HANDBOOK TO THE INDIAN COURT,

PARIS UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION,

1878.

INTRODUCTION.

The Indo-Germanic shore, or litus Arianum.

A COMPARISON has often been drawn between the outlines and the civilisations of the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The continent of Africa, the first peopled of the three, presents the most uniform outline, as it does the most monotonous surface. Its coast line is almost unbroken by gulfs and bays, or even by any considerable river estuary or other inlet of the sea affording access to the interior, and, shut up within its harbourless, unapproachable mass from the rest of the world, its tribes and nations still remain in their primitive state of savagery, or have advanced only to barbarism. Europe is penetrated in every direction by prolonged bays, gulfs, and inland seas; separating it into distinct and very diverse natural regions, all in easy communication with each other and with the numerous islands surrounding the coast, continuations of the netted mountain chains the upheaval of which determined the complicated, or, as it might be expressed, highly elaborated figure of this continent; which, although the latest peopled of the three, is the most advanced in civilisation. The coast line of Asia is scarcely less varied, but its peninsulas and gulfs are on so large a scale as almost to form continents and oceans' in themselves. Indeed the mountain systems of Europe culminate in the stupendous plateau of Central Asia, and Europe is really but the greatest peninsula of Asia. Burma, Siam, and Anam are more than seven times the area of Turkey in Europe and Greece; India is fourteen times the area of Italy, and Arabia is more than five times the area of Spain and Portugal. India is as large as Europe, exclusive of Russia, and the whole continent of Asia is larger than Europe and Africa put together. Upheaved in such colossal proportions, whatever advantages of communication it offers along the shores of

its boundless seas, internally it presents, in its dull, tame, and inhospitable distances, and impassable, icy heights, even greater obstructions to human intercourse than inner Africa; and though the civilisation of Asia is far before that of Africa, it has never advanced beyond its semi-civilised as distinguished from its barbarous stage, while Central Asia still remains barbarous, and in some regions almost savage; its inaccessibility having given rise to the medieval legend of the Shut-up Nations.

It is a remarkable coincidence that Europe should repeat on a smaller scale the main features of the coast line of Asia. The peninsula of Arabia is repeated in the Iberian peninsula; Asia Minor and Persia in France; India in Italy; Burma, Siam, Anam, and the Eastern Archipelago in Turkey, Greece, and the Grecian Archipelago; and the Chinese Empire in Russia; while Japan is placed on the east of the Euro-Asian continent symmetrically with the British Isles on the west. The parallelism between India and Italy is very striking; the Himalayas are repeated in the Alps; the Indus and Ganges in the Rhone and the Po; Karachi is Genoa or Marseilles; Calcutta, Venice; Delhi, Milan; Bombay, Naples; Ceylon, Sicily; and the Laccadive and Maldive Islands are the mountain peaks of a submerged Corsica and Sardinia.

If we indeed forget for a moment the arbitrary, although convenient, division of Europe and Asia into two continents, and view them as one, we shall not fail to observe the manner in which its elaborately broken coast line stretches obliquely from the British Isles, in the temperate zone, gradually southward through a distance, as the crow flies, of from 8,000 to 9,000 miles, until it ends in the Eastern Archipelago, under the Equator, thus inviting the nations along its entire length to mutual commerce, not simply by the facilities it gives them for intercommunication, but also by the infinite variety in the productions of the temperate and tropical zones, which passed on from country to country, they have to offer one another. Once settled by the human race, it was inevitable that a great commerce, with its perennial sources in the fertility of the Eastern Archipelago,-"the world's green end" of Homer's "blameless Ethiopians,"-should spring up everywhere along this remarkable coast line. The renown of the riches of the trade in spices and other aromatics with the islands of the Eastern Archipelago was propagated all over Asia and Europe in the Legends of the Land of Gold, and the geographical and other myths of fable and folk-lore are the vague, broken traditions of an immemorial trade, in its prehistoric beginnings, pursued along these shores of old romance. For centuries this commerce was carried on, not directly between one country and another, but through innumerable intermediate agencies, so that distant countries knew each other only by their productions and the strange "travellers' tales," which grew in wonder as they were passed from mouth to mouth between the East and the West. The very name of India remained unknown among the nations of the Mediterranean Sea for centuries after its costly perfumes had been in daily use in the service of the Jews'

Tabernacle at Shiloh and Jerusalem, and earlier still for embalming the dead in Egypt.

