day but the Queen herself was kept in full touch with the Nizam’s pretensions.

This last underground communication was arranged through one Lothrein, whom Palmer had chanced to know well in Germany many years before, and who had been in the intimate confidence of Prince Albert. Lothrein’s influence over Queen Victoria may be judged by the fact that when all her Councillors, all her Court women, and even the illustrious John Brown himself had failed to induce this royal lady to sign State documents to the validity of which her signature was essential – and they would sometimes be left to accumulate for months at a time – Lothrein was sent for as a last resource. He did not relish the job at all; but he never failed by his personal influence and his touching appeals to the memory of “the great and good” to induce Queen Victoria whom three realms obeyed to fulfil the duties she was paid to perform. And in this matter of the Berars Lothrein, for old friendship’s sake, actively bestirred himself. The impropriety of the proceedings of the Government of India was laid bare before Queen Victoria herself in all its iniquity, and everything goes to show she was personally strongly in favour of justice being done. In fact, when Sir Salar Jung started from India for England, there can be little doubt that he came over with some pledge from the highest quarters that the Berars should be given back – as I don’t think any impartial reader of the evidence can deny they ought to have been – and that he should return in triumph to Hyderabad as the benefactor of his country.

But luck is everything in politics. No sooner did Salar Jung arrive in Europe than ill-fortune began to dog his footsteps. He fell downstairs at his hotel in Paris and broke his leg. This was not only a serious matter for him, as injuring his health and affecting his nerves, but it threw all arrangements behind on this side of the Channel. When he came to London, therefore, he was in no good physical or mental condition for his encounter with the India Office, which surrounded him with its agents and did everything possible to make him politically uncomfortable. He felt this and said sadly, “I am not the man in London that I am in Hyderabad.” Nevertheless, and in spite of all intrigues and mistakes, it was understood and agreed that when, at the close of his visit, the Dewan went down to Osborne to take his leave of the Queen he should formally ask for, and Victoria should herself concede, the restoration of the lost provinces. So Salar Jung went to the Isle of Wight on this historic mission, arrived at Osborne, and was at once ushered into the presence of the Queen as arranged. She, so it is averred, went forward three steps to meet him, and the Eastern Statesman was so overwhelmed by this act of condescension on the part of his Empress that he actually forgot to ask for the Berars at all. At any rate he did not get them and went back empty-handed to India.

My own opinion is that Sir Salar Jung had been threatened by certain personages in London as to what should befall Hyderabad, if he ventured to take advantage of the good dispositions of the British Government and the Queen, and that at the last moment, in his enfeebled state of health, his nerve failed him. In any case the Berars were not surrendered, and remain under British dominance to this day. Probably in the long run this was just as well, for their surrender would have given an entirely false impression of the intention of our middle class to do justice in other directions.

The contentions of the official apologists in favour of retaining possession of the Nizam’s provinces, in contravention of treaty rights and common honesty, were mainly based – as the God of Battles could not decently be called in as a final Court of Appeal on the record of official documents – upon the assumption that the people under British rule were much better off in every way than under native rule. I therefore set myself to inquire whether this was really the case, and I will say this, that I spared myself neither time, trouble, nor expense to enable me to arrive at the right conclusion. I began my investigations, as I have already said, with a strong feeling as to the beneficence of our rule in Hindustan, and I confined myself, in the first instance at least, to the study of official reports and histories and books written by Anglo-Indians of repute.

I discovered, to my astonishment and regret, that Report after Report and Commission after Commission proved the existence of such terrible and ever-increasing poverty among the agricultural population of India that I began to doubt whether our rule could possibly be as good as it was stated to be. The statistics of famine told on the same side, and I bethought me of Geddes’ views, which I had not before fully accepted, and read his pamphlet and evidence over again. Then I found that even such well-known men as Sir William Sleeman, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Lord Teignmouth, Major Evans Bell, Colonel Osborne, had been greatly troubled as to the steady impoverishment of the common people when they were transferred from native to European administration, and attributed this entirely to the defects of our administration.

I also went thoroughly into the figures of the Public Works Department, and was horrified at the extravagance, incompetence, and jobbery admitted to have gone on even by officials themselves. The methods of taxation were next examined, and these seemed to me bad in principle and very onerous in exaction. The subject quite overmastered me. Every minute of my spare time was given to India, and volumes of Blue Books on India filled up the house. Then came the series of frightful famines from 1876-1879, and I persuaded Greenwood to allow me to set forth my new opinions in his paper over my initial “H.” I had not written much before the letters made a stir.

