Happily there are signs that, in Indian agriculture at least, the transition period is working itself out and that conditions may soon be on the mend. Both the British Government and the native princes have vied with one another in spreading Western agricultural ideas and methods, and since the Indian peasant has proved much more receptive than has the Indian artisan, a more intelligent type of farmer is developing, better able to keep step with the times. A good instance is the growth of rural co-operative credit societies. First introduced by the British Government in 1904, there were in 1915 more than 17,000 such associations, with a total of 825,000 members and a working capital of nearly $30,000,000. These agricultural societies make loans for the purchase of stock, fodder, seed, manure, sinking of wells, purchase of Western agricultural machinery, and, in emergencies, personal maintenance. In the districts where they have established themselves they have greatly diminished the plague of usury practised by the "banyas," or village money-lenders, lowering the rate of interest from its former crushing range of 20 to 75 per cent. to a range averaging from 9 to 18 per cent. Of course such phenomena are as yet merely exceptions to a very dreary rule. Nevertheless, they all point toward a brighter morrow.[231]
But this brighter agricultural morrow is obviously far off, and in industry it seems to be farther still. Meanwhile the changing Orient is full of suffering and discontent. What wonder that many Orientals ascribe their troubles, not to the process of economic transition, but to the political control of European governments and the economic exploitation of Western capital. The result is agitation for emancipation from Western economic as well as Western political control. At the end of Chapter II we examined the movement among the Mohammedan peoples known as "Economic Pan-Islamism." A similar movement has arisen among the Hindus of India—the so-called "Swadeshi" movement. The Swadeshists declare that India's economic ills are almost entirely due to the "drain" of India's wealth to England and other Western lands. They therefore advocate a boycott of English goods until Britain grants India self-government, whereupon they propose to erect protective tariffs for Indian products, curb the activities of British capital, replace high-salaried English officials by natives, and thereby keep India's wealth at home.[232]
An analysis of these Swadeshist arguments, however, reveals them as inadequate to account for India's ills, which are due far more to the general economic trend of the times than to any specific defects of the British connection. British governance and British capital do cost money, but their undoubted efficiency in producing peace, order, security, and development must be considered as offsets to the higher costs which native rule and native capital would impose. As Sir Theodore Morison well says: "The advantages which the British Navy and British credit confer on India are a liberal offset to her expenditure on pensions and gratuities to her English servants.... India derives a pecuniary advantage from her connection with the British Empire. The answer, then, which I give to the question 'What economic equivalent does India get for foreign payments?' is this: India gets the equipment of modern industry, and she gets an administration favourable to economic evolution cheaper than she could provide it herself."[233] A comparison with Japan's much more costly defence budgets, inferior credit, and higher interest charges on both public and private loans is enlightening on this point.
In fact, some Indians themselves admit the fallacy of Swadeshist arguments. As one of them remarks: "The so-called economic 'drain' is nonsense. Most of the misery of late years is due to the rising cost of living—a world-wide phenomenon." And in proof of this he cites conditions in other Oriental countries, especially Japan.[234] As warm a friend of the Indian people as the British labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, states: "One thing is quite evident, a tariff will not re-establish the old hand-industry of India nor help to revive village handicrafts. Factory and machine production, native to India itself, will throttle them as effectively as that of Lancashire and Birmingham has done in the past."[235]
Even more trenchant are the criticisms formulated by the Hindu writer Pramatha Nath Bose.[236] The "drain," says Mr. Bose, is ruining India. But would the Home Rule programme, as envisaged by most Swadeshists, cure India's economic ills? Under Home Rule these people would do the following things: (1) Substitute Englishmen for Indians in the Administration; (2) levy protective duties on Indian products; (3) grant State encouragement to Indian industries; (4) disseminate technical education. Now, how would these matters work out? The substitution of Indian for British officials would not lessen the "drain" as much as most Home Rulers think. The high-placed Indian officials who already exist have acquired European standards of living, so the new official corps would cost almost as much as the old. Also, "the influence of the example set by the well-to-do Indian officials would permeate Indian society more largely than at present, and the demand for Western articles would rise in proportion. So commercial exploitation by foreigners would not only continue almost as if they were Europeans, but might even increase." As to a protective tariff, it would attract European capital to India which would exploit labour and skim the profits. India has shown relatively little capacity for indigenous industrial development. Of course, even at low wages, many Indians might benefit, yet such persons would form only a tithe of the millions now starving—besides the fact that this industrialization would bring in many new social evils. As to State encouragement of industries, this would bring in Western capital even more than a protective tariff, with the results already stated. As for technical education, it is a worthy project, but, says Mr. Bose, "I am afraid the movement is too late, now. Within the last thirty years the Westerners and the Japanese have gone so far ahead of us industrially that it has been yearly becoming more and more difficult to compete with them."
