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OUR LATEST BRITISH CRITIC.

that not only has the air been traced back in Eng-| great deal to admire in the American. I like his land to the time of Charles I., but "it appears that tolerance, his frankness, his familiarity, his indethe doggerel verses that are sung to it can claim pendence. He is uniformly polite; but is just a nearly as respectable an antiquity;" and, more- little snobbish." But we are told it takes a sharp that "the song is said to be identical with observer to discover these good qualities; for "what one sung by the agricultural laborers in the Nether-is best in the American character-the real sensilands;" and furthermore that "Kossuth and his bility and tenderness which vibrate beneath the fellow Hungarians, when in this country, are said surface, and stir, now and then, a naturally languid to have recognized it as one of the old national airs and self-indulgent race till it thrills with a generof their native land." And still further, that Mr.ous enthusiasm-this the American does his best Our tourist "did" Niagara; but disBuckingham Smith, some time American Secretary to conceal." the misses the Falls in half a dozen words: "To me of Legation at Madrid, affirms that this is ancient Sword-Dance of the Biscayans." Mr. they were disappointing." Washington is rather Moore, at the conclusion of his discourse, said: pooh-poohed: "It is no more than a skeleton city, The American whose heart is not stirred by the artificially endowed with objects of interest; only simple drum-and-fife tones of Yankee Doodle, Providence has not fallen in with the designs of its knows little of the history of his country, and cares founders. There is little trade, and a small purless for its heroic past. The poet who shall make poseless population." Our visitor's three-months' an immortal song fit for union with notes which tour took him to Florida, and from thence to New re-echo the tones of the first century of American Orleans; and lastly to Chicago, where at last he patriotism, will command the homage of all com- found something to praise-though in a qualified manner. "Nothing," he says, "which I saw in ing centuries of American freedom." America impressed me more than this city. Beautiful it is not, for nothing that the craft or enterprise of man has reared upon American soil is truly beautiful; but there is dignity in the long lines of the tree-bordered avenues, and the vistas of the And to think of the activity disstately streets. played in the great reconstruction," since the city was laid in ruins fourteen years ago. "And yet, he adds, "it was not America alone which raised this phoenix city from the ashes of the old. To-day The the population of Chicago is not yet American: it is German, Scandinavian, Irish, English. women have still the round freshness and bloom of the Teutonic type; the sap of the Old World has The men not yet dried out of the faces of the men. The inevitable change no doubt will come. will soon wither into Americans, and the beautiful women of Chicago will learn to eat five meat meals It is the same with the ina day. . . . . No nation has a shorter history— The young American has none is more mature. dividual and the race. no childhood, the race has had no youth; new without freshness, old without antiquity. Who would care to forecast the future of a country and a people of which such things must be said?" Yet our Briton finally winds up his doleful Jesemiad in a rather hopeful strain: "And yet, when criticism has done its worst, and the faults of the American in the Republic have been most unsparingly exposed, of one thing its history assures us well great crises of its destiny America has not yet Whatever be the changes of the fufailed. ture, if its citizens are but true to the splendid principles on which their state was founded, then the political and social evolution of the New World may still guide the Old towards finer issues of beneficence and peace:" or at least to "free trade," of which he had managed just before to get in a premonitory good word or two: "When the immense West," he tells us that he once said to an American manufacturer, “is peopled, and your farmers control the elections, there will then be only two alternatives-free-trade or a rupture of the union." With which utterance, we bid goodby to our three-months' visitor.

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AN anonymous Briton who last year made a tour in the United States gives in Macmillan's Magazine a dozen pages of his "first impressions of the American people. "You cannot," he says, 'mistake a genuine Yankee for the representative of any other nationality under the sun;" and somehow or other, every European coming here, gets transformed into a Yankee before he knows it. The country," he avers, "has an omnivorous appetite for fresh colonists, and a digestion which absorbs and assimilates them all. It takes an Irishman or a German landed in the States perhaps a shorter time, an Englishman or Scotchman perhaps longer time, to become an American, but they are all transformed at last." And this transformation, if we may put faith in our Briton's "impressions," is one very much for the worse. Physically," he says, "there is deterioration. The climate withers all. The face becomes dry and parched, the movements slow and languid; the There is no greater mistake,' speech drawls. continues our visitor, "than to imagine that the typical American is an energetic being, vivid and versatile of mind, restlessly eager in the active realization of his ideas; for, in truth, he is the slowHe has a faded est and most lethargic of men. and languid look. The enterprise of the States is largely in the hands of new settlers. It is they who people the distant West. The native American looks as if he would stop altogether. When he does exert himself it is for the discovery of some new means of avoiding trouble. He is a great mechanical inventor, but he perfects nothing. He is not without literary and artistic sensibility, but he has produced no great work of genius. The sustained effort such work demands is beyond the "National apathy and compass of his powers." bloodlessness" is what struck our visitor as the most marked characteristic of the American people. He grants, indeed, "that morally there is a

