1

leash by military force, and in consequence the adherents to this type of theory have opposed all concessions and advocated repression.

In the words of Herbert Taylor in 1881:

All self-deception must be cast aside, with all expression of pharisaical philanthropy; and we must boldly acknowledge what nine out of ten of us deny with our lips, though confessing in our hearts, that we are in India primarily for our own national good.1

Mr. McLean, M.P., repeated this thought in 1889 when he said:

Let us have the courage to repudiate the pretence which foreign nations laugh at, and which hardly deceives ourselves, that we keep India merely for the benefit of the people of that country, and in order to train them for selfgovernment. We keep it for the sake of the interests and the honour of England, and the only form of government by which we can continue to hold it in subjection is that of a despotism.3

On the whole the expressions of the liberal view have been the most frequent. For instance, John Bright in 1858 said: "You may govern India, if you like, for the good of England, but the good of England must come through the channel of the good of India."4

Gladstone in his Limehouse speech said that, "Our time in India depended on our stay there being profitable to the people and our making them understand that. . . . . It will not do for us to treat with contempt or even with indifference the rising aspirations of this great people."s

Lord Northbrook in the same vein said: "Never forget that it is our duty to govern India not for our own profit and advantage but for the benefit of the natives of India.'

116

Herbert Taylor, "The Future of India,' Contemporary Review, XXXIX (1881), 475-76.

2 Voice of India, VII (1889), 302.

3 See the following articles for additional illustrations of the exploiter's views. "The English in India," Westminster Review, LXIX (1858), 199 et seq; "The Climate and the Work," Cornhill Magazine, VI (1862), 244; M. E. Grant-Duff, "India, Political and Social," Contemporary Review, XXVI (1875), 857-86; H. G. Keene, "John Bull's Eastern Estate," Westminster Review, CXLVII (1897), 357-66; Arthur Sawtell, "India under British Rule," Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, XXXVII (1906), 291; George Chesney, "The Value of India to England,” Nineteenth Century Review, III (1878), 227–38; H. Fielding Hall, "The Competition Wallah," Fortnightly Review, XCIX (1913), 279-89. The soundness of the arguments thus advanced has at times been denied. In this connection see the following articles: M. E. Grant-Duff, loc. cit.; Grant Allen, "Why Keep India?" Contemporary Review, XXXVIII (1880), 544–56. 4 Parliamentary Debates, N.S., Vol. CLI (1858), col. 346.

s Ibid., 4th Ser., Vol. III (1892), col. 94.

• Bernard Mallet, Thomas George, Earl of Northbrook, p. 135.

In 1892 Mr. McNeal said in Parliament, "Englishmen or Europeans ought to leave India if they did not stay there for the benefit of the people."

A. G. Leonard in 1909 repeated the same thought in the Westminster Review. He wrote:

As a point of honour alone, it is obviously our duty to do nothing in India that will earn for us the hatred of her people and the subsequent reproach of humanity, when in the days that are to follow the history of our relations with her shall come to be written. It is within our reach on the contrary to make our administration of India a living monument of British greatness and humanity that will earn for Great Britain an enduring and imperishable fame. To arrive at this climax we must not only care for and foster Indian interests as they were one with ours, but also make it our business to develop the capacities and energies of the people as we develop our own.3

As far as the actual government has gone, it seems not to have mattered so very materially which of the two policies had its exponents in power. On the whole the Liberals have stood for the more generous policy and the Conservatives for the more selfish. Actually their behavior has been very much alike. The Liberal Lord Ripon gave a tremendous impulse to self-government, particularly in rural tracts, but he, on the other hand, abolished the duty on cotton, as the natives believed in the interests of the Lancashire mills. It is true that with the exception of the Indian Councils Act of 1892 which inaugurated the right of interpellation and enlarged the legislative councils, extending to them the elective principal and increasing their right to discuss the budget, all the extensions of self-government have been by the Liberals, but the execution of the reforms have been carried out by the Conservatives with very much the same spirit. As a rule the good of England has in practice been sought by both in what they regarded as the good of India.

1 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Ser., Vol. III (1892), col. 93.

Major A. G. Leonard, "How to Reform India," Westminster Review, CLXXI (1909), 627-28.

3 For other elaborations of the liberal attitude see the following: "The English in India," Westminster Review, LXIX (1858), 203; "Self-Government in India," British Quarterly Review, XXXVIII (1863), 432; Journal of the National Indian Association, 1872, p. 90; "Duties of England to India,” Fraser's Magazine, LXIV (1861), 674-77; A. P. Sinnett, "Anglo-Indian Complications," Fortnightly Review, XL (1883), 409; A. Hobhouse, "Last Words on Mr. Ilbert's Bill," Contemporary Review, XLIV (1884), 400-401; C. H. T. Crosthwaite, "The New Spirit in India," Blackwood's Magazine, 1906, pp. 403-14.

There have, it is true, been occasional black spots on England's record which must not be forgotten in an impartial survey. Most of them seem to be attributable either to race feeling or weakness in certain individuals intrusted with enormous power. Let two instances suffice.

In January, 1872, there occurred an insignificant rising among a sect called the Kookas. No lives were lost, and in their attack on a fort the Kookas seem to have merely attempted to bind and not to kill. They were easily suppressed. Fifty prisoners were taken. Without any semblance of a trial the English official had them all blown from the cannon's mouth. He was dismissed from the service, but no other action was taken.1

The treatment of the natives by individual Englishmen has often been domineering and even brutal. Occasionally there have even been cases like the following one described by William Bonnar.

