04-19-2005, 07:29 AM
<b>India in Bondage by Jabez T. Sunderland; Lewis Copeland Company, 1932 </b>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Her Right to Freedom and a Place Among the Great Nations </b>
CHAPTER I
A VISIT TO INDIA. WHAT BRITISH RULE MEANS. INTRODUCTORY
The impression is widespread in America that British rule in India has been, and is, a great and almost unqualified good. <b>The British themselves never tire of "pointing with pride" to what they claim to have done and to be doing for the benefit of the Indian people. </b>What knowledge we have in America regarding the matter comes almost wholly from British sources, and hence the majority of us do not suspect that there is another side to the story. <b>But the Indian people claim, very earnestly claim, that there is another side, which cannot fail to prove a disillusionment to all who learn the truth about it. </b>
During the days of chattel-slavery in the Southern States of the American Union, so long as the world knew of slavery only through the representations of it given by the slave-holders, <b>the impression was common that slavery was a beneficent institution. It was not until the slaves themselves began to find a voice and the "sacred institution" came to be described from the standpoint of the bondman, that its real character began to be understood.</b>
I
What, in reality, does British rule in India mean--not from the standpoint of the <b>British Government which gets such great political prestige from the holding of this vast Asiatic dependency;</b> not as it is seen by the army of British officials in India who derive their living and their wealth from British economic domination there; <b>but what does it mean as experienced by the 320 millions of Indian people who as a nation have had a long and proud past, but who more than a century and a half ago as we have seen were conquered and disarmed and have been held in subjection ever since by a foreign power? </b>
Ever since Edmund Burke's famous impeachment of Warren Hastings for his misdeeds in India, there have not been wanting Englishmen, both in India and at home, who have seen and deplored, and to some extent pointed out, <b>what they have believed very serious wrongs connected with the British rule of the Indian people. </b>Naturally such utterances have been unpopular in England, and have been <b>"hushed up"</b> as much as possible. It has not been uncommon to denounce such plain speaking as unpatriotic and traitorous. However, free speech has not been wholly suppressed. A great body of testimony has been accumulated both in England and India, showing that the results of foreign conquest and foreign rule in this instance have not been essentially different from results of such conquest and rule everywhere else. This or that foreign domination may be a little more or a little less intelligent here or cruel there, but in every case and in every country and age its essential nature is the same. <b>It is founded on force and not on justice.</b> Its result is certain to be deep and widespread injury to those robbed of their freedom and their rights, and in the end to those who do the robbing, as well. The rule of any people by the sword of a foreign conqueror is always a bitter thing to those who feel the sword's pitiless edge, whatever it may be to those who hold the hilt of the sword. <b>But it is worse than bitter; it is demoralizing, degenerating, destructive to the character of those held in subjection. It tends to destroy their self-respect, their power of initiative, their power of self-direction, to create a slave-psychology and rob them of all hope and incentive in life. Injury of this kind is the deepest that can be inflicted upon humanity. </b>
II
To understand fully the great problem confronting the people of India to-day, we must have clearly in mind the exact relation between India and England. <b>India is a dependency, not a colony.</b> Great Britain has both colonies and dependencies, and many persons suppose them to be identical. But they are not necessarily so. Colonies may be self-ruling--six of those connected with the British Empire are, namely, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State. <b>But other British colonies are not self-ruling. These are dependencies. </b>As already said, India is a dependency.
As the result of a pretty wide acquaintance in England and a residence of some years in Canada, I am disposed to believe that nowhere in the world can be found governments that are more free, that more fully embody the intelligent will of their people, or that better serve their people's many-sided interests and wants, than those of the self-ruling colonies or "dominions" of Great Britain. I do not see but that these are in every essential way as free as if they were full republics. Probably they are not any more free than the people of the United States, but it is no exaggeration to say that they are essentially as free. The connection of most of them with England, their mother-country, is not one of coercion but of choice; it is one of reverence and affection. That the British Government assures such liberty in even a part of its colonies is a matter for congratulation and honorable pride. To this extent it stands on a moral elevation equal, if not superior, to that of any government in the world.
But turn now from Britain's free colonies to her dependencies. Here we find something for which there does not seem to be any natural place among British political institutions. Britons call their flag the flag of freedom. They speak of the British Constitution, largely unwritten though it is, as a constitution that guarantees freedom to every British subject in the world. Magna Charta meant self-government for the English people. Cromwell wrote on the statute books of the English Parliament: "All just powers under God are derived from the consent of the people." Since Cromwell's day, this principle has been fundamental, central, undisputed, in British home politics. It took a little longer to get it recognized in colonial matters. The American colonies in 1776 took their stand upon it. "Just government must be based upon the consent of the governed." "There should be no taxation without representation." These were their affirmations. Burke and Pitt and Fox and the broader-minded leaders of public opinion in England were in sympathy with their American brethren. If Britain had been true to her principle of freedom and self-rule she would have kept all her American colonies in 1776. But she was not true to it and so she lost them. Later she came very near losing Canada in the same way. But her eyes were opened in time and she gave Canada freedom and selfgovernment. This prevented revolt and fastened Canada to her with hooks of steel. Since this experiment with Canada, it has been a settled principle in connection with Britain's free colonies, or dominions, as well as with her home politics, that there is no just power except that which is based upon the consent of the governed.
But what are we to do with this principle when we come to the dependencies? Is another and different principle to be adopted here? Are there indeed peoples whom it is just to rule without their consent? Is justice one thing in England and Canada and another thing in India? It was the belief and conviction that what is justice in England and Canada is justice everywhere, that made Froude declare, "Free nations cannot govern subject provinces."
III
Why is England in India at all? Why did she go there at first and why does she remain? If India had been a comparatively empty land as America was when it was discovered, so that Englishmen had wanted to settle there and make homes, the reason would have been plain. But it was a land already full, and as a matter of fact practically no Englishmen have ever gone to India to settle or make homes. If the Indian people had been savages or barbarians, there might have seemed on the surface of the question, some reason for England's conquering and ruling them. But they were a people with highly organized governments far older than that of Great Britain, and with a civilization that had risen to a splendid development before England's was born.
Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India, said in his address at the Great Delhi Durbar in 1901, <b>"Powerful Empires existed and flourished here (in India) while Englishmen were still wandering, painted, in the woods, and while the British Colonies were still a wilderness and a jungle. India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe." </b>It is such a land that England has conquered and is ruling as a dependency. It is such a people that she is holding without giving them any voice whatever in their own destiny. The honored Canadian Premier, Sir Wilfred Laurier, at the Colonial Conference held in London in connection with the coronation of King Edward, declared: "The Empire of Rome was composed of slave states; the British Empire is a Galaxy of Free Nations." But is great India a free nation? In a speech made at the League of Nations in Geneva, in September, 1927, Sir Austen Chamberlain described the British Empire as "a Great Commonwealth of Free and Equal Peoples." <b>Why do these statesmen use such language when they know how contrary to the facts it is? </b>India, which constitutes <b>more than four-fifths of the Empire, is not free; it is in bondage. Its people are not allowed "equality" with the free minority, the free one-fifth, but are ruled by compulsion. Thus we see that in truth the British Empire is to a four or five times larger extent a "Slave Empire," than it is a "Galaxy of Free Nations" or a "Great Commonwealth of Free and Equal Peoples." </b>
Perhaps there is nothing so dangerous or so evil in its effects, as irresponsible power. <b>That is what Great Britain exercises in connection with India--absolute power, with no one to call her to account. </b>I do not think any nation is able to endure such an ordeal any better than is Britain, but it is an ordeal to which neither rulers of nations nor individuals in private life should ever be subjected. The risks are too great. The wrongs and tyrannies inseparable from it are too serious. England avoids it in connection with her own rulers, by making them strictly responsible to the English people. The rulers of Canada are strictly responsible to the Canadian people. Every free nation safeguards alike its people and its rulers by making its rulers answerable in everything to those whom they govern. But here is the anomaly of British rule in India--<b>Britain rules India but does not acknowledge any degree whatever of political responsibility to the people of India. </b>
Whatever freedom or political privileges they enjoy are purely "favors" which she in her kindness "graciously grants" to them; she does not for a moment admit that any political freedom or political power belongs to them of right--is their just possession, which they may rightly demand of Great Britain and which she has no right to withhold. Her will is the supreme law; and India must submit in everything.
