This article attempts to shed new light on the character of late Victorian Liberalism by investigating its political priorities in British India. It takes as its particular focus the debates which raged between 1881 and 1883 over the Government of India Resolution on Local Self-Government. Along with the Ilbert Bill, the Resolution comprised the centrepiece of the marquis of Ripon's self-consciously Liberal programme for dismantling Lytton's Raj. Indeed, the late Victorian politicization of the Raj was central to Ripon's motivations in promulgating the Resolution. According to the Indian civil servant H. M. Kisch, Lytton had been ‘the first Viceroy who has throughout his administration worked as a servant of a Party at home only, regardless of the views of his Council, and he has done all that was possible to render the office an unstable one dependent on the success or failure of the Ministry’.Footnote 1 From its revival of Durbars to its forward policy in Afghanistan, Lytton's viceroyalty comprised the very apex of the Tory vision for India. Ripon's appointment in 1880, after Gladstone had failed to persuade first Kimberley and then Goschen to take up the viceroyalty, politicized the office even further. At the time of his appointment, Ripon's views were markedly more ‘advanced’ than those of most Liberals, including Gladstone himself. Sir Henry Maine was not alone in believing Ripon to be a ‘dangerous radical’.Footnote 2 As Ripon himself confessed in 1881, his tenure as viceroy not only ‘deepened [his] liberal convictions’, but actually made him ‘more radical every day’.Footnote 3 Yet, as Sarvepalli Gopal has pointed out, ‘Gladstone never later regretted his decision [to appoint Ripon]…because of Ripon, the influence of Gladstonian Liberalism became a permanent element in the political scene of British India.’Footnote 4 When analysed in conjunction with contemporaneous Liberal discourse on English local government reform, the debates surrounding the Resolution help to clarify many of the central principles of late Victorian Liberalism. In particular, these debates emphasize the profound importance of local government reform to what one might call the Liberal project. Beyond its utility in effecting retrenchment, efficiency, and ‘sound finance’, local government reform was valued by Liberals as the best and safest means of promoting ‘political education’ among populations with increasingly strong claims to inclusion within the body politic.
I
In both India and Great Britain, ‘political education’ entailed a process of acculturation through which individuals and groups would become habituated to ‘self-government’ by internalizing the values and mentalities of the governing class. One can characterize ‘political education’ as a tool of ‘liberal governmentality’. The press, public meetings, and petitions (Gladstone's ‘three graces of the Constitution’) were each conceptualized by the Victorians as vehicles for promoting political education among the general populace. Moreover, as James Thompson has recently argued, faith in the educative capacity of this ‘constitutional troika’ was shared by Conservatives and Liberals alike.Footnote 5 Liberals alone, however, professed a faith in the instrumentality of local government in developing the mental and moral capacities of its participants. In fact, many Liberals went so far as to argue that participation in institutions of local governance was the best, and perhaps the only, means of nurturing the development of the kind of expansive, non-sectarian, and ‘public spirited’ outlook among the general population which was necessary to the proper functioning of a polity. As Joseph Chamberlain said of local government in 1885,
In addition to its having accomplished the exact reforms which it was intended to effect, it has proved an educational agency of the highest value. It has elicited and nurtured qualities in the case of individuals which might otherwise have languished for lack of opportunity; it has opened the way from parochial politics to Imperial statesmanship; its discipline, its competition, its stimulus have invested those who have actively taken part in it with a dignity of a solid and energizing kind.Footnote 6
Advocates of political education claimed that experience of local government would necessarily impart the character-building virtues of responsibility, self-mastery, and civic consciousness to both individuals and communities which had hitherto been excluded from political life. Parish vestries, municipal councils, and other local boards were consequently often valorized by such Liberals as ‘schools of civic virtue’ and ‘training schools for imperial government’. Ripon himself characterized institutions of local government as ‘engines for the training of the people’.Footnote 7 As this suggests, even in India, local government reform was never simply conceptualized as an efficiency measure aimed at promoting ‘sound finance’ and retrenchment. Nor was it merely a ‘safety valve measure’ designed to pacify communities which would continue to be excluded from the ‘actual’ corridors of political power.Footnote 8 Rather, Liberals understood local government reform to be a vital tool for effecting the kind of fundamental psychological transformation which was deemed necessary for the safe development of a liberal political culture. Moreover, a comparative analysis of discourses on municipal reform in Britain and India suggests that Liberals applied precisely the same logic in both contexts.
Yet, the language of ‘political education’ has received far more attention from historians of British India than from historians of Britain. This is a pity not only because the domestic importance of ‘political education’ has been undervalued, but also because its imperial meaning has been misrepresented as a consequence of its domestic neglect. In ignorance of its domestic British usage, historians of British India have argued that ‘political education’ was central to the construction of an imperial ‘discourse of difference’ which emphasized the supposedly vast evolutionary distance standing between Britain and India. Thomas Metcalf has claimed, for instance, that Ripon's municipal reforms, and their attendant appeal to ‘political education’, were ‘permeated with a condescending paternalism’ which re-enforced, rather than weakened, existing notions of Indian cultural inferiority.Footnote 9 Similarly, Douglas Haynes, in his work on colonial Surat, has included ‘political education’ among his list of the ten keywords and phrases which ‘carried particular potency for the ruling group’ in establishing the legitimacy of their privileged position.Footnote 10 Yet, as the following article argues, the language of ‘political education’ was invoked by Liberals in strikingly similar ways, for strikingly similar ends, at precisely the same historical moment in both Britain and India. Far from being a discourse of difference, the late Victorian commitment to ‘political education’ suggests the depth of Liberal universalism.
