Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “Though I thanked you for your speech a few days ago, I have always meant to write and tell you how glad I am to have a copy of it. If you will allow me to say so, the speech was a most eloquent one, and not only that, but it gave expression to opinions which, in my estimation, it is impossible to over-value. To me it seems all-important that the young men who are coming on, and who will make the history of Canada, should speak out clearly and decidedly in their insistence on the manliness and purity of public life. Nothing, in my opinion, can be more unfortunate to a country than that its people should be ready to accept as a matter of course a low standard of public and political morality.

  “I know how difficult it is from the nature of things for people to speak out as they would often like to do. At the same time I sometimes think that public opinion in Canada is too apathetic, and not prone enough to be outspoken on public affairs. Many of the best brains in the country are no doubt engaged in business and professions and are not available for political careers — but even they can make their voices heard; and I venture to think that more of them might be inclined to enter the political lists than do at present. Anyhow I am thoroughly with you in the all-importance of the pure public spirit of rising Canada.”

  Minto’s main task had been the harmonizing of forces which might well have clashed — the nationalism of Canada and the new self-conscious imperialism of Britain. Largely owing to his patience and tact any shadow of conflict was avoided. In the matter which he had most at heart, imperial defence, his prescient warnings were indeed neglected, but Canada was enabled to advance towards her national destiny unhampered by a too strait imperial bond, while at the same time the more potent and delicate ties with the mother-country were notably strengthened. In his term of office he had to deal especially with two distinguished figures who had a real formative effect on his mind. Of the two Mr. Chamberlain’s influence was perhaps the lesser. Minto respected him extremely, and shared most of his views; to him the Colonial Office without Mr. Chamberlain was like the War Office without Lord Wolseley; but in temperament the two had little in common except courage. Their relationship was one of mutual loyalty and respect, but scarcely of intimacy. With Sir Wilfrid Laurier, on the other hand, Minto frequently disagreed, and was often exasperated. He believed that excessive temporizing for the sake of party unity was bad tactics even for that purpose, and he had little patience with the type of mind which seemed to be content to govern adroitly from day to day without any policy worthy of the name. But it is impossible to read his letters and journals without realizing that there was growing up in him a feeling that after all Sir Wilfrid might be right — that in a new land, with so many incompatible elements inside her borders, the slow game might be the wise game, that the time was not ripe for a clenched and riveted formula of Empire, and that the true solution must be left to the processes of time. At any rate, lover of decided action as he was, in his public conduct the Whig element in Minto dominated the Liddesdale impetuosity, and it would appear that history has vindicated both him and his Prime Minister. Of the affection between the two men there was no question. Sir Wilfrid’s graciousness and charm won the heart of one who was always a lover of gentleness. Once Lady Minto, speaking of him to Mr. Chamberlain, said that, whatever his foibles, he was a great gentleman. “I would rather,” ran the reply, “do business with a cad who knows his own mind.” Minto would not have assented. Under no circumstances did he believe in the cad.

  BOOK III.

  CHAPTER 9. VICEROY OF INDIA, 1905-6

  AFTER his six strenuous Canadian years Minto hoped for a rest at home, and longed especially for that Border country life which lay always nearest to his heart. But a retiring Governor-General is not readily permitted to sink into the ease of a private citizen; he became the quarry of a thousand organizations in quest of a president or an apologist; and even when he escaped to Minto he found leisure hard to come by. He was busy with improvements on his estate, including the installation of electric light and the building of a new wing, and these, with a little hunting and a number of visits, filled his time in the winter and spring of 1904-5. In May he went to Rome, at the request of the Board of Agriculture, as one of the British delegates to the International Agricultural Congress, and after a brief stay returned in July to politics and dinners in London, including a banquet to his old tutor, Dr. Warre, on his retirement from the headmastership of Eton. By the 12th of August he was back at Minto, filling his days, like Sir Walter Scott, with the overseeing of his improvements. The place was in the hands of workmen, and he and his wife were installed in the factor’s little house at Cleughhead.

  Absorbed in domestic plans, and already half drawn into the machine of British affairs, Minto had almost forgotten the possibility of the Indian viceroyalty which had been mooted a year ago before he left Canada. There seemed to be many candidates, and it had been his fashion to wait in these matters upon the hand of Providence. Therefore it was with a real surprise that, on the morning of 18th August, as he was walking down to Minto before breakfast, he opened a letter from Mr. St. John Brodrick, which told him that Lord Curzon had resigned and that he was nominated as his successor. In the garden afterwards, when the hot August sun was beginning to drive the mist from the hills, he told his wife. “The greatest appointment I have ever hoped for,” he wrote in his journal, “and still what a pang to leave the dear old place again — and all the difficulties about the children. Mary took it so well. I know she feels the same as I do, and it is a recognition of all her good work quite as much as of anything I have ever done. But it is a very high trial.”