What is the result? Are the interests and rights of India protected? Is it possible for the rights of any people to be protected without self-rule--without a government responsible to those who are governed? I invite Americans to come with me to India and see. What we find. there will go far towards furnishing a key to the meaning of India's struggle for freedom and self-government.
IV
Crossing over from America to London, we sail from there to India on a magnificent steamer. On board is a most interesting company of people, made up of merchants, travellers, and especially Englishmen who are either officials connected with the Indian Government or officers in the Indian army, who have been home on furlough with their families and are now returning. We land in Bombay, a city that reminds us of Paris or London, or New York or Washington. Our hotel is conducted in English style. We go to the railway station, one of the most magnificent buildings of the kind in the world, to take the train for Calcutta, formerly the capital, some fifteen hundred miles away. Arrived in Calcutta, we hear it called the City of Palaces, nor do we wonder at the name.
Who owns the steamship line by which we, came to India? The British. Who built that splendid railway station in Bombay? The British. Who built the railway on which we travelled to Calcutta? The British.
To whom do these palatial buildings in Calcutta belong? Mainly to the British. We find that both Calcutta and Bombay have a large commerce. To whom does the overwhelming bulk of this commerce belong? To the British. We find that the Indian Government, that is, the British Government in India, has directly or indirectly built some 40,000 miles of railway in India; has created good postal and telegraph systems reaching practically throughout the country; has founded lawcourts after the English pattern, and has done much else to bring India in line with the civilization of Europe. <b>It is not strange that visitors begin to exclaim, "How much the British are doing for India!""How great a benefit to the people of India British rule is!" </b>
But have we seen all? Is there no other side? Have we probed to the underlying facts, the foundations upon which all this material acquisition is based? <b>Are these signs of prosperity which we have noticed, signs of the prosperity of the Indian people, or only of their English masters? </b><b>If the English are living in ease and luxury, how are the people of the land living? Who pays for these fine buildings that the British rulers of the land occupy and take the credit for? And the railways, the telegraphs and the rest? Do the British? Or are they paid for wholly out of the taxes of a nation which is perhaps the most poverty-stricken in the entire world? Have we been away at all from the beaten track of tourist travel? Have we been out among the Indian people themselves, in the country as well as in the cities? Nearly eight-tenths of the people of India are "ryots" -small farmers who derive their sustenance directly from the land. Have we taken the trouble to find out how they live, whether they are growing better off or poorer year by year? </b>
Especially, have we looked into the causes of those famines, the most terrible known to the modern world, which have long swept like a besom of death over India, with their black shadows, plague and pestilence, following in their wake? <b>Here is a side of India with which we must become acquainted, before we can understand the true situation. The great disturbing, portentous, all-overshadowing fact connected with the history of India in recent years has been the succession of these famines, and the consequent plague epidemics. </b>
V
What do these famines mean? Here is a picture from a book written by a distinguished British civilian who has had long service in India and knows the Indian situation from the inside. Since he is an Englishman, we may safely count upon his prejudices, if he has any, being upon the side of his own countrymen. Mr. W. S. Lilly , in his "India and Its Problems," writes as follows:
"During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of the Indian people perished of famine. In one year alone--the year when Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, assumed the title of Empress,--5,000,000 of the people of Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted,--a region twice the size of Wales-one-fourth of the whole population perished in the famine of 1876-77. I shall never forget my own famine experience; how, as I rode out on horseback, morning after morning, I passed crowds of wandering skeletons, and saw human corpses by the roadside, unburied, uncared for, half devoured by dogs and vultures; and how --still sadder sight--children, 'the joy of the world' as the old Greeks deemed them, had become its ineffable sorrow there, forsaken even by their mothers, their feverish eyes shining from hollow sockets, their flesh utterly wasted away, only gristle and sinew and cold shivering skin remaining, their heads mere skulls, their puny frames full of loathsome diseases engendered by the starvation in which they had been conceived and born and nurtured--the sight, the thought of them haunts me still." Every one who has been in India in famine times, and has left the beaten track of westernmade prosperity, knows how true a picture this is.
Mr. Lilly estimates the number of famine-deaths in the first eight decades of the last century at 18,000,000. Think what this means--within a little more than two generations as many people died from lack of food as the whole population of Canada, the New England States, Delaware and Florida; nearly half as many as the whole population of France! But the most startling aspect of the case appears in the fact that the famines increased in number and severity as the century went on. Suppose we divide the last century into quarters, periods of twenty-five years each. In the first quarter there were five famines, with an estimated loss of 1,000,000 lives. During the second quarter of the century there were two famines with an estimated mortality of 400,000. During the third quarter there were six famines, with a recorded loss of life of 5,000,000. And during the last quarter of the century--what do we find? Eighteen famines, with an estimated mortality reaching the awful total of from 15,000,000 to 26,000,000. And this does not include the many more millions (over 6,000,000 in a single year) kept alive by Government doles.
As a matter of fact, virtual famines are really perpetual in India. They exist when they are not reported by the Government at all, and when the world knows nothing of their existence. Even when the rains are plentiful and crops are good, there is always famine, that is, starvation on a wide scale, somewhere in the land, taking its toll of thousands and even millions of human lives, of which we read nothing in any Government statement, and of which we know only when we see it with our own eyes. Millions of the people of India who are reported by the British Government as dying of fever, dysentery and other similar diseases, really perish as the result of emaciation from this long and terrible lack of food, this endless starvation. When epidemics appear, such as plague and influenza, depletion from life-long starvation is the main cause of the terrible mortality.
VI
What is the explanation of all this terrible and persistent famine, seen and unseen,--this famine, part of it reported under its true name, part under some other name, but most of it not reported at all?
The common answer is, the failure of the rains. But there seems to be no evidence that the rains fail now any oftener or in greater extent than they did a hundred years ago. Moreover, why should failure of rains bring famine? It is a matter of indisputable fact that the rains have never failed in India over areas so extensive as to prevent the production of ample food for the entire population. Why then, have the people starved? Never because there was any real lack of food. Never because there was any lack of food even in the famine areas, brought by railways or otherwise within easy reach of all. There has always been plenty of food raised in India, even in the worst famine years, for those who had money to buy it with. And until during the World War, the price of food in India has been quite moderate. This is the report of two different British Commissions that have carefully investigated the matter. Why then, have all these millions of people died for want of food?
