The fact, nevertheless, cannot be denied, though it is an unpleasant admission, that a large proportion of the immense agricultural population of India have remained miserably poor. Indian, politicians ascribe this poverty to the crushing burden of the land revenue collected by Government--a burden which has been shown to work out only to about 1s. 8d. per acre of crop and is being steadily reduced in relation to the gross revenue of the country--but they say nothing about the exactions of the native landlord, who has, for instance in Bengal, monopolized at the expense of the peasantry almost the whole benefit of the Permanent Settlement. Some very significant facts with regard to _rayatwari_ landlords were brought out in a debate this year in the Legislative Council of Madras, when Mr. Atkinson, in reply to one of his Hindu colleagues who had been denouncing the Government a.s.sessments in certain villages, produced an overwhelming array of figures to show that in those very villages the rents exacted by native landlords varied between eight and eleven times the amount which they paid to Government.
Nor do Indian politicians say much about the native moneylender, who is far more responsible than the tax-gatherer for the poverty of the peasant. Still less do they say about the extravagance of native customs, partly religious and partly social, which makes the peasant an easy prey to the moneylender, to whom he is too often driven when he has a child to marry or a parent to bury or a Brahman to entertain.
Indebtedness is the great curse of Indian agriculture, and the peasant"s chief necessity is cheap credit obtained on a system that will not cause him to sink deeper into the mire. Here again it is not Indian politicians, but the British rulers of India who have found a solution, and it is of such importance and promise that it deserves more than mere pa.s.sing mention.
It has been found in the adaptation to Indian requirements of the well-known Raffeisen system. Sir William Wedderburn was, I believe, actually the earliest advocate of this movement, but the first practical experiments were made in Madras as a result of exhaustive investigation by Sir Frederick Nicholson and in the United Provinces when Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell was Lieutenant-Governor, and one of the many measures pa.s.sed by Lord Curzon for the benefit of the humbler cla.s.ses in India, with little or no support from the politicians and often in despite of their vehement opposition, whilst Nationalist newspapers jeered at "a scheme for extracting money from wealthy natives in order that Government might make a show of benevolence at other people"s expense," was an Act giving legal sanction to the operations of a system of co-operative banks and credit societies. It found a healthy basis ready made in the Indian village system, and though it would never have succeeded without the informing energy and integrity of "sun-dried bureaucrats" and the countenance given to it by Government, it has had the cordial support of many capable native gentlemen. It is now only eight years old, but it has begun to spread with amazing rapidity. The report of the Calcutta Conference of Registrars last winter showed that the number of societies of all kinds had risen from 1,357 in the preceding year to 2,008, and their aggregate working capital from 44 lakhs to nearly 81 (one lakh or Rs.100,000=6,666). The new movement is, of course, still only in its infancy, but it is full of promise. The moneylender, who was at first bitterly hostile, is beginning to realize that by providing capital for the co-operative banks he can get, on the whole, an adequate return with much better security for his money than in the old days of great gains and, also, great losses. One of the healthiest features is that, notwithstanding the great expansion of the system, during the last twelve months, the additional working capital required was mainly provided by private individuals and only a very small amount by Government. Another hopeful feature is that the money saved to the peasant by the lower interest he has to pay on his debts pending repayment is now going into modern machinery and improved methods of agriculture. The new system appeals most strongly to poor and heavily indebted villages, and in the Punjab, where the results are really remarkable, especially in some of the backward Mahomedan districts, it is hoped, that within a few years nearly half the peasant indebtedness, estimated at 25 to 30 millions sterling, will have been wiped off.
Practical education is, however, as urgently needed for Indian agriculture as for any other form of Indian industry. The selection of land and of seeds, the use of suitable manures, an intelligent rotation of crops, the adoption of better methods and less antiquated implements can only be brought about by practical education, and the demand for it is one that Government will hear put forward with growing insistency by the new Councils on which Indian landowners have been wisely granted the special representation that the agricultural interests of India so abundantly deserve.