HINDUISM BY A HINDU.

propitiated merely for the acquisition of riches.

IT is natural that much diffidence should be But the truth is that I am rather of a melanfelt by a Hindu, with somewhat conservative choly and vaguely speculative temperament. and old-fashioned Brahmanic ideas, in ventur- I come from that part of India which is the ing, even with the aid of kind English friends, home of Brahmanic theosophy, and where a to place before an English public some ex- few lean Pandits still continue puzzling thempression of the perplexities and forebodings selves over the mystery of existence, and are which beset him. Several Indian gentlemen less interested in making the best of this senhave latterly written excellent papers in the sational world than in making their escape from London reviews, that have met with a gener-it. Such persons are undoubtedly the prod ous reception; but I think these have been uct of their environment, as yet undisturbed mostly young men belonging to the latest by exotic influences. English gentlemen who school of advanced practical reformers; they have endured many hot seasons in the Ganhave been carefully educated in England, or getic plains, especially when cholera is raging, in Anglo-Indian Colleges, and their writings will understand why the philosophy of life are in the tone and upon the subjects that that I have received from my forefathers is suit the sanguine humor of the day. They not a very cheerful one. I have been told slash away in good democratic style at the that some forty years ago the English officers Indian Government and its measures; they at a large station in those parts formed themdeal usually with such questions as the Ilbert selves into what they called a Hellfire Club, Bill, the disestablishment of English chaplains and proceeded to adapt their mode of life to in India, tenant-right, or the representation the diabolical despair thus indicated. The inof the people. No one would be surprised if, cident perhaps illustrates the religious deinstead of an Asiatic name, these articles borespondency generated in those latitudes; and it some ordinary English signature; but although also betrays your English impatience of unsuch consummate imitation may flatter your comfortable existence, and your characteristic national self-esteem, I find myself, regretfully, unable to share the gratification with which my English acquaintances discover that a young Bengalee can be trained to write almost exactly like a Londoner.

My own position is different; and I have neither the capacity nor the taste for venturing into this field of political discussion. I have had a good English education but it was given to me at Benares, where the study of Sanskrit classics still survives; and though I have looked into the current literature of Europe, I have never been able, even by crossing the seas, to escape beyond the deep shadow that has been cast over my ideas and feelings by the climate, the religious practices, and the philosophy of my own country. The enfranchised Hindu, who is attracted by the luxurious and (perhaps I may say) the sensual side of European life, contrives to make merry after the hearty manner of Englishmen, enjoys wine and women's society, and rejoices loudly in the rapid material development of his people. I do not undervalue the benefits of railways, sound finance, and an efficient police; but I confess myself to be not profoundly interested in the spread of European comfort, or in the accumulation of riches and luxuries among the commercial and the professional classes in India. One of your cynical writers has observed that we can see what the Christian God thinks of wealth by marking the kind of people on whom He bestows it; and in my own country those popular deities do not bear a very high character who are

hurry to reach the end of a tiresome journey. For it is to me remarkable that, while your people are full of restlessness and irritability over the ennui and vexations of their present life, they seem nevertheless very well reconciled to the prospect of one single hasty run through the visible world, ending with sudden and final precipitation into an abyss just beyond it.

This reminds me sometimes of your rapid tours through India, when, after much hurrying to and fro in steamers and on rail-ways, the traveller's journey closes abruptly with the rush of an express train into some gloomy London terminus, whence he is borne off into the midst of a yellow fog and disappears.

We Indians endure life more patiently, journey through it more quietly; we do not first accept existence as eternal, and then stake our whole future on one desperate race; but we cherish the hope that, after many stages and diverse trials, we shall at last slip altogether outside the pains and penalties of existence. We think that by putting all the suffering of life to come into the state of penal existence you may leave nothing but ennui for the state that is expected to be one of blessedness; that no such division of sensations into absolute happiness and absolute misery is conceivable; and that consequently we are right in holding that the final stage of rest, the real journey's end, must be absorption and unconsciousness.

