RECOGNITION AT THE INDIA OFFICE 197 the increase of its burdens' was neither good in itself, nor could it be of long duration. To-day we are not wholly blind, notwithstanding the general obscurantism, which, sometimes, seems wilful obscurantism. The injury-of increasing the burdens on the land and leaving cities and towns insufficiently taxed-' is exaggerated in India,' said Lord Salisbury (April 29, 1875), 'where so much of the revenue is exported without a direct equivalent.' The Secretary of State for India, as Lord Salisbury was then, proceeded to say: As India must be bled the lancet should be directed to the parts where the blood is congested, or at least is sufficient, not to those which are already feeble from the want of it.' This observation makes it clear that to one British statesman out of the many who have had direct charge of Indian affairs, the fact, that India was paying tribute to England, was perfectly clear. With his great ability and luminous powers of description Lord Salisbury put the matter beyond peradventure in two striking phrases :— - . . . India, where so much of the revenue is exported without a direct equivalent.' 'As India must be bled, the lancet should be directed to the parts where the blood is congested, or at least sufficient, not to those which are already feeble for the want of it.' There were others in the India Office at that time who shared these views and who did not hesitate to express them. But for some reason not readily apparent, from I'More than twenty years ago the late Sir Louis Mallet (I presume with the knowledge and consent of Lord Cranbrook, then Secretary of State for India, and of my friend the late Edward Stanhope, then Under-Secretary), put at my disposal the confidential documents in the India Office, from Indian Finance Ministers and others, bearing on this question of the drain from India to England and its effects. The situation is, to my mind, so desperate that I consider I am entitled to call on Lord George Hamilton to submit the confidential memoranda on this subject, up to and after the year 1880, for the consideration of the House of Commons. I venture to assert that the public will be astonished to read the names of those who (privately) are at one with me on this matter. As to remedy, there is but one, and it is almost too late for that: the staunching of the drain and the steady substi that time forward no such word has been spoken, or, if spoken, has not been allowed to appear in any of the publications emanating from the Office. The names of things concerning the fundamental facts of human nature and of administrative conditions may change the essential conditions are unvaried. This is especially the case with India. A student of AngloIndian nomenclature in relation to the procedure of affairs during, say, the past thirty years, finds himself, on consulting the official records of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, in a world of most refreshingly frank and wholly unaccustomed expressions. Yet, the burden of dispatches from the India House to 'loving friends' in India refer to much the same topics as do the dispatches which to-day pass backwards and forwards between Whitehall on the one hand and Calcutta and Simla on the other. Notably is this true of the correspondence of the finance departments. The problems to be faced now are the problems which were faced then. In the Company's days, urged by the need for dividends and by the payments to be made to His Majesty's Government for troops and in other respects, much turned upon the Investment.' The Investment meant so many millions of pounds sterling employed for the purchase of goods to be loaded into the Company's ships and sold in English markets to provide salaries, dividends, and interest on the fruits of the tution of Native rule, under light English supervision, for our present ruinous system.'-H. M. HYNDMAN, Morning Post, July 2, 1901. In a preceding communication from the same writer names had been named to this extent: I may say, in conclusion, that my views on this matter have been and are shared by such men, dead and living, as Mr. Montgomery Martin, Sir George Wingate, Mr. James Geddes (Bengal Civil Service, hero of the Orissa famine of 1866), Sir Louis Mallet, Colonel Osborn, Major Evans Bell, Mr. Robert Knight, Sir William Wedderburn, Mr. Chester Macnaghten (late Principal of the Rajkumar College, Rajkote, Kattywar), Mr. William Digby, Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, and many more; and I believe I should not be very far wrong if I added Lord Salisbury and another ex-Secretary of State for India to the list.' The name of the late Sir George Campbell, K.C.S.I., M.P., once Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, must also be included. His remarks will be found in the succeeding chapter. INDIAN RULERS-GLORIFIED MERCHANTS 199 economical sin of international borrowing,' on which the directors discoursed, a sin which, notwithstanding its condemnation, was committed with impunity immediately wars with the object of conquest seemed inevitable and were taken in hand. The process was simple. If 'Commerce' had not profits for the 'Investment,' then 'Territory' provided what was needed-that is to say, the proceeds of taxation paid for the goods to fill the ships' holds and to find employment for the broker in Mincing Lane and its purlieus. The rulers of India, then, might be governing men, but, first and foremost, they were merchants. The fact was open and undisguised. Now