It was the "sun-dried bureaucrat" again who in regard to Indian industries as well as to Indian agriculture preached and practised sound _Swadeshi_ before the word had ever been brought into vogue by the Indian politician. The veteran Sir George Birdwood, Sir George Watt, Sir Edward Buck, and many others have stood forth for years as the champions of Indian art and Indian home industries. As far back as 1883, a Resolution was pa.s.sed by Government expressing its desire "to give the utmost encouragement to every effort to subst.i.tute for articles now obtained from Europe articles of _bona fide_ local manufacture or indigenous origin." In 1886, a special Economic Department was created to keep up the elaborate survey of the economic products of India which Sir George Watt had just completed under State direction. But the most important administrative measure was the creation under Lord Curzon of a separate portfolio of Commerce and Industry in the Government of India, to which a civilian, Sir John Hewett, was appointed with very conspicuous success. It was also under Lord Curzon that the most vigorous impulse was given to technical education of which the claims had already been advocated by many distinguished Anglo-Indian officials, such as Sir Antony MacDonnell and Sir Auckland Colvin. The results of an exhaustive inquiry conducted throughout India by a Committee of carefully selected officers were embodied in the Educational Resolution of 1904. Particular stress was laid upon the importance of industrial, commercial, and art and craft schools as the preparatory stages of technical education, for which, in its higher forms, provision had already been made in such inst.i.tutions as the engineering colleges at Sibpur, Rurki, Jubbulpore, and Madras, the College of Science at Poona, and the Technical Inst.i.tute of Bombay. Until then the record of technical schools had too often resembled the description which Mr.
Butler, the new Minister of Education, tersely gave of that of the Lucknow Industrial School--"a record of inconstant purpose with breaks of unconcern." Not only did the question of technical education receive more systematic treatment, but a special a.s.signment of Rs.244,000 a year was made in 1905 by the Government of India in aid of the provincial revenues for its improvement and extension. It was not, however, until the liberality of the late Mr. J.N. Tata and his sons, one of the best known Pa.r.s.ee families of Bombay, recently placed a considerable income for the purpose at the disposal of Government that steps have been taken to establish an "Indian Inst.i.tute of Science" worthy of the name, to which the Mysore Government, who have given a site for it in Bangalore, as well as the Government of India, have promised handsome financial a.s.sistance.
Whilst the encouragement given to Indian technical education has until quite lately proceeded far more from the British rulers of India than from any native quarter, it has been also until quite lately British capital and British enterprise that have contributed mostly to the development of Indian industry and commerce. The amount of British capital invested in India for its commercial and industrial development has been estimated at 350,000,000, and this capital incidentally furnishes employment for large numbers of Indians. Half a million are employed, on the railways alone. Another half million work on the tea estates. The Bombay and Ahmedabad cotton mills represent at the present day the only important and successful application of Indian capital and Indian enterprise to industrial development. The woollen, cotton, and leather industries of Cawnpore, which has become one of the chief manufacturing centres of India, and the great jute industry of Bengal were promoted almost exclusively by British, and not by indigenous effort. Real _Swadeshi_, stimulated by British teaching and by British enterprise, was thus already in full swing when the Indian politician took up the cry and too often perverted it to criminal purposes, and, though he may have helped to rouse his sluggish fellow countrymen to healthy as well as to mischievous activity, it may be doubted whether any good he has done has not been more than counterbalanced by the injurious effect upon capital of a violent and often openly seditious agitation. Mr. Gokhale himself seems to have awakened to this danger, when in an eloquent speech delivered by him at Lucknow, in support of _Swadeshi_ in 1907, he protested, rather late in the day, against the "narrow, exclusive, and intolerant spirit" in which some advocates of the cause were seeking to promote it, and laid stress upon the importance of capital as well as of enterprise and skill as an indispensable factor of success. British investments are large, but not so large as they might and should be, and the reluctance to invest in India grows with the uneasiness caused by political unrest.
That an immense field lies open in India for industrial development need scarcely be argued. It has been explored with great knowledge and ability in a very instructive article contributed last January to the _Asiatic Quarterly Review_ by Mr. A.C. Chatterjee, an Indian member of the Civil Service. Amongst the many instances he gives of industries clamouring for the benefits of applied science, I will quote only the treatment of oil seeds, the manufacture of paper from wood pulp and wood meal, the development of leather factories and tanneries, as well as of both vegetable and chemical dyes, the sugar industry, and metal work--all of which, if properly instructed and directed, would enable India to convert her own raw materials with profit into finished products either for home consumption or for exportation abroad. It is at least equally important for India to save her home industries, and especially her hand-weaving industry, the wholesale destruction of which under the pressure of the Lancashire power loom has thrown so many poor people on to the already over-crowded land. Here, as Mr.