Because they were so indescribably poor. All candid and thorough investigation into the causes of the famines of India has shown that the chief and fundamental cause has been, and is, the poverty of the people-a poverty so severe and terrible that it keeps a large proportion of the population on the very verge of starvation even in the years of greatest plenty, prevents them from laying up anything against times of extremity, and hence leaves them, when their crops fail, absolutely undone-with nothing between them and death unless some form of charity comes to their aid. Said Sir Charles Elliott, long the Chief Commissioner of Assam, "Half the agricultural population do not know from one half-year's end to another what it is to have a full meal." Said the Honorable G. K. Gokhale, one of the Viceroy's Council, "From 60,000,000 to 70,000,000 of the people in India do not know what it is to have their hunger satisfied even once in a year."
Nor does there seem to be any improvement. Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. C. F. Andrews, witnesses of the most competent and trustworthy character, have both recently given it as their judgment that to-day the people of India are growing steadily poorer. 1
VII
Here we get a glimpse of the real India. It is not the India which the usual traveller sees, following the common routes of travel, stopping at the leading hotels conducted after the manner of London or Paris, and mingling with the English lords of the country. It is not the India to which the British "point with pride" and tell us about in their books of description and their commercial reports. But this is India from the inside, it is the India of the Indian people, of the men, women, and children to whom the country of right belongs, who pay the taxes and bear the burdens, and support the costly government carried on by foreigners. It is the India of the men, women, and children who do the starving when the famine comes. It is the India of the men and
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->1 Says Mr. Bernard Houghton, M. P., "It is certain that the condition of the peasantry, the backbone of India, is year by year worsening. Not only are the Government land revenue demands exacting and oppressive, but the proportion of land owned by landlords and moneylenders tends steadily to increase. The figures in this matter are conclusive."-Swarajya, Congress Number, December, 1927. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
women who are now struggling for their independence, as their only hope of ever getting rid of the exploitation of their country, and therefore of their poverty and misery.
What causes this awful and growing poverty of the Indian people? Said John Bright: "If a country be found possessing a most fertile soil and capable of bearing every variety of production, yet notwithstanding, the people are in a state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chances are there is some fundamental error in the government of that country."
VIII
<b>One cause of India's impoverishment is heavy taxation. Taxation in England and Scotland is high, so high that Englishmen and Scotchmen complain bitterly even in normal times, times of peace. But the people of India are taxed more than twice as heavily as the people of England and more than three times as heavily as Scotland. </b>Mr. Cathcart Watson, M. P., said in the British House of Commons, "We know that the percentage of the taxes in India, as related to the gross product, is more than double that of any other country." But high taxation in such countries as Scotland and England and America does not cause a tithe of the suffering that it does in India, because the incomes of the people in these countries are so very much greater than are the incomes of the Indian people. Herbert Spencer in his day protested indignantly against "the pitiless taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half the product of their soil". Yet the taxation now is higher than in Spencer's day. No matter how great the distress, taxes go up and up.
Notice a single item, the tax on salt. All civilized nations recognize that salt is one of the last things in the world that should be taxed in any country, for two reasons: first, because it is everywhere a "necessity of life" and therefore nothing should be done to deprive the people of a proper quantity of it; and second, because in the very nature of the case a tax on it falls most heavily on the very poor. But it is a tax which is easily collected, and which, if fixed high, is sure to produce a large revenue, because everybody must have salt or die. And so it has been the fixed policy of Government to impose a heavy salt tax upon the Indian people. During much of the past, this tax has been so high as actually to compel the reduction of the quantity of salt consumed by the impoverished millions of the country to less than one-half the amount declared by the medical authorities to be absolutely necessary for health, if not for life itself.
IX
<b>Another cause of India's impoverishment is the destruction of her manufactures as a result of British rule.</b> When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed, it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. The source of her wealth was largely her splendid manufactures. Her cotton goods, silk goods, shawls, muslins of Dacca, brocades of Ahmedabad, rugs, pottery of Scind, jewelry, metal work, and lapidary work, were famed not only all over Asia, but in all the leading markets of North Africa and Europe. What has become of those manufactures? For the most part, they are utterly gone, destroyed. Hundreds of villages and towns of India in which these industries were carried on are now wholly depopulated, and millions of the people who were supported by this work have been scattered and driven back on the land, to share the already too scanty living of the poor ryot. What is the explanation? Great Britain wanted India's markets. She could not find much entrance for British manufactures so long as India was supplied with manufactures of her own. So those of India must be sacrificed. England had all power in her hands, and so she proceeded to pass tariff and excise laws that ruined the manufactures of India and secured this market for the manufactures of Manchester and Birmingham. India could not retaliate with counter tariff laws, because she was at the mercy of the conqueror. If is true that India is getting back manufactures in some degree. Cotton mills, jute mills, woolen mills and others, in considerable numbers, are being built and operated in several of her large cities. But their value to India is questionable. The wealth they produce does not reach and benefit the Indian people at all to the extent which that produced by India's former manufactures did; it enriches practically nobody except the mill-owners and a few capitalists, a majority of whom are British. <b>Of course, these mills give employment to quite large numbers of Indian workers; but for the most part it is under conditions of low wages, long hours, insanitation, and wretched housing which are hardly less than inhuman. </b>
X
<b>A third cause of India's impoverishment is the enormous and wholly unnecessary cost of her Government.</b> Writers in discussing the financial situation in India have often pointed out the fact that her Government is the most expensive in the world. Of course, the reason is plain: it is because it is a Government carried on by men from a distant country, not by the people of the soil. These foreigners, having all power in their own hands, including power to create such offices as they choose and to attach to them such salaries as they please, naturally do not err on the side of making the offices too few; or the salaries and pensions too small. Nearly all the higher officials throughout India are British. To be sure, the Civil Service is nominally open to Indians. But it is hedged about with so many restrictions that Indians are able for the most part to secure only the lowest and poorest places. The amount of money which the Indian people are required to pay as salaries to this great army of foreign civil servants and appointed higher officials, and then, later, as pensions for the same after they have served a given number of years in India, is very large. That in three-fourths, if not in nine-tenths of the positions, quite as good service, and often much better, could be obtained for the Government at a fraction of the present cost, by employing educated and competent Indians, who much better understand the wants of the country, is demonstrably and incontrovertibly true. But that would not serve the purpose of England, who wants these lucrative offices for her sons. <b>Hence poor Indian ryots must sweat and starve by the million, that an evergrowing army of foreign officials may have large salaries and fat pensions. And, of course, much of the money paid for these salaries and practically all paid for the pensions, goes permanently out of India. </b>
XI
