THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA:

A REVIEW OF THE LIFE AND WORKS OF GARCIN DE TASSY.

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HE Academy is accustomed on the anniversary of its foundation to recall the memory of those of its members who have died during the past year. On the present occasion a name occurs among them, for which I hope to gain the special interest of this honoured assembly. His work transcended the usual narrow circle of learned labour; he took an international position; he was the interpreter and spokesman of a great people, one of the most energetic and influential of the many learned intermediaries between East and West. His name is closely bound up with a popular movement, already in its beginnings powerful and full of promise, and will long be named and honoured even more on the banks of the Ganges than of the Seine, where he lived and died.

Joseph Heliodore Garcin de Tassy, born at Marseilles, January 25th, 1794, came to Paris as early as 1817, where he had the good fortune to be received into the school of the first Orientalist of his day, the illustrious and many-sided Sylvestre de Sacy. It was here that his determination was matured to devote himself wholly and permanently to Oriental studies. Sacy, who soon recognised the value of the young man, induced the Government to erect in 1828 a new chair for the Hindostance languages, which had not before been taught in Paris, and to appoint Garcin professor. For fifty years he worked on unwearied, and undisturbed by all the political changes and catastrophes, by word of mouth and by writing, for the extension of a knowledge of Oriental language and literature, and for promoting the harmony of East and West. Numerous students have gone forth from his lecture-room into all parts of the world; many of them are now living and working in An address delivered before the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences at Munich, March 28, 1879.

England, and still more in India, where he is held in grateful honour and the journals have made his portrait familiar.

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Every educated Frenchman looks with pride on the Institute of France, in its five divisions, as the intellectual ornament of his country, and a creation which finds no parallel in any other nation. He sees in it universal corporation, embracing every department of science, every sphere of intellectual aspiration. It is through his reception into one of its branches that a scholar receives in the eyes of his countrymen his consecration and the patent of his scientific rank. In the sad times of the second Empire it was the sole remaining fortress of intellectual freedom; and although the literary opposition of the whole Constitutional school was concentrated and brought to a point there, the Government, elsewhere so harsh and imperious, shrank from making any violent assault on the learned Corporation. His reception into the Institute, of which he was a member for above forty years, forms a brilliant epoch even in Garcin's life. He was elected in 1838 into Talleyrand's place. The Academy might well be congratulated on this exchange; for, if his predecessor has signalized himself by the saying that "language was given to men to conceal their thoughts," he, on the contrary, was full of a noble, gentle, yet courageous sense of truth. I know few Frenchmen in whom national idiosyncrasy and narrowness were so thoroughly subordinated to cosmopolite feeling and an unselfish love of humanity. Nor was there in him any trace of that partly personal, partly national vanity, which we so often smile at as a French infirmity.

Garcin's writings consist either of grammatical matter or of translations from the Persian, Arabian, and Indian. His special preference was for the language and speculations of Sofism. His reputation in India rests chiefly on two out of his many works, which are also the most noteworthy and instructive for us. The one is his "History of Hindoo and Hindostanee Literature," published in a second and greatly enlarged edition in 1870; the other is his collection of annual Reports on Hindostanee Language and Literature. The first is a repository in three stout volumes of a literature to a great extent still very young, but very copious in the domain of poetry and of religious matters, related to the Persian and, like it, permeated with the ideas of Sofism, as it is peculiar to Islam, but yet finds its basis in Brahminism. This literature cannot indeed be compared for importance and value to the old Indian, the Sanscrit works; but it is the intellectual mirror of so many millions in a middle stage of culture, and it is only to be wished that it might receive more attention than hitherto in Germany, for our associate Trumpp, if I am not mistaken, is the only person who has seriously taken it in hand.

Garcin's second work comprises those Introductory Discourses and Reports on Indian Language, Literature, and Life, with which he used every year to open his course. They began in 1850, and were at first

short addresses, but grew into reviews of the whole intellectual life and development of the Indian Empire. His lucid and interesting Reports, based on Indian authorities, which he constantly quotes, deal with the question of language, so important for India, the state of the serial press, the movements in the religious sphere, mission work, the labours of literary societies, and the efforts of the Government for school and popular education. There was nothing of the kind in India, and so much the more eagerly were his reports read, quoted, and translated there, so that the Paris professor became an authority for the Hindoos, and his statements were appealed to and discussed in the native journals.

It is not easy for a Frenchman to do full justice to the position and administration of England in India. He cannot forget that France and England once contended for the possession of that fair and wealthy land, that there was a moment when it seemed doubtful whether France would not win the vast inheritance. It was not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, Dupleix, who first undertook to make conquests in India with an army composed of natives. Yet the aspect of the present condition of the world brings home to Frenchmen the question so unwelcome to their patriotism, why it is that in whatever region French and English aims and arms have come into conflict their own nation has had to succumb, while the British remained masters of the field, alike on the Ganges, in Canada, in the West Indies, and in Egypt.

Meanwhile, the clearness and freedom of Garcin's cosmopolite breadth of view and his love of truth would not allow him to mistake the greatness of this British creation, or to underrate its value. His reports

and reviews, indeed, have done more than any English work known to me to rouse the admiration of the reader for this political edifice. The Empire of British India is so extraordinary a phenomenon, and it is so unique and unparalleled in the history of the world, that it fills the beholder with perpetual astonishment, and constrains him to reflect on the ways and means by which this marvellous edifice was constructed and so firmly consolidated.