Chatterjee wisely remarks, combination and organization are badly needed, for "the hand industry has the greatest chances of survival when it adopts the methods of the power industry without actual resort to power machinery." The articles on the Indian industrial problem in _Science Progress_ for April and July, by Mr. Alfred Chatterton, Director of Industries, Madras, are also worth careful attention. He remarks quite truly that her inexhaustible supplies of cheap labour are "India"s greatest a.s.set"; but he too wisely holds that the factory system of the West should only be guardedly extended and under careful precautions. The Government of India have at present under consideration important legislative measures for preventing the undue exploitation of both child and adult labour--measures which are already being denounced by the native Press as "restrictive" legislation devised by the "English cotton kings" in order to "stifle the indigenous industries of India in their infancy"!
What Government can do for the pioneering of new industries is shown by the success of the State dairies in Northern India and of Mr.
Chatterton"s experiments in the manufacturing of aluminium in Madras.
There is an urgent demand at present for industrial research laboratories and experimental work all over India, and above all for better and more practical education. But it would seem that, in this direction, the impetus given by Lord Curzon has somewhat slackened under Lord Minto"s administration, owing, doubtless, to the absorbing claims of the political situation and of political reforms.
In speaking in the Calcutta Council on a resolution for the establishment of a great Polytechnic College, the Home Member was able to point to a fairly long list of measures taken at no small cost by the State to promote technical education in all parts of India, and he rightly urged that there would be little use in creating a sort of technical University until a larger proportion of students had qualified for it by taking advantage of the more elementary courses already provided for them. His answer would, however, have been more convincing could he have shown that existing inst.i.tutions are always adequately equipped and that considered schemes which have the support of the best Indian as well as of the best official opinion are not subjected to merely dilatory objections at headquarters. Three years ago, after the Naini Tal Industrial Conference, the most representative ever perhaps held in India, Sir John Hewett, who had been made Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces after having been the first to hold the new portfolio of Commerce and Industry, developed a scheme for the creation of a Technological College at Cawnpore, which met with unanimous approval. Nothing has yet been done to give effect to it, and it was not only the Indian but many of the European members, official as well as unofficial, of the Viceroy"s Legislative Council who sympathized with Mr. Mudholkar"s protest when he asked with some bitterness what must be the impression produced in India by the shelving of a scheme that was supported by men of local experiences by the head of the Provincial Government, and by the Government of India, because people living 6,000 miles away did not consider it to be absolutely flawless.
In one direction at any rate, India can rightly demand that Government should be left an entirely free hand--namely, in regard to the very large orders which have to be placed every year by the great spending departments. It has now been laid down by the Secretary of State that Indian industry should supply the needs of Government in respect of all articles that are, in whole or in part, locally manufactured. But Indian industry would be able to supply much more if the Government of India were in a position to give it more a.s.sured support. The case of the Bengal Iron and Steel Company has been quoted to me, which was compelled to close down its steel works and to reduce the number of its iron furnaces in blast from four to two because the promises of support received from Government when the company took over the works proved to be largely and quite inexcusably illusory. For works of this kind cannot be run at present in India unless they can depend upon the hearty support of Government, which, through the Railways and Public Works Department, is the main, and, indeed, the only, consumer on a large scale.
At the present moment, Messrs. Tata are making a truly gigantic endeavour to acclimatize the iron and steel industry in India by the erection of immense works at Sakti in Bengal, where they have within easy reach a practically unlimited supply of the four necessary raw materials iron ore, c.o.king coal, flux, and manganese ore. To utilize these, plant is being set up of a yearly capacity of 120,000 tons of foundry iron, rails, shapes, and merchant bars, and plans have been drawn out for an industrial city of 20,000 inhabitants. The enterprise is entirely in Indian hands with an initial share capital of 1,545,000 administered by an Indian board of directors, who have engaged American experts to organize the works. Government has granted various railway facilities to the company and has placed with them an order for 200,000 tons of rails for periodical delivery. Upon the future of these works will probably depend for many years to come the success of the metallurgical and other kindred industries of India, and it is to be hoped that Government will be allowed to give them all reasonable a.s.sistance without interference from home. Another purely Indian enterprise--also under the auspices of Messrs. Tata--is a great scheme for catching the rainfall of the Western Ghats and creating a hydro-electric supply of power which will, amongst other uses, drive most of the Bombay mills.