Another burden on the people of India which they ought not to be compelled to bear, and which does much to increase their poverty, is the enormously heavy military expense of the government. I am not complaining of the maintenance of such an army as may be necessary for the defense of the country. But the Indian army is kept at a strength much beyond what any possible defense of the country requires. India is made a sort of general rendezvous and training camp for the Empire, from which soldiers may at any time be drawn for service in distant lands--in many parts of Asia, in Africa, in the islands of the sea, and even in Europe. Numerous wars and campaigns are carried on outside of India, expense for the conduct of which, wholly or in large part, India is compelled to bear. For such foreign wars and campaigns--in which India and the Indian people of India had no concern, from which they derived no benefit, the aim of which was solely conquest and extension of British power--<b>India was required to pay during the last century the enormous total of more than $450,000,000. </b>This does not include her expenditures in connection with the war in Europe in 1914-18. <b>Toward the maintenance of that war India contributed 1,401,350 men--combatants and non-combatants. (These are official figures.) She also paid--was compelled to pay despite her awful poverty-the terrible sum of £100,000,000 ($500,000,000). This was announced to the world as a "gift," but it was a gift only in name. As a matter of fact, it was forced, coerced, wrung from the Indian people, as all India knows to its sorrow. Nor was this sum all, as the world generally supposes. Other sums were contributed from India (under pressure, virtual compulsion) in different forms, under different names, all taken together, totalling--it is claimed--almost another $500,000,000. How many such burdens as these can the people of India bear, without being destroyed? </b>
XII
<b>England claims that India pays her no "tribute." Technically this is true; but in reality it is very far from true. In the form of salaries spent largely in England, and pensions spent wholly there, interest drawn in England from Indian investments, "profits" made in India and sent "Home," and various forms of "exploitation" carried on in India for the benefit of Englishmen and England, a vast stream of wealth (whether it is called tribute or not) has been pouring into England from India ever since the East India Company landed there some three hundred years ago, and is going on still with steadily increasing volume. </b>1
Says Mr. R. C. Dutt, author of the "Economic History of India" (than whom there is no higher authority) : "A sum reckoned at twenty millions of English money or a hundred millions of American money--some authorities put it much higher--is remitted annually from India to England without any direct equivalent. It should be borne in mind that this sum is equal to half the net revenues of India. Note this carefully--onehalf of what India pays every year in taxes goes out of the country and is of no further service to those who have paid the taxes. No other country on earth suffers like this. No country on earth could bear such an annual drain without increasing impoverishment and repeated famines." We denounce ancient Rome for impoverishing Gaul and Egypt, Sicily and Palestine, to enrich herself. We denounce Spain for robbing the New World and the Netherlands to amass wealth. England is following exactly the same practice in India. Is it
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->1Â Major Wingate, in his book "A Few Words on Financial Relations with India" (pp. 2 and 3) says: "The British Indian empire has been acquired, extended and consolidated, by means of its own resources, and up to this present hour the British treasury has never contributed a shilling in aid of any Indian object whatever. . . . Not only is it a fact that India has been acquired without the expenditure of a single shilling on the part of this country (Britain), but it is actually a fact that India has regularly paid to Great Britain a heavy tribute. . . . Tribute is a transference of a portion of the annual revenue of a subject country to the ruling country, without any material equivalent being given in exchange. . . . Its effect is, of course, to impoverish the one country and to enrich the other. . . . The exaction of a tribute from India, as a conquered country, would sound harsh and tyrannical in English ears; so the real nature of the Indian contribution (tribute) has been carefully concealed from the British public, under the less offensive appellation of 'Home Charges on the Indian Government.'"
( Major Wingate was Revenue Survey Commissioner for the Bombay Presidency. His book was published in 1859 by William Blackwood and Sons, London, and republished in 1926 by Major B. D. Basu, I. M. S. in Allahabad.) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
strange that under her rule she has made India a land of widespread and continuous starvation?
XIII
But India's poverty, terrible as it is, is only a part of the wrong done to her by England. The greatest injustice of all is the loss of her liberty--the fact that she is allowed little or no part in shaping her own destiny. As we have seen, Canada, Australia, and other British colonies are free and self-governing. India is kept in absolute subjection. Yet her people are largely of Aryan blood, the finest race in Asia. <b>There are not wanting men among them, men in great numbers, who are the equals of their British masters in knowledge, ability, trustworthiness, in every high quality. Not only is such treatment of such a people tyranny in its worst form (as many Englishmen themselves realize) but it is a direct and complete violation of all those ideals of freedom and justice of which England boasts and in which Englishmen profess to believe.</b> It is also really a most shortsighted policy as regards England's own interests. It is the kind of policy which cost her the American colonies, and later came near to costing her Canada, as well. If persisted in, it must cost her India also.
XIV
What is the remedy for the evils and burdens underwhich India suffers? How may the Indian people be relieved from their abject and growing poverty? How can they be given prosperity, happiness and content?
Many answers are suggested. One is--lighter taxes. This, of course, is important; it is, indeed, vital. But how can it be brought about so long as the people have no power to change in the slightest degree the cruel tax laws from which they suffer? The Government wants these heavy taxes for its own uses, and is constantly in. creasing the rates. The protests of the people fall on deaf ears. Taxes were never so high as they are now. Under the Government's boasted "New Reform Scheme" of 1919, they were not lowered, but actually increased.
Another remedy suggested for India's suffering is that of enacting such legislation and inaugurating such measures as may be found necessary to restore as far as possible the native industries which have been destroyed. This is exactly what India would like, and would bring about if she had power--if she had selfrule; but will an alien government, one which has itself destroyed these industries for its own advantage, ever do this?
Another remedy proposed is to reduce the unnecessary and illegitimate military expenses. This is easy to say, and, of course, is most reasonable. But how can it be brought about so long as the Government insists on such expenditures, and the people have no power to order the contrary?
<b>Another thing urged is to stop the drain of wealth to England. </b>But how can a single step be taken in this direction of stopping it, so long as absolutely all power is in the hands of the very men who created the drain, who are enriched by it, and who are determined to continue it?
<b>It all comes back to this: The fundamental difficulty, the fundamental evil, the fundamental wrong, lies in the fact that India is a subject land, politically a slave land, ruled by foreigners. It is for this reason that she is unable to guard her own interests, unable to protect herself against unjust laws, unable to inaugurate those measures for her own advancement which must always come from those immediately concerned. </b>
XV
In other words, the only remedy for India's wrongs, her economic ills and her political degradation, is that which in all ages of the world and in all lands has been found to be the only possible remedy for the evils of foreign rule, and that is, the self-rule which India is demanding. <b>England knows this, and would perish before she would permit any foreign nation to rule her. </b>Every nation in Europe knows it and hence every one would fight to the death before it would surrender its freedom and independence. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa know it; therefore, although they are all children of Great Britain, not one of them would consent to remain in the British Empire for a day unless permitted absolute freedom to make and administer its own laws, and therefore to protect itself and shape its own destiny.
Here lies India's only hope. <b>She must become an absolutely independent nation with no connection with Great Britain,</b> or else remaining in the Empire, she must be given the place of a real partner (not that of a subordinate under a partner's name),--a place of as true freedom and of as perfect equality with the other partners in the Empire, as that of Australia, or New Zealand, or South Africa, or Canada.
