Further, to expect, as some English publicists appear to expect, that Indian people will sell their jewels and melt their gold and silver nose and ankle and finger rings, to enable them to find capital for industrial enterprises in which they do not believe, or to improve their land according to a foreigner's notions of improvement, is to expect from them what is looked for from no other people on the face of the earth, and what no other people does. Whence comes the capital employed in joint stock and other enterprises in the United Kingdom? Does any appreciable amount of it come from the jewelry, the paintings, the Sevres vases, the hoarded wealth of the rich people of this land? It is only as there is capital over and above what makes for the adornment of the person and the enrichment of the home that general enterprise is nourished, even in our go-ahead industrial United Kingdom. If this fact were more often borne in mind there would be less injustice done to what is called the want of energy and effort on the part of Indian socalled capitalists, while many foolish gibes as to the alleged 'hoarding' propensities of our Indian fellowsubjects would be spared. Stop the drain from India, and there may be a chance of wealth accumulating; India may then be able to pay for her own industrial enterprises. While the drain continues wealth cannot accumulate, and the public works which her foreign rulers declare to be necessary must be constructed with foreign capital, and, in the process, will be brought about the further degradation, and, finally, the ruin of India. Much is said about the hoarding by the natives, but how little is the share for each to hoard, and what hoardings-in the shape of investments, plate, jewelry, watches, personal ornaments-there are in England! I do not suppose that any Englishman would say that the natives of India ought to have no taste and no ornaments, and must only live like animals. But, after all, how little there is for each, if every one had his share to hoard or to use. The fact is that, far from hoarding, millions who are living on "scanty subsistence" do not know what it is to have a silver piece in their possession. It cannot be otherwise. To talk of Oriental wealth now, as far as British India is concerned, is a figure of speech, a dream!'-DADABHAI NAOROJI, Poverty of India.' CHAPTER VI THE 'TRIBUTE': WHAT IT IS, HOW IT WORKS . . not a fact to be found in support of Allegations' that 'An Administration absolutely Unselfish.' Does India Really Pay a Tribute ? The Symposium at the India Office in 1875. Lord Salisbury on Produce Exported without a Direct How the Mercantile Transaction Involving the Payment of The Viceroy and Secretary of State, as Money Brokers, The Tribute' Not All Gain to England; it does Serious 'The Tribute which is so balefully weighing down the Indian 'You speak,' said the Rt. Hon. Lord George Hamilton, Secretary of State for India, in a letter to Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, of the increasing impoverishment of India, and the annual drain upon her as steadily and continuously exhausting her resources. Again I assert you are under a delusion. Except that, during the last five years the rainfall has thrice failed, and created Part of a correspondence between these gentlemen on the present condition of India and (as Mr. Naoroji put it) its rapidly-growing impoverishment. DOES INDIA PAY TRIBUTE ? 195 droughts of immense dimensions, there is not a fact to be found in support of your allegations.' 'Does India pay tribute to England?' Certainly not,' the average Englishman would reply. 'We do not rule India in that way. Tribute? Oh! it is nonsense to suppose we take tribute from another country, especially a country like India. We rule India for nothing, except payment for the work we do there.' The more than average man, the capable scholar, the high administrator, all reply with like expressions. One of the highest of ex-officials, whose service in India recently came to an end, said, in the presence of the present writer, during the present year (1901): 'Oh! that absurdity about a drain from India to England! There is no drain. If there be a drain it is all the other way.' He was highly indignant, as he thus spoke, with any one who thought otherwise. The cynic may ask: Does England, indeed, then rule India for naught?' And he will get a reply in some such terms as these : 'I have simply to repeat what I suppose is the most striking impression that India leaves on every traveller of the magnificent work that has been done, and is being done, by English Administration.' And, of course, 'The spectacle,' continues the same writer, 'of an administration absolutely unselfish, just, scrupulous, unweariedly energetic, provident, charitable, worked by men of untiring self-sacrifice and indomitable courage from the highest to the lowest, keeping order in what would quite obviously otherwise be illimitable chaos-a Government, local as well as central, exact, firm, yet responsive to a touch, and absolutely devoted to the good 'Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.' of the people, is one which makes one proud and thankful for British rule.' I This is how nearly every Englishman regards the British connection with India. Yet it is wholly a fancy picture. Our absolutely unselfish' and 'scrupulous rule is compatible with the existence of a drain of India's resources which is enriching an already wealthy country at the cost of insufficient food, insufficient clothing, and no comforts of any kind for enjoyment by twice as many millions of British subjects as there are people residing in the United Kingdom. Compatible, too, with one returned civilian getting as much for pension each year as the average income of thirteen hundred people. The rule has to be good, the man has to have done wonders, to justify any foreigner for non-equivalent services' (in Lord Salisbury's phrase) taking so much from the means of an always hungry and ill-nourished people. The word Tribute' is only once mentioned in the general accounts of the Government of India. It is then employed to designate certain payments made by the Feudatory States to the suzerain Power. The total amount is £909,701 per annum. Of anything in the shape of a tribute' in the transactions existing between India and England nothing is said. Why? Because,' the reply is given to any question of the kind which may be asked, 'there is nothing in the shape of tribute from the one country to the other. Are Englishmen South American Spaniards that they should exact a tribute from the people over whom they bear rule?' One hundred and twenty years ago there was no insuperable objection to call things by their right names. Burke 2 declared it must have been always evident to considerate persons that the vast extraction of wealth from a country lessening in its resources in proportion to I Rev. W. H. Hutton, B.D., Tutor and Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford: Impressions of India,' contributed to The Guardian, May, 1901. 2 Ninth Report of Select Committee on the Affairs of India, p. 57, vol. viii. J. C. Nimmo, 1899. |