In regard to minor Indian industries, hints have, I am a.s.sured, too frequently been sent out from England that the claims of British industry to Government support must not be forgotten. Even now no change has been made in the regulations which compel the Government of India to purchase all articles not wholly or partly manufactured in India through the Stores Department of the India Office. The delay thus caused in itself represents a serious loss, for it appears to take an average of nine months for any order through that Department to be carried out, and further delays arise whenever some modification in the original indent is required. Nowadays merchants in India keep for ordinary purposes of trade such large collections of samples that in nine cases out of ten Government Departments could settle at once upon what they want and their orders would be carried out both more quickly and more cheaply.
The maintenance of these antiquated regulations, which are very injurious to Indian trade, is attributed by Indians mainly to the influence of powerful vested interests in England.
The time would also seem to, have arrived when, with the development of Indian trade and industry, private contracts might with advantage be subst.i.tuted for the more expensive and slower activities of the Public Works Department. Work done by that Department is bound to be more expensive, for its enormous establishment has to be maintained on the same footing whether financial conditions allow or do not allow Government to embark on large public works expenditure, and when they do not, the proportion of establishment charges to the actual cost of works is ruinous. When the Calcutta Port Trust and other inst.i.tutions of the same character put out to contract immense works running every year into millions, why, it is asked, should not Government do the same? Some works like irrigation works may properly be reserved for the Public Works Department, but to mobilize the Department whenever a bungalow has to be built or a road made by Government, is surely ridiculous.
Indian opinion is at present just in the mood when reasonable concessions of this kind would make an excellent impression; and, if they are not made spontaneously, the enlarged Indian Councils will soon exert pressure to obtain them.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND GREAT BRITAIN.
When Lord Morley introduced his Indian reforms scheme, a section at least of the party to which he belongs supported it not only on general grounds, but more especially in the belief that it would strengthen the hands of the Imperial Government in dealing with the hide-bound officialism of which the Government of India is in the eyes of some British Radicals the visible embodiment. None of them, probably, antic.i.p.ated that the boot would be on the other leg. If the Government of India have sometimes sacrificed Indian interests to British interests, it has been almost exclusively in connexion with the financial and fiscal relations between the two countries, and often against the better judgment and sense of justice of Anglo-Indian officials. In this respect the enlarged Indian Councils will lend far greater weight than in the past to any representations which the Government of India may make at Whitehall.
Even in the course of its first session at Calcutta the Imperial Council has given abundant indications of its att.i.tude. In the Budget debate, Sir Vithaldas Thackersey, one of the Indian elected members from Bombay, remarked very pointedly that "there is an impression abroad that, in deciding most important questions of economic and financial policy, the Government are obliged to be guided by political exigencies." Official secrets have a way of leaking out in India, and Sir Vithaldas knew what he was talking about when he added with regard to the Budget under discussion--"It is generally believed that, if the Government of India had had a freer hand, they would have preferred the raising of the general tariff or a duty on sugar, which would have been less objectionable than the levying of the proposed enhanced duties in the teeth of the practically unanimous opposition of the non-official members of this Council and of the public generally".
It is certainly unfortunate that on the first occasion on which the Government of India had to lay a financial statement before the enlarged Council, Indian members should have come to the conclusion that the unpopular Budget submitted to them was not the one originally proposed by the Indian Finance Department, but that it had been imposed upon that Department by the Secretary of State in deference to the exigencies of British party politics. Equally unfortunate is it that the financial difficulties which this Budget had to meet were mainly due to the loss of revenue on opium in consequence of the arrangements made by Great Britain with China, in which Indian interests had received very scant consideration. Not only had Sir Edward Baker, when he was Finance Minister three years ago, given an a.s.surance that the new opium policy would be carried out without any resort to extra taxation, but there is a strong feeling in India that the praiseworthy motives which have induced the Imperial Government to come to terms with China on the subject of the opium trade would be still more creditable to the British people had not the Indian taxpayer been left, with his fellow-sufferers in Hong-Kong and Singapore, to bear the whole cost of British moral rect.i.tude. The Imperial Council did not confine itself, either, to criticism of what had happened. Sir Vithaldas Thackersey had probably every Indian and many official members with him when he made the following very clear intimation as to the future:--"We are prepared to bear our burdens, and all that we ask is that the country should be allowed greater freedom in choosing the methods of raising revenue. I am unable to see how it will be injurious to the interests of Government if this Council is allowed a more real share as regards what articles shall be taxed and what duties shall be paid."