We have now before us the data for understanding, in a measure at least, the meaning of India's struggle for freedom. <b>That struggle means the normal, necessary and just awakening and protest of a great people too long held in subjection.</b> <b>It is the effort of a nation once illustrious and still conscious of its inherent superiority, to rise from the dust, to stand once more upon its feet, to shake off fetters that have become unendurable. It is the endeavor of the Indian people to get for themselves again a country that in a true sense will be their own, instead of remaining--as for more than a century and a half it has been, a mere preserve of a foreign power--in John Stuart Mill's words, England's "human cattle farm." </b><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Her Right to Freedom and a Place Among the Great Nations </b>
CHAPTER I
A VISIT TO INDIA. WHAT BRITISH RULE MEANS. INTRODUCTORY
The impression is widespread in America that British rule in India has been, and is, a great and almost unqualified good. <b>The British themselves never tire of "pointing with pride" to what they claim to have done and to be doing for the benefit of the Indian people. </b>What knowledge we have in America regarding the matter comes almost wholly from British sources, and hence the majority of us do not suspect that there is another side to the story. <b>But the Indian people claim, very earnestly claim, that there is another side, which cannot fail to prove a disillusionment to all who learn the truth about it. </b>
During the days of chattel-slavery in the Southern States of the American Union, so long as the world knew of slavery only through the representations of it given by the slave-holders, <b>the impression was common that slavery was a beneficent institution. It was not until the slaves themselves began to find a voice and the "sacred institution" came to be described from the standpoint of the bondman, that its real character began to be understood.</b>
I
What, in reality, does British rule in India mean--not from the standpoint of the <b>British Government which gets such great political prestige from the holding of this vast Asiatic dependency;</b> not as it is seen by the army of British officials in India who derive their living and their wealth from British economic domination there; <b>but what does it mean as experienced by the 320 millions of Indian people who as a nation have had a long and proud past, but who more than a century and a half ago as we have seen were conquered and disarmed and have been held in subjection ever since by a foreign power? </b>
Ever since Edmund Burke's famous impeachment of Warren Hastings for his misdeeds in India, there have not been wanting Englishmen, both in India and at home, who have seen and deplored, and to some extent pointed out, <b>what they have believed very serious wrongs connected with the British rule of the Indian people. </b>Naturally such utterances have been unpopular in England, and have been <b>"hushed up"</b> as much as possible. It has not been uncommon to denounce such plain speaking as unpatriotic and traitorous. However, free speech has not been wholly suppressed. A great body of testimony has been accumulated both in England and India, showing that the results of foreign conquest and foreign rule in this instance have not been essentially different from results of such conquest and rule everywhere else. This or that foreign domination may be a little more or a little less intelligent here or cruel there, but in every case and in every country and age its essential nature is the same. <b>It is founded on force and not on justice.</b> Its result is certain to be deep and widespread injury to those robbed of their freedom and their rights, and in the end to those who do the robbing, as well. The rule of any people by the sword of a foreign conqueror is always a bitter thing to those who feel the sword's pitiless edge, whatever it may be to those who hold the hilt of the sword. <b>But it is worse than bitter; it is demoralizing, degenerating, destructive to the character of those held in subjection. It tends to destroy their self-respect, their power of initiative, their power of self-direction, to create a slave-psychology and rob them of all hope and incentive in life. Injury of this kind is the deepest that can be inflicted upon humanity. </b>
II
To understand fully the great problem confronting the people of India to-day, we must have clearly in mind the exact relation between India and England. <b>India is a dependency, not a colony.</b> Great Britain has both colonies and dependencies, and many persons suppose them to be identical. But they are not necessarily so. Colonies may be self-ruling--six of those connected with the British Empire are, namely, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State. <b>But other British colonies are not self-ruling. These are dependencies. </b>As already said, India is a dependency.
As the result of a pretty wide acquaintance in England and a residence of some years in Canada, I am disposed to believe that nowhere in the world can be found governments that are more free, that more fully embody the intelligent will of their people, or that better serve their people's many-sided interests and wants, than those of the self-ruling colonies or "dominions" of Great Britain. I do not see but that these are in every essential way as free as if they were full republics. Probably they are not any more free than the people of the United States, but it is no exaggeration to say that they are essentially as free. The connection of most of them with England, their mother-country, is not one of coercion but of choice; it is one of reverence and affection. That the British Government assures such liberty in even a part of its colonies is a matter for congratulation and honorable pride. To this extent it stands on a moral elevation equal, if not superior, to that of any government in the world.
But turn now from Britain's free colonies to her dependencies. Here we find something for which there does not seem to be any natural place among British political institutions. Britons call their flag the flag of freedom. They speak of the British Constitution, largely unwritten though it is, as a constitution that guarantees freedom to every British subject in the world. Magna Charta meant self-government for the English people. Cromwell wrote on the statute books of the English Parliament: "All just powers under God are derived from the consent of the people." Since Cromwell's day, this principle has been fundamental, central, undisputed, in British home politics. It took a little longer to get it recognized in colonial matters. The American colonies in 1776 took their stand upon it. "Just government must be based upon the consent of the governed." "There should be no taxation without representation." These were their affirmations. Burke and Pitt and Fox and the broader-minded leaders of public opinion in England were in sympathy with their American brethren. If Britain had been true to her principle of freedom and self-rule she would have kept all her American colonies in 1776. But she was not true to it and so she lost them. Later she came very near losing Canada in the same way. But her eyes were opened in time and she gave Canada freedom and selfgovernment. This prevented revolt and fastened Canada to her with hooks of steel. Since this experiment with Canada, it has been a settled principle in connection with Britain's free colonies, or dominions, as well as with her home politics, that there is no just power except that which is based upon the consent of the governed.
But what are we to do with this principle when we come to the dependencies? Is another and different principle to be adopted here? Are there indeed peoples whom it is just to rule without their consent? Is justice one thing in England and Canada and another thing in India? It was the belief and conviction that what is justice in England and Canada is justice everywhere, that made Froude declare, "Free nations cannot govern subject provinces."
III
Why is England in India at all? Why did she go there at first and why does she remain? If India had been a comparatively empty land as America was when it was discovered, so that Englishmen had wanted to settle there and make homes, the reason would have been plain. But it was a land already full, and as a matter of fact practically no Englishmen have ever gone to India to settle or make homes. If the Indian people had been savages or barbarians, there might have seemed on the surface of the question, some reason for England's conquering and ruling them. But they were a people with highly organized governments far older than that of Great Britain, and with a civilization that had risen to a splendid development before England's was born.
Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India, said in his address at the Great Delhi Durbar in 1901, <b>"Powerful Empires existed and flourished here (in India) while Englishmen were still wandering, painted, in the woods, and while the British Colonies were still a wilderness and a jungle. India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe." </b>It is such a land that England has conquered and is ruling as a dependency. It is such a people that she is holding without giving them any voice whatever in their own destiny. The honored Canadian Premier, Sir Wilfred Laurier, at the Colonial Conference held in London in connection with the coronation of King Edward, declared: "The Empire of Rome was composed of slave states; the British Empire is a Galaxy of Free Nations." But is great India a free nation? In a speech made at the League of Nations in Geneva, in September, 1927, Sir Austen Chamberlain described the British Empire as "a Great Commonwealth of Free and Equal Peoples." <b>Why do these statesmen use such language when they know how contrary to the facts it is? </b>India, which constitutes <b>more than four-fifths of the Empire, is not free; it is in bondage. Its people are not allowed "equality" with the free minority, the free one-fifth, but are ruled by compulsion. Thus we see that in truth the British Empire is to a four or five times larger extent a "Slave Empire," than it is a "Galaxy of Free Nations" or a "Great Commonwealth of Free and Equal Peoples." </b>
Perhaps there is nothing so dangerous or so evil in its effects, as irresponsible power. <b>That is what Great Britain exercises in connection with India--absolute power, with no one to call her to account. </b>I do not think any nation is able to endure such an ordeal any better than is Britain, but it is an ordeal to which neither rulers of nations nor individuals in private life should ever be subjected. The risks are too great. The wrongs and tyrannies inseparable from it are too serious. England avoids it in connection with her own rulers, by making them strictly responsible to the English people. The rulers of Canada are strictly responsible to the Canadian people. Every free nation safeguards alike its people and its rulers by making its rulers answerable in everything to those whom they govern. But here is the anomaly of British rule in India--<b>Britain rules India but does not acknowledge any degree whatever of political responsibility to the people of India. </b>
Whatever freedom or political privileges they enjoy are purely "favors" which she in her kindness "graciously grants" to them; she does not for a moment admit that any political freedom or political power belongs to them of right--is their just possession, which they may rightly demand of Great Britain and which she has no right to withhold. Her will is the supreme law; and India must submit in everything.
