Is English rule in India just, as we find it to-day? Fortunately, England permits free speech in England, although she has sometimes restricted it in her colonies, and there has not been a public question under consideration in England for a century which has not brought out independent opinion. It is the glory of England that she was an early champion of freedom of speech, and it is the glory of Englishmen that they criticise their own government when they think it wrong. During the American revolution, Burke thundered his defense of the rights of the colonists, and Walpole warned his countrymen that they could not destroy American liberty without asserting principles which, if carried out, would destroy English liberty as well. During the recent war in South Africa the British had no more severe critics than were to be found among her own people and in her own parliament. And so, to-day, British rule in India is as forcibly arraigned by Englishmen as by the Indians themselves. While Mr. Naoroji, an Indian, goes to England and secures from a meeting of a radical club the adoption of a resolution reciting that as "Britain has appropriated thousands of millions of India's wealth for building up and maintaining her British Indian empire and for drawing directly vast wealth to herself;" that as "she is continuing to drain about thirty million pounds sterling of India's wealth every year unceasingly in a variety of ways" and that as "she has thereby reduced the bulk of the Indian population to extreme poverty, destitution and degradation, it is therefore her bounden duty, in common justice and humanity, to pay from her own exchequer the costs of all famines and diseases caused by such impoverishment." And further, "that it is most humiliating and discreditable to the British name that other countries should be appealed to or should have to come to Britain's help for relief of Britain's own subjects, and after and by her un-British rule of about one hundred and fifty years."
VICEROY'S PALACE AT CALCUTTA.
While, I repeat, Mr. Naoroji was securing the unanimous adoption of the above resolution in England, Sir Henry Cotton, now a member of parliament, but for thirty-five years a member of the Indian civil service, was preparing his book, New India, in which he courageously points out the injustice from which India now suffers. Neither he nor Mr. Naoroji suggests Indian independence. Both believe that English sovereignty should continue, but Mr. Cotton shows the wrongs now inflicted upon India and the necessity for reform. Not only does he charge that the promises of the queen have been ignored and Indians excluded from service for which they were fitted, but he charges that the antagonism between the officials and the people is growing and that there is among civilian magistrates "an undoubted tendency to inflict severe sentences when natives of India are concerned, and to impose light and sometimes inadequate punishment upon offenders of their own race," and that in trials "in which Englishmen are tried by English juries" the result is sometimes "a failure of justice not falling short of judicial scandal." If justice can not be found in the court, where shall she be sought?
After the Indian mutiny, the Queen, in a proclamation, promised that natives should be freely and impartially admitted to offices, "the duties of which they might be qualified by their education, ability and integrity to discharge." Lord Lytton, a viceroy of India, in a confidential document which afterward found its way into print, speaking of the pledges of the sovereign and the parliament of England, said: "We all know that these claims and expectations never can be fulfilled. We have had to choose between prohibiting them (the natives of India) and cheating them, and we have chosen the least straightforward course." And again: "Since I am writing confidentially, I do not hesitate to say that both the governments of England and of India appear to me, up to the present moment, unable to answer satisfactorily the charge of having taken every means in their power of breaking to the heart the words of promise they had uttered to the ear."
The government of India is as arbitrary and despotic as the government of Russia ever was, and in two respects it is worse. First, it is administered by an alien people, whereas the officials of Russia are Russians. Second, it drains a large part of the taxes out of the country, whereas the Russian government spends at home the money which it collects from the people. A third disadvantage might be named since the czar has recently created a legislative body, whereas England continues to deny to the Indians any form of representative or constitutional government. Under British rule there is no official corruption and the government is probably as impartial as an alien government can be expected to be, but British rule has the defects which are inherent in a colonial policy.
The people of India are taxed, but they have no voice in the amount to be collected or in the use to be made of the revenue. They pay into the government nearly two hundred and twenty-five millions of dollars a year, and of this nearly one hundred millions is expended upon an army in which Indians can not be officers. It is not necessary to keep such an army merely to hold the people in subjection, if the Indians are really satisfied with English rule; and if the army is intended to keep Russia from taking India, as is sometimes claimed, why should not the British government bear a part of the burden? Would it not be wiser to so attach the Indian people to the British government that they would themselves resist annexation to Russia?