It is upon such questions as these that the voice of the enlarged Councils will in future cause much more frequent embarra.s.sment to the Imperial Government than to the Government of India, and I shall be much surprised if they have not to listen to it in regard to various "home charges" with which the Government of India have from time to time very reluctantly agreed to burden Indian finance at the bidding of Whitehall.
The Indian Nationalist Press has not been alone in describing the recent imposition on the Indian taxpayer of a capitation allowance amounting to 300,000 a year to meet the increased cost of the British soldier as "the renewed attempt of a rapacious War Office to raid the helpless Indian Treasury," and even the increase in the pay of the native soldier, which Lord Kitchener obtained for him, does not prevent him and his friends from drawing their own comparison between the squalor of the quarters in which he is still housed and the relatively luxurious barracks built for Tommy Atkins under Lord Kitchener"s administration at the expense of the Indian taxpayer. It is no secret that the Government of India have also frequently remonstrated in vain when India has been charged full measure and overflowing in respect of military operations in which the part borne by her has been governed less by her own direct interests than by the necessity of making up with the help of Indian contingents the deficiencies of our military organization at home. It was no Indian politician but the Government of India who expressed the opinion that:--
The Imperial Government keeps in India and quarters upon the revenues of that country as large a portion of its army as it thinks can possibly be required to maintain its dominion there; that it habitually treats that army as a reserve force available for Imperial purposes; that it has uniformly detached European regiments from the garrison of India to take part in Imperial wars whenever it has been found necessary or convenient to do so; and, more than this, that it has drawn not less freely upon the native army of India, towards the maintenance of which it contributes nothing, to aid in contests outside of India with which the Indian Government has had little or no concern.
All these are, however, but secondary issues to the much larger one which the creation of the new Councils must tend to bring to the front with all the force of the increased weight given to them by the recent reforms. For that issue will raise the whole principle of our fiscal relations with India, if it results in a demand for the protection of Indian industries against the compet.i.tion of imported manufactures by an autonomous tariff. It must be remembered that the desire for Protection is no new thing in India. Whether we like it or not, whether we be Free Traders or Tariff Reformers, we have to reckon with the fact that almost every Indian is a Protectionist at heart, whatever he may be in theory.
The Indian National Congress has. .h.i.therto fought shy of making Protection a prominent plank of its platform, lest it should offend its political friends in England. Yet as far back as 1902 a politician as careful as Mr. Surendranath Banerjee to avoid in his public utterances anything that might alienate British Radicalism, declared in his inaugural address at the 18th session of the Congress that "if we had a potential voice in the government of our own country there would be no question as to what policy we should follow. We would unhesitatingly adopt a policy of Protection." This note has been accentuated since the political campaign in favour of militant Swadeshism, and when English Radicals sympathize with the _Swadeshi_ boycott as a protest against the Part.i.tion of Bengal, they would do well to recollect that, before Indian audiences, the most violent forms of _Swadeshi_ are constantly defended on the ground that British industrial greed, of which Free Trade is alleged to be the highest expression, has left no other weapons to India for the defence of her material interests. Mr. Lala Lajpat Rai, who has the merit of often speaking with great frankness, addressed himself once in the following terms to "those estimable gentlemen in India who believe in the righteousness of the British nation as represented by the electors of Great Britain and Ireland, and who are afraid of offending them by the boycott of English-made goods":
If there are any two cla.s.ses into which the British nation can roughly be divided they are either manufacturers or the working men. Both are interested in keeping the Indian market open for the sale and consumption of their manufactures.
They are said to be the only friends to whom we can appeal against the injustice of the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy.