What is the result? Are the interests and rights of India protected? Is it possible for the rights of any people to be protected without self-rule--without a government responsible to those who are governed? I invite Americans to come with me to India and see. What we find. there will go far towards furnishing a key to the meaning of India's struggle for freedom and self-government.
IV
Crossing over from America to London, we sail from there to India on a magnificent steamer. On board is a most interesting company of people, made up of merchants, travellers, and especially Englishmen who are either officials connected with the Indian Government or officers in the Indian army, who have been home on furlough with their families and are now returning. We land in Bombay, a city that reminds us of Paris or London, or New York or Washington. Our hotel is conducted in English style. We go to the railway station, one of the most magnificent buildings of the kind in the world, to take the train for Calcutta, formerly the capital, some fifteen hundred miles away. Arrived in Calcutta, we hear it called the City of Palaces, nor do we wonder at the name.
Who owns the steamship line by which we, came to India? The British. Who built that splendid railway station in Bombay? The British. Who built the railway on which we travelled to Calcutta? The British.
To whom do these palatial buildings in Calcutta belong? Mainly to the British. We find that both Calcutta and Bombay have a large commerce. To whom does the overwhelming bulk of this commerce belong? To the British. We find that the Indian Government, that is, the British Government in India, has directly or indirectly built some 40,000 miles of railway in India; has created good postal and telegraph systems reaching practically throughout the country; has founded lawcourts after the English pattern, and has done much else to bring India in line with the civilization of Europe. <b>It is not strange that visitors begin to exclaim, "How much the British are doing for India!""How great a benefit to the people of India British rule is!" </b>
But have we seen all? Is there no other side? Have we probed to the underlying facts, the foundations upon which all this material acquisition is based? <b>Are these signs of prosperity which we have noticed, signs of the prosperity of the Indian people, or only of their English masters? </b><b>If the English are living in ease and luxury, how are the people of the land living? Who pays for these fine buildings that the British rulers of the land occupy and take the credit for? And the railways, the telegraphs and the rest? Do the British? Or are they paid for wholly out of the taxes of a nation which is perhaps the most poverty-stricken in the entire world? Have we been away at all from the beaten track of tourist travel? Have we been out among the Indian people themselves, in the country as well as in the cities? Nearly eight-tenths of the people of India are "ryots" -small farmers who derive their sustenance directly from the land. Have we taken the trouble to find out how they live, whether they are growing better off or poorer year by year? </b>
Especially, have we looked into the causes of those famines, the most terrible known to the modern world, which have long swept like a besom of death over India, with their black shadows, plague and pestilence, following in their wake? <b>Here is a side of India with which we must become acquainted, before we can understand the true situation. The great disturbing, portentous, all-overshadowing fact connected with the history of India in recent years has been the succession of these famines, and the consequent plague epidemics. </b>
V
What do these famines mean? Here is a picture from a book written by a distinguished British civilian who has had long service in India and knows the Indian situation from the inside. Since he is an Englishman, we may safely count upon his prejudices, if he has any, being upon the side of his own countrymen. Mr. W. S. Lilly , in his "India and Its Problems," writes as follows:
"During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of the Indian people perished of famine. In one year alone--the year when Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, assumed the title of Empress,--5,000,000 of the people of Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted,--a region twice the size of Wales-one-fourth of the whole population perished in the famine of 1876-77. I shall never forget my own famine experience; how, as I rode out on horseback, morning after morning, I passed crowds of wandering skeletons, and saw human corpses by the roadside, unburied, uncared for, half devoured by dogs and vultures; and how --still sadder sight--children, 'the joy of the world' as the old Greeks deemed them, had become its ineffable sorrow there, forsaken even by their mothers, their feverish eyes shining from hollow sockets, their flesh utterly wasted away, only gristle and sinew and cold shivering skin remaining, their heads mere skulls, their puny frames full of loathsome diseases engendered by the starvation in which they had been conceived and born and nurtured--the sight, the thought of them haunts me still." Every one who has been in India in famine times, and has left the beaten track of westernmade prosperity, knows how true a picture this is.
Mr. Lilly estimates the number of famine-deaths in the first eight decades of the last century at 18,000,000. Think what this means--within a little more than two generations as many people died from lack of food as the whole population of Canada, the New England States, Delaware and Florida; nearly half as many as the whole population of France! But the most startling aspect of the case appears in the fact that the famines increased in number and severity as the century went on. Suppose we divide the last century into quarters, periods of twenty-five years each. In the first quarter there were five famines, with an estimated loss of 1,000,000 lives. During the second quarter of the century there were two famines with an estimated mortality of 400,000. During the third quarter there were six famines, with a recorded loss of life of 5,000,000. And during the last quarter of the century--what do we find? Eighteen famines, with an estimated mortality reaching the awful total of from 15,000,000 to 26,000,000. And this does not include the many more millions (over 6,000,000 in a single year) kept alive by Government doles.
As a matter of fact, virtual famines are really perpetual in India. They exist when they are not reported by the Government at all, and when the world knows nothing of their existence. Even when the rains are plentiful and crops are good, there is always famine, that is, starvation on a wide scale, somewhere in the land, taking its toll of thousands and even millions of human lives, of which we read nothing in any Government statement, and of which we know only when we see it with our own eyes. Millions of the people of India who are reported by the British Government as dying of fever, dysentery and other similar diseases, really perish as the result of emaciation from this long and terrible lack of food, this endless starvation. When epidemics appear, such as plague and influenza, depletion from life-long starvation is the main cause of the terrible mortality.
VI
What is the explanation of all this terrible and persistent famine, seen and unseen,--this famine, part of it reported under its true name, part under some other name, but most of it not reported at all?
The common answer is, the failure of the rains. But there seems to be no evidence that the rains fail now any oftener or in greater extent than they did a hundred years ago. Moreover, why should failure of rains bring famine? It is a matter of indisputable fact that the rains have never failed in India over areas so extensive as to prevent the production of ample food for the entire population. Why then, have the people starved? Never because there was any real lack of food. Never because there was any lack of food even in the famine areas, brought by railways or otherwise within easy reach of all. There has always been plenty of food raised in India, even in the worst famine years, for those who had money to buy it with. And until during the World War, the price of food in India has been quite moderate. This is the report of two different British Commissions that have carefully investigated the matter. Why then, have all these millions of people died for want of food?