Jan Palmowski has claimed that ‘urban local government legislation in the first half of the nineteenth century responded primarily to practical need rather than ideological design’, and that only from the 1850s did ‘local government become an increasingly liberal concern’.Footnote 11 Regardless of whether this chronology is entirely accurate, there is unquestionable merit in the view that local government was more crucial to the Gladstonain Liberal party than it had been to earlier ‘liberal’ coalitions.Footnote 12 Indeed, ‘local self-government’ was among the six core principles of the ‘Liberal's Creed’ outlined by T. M. Webb in 1868.Footnote 13 Gladstone's first government was responsible for a raft of significant local government reforms – from the enfranchisement of female ratepayers in 1869 to the creation of a new Local Government Board in 1871 – which massively expanded the powers of municipal councils. The municipalization of gas and water supplies, the widespread adoption of Public Library Acts, and the provision of new municipal public health services – from public baths to paved roads – was enabled by the reforms of these years.Footnote 14 Consequently, the late Victorian civic flourishing of provincial cities was widely understood to be a Liberal achievement. For Thomas Hughes, the late Victorian Tory mayor of Liverpool, there was simply no connection between ‘Conservative principles and the general policy of sewerage and roadmaking’.Footnote 15 Little wonder, then, that Gladstone emphasized local government reform as a top priority in his programme for the 1874 elections.Footnote 16 Especially from the mid-1870s, the drive for ‘local self-government’ operated as a critically important Liberal binding agent and identity marker. Indeed, considerations of party cohesion and consensus were paramount in enhancing the importance of local government to the Liberal platform as the party became increasingly at odds with itself. Amid the swirl of centripetal forces separating out Chamberlainite radicals, Gladstonian reformers, and Whig grandees, the development and reform of ‘popular self-government’ held the party together.Footnote 17
From the late 1870s, just as local government reform became increasingly important to Liberal party cohesion, the ‘eastern question’ prompted a Liberal re-evaluation of British engagement in South and Central Asia. If India's role in shaping Disraelian foreign policy forced Liberals to clarify their thinking on India's value to Great Britain, it also encouraged vigorous Liberal debate over the precise nature of Britain's obligations to India.Footnote 18 Robert Lowe's view – that British India was a dangerous geo-strategic liability and that the despotic nature of Lytton's regime would ultimately both undermine the legitimacy of the Raj and corrupt British domestic political culture – was shared by many Liberals.Footnote 19 Most, however, also conceded that although India compromised British international security, quitting India was not an option. Gladstone himself, while granting the many foreign policy vulnerabilities to which the Raj exposed Britain, emphasized Britain's moral and political obligations to India in a series of Nineteenth Century essays. It was in these essays that Gladstone promised ‘justice for India’ and first outlined his three-pronged Indian programme of ‘sound finance, moderate establishments, and a liberal extension of native privileges’.Footnote 20 The implementation of this programme would entail an erasure of much of Lytton's atavistic regime and a rejection of Disraeli's ‘new imperialism’ generally.Footnote 21 Ripon's 1882 Resolution on Indian Local Self-Government, which promoted all three features of Gladstone's Indian policy simultaneously, was consequently laden with political significance.Footnote 22
II
The 1882 Resolution was the culmination of a series of reform measures, initiated by the Indian Finance and Commerce Department during the autumn of 1881, which sought to decentralize Indian taxation on a ‘uniform and extended basis’. Evelyn Baring, the viceroyal council member most responsible for advocating a decentralized system of finance, claimed precedent for these measures in Mayo's earlier attempts to shift the management of local rates from central and provincial administration to local bodies, and to remove from the municipalities the heavy charges associated with policing.Footnote 23 In late September 1881, Ripon issued his first Resolution on the subject, instructing all provincial governments to ascertain ‘what items of receipt and charge can be transferred from “Provincial” to “Local” heads…[and] what redistribution of items is desirable’. The provincial governments were also asked to consider ‘ways of equalizing local and municipal taxation throughout the Empire, checking severe or unsuitable imposts, and favoring forms most in accordance with popular opinion and sentient’.Footnote 24
The 1881 Resolution was a finance initiative aimed at effecting the first strand of Gladstone's Indian programme (‘sound finance’), but little concerned with the third (‘liberal extension of native privileges’). However, it cleared the decks for further reform of central–local relations and signalled the Government of India's intention to liberalize the operation of Indian local government more generally. Although a handful of governors questioned the efficacy of localized taxation, all complied with Ripon's request to explore avenues of financial retrenchment, and some even went so far as to implement schemes giving effect to it by the early months of 1882. The transition from finance to politics, and the corresponding shift from scepticism among the officers of the provincial governments to outright opposition, came in May 1882 when Ripon issued his Resolution on Local Self-Government. The new Resolution insisted on five related reforms. First, it urged that municipal councils should be established in every Indian city and town of over 5,000 inhabitants, and that local boards should be established in all rural districts where ‘intelligent local agency can be found’. Secondly, it urged the provincial governments to ensure that all local boards, whether urban or rural, should have a ‘large preponderance’ of non-official members, and that these members should be entitled to hold office for terms of not less than two years. In practice, this would mean that, at any given moment, at least two-thirds of the members of each local board and municipal council would be ‘non-officials’. Thirdly, the Resolution insisted that members of boards and municipal councils should be chosen by election ‘where local circumstances will permit’ (especially in all towns of ‘any considerable size’) and suggested that the practice of election should be introduced gradually even to ‘backward rural tracts’. Regarding methods of election, the Resolution suggested that the provincial governments ‘consult the leading Natives of each locality…as to the arrangements most likely to meet their local circumstances’. Fourthly, and most controversially, the Resolution urged that official chairmen of councils should be avoided at all costs, and that non-official members must be ‘led to feel that real power is placed in their hands, and that they have real responsibilities to discharge’. Fifth, as a consequence of the need for financial decentralization, the 1882 Resolution urged that municipal councils and rural local boards be given full management of all local rates and taxes, and that they should be empowered to initiate and direct the construction of all local works.Footnote 25