Offend them, we are told, and you are undone. You lose the good will of the only cla.s.ses who can help you and who are prepared to listen to your grievances. But, boycott or no boycott, any movement calculated to increase the manufacturing power of India is likely to incur the displeasure of the British elector. He is a very well-educated animal, a keen man of business, who can at once see through things likely to affect his pocket, however cleverly they may be put or arranged by those who hold an interest which is really adverse to his. He is not likely to be hoodwinked by the cry of _Swadeshi_ minus the boycott, because, really speaking, if effectively worked and organized, both are one and the same thing.
That _Swadeshi_ as understood by educated Indians of all cla.s.ses and of all political complexions means in some form or other Protection was made clear even in the Imperial Council. The Finance Member, Sir Fleetwood Wilson, was himself fain to pay homage to it, but his sympathy did not disarm Mr. Chitnavis, an Indian member whose speech deserves to be recorded, as it embodied the opinions entertained by 99 out of every 1,000 Indians who are interested in economic questions and by a very large number of Anglo-Indians, both official and non-official:--
The country must be grateful to him [the Finance Member]
for his sympathetic att.i.tude towards Indian industries.
"I think _Swadeshi_ is good, and if the outcome of the changes I have laid before the Council result in some encouragement of Indian industries, I for one shall not regret it." For a Finance Minister to say even so much is not a small thing in the present state of India"s dependence upon the most p.r.o.nounced and determined Free Trade country in the world.... At the same time we regret the absence of fiscal autonomy for India and the limitations under which this Government has to frame its industrial policy. We regret that Government cannot give the country a protective tariff forthwith. However excellent Free Trade may be for a country in an advanced stage of industrial development, it must be conceded that Protection is necessary for the success and development of infant industries. Even p.r.o.nounced protagonists of Free Trade do not view this idea with disfavour. That Indian manufacturing industry is in its infancy does not admit of controversy. Why should not India, then, claim special protection for her undeveloped industry? Even countries remarkable for their industrial enterprise and excellence protect their industries. The United States and Germany are decidedly Protectionist. The British Colonies have protective tariffs... protective in purpose, scope, and effect. They are not like the Indian import duties, levied for revenue purposes. The Indian appeal for Protection cannot in the circ.u.mstances be unreasonable.
The development of the industries is a matter of great moment to the Empire, and the popular leanings towards Protectionism ought to engage the sympathy of Government. The imposition of import duties for revenue purposes is sanctioned by precedent and principle alike.
... And yet for a small import duty of 3-1/2 per cent, upon cotton goods a countervailing Excise duty upon home manufactures is imposed in disregard of Indian public opinion, and the latest p.r.o.nouncement of the Secretary of State has dispelled all expectations of the righting of this wrong.
No measure has done greater injury to the cause of Free Trade in India or more permanent discredit to British rule than this Excise duty on Indian manufactured cotton, for none has done more to undermine Indian faith in the principles of justice upon which British rule claims, and, on the whole, most legitimately claims, to be based. In obedience to British Free Trade principles, all import duties were finally abolished in India at the beginning of the eighties, except on liquors and on salt, which were subject to an internal Excise duty. In 1894, however, the Government of India were compelled by financial stress to revive the greater part of the old 5 per cent tariff on imports, excluding cottons, until the end of the year when cottons were included and under pressure from England. Lord Elgin"s Government had to agree to levy a countervailing Excise duty of 5 per cent on cotton fabrics manufactured in Indian power mills. After a good deal of heated correspondence the Government of India were induced in February, 1896, to reduce the duty on cotton manufactured goods imported from abroad to 3-1/2 per cent., with the same reduction of the Indian Excise duty, whilst cotton yarns were altogether freed from duty. This arrangement is still in force.
Rightly or wrongly, every Indian believes that the Excise duty was imposed upon India for the selfish benefit of the British cotton manufacturer and under the pressure of British party politics. He believes, as was once sarcastically remarked by an Indian member of the Viceroy"s Legislative Council, that, so long as Lancashire sends 60 members to Westminster, the British Government will always have 60 reasons for maintaining the Excise duty. To the English argument that the duty is "only a small one" the Indian reply is that, according to the results of an elaborate statistical inquiry conducted at the instance of the late Mr. Jamsetjee N. Tata, a 3-1/2 per cent Excise duty on cotton cloth is equivalent to a 7 per cent duty on capital invested in weaving under Indian conditions. The profits are very fluctuating and the depreciation of plant is considerable. Equally fallacious is another argument that the duty is in reality paid by Englishmen. The capital engaged in the Indian cotton industry is, it is contended, not British, but almost exclusively Indian, and a large proportion is held by not over-affluent Indian shareholders.