People would not believe that what I stated was drawn entirely from official documents, without garbling or misrepresentation. A committee of the House of Commons was then sitting, of which Professor Fawcett, who had been my lecturer in Political Economy when I was at Trinity, chanced to be chairman. Mr. Fawcett had no idea, of course, who “H” was. But he wrote to the editor and requested that as “H” evidently knew much more about the Public Works Department and Indian finance generally than any of the witnesses who had given evidence, “H” should submit himself for examination. As, however, I had never been in India, and my knowledge had been obtained from sources open to all the world, Greenwood and I decided it was better I should not appear before the committee. I am inclined to think now this was a mistake. But the result was that Mr. James Knowles of the Nineteenth Century, learning that I was “H,” offered me as much space as I could want, in reason, to state my case in his Review. It was a great opportunity, and I resolved to take full advantage of it.

I have seen such strange coincidences occur during my long life that I am driven to the conclusion that we are unable to account for not a few of the incidents which greatly affect the current of our lives. The matter to which I now refer was an apparent trifle, yet it meant a great deal to the completeness of the case for India. I had finished my paper, and was about to send it off to the Nineteenth Century, feeling that I had not been able to put the statistical part of it as clearly and convincingly as it should have been put, when I strolled into Messrs. Kings, the Parliamentary booksellers, then in King Street, which has since been pulled down. I used at that time to go there frequently for Indian books and papers. As I left the shop I noticed a booklet from which the cover had been torn, and the words, The Poverty of India, in heavy black letters on a white ground, stared up at me. If the cover had remained I certainly should not have noticed it. “What is that?” I asked. “Only a mass of figures,” was the reply. I at once seized the little volume, and found that Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji had therein placed at my disposal precisely the statistics about India which completed my own work. The article was published under the title Mr. Knowles chose for it, The Bankruptcy of India, as the first paper in the Nineteenth Century for October 1878.

As I look back over those three-and-thirty years I wonder at the sensation it made. The article was immediately translated into nearly every European language, as well as into more than one of the Indian tongues. Upwards of thirty offers to reply to it from distinguished writers poured in upon the editor of the Nineteenth Century, and the subject was hotly discussed everywhere. I was told confidentially that I should be hopelessly crushed under the weight of metal that was being brought to bear upon me, and so on. But my years of reading and reflection on this great issue had given me confidence, and I felt sure I was right. Nevertheless, I awaited the criticisms with anxiety, fearful that I might have made some irretrievable blunder. My three principal antagonists were Sir Erskine Perry in the Nineteenth Century, Mr. John Morley in the Fortnightly Review, and Sir Juland Danvers in Fraser’s Magazine. I found it, however, even easier than I anticipated to reply effectively to my assailants, and the influence of my rejoinder was far greater than I could possibly have anticipated.

I had formulated in my mind a definite policy in regard to India and Asia generally, which called for the re-establishment of genuine Indian rule throughout Hindustan, under light English leadership, the terrible drain of produce without commercial return being stanched. Thus India from then onwards would, as I believed, have gained steadily in wealth and have become, on friendly terms with us, one of the finest Empires the world has ever seen. That, I say, was my belief then, that is still my conviction now. It would have been a magnificent attempt to make up for our criminal and ruthless plunder at the beginning, and the cold-blooded economic exploitation of the middle, of our regime, to have helped forward the splendid peoples of India to take up their rightful position in the world at its close. Having convinced myself that our system was injurious to India and really harmful to ourselves, I thought no time should be lost in remedying our blunders and in establishing a new system.

But I had another object in view which I only disclosed to a few friends and partly through them, and partly directly, to the statesmen who at this time agreed with me and were afterwards prepared to carry out the policy. During my travels in Australia and America, I had become of one mind with those who held that in the near future China would – at this period Japan was scarcely thought of – adopt European weapons and methods of warfare and claim all, and perhaps a good deal more than all, the territory she had ever held in Asia. The bulk of the population of India is of the same Aryan stock as our own and its inhabitants have good historic reasons for fearing Mongolian domination. A self-governing, powerful Empire of India, therefore, with her 300,000,000 of population, supported by Great Britain, would have presented a formidable barrier to any hostile Chinese movement, while there could be little danger of similar aggression on the part of the Indians themselves.

