CHAPTER XXIV.

1858-1863.

LAST YEARS IN INDIA.

Some Fruits of Duff's Earlier Labours.-Administrative Progress. -Growth of the Bengal Mission.-Sindia, Dinkur Rao and Major S. C. Macpherson.-Native Female Education.-Dr. T. Smith, Rev. J. Fordyce, and Mrs. Mullens.-Zanana Instruction.-Duff's Caste Girls' Day School.-Death of Lacroix.— Missionary Methods and Christian Unity.-Deaths of Dr. Ewart and Gopeenath Nundi.-Revival Meetings and Ardent Longings. -Conference in Edinburgh on Free Church Missions.-Mr. Bhattacharjya and the Mahanad Rural Mission. -A Competition-Walla's Picture of Duff's Spiritual Work.-The Condition of the Peasantry of Bengal.-Fluctuating Tenure, Rising LandTax and Rack-Renting.-The Indigo Riots in Nuddea.-Dr. Duff's Letter to the Commission of Inquiry.-Rev. J. Long and the "Neel Durpun."-The Educational Destitution of Bengal.Mr. Drinkwater Bethune and the Bethune Society.-The Missionary-President and his Work.-A Founder of the University of Calcutta.-Departure from the Principles of the Charter of Education since Duff's time.-Trevelyan's Proposal that he be Vice-Chancellor.-Repeated Illness ends in Dysentery again.— Voyage to China.-Shut up to accept the General Assembly's Invitation to become Foreign Missions Superintendent.-All Classes and Creeds unite to Honour the departing Missionary.Reply to the Educated Hindoos and Muhammadans of Bengal.— Estimates of his Indian Career.-Sir Henry S. Maine and Bishop Cotton.

In the eight years ending 1863, which formed the third and last of Dr. Duff's periods of personal service in India, he enjoyed a foretaste, at least, of that which is generally denied to the pioneers of philanthropy in its highest forms. "One soweth and another reapeth," is the law of the divine kingdom. The five years from 1830 to 1835 had been a time

emphatically of sowing the seeds of a new system, but that had borne early and yet ripe fruit in the first four converts. The eleven years which closed in 1850 had been a time of laying the foundation of a second organization and of consolidating the infant Church. But, thereafter, educated and representative converts, Hindoo and also Muhammadan, flowed into it. One year saw so many as twenty, while catechumens became catechists, these were licensed as preachers, and these ordained as missionaries, themselves privileged to attract and baptize converts from among all castes and classes of their countrymen. At one time Dr. Duff found himself alone in the Bengal Mission, with his earlier converts become his colleagues and only Mr. Fyfe at his side. At another he rejoiced in reinforcements of young missionaries from Scotland. All around he

saw the indirect results of his whole work since 1830, in native opinion, British administration, and AngloIndian society, the progress of which, having reached an almost brilliant position under Lord Dalhousie, was not only not checked, but received a new impetus in the Mutiny under Lord Canning. He saw the beneficial results of the Charter of 1853, he delighted in the perhaps too radical and rapid changes introduced by the Crown in 1858. For no one then realized that every reform in India, and even every material improvement to be carried out by the Public Works Department means money at last, increased taxation of the

poor, diminished power on the part of the people to withstand natural calamities, increasing debt and the risk of dangerous political discontent. Up to 1863, at least, not only was nothing of this apparent, in spite of the cost of trampling out the Mutiny, but the opposite seemed likely to be the case. For Lord Canning, led by Colonel Baird Smith's report on the famine of 1860-61, had given a political bottom to

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financial reorganization, in his adoption of the principle of fixity in the land-tax and permanence of tenure, as sanctioned by the Crown under Lord Halifax and the Duke of Argyll subsequently, but rashly upset by their successors. And Mr. James Wilson, followed by Mr. S. Laing, had established the corresponding principle of direct taxation of the trading, manufacturing, capitalist, and official classes, at once as the complement of such fixity and the corrective of the unequal incidence of the public burdens on the land and its poor cultivators. This too was departed from, after 1863, by their doctrinaire successors, with consequences which every year shows to be more alarming and incurable save by a return to the Canning-Wilson policy.