Because they were so indescribably poor. All candid and thorough investigation into the causes of the famines of India has shown that the chief and fundamental cause has been, and is, the poverty of the people-a poverty so severe and terrible that it keeps a large proportion of the population on the very verge of starvation even in the years of greatest plenty, prevents them from laying up anything against times of extremity, and hence leaves them, when their crops fail, absolutely undone-with nothing between them and death unless some form of charity comes to their aid. Said Sir Charles Elliott, long the Chief Commissioner of Assam, "Half the agricultural population do not know from one half-year's end to another what it is to have a full meal." Said the Honorable G. K. Gokhale, one of the Viceroy's Council, "From 60,000,000 to 70,000,000 of the people in India do not know what it is to have their hunger satisfied even once in a year."
Nor does there seem to be any improvement. Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. C. F. Andrews, witnesses of the most competent and trustworthy character, have both recently given it as their judgment that to-day the people of India are growing steadily poorer. 1
VII
Here we get a glimpse of the real India. It is not the India which the usual traveller sees, following the common routes of travel, stopping at the leading hotels conducted after the manner of London or Paris, and mingling with the English lords of the country. It is not the India to which the British "point with pride" and tell us about in their books of description and their commercial reports. But this is India from the inside, it is the India of the Indian people, of the men, women, and children to whom the country of right belongs, who pay the taxes and bear the burdens, and support the costly government carried on by foreigners. It is the India of the men, women, and children who do the starving when the famine comes. It is the India of the men and
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->1 Says Mr. Bernard Houghton, M. P., "It is certain that the condition of the peasantry, the backbone of India, is year by year worsening. Not only are the Government land revenue demands exacting and oppressive, but the proportion of land owned by landlords and moneylenders tends steadily to increase. The figures in this matter are conclusive."-Swarajya, Congress Number, December, 1927. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
women who are now struggling for their independence, as their only hope of ever getting rid of the exploitation of their country, and therefore of their poverty and misery.
What causes this awful and growing poverty of the Indian people? Said John Bright: "If a country be found possessing a most fertile soil and capable of bearing every variety of production, yet notwithstanding, the people are in a state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chances are there is some fundamental error in the government of that country."
VIII
<b>One cause of India's impoverishment is heavy taxation. Taxation in England and Scotland is high, so high that Englishmen and Scotchmen complain bitterly even in normal times, times of peace. But the people of India are taxed more than twice as heavily as the people of England and more than three times as heavily as Scotland. </b>Mr. Cathcart Watson, M. P., said in the British House of Commons, "We know that the percentage of the taxes in India, as related to the gross product, is more than double that of any other country." But high taxation in such countries as Scotland and England and America does not cause a tithe of the suffering that it does in India, because the incomes of the people in these countries are so very much greater than are the incomes of the Indian people. Herbert Spencer in his day protested indignantly against "the pitiless taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half the product of their soil". Yet the taxation now is higher than in Spencer's day. No matter how great the distress, taxes go up and up.
Notice a single item, the tax on salt. All civilized nations recognize that salt is one of the last things in the world that should be taxed in any country, for two reasons: first, because it is everywhere a "necessity of life" and therefore nothing should be done to deprive the people of a proper quantity of it; and second, because in the very nature of the case a tax on it falls most heavily on the very poor. But it is a tax which is easily collected, and which, if fixed high, is sure to produce a large revenue, because everybody must have salt or die. And so it has been the fixed policy of Government to impose a heavy salt tax upon the Indian people. During much of the past, this tax has been so high as actually to compel the reduction of the quantity of salt consumed by the impoverished millions of the country to less than one-half the amount declared by the medical authorities to be absolutely necessary for health, if not for life itself.
IX
<b>Another cause of India's impoverishment is the destruction of her manufactures as a result of British rule.</b> When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed, it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. The source of her wealth was largely her splendid manufactures. Her cotton goods, silk goods, shawls, muslins of Dacca, brocades of Ahmedabad, rugs, pottery of Scind, jewelry, metal work, and lapidary work, were famed not only all over Asia, but in all the leading markets of North Africa and Europe. What has become of those manufactures? For the most part, they are utterly gone, destroyed. Hundreds of villages and towns of India in which these industries were carried on are now wholly depopulated, and millions of the people who were supported by this work have been scattered and driven back on the land, to share the already too scanty living of the poor ryot. What is the explanation? Great Britain wanted India's markets. She could not find much entrance for British manufactures so long as India was supplied with manufactures of her own. So those of India must be sacrificed. England had all power in her hands, and so she proceeded to pass tariff and excise laws that ruined the manufactures of India and secured this market for the manufactures of Manchester and Birmingham. India could not retaliate with counter tariff laws, because she was at the mercy of the conqueror. If is true that India is getting back manufactures in some degree. Cotton mills, jute mills, woolen mills and others, in considerable numbers, are being built and operated in several of her large cities. But their value to India is questionable. The wealth they produce does not reach and benefit the Indian people at all to the extent which that produced by India's former manufactures did; it enriches practically nobody except the mill-owners and a few capitalists, a majority of whom are British. <b>Of course, these mills give employment to quite large numbers of Indian workers; but for the most part it is under conditions of low wages, long hours, insanitation, and wretched housing which are hardly less than inhuman. </b>
X
<b>A third cause of India's impoverishment is the enormous and wholly unnecessary cost of her Government.</b> Writers in discussing the financial situation in India have often pointed out the fact that her Government is the most expensive in the world. Of course, the reason is plain: it is because it is a Government carried on by men from a distant country, not by the people of the soil. These foreigners, having all power in their own hands, including power to create such offices as they choose and to attach to them such salaries as they please, naturally do not err on the side of making the offices too few; or the salaries and pensions too small. Nearly all the higher officials throughout India are British. To be sure, the Civil Service is nominally open to Indians. But it is hedged about with so many restrictions that Indians are able for the most part to secure only the lowest and poorest places. The amount of money which the Indian people are required to pay as salaries to this great army of foreign civil servants and appointed higher officials, and then, later, as pensions for the same after they have served a given number of years in India, is very large. That in three-fourths, if not in nine-tenths of the positions, quite as good service, and often much better, could be obtained for the Government at a fraction of the present cost, by employing educated and competent Indians, who much better understand the wants of the country, is demonstrably and incontrovertibly true. But that would not serve the purpose of England, who wants these lucrative offices for her sons. <b>Hence poor Indian ryots must sweat and starve by the million, that an evergrowing army of foreign officials may have large salaries and fat pensions. And, of course, much of the money paid for these salaries and practically all paid for the pensions, goes permanently out of India. </b>
XI