But it is of no use to debate whether the Eastern or the Western solution of the great problem of a future life be the more satisfae

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tory. Your missionaries will never convince, sculptor in outlying places will execute temus, and we do not seek to convince you. My ples beautiful in design and details, because present concern is with the immediate future, the subject not only inspires and exalts his in a phenomenal sense, of that ancient and imagination, but leaves it quite free. The inunfortunate people to whom I belong. unfor- troduction of your European patterns is contunate because with all their intellectual depth fusing to the spiritual instinct as to form and they have inherited little political capacity, color; the imaginative faculty becomes superand because, under the impulse and influence fluous; and then the immense European deof what you call civilization, they seem to be mand for " Indian curiosities " has demoralized on the way towards cutting loose the mainstay our artisans, who, instead of endeavoring to exand chief bond of their society, Religion. I press the multiform religious idea, however see all round me in India signs of the disin- grotesque, are now employed in executing tegration of the old caste system and regula- wholesale commercial orders according to tive rituals, which have grown up in this cli- sample. However, let us give up Art as probmate and country; and I can perceive that ably doomed, and admit that material progthe next generation may need an entirely fresh ress in the more solid sense is undeniable; the set of authoritative rules of conduct and be- chapter in your Blue Book which purports to lief. And as I must admit that the Indian register India's moral progress is still rather gods (in whom I have, secretly, no great con- disappointing to me. fidence) do not seem to be coming forward with I find that in this official volume moral progany new revelation for our guidance, I have ress signifies, generally, the spread of pribeen looking, as we Asiatics are apt to do, mary and middle-class instruction in the for assistance to the English government Government schools and colleges. This puband the English nation. I have heard, lic instruction is necessarily utilitarian and moreover, that your people are not unac- secular; and the English text-books are full quainted with similar difficulties connected of outlandish and unfamiliar allusions; but with a perceptible decline of religious belief. And, therefore, since I reached England, I have been glancing over the latest books and articles on ethical questions, in the hope--now that the lights of Asia are burning low-of gaining something by the exchange of old lamps for new.

the course of teaching gives much serviceable information, and is therefore becoming very popular with the great and growing class of those who learn in order to earn. I have nothing to say against this kind of education, nor against the higher university examinations -except this, that I am not at ease about its I have not as yet found much solace from eventual effect, taken alone, upon moral progconsidering the ways of your government ress. It seems to me doubtful whether, acin India. In Asia no serious person ex- cording to the Blue Book classification, the pects much from rulers, especially in the words moral and material do not practically way of moral instruction or example: yet, mean the same thing; and I fear that among considering that it is the English administra- Indians educated under your system there is a tion of India which has turned all our re- distinct leaning towards this interpretation. ligious ideas upside down, and remember- We are also parting rapidly, under the influing that spiritual anarchy is of serious concern ence of this public instruction, with our reto any government, I am inclined to doubt | ligious beliefs; they were never of much ethiwhether your official views and proceedings cal use to us; but at any rate they provided are quite up to the level of your own situation. certain authoritative theories of conduct and The India Office periodically issues a Blue social obligation. And now that the whole Book purporting to describe the moral and form and character of our society are changmaterial progress of India under British rule. ing, and Western civilization, applied suddenly Material progress is easily demonstrated like a galvanic battery, is waking us up into a there can be no doubt that trade is flourishing, new state of life, we may naturally, if unreacultivation extending, and that all the indus- sonably, expect the English, to whom we owe trial pursuits have increased and multiplied, all this material advancement, to help us forwhile we have been taught many things that ward also in the re-adjustment of our moral our fathers never knew. I am not so sure, ideas upon a new foundation. That this exby the way, whether progress is demonstrable pectation is not entirely unreasonable is inin Art, and I fear that you have not enhanced deed admitted by the Government, for the the poetical aspect of things in India. Art in problem has been very recently stated, and its higher orders has hitherto, like morality, even some solution of it attempted, in a vopreferred a religious to an obviously utilitarian luminous report of the Education Commission, motive and when utility comes too obtru- that issued in 1884. This Commission, in sively into the foreground, the artistic, like the religious, spirit becomes depressed and loses grasp of its principle. At this hour a Hindu

the course of an elaborate inquiry into the method of public instruction in India, came inevitably upon the difficulty of religious in

struction in State schools, and having adroitly | Government now goes about hazily seeking to rounded this point by declaring that the State discover what suits the people. Of such theoloffers no such instruction, found themselves ogy, however, so far as it prevails among the brought up in front of the much wider and deeper problem of moral teaching.

