WHAT IS HINDOOISM?

Colonist, Volume II, Issue 105, 22 October 1858, Page 4

WHAT IS HINDOOISM?

• . (From Hie Weekly Dispatch. We talk of our Australian, our Canadian, or South African.colonies. But when we turn our eyes to the East, we speak of our Indian empire. The former are occupied by Anglo-Saxons. Our own countrymen •are their inhabitants. They are a law unto themselves. ' Each region is entrusted with all the functions of independent action. The inhabitants are armed with the whole functions of self-government. The Queen's subjects have their own Parliament, elected by themselves, and paramount over the Governor nominated by the Crown, and the officers of the State, or of the mothercountry. The franchise of freemen is made an inseparable incidence of mere habitancy and allegiance. AH who pay taxes and perform the duties of citizenship are, in the eye of our constitution* equal before the law y every subject who owns the Queen's allegiance is encompassed with the rights which are implied in the equivalent duties of free vassals of our English Crown. Every Englishman is free to settle in them —carries thither all the prerogatives which gird him in the mother country. Every British subject, "of whatever clime, complexion, or degree," can freely travel or buy and occupy land in any of these colonies. Even in the West Indies, the former African slave is now the British citizen, represents in the colonial legislature white men, judges his former owners on # the bench, or instructs them from the pulpit. Two exceptions there are to this rule. The Hudson's Bay Company recognises no right of British citizenhood within their territories —will suffer as few Europeans as possible to settle within their bounds. They have no Parliament or responsible Government. The directors of the joint adventure are lords paramount of their territory. They alone govern. No man can set foot in or colonise on the soil without permission of the Company. He must leave whenever he is so required. So it is in India— so it is called, not a British colony, but " our Eastern empire." There is no representation within its borders—no citizenhood —no suffrage"—no popular control. The country is the Company's and the fulness thereof. There are subjects, but no rights -^-citizens, but without liberty or prerogatives. No Press—no free speech—no Senate—no rulers responsible to the ruled. The Governor-General is only a delegated tyrant —a deputed autocrat. .There is no State—no constitution—no suffrage—no accountability. There is only boundless authority, annexation, appropriation, conquest, usurpation. The ruled have no rights—the rulers no accountability. These features of an absolute monarchy have hitherto excluded these " dependencies of the British Crown" from the category of our colonial system. We have disowned and disclaimed them. They have formed no portion of our constitutional economy. They exist without our privity. We treat the acts of their rulers only as we would those of British subjects in a foreign country* They are the property and patrimony of those who subdued them. They are emphatically the dominion of directors and proprietors. We have, interfered, not as lords paramount of the soil, but only as diplomatic protectors of our subjects. The trading companies who acquired them are their tyrants, rule them as conquerers and owners, not as citizens responsible to their fellow subjects. They were not within the pale of our constitution; they were excepted from the category of our laws. Whatever disgrace attached to such a commercial dictatorship rested solely with the dictators. England did not reign in Hindostan or within the fur regions; it did no more than watch over and adopt the supremacy of the companies. It is now proposed "to terminate this government by joint adventure. It is resolved that India should at once become an integral portion of the British empire. This entirely exceptional system of foreign acquisition is to be incorporated into our imperial economy. Nothing is now to intervene between England and the shame of such a rule. We are to stand towards India in the character, right, and place hitherto assumed: by and permitted to the East India Company. It is in gazette language to be England to be -autocrat vice Leadenhall-street, superseded^ / When the United States acquire new territory, they uniformly bestow on it American institutions at once. Texas, California, all the new regions acquired, conquered, or settled, have been endowed with a liberal constitution and self-govern-ment on the spot. After a certain probation, and the settlement, of an adequate population, they are made independent equal Fedeial States, and admitted into all the privileges and prerogatives of the Union, sending members to Congress and delegates to the Senate. What is our own process ? No colony of ours has any voice in our Senate'; our dependencies have had to give members of our Parliament salaries ' as their agents, and we have only gradually modified the corrupting influences of trusting colonial patronage in the hands of ministers by the jealousy of each colony insisting upon appropriating all offices to natives of the particular dependency, and gradually achieving, against every effort of the Ministers of the mother-country, entire self-control, and the complete mastery over the nominees of the Crown. Our proposed method of dealing with India is not consistent with any form of government recognised by the past policy of this country. We do not absorb it into our own system; we do not hand over to it independent institutions; we do not separate it from our.lmperial Administration, and leave its anomalies to be dealt with by the "company of merchant adventurers trading to the East Indies." England, the parent and model of free countries —the . exemplar of the fitness of mankind for civil and religious liberty,—that professes to teach the nations how to live—that has ever stood up for peoples against rulers — tfrat has been the .of Constitutional Government and the dread of tyrants