The southern coast line of Europe and Asia is interrupted between the Mediterranean and Red Sea by the Isthmus of Suez, and as, from this point, the peninsula of Arabia extends for about 1,500 miles southwards into the Arabian Sea, the Isthmus of Suez really presents the length and breadth of Arabia as an obstruction to the direct course of the trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. As it is twice as long from Suez to Aden as from the Mediterranean to the head of the Persian Gulf, the commercial advantages of the Red Sea route, even after the discovery of sailing to India by the monsoons, have always been nearly equalled by the comparative shortness of the route by the Persian Gulf and Euphrates Valley. From time immemorial these two lines have competed on almost equal terms for the commerce of India, and the competition between them is the true key to the history of the successive states and empires which rose and fell along their course; rose as they gained the trade of India; fell when they lost it. So great an obstruction was the Isthmus of Suez found to be, that the rulers of Egypt twice or thrice endeavoured to cut a canal between the Red Sea and the Nile, while, in the hope of avoiding the circumnavigation of Arabia, the daring attempt was successfully made to circumnavigate the continent of Africa itself.

So important are the positions in connexion with the Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes, that not only was there always a rivalry between the nations on the Persian Gulf and those on the Red Sea, but it was a vital question among the latter whether the Indian trade should go by the Gulf of Akaba or the Gulf of Suez. The rivalry between Assyria and Egypt, and Assyria and Phoenicia, and between Jerusalem and Tyre on the one hand, and Jerusalem and Petra on the other, which finds such startling expression in the prophetic denunciations and lamentations of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, had largely for its origin the competition for the monopoly, or at least a share, of the riches of the commerce of India and the Eastern Archipelago. The overwhelming vantage ground of the Semitic races, and, particularly, of the Arabians and Phoenicians [for the Hebrews were somewhat unfortunately placed between the Idumæans and the Phoenicians], was that, from the dawn of history, they, were already in possession of all the lands separating the Mediterranean from the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. This gave them their start in the civilisation of the world. The Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, and the Arabians in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean, at once engrossed in their own hands the whole of the trade between the Mediterranean countries and Southern Asia, the Arabs keeping it without interruption until Da Gama opened up the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope. Ultimately the Phoenicians and their colonies were forced to succumb to the rivalry of Assyria, Greece, and Rome; yet Tyre was not finally destroyed till taken by the Crusaders, who would appear to have been often

strongly influenced by commercial motives, or were at least ever ready to advance the commercial interests of the mediæval Italian States in the 12th century. During the 300 years subsequent to Da Gama's successful enterprise the Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes gradually fell into disuse, but now are regaining their former importance; and to secure them against all danger, as the future highways of the rapidly increasing commerce of Europe and America, with Asia and Australasia, has become one of the highest political duties of our age. Commerce always sets steadily towards the shortest routes, and under the pressure of the competition of modern Europe for the commerce of the East, the Euphrates Valley, which is the shortest road between the Mediterranean and Persia and India, will, within another generation, become the chief commercial road between these countries and the West. Commercial supremacy, the only sure foundation of political supremacy, is absolutely dependent on the opportunity of roads and markets, on strategical points and communications, as military men call them. Indeed war is only another form of commercial rivalry, seeking by violence the same advantages which commerce often far more surely wins by its slower, deadlier sap. It was of comparatively little consequence that the Egyptian government and the MedoBabylonian monarchy were overthrown, or that ancient Tyre was twice razed to the ground, for, while the commerce of India still went by the Red Sea and Euphrates Valley, the people prospered; but when the Portuguese outflanked these routes by doubling the Cape, Egypt became "a base kingdom," and Babylon "a refuge for the wild beasts of the desert," and Tyre "a place to spread nets upon." If