There is nothing to choose between the records of the two great political parties at home in their treatment of England"s financial and fiscal relations with India, and English Tariff Reformers have as a rule shown little more disposition than English Free Traders to study Indian interests. In fact, until Mr. M. de P. Webb, a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, published under the t.i.tle of "India and the Empire"
an able exposition of the Tariff problem in relation to India, very few Tariff Reformers seemed even to take India into account in their schemes of Imperial preference. I hope, therefore, to be absolved from all suspicion of party bias in drawing attention to a question which is, I believe, destined to play in the near future a most important--perhaps even a determining--part in the relations of India to the British Empire.
One of the first things that struck me on my return to India this year--and struck me most forcibly--was the universality and vehemence of the demand for a new economic policy directed with energy and system to the expansion of Indian trade and industry. It is a demand with which the great majority of Anglo-Indian officials are in full sympathy, and it is in fact largely the outcome of their own efforts to stimulate Indian interest in the question. There is very little doubt that the Government of India would be disposed to respond to it speedily and heartily on the lines I have already briefly indicated. Will the Imperial Government and the British democracy lend them a helping hand or even leave a free hand to them? If not, we shall a.s.suredly find ourselves confronted with an equally universal and vehement demand for Protection pure and simple by the erection of an Indian Tariff wall against the compet.i.tion of imported manufactures. I need hardly point out how the rejection of such a demand would be exploited by the political agitator or how it would rally to the side of active disaffection some of the most conservative and influential cla.s.ses in India. For if, as those Englishmen who claim a monopoly of sympathy with the people of India are continually preaching, we must be prepared to sacrifice administrative efficiency to sympathy, how could we shelter ourselves on an economic issue behind theories of the greater economic efficiency of Free Trade? If we are to try "to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas"--a principle with which I humbly but fully agree--how could we justify the refusal to India, of the fiscal autonomy for which there is a far more widespread and genuine demand than for political autonomy?
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE POSITION OF INDIANS IN THE EMPIRE.
The problems of Indian administration are in themselves difficult enough to solve, but even more difficult are some of the problems connected with the relations of India and her peoples to the rest of the Empire.
One of these has a.s.sumed during the last few years a character of extreme gravity, which neither the Imperial Government nor the British public seems to have at all adequately grasped.
"I think," said Mr. Gokhale in moving his resolution for the prohibition of Indian indentured labour for Natal, "I am stating the plain truth when I say that no single question of our time has evoked more bitter feelings throughout India--feelings in the presence of which the best friends of British rule have had to remain helpless--than the continued ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa."
Every Indian member of the Viceroy"s Legislative Council who spoke during that debate, whatever race or creed or caste he represented, endorsed the truth of Mr. Gokhale"s statement, and had a vote been taken on the resolution it would have had what no other resolution moved during the whole session would have secured--the unanimous support of the whole body of Indian members and the sympathy of every English member, official as well as unofficial. The Government of India wisely averted a division by accepting the resolution. Not a single attempt was made either by the Viceroy in the chair or by other representatives of Government to controvert either Mr. Gokhale"s statement or the overwhelming array of facts showing the nature and extent of the ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa, which was presented by the mover of the resolution and by every Indian speaker who followed him.
The whole tone of the debate was extremely dignified and self-restrained, but no Englishman can have listened to it without a deep sense of humiliation. For the first time in history the Government of India had to sit dumb whilst judgment was p.r.o.nounced in default against the Imperial Government upon a question which has stirred the resentment of every single community of our Indian Empire. It was the one question which called forth very deep feeling in the Indian National Congress at Lah.o.r.e last December, where subscriptions and donations flowed in freely to defray the expenses of a campaign throughout India, and it figured just as prominently in the proceedings of the All-India Moslem League, which held its annual meeting there in the following month. In fact, Mahomedans have the additional grievance that the laws of the Transvaal discriminate by name against those of their faith.
