To sum up, Indian economists are in favour, first, of import duties on manufactured goods such as are imposed in Australia and other colonies; secondly, of a shifting of the financial burden as far as possible from the agricultural poor to the commercial rich; and thirdly, of a renunciation by the Government of its indefinite claims upon the land. These views will probably be considered preposterous in England, where we have cut-and-dried principles of economy in contradiction to them. But it is certain that all native opinion is against us, and that our present system is bringing India very near to ruin. Surely, there must be something wrong in a state of things which has produced the spectacle of a Government, after having absorbed to itself the whole land rent of a country, still finding itself constantly in financial shifts. The Government of India, as landlord, does practically nothing for the land. All is squandered and spent on other things; and the people who till the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless. This I call the agricultural danger, and if it is not one I again ask where the flaw in my reasoning lies. At least it is a reasoning held by ninety-nine out of every hundred educated and intelligent Indians.
Note.—Since this was published, in 1884, some reduction, as already stated, has been made in the iniquitous salt tax; but most of the other economic evils still prevail, some of them in an exaggerated form. No attempt has been made, by the imposition of import duties, to re-create the lost native industries, nor has any permanent settlement of the land revenue been granted, notwithstanding the example of its astonishing success in restoring agricultural prosperity under very similar conditions in Egypt. Famines continue to be attributed by Viceroy after Viceroy, not to their true economic causes, but to the “act of God” in withholding the rain, which in spite of the forest laws is still in periodical default. Imperial expenditure has not been lessened, nor has the burden of personal debt on the ryot’s back been relieved. He is still the rack-rented tenant of an absentee state-landlord throughout the greater part of British India.
CHAPTER XIII
RACE HATRED
If agricultural distress is the major premiss of revolution in India, the growth of political education in the towns is its minor—political education, that is, unaccompanied by any corresponding growth of political power.
With all my belief in Asiatic progress, I confess that before my recent visit to India I was not prepared to find this latter at all so far advanced as in fact it is; and from first to last I remained astonished at the high level at which native intelligence in political science already stands. I had judged it till then by such scraps of Indian newspaper criticism as I had come across, quoted not seldom by English writers in a hostile sense, and I had judged it wrongly. The newspapers of India, at least those edited in English, are neither on a par with our own, nor do they bear an equal relation to the mental powers of those whose views they expound. I mean that, whereas in England an article in the “Times” or in one of the leading magazines, on a given subject, is, as a rule, intellectually superior to the speeches statesmen are delivering on the same subject, in India the oral arguments are always the best.[17] Nor is it too much to say that for conversation of a political character there are few races in the world which can equal those of India, or that it would be difficult from our own House of Commons to choose men capable of sustaining a successful argument with the best educated Indians on any of the subjects specially interesting to them. I was throughout struck by this. The native mind is quick, lucid, and, it seemed to me, also eminently judicial; and I found it distinguished by the absence of all such passionate exaggeration as I had been led to expect. Though in some of the public speeches I heard made at Calcutta the flowers of rhetoric were certainly not wanting, I did not find anything but what was substantial in the arguments used, and I was repeatedly conscious of being tempted myself to use stronger language than any which even at private meetings was indulged in by the speakers. It seemed to me that a great deal more might have been said without violating the truth, that evils were often minimized, advantages dwelt on, and that there was a general disposition to understate rather than exaggerate matters in discussion. Often in conversation I have been on the point of protesting against the too naïve confidence of men known as demagogues in the good faith of English political action, against their implicit trust in the virtue of reason and a just cause, and their belief that, when they should have proved their griefs to be well founded, relief would thereupon be given. They seemed intentionally to ignore the selfishness and indifference of party statesmanship in England with regard to India, and to be only too willing, in spite of political deceptions, still to be deceived.
It is indeed remarkable that, considering how much real ground of complaint there is against the present state of things, how just and deep are the causes of personal resentment stirring the minds of men, how galling to them are the everyday incidents of being ruled by an alien race, and how little prospect there is of any speedy change, there should be so few agitators of Indian opinion who speak even in secret of any real rupture with England as a thing to be desired. I hardly met with one on my travels seriously so minded; and all seemed vividly to remember the evils of their past history, and to see in them a warning of possible dangers in the future and a reason for caution in their words and actions. This, I say, was remarkable, and to one who, like myself, was seeking the germs of self-governing power in India, presented itself as a very hopeful sign. Froth, fury, and passionate denunciation I found little of in India. Of logical argument I found much, and of that reasoning from facts which is the best of all reasoning, and which in politics goes by the name of common sense.
While, however, I observed and am able to testify to the extreme moderation of what may be called the responsible leaders of native opinion in their purely political views, I could not fail in my intercourse with the educated of all classes to become aware of the ever-widening gulf of personal dislike which separates these from the individual Englishmen who rule them. The question of race hatred in India is a very delicate one to approach; and I am conscious of accepting no little responsibility in venturing to treat of it at all; and if I have resolved to attempt it, it is that I consider it would be affectation in a writer on India to pass over so marked and growing a feature of modern Indian society, and that there are cases where the truth at any risk should be told, and where facts, however painful and humiliating, are better stated in their nakedness, while they can still be stated calmly, than left to disclose themselves in some violent form at a day when calm judgement shall have become impossible.