Editor’s Note: The following article was originally printed in New Lanka magazine in the mid-1950s.
Any attempt to write of the character of a people is bound to be inadequate. Mistakes are sure to be made, and the knowledge of any one writer must be far from perfect. For a foreigner to write such an article is to seek for trouble, but as I am invited to make the rash attempt, I herewith do so. I have more deep and intimate friendships in Ceylon than in any other country in this world. That must be my excuse for accepting this invitation.
The Apostle Paul stated that God had made all nations of one blood, and scientists today tell us that though there are different kinds of blood among peoples of each nation, yet all peoples are alike in blood, and the differences are common to all nations.
I have had more than twenty different peoples or nations represented in my schools. Their backgrounds differed greatly. There were Africans of many types; a few from the Americas; Asiatics from many parts of India, from Burma, China, and Malaya; Europeans including Belgians, English, French, Germans, and Russians. Yet, when these boys—so very different in background—started to work together, no one seeing them in the lower classes could foretell, by their nationality, which would rise to the top of the school, do the best work, or be the most trusted prefect or captain.
Yet nations vary greatly owing to their very different traditions and upbringing. To grow reasonably and to develop properly, however, nations must be free. It was truly said a century ago by a great British Governor in India, “The improvement of the character of a people and keeping them at the same time in a state of dependency on foreign rulers are matters quite incompatible with each other.” Bonar Law, though a British Prime Minister, saw the same truth and told us it was better for a people to have a worse form of government under their own control than to have a better form imposed from without, with no intention of their being consulted in any foreseeable future.
Again, though it is less generally noticed, those who govern others from above without consulting them deteriorate quite as surely as those they rule. It is not without reason that the word “imperialism” stands for much which is deservedly hated, or that the word “settler” calls up a less friendly picture than does the word “farmer.” When, in 1914, the First World War broke out, the G.O.C. in Ceylon said openly that no Ceylonese need offer for the front, for they were “the women of the East” and would be unable even to carry their kit and do the necessary marches. Ten days later, a company of cadets stood before him who had marched seventy-two miles within thirty-two hours, carrying rifles and kit, and all of them in well-polished and spotless uniforms.
A good company left Ceylon to fight in British battalions, and the mentions and rewards they won were well above the average for their numbers. Their parents were also first-rate. The G.O.C. had wrongly despised a people because they were under foreign rule. Cowards they were not. Some thirty years later, foreign rule had gone, and a Royal Duke had come to open Ceylon’s first Parliament. Speaking to the Prime Minister as they surveyed the crowds, His Royal Highness said that he had often heard of the marvellous beauty of Ceylon, but, true as that was, one other thing had struck him even more—the wonderful way the crowds responded to the police, how readily and well the police controlled them. The Prime Minister told him the story of how a police force which, three years before, had been largely hostile to the people and disliked by them, had become an efficient, united, and patriotic body. That reputation was gained under self-government, and the Royal observer had seen police and people free and united under self-government.
In 1904, when I first came to Ceylon, the Kandyan peoples seemed to me to be almost static and without any lively hope of anything better. Hope has, in history, been regarded by most cultures as a dangerous and deceptive thing. Most peoples have preferred to look back to a golden era in the past rather than to a future for which they must strive. Greece and Rome regarded hope with deep suspicion. Of all the nations of antiquity, the Jews alone cultivated hope, and their hope, drawn from their prophets, made them strong to endure and to survive. As far as I know, Paul the Apostle was the first to place hope in the list of the primary virtues, and to him it was one of the first three. And a real hope held with courage seems to be the first essential for national advance.
In Trinity College, then, we set out to arouse hope. In the school itself there was much self-government. But our best instrument was social service. We were most deeply indebted to the most brilliant and probably the noblest man I have ever worked with, N. P. Campbell. A very great scientist, he led us—staff and boys alike—into the study of social conditions with a view to their improvement, and into friendship with villagers and slum dwellers with a view to their united cooperation with us. His leadership resulted in the finest social welfare work I have seen or heard of.
The Kandyans had once been self-governing, and their chiefs had carried wisely the burden of local government. But most of the local government and responsibility had been taken over by the Civil Service, and the D.C., for administrative purposes, was more important than the Ratamahatmeya. As we worked for better housing, improved agriculture, and sanitation, we were outside government controls, and yet we could see a future of decent housing and better food and schools to be gained by our common toil.
The ghastly slums of Kandy were cleared, village agriculture improved, and all classes and the various races that make up the Ceylonese nation—Sinhalese, Tamil, Burgher—worked as one for the future of the nation that was to be. One youth, who was not from Trinity but from St. Thomas’s, heard of the work, was impressed by it, took it up, and became Ceylon’s first Prime Minister—the great and noble Senanayake.
This social work gave me my opportunity to get to know not only masters and boys, but also villagers and the poorest of the poor in the towns. The suggestions as to what we should do came from villagers and slum dwellers, as well as from boys and masters. I gained a lasting admiration for all types. One man who became a great friend of mine, and who won my deep respect, was a poor villager. He was horrified when he saw the lives which the conservancy workers lived. He gave up all else and lived amongst them, an unpaid friend and catechist.
Inside the College all worked together. We had no trouble about racial divisions; Sinhalese, Tamils, Burghers, Malays, and English—we were one. I introduced the teaching of Sinhalese and Tamil into the College, insisting that each boy should, as far as possible, lay the foundations of his knowledge in his mother tongue. This did not mean a racial division throughout the school, for the local languages were taught by experts in classes set aside for the purpose. But it aroused violent opposition in some papers and from the cruder demagogues, who said I was trying to lower the standard of English in order to reduce the Sinhalese to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for the English population.
The school remained sane, and boys studied their own languages with avidity, becoming thereby nearer to and more useful to their own people. Of all the boys that have been in the schools with me, the one I most admired and revered went soon after school to look after his up-country estates. He was a fine, strong, athletic youth, and he gave all the strength and ability he had to helping the villagers around him toward better agriculture and a more adequate diet, and he also saw that their sick got every attention. Night after night he arrived home weary and rested, sitting still in the darkness. Malaria carried him off, and Ceylon lost in that youth as grand a young statesman and human being as it has been my privilege to know.
Ceylon has no lack of great citizens. I think of men I know who have fought corruption, of others who are doing great educational work, and again, of some most generous givers to great causes and to the needy. That many of her thinking men are experienced and courageous judges of public life is clear from the popularity of Colette’s excellent cartoons—penetrating and as brilliant as the best of the West.
Yet none can foretell the near future of Ceylon. Her electorate is still largely inexperienced. Self-seeking demagogues are still frequently taken at their own valuation. The best schools in Ceylon are compelled to divide their classes into racial groups. Nothing is gained thereby educationally. In the old days we could teach the mother tongues as efficiently as now, and yet keep the Ceylonese one people. But demagogues, playing up a Sinhalese nationalism or imperialism, care little for unity and much for votes.
Would that we still had the great Senanayake. But no one who knows the peoples of Ceylon can fear for her future. The electorate are intelligent, if yet inexperienced. They are kindly and generous, and will soon learn to take the demagogues at their proper value—not a high one.
The problems of Ceylon can be seen and grasped much more easily than in vast lands like India and China. Her statesmen will much more surely and more quickly be able to find satisfactory solutions for them. But these solutions will be seen, studied, and largely copied in the vaster lands. Ceylon can be, and I believe will be, as much to Asia as Britain has been to Europe.