These were very substantial reforms given the existing state of municipal and local management in India, which, despite a raft of reforms during the early 1870s, was rudimentary at best. Prior to 1882, the central provinces was alone in widely applying the elective principle in local government. Even the presidencies lagged far behind the new ideal. Of the Bengal presidency's eighty-six municipalities, only four admitted elected members.Footnote 26 Moreover, in three of these municipalities, elected members comprised less than half of all councillors.Footnote 27 All four municipalities, including Calcutta, had appointed official chairmen. In the Bombay presidency, which in 1882 contained 106 towns with over 10,000 inhabitants, the Bombay City Corporation alone admitted elected members – this despite the fact that the large, prosperous cities of Poona and Ahmadabad had for years agitated for elected municipal councils. As in the Bengal municipalities, the elected Bombay city councillors comprised less than half of the entire council membership, and the council's chairman was an appointed official. Madras was no different. Half the membership of the Madras city commission was appointed and its president was an official. Moreover, in a presidency with over 500 towns and cities containing populations of at least 5,000 inhabitants, only forty-eight had been incorporated into municipalities, and only twelve of these municipalities were even partially elective.Footnote 28 Outside the presidencies, conditions of local government were even less advanced. The membership of the Punjab's 195 municipal commissions was almost entirely appointed, and the leadership of these local bodies was entirely official.Footnote 29 The same was true of district committees in the Northwest Provinces.Footnote 30 In Assam, local government was almost entirely unknown, and what did exist was dominated by European planters and their agents.Footnote 31
The 1882 Resolution carried no statutory force. It urged, but could not compel, provincial governments to effect reform. Consequently, very few of its proposed reforms were adopted. A handful of provincial governments put elements of these reforms into place. The Madras government, for instance, passed legislation in 1884 and 1885 which drastically reduced the number of officials sitting as members of its municipal councils and which significantly increased the number of municipal councils in operation.Footnote 32 Despite such bright spots, however, the Resolution made very little impact on the actual operation of local government in British India. Sir Ashley Eden's belief that local government reform ‘must be introduced with the utmost caution’, was more representative of the sceptical provincial response to Ripon's Resolution, and indeed Ashley's Bengal Local Government Act of 1883 refused to reform local government outside the existing municipalities.Footnote 33 Regardless of the Resolution's ultimate success or failure in implementing local government reform, however, the arguments mobilized by Ripon and his fellow reformers to win support for the Resolution exercised a long-lasting influence over Indian reform discourse.Footnote 34 These arguments also reveal a great deal about value assigned by Victorian Liberals to local government reform. In particular, they reveal the centrality of ‘political education’ to Liberal conceptualizations of the utility and purpose of local government. Liberal elaborations of the acculturating functions of local government suffused the debates over Ripon's Resolution. Indeed, they lay at the very heart of the Resolution itself. ‘It is not, primarily, with a view to improvement in administration that this measure is put forward and supported’, the Resolution famously claimed, ‘[rather] it is chiefly desirable as an instrument of political and popular education’.Footnote 35
Ripon himself claimed that there was no greater or more important political object than the promotion of ‘political education’, and he was not alone in this belief.Footnote 36 Evelyn Baring, the Gladstonian finance member considered by most Indian officials to be a metropolitan ‘doctrinaire’ wholly unacquainted with, and uninterested in, the ‘facts of the ground’, similarly emphasized the importance of political education. When, in May 1882, Hartington urged caution in promoting local government reform, Baring responded that the encouragement of native ‘political education’ was inherently cautious and he further confessed that he was ‘convinced that the only reasonable plan open to government is to induce the people themselves to contribute as far as may be to the management of their own affairs, – and to develop, or create if need be, a capacity for self-help in respect of all matters that have not, for imperial reasons, to be retained in the hands of the representatives of government’.Footnote 37 This emphasis on ‘learning by doing’ also found broad support outside official circles. From Bombay, Javerilal Umiashankar Yajnik claimed that ‘public spirit’ and civic responsibility could only be developed by ‘habituating the people to a course of public and political life…The extension of Local Self-Government is desired’, he claimed, ‘as “an instrument of political and popular education”’.Footnote 38 Ripon, perhaps naively given the undermining effect that local government reform would have on official authority, believed that this project of psychological engineering would meet with universal approval, and was clearly surprised when not everyone shared his vision. ‘That phrase “political education”’, Ripon claimed in 1884, ‘has been a good deal criticized, but for my own part I adhere to it…indeed to me it seems so extremely natural and obvious that the extension of Local Self-Government must be an important instrument of political education, that I should have thought the statement was one which could not be contested.’Footnote 39 The criticism of which Ripon complained came almost exclusively from Lyttonian Conservatives eager to voice their deep scepticism of local government's capacity to transform native habits of mind.