It seems strange at the present time, but it is nevertheless the fact, that at that period, following upon my reply to my critics, the Conservative Party accepted this policy. After all, this was no more than to carry out on a larger scale the principles which Lords Salisbury and Iddesleigh had already adopted in regard to Mysore. However that may be, those two noblemen, with Lord Cranbrook, who was then Secretary of State for India, and Mr. Edward Stanhope, the Parliamentary Under Secretary, as well as Sir Louis Mallet, the Permanent Under Secretary, whom I saw almost daily, were all in favour of making a new departure; and Mr. Edward Stanhope, who was my close personal friend, was kind enough to reserve for me a seat “under the gallery” in the House of Commons, in order that, as he pleased to say, “you may hear the beginning of your policy proposed to the House of Commons.”

I had seen before this a very great deal of Sir George Kellner, who was then Lord Salisbury’s confidential assistant at the Foreign Office, and he told me that Lord Salisbury was quite satisfied as to the soundness of my contentions; and Lord Iddesleigh more than once confirmed this view to me when I met him, as I frequently did then, in private society. Lord Cranbrook being also on the same side, I had good reason to hope that this policy would be pushed to its legitimate conclusion; as it seemed scarcely possible that, even if the Conservatives were defeated at a General Election, the Liberals, who always claimed to have a deep sympathy with India, would fail to take up and even to extend a systematic change thus publicly begun. If freedom was desirable for the Servians and Bulgarians, it could scarcely be less advantageous to the peoples of India with their ancient and glorious civilisation.

Unfortunately all these legitimate anticipations were entirely falsified. Immediately the Liberal Government took office after the General Election of 1880, every reform in India which the Conservatives had introduced was set aside, and all the old jobs and abuses were revived by Mr. Gladstone and Lord Hartington. This deliberate set-back arrested the whole current of events, and, sad to say, from that time to this the miserable system of draining India of her wealth to the extent of upwards of £30,000,000 a year for the benefit of the well-to-do classes in the United Kingdom – Ireland has had her full share in this nefarious business – and the crushing out of all initiative and vigour among the Indian population has been relentlessly kept up by both the English political factions. Though I have never ceased to work and agitate for India, this failure to continue my policy of justice and development in 1880 has always been for me the saddest disappointment of my life. But my experience in regard to our two factions is that, when in office, alike in India, in Egypt, and even in South Africa, outside of the infamous and disastrous Transvaal War, the Liberals are worse than the Tories. [1]

I have dealt at some length with this episode in regard to India, not only because of the vast importance of right dealing towards 300,000,000 of people but on account of an infinitely smaller matter, though interesting to some, the effect, namely, which it had upon my career. I may mention that from 1874 onwards I began to acquire a certain position in the world of journalism and letters, and the strong line I took against the pro-Russian party during the Russo-Turkish War, while putting me at variance with a certain school of Radicals, brought me into contact with others, some of whom became my intimate friends. I could not for the life of me see then, and I cannot see now, that the desire to emancipate Christian populations from the decaying domination of the Ottoman Turk was sufficient justification for supporting the growing and aggressive despotism of Russia. The latter seemed to me far the more dangerous at that time to European democracy, and this opinion was shared by many democrats, not only in the United Kingdom but throughout Europe. Anyhow, I took that side as vigorously as I could, and it amuses me now to know that many friends with whom later I became so closely associated, used to denounce my letters signed “H” on this subject as specially obnoxious, though they had no idea who the writer was.

The fight was a very bitter one, and aroused more ill-feeling between the opponents than anything I can remember except, perhaps, Home Rule and the Irish Land question, which came on a little later. One result of my activity against Russia was that I discovered that I could speak, and this discovery was made, of all places in the world, in the old St. James’s Hall. I had never opened my lips on a public platform before, and I began with an amount of nervous diffidence which was absurd on the part of a man of thirty-seven, who knew what he wanted to talk about and had something quite definite to say. However, much to my surprise, I found I got on very well with the audience, who apparently were sorry when I sat down. I should doubt whether anybody who has done such an amount of public speaking as I have ever began his apprenticeship to the platform at so late an age, and, even then, some three years elapsed before I took to agitation in earnest.

 
Chapter 11
 

Footnote

1. Although the late Duke of Devonshire, then Lord Hartington, knew that I was bitterly opposed to the policy of the Liberal Government in restoring all the old jobs in India which his Tory predecessors had begun to suppress, he, as Secretary of State for India, wrote me with his own hand the following letter to my house:–

 
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