The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary. George Smith

it had been, more or less consciously, becoming a ruler. In 1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous letter, tried to arrest the ruin which the famine had only hastened by ordering that a settlement of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not with mere farmers like the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars, and that the rate be fixed for ten years. Cornwallis and Shore took three years to make the detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll of Bengal proper was fixed at £2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate should be fixed not only for ten years, but for ever. The experienced Bengal civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third of the rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its value was but little known, and its estates were without reliable survey or boundaries.

      We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they asserted and wrong in what they denied. The principle of fixity of tenure and tax cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political value, but it should have been applied to the village communities and cultivating peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than the large ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the standard of corn rents. Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what some years afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the present German people and empire. The dispute as to a permanent or a decennial settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and Charles Grant, took a week to consider it. His verdict was given in favour of feudalism. Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the settlement had been declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to Benares also.

      During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different direction. The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power "to enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection and welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators of the soil." The peasants continued long to be so few that there was competition for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the courts had hardly begun when they were many, and the zameendars were burdened with charges for the police. But in 1799 and again in 1812 the state, trembling for its rent, gave the zameendars further authority. The principle of permanence of assessment so far co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges valley and the peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of cultivation, that all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of the Mutiny, it was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to its natural limits from the two seas to the Himalaya. But in 1859 the first attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power of the zameendars. And now, more than a century since the first step was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties which all past landed regulations have intensified—to give the state tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops. As pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at once ground down the mass of the people and created a class of oppressive landlords destitute for the most part of public spirit and the higher culture. Both were disinclined by their circumstances to lend an ear to the Gospel, but these circumstances made it the more imperative on the missionaries to tell them, to teach their children, to print for all the glad tidings. Carey, himself of peasant extraction, cared for the millions of the people above all; but his work in the classical as well as the vernacular languages was equally addressed to their twenty thousand landlords. The time of his work—before Bentinck; and the centre of it—outside the metropolis, left the use of the English weapon against Brahmanism largely for Duff.

      When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the substitution of the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of courts and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one omission and one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to rectify. He did not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the language of the old Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and he excluded from all offices above £30 a year the natives of the country, contrary to their fair and politic practice. Bengal and its millions, in truth, were nominally governed in detail by three hundred white and upright civilians, with the inevitable result in abuses which they could not prevent, and oppression of native by native which they would not check, and the delay or development of reforms which the few missionaries long called for in vain. In a word, after making the most generous allowance for the good intentions of Cornwallis, and conscientiousness of Shore, his successor, we must admit that Carey was called to become the reformer of a state of society which the worst evils of Asiatic and English rule combined to prevent him and other self-sacrificing or disinterested philanthropists from purifying. The East India Company, at home and in India, had reached that depth of opposition to light and freedom in any form which justifies Burke's extremest passages—the period between its triumph on the exclusion of "the pious clauses" from the Charter of 1793 and its defeat in the Charter of 1813. We shall reproduce some outlines of the picture which Ward drew:—⁷

      "On landing in Bengal, in the year 1793, our brethren found themselves surrounded with a population of heathens (not including the Mahometans) amounting to at least one hundred millions of souls.

      "On the subject of the divine nature, with the verbal admission of the doctrine of the divine unity, they heard these idolaters speak of 330,000,000 of gods. Amidst innumerable idol temples they found none erected for the worship of the one living and true God. Services without end they saw performed in honour of the elements and deified heroes, but heard not one voice tuned to the praise or employed in the service of the one God. Unacquainted with the moral perfections of Jehovah, they saw this immense population prostrate before dead matter, before the monkey, the serpent, before idols the very personifications of sin; and they found this animal, this reptile, and the lecher Krishnu {u-caron} and his concubine Radha, among the favourite deities of the Hindoos …

      "Respecting the real nature of the present state, the missionaries perceived that the Hindoos laboured under the most fatal misapprehensions; that they believed the good or evil actions of this birth were not produced as the volitions of their own wills, but arose from, and were the unavoidable results of, the actions of the past birth; that their present actions would inevitably give rise to the whole complexion of their characters and conduct in the following birth; and that thus they were doomed to interminable transmigrations, to float as some light substance upon the bosom of an irresistible torrent …

      "Amongst these idolaters no Bibles were found; no sabbaths; no congregating for religious instruction in any form; no house for God; no God but a log of wood, or a monkey; no Saviour but the Ganges; no worship but that paid to abominable idols, and that connected with dances, songs, and unutterable impurities; so that what should have been divine worship, purifying, elevating, and carrying the heart to heaven, was a corrupt but rapid torrent, poisoning the soul and carrying it down to perdition; no morality, for how should a people be moral whose gods are monsters of vice; whose priests are their ringleaders in crime; whose scriptures encourage pride, impurity, falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose worship is connected with indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a brothel? As might be expected, they found that men died here without indulging the smallest vestige of hope, except what can arise from transmigration, the hope, instead of plunging into some place of misery, of passing into the body of some reptile. To carry to such a people the divine word, to call them together for sacred instruction, to introduce amongst them a pure and heavenly worship, and to lead them to the observance of a Sabbath on earth, as the preparative and prelude to a state of endless perfection, was surely a work worthy for a Saviour to command, and becoming a christian people to attempt."

      The condition of women, who were then estimated at "seventy-five millions of minds," and whom the census shows to be now above 144,000,000, is thus described after an account of female infanticide:—

      "To the Hindoo female all education is denied by the positive injunction of the shastru {u-caron}, and by the general voice of the population. Not a single school for girls, therefore, all over the country! With knitting, sewing, embroidery,