In the months immediately following the Resolution's publication, the governor of Bombay, Sir James Fergusson, emerged as the mouthpiece of opposition to Indian local government reform. Fergusson had arrived in Bombay just weeks prior to Ripon's appointment as viceroy. Like Ripon, he was a political appointee – Disraeli had appointed Fergusson to the governorship just one month before resigning from office.Footnote 40 Fergusson was a committed Tory, standing as a Conservative in no fewer than thirteen elections, sitting as a Conservative MP in eight separate parliaments, and serving as under-secretary of state for India in Derby's second and Salisbury's first governments. Indeed, it is likely that Fergusson never would have gone to Bombay in the first place had he been returned to parliament for Greenock in 1878. As it happened, he lost the election by a mere sixty votes, sailed for India in March 1880, and quickly became Ripon's most vocal and formidable critic. In late May 1882, Fergusson confessed to Ripon his scepticism over the viability of non-official local board presidents. ‘Except in Bombay’, claimed Fergusson, ‘there has been little or no disposition [among ‘leading natives’] to take the initiative or even to cooperate intelligently’ in administrative matters.Footnote 41 These concerns were then further elaborated, and extended into a rival plan for local government reform, by Fergusson four months later when the government of Bombay issued its own Resolution attacking Ripon's general policy of Indian local self-government.
After characterizing Ripon's proposals for local self-government as both ‘premature’ and ‘very radical’, the Bombay Resolution strongly urged that the collectors, acting under the control and orders of their respective district commissioners, should continue to act as presidents of their respective municipalities and district local fund committees for the foreseeable future. ‘To entrust at once’, warned the Bombay Resolution,
with full administrative functions persons who, however estimable and public spirited they may be, have never before exercised such powers or had any previous training, and to deprive them at the same time of the council and guidance of the officers who have hitherto devised and carried out all reforms and superintended the operations of various committees, would be a hazardous step and a measure which this Government is not prepared to adopt.Footnote 42
In addition to enabling local communities to overcome, or at least to manage successfully, caste and sectarian enmities, official leadership was said by the Bombay Resolution to be the only means of promoting public health and of avoiding wasteful public expenditure. ‘It is not improbable’, augured the Resolution, ‘that if native communities and their representatives were allowed absolutely unrestricted discretion, vaccination and sanitation would in some districts, ere many years, become completely things of the past and be utterly disregarded.’Footnote 43 Although the Bombay Resolution conceded the propriety of elections in city and town municipalities, it nonetheless maintained that no more than half of any municipal corporation's membership should be elected, and that no fewer than half should be composed of appointed officials.Footnote 44
Ripon was in no doubt about Fergusson's motives, describing the Bombay Resolution as a piece of ‘political mischief’.Footnote 45 Writing in early October to Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, the newly arrived Liberal governor of Madras and an enthusiastic supporter of Ripon's programme for local self-government, Ripon characterized the Bombay Resolution as Tory propaganda guilty of misrepresenting ‘in the most flagrant manner’ the intentions of the Government of India. ‘Fergusson has put out his resolution about local self-government’, wrote Ripon, ‘the first paragraphs of it are evidently intended for the consumption of his Tory friends at home’. Having established the party political nature of the Bombay Resolution, Ripon urged further politicization of the debate over Indian local self-government. ‘It would be a very useful thing’, Ripon told Grant-Duff, ‘in case the subject should be discussed in Parliament, if you would give a counterblast to Fergusson…if Bombay is to blow its Tory penny whistle why should not Madras sound its Liberal trumpet?’Footnote 46 Ripon's comfort in enlisting Grant-Duff's support on such baldly political terms had been encouraged by Grant-Duff's earlier articulations of the basis of his support for Ripon's Resolution. In June 1882, Grant-Duff had confessed to Ripon that his ‘desire to extend and intensify, if I may use that expression, local self-government’ had proceeded out of the fact that he and Ripon had ‘grown up in the same political school’.Footnote 47 Moreover, Ripon and Grant-Duff were not alone in conceptualizing Indian local government reform in party political terms. The Indian Spectator, for instance, which enthusiastically supported Ripon's Resolution, rejoiced at the politicization of Indian domestic policy. ‘This single reform’, claimed the newspaper, ‘in itself may vindicate the advent of the Liberals to power as a direct gain to India.’Footnote 48
Ripon, Grant-Duff, Baring, and other Liberal promoters of Indian local government reform were, however, more circumspect in their public pronouncements. While happy to speak the language of political partisanship in private, many prominent supporters of Indian local government reform publicly characterized Ripon's Resolution as an apolitical legacy of Lord Mayo's earlier reforms.Footnote 49 Indeed, many Liberal professions of support for the Resolution were tellingly defensive in their vigorous denial of the ‘commonplace view’ that Indian local self-government reform was a Liberal measure. The Liberal parliamentarian and supporter of Ripon's Resolution Julian Goldsmid, for instance, claimed in 1883 that although ‘many have written and spoken…as if it [the policy of Indian local self-government] had been invented and promulgated by a Liberal Viceroy for party and political objects’, this analysis was ‘pure error’.Footnote 50 Whereas many Liberal supporters of Ripon's Resolution publicly denied the measure's political partisanship, the Resolution's critics were in no doubt as to the political valences of Indian local government reform. In his correspondence with Lord Ripon, James Fergusson himself expressed a suspicion ‘that the policy now pressed upon us is based upon theoretical rather than practical considerations’.Footnote 51 This criticism was frequently levelled against Ripon's Resolution by its critics, not least in Lord Salisbury's description of Ripon's Resolution, as being ‘full of the catchwords of cosmopolitan Radicalism’ and in his consequent charge that ‘there are wider political schemes connected with it’.Footnote 52 The Lyttonian Anglo-Indian newspaper The Englishman agreed with this assessment, noting that Ripon and his fellow doctrinaire Liberals were ‘bent on foisting on India’, out of theoretical considerations, local self-government reforms for which the country was not prepared.Footnote 53