Another burden on the people of India which they ought not to be compelled to bear, and which does much to increase their poverty, is the enormously heavy military expense of the government. I am not complaining of the maintenance of such an army as may be necessary for the defense of the country. But the Indian army is kept at a strength much beyond what any possible defense of the country requires. India is made a sort of general rendezvous and training camp for the Empire, from which soldiers may at any time be drawn for service in distant lands--in many parts of Asia, in Africa, in the islands of the sea, and even in Europe. Numerous wars and campaigns are carried on outside of India, expense for the conduct of which, wholly or in large part, India is compelled to bear. For such foreign wars and campaigns--in which India and the Indian people of India had no concern, from which they derived no benefit, the aim of which was solely conquest and extension of British power--<b>India was required to pay during the last century the enormous total of more than $450,000,000. </b>This does not include her expenditures in connection with the war in Europe in 1914-18. <b>Toward the maintenance of that war India contributed 1,401,350 men--combatants and non-combatants. (These are official figures.) She also paid--was compelled to pay despite her awful poverty-the terrible sum of £100,000,000 ($500,000,000). This was announced to the world as a "gift," but it was a gift only in name. As a matter of fact, it was forced, coerced, wrung from the Indian people, as all India knows to its sorrow. Nor was this sum all, as the world generally supposes. Other sums were contributed from India (under pressure, virtual compulsion) in different forms, under different names, all taken together, totalling--it is claimed--almost another $500,000,000. How many such burdens as these can the people of India bear, without being destroyed? </b>
XII
<b>England claims that India pays her no "tribute." Technically this is true; but in reality it is very far from true. In the form of salaries spent largely in England, and pensions spent wholly there, interest drawn in England from Indian investments, "profits" made in India and sent "Home," and various forms of "exploitation" carried on in India for the benefit of Englishmen and England, a vast stream of wealth (whether it is called tribute or not) has been pouring into England from India ever since the East India Company landed there some three hundred years ago, and is going on still with steadily increasing volume. </b>1
Says Mr. R. C. Dutt, author of the "Economic History of India" (than whom there is no higher authority) : "A sum reckoned at twenty millions of English money or a hundred millions of American money--some authorities put it much higher--is remitted annually from India to England without any direct equivalent. It should be borne in mind that this sum is equal to half the net revenues of India. Note this carefully--onehalf of what India pays every year in taxes goes out of the country and is of no further service to those who have paid the taxes. No other country on earth suffers like this. No country on earth could bear such an annual drain without increasing impoverishment and repeated famines." We denounce ancient Rome for impoverishing Gaul and Egypt, Sicily and Palestine, to enrich herself. We denounce Spain for robbing the New World and the Netherlands to amass wealth. England is following exactly the same practice in India. Is it
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->1Â Major Wingate, in his book "A Few Words on Financial Relations with India" (pp. 2 and 3) says: "The British Indian empire has been acquired, extended and consolidated, by means of its own resources, and up to this present hour the British treasury has never contributed a shilling in aid of any Indian object whatever. . . . Not only is it a fact that India has been acquired without the expenditure of a single shilling on the part of this country (Britain), but it is actually a fact that India has regularly paid to Great Britain a heavy tribute. . . . Tribute is a transference of a portion of the annual revenue of a subject country to the ruling country, without any material equivalent being given in exchange. . . . Its effect is, of course, to impoverish the one country and to enrich the other. . . . The exaction of a tribute from India, as a conquered country, would sound harsh and tyrannical in English ears; so the real nature of the Indian contribution (tribute) has been carefully concealed from the British public, under the less offensive appellation of 'Home Charges on the Indian Government.'"
( Major Wingate was Revenue Survey Commissioner for the Bombay Presidency. His book was published in 1859 by William Blackwood and Sons, London, and republished in 1926 by Major B. D. Basu, I. M. S. in Allahabad.) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
strange that under her rule she has made India a land of widespread and continuous starvation?
XIII
But India's poverty, terrible as it is, is only a part of the wrong done to her by England. The greatest injustice of all is the loss of her liberty--the fact that she is allowed little or no part in shaping her own destiny. As we have seen, Canada, Australia, and other British colonies are free and self-governing. India is kept in absolute subjection. Yet her people are largely of Aryan blood, the finest race in Asia. <b>There are not wanting men among them, men in great numbers, who are the equals of their British masters in knowledge, ability, trustworthiness, in every high quality. Not only is such treatment of such a people tyranny in its worst form (as many Englishmen themselves realize) but it is a direct and complete violation of all those ideals of freedom and justice of which England boasts and in which Englishmen profess to believe.</b> It is also really a most shortsighted policy as regards England's own interests. It is the kind of policy which cost her the American colonies, and later came near to costing her Canada, as well. If persisted in, it must cost her India also.
XIV
What is the remedy for the evils and burdens underwhich India suffers? How may the Indian people be relieved from their abject and growing poverty? How can they be given prosperity, happiness and content?
Many answers are suggested. One is--lighter taxes. This, of course, is important; it is, indeed, vital. But how can it be brought about so long as the people have no power to change in the slightest degree the cruel tax laws from which they suffer? The Government wants these heavy taxes for its own uses, and is constantly in. creasing the rates. The protests of the people fall on deaf ears. Taxes were never so high as they are now. Under the Government's boasted "New Reform Scheme" of 1919, they were not lowered, but actually increased.
Another remedy suggested for India's suffering is that of enacting such legislation and inaugurating such measures as may be found necessary to restore as far as possible the native industries which have been destroyed. This is exactly what India would like, and would bring about if she had power--if she had selfrule; but will an alien government, one which has itself destroyed these industries for its own advantage, ever do this?
Another remedy proposed is to reduce the unnecessary and illegitimate military expenses. This is easy to say, and, of course, is most reasonable. But how can it be brought about so long as the Government insists on such expenditures, and the people have no power to order the contrary?
<b>Another thing urged is to stop the drain of wealth to England. </b>But how can a single step be taken in this direction of stopping it, so long as absolutely all power is in the hands of the very men who created the drain, who are enriched by it, and who are determined to continue it?
<b>It all comes back to this: The fundamental difficulty, the fundamental evil, the fundamental wrong, lies in the fact that India is a subject land, politically a slave land, ruled by foreigners. It is for this reason that she is unable to guard her own interests, unable to protect herself against unjust laws, unable to inaugurate those measures for her own advancement which must always come from those immediately concerned. </b>
XV
In other words, the only remedy for India's wrongs, her economic ills and her political degradation, is that which in all ages of the world and in all lands has been found to be the only possible remedy for the evils of foreign rule, and that is, the self-rule which India is demanding. <b>England knows this, and would perish before she would permit any foreign nation to rule her. </b>Every nation in Europe knows it and hence every one would fight to the death before it would surrender its freedom and independence. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa know it; therefore, although they are all children of Great Britain, not one of them would consent to remain in the British Empire for a day unless permitted absolute freedom to make and administer its own laws, and therefore to protect itself and shape its own destiny.
Here lies India's only hope. <b>She must become an absolutely independent nation with no connection with Great Britain,</b> or else remaining in the Empire, she must be given the place of a real partner (not that of a subordinate under a partner's name),--a place of as true freedom and of as perfect equality with the other partners in the Empire, as that of Australia, or New Zealand, or South Africa, or Canada.
We have now before us the data for understanding, in a measure at least, the meaning of India's struggle for freedom. <b>That struggle means the normal, necessary and just awakening and protest of a great people too long held in subjection.</b> <b>It is the effort of a nation once illustrious and still conscious of its inherent superiority, to rise from the dust, to stand once more upon its feet, to shake off fetters that have become unendurable. It is the endeavor of the Indian people to get for themselves again a country that in a true sense will be their own, instead of remaining--as for more than a century and a half it has been, a mere preserve of a foreign power--in John Stuart Mill's words, England's "human cattle farm." </b><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->