There is scarcely a city of any importance in India in which public meetings have not testified to the interest and indignation which the subject arouses in every cla.s.s of Indian audience.
This is a very grave fact. I need not enter into the details of the question. They are well known. There may be some exaggerations, Indian immigrants may not always be drawn from desirable cla.s.ses, there may be differences of opinion as to the wisdom of the att.i.tude taken up by some of the Indians in South Africa, and Englishmen may sympathize with the desire of British and Dutch colonists to check the growth of another alien population in their midst. But that the Indian has not received there the just treatment to which he is ent.i.tled as a subject of the British Crown, and that disabilities and indignities are heaped upon him because he is an Indian, are broad facts that are not and cannot be disputed. The resolution adopted by the Imperial Council, with the sanction of the Government of India, was formally directed against Natal because it is only in regard to Natal that India possesses an effective weapon of retaliation in withholding the supply of indentured labour which is indispensable to the prosperity of that colony. But the Indian grievance is not confined to Natal; it is even greater in the Transvaal.
Still less is it confined to the particular cla.s.s of Indians who emigrate as indentured labourers to South Africa. What Indians feel most bitterly is that however well educated, however respectable and even distinguished may be an Indian who goes to or resides in South Africa, and especially in the Transvaal, he is treated as an outcast and is at the mercy of harsh laws and regulations framed for his oppression, and often interpreted with extra harshness by the officials who are left to apply them. This bitterness is intensified by the recollection that, before the South African War, the wrongs of British Indians in the Transvaal figured prominently in the catalogue of charges brought by the Imperial Government against the Kruger _regime_ and contributed not a little to precipitate its downfall. In prosecuting the South African War Great Britain drew freely upon India for a.s.sistance of every kind except actual Indian combatants. Not only was it the loyalty of India that enabled the British troops who saved Natal to be embarked hurriedly at Bombay, but it was the constant supply from India of stores of all kinds, of transport columns, of hospital bearers, &c., which, to a great extent, made up throughout the war for the deficiencies of the British War Office. There are monuments erected in South Africa which testify to the devotion of British Indians who, though non-combatants, laid down their lives in the cause of the Empire. Yet, as far as the British Indians are concerned, the end of it all has been that their lot in the Transvaal since it became a British Colony is harder than it was In the old Kruger days, and the British colonists in the Transvaal, who were ready enough to use Indian grievances as a stick with which to beat Krugerism, have now joined hands with the Dutch in refusing to redress them. The Government of India have repeatedly urged upon the Imperial Government the gravity of this question, and Lord Curzon especially pressed upon his friends, when they were in office, the vital importance of effecting some acceptable settlement whilst the Transvaal was still a Crown Colony, and, therefore, more amenable to the influence of the Mother Country than it would be likely to prove when once endowed with self-government. Yet the Imperial Government after a succession of half-hearted and ineffective protests have now finally acquiesced in the perpetuation and even the aggravation of wrongs which some ten years ago they solemnly declared to be intolerable.
Apart from the sense of justice upon which Englishmen pride themselves, it is impossible to overlook the disastrous consequences of this _gran rifiuto_ for the prestige of British rule in India. One of the Indian Members of Council, Mr. Dadabhoy, indicated them in terms as moderate as they were significant:--
In 1899 Lord Lansdowne feared the moral consequences in India of a conviction of the powerlessness of the British _Raj_ to save the Indian settlers in the Transvaal from oppression and harsh treatment. That was when there was peace all over this country, when sedition, much more anarchism, was an unheard-of evil. If the situation was disquieting then, what is it now when the urgent problem of the moment is how to put down and prevent the growth of unrest In the land? The ma.s.ses do not understand the niceties of the relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies; they do not comprehend the legal technicalities. The British _Raj_ has so far revealed itself to them as a power whose influence is irresistible, and when they find that, with all its traditional omnipotence, it has not succeeded in securing to their countrymen --admittedly a peaceable and decent body of settlers who rendered valuable services during the war--equal treatment at the hands of a small Dependency, they become disheartened and attribute the failure to the European colonist"s influence over the Home Government. That is an impression which is fraught with incalculable potentialities of mischief and which British statesmanship should do everything in its power to dispel. The present political situation in India adds special urgency to the case.