Dr. Duff's Bengal Mission went on growing. It had never been so prosperous, spiritually and educationally, as in the Mutiny year. Then it entered on the new college buildings in Neemtolla Street, for which he had raised £15,000 in Scotland, England and the United States. The first visitor was Sindia, the Maharaja of Gwalior, descendant of the Maratha who fought Arthur Wellesley at Assye. At that time the chief was only twenty-seven years of age, but he had given promise of the same vigour of character as well as loyalty to the paramount power, which were to save him in the Mutiny and advance him to ever greater honour under almost every Viceroy to the present day. He was especially fortunate in the guidance, as political agent, of Major S. Charters Macpherson, and, as prime minister, of the Raja Dinkur Rao. The former was well-known to Dr. Duff, who had written. at length, in the Calcutta Review, on his remarkable success in suppressing human sacrifices among the indigenous tribes of Orissa. The latter was afterwards selected by Lord Canning himself as the native

statesman most competent to sit in the imperial legislature in Calcutta, and his memorandum on the government of Asiatics is still of curious authority. The two "politicals," the Scottish son of the manse and the Maratha Brahman, had combined to make the Maharaja a sovereign wise for the good of the people and of himself. His Highness had come to Calcutta to be further influenced by the Governor-General. He inspected Dr. Duff's college and school, from the lowest to the highest class, as models to be reproduced in Gwalior.

"The number of boys-about twelve hundred— appeared greatly to surprise him; and he was still more surprised when informed that they all came to us voluntarily, and that, with very few exceptions, we did not know their parents or guardians. They came spontaneously, and received freely at our hands combined instruction in literature, science and the Christian religion. And when he realized the fact that ours was not a Government institution, but one supported wholly by private Christian benevolence, he seemed lost in wonder. One inference which his wise Dewan very adroitly drew was this, that if private beneficence could erect such an edifice, and sustain its living educational machinery, it would never do for the Maharaja of Gwalior to aim at the ultimate realization of anything inferior in the capital of his dominions. That the impressions produced on the whole party were not transient merely, will appear from this note which reached me from Major Macpherson: 'The Dewan (prime minister) is exceedingly anxious to have an interview with you, to consult you about his measures of education. You cannot think how highly delighted His Highness's ministers, and all the rest are with your Institution. Nothing could exceed their admiration; and the Dewan thinks it the great work of

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Calcutta. He would go to you at any hour and any place.' This morning the Dewan called at my house, and is to come again on Monday. The enlightened intelligence of this man is truly surprising. His measures of education for the Gwalior state will doubtless, according to our estimate, be defective in some vital points. But they will be instrumental in awakening multitudes, in a certain way, from the sleep and slumber of ages; and, under a gracious Providence, may be overruled as preparing the way for more decidedly evangelizing measures hereafter. A visit like that now intimated seems also to prove how important it is to maintain an Institution such as ours, in the metropolis of India, in a state of efficiency, and of a scale of magnitude fitted to attract strangers to it. The sight of it in active operation has heretofore stimulated not a few to go away resolved to attempt something of the kind in their own neighbourhoods. To others it has suggested improvements in the routine of existing seminaries. And now it bids fair to exert an important influence on the education of myriads in Central India. It is a city set on a hill; and any abatement in its efficiency would be regarded not merely as a loss to the many hundreds taught in it, but as, in some sort, a national calamity."

Thus was reproduced on a larger scale the experience of a quarter of a century before. Then Bengal zemindars, other missionaries, and the Government of India itself, had copied the model. Now it was studied by tributary sovereigns for reproduction in distant native states. But, up to this year, no Christian mission has been established in Gwalior, though the way has ever since been open. Under the less tolerant Maharaja Holkar, the other Maratha capital of Indore has for some time been evangelized; while in Jeypore and other Rajpoot states the United Presbyterian Church