"If we may judge by the utterance of the witnesses," says the Report, "there is in the North-western provinces and the Panjáb a deep-seated and widespread feeling that discipline and moral supervision require to be supplemented by definite instruction in the principles of morality. The feeling seems not to be so strong in the provinces where Western education has been most firmly established."

more intelligent classes, it is to be expected that scientific education and moral aspirations will make short work; and indeed idolatry is to many of us merely traditional symbolism, For this useful to simple-hearted devotion. superficial polytheism is after all nothing more than a fantastic mystery-play, exhibiting under various figures and disguises the marvellous drama of Nature; it is the only form in which the Pantheistic principle of a divine omnipresIt will be noticed, in the first place, that ent energy can be interpreted to the people. this solicitude about morality prevails chiefly And as for our high ritual, with its elaborate in the old-fashioned and less Anglicized prov- forms, its severe penances, and the fantastic inces; and, secondly, that, since in almost posturing of our ascetics, all this is only selfall our schools and colleges the pupils attend discipline for wrestling with or appeasing the by the day, it seems to be assumed that the unknown but ubiquitous Forces that press principles of morality will not be learnt at round on the soul in its passage through dihome. And the Commission, acknowledging verse existences. As the Sankhya philosophy the inherent instability of "a morality based represents Nature acting a pantomime before to a large extent upon considerations of pru- the soul, like a dancing-girl before some prince, dent self-interest," recommends "that an attempt be made to prepare a moral text-book, based on the fundamental principles of natural religion, such as may be taught in all Government and non-Government colleges."

so do our Hindu worshippers and devotees take up positions, strike attitudes, and recite sacred verses; and I suppose something of the kind goes on in every liturgy. It is the secret of the few in India, as possibly in other countries, that nothing of the kind will really avail, that the Supreme Being is not to be bribed or flattered, that he is a legislator who issues hard laws without deigning to explain them except by the consequences, an Artist who disdains to introduce his own personality into the story of human destinies, but who leaves men to find out the plot and the moral through the dramatic evolution of his works.

It must be admitted that this is but a weak and hesitating treatment of the problems which beset the moral progress of our rising generation, and which disquiet Hindus like myself. You English are aware, I presume, that you have made yourselves responsible for the destinies of about two hundred and fifty millions of people, most of whom are morally as well as materially in a rather primitive condition. Among most of these millions the re- And, therefore, when your missionaries and ligious conception has not yet reached that philologists expound to us that the Hindu particular stage at which one object of divine mythology is mere imagination, and that the government is understood to be the advance-gods are fanciful creations, we of the priestment of morals. On the other hand, there is hood can only reply mournfully that we have a considerable minority whose ideas have known it for some thousand years: the Divinipassed beyond this stage, and who conceive their Divinity as supremely indifferent to all things, material as well as moral; but on the whole the popular divinities are supposed to follow very much the same policy as that of the British Government in India; they superintend material interests in this world, and do not profess to prescribe in moral cases, except by attaching penalties to disregard of certain unintelligible laws.

Moreover, we Hindus have never constructed any positive dogmatic creeds or commandments for general use: the common polytheism has grown up out of the nature of things and out of observations, exceedingly inaccurate and short-sighted, of phenomena; so that our natural theology is a sort of rudimentary utilitarianism. We have for ages been groping about to ascertain by experience what is the will of the gods and of the Government; just as your

ties are shadows and signs of the Incomprehensible. The vanishing of polytheism will simply clear away a harmless illusion, as when on a stage actors take off their masks and costumes, and speak with their natural voice; it will uncover Nature working according to regular laws to be understood of any one, and beyond Nature there will be nothing visible at all, except the dark stage curtain. I have little hope that the disappearance of our popular superstitions will leave any solid platform for the development of a superior religion. We Indians are not barbarous tribes who can be lifted up by missionaries from a lower to a higher grade of supernatural conceptions, nor is the world now in the same condition as when in Europe the old pagan statues were unearthed and set up again with new names. For the real substance of my country's religion, the mainspring that moves the puppet-show

of popular idolatry, is Pantheism; and it is doctrine also contains some elements of pracwith Pantheism, not Polytheism, that a rising tical morality. morality will have to reckon.

