CHAPTER X.

INDIA.

'As time passes it rather appears that we are in the hands of a Providence which is greater than all statesmanship, that this fabric so blindly piled up has a chance of becoming a part of the permanent edifice of civilization, and that the Indian achievement of England, as it is the strangest, may after all turn out to be the greatest; of all her achievements.'--Prof. J. R. Seeley.

'BUT above all, what is to be done with India'? With this question Mr. Goldwin Smith makes the relation of India to the Empire the crux of the Federation problem. To him the difficulty presented seems insoluble, chiefly because he believes that it would be impossible for a federation of democratic communities scattered over the globe to hold India, about which they know little, as a dependency. He even doubts, in his customary vein of pessimism, whether the fate of the Indian Empire is not already 'sealed by the progress of democracy in Britain.' So far from this last being the case it looks as if the English working man, who has annually more than £60,000,000 of trade staked on our hold on India, will be the last to weaken by his vote our position in the country or our grip on the waterways which lead to the East. Every second or third day's work of the Lancashire cotton-spinner is done for the Indian market, or for other Eastern {244} markets which we control on account of our position in India. In some large districts, such as that of Oldham, the proportion is three days' work out of four. And the Lancashire spinner is a keen political thinker, especially where his bread and butter are concerned.

The industry of the city of Dundee depends almost entirely upon the supply of a single fibre from the valley of the Ganges. The Dundee jute-worker is a Radical, but he is not likely for that reason to forget that his daily wage depends on the hold which the Empire keeps upon Bengal. The purely trade relation of India to the United Kingdom was clearly put by Lord Dufferin in his address to the London Chamber of Commerce three years ago. He said:--

'During the past year our trade with our Indian Empire was larger than our trade with any other country in the world, with the exception of the United States, amounting to no less a sum than £64,000,000. If, again, we merely confine our attention to a comparison of our exports to India with our exports to other countries, we shall find that the same statement holds good, namely, that the exports of Great Britain to India are greater than those to any other country in the world except the United States, amounting as they do to £34,000,000, whereas our exports to France do not exceed £24,000,000, and to Germany £27,000,000. In fact, India's trade with the United Kingdom is nearly one-tenth of the value of the total British trade with the whole world. ... In 1888 she took £21,250,000 worth of our cotton goods {245} and yarns, out of a total of £72,000,000 worth exported to all countries, whereas China only took £6,500,000 worth, Germany £2,500,000 worth and the United States £2,000,000 worth. Again, if we take another great section of British exports, such as hardware, machinery and metals, we find that out of a total export of £36,000,000 to all countries India in 1888 took £5,750,000 worth, whereas we only sent £3,000,000 worth to France, £1,750,000 worth to Russia, and £750,000 worth to China.

'These figures, I think, should be enough to convince the least receptive understanding what a fatal blow it would be to our commercial prosperity were circumstances ever to close, either completely or partially, the Indian ports to the trade of Great Britain, and how deeply the manufacturing population of Lancashire, and not only of Lancashire, but of every centre of industry in Great Britain and Ireland, is interested in the well-being and expanding prosperity of our Indian fellow-subjects. Indeed it would not be too much to say that if any serious disaster ever overtook our Indian Empire, or if our political relations with the Peninsula of Hindostan were to be even partially disturbed, there is not a cottage in Great Britain, at all events in the manufacturing districts, which would not be made to feel the disastrous consequences of such an intolerable calamity.'

There is another point to consider. The rapid growth of our vast Indian commerce has been largely due to the application on an immense scale of British capital {246} for the opening up of the country by railways and canals, and for the conservation and distribution of water by systems of irrigation. It is estimated that £350,000,000 are thus invested, to which must be added other large sums employed in various forms of industrial enterprise; the profits and interest of all this capital flowing back steadily to the United Kingdom, and evidently secured only by British dominance.

When to all this we connect the fact that from 75,000 to 100,000 British people find well paid employment in carrying on the government, defence and industrial development of the country we begin to understand the vast range of national interests involved in our retaining possession of India. The estimate that the people of the United Kingdom draw from India sixty or seventy millions sterling every year in direct income is probably a moderate one. Directly then Britain's stake in India is enormous. Indirectly our possession of the country would probably determine the drift of the commerce of the vast regions still further East.

Nor is it the United Kingdom alone which is concerned.

The present and prospective interest of the Australasian colonies in India are also great, not only for the military reasons which have been mentioned, but in view of the growing trade relations. India reduced to anarchy by the withdrawal of British rule, or India governed by Russia, would mean a serious blow {247} to Australasian trade, present and prospective. It might easily mean exclusion from all the markets of the East.

South Africa, which owed its earliest development to the fact that it was the stopping place on the road to India, still owes much of its importance to the same cause. The interest of Canada in India is more remote, but now that Canadian steamship lines are on the Pacific, with their terminus at Hong Kong, Britain's position in the East has a new interest for the Dominion.

But every British colony great and small is directly and deeply interested in the maintenance of the power of the Empire, and if the continued power of the Empire involves, as it seems to do, the retention and government of India, the colonies should not shrink from sharing that responsibility.