they are rulers indeed, but no longer figure as merchants. The Viceroy does not buy wheat, and jute, and tea, and indigo, and oil seeds, and coffee, and cotton, endorse the Bills of Lading, as did Warren Hastings in his time, and consign the produce to the Secretary of the India Office in London. All the same month by month a mercantile transaction is carried through identical with that which was familiar and easily understood when done openly and above-board. Lord George Hamilton is the head of a larger mercantile house than that over which Mr. Pierpont Morgan presides as Master of the United States Steel Trust. Mr. Clinton Dawkins, in exchanging his Finance Ministership of India for a partnership in an eminent banking firm doing business in London and New York, merely exchanged one commercial situation for another. Our whole connection with India rests upon the shop-keeping element in the relations between the two countries being strictly maintained. Let those visible signs of India's subordination to England which are manifest in the balance of exports over imports in the annual trade of the two countries be stopped by that great merchant the Secretary of State ceasing to offer Council Bills for purchase, and India would not greatly concern us as a nation, if only the inevitable liquidation provided us with twenty shillings in the £, and we received 'compensation for disturbance,' which we should certainly exact. The merchant-statesman no longer buys goods in India himself, sells them in the open market and appropriates the proceeds to pay what is due to moneylenders in England, (called, for euphony's sake, shareholders-the other name is ugly and is to be reserved for sowkars and bunniahs), annuitants, and pensioners, not to mention his own emoluments and those of his not small army of assistants. He has to have about sixteen millions sterling of hard cash every year to pay to the respective parties just mentioned. His Agent in Calcutta, the Head of the Civil Administration, the representative of British Majesty, has collected the money that is wanted and holds it ready for transmission. He cannot, however, very well send the rupees he has actually obtained from the taxed community. Neither would it be dignified on the part of Lord Curzon of Kedleston to buy produce and see it shipped from dock or ghat. Other people in England, merchants who have ascertained the wants of the Western people, have agents in India who buy produce and who are ready to undertake all the technicalities involved in shipping it to England. They do this, and their principals in London having received and sold the goods wish to transmit to India payment for what they have received. If Lord Curzon does not want to send over actual coin in bulk neither does the outside merchant wish to send more ingots of gold or silver or brass to India than the few well-to-do Indian people require as a metallic reserve or for conversion into ornamentssuch ornaments being a kind of savings' bank whence (before the Mints were closed) the full silver value of the savings could, at any moment, be obtained (less a small commission) in current coin of the realm. Thus, the Secretary of State wants the money which his Agent in Calcutta holds for him; the vendor merchant in London wants to pay his correspondent or Agent at an Indian port or in an inland city for the produce and goods he has received and has sold. What THE BRITISH FARMER'S (INDIAN) WOES 201 better course can the English merchant adopt to secure his ends than that he should pay what he has to pay to the Secretary of State in London who will instruct his Agent-the Viceroy-to pay in Calcutta or elsewhere a corresponding sum to the Exchange Bank which has come into existence as the medium for such transactions? I Because Indian produce is the only means by which these transactions can be carried through, the British farmer has nearly ceased to grow wheat. Cheap labour in India and the utter helplessness of the cultivator has helped to bring the agriculturist in the United Kingdom to the deplorable pass described by Mr. Rider Haggard in his July-October visitation through the agricultural districts of England. Economic causes, as inexorable as the law of gravitation or the transmission of light from the sun and stars, from lamp and candle, have made the wealth gained by iron-master and manufacturer who send steel rails and locomotives to India paid for out of money lent by England and not provided by India, to play a large part in producing the harder struggle for life which the British agriculturist has to endure. A study of these economics would lead English landowners and farmers to hold very different political views from those they at present possess. But there is no Party in the British State with knowledge or discernment to teach them what they should know. 'The glut of Indian commodities in the English market,' says Mr. Inwood Pollard,2 is the result of India's growing Home charges. For, whereas English merchants only expended 304,000,000 of tolas 3 of silver I 1 See a series of articles contributed to the Express newspaper, London. 2 The Indian Tribute and the Loss by Exchange; an Essay on the Depreciation of Indian Commodities in England,' by Thomas Inwood Pollard. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. 1884. I have exchanged the word 'our' into 'India' to increase the perspicacity of the passage for English readers. 3 A tola is a measure of weight. The standard tola weighs 180 troy grains, or one rupee. |