  The appointment was to be curiously informal in every detail. Minto never heard a word directly from the Prime Minister. The Prince and Princess of Wales were on the eve of departing for India, and it was arranged that Lord Curzon should meet them at Bombay, and that he should receive the incoming Viceroy in the same place instead of in Calcutta — a departure from precedent fraught with possibilities of contretemps. Minto paid a visit to the King at Balmoral, and then set himself to the exhausting business of farewells. He found it hard to tear himself from his home, which he had just recovered and beautified, for the spell of the Border grows the stronger for absence, and many of the old folk about the place he could not expect in the course of nature to see again. He had the regulation talks with Mr. Balfour, and with Mr. Brodrick, the Secretary of State for India, but as the Conservative administration was tottering to its fall these were naturally of a slighter character than usual. It was tacitly recognized that in a month or two he would be the servant of a very different government. He took counsel of the Nestor of imperial administration, Lord Cromer, “the only one among all the public men I know who has impressed me as a really big man.” There were the usual dinners — one, especially, composed entirely of old Eton, Cambridge, Army, and hunting friends, when Minto very modestly set out his hopes. “I am succeeding,” he said, “a brilliant ruler who, in perfecting the machinery of state, has given evidence of abilities and talents which no successor can hope to emulate. And yet my racing days have taught me that many a race has been won by giving the horse a rest in his gallops.” On 2nd November the Mintos left London, almost on the same day as seven years before they had sailed from Liverpool for Canada, and on the afternoon of 17th November arrived at Bombay.

  II

  When in 1806 the first Earl of Minto went to India as Governor-General, it was in succession — save for the brief interludes of Cornwallis and Sir George Barlow — to the great era of expansion under the Marquis Wellesley which had made the British Government paramount throughout the peninsula. His task was to consolidate what had been won, to join the raw edges which are left by change, and to make of the new order of things a harmonious and organic polity. The duty which fell to his descendant a century later was not dissimilar. The history of India does not permit itself to be summarized in a paragraph, but it is necessary to glance briefly at the decade which preceded Minto’s arrival.

  The age
of the conquering Viceroys ended with Dalhousie, and with him, too, began the succession of rulers who have given their minds to the development of the wealth of the land and the prosperity of the Indian people, for even the great reforming regime of Lord William Bentinck had been devoted rather to the elimination of old abuses than to positive advances in what the modern world calls civilization. The Mutiny obscured for a moment the work of the greatest figure among the Viceroys, who completed the task of Wellesley and continued the policy of Bentinck, but the foundations remained, and the India of to-day is in the main Dalhousie’s creation. The post-Mutiny governors, after the transference in 1858 of all India to the British Crown, had the same types of problem to face, which they dealt with after their individual fashions. They had the permanent question of frontier defence — the belt of wild tribes in the mountains of the North-West, the uncertain Power of Afghanistan, and the potential menace of Russia from beyond the trans-Himalayan deserts. They had the difficult business of finance, complicated by the falling rupee, and an intricate group of economic problems, dating from Dalhousie’s reconstruction. They had the more purely administrative questions, the efficiency of the civil service, the degree to which decentralization was possible, the nature and strength of the armed forces of the Crown, both British and native, and their relations to the civil government. And behind all, they had the problem of the Indian people, their education, the effect upon them of Western ideas, the question of how far and to what end they should be trained in political responsibility. Different Viceroys concentrated on different aspects of their task; Lytton was preoccupied with the frontier, Northbrook with finance, Ripon with the application to India of Gladstonian Liberalism, Dufferin with administrative reforms; and to the idiosyncrasies of each must be added the idiosyncrasies of the various British Governments which they served. But behind all the transitory viceregal race there was the continuity of the greatest civil service since the days of the Roman Empire, a body of highly-trained and devoted men, working with a vast accumulated body of knowledge to aid them and in the spirit of a high and unselfish tradition. India was virtually a bureaucracy of the most efficient type, for the machine was stronger than any Viceroy, great as were the Viceroy’s powers, and far stronger than even the most vigilant Secretary of State. For, since the passing away of the East India Company, Britain had infinitely less knowledge of her Indian dependency. In the old days at each renewal of the company’s charter there had been a more or less thorough inquisition into the state of Indian affairs, but now the home country was content to trust to the India Office and the Viceroy, and an Indian discussion in the House of Commons became a byword for apathy and dullness. The mood of the Indian people could only be guessed at even by the well-informed at home, and its aspirations became little more than rhetorical speculations in party debate.

  In 1899 Lord Curzon, then scarcely forty years of age, succeeded Lord Elgin. He had imagination and enthusiasm, complete self-confidence, a high courage, and an industry and a speed which left his colleagues panting behind him. This is not the place to enlarge on that remarkable term of office. To each of the standing problems of Indian rule he brought his own weighty contribution. He continued the policy begun by Lord Elgin on the North-West frontier, withdrew British garrisons from the tribal zone, putting tribal levies in their place, and created a new North-West frontier province. By comprehensive schemes of irrigation, by reforms in the collection of land revenue, and by the institution of co-operative credit societies, he laboured to put agriculture on a securer basis. He overhauled the whole administrative machine, reformed the police, lopped off dead wood from the civil service, and checked that addiction to paperasserie which is the foible of even the best bureaucracy. Inspired with the romance of India’s history, he showed a reverent concern for her great public memorials. He was aware of the growth of the selfgovernment movement, which, from the small beginnings of the first Indian National Congress of 1885, had now become a power, and, believing that the ills caused by a smattering of Western education could only be cured by a better and fuller knowledge, he strove to broaden the whole educational system, and in spite of much opposition carried his Universities Act of 1904. To a casual observer the spectacular and controversial character of some of his reforms was apt to obscure the enormous mass of sound and painstaking work, the beneficial effect of which was beyond question.

