and before he had been a year in the country; there is not a department of the State but has been galvanised vivified by that all - pervading energy. "The pace has been quickened, the standard raised." Let it not be supposed that the noble sentiments which ushered in this great Viceroyalty, and with which from time to time during the last seven years the Viceroy has expounded the principles of government, were words only, unsupported by a substantial edifice of deeds accomplished. It is impossible here to attempt to deal in detail with the many and varied measures that have been undertaken and brought to maturity, but some of the more important and striking may be briefly reviewed, and these will suffice to show how fully Lord Curzon's love of India, its people, and its history has borne fruit in the results of his administration. to practise the precepts which he preached. "My view of every question," he declared in addressing the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce in February 1903, "is that the way to deal with it is to understand it, and the way to understand it is to dig down to the bed-rock of concrete fact and experience." This sentence gives us an epitome of the manner of Lord Curzon's work in India, just as his declaration of faith before he left England indicated the spirit which has ever prompted that work. The range of his inquiries and investigations, the extent of the reforms and legislation undertaken by him, are astonishing; but far more astounding is the grasp which he has displayed of every subject however intricate it might be, the knowledge of detail however small, and yet at the same time the breadth and liberality of his view. Well might he claim, when he left India last year, "Reform has been carried through every branch and department of the administration; abuses have been swept away, anomalies remedied, the pace quickened, and standards raised." There lies the secret of his immediate success. Great as have been many of the reforms which he has carried through, their full effect will not, in many cases, be realised for years to come, by reason of their very greatness and far-reaching character; but the influence of Lord Curzon's indomitable number of important measures energetic enthusiasm, to which Lord Curzon has addressed himself has been doubled and even trebled; but will, Soon after he assumed office he took occasion to inform his Council that he had already compiled a list of twelve important reforms to which he hoped to address himself while in India; two years later, when some of the twelve had already been dealt with, he enumerated the whole list, and indicated the action which he proposed to take on those which had not yet been touched. Since that time the original twelve have all been disposed of, and the the original dozen contain some of the most striking as well as the most important, and from amongst them most of our instances may be drawn. Foremost in importance-according to the Viceroy's own classification, which no one is likely to dispute was "the creation and pursuit of a sound Frontier Policy." Every one will remember that in 1897 several years of almost continuous disturbance and warfare on the Punjab frontier culminated in an outbreak which extended from Waziristan in the west to Swat and Buner in the north, which was prolonged for a period of nearly nine months, and was so serious as to necessitate the employment of a very large proportion of the available field army of India. The fanaticism and fury of this outbreak were undoubtedly the direct consequence of the policy with regard to Chitral, but beyond this was the equally fatal fact that for years the Government of India had had no definite or continuous policy at all with regard to the frontier. The advocates respectively of the "forward policy" and the "Lawrence policy" argued interminably and prevailed by turns. When the former were in the ascendant, the British soldier "trailed his coat" in isolated outposts, from the Black Mountain to the Gomal Valley; when the other side in turn obtained the upper hand, a general scuttle from all outlying positions proclaimed to the tribesmen the nervousness of the party in power. When Lord Curzon assumed the Viceroyalty, the "forward policy" was the order of the day, and he found that small British garrisons were holding isolated positions, all more or less untenable against serious attack, in the Swat Valley, in the Khyber, in Kurram, on the Samana, and in Waziristan. As he himself put the case when revising his policy last year: "We seemed likely once more to tread the vicious circle that has beguiled us so often before." One of his first cares was to inaugurate the policy on which he had already set his heart, and which he has summed up in these principles: "Withdrawal of British forces from advanced positions; employment of tribal forces in the defence of tribal country; concentration of British forces in British territory behind them, as a safeguard and a support; and improvement of communications in rear." The novel and striking feature of this policy was the employment of tribal forces to hold that tribal country which had hitherto been occupied only by small detachments of British troops. It was the application to the frontier of the principles of conciliation, of treating the frontier tribes with sympathy and with confidence, "as if they were men of like composition with ourselves," to which Lord Curzon had already expressed his adherence. It was an experiment not without risk, and many were found to prophesy its failure. But, nothing daunted by gloomy prog nostications, the Viceroy proceeded to carry out his scheme. Frontier levies and tribal militias were raised, officered by Englishmen, and gradually replaced the British garrisons all along the frontier. Of course there were difficulties and checks here and there, but there has been no serious breakdown in the pursuance of the policy. For seven years there has been no tribal outbreak, nor any military operations worthy of the name, and when it is stated that between 1852 and 1898 scarcely any consecutive two years passed without such outbreaks operations, it will at least be conceded that Lord Curzon's frontier policy bids fair to prove more successful than what went before it. or Closely connected with that policy was the partition of the Punjab, and the creation of the North-West Frontier Province -a measure which was strongly opposed at the time, and the necessity for which is still denied by many. Lord Curzon's object was to bring the question of the defence of the frontier more directly under the Government of India than could be the case when the authority of a local administration intervened, and this object has successfully been attained, and with good political results. His opponents declare that the new province has too small an administration to give opportunities for healthy life, and that internal development will be sacrificed to the more interesting duties of political charge. The point is not one which need be argued here, nor is it of