If any Hindu desires to go behind the ordinary rites of worship and propitiations, and to understand the inner nature of Divine government, he learns that the Deity pervades and is immanent in all forces and forms, and that the gods whom he has been adoring are mere embodiments of or emanations from the Universal Energy. Very many inquirers go thus far, and here most of them stop; but those who, perceiving that the identity of God with the material universe cannot be an ultimate idea, ask what is beyond, may be told that there is somewhere an Infinite Being, unconditioned and unconscious, to whom object and subject present no duality. Such a Being can have no interest in the cosmic evolution; it acknowledges no liability for the facts or results of the soul's existence, or for the ills that have inevitably followed the clothing of the soul's integument with sensation. To escape from corporeal fetters, out of the endless desert of ignorance and delusion, is the soul's concern; the spirit, calm and still, regards its struggles, looking on at the fantastic play of forces set in motion by some secondary Demiurge.

The Western creeds seem to regard eternal punishment as mainly retributive, while the metempsychosis may be thought to have a nearer affinity with the reformatory discipline which in your latest administrative systems is taken to be the higher method of dealing with offenders. On the other hand, the ethical defect of our doctrine, as a working scheme of moral government, is that it relieves both gods and men of individual responsibility, in any single existence, either for the justice of the sentences or for the offence found. It is as if men were taught to expect, after innumerable periods of probation, and upon a most complicated balance of countless transactions, a final judgment-day at which they should be absolved or condemned without the faintest recollection of what they had done, and without any explanation or summing-up on the part of a presiding Power. I admit that such a process would be not unlike the manner in which we occasionally suffer on earth, as when one is seized and suddenly executed by a despotic ruler, or as when an aërolite kills one dead; but these are just the incidents that make us in India doubt all theories of a watchful Providence, and the natural consequence has been a strong tendency towards fatalism. If it be true, as English judges have said, that in India evidence given in articulo mortis is far less trustworthy than in Europe, I should take this to be a minor symptom of the inadequacy of our transmigration dogma as a moral restraint.

To all this it may be objected, by those who are superficially acquainted with India, that recondite and abstruse theologic doctrines are wide apart from the popular religion. But nothing is more certain than that for centuries the prevailing beliefs of all Hindus who form any definite ideas on questions touching God and immortality have been colored and moulded by Pantheism. And if there is one metaphysical dogma that has taken a kind of physical shape, and has thus impressed itself on the multitude, it is the belief in metempsychosis, i.e., in the scheme of future existence regulated, not according to the decision of a Supreme Judge in faith and morals, but by the spontaneous and, as it were, natural operation of a soul's experiences.

We may assume, then, that Polytheism will rapidly subside; and we have to inquire whether the essence of the Brahmanic theology offers any material for a religious reformation of the kind suitable to an enlightened and practical people. I am afraid that the only point, in all our theology, of direct interest to humanity in regard to its future destiny is the process of the soul's transmigration through incessant births and deaths, until at last it becomes absorbed in the totality of existences. As the accomplishment of this journey depends more or less upon a balance of merits and demerits, the conception might possibly be developed into an ethical doctrine; though how far the rate of progress depends upon works, and how far upon a deep subjective realization of divine attributes, has always been a matter for scholastic dispute. On the whole, however, the predominating influence is that of a creature's own deeds; and here the practical common-sense and experience of mankind, transfigured into a transcendental idea, is to be detected in the belief that each generation fares according to the sins or welldoing of its predecessor. And perhaps the This is, as I have said, the one element of notion that at each death consciousness is so some ethical promise that can be extracted interrupted, that the precise sins or successes from the mass of our traditional beliefs. of a previous existence are not remembered, Otherwise, the transmigration is only one but can only be guessed at by their effect, series in the shifting exhibition of Pantheism, merely indicates that the real morality of our an incessant change of form and habitation actions cannot be properly determined at all without any moral evolution; and the prospect in a single life. Here we may trace an anal- of such an illimitable journey towards the Inogy with the modern scientific theory of hered- finite only extinguishes human sympathy for itary transmission of experiences; and the the individual by minimizing the importance of

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