Nature has defined the greatness, the unity, and the limits of this giant Empire by the Himalaya range on the north, the sea on the east, south, and west. It embraces a fifth part of the entire human race; its mistress is throned on an island thousands of miles away, and this nation of 240,000 000 is ruled by a handful of some 30,000 strangers, whose native land was still marsh and forest, and their forefathers clothed in the skins of wild animals, when India already possessed an uncommonly rich and highly elaborated language, great epic poems, philosophical systems, and a social order based on religion. And their foreign rulers are divided from their subjects by everything which elsewhere associates and binds men together, by race, colour, religion, language, manners, and customs; they do not come with the intention of settling and taking root in the country, but rather with the

view of leaving it again after their work is done, and have therefore neither the desire nor the expectation of ever becoming fused in one social community with the natives.

We look in vain for any similar phenomenon either in the past or in the present. The Roman Empire in its best days did not include half the existing population of India; it was for long periods a mere barren military domination; the majority of its emperors lie under the ban of history, and it passed through growing impoverishment and depopulation to its inglorious fall, while apart from extraordinary calamitiesthe population of British India increases-if the statements published by Anglo-Indian authorities may be relied upon-by twenty-four millions every year.* The Califate was, indeed, from the eighth to the eleventh century, a world-wide empire, extending from the Indus to the Pyrenees, but it rested on the oppressive and soul-killing power of a fanatically intolerant religion, forced on the natives at the sword's point; its history is chiefly made up of an endless series of religious wars and palace revolutions, while the gifts it bestowed on its subjects were despotism, the domestic economy of the harem, the degradation of the female sex, and in the higher classes the destruction of family life. In the present

Indian Empire, on the contrary, there has never been a quarrel among the rulers, a disputed succession is impossible, and no one has ever been persecuted or even placed at a disadvantage on account of his faith. Still sharper is the contrast between the former dominion of Spain in South and Central America, and that of British India. The Spanish was a colonial empire; the natives were distributed as slaves by the colonists through their system of Encomiendas,† crushed under the burden of compulsory service, completely exterminated on the islands, and destroyed by millions in Peru and Mexico. In India, on the contrary, the English have not sought to become colonists and landowners. The tropical climate itself makes that impossible; no English family stays there to the third generation, and parents are obliged to send their children to a cooler climate to be brought up. Fortunately, alike for England and for India, there are no Creoles, nor Mulattoes, Mongrels, Tertiaries, and Quaternaries, or by whatever other name the bastard races and half-breeds may be called. In a word, to compare the Spanish and English rule over subject nations would be-to use the Persian simile-like comparing the kingdom of Ahriman to that of Ormuzd.

It was a peaceable Company of English merchants in search of money who first set foot in India at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They had no thought of acquiring land, but only wanted to carry on money transactions. They built factories, but gradually found that in an unsettled country their factories must be fortified. From strong fortresses they grew into flourishing and populous cities; and the in[There must obviously, as the author himself suspected, be some mistake here.] [See Helps's "Spanish Conquest in America," vol. i. p. 197.]

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habitants were obliged in self-defence to begin to arm themselves and the natives in their pay. Before long they were drawn into the quarrels and contests of the native princes; they were sought and made use of, and then again dreaded and attacked. Almost against their will they developed into a ruling power in the country. It was not till It was after ninety years, in 1689, that it occurred to them as advisable for the Company to acquire land and subjects. But thenceforth this was regarded as the chief object, to which commercial business was subordinate. The transformation of a mercantile Company, in spite of itself, into a mighty conquering power, was due to a brave adventurer, who soon proved to be a great general and statesman-Clive. But he enlarged the Anglo-Indian dominion much more through treaties and cessions of territory than by mere conquest. The empire of the Great Mogul had, after a brief period of splendour, been brought to an end through the wickedness of its own princes and the power of the Mahrattas, which in turn soon succumbed to its own internal discords. The European rival powers of Portugal, Holland, and France could no longer hold their ground in India; they were obliged to retire, or to suffer the loss of all but mere fractions of what they held before. Meanwhile the English power was steadily advancing, for it was impossible to stand still: each fresh conquest by the law of self-preservation led to another. This Company was an unwieldy, helpless machine, which the Hindoos could only regard as an old woman, an Indian Begum ; but it was managed by a succession of excellent generals, who hold a place in history as unique as that of the Empire they built up. From time to time orders were sent out to them from London to desist, but the internal distraction and despotic barbarism of the separate States left them no choice; the British dominion increased in geometrical progression. The Company is now dissolved, and India is part and parcel of the possessions of the British Crown; for the last twenty years an Empire, in population and area the second in the world, yielding only to China; in power and readiness for action the first in Asia.

The year 1857, with its military mutiny and the sudden revolt of the Sepoys, put the strength of the Empire to a severe test; its continued existence was called in question, and very many, both in Asia and in Europe, thought its destruction inevitable. It passed through the ordeal splendidly and triumphantly. The masses took no part in the revolt, the higher classes and vassal princes remained loyal to the Government, the faults and mistakes which had paved the way for the insurrection and rendered it possible were recognised, and a beneficent spirit of investigation and self-knowledge was roused in both the military and civil administration. It could not be denied that in the founding and enlargement of this Empire there was a large admixture of violence and wrong. In Macaulay's words: "During the great conquest English power first appeared in India without English morality; some time had