—that rebuked the Court of Spain for its ..oppression, and withdrew its ambassador from Naples because of the tyranny of the Sovereign—that pretended, at least, sympathy with Poland and Hungary, and recognised the French Republic—that suppresses the slave trade, and gave twenty millions to strike fetters from the African— that England that sneers at Legree and goes to war with Russia for its aggressions, and taunts Brother Jonathan with the lies of his declaration of independence—that same England is now to stand before the world, and her former self, face to face with this plain fact, that she is to hold 180,000,000 of her subjects, whom her mercenaries call "niggers," by sheer force of conquest, in the iron vyce of a purer military despotism than ever disgraced Rome herself. In her government of that vast region her subjects are to be as entirely ignored as slaves in New Orleans. They are" to have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; nothing with the taxes but to pay them; they are to be levied by the bayonet, assessed by drum-head discretion, appropriated by strangers, paid to foreign mercenaries, and the whole people are to be as entirely beyond the pale of their own Administration as if they had no existence , whatever. No trust to be reposed in them, no faith or honor credited to them, no responsibility or ambition, " that last, infirmity of noble minds," stirred in them, no hope held out to them, no prospect opened to them, except as the arms of servility, the bribe of their subserviency. For them there is to be no country that shall inspire patriotism, no cause to live or die for, no prize to be great, scarcely any motive to be good. The springs of action which rouse men to self-assertion, and animate them to heroism and self-sacrifice, the levers by which society and Providence » —The clear spirit doth raise, To acorn delights and live laborious days— without which nations are but animals, and existence mere sensation, and progress is impossible—these India is to know no more; and England, that cants about oppressed nationalities in Europe, and acquits Bernard with infinite self-applause, is to extinguish the very name in the East. The Rubicon is passed; the wooden horse is drawn within our citadel; the murmur of armed treachery may be heard within its trunk.. Not for India, but for a nobler country and a greater race we tremble. A thousand Hindostans would not compensate the human race for the destruction of the character and virtue of England. Not even by our Parliament is the vast Eastern Empire to be ruled. On nine or eighteen wooden pegs are a like number of. salaries to be hung. A fifth part of the human race are to be governed in a counting-house of clerks, by single and double entry. A secretary and his precis writers are to reign over an empire, as warehousemen deal out calicos from their Manchester floors. At least three thousand places per annum will be at the disposal of our Indian Councilmen. Twentyfive thousand Englishmen will yearly be drawn from the mother country to repair the waste of an Oriental climate. Every man will go with the design to draw all he can from the country, and retire to England with the spoil. What sort of Englishman will he have become on his return, trained in absolutism, habituated to despise the conquered .race, pampered with the hollow homage of abject servility, accustomed to call all around him niggers, to tread upon and despise the ministers to his luxury, and the passive victims of his power and his exactions? It was by drawing the wealth of the world to Rome that the people were degraded to be the corrupted tools of privileged orders, and to combine with tlie bureaucratic order to crush the middle-classes. What were the tributes of the Roman provinces to the riches of the Indies? Talk of household suffrage! Did it save the electors of Rome from sneaking after the nobility 5 whining for holidays, peck loaves and beer ? England, fed by the plunder of Eastern tribute not honestly earned or fairly bartered, will become like the loafer freemen and rowdy voters of our boroughs, trusting to the casual and eleemosynary windfalls of illgotten spoil, in place of the certain returns of regular and honorable industry. Our own columns, lately, in noticing the trial of the King of Delhi, state that: " One result of this trial will ,be to show what slender hope there is of the European ever obtaining the confidence or sympathy of the natives. It will prove that an organised conspiracy can go on for months under our very noses, and that not a native will be found to betray it; that, in short, we are looked upon by all classes as a common enemy; and that the boasted benefits of our European government, far from being appreciated, would be gladly exchanged for the tyranny and oppression of;,a Mahometan despotism." Such is the foundation of our claim to confer the benefits of a British dictatorship upon the ungrateful objects of our universal philanthropy ! The nation that holds ,a general jubilee for the noble stand made by a British jury oh behalf of European nationalities and oppressed patriotism, rules a fifth part of the human race^by a board of official stipendiaries reigning by bayonets and parks of artillery, even now razing great cities to the ground, burning villages by the thousand, "hanging like fun," without even the form of trial, all who have the manliness to think they have rights to assert or a country to love, sanctifying every enormity by ,the .tyrant's plea ofnecessity, and robbing a nation of its liberty to promote its prosperity. So it has pleased this British people, and all that remains for those who deprecate the policy is now. to make the best of it. The mission of England is now to educate India to the faculty of self-government,— to hasten the time when it shall be ruled, not in London by a Board, but in Calcutta by a native Parliament; when the desolating superstition of perverted Brahminism shall be superseded,'-first, by the anqient

and much purer and more intelligent faith of the Veds, and then by its natural completion and successor, Christianity,—-to rule by clemency, love, and reason, not by ignorance and terror —in a word, to make make -India worthy to be part and parcel of the British Empire. Hindooism contains within its own history the sources of the regeneration of India, and, as a guide to our future policy, we propose to explain what it is.