"Peace hath her victories

No less renown'd than war,"

its defeats also are more terrible and crushing, and far more enduring in their disastrous results. The discovery of Da Gama made the whole of Western Asia a desert, and impoverished all the countries of the Mediterranean for nearly three centuries.

The Settlement of the Old World by the Human Race.

The early civilisation of the world was thus developed along the course of the Indian trade, which grew up in consequence of the facilities the coast-line of Southern Europe and Asia presents for intercommunication, and the direct inducements to commerce offered by the prodigal diversity of the natural productions to be found along it. The earliest civilisations arose in those countries-Arabia, Egypt, Chaldæa, Assyria, Babylonia and Phoenicia-which are situated about the point where it is interrupted by the Isthmus of Suez, the inhabitants of which naturally became the land-transit agents of a trade, of which the Arabians and Phoenicians were at last the general sea carriers. Science is only now beginning to conjecture whence and how these countries were peopled by the human race. We know only that, when the Aryan races first began, between B.C.

3000-2000, their westward migrations from their primeval home in High Asia, there were yellow Turanian races everywhere behind them and on their right, and black Turanian races everywhere on their left, and that the Semitic race was already in possession of the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia, and settled in Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and Arabia. Few now pretend to doubt the common origin of mankind; and the genealogies of Genesis are recognised to be in the strictest accordance with the results of the latest ethnological science. They present indeed a real geographical picture of the world as it was known to the Hebrews during the period between their bondage in Egypt and the Captivity. If therefore we broadly accept the Bible account of the creation of man, and take into consideration the present localisation of races on the globe, and the fact that the distribution of land and water on its surface is constantly changing, and that nowhere in the known continents of the world do we find a truly aboriginal, autochthonous race, we shall have little difficulty in also accepting the hypothesis that the human race first appeared on a continent, named Lemuria by Sclater, since sunk somewhere in the Indian Ocean, which once united Africa to Southern India and the Malayan peninsula, and from which it is quite possible the whole world was peopled; Eastern and Central and Northern Asia by way of Burma and the gorges of the Brahmaputra; Semitic Arabia and Western Asia, and Northern Africa from the mountains of Kurdistan [Ararat] and Armenia; and Aryan Asia and Europe from the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Western Himalayas. The mountains of Armenia, the Elburz, Hindu Kush, and Western Himalayas may be generally identified with the earthly Paradise of the Semitic and Aryan races. It was one race which wandered forth from Lemuria to the utmost ends of the earth, and under the influence of diversified physical circumstances became many races, and reached at last its highest intellectual development in the Semitic and Aryan races. The higher civilisations seem always to have originated in the contact or mixing of different races. The contact and ultimate mingling of the Aryan with Turnaian races produced the simple, intellectual civilisation of India. On the other hand, the mingling of the Semitic with Turanian races, under later Aryan domination, produced the imposing material civilisation of Assyria; while the elaborately symbolical religious civilisation of Egypt would seem to have been the result of the mixture of a Semitic element with the original Turanian race of the higher Nile valley, and probably of an Aryan influence received indirectly through Assyria and India. The consummate artistic civilisation of Greece was the effect of the contact of a pure Aryan race with the already advanced civilisations of Phoenicia and Egypt. Everywhere the keen, bright, energetic Aryan race excited the other races to a higher civilisation, and only the civilisations in which the Aryan element is pure or predominant have proved progressive; those in which it was overwhelmed by the Turanian races having always been unprogressive, as in India, Egypt, and Assyria.

The development of civilisation in its higher forms is, in fact, in