In fact, Mr. Bose goes on to criticize the whole system of Western education, as applied to India. Neither higher nor lower education have proven panaceas. "Higher education has led to the material prosperity of a small section of our community, comprising a few thousands of well-to-do lawyers, doctors, and State servants. But their occupations being of a more or less unproductive or parasitic character, their well-being does not solve the problem of the improvement of India as a whole. On the contrary, as their taste for imported articles develops in proportion to their prosperity, they help to swell rather than diminish the economic drain from the country which is one of the chief causes of our impoverishment." Neither has elementary education "on the whole furthered the well-being of the multitude. It has not enabled the cultivators to 'grow two blades where one grew before.' On the contrary, it has distinctly diminished their efficiency by inculcating in the literate proletariat, who constitute the cream of their class, a strong distaste for their hereditary mode of living and their hereditary callings, and an equally strong taste for shoddy superfluities and brummagem fineries, and for occupations of a more or less parasitic character. They have, directly or indirectly, accelerated rather than retarded the decadence of indigenous industries, and have thus helped to aggravate their own economic difficulties and those of the entire community. What they want is more food—and New India vies with the Government in giving them what is called 'education' that does not increase their food-earning capacity, but on the contrary fosters in them tastes and habits which make them despise indigenous products and render them fit subjects for the exploitation of scheming capitalists, mostly foreign. Political and economic causes could not have led to the extinction of indigenous industry if they had not been aided by change of taste fostered by the Western environment of which the so-called 'education' is a powerful factor."
From all this Mr. Bose concludes that none of the reforms advocated by the Home Rulers would cure India's ills. "In fact, the chances are, she would be more inextricably entangled in the toils of Western civilization, without any adequate compensating advantage, and the grip of the West would close on her to crush her more effectively." Therefore, according to Mr. Bose, the only thing for India to do is to turn her back on everything Western and plunge resolutely into the traditional past. As he expresses it: "India's salvation lies, not in the region of politics, but outside it; not in aspiring to be one of the 'great' nations of the present day, but in retiring to her humble position—a position, to my mind, of solitary grandeur and glory; not in going forward on the path of Western civilization, but in going back from it so far as practicable; not in getting more and more entangled in the silken meshes of its finely knit, widespread net, but in escaping from it as far as possible."
Such are the drastic conclusions of Mr. Bose; conclusions shared to a certain extent by other Indian idealists like Rabindranath Tagore. But surely such projects, however idealistic, are the vainest fantasies. Whole peoples cannot arbitrarily cut themselves off from the rest of the world, like isolated individuals forswearing society and setting up as anchorites in the jungle. The time for "hermit nations" has passed, especially for a vast country like India, set at the cross-roads of the East, open to the sea, and already profoundly penetrated by Western ideas.
Nevertheless, such criticisms, appealing as they do to the strong strain of asceticism latent in the Indian nature, have affected many Indians who, while unable to concur in the conclusions, still try to evolve a "middle term," retaining everything congenial in the old system and grafting on a select set of Western innovations. Accordingly, these persons have elaborated programmes for a "new order" built on a blend of Hindu mysticism, caste, Western industry, and socialism.[237]
Now these schemes are highly ingenious. But they are not convincing. Their authors should remember the old adage that you cannot eat your cake and have it too. When we realize the abysmal antithesis between the economic systems of the old East and the modern West, any attempt to combine the most congenial points of both while eschewing their defects seems an attempt to reconcile irreconcilables and about as profitable as trying to square the circle. As Lowes Dickinson wisely observes: "Civilization is a whole. Its art, its religion, its way of life, all hang together with its economic and technical development. I doubt whether a nation can pick and choose; whether, for instance, the East can say, 'We will take from the West its battleships, its factories, its medical science; we will not take its social confusion, its hurry and fatigue, its ugliness, its over-emphasis on activity.'... So I expect the East to follow us, whether it like it or no, into all these excesses, and to go right through, not round, all that we have been through on its way to a higher phase of civilization."[238]