sputable rights. When we have to
do with semi-savages, we may have to enforce our own views upon them by
the strong hand. Some one, for example, had maintained that the eighth
commandment forbade us to interfere with independent tribes; Fitzjames
observes (December 25, 1878) that they have just the same right to be
independent as the Algerine pirates to infest the Straits of Gibraltar.
A parcel of thieves and robbers who happen to have got hold of the main
highway of the world have not, therefore, a right to hold it against all
comers. If we find it necessary to occupy the passes, we shall have to
give them a lesson on the eighth commandment. Nobody will ever persuade
him that any people, excepting 'a few strapping fellows between twenty
and forty,' really prefer cruel anarchy and a life of murder and plunder
to peace and order. Nor will anyone persuade him that Englishmen, backed
by Sikhs and Ghoorkas, could not, if necessary, reduce the wild tribes
to order, and 'sow the first seeds of civilisation' in the mountains.

To some people it may seem that the emphasis is laid too much upon force
and too little upon justice. I am only concerned to say that Fitzjames's
whole theory is based upon the view--sufficiently expounded
already--that force, order, and justice require a firm basis of
'coercion'; and that, while we must be strictly just, according to our
own views of justice, we must not allow our hands to be tied by hollow
fictions about the 'rights' of races really unfit for the exercise of
the corresponding duties. On this ground, he holds it to be possible to
have an imperial 'policy which shall yet be thoroughly unjingo-like.'

Upon this I need insist no further. I shall only say that he always
regarded the British rule in India as the greatest achievement of the
race; that he held it to be the one thoroughly satisfactory bit of work
that we were now doing; and, further, that he held Lytton to be a worthy
representative of our true policy. A letter which strikingly illustrates
his enthusiasm was written in prospect of the great durbar at Delhi when
the Queen was proclaimed Empress of India (January 1, 1877). No man, he
thinks (September 6, 1876), ever had before or ever will have again so
splendid an opportunity for making a great speech and compressing into a
few words a statement of the essential spirit of the English rule,
satisfactory at once to ourselves and to our subjects. 'I am no poet,'
he says, 'as you ar