an importance at all comparable with the question of the preservation of peace on the Indian borders and the establishment of good relations with the frontier tribes. If, as seems likely, Lord Curzon's policy shall prove to have solved this difficult problem, it may be counted as one of his principal triumphs. Another reform which is prominent amongst the measures of the last seven years, in view of its effect upon the prosperity of India, is is the establishment in that country of a gold standard. Most people at home have heard something more or less vaguely of the depreciation of the rupee and the consequent losses to India, but no one who was not in the East some twelve to eighteen years ago can at all realise what these words mean. The continuous and incalculable fluctuations in the value of the rupee from day to day were not only fraught with incessant inconvenience to traders and even to private persons in the relations of daily life, worse than this, they resulted in an atmosphere of uncertainty and instability in all commercial matters which was fatal to economic progress; and, above all, this unfortunate instability so discredited India in the eyes. of owners of capital at home that it was impossible to induce them to put money into undertakings in that country, however profitable, and all industrial and commercial development was starved for want of funds. Then, in 1893, came the closing of the Indian mints, which up to that time had been open to the free and unlimited coinage of silver. This measure, undertaken by Lord Lansdowne on the advice of his able finance minister Sir David Barbour, was the first step towards the recovery of the situation, and paved the way for Lord Curzon's legislation of 1899, by which a gold standard was established and the currency system started that, in the course of a few months, practically fixed the exchange value of the rupee at 16d. Since that time Lord Curzon has gone further, and has created a gold reserve fund which has risen from three millions in 1900 to nearly seven millions in 1904; while the currency reserve fund, which is intended to secure the stability of the Indian note circulation and to meet any demand for gold, has now reached the considerable total of upwards of ten and a half millions sterling. No measures or reforms have done more than these to improve the credit and the financial position of India. The distrust which formerly existed has not yet been wholly laid to rest, and British capitalists have not yet come to appreciate what a rich field for enterprise exists in our great dependency. In no quarter is that "colossal ignorance" concerning India, about which Mr George Wyndham spoke last session, more marked than amongst our financiers; but that this ignorance will ere long be dispelled cannot be doubted, and to this end the financial policy of Lord Curzon has already largely contributed. Nor was his currency reform the only direction in which Lord Curzon assisted the commercial development of India. The attainment of this object has been constantly prominent amongst his schemes of improvement as well as amongst his less public acts during his tenure of office. He spared no pains to bring the mineral and commercial wealth of the country to the notice of a wider public than that existing in the East. By personal effort he facilitated relations between the Government and the commercial community, he quickened the somewhat ponderous procedure of Government offices, and laboured "to purge the administration from the reproach of dilatoriness or indifference to commercial development." More than this, by the imposition during the first few months of his Viceroyalty of countervailing duties on imported sugar in order to protect the indigenous sugar industry from the overwhelming competition of State-aided beet sugar from continental Europe; by the passing of an Act for the better control and regulation of mines; by the institution of a Mining Department, and the issue of more liberal mining rules; by the development of the coal industry and by measures for facilitating its carriage; and by various efforts to open up new trade relations between India and her neighbours, or to improve those al ready existing,-by all these measures has Lord Curzon evinced his sympathy with the commercial classes of India and endeavoured to assist and develop its industries. Finally, the present year has witnessed the accomplishment of a reform for which he has laboured for some time past, namely, the constitution of a new department of Government, under a separate Member of Council, for the special purpose of dealing with all matters connected with Commerce and Industry. This measure promises to have important results. "We must have special departments," Lord Curzon declared in 1903, "and special men over them, to deal with special jobs, instead of allowing technical subjects to be dealt with at the end of a day's work by a tired-out civilian." This enlistment of the services of specialists is a noticeable feature of the late Viceroy's policy. It has been applied to Education, Architecture, Archæology, and-most important of all-to Agriculture. It has already been remarked that Lord Curzon's enthusiastic and active sympathy was shown to none more warmly than to the vast masses of the agricultural population. No one also recognised more clearly than he how much the prosperity of those classes, "the bone and sinew of our strength" as he called them, means to the prosperity of India. During his first year in India he was confronted with a famine which, within the range of its incidence, was the severést that the We country had ever known. cannot here go into the statistics of this terrible visitation, but an idea of its extent and its severity may be gathered from the statements that it affected an area of 400,000 square miles, and a population of 60 millions. "It was not merely a crop failure, but a fodder famine on an enormous scale, followed in many parts by a positive devastation of cattle-both plough cattle, buffaloes, and milch kine. In other words, it affected, and may almost be said to have annihilated, the working capital of the agricultural classes." Moreover, it followed so closely upon the prolonged famine of 1896-97, and in so many cases affected the same area, that the distress, destitution, and disease which it occasioned were greatly aggravated. Coming as it did when the eyes of English people all over the world were fixed with deep anxiety and concern upon the war in South Africa, it attracted less attention and enlisted less sympathy at home than would at any other time. have been the case; but in India it engrossed the whole attention of Government, and placed a terrible strain upon Indian resources and officials. That it was combated with a success and an energy unsurpassed nay, more, unprecedented-in Indian history, was due no less to the personal efforts of the Viceroy than to the experience gained from the unhappy lessons of the previous few years. It hardly needs to be added that this energetic action was fully |
