CHAPTER XXV
POLITICAL
Consequences do not appeal as a subject of interest to the typical British mind until they have arrived. But when, as was the case in our acquisition of India, a heedlessness of consequences is accompanied by ignorance of the future development of his own government into a democratic tyranny, the extension of free institutions by a conqueror to a subject race becomes fraught with aggravated dangers. These are now upon us and we have to steer between a panic withdrawal of liberties and an equally rash programme in their too rapid extension.
The more we can help India to become a nation, the more we can knit her together by conscious bonds of common needs and aspirations the better it will be for her and the better, therefore, for ourselves now that we can no longer tolerate with equanimity an exploitation of a subject race solely for our own commercial advantage.
That East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, is one of the worst superstitions prevalent among British people. Let those who so glibly reiterate what I believe to be a falsehood pernicious in its tendency to preserve a bigoted exclusiveness, compare India not with the West of to-day but with ancient and mediæval Europe.
The anchorite in a cage at some street corner, mendicant friars and pilgrims with their bowls, flagellants and the innumerable sects that seek to honour God by scorning his gifts, altars made red with the blood of sacrifice, the tight-rope walker and the ballad man, religious pageantry and the pomp of kings, the calm aloofness of sequestered lives, the careless luxury of courts, the squalid existence of a servile peasantry, the sordid rookeries of each reeking town, unchecked disease and callous cruelty, the taciturn denial of every new discovery, and brooding superstition over all—the counterpart of nearly every phase of life, so often considered as typically Oriental—surely existed in past ages between Rome and Bristol.
It needs no conscious pharisaism for men of both authority and learning to contrast the ideals of modern industry unfavourably with those of renunciation and quietism and to call the one new and the other old; but this is only another way of saying that authority and learning are not always denied even to sentimentalists though they be without hope and see the world with but a single eye.
Oh, wondrous dreamings of a golden age that never was under the light of the sun! Were the people of India under Akhbar or Asoka better in any one respect than they are to-day? The wanderings of ascetic Sadhus and Yogis have probably worked towards the cementing of the country, and their spirit of detachment has at the same time helped to withdraw attention from the yoke of foreign rule.
It has been shown in the history of modern India that at a time of mutiny and under the excitement of anger at inhuman butchery, one of our bravest and (in his own profession of soldiering) most capable of men may have his ideas of civilization so far distorted as to plead for a return to methods of the most extreme savagery in the treatment of prisoners; but it has not been shown that any Englishman of recognized capability to-day has such a distorted view that he looks upon India as a permanent goose to be kept sufficiently nourished to lay golden eggs for the benefit of his own country. To whatever party he may belong, every Englishman in England, who studies Indian affairs and the relation of India to the rest of our Empire, feels that our rule should be so conducted as to prepare India for ultimate self-government and a place in the future councils of a British confederation among the other units of the Empire.