III
Conservative critics of Ripon's Resolution reserved special venom for the Resolution's emphasis on ‘political education’, which they almost unfailingly characterized as a Liberal ‘humbug’. Lytton's critique of ‘political education’, for instance, stood at the very core of his condemnation of Ripon's Resolution as an ill-considered and dangerous ‘experiment’. ‘I am well aware’, declared Lytton in the House of Lords,
Of the commonplaces about the educational influence of local institutions; but I own I attach as little value to that theory as the Governor General in Council attaches to the opinion of his district officers. I do not believe that any people in the world were, or ever will or can be, educated in this manner. The opinion that in England parish vestries have been the great instruments of national political education I believe to be utterly unfounded.Footnote 54
Lytton went on to characterize as a ‘dull romance’ the view that the babus who would come to dominate liberalized local boards would devote themselves to ‘the profitless task of leading selfish, ignorant, narrow-minded peasants to recognize by degrees the working of general principles in the detailed administration of the revenues’.Footnote 55 But Ripon's views on the operation of political education comprised more, according to Lytton, than merely a ‘dull romance’ – they were also extremely dangerous. The removal of official leadership from local boards would not only fail to inculcate the right sort of attitudes, mentalities, and habits of mind among native populations. It would also result in a complete dereliction of governance. ‘The real belief of probably the vast mass of the Indian peasantry’, claimed Lytton, ‘is that life is only just worth living, and not by any means worth taking much trouble about; that the evils sent by the unseen Powers ought to be borne with resignation, and that it is certainly extremely troublesome, and probably rather impious, to try to remove them.’ In the absence of official leadership, this native apathy would destroy all existing schemes aimed at promoting public health, civic improvement, and famine relief. Ripon's experiment in political education would, in other words, lead to social catastrophe.Footnote 56
In Lytton's critique of the ‘cant of political education’, we find the two central concerns shared by most critics of Indian local government reform. Namely, that the removal of official superintendence would give free reign to native apathy, narrow-mindedness, and selfishness, and that native-led local regimes would consequently neglect their civic responsibilities, resulting in a complete breakdown of good governance. Fergusson opposed the Resolution on precisely these grounds, warning Ripon in January 1883 that ‘by suddenly withdrawing the guiding hands, we shall give the reins to partisan jealousies, to selfish intrigue, and to disloyal feelings’.Footnote 57 The supposed absence of any kind of native civic consciousness or ‘public spirit’ was repeatedly emphasized by Ripon's critics. Substantial native landlords, for instance, were said to be completely uninterested in public service, and officials held out little hope that this class of men would ever be compelled to take up district board responsibilities consonant with those of an English county magistrate.Footnote 58 Moreover, the unfitness of native landlords for local government service was said to be a consequence of more than simple apathy. Unlike their English counterparts, native landlords were said to be devoid of any sense of paternal responsibility or expansive civic outlook. As James Munro, the inspector-general of police for Bengal, put it: ‘of public spirit properly so-called, there has in my experience been no development amongst the Zamindars of the division; they remain as despotic, as disregardful of the interests of their tenants, and as selfish as were their forefathers’.Footnote 59 Although he conceded that ‘public spirit’ was more advanced among the university-educated urban professional class, Munro and his fellow critics of local government reform maintained that native pleaders, journalists, and others of this class were far more interested in promoting ‘political agendas’ than in promoting the ‘public good’.Footnote 60 Sir Ashley Eden similarly regretted the influence of these ‘ambitious young men’ in the Calcutta Corporation, where, he claimed, their chief aim was ‘to bring themselves before the public, and acquire notoriety as speakers, much to the detriment of real business. The more the men of this class push themselves forward’, he went on, ‘the more do the real working men – men of substance and strong interest in the welfare of the town – shrink from participation in the management of municipal affairs.’Footnote 61
If native professionals were considered by Ripon's critics to be grasping and over-eager (for all the wrong reasons) for local self-government, most other natives were characterized as unwilling to participate. In their various reports on the feasibility of Ripon's scheme, the Bombay collectors repeatedly emphasized the apathy of non-official local board members as yet further evidence of the foreignness of ‘public spirit’ to the native mind. ‘It will, I fear, be admitted’, noted the commissioner of the Bombay Northern District,
