Published unsigned as a leading article, without a headline, in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 5371, July 9, 1858, p. 4, cols. 5-6; MEGA² (I/16) prints it in its appendix, as an article by Karl Marx reworked by the editors of the paper, under the title “Indian Debates”; first republished in MEGA². Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). Traducción al español.
How to supply an army for India still continues an anxious subject of discussion in the British journals, and we recommend their tribulations on this score to the attention of those among us, of whom we fear the number is not small, anxious to engage the United States in a career of foreign conquest and territorial extension. There is a strong party, with The London Times at its head, which strongly urges an army for India composed entirely of European troops. But the objections to this course are numerous, and apparently decisive. First comes the cost, enhanced, in the case of European soldiers, not only by the excess of pay, but still more by the cost of recruitment, of passage to India, of the different style of barracks and provisions required for Europeans, and above all by their mortality. When a native soldier dies the vacancy is filled, or used to be under the old system, without difficulty or expense. No bounty was needed to obtain recruits, and the Government may even be said to have been the gainer, by escaping its liability to a pension. On the other hand, the replacing of every European soldier involves a cost, at the smallest calculation, of not less than $500.
But suppose the money could be found to pay them, whence are the men to come? When the vast extent of India is considered, it would be impossible to think of getting on with less than a hundred thousand men. Even in Algeria, comparatively small as it is, and within a day’s sail of France, the French maintain a force of seventy or eighty thousand men. In Georgia, which Russia considers an integral part of her empire, though obliged to hold it by force, the army is not less. But how is a force of a hundred thousand men, especially considering the mortality to which it would be subjected, to be maintained and recruited without exhausting the whole British material available for military purposes, and leaving the rest of the empire without any army at all? Great were the straits to which Great Britain was reduced, even to the extent of attempting to evade our neutrality laws by picking up recruits in our American cities, even by the small drain occasioned by the late Russian war. To meet the drain of a long continental war, and at the same time to keep up an Indian army composed exclusively of European soldiers, would be out of the question.
Besides, it does not seem to be quite certain that even such an army would afford an absolute security against mutiny and revolt. It would by no means be impossible that such an army, instead of holding India for England, might be made the instrument by some bold commander—perhaps by some ambitious Governor General—for establishing, or attempting to establish, an independent empire. Remote and improbable as such a contingency is, it is not more so than the general mutiny of the Bengal army would have been thought to be three years ago.
But even if the men could be had, they would not answer all the purposes for which an Indian army is needed. The climate forbids that Europeans should do more than live with difficulty in cantonments, so as to be ready in bodies for field service, with a heavy consumption of life when so employed. They cannot be disseminated all over the country, nor held in small detached bodies. They cannot do the work of soldiers or even of escort under ordinary circumstances. At this moment the commander-in-chief is obliged to employ a body of Sikhs at his headquarter camp because they stand the sun better.
Thus driven back to India for soldiers, it is impossible not to recognize the fact that the late Bengal Sepoy army was composed of the best materials for that purpose which India affords. Physically and morally, the Sepoys constituted a superior class. The Bengal Sepoy was commonly a small landholder in his own person, or related to some considerable landholder anxious to establish a link connecting him with the British Government. At least two million of landholders were thus brought, directly or indirectly, to feel a personal interest in the permanency of the British rule—a sort of connection with the native population difficult to be established through any other class of recruits. The native forces employed in suppressing the rebellion, and which already amount to some 50,000 men, are mostly Sikhs from the Purjaub. But though brave and warlike, there are great objections to employing them. Unlike the late Bengal Sepoys, they are notoriously turbulent, drunkards on system, and debauchees of the grossest description. They are doubtless freer from religious prejudices than the other Hindoos, yet they too are easily capable of being wrought up to a high pitch of religious enthusiasm. Besides, to compose an army exclusively of them would be to repeat the great fault of the army just lost by revolt, which consisted quite as much in identity of local origin as in identity of caste. Already, indeed, rumors come from India that these Sikhs begin to take on airs though the British owed India to them. The favorite idea in England just now is in favor of an army of men of low caste or no caste. The notion is generally received that had the Bengal army been composed of men of low caste, there would have been no revolt. High caste is assumed to mean bigotry and fanaticism, and low caste to imply comparative indifferentism and freedom from religious prejudice. It is asserted, however, by persons well acquainted with India, that the reverse is the fact. They tell us—and the general experience of human nature makes their statement very probable—that the low caste man is far more tenacious on the subject of caste, and makes much more clamor about it, than the Rajpoot or the Brahmin. When any service is required which militates with religious prejudice, such, for instance, as serving beyond sea, the men of high caste are invariably those who volunteer for it; and it is these men, too, not the low castes, who, when a favorite English officer dies, in spite of religious prejudice, carry his body to the grave. In taking the low castes, they must be taken with all their vices, of which drunkenness is one of the most prevailing. It appears from the records of the Madras army that the native officers in that service are frequently court martialed for offenses which were scarcely known among the privates of the Bengal army.
The prevailing prejudice against the high-caste soldiers, of whom the late Bengal army was composed, will be likely to exclude them in a great measure from such a new military establishment as may be substituted for it; yet whether anything will really be gained by their exclusion is a question which still remains to be solved.