  But the wisest changes, if they are many and sudden, will produce a revulsion. On the long view, it may fairly be said that Lord Curzon had provided for India a diet which, though wholesome in quality, was too large in quantity for a normal digestion. No Viceroy had ever sought more earnestly the welfare of the Indian people, but there comes a time in the development of a race when they are less grateful for wise ruling than for permission to blunder on their own account. He had underrated the dissatisfaction which a cyclone of reform from above would produce not only among the cruder vested interests of the Indian bar and Indian journalism, but among even honest and public-spirited citizens. The event which caused his resignation was, indeed, a comparatively trivial matter as far as Indian policy was concerned, being no more than a difference of opinion with Lord Kitchener as to the method by which military proposals should be presented to the Viceroy’s Executive Council — Lord Kitchener demanding a single department presided over by the Commander-in-Chief as an ordinary member of Council, and Lord Curzon objecting that the civil power would thereby be deprived of independent military advice, and all military authority would be concentrated in the hands of the Commander-in-Chief. It may be fantastic to argue, as some have done, that Lord Kitchener’s victory was responsible for the breakdown of the Indian army system ten years later in Mesopotamia, but it is doubtful whether much was gained by the change either in administrative efficiency or economy. Lord Curzon was tired and out of health, and a difference which might easily have been settled was allowed to become a clash of adamantine principles. More serious was the other step which the Viceroy took in his last year of office. The Presidency of Bengal was proving unwieldy for a single provincial government, and Lord Curzon decided to separate the flat wet plains and jungles of the eastern section and combine them with the province of Assam. This gave the Mohammedans a majority in the new province, and thereby inflamed the Hindus of Bengal, who saw in it a menace to their religious preponderance, and to the importance of Calcutta. The cry arose that the Bengali nation had been insulted and split in twain, and, the sensational triumph of Japan over Russia having kindled the race-consciousness of the East, in the autumn of 1905 a very pretty campaign began of boycott and agitation.

  The first Minto had followed on the stirring times of Wellesley, and had rightly hoped for a period of peace and internal development, which he did not obtain. His great-grandson entered upon office with the same hopes, and was to be doomed to the same disappointment. In India it is unsafe at the best to forecast the future. “No prudent man,” said Dalhousie, as he left with the seal of death on him, “would venture to predict a long continuance of peace in India. . . . Insurrection may arise like an exhalation from the earth;” and his successor, Canning, speaking at a farewell banquet in England, declared in prophetic words: “I wish for a peaceful time of office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a man’s hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin.” Already the cloud was larger than a man’s hand. There were the smouldering embers in Bengal, rapidly being fanned into flame; there was a general unsettlement of men’s minds owing to a plethora of sudden changes, the vigour of which had not perhaps been softened by tactfulness in method. Peace and quiet might be what India needed, but it was far from certain that they were what she would choose. From the beginning of his term of office it was clear that the land stood at the parting of the ways, and that it lay with the new Viceroy to make decisions as momentous as any taken by his predecessors.

  In Canada Minto had learned the du
ty of a self-effacing governor, quick to understand the nuances of constitutionalism, and exercising his power by suggestion and counsel. His new position was very different, for he was in a land remote from the forms and spirit of Western democracy, wielding through his Council an executive authority far greater than that of an ordinary monarch. His business was to govern as well as to reign. His position was not only the most responsible in the overseas British Empire, but by far the most onerous, and its laboriousness had been increased by Lord Curzon’s passion for drawing into his hands the minutest details. In addition to the normal routine which filled most of the hours of a working day, he must exercise a personal influence, for in the East the personal factor is omnipotent, journeying throughout the length of the land, to meet and learn from every class and condition. He must be patient and tactful and urbane, for in recent years many nerves had been frayed and tempers ruffled. He must not become so immersed in detail as to miss seeing the wood for the trees, for his first duty was the long view. As Minto reflected upon his burden it must have occurred to him that at last his ambition had been gratified, and that he had found a form of soldiering. The position of a Viceroy is like that of a general; he has to forecast the campaign, to take in the last resort great decisions alone, to foster the moral of his army, which is the three hundred millions of India, and to check ruthlessly in the common interest any impulse to anarchy. The words which his great-grandfather used a century earlier must have often recurred to his memory, as a reminder of the solemnity of his charge: “I entreat them to be persuaded that no man of honour at the head of a government will ever compromise with revolt; he has no option but to maintain the contest or abandon his trust and fly from his duty.” And he may well have reflected that the giving effect to this maxim might be for a far-sighted and liberal mind one of the most difficult of human tasks.