by those who are most conversant with the workings of these local bodies, that there is, as a rule, little of life in their proceedings, or of public spirit in their supervision. It will generally be acknowledged that if the results obtained are traced to their sources, they will, in eight cases out of ten, be found to have been effected by the pressure put on the committees by their official members.Footnote 62
The first assistant collector of Surat similarly claimed that the native ‘dislike to accept so much responsibility’ would comprise the greatest obstacle to successful local government reform.Footnote 63 Moreover, native apathy was said to give way only in cases where individual self-interest could be found. According to the assistant collector of Kanara, although non-official membership on a local board was sought after, ‘none of the members is willing to take upon themselves the burden of active membership, and when any of them do attend, it is generally with some purely selfish end in view’.Footnote 64 The collector of Panch Mahals fully endorsed this view, noting that ‘the people are to a certain extent apathetic, but…they always show themselves fully alive when their own immediate interests are concerned’.Footnote 65 Indeed, evaluations of native ‘selfishness’ and ‘narrowness’ lay at the very heart of official opposition to local government reform – especially in the mofussil districts – and native selfishness, and the corresponding ‘inability to take a broad view’, was repeatedly characterized as especially inimical to the development of ‘public spirit’. These were precisely the terms upon which the collector of Satara, William Pratt, staked his opposition to Ripon's reforms. Among the non-official members of his district's local boards, claimed Pratt,
the public good is a word that is hardly understood. They can understand the good of an individual, or of a class, or of a certain interest, but not of the public. For this reason they require to be controlled by those who have no interests, but those of the public good, at heart.Footnote 66
In addition to emphasizing the challenges of native apathy and narrow-mindedness, many critics claimed that caste distinctions and religious sectarianism fatally undermined the capacity of local self-government for developing ‘public spirit’ and advancing native political education generally. ‘Local self-government in its true scope’, claimed one such critic, ‘is possible only through the leveling of caste and the suspension of creed antagonism.’ If implemented before such ‘leveling’ and ‘suspension’ was accomplished, local self-government would only encourage and intensify sectarian conflict, and consequently further delay the development of ‘public spirit’ among native communities.Footnote 67 Such views were widespread, especially among the collectors and other officials in rural districts. Joshua King, collector of Ahmednagar, blamed what he called ‘the narrow prejudices and sympathies’ of the native worldview on the ‘isolation of caste’, and doubted whether such narrowness could ever be enlarged into anything like a concern for the public good.Footnote 68
Of course, political education was valued by its proponents precisely for its supposed instrumentality in ‘enlarging sympathies’ and developing conceptions of the ‘public good’. Supporters of Indian local government reform consequently argued that, far from undermining the case for reform, prejudices of caste and creed made Ripon's proposed reforms all the more necessary. The Bombay Liberal Javerilal Umiashankar Yajnik, for instance, was quite certain that local government reform comprised the best and most effective tool for erasing such sectarianism. There was a time, admitted Yajnik, when the presence and guiding influence of the collector was needed to overcome caste enmities and local factionalism. Moreover, Yajnik conceded ‘the existence of caste enmities and factions among members of certain local boards is not denied’. However, Yajnik also claimed that these caste enmities would only give way once local self-government was realized, and that, in particular, they ‘may be expected to be minimized under a sense of personal responsibility’ once the official leadership of local boards was removed.Footnote 69 Yajnik was not alone, among supporters of Ripon's Resolution, in emphasizing the transformative influence that giving non-officials a greater measure of ‘responsibility’ would have. In Madras, the High Court advocate Sir Panambakkam Anandacharlu regarded the removal of official local board leadership as conducive to ‘compelling the exercise of reflective and acquisitive powers on the part of the [non-official] members, who, under the weight of real responsibility, are sure to be much more assiduous than when they play second fiddle or play no fiddle at all as at present’.Footnote 70 Official supporters of the Resolution expressed similar views. In the Punjab, Charles Aitchison admitted that ‘amongst the native community, the various capacities requisite in public life are as yet, for the most part, immature’. Yet he also claimed that ‘it is precisely for this reason that a period of public and political training is necessary…placed in new positions of responsibility, the representatives of the people on local boards will, it is to hoped, become, year by year, more intelligent, independent, and self-reliant’.Footnote 71 Alfred Lyall, the governor of Assam, agreed completely, claiming to Ripon that the removal of official local board leadership would have miraculous effects on native dispositions and habits of mind. ‘It is this which mainly will educate people’, declared Lyall, ‘not merely sitting at a table to decide what shall be done, but taking a hand in doing it oneself, learning by ones failures, and gaining a knowledge of the limitations of human capacity.’Footnote 72
The Bombayite author ‘Sina’ similarly understood the development of non-official responsibility and accountability as central to Ripon's project for political education. According to Sina's analysis, official leadership of local boards was counterproductive in that it encouraged native ‘passivity’ and compelled non-officials to ‘stand aside while everything is done for them’. This dynamic merely reinforced the native habits of ‘narrowness’ and ‘selfishness’ about which the collectors complained. ‘The natives should not always be made to go in leading strings’, warned Sina.
