India is to-day governed by an English Civil Service whose fairness, honesty, and general efficiency no informed person can seriously impugn. But this no longer contents Indian aspirations. India desires not merely good government but self-government. The ultimate goal of all Indian reformers is emancipation from European tutelage, though they differ among themselves as to how and when this emancipation is to be attained. The most conservative would be content with self-government under British guidance, the middle group asks for the full status of a Dominion of the British Empire like Canada and Australia, while the radicals demand complete independence. Even the most conservative of these demands would, however, involve great changes of system and a diminution of British control. Such demands arouse in England mistrust and apprehension. Englishmen point out that India is not a nation but a congeries of diverse peoples spiritually sundered by barriers of blood, language, culture, and religion, and they conclude that, if England’s control were really relaxed, India would get out of hand and drift toward anarchy. As for Indian independence, the average Englishman cannot abide the thought, holding it fatal both for the British Empire and for India itself. The result has been that England has failed to meet Indian demands, and this, in turn, has roused an acute recrudescence of dissatisfaction and unrest. The British Government has countered with coercive legislation like the Rowlatt Acts and has sternly repressed rioting and terrorism. British authority is still supreme in India. But it is an authority resting more and more upon force. In fact, some Englishmen have long considered British rule in India, despite its imposing appearance, a decidedly fragile affair. Many years ago Meredith Townsend, who certainly knew India well, wrote:
“The English think they will rule India for many centuries or forever. I do not think so, holding rather the older belief that the empire which came in a day will disappear in a night.... Above all this inconceivable mass of humanity, governing all, protecting all, taxing all, rises what we call here ‘the Empire,’ a corporation of less than 1,500 men, partly chosen by examination, partly by co-optation, who are set to govern, and who protect themselves in governing by finding pay for a minute white garrison of 65,000 men, one-fifth of the Roman legions—though the masses to be controlled are double the subjects of Rome. That corporation and that garrison constitute the ‘Indian Empire.’ There is nothing else. Banish those 1,500 men in black, defeat that slender garrison in red, and the empire has ended, the structure disappears, and brown India emerges, unchanged and unchangeable. To support the official world and its garrison—both, recollect, smaller than those of Belgium—there is, except Indian opinion, absolutely nothing. Not only is there no white race in India, not only is there no white colony, but there is no white man who purposes to remain.... There are no white servants, not even grooms, no white policemen, no white postmen, no white anything. If the brown men struck for a week, the ‘Empire’ would collapse like a house of cards, and every ruling man would be a starving prisoner in his own house. He could not move or feed himself or get water.”[51]
These words aptly illustrate the truth stated at the beginning of this book that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics but race, and that the most imposing political phenomena, of themselves, mean nothing. And that is just the fatal weakness underlying the white man’s present political domination over the brown world. Throughout that entire world there is no settled white population save in the French colonies of Algeria and Tunis along the Mediterranean seaboard, where whites form perhaps one-sixth of the total. Elsewhere, from Morocco to the Dutch Indies, there is in the racial sense, as Townsend well says, “no white anything,” and if white rule vanished to-morrow it would not leave a human trace behind. White rule is therefore purely political, based on prescription, prestige, and lack of effective opposition. These are indeed fragile foundations. Let the brown world once make up its mind that the white man must go, and he will go, for his position will have become simply impossible. It is not solely a question of a “Holy War”; mere passive resistance, if genuine and general, would shake white rule to its foundations. And it is precisely the determination to get rid of white rule which seems to be spreading like wild-fire over the brown world to-day. The unrest which I have described in Egypt and India merely typify what is going on in Morocco, Central Asia, the Dutch Indies, the Philippines, and every other portion of the brown world whose inhabitants are above the grade of savages.
Another factor favoring the prospects of brown emancipation is the lack of sustained resistance which the white world would probably offer. For the white world’s interests in these regions, though great, are not fundamental; that is to say, racial. However grievously they might suffer politically and economically, racially the white peoples would lose almost nothing. Here again we see the basic importance of race in human affairs. Contrast, for example, England’s attitude toward an insurgent India with France’s attitude toward an insurgent North Africa. England, with nothing racial at stake, would hesitate before a reconquest of India involving millions of soldiers and billions of treasure. France, on the other hand, with nearly a million Europeans in her North African possessions, half of these full-blooded Frenchmen, might risk her last franc and her last poilu rather than see these blood-brothers slaughtered and enslaved.
Assuming, then, what to-day seems probable, that white political control over the brown world is destined to be sensibly curtailed if not generally eliminated, what are the larger racial implications? Above all: will the browns tend to impinge on white race-areas as the yellows show signs of doing? Probably, no; at least, not to any great extent. In the first place, the brown world has within its present confines plenty of room for potential race-expansion. Outside India, Egypt, Java, and a few lesser spots, there is scarcely a brown land where natural improvements such as irrigation would not open up extensive settlement areas. Mesopotamia alone, now almost uninhabited, might support a vast population, while Persia could nourish several times its present inhabitants.
India, to be sure, is almost as congested as China, and the spectre of the Indian coolie has lately alarmed white lands like Canada and South Africa almost as much as the Chinese coolie has done. But an independent India would fall under the same political blight as the rest of the brown world—the blight of internecine dissensions and wars. The brown world’s present growing solidarity is not a positive but a negative phenomenon. It is an alliance, against a common foe, of traditional enemies who, once the bond was loosed in victory, would inevitably quarrel among themselves. Turk would fly at Arab and Turkoman at Persian, as of yore, while India would become a welter of contending Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and heaven knows what, until perchance disciplined anew by the pressure of a Yellow Peril. In Western Asia it is possible that the spiritual and cultural bonds of Islam might temper these struggles, but Western Asia is precisely that part of the brown world where population-pressure is absent. India, the overpeopled brown land, would undergo such a cycle of strife as would devour its human surplus and render distant aggressions impossible.
A potential brown menace to white race-areas would, indeed, arise in case of a brown-yellow alliance against the white peoples. But such an alliance could occur only in the first stages of a pan-colored war of liberation while the pressure of white world-predominance was still keenly felt and before the divisive tendencies within the brown world had begun to take effect.
Short of such an alliance (wherein the browns would abet the yellows’ aggressive, racial objectives in return for yellow support of their own essentially defensive, political ends), the brown world’s emancipation from white domination would apparently not result in more than local pressures on white race-areas. It would, however, affect another sphere of white political control—black Africa. The emancipation of brown, Islamic North Africa would inevitably send a sympathetic thrill through every portion of the Dark Continent and would stir both Mohammedan and pagan negroes against white rule. Islam is, in fact, the intimate link between the brown and black worlds. But this subject, with its momentous implications, will be discussed in the next chapter.