Professor Seeley has proved with conclusive clearness that the government of India has had very little effect upon the domestic politics of England; there is no reason to think that it would have more upon the domestic politics of the Empire.

The political difficulty about India's relation to a united Empire is, however, felt very widely. It is one of the first which occurs to the minds of most men when they turn their attention to the question, as I have found during public discussion in many parts of the Empire. Nor is this to be wondered at. That a country enjoying popular representative institutions should rule as an imperial power over some hundreds {248} of millions of people without representation in their own government is an extraordinary anomaly. Men's minds have, however, become accustomed to it by long usage, and the fact is accepted almost without remark. But when a proposal is made to re-construct the national organism on what is claimed to be a logical basis, the incompatibility between our popular system of government, and the system which we apply to India at once re-appears.

The anomaly, however, would be no greater under federation than without it, and it is one with which the British mind in all parts of the Empire is familiar. Most of the great colonies have had on a small scale the experience which the United Kingdom has had on a large scale of ruling weaker races without giving them representation.

Unquestionably confusion of thought is caused by the careless use of the term Empire into which English people have fallen. Applied to India and the crown colonies it is admissible, though with the qualification that in practice the Empress of India acts as much under advice as the Queen of England. As a name for the 'slowly grown and crowned Republic' of which the mother-land is the type and the great self-governing colonies copies, the term Empire is a misnomer, and has none of the meaning which it has when applied to Russia, Austria, or the France of the Napoleons. If immediate reflection of the popular will in public policy be taken as the test, England, Canada, and Australia are more republican than the modern {249} republics; as democratic as is well possible under a representative system of government. But the people of this 'crowned republic,' proud of their capacity for self-government, and impatient of any illegitimate control over themselves, have assumed the task of governing a real Empire--one which contains a population of some hundreds of millions of various races. The legitimacy of this assumed task we need not stay to discuss. The actual relation of Britain to India as to several other countries without self-government is a fact; and one which has passed beyond the range of discussion.

This government of India the United Kingdom, upon which the work now devolves, finds it possible to carry on, and on the whole efficiently. That it is done to the good of the people ruled is scarcely open to question. British rule in India may be far from ideally perfect, but that it is superior to anything India ever had before is freely admitted even by foreigners. Is there anything in the nature of the case which would prevent the representatives of a united British race from carrying forward the government of India as do now the representatives of the United Kingdom alone?

Let us consider the system of government. To the Indians themselves no representation, as we understand the term, is given. While largely employed for executive functions they take no part in legislation. An English statesman of proved capacity, assisted by a council of experienced specialists, is placed as {250} Viceroy at the head of affairs. Under him is a trained body of civil servants, selected by a rigid system of examination. To these the general administration of the country is committed. It is a system of government by experts.

The fiscal system of India, its revenue and expenditure, are kept entirely separate from those of the United Kingdom. It has its separate and clearly defined code of laws suited to its circumstances. It has a practically independent military organization. The government of the great dependency is not only essentially different in form from that of the self-governing portions of the Empire, but revolves in a sphere of its own. The general lines of Indian policy come under the review of Parliament; the pressure of public opinion is kept upon those who rule India through the channel of Parliamentary criticism; beyond this the rule of the country is left to the specialists to whom it has been committed. It has been long since any question of Indian policy made or unmade a government.

I have met everywhere, in Britain and in the colonies, people who think that India makes a heavy drain upon the revenues of the United Kingdom, and would do so upon the revenues of a united Empire. This is an example of that ignorance which, it has been truly said, is the most probable dissolvent of the Empire. It is therefore not unnecessary to say that India pays exclusively for its own defence and government. Every soldier, white or native, from the {251} Commander-in-Chief down to the humblest sepoy; every civil servant, from the Governor-General to the lately appointed clerk, is paid from Indian revenues alone. India does even more, it pays the whole expense of the India Office in London, and for the maintenance of Aden and other ports near the mouth of the Red Sea, with their garrisons, although these give protection to other Eastern commerce and to that of the Australasian colonies as well as Indian. India contributes also to the maintenance of consular establishments in China and of the British Embassy in Persia. The resources and the fighting power of India stand today as a barrier to guard from danger the enormous British commerce in the Eastern seas, to keep back the most dangerous military power of Europe and Asia from nearer approach to the English communities of the South.

The question whether any degree of representation could be given to the Indian population would remain for a federated Empire, just as it now exists for the United Kingdom. The problem would be no greater and no less. Any step taken in that direction would no doubt be exceedingly cautious and tentative. But for dealing with this, as with all other Indian problems, a united Empire, with its consolidated strength, would be vastly more efficient than a nation going through various stages of disintegration.

The answer which appears to me sufficient to those whom claim that Britain's control of India interposes {252} an insuperable obstacle to a Federal system for the Empire is this:--

India is practically a crown colony, and as yet the United Kingdom has shown no inclination to govern it otherwise than as a crown colony. The same duty may be rightly accepted and duly fulfilled by British people as a whole under any system of common government. To accept it would create no new national burden or risk, would react no more upon the ordinary political development of the various states than it has upon that of the United Kingdom.

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