It is the old story of not allowing a boy to go into the water until he can swim; he never will learn to swim unless he goes into the water and incurs a little risk and paddles about…[moreover] a school master is a much cleverer person than any of his pupils, but it does not follow that he should do all their tasks for them…individuals may not do a thing so well as the officers of Government, yet it is desirable that it should be done by them rather than by the government as a means of their own mental education, as being the practical part of the popular education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests and the management of joint concerns.Footnote 73
No less a figure than A. O. Hume himself, who, incidentally, considered Indian local government reform to be of ‘momentous’ importance, justified Ripon's programme in exactly the same way. Hume agreed with the official view that Indians were ‘among the most selfish people in the world’ and lacked any conception of the public good. However, he, like Sina and many others, claimed that local self-government was the only tool available for effecting an enlargement of the native mind and the creation of Indian ‘public spirit’.Footnote 74
As the preceding demonstrates, opposition to, and support of, Ripon's Resolution hinged on the relative faith placed by individuals in the capacity for local self-government to transform attitudes and habits of mind, and therefore on the value and viability of ‘political education’. It is clear that whereas critics of Ripon's Resolution conceptualized local government as an end in itself (which is to say, as a guarantor of sound and public spirited governance), supporters saw it as both an end and a means to that end. Put another way, critics of Ripon's vision for political education argued that ‘public spirit’ should be a pre-requisite of self-government, and could never be its by-product. In particular, critics of local government's supposed role in promoting political education denied that the right sort of governing attitudes and mentalities could ever be engineered so quickly and artificially. They instead insisted that authentic habits of mind could only develop through a long-term, organic process of slow evolution. Horticultural metaphors which emphasized the slow growth of true political education were repeatedly invoked by critics of Ripon's Resolution. The Bombay Resolution, for instance, claimed at its very outset that ‘political education is a tender plant of very slow growth, and it cannot wisely be forced into a premature development’.Footnote 75 From the Northwest Provinces, Ripon received similar warnings that ‘popular institutions must grow; they can't be made to order, and the attempt to create them by order will interfere with their natural growth. By all means let them be nurtured and fostered. But not forced.’Footnote 76 The precise means by which critics of Indian local self-government intended to nurture and foster such institutions and attitudes, however, remained unelaborated. Ripon, for one, was deeply frustrated by this ‘chicken and egg’ argument. ‘The Government of India have distinctly explained that they consider the extension of local self-government to be chiefly desirable as an instrument of political and popular education’, Ripon reminded Fergusson in October 1882,
[yet] the Governor of Bombay in Council would, it appears, have preferred to ‘create and educate a public spirit’ before entrusting more extended powers to Municipalities and Local Fund Committees. It is not explained what are the measures which His Excellency in Council would have proposed to adopt for the purpose of creating and educating public spirit; and in the absence of any information on the subject, the Governor General in Council cannot but feel much doubt as to the power of any Government to create public spirit otherwise than by affording the public a practical opportunity for displaying and cultivating such a spirit in the management of some portion, however limited, of public affairs. It is far easier for an Executive Government, by direct action, to check and hamper the development of public spirit than to create it.Footnote 77
Whatever means Fergusson and his fellow conservatives had in mind for promoting ‘true’ political education, one thing was certain: they were deeply critical of the Liberal faith in ‘learning by doing’. In Munro's words, ‘the gift of political freedom to a people unprepared for it is but as a present of edged tools to children – a thing to be played with to the ultimate injury of the recipients of the boon’.Footnote 78
IV
Although most fully elaborated in India, the Liberal faith in local government's educative capacity was equally strong in Britain itself. The character forming capacities of local self-government had been central to Joshua Toulmin Smith's early and mid-Victorian advocacy for municipal reform. ‘True institutions of local self-government’, Toulmin Smith famously claimed in 1851, ‘supply immediate and perfect means, and the only means, of thoroughly developing the powers and faculties of every man’.Footnote 79 By the early 1860s, this view had become a Liberal commonplace. J. S. Mill, for one, was absolutely convinced of the utility of local government in imparting to its participants the values necessary for the safe and effective operation of a liberal polity. ‘In the case of local bodies’, argued Mill in 1861,
besides the function of electing, many citizens in turn have the chance of being elected, and many, either by selection or by rotation, fill one or other of the numerous local executive offices. In these positions they have to act, for public interests, as well as to think and speak, and the thinking cannot all be done by proxy. It may be added that these local functions, not being in general sought by the higher ranks, carry down the important political education which they are the means of conferring, to a much lower grade in society. The mental discipline being thus a more important feature in local concerns than in the general affairs of the State.Footnote 80
Using Millbank Systems’ digitized Hansard and the Gale News Vault database, it is possible to chart the increasing frequency with which the term ‘political education’ was used by the political classes during the second half of the nineteenth century. In both databases, invocations of ‘political education’ reach an apex during the 1880s. The Gale data is particularly suggestive of political education's ubiquity during this decade, when its incidence was more than triple that of the 1860s and nearly nine times that of the 1850s.Footnote 81 Moreover, as in India, so in Britain it was Liberals who, during the 1880s, spoke the language of ‘political education’ most fluently and with greatest conviction. In parliament, during debates on the 1888 County Councils Bill, it was Henry Peyton Cobb, the Liberal MP for Rugby, who spoke of fostering the ‘germs of local life’ and promoting ‘the political education of the people’.Footnote 82 Conservative advocates of the measure failed to cast their support in such terms. In public, it was Charles Dilke and Joseph Chamberlain who placed ‘political education’ at the heart of their arguments for an extension and liberalization of local government.Footnote 83 Indeed, advanced Liberals were especially enthusiastic about the transformative impact of ‘political education’ through participation in local government. Charles Bradlaugh, for one, regarded local boards, vestries, and town councils as ‘so many schools of political education, in which men, and women too, might learn self-government’.Footnote 84 The pamphlet literature concerning domestic political education was similarly dominated by Liberal voices, and its themes were nearly identical to those emphasized by supporters of Ripon's Resolution in India. One finds the ‘university Liberal’ George Broderick, for instance, arguing in 1882 that the reform of English local government would encourage the development of public spirit and minimize sectarian (in the English context class, rather than religious) conflict.Footnote 85 In the same year, the London solicitor and ‘staunch Liberal’ George Whale published his Fragment on political education, which characterized local government as a ‘training school for imperial government’ which would necessarily impart to its participants the expansive outlook and related ‘valuable mental habits’ essential to the development of public spirit.Footnote 86 Four years later, the Westminster Review essay ‘Local self-government and political education’ made precisely the same argument, claiming in particular that English local government is ‘valuable for this reason among others, that it forms a valuable school of training and education for the production of those mental qualities which are necessary to equip a citizen to take part in Imperial concerns’.Footnote 87 Indeed, this view of local government's instrumentality in promoting political education had become so widespread by 1886 that one critic, writing in the Saturday Review, identified it as a ‘consecrated fiction’.Footnote 88
