“No, but does that signify? Many English have spoken the truth. Edmund Burke said, ‘The Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our protection which destroys India.’ The English historian, Montgomery Martin, wrote that so constant a drain as England’s upon India would impoverish England herself if she were subjected to it. And here reflect that the wage of the laborer, when he gets work, averages but twopence a day. J. I. Sunderland observes, ‘The British have given India railways, jute-mills, tea plantations, and many things else.... The profits go to the British.’ Mr. Sunderland, no doubt, remarks elsewhere about the opium industry. Herbert Spencer declares that it was an arrogant assumption upon the part of the British to accept as a fact that India exists for England. He also characterizes England’s relations to India as a ‘cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection.’”
“But we in America,” said Mr. Jasper—“I refer to those who have not looked deeply into the question—even our president, Mr. Roosevelt—have regarded English rule in India as a vast and beneficent system.”
“Ah, yes,” responded the stranger, with a queer smile; “as you say, those who have not looked deeply into the question, regard it so. There was another American president, Mr. Lincoln, who declared that no man is good enough to govern another man.... But there are errors of judgment all around the world, and errors of ignorance which make for cruelty. English agents will come here to poor little Rydamphur presently with rice and millet, and when the rains start, the periodic famine officially will be declared over for another year, and the people of this district will arise to the normal condition of forty millions of India—that of slow starvation.”
“But why don’t the Hindus emigrate?”
“Mother India cannot afford to give her children passage money,” the stranger declared quickly. “She is sending a few, the pith and promise of her young men, to America and elsewhere to learn from the younger peoples how to take care of herself in commercial matters, in the hope of reviving her industries in centuries to come. But the ordinary low-castes, the fuel of the famines, would have to starve a little extra in good times to save from their earnings the price to cross one of our North River ferries. They would die long before they hoarded the fare from Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island.”
Mr. Jasper’s eyes kindled at the references. “But why do the Hindus not fight?” he asked.
“India has no arms.”
“But even our little South and Central American States get arms and fight right merrily with them.”
“India is poorer than the little South and Central American States—so poor that it requires a white man years to conceive the meaning of her poverty.” The speaker leaned forward and added in a slow, bitter way: “Forty millions in India are hungry to-night: forty millions are never otherwise than hungry—they pass from the womb to the burning-ghats, never having known a moment of repletion: yet England drains India of one hundred million dollars a year. Listen; in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century ten millions in India died of famine. In the same period England vampirized this land of the hungry of twenty-five hundred millions of dollars. This is one of the tragic facts of the world.
“Here’s another: in the nineteenth century England compelled India to maintain five times as many troops as were needed for her own defense or her own subjection—in other words, forced India to furnish troops for British conquests outside of India!... Would you mind, sir, if I uttered a sentence that has never been uttered before?”