Not so very long ago I heard a civil surgeon gaily tell at a mess dinner how the other day he had felt constrained to teach a native somewhat forcibly his respectful duty to the "Ruling Race." The "nigger," as he put it, had his whiskers and beard tied up, as all natives like to have them when travelling, when he met him on a country road. The doctor pulled him up and demanded to know why he had not undone his face cloth when he saw a Sahib coming. Then suddenly remembering that he had a pair of forceps in his pocket, he dismounted, and taking the poor man's head under his powerful arm extracted two of his teeth, saying, "Now tie up your mouth, my man. excuse now."2

You have some

Such instances, however, are very much the exception. Over against them should be set the manner in which the settlement officers work among the people and the conduct of British officers in dealing with famine and in taking their lives in their hands to combat epidemics such as cholera and plague.3 Instances also are numerous of life-long intimate friendships between Englishmen and natives and of the preference by the natives for English officials to those of their own race.4

'James Routledge, English Rule and Native Opinion in India, p. 100.

2 William Bonnar, "The English in India," Contemporary Review, LXVIII (1895), 566.

3 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, XXXVIII (1906–7), 150.

4 In this connection see: J. Anderson, "Indian Self-Government," East and West Magazine, VI (1907), 337-47; John Morley, "Signs of the Times in India," Edinburgh Review, CCVI (1907), 297; Sir Bampfylde Fuller, "Quo Vadis," Nineteenth Century Review, LXV (1909), 714.

How successful England has been in Anglicizing India cannot be answered. On the material side England has performed marvels in the construction of a steadily growing network of hospitals, roads, transportation and irrigation canals, railways, and telegraph lines. She has given India a postal system. Englishmen and English capital have, for the most part, built and operated the cotton and other factories, created its tea, jute, indigo, and rubber plantations, and developed its mines and oil wells.

Economically speaking, however, the success and value of these measures is disputed by many of the educated natives, perhaps on account of sentimental bias. They contend that the expense involved constitutes a "drain" to England that has been variously estimated at from eighteen to hundreds of millions of pounds a year, in the form of salaries, pensions, various home charges, interest on investments, and similar items.' This it is claimed has more than offset the benefits derived from the development projects and even those from the pax Britannica and the English administrative system. This seems more than doubtful, but does derive some color from the fact that India as a whole is appallingly poverty- and frequently gruesomely famine-stricken.

On the moral side the English government has been able to do less. Suti and Thugi were suppressed, but Queen Victoria's proclamation in 1858 announced a policy of religious neutrality which has been strictly adhered to. In India the religious comes so near to being synonymous with social that it has been possible for the government to do but little.

The English government is only incidentally responsible for the tremendous transformation now in progress in native thought in India. It is but one phase of the mental revolution in the oriental mind throughout the East, and is to be primarily attributed to the same causes-the shrinkage of the world by improved means of communication and the readjustments necessitated by new machines, new processes, and new

1 Among the estimates the following are a few examples. A Hindu, “The Grievances of India," Dark Blue Magazine, III (1872), 325: 10,000,000 pounds a year and the support of 80,000 Britons. H. M. Hyndman, "Bleeding to Death," Nineteenth Century Review, VIII (1880), 165: 20,000,000 pounds a year. J. S. Keay, "The Spoliation of India,” Nineteenth Century Review, XIV (1883), 5, 16: 30,000,000 pounds a year in "direct tribute"; 70,000,000 pounds a year, total drain. E. Pratt, "India and Her Friends," Westminster Review, CXLVII (1897), 646: 30,000,000 pounds a year. A. Sawtell, op. cit., p. 290: 200,000,000 pounds a year. Saint Nihal Singh, "Unrest in India," Arena, XXXVIII (1907), 604: 20,000,000 pounds annually. Parliamentary Debates, 4th Ser., Vol. III (1892), col. 106: 13,000,000 pounds annually for salaries alone.

thoughts. England at most has only modified it slightly in India. If anything she seems to have retarded it, as compared to the same movement in China and Japan.

What England has been able to accomplish on the social and moral side has been almost entirely through education. This problem of educating, even in the elements, the enormous population has been attacked by the government, the missionaries, and by the Hindus and Mohammedans themselves, but the progress made has been relatively insignificant. The surface only has been scratched. Some thousands of as keen minds as exist anywhere in the world have been given university educations, some millions have been taught to read and write some language, but the hundreds of millions can do neither.

As yet the time has been too short to judge as to the permanence1 and depth of the English influence either on the material or moral side. It seems inconceivable that India should ever discard England's material contribution to the development of the country, but it will be no great marvel if the most enduring imprint left by England on Indian life will prove to be that made by the political mold, and the most significant work done by England in India will be found to have been the development of self-government in the country and the transplanting to India of English political institutions and ideals.

In England's effort to solve the problem of Anglicizing India, she has so far succeeded in maintaining her all-essential political supremacy largely through two conditions. The first and most important of these has been the infinite number of divisions and antagonisms-religious, racial, social, and political-which divide India and which enabled the East India Company to establish its dominion by conquering the country in sections and playing one native unit off against another.

It has, since the days of the Company, also precluded any unity on the part of the masses. Had England's rule been harsh, doubtless something of the nature of a united front might have been patched up, and of late among the upper classes there have been symptoms of an inchoate national sentiment which may ultimately permeate the lower strata and produce a united India. As yet, however, the antagonism of race to race, caste to caste, and religion to religion has been far greater than any aversion to British rule. Any tendency to unity has been further checked in all except the English-speaking classes by the barrier of language, which has prevented any real combination between groups.

'For some estimates of the reality and permanence of English achievements in India, see: M. E. Grant-Duff, op. cit., pp. 866 et seq.; G. Wegener, op. cit., pp. 960-77.