The diffusion and increasingly widespread endorsement, from the 1860s, of this ‘consecrated fiction’ was a consequence of two simultaneous developments. In the first place, as E. P. Hennock and Derek Fraser have demonstrated, the social profile of municipal corporation membership across England was dramatically altered between the early 1850s and mid-1880s. As municipal corporations shifted their focus from the management of corporate property to the development of public health infrastructure, smaller ratepayers, representing shopkeepers and other petty commercialists anxious about the rate increases which such development would necessarily entail, increasingly replaced men of high social standing and wealth on municipal councils.Footnote 89 This alteration of council membership was partially enabled by the Small Tenements Rating Act of 1850 and the Municipal Franchise Act of 1858, both of which expanded the municipal electorate by promoting the enfranchisement of compound tenants.Footnote 90 According to the report of the 1859 Select Committee tasked with evaluating the working of these acts, ‘wherever the Act of 1850 has been carried into full operation, the lowest class of the population have acquired a predominant influence over municipal elections…the character and dignity of the corporation is said to be lowered by the intrusion of unworthy members’.Footnote 91 The transformation of municipal representation in mid-Victorian Leeds illustrates the impact of these changes. In 1836, the Leeds Town Council was dominated by the city's social and economic elite. Fifty-three of the council's sixty-four members were drawn from Leeds's gentry, professional, merchant, and manufacturing classes. By 1851, the social profile of the council had changed dramatically: the ‘shopocracy’ had captured the majority of seats, and the previously dominant elites accounted for just half of the total membership. The declining fortunes of the professional class, incidentally the class regarded by contemporaries as most cognizant of the ‘public good’ and least likely to advocate narrow sectional interests, were particularly striking. In 1838, fourteen professionals sat as Leeds councillors; in 1851, there were only three; and by 1874, professionals had been completely excluded from the council.Footnote 92 Although professionals fared slightly better in other councils, the general trend toward a ‘lower social standard’ of councillor was everywhere the same, and attracted much criticism from contemporary observers of municipal affairs. In Hennock's words, ‘the replacement of substantial and respectable men by people “lower in the scale” was, to put it bluntly, regarded as a deplorable lapse’.Footnote 93 Measures were, of course, taken to counteract this supposed deterioration in the character of municipal membership. Although the 1869 Municipal Corporations Act, for instance, is primarily remembered for extending the municipal franchise, it also sought to elevate the social profile of municipal councils by entitling suburban property holders resident outside the municipal boundary to stand for election. This all suggests that, from the 1860s, the involvement of ‘fit and proper persons’ in local governance could no longer be taken for granted. Increasingly, ‘fitness’ needed to be inculcated among sitting councillors. This necessitated a reconceptualization of the functions of local government and encouraged the view that political education should be one of these functions.
The second development which encouraged Liberal faith in political education was the mid-Victorian emergence of an obsession with ‘character’. In Stefan Collini's analysis, the transition from a Whiggish language of ‘virtue’ to a Liberal language of ‘character’ sped up markedly during the 1850s and 1860s in the context of debate over franchise reform. From the 1860s onward, the possession of character (which, in its ‘evaluative meaning’, implied the possession of self-restraint, consciousness of civic duty, and strenuous effort) became intimately bound up with the criteria for belonging to the body politic.Footnote 94 More than this, however, mid- and late Victorian Liberals also believed that the reach of the state profoundly influenced individual character formation, and were consequently careful to minimize any government scheme which might have the effect of ‘weakening’ the character of its citizens. This concern for the role played by the state in forming character translated easily into an interest in the extent to which participation in political institutions might enable the growth of character. After all, what was the purpose of political education if not to impart ‘character’ to those who lacked it?
Why, then, did the Liberal language of ‘political education’ reach its apotheosis during the 1880s? To be sure, debates over Irish Home Rule and parliamentary franchise reform played their parts.Footnote 95 However, as the pamphlet literature suggests, local government reform remained a central concern of those who invoked the rhetoric of ‘political education’. Indeed, it is more than coincidental that a major, but curiously overlooked, Municipal Corporations Act of 1882 abolished property qualifications for prospective councillors altogether by providing that every person qualified to elect councillors was also qualified to be elected. Nor is it coincidental that this act, and the subsequent 1884 Municipal Elections (Corrupt and Illegal Practices) Act, codified, for the first time, specific provisions permanently disfranchising and excluding from municipal office any councillors found guilty of accepting or offering bribes. The crisis of confidence which had been building since the 1850s over the ‘fitness’ of municipal councillors crested during the 1880s. Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, writing in 1883, believed that the domination of municipal government by the ‘small tradesman class’ and the ‘abstention of the more educated classes in taking part in local government’ comprised the ‘great and growing evil’ of the day.Footnote 96
In the presence of such deep anxieties over the corruption of the municipal ideal and the loss of ‘public spirit’, local government became both the problem and the answer. Liberals mobilized the language of political education to allay such anxieties and to justify Liberal legislation aimed at the further democratization of local government. According to the Liberal analysis, while legislation could discourage corruption, only political education could abnegate self-interested and corrupt impulses altogether. This analysis was applied with equal force and emphasis in both India and Britain. Yet, by abstracting the debates on Indian local self-government from concurrent metropolitan discourse on ‘political education’, historians have lost sight of the striking consistency of Liberal thought on the importance of local government reform. Moreover, by ignoring the nature of the Indian debates, the importance assigned by late Victorian Liberals to local government reform has been misrepresented. Accounts which emphasize the importance assigned by Liberals to the utility of institutions of local government in effecting retrenchment, efficiency, and economy must be supplemented by a recognition that local government had a more profound role. It was no less than the training ground and engine for the development of ‘character’ and the generation of ‘public spirit’.
