THE INDIAN BUDGET. T HERE were two points in the able
sta.tement on India made by the Master of Elibauk in the House of Commons last week to which we think not nearly enough attention has been called. All those parts of his speech which treated of the facts of outrage, and the methods of dealing with outrage, have been duly appreciated and emphasised by those who perceive that unless order is maintained government becomes impossible. In certain districts the people have ceased to aid the Government in its administration ; therefore the normal means of government, which assume and depend upon that aid, are thrown out of gear, and abnormal means become indispensable. It is well that they should be seen to have a perfectly rational basis. But the two points which we wish particularly to dwell upon are the answers to the familiar charges (1) that there is a heavy financial drain on India, Britain and British investors acting as a vampire and sucking away the life-blood of India ; and M that famine and plague have become the scourges of India only since the British occupation, and that the British are therefore directly responsible for millions of deaths. These charges have been made by Englishmen in England, and by Englishmen, like Mr. Keir Hardie, travelling in India. If it can be shown that they are believed and reproduced by Indian revolutionaries, we shall know where to look for some part at least of the sources and motives of outrage.
In his recently published book on India Mr. Keir Hardie says :—"It is calculated that the British capital invested in India. in railways, irrigation schemes, public works and undertakings of various kinds amounts to £500,000,000. That of itself, at 5 per cent. interest, represents a burden upon India [the italics are ours] of £25,000,000 sterling a year. By a burden I mean that the interest is paid to bondholders in this country, and is not therefore bene- fiting the people from whom it is taken." The mind reels at the wrong-headedness and perversity—or is it only ignorance, as we should prefer to believe ?—of such a statement. The money on which interest is drawn is lent to India for the carrying out of public works indis- pensable for the progress and comfort of the country; and they could not have been carried out at all if the money had not been provided. Does Mr. Keir Hardie mean that people are vampires who do not lend their money for nothing ? Does he think that when a banker has lent a man a sum of money for some particular expense, such as educating his children, and charges interest on the loan, the banker is putting an unfair "burden," or causing what can reasonably be called "a financial drain," on the borrower ? Mr. Heir Hardie should look about him, and he will no doubt learn from many of his friends that the banker is regarded as a friend in need, and that those who call in his aid would not know what to do without it. Britain is India's banker, and the ridiculous talk about burdens and "drains" means nothing more than that.
Again, Mr. Keir Hardie says :— " The amount of taxes raised direct from the peasant is from 60 per cent. to 65 per cent. of the value of the yield of the land, in addition to which they have to pay local cesses and various other small items, so that probably not less than 75 per cent. of the harvest goes in taxes. To most people this will seem incom- prehensible. A 5 per cent. tax on income at home leads to heavy and continuous grumbling, and yet the 5 per cent. is assessed not on the total produce of the land, but on the profits. What, then, must be the condition of a country in which the tax is not 5 per cent, on the profits, but 75 per cent, on the harvest reaped? From time to time the revenue charges are revised so that the Government may obtain the last penny which can be wrung from the over-weighted peasani,. Increases of 30 per cent. are common, and there are many on record of 60, 70, and even 100 per cent."
The charge that there is not only an industrial drain, but a. political drain, equally unjustifiable, on India has been elaborated by several critics, but the passages we have quoted from Mr. Heir Hardie's book must suffice as an example of the form such accusations take. Now let us see how such statements reappear in similar forms. When Dhingra, the murderer of Sir Curzon Wyllie, was com- mitted for trial at the Westminster Police Court he said : "I hold the English responsible for taking away £100,000,000 every year from India to this country." Dhingra, of course, declared that Britain oppressed his country in numerous other ways, but here we are con- cerned only to give the exact words in which he pronounced the theory of an iniquitous " drain." We must now give the answer to such utterly unfounded charges, remarking that Mr. Heir Hardie and. his allies must either disprove the Master of Elibank's explanation with a care equal to that with which it has been drawn up, or refrain from the awful mischief of repeating the accusation. We quote front the Times report :— " If the House will allow me, I wish to digress for a moment to deal with a charge that is constantly made, and has recently been repeated, to the effect that there is poverty in India which is largely due to the political and commercial drain on the country year by year, the political, it is asserted, amounting to £30,000,000 and the commercial to £40,000,000. These figures have been placed even higher by those who wish to blacken the Indian administration in order to bolster up a malicious agitation against this country. I think it is incumbent upon the repre- sentative of the Indian Government in this House to deal with the statement. I may at once say that it has no foundation in fact. Its origin is to be found, no doubt, in the fact that India makes annually considerable payments in England in return for services rendered, such as the loan of British capital ; but there is no justification for describing these payments as a drain, and their amount is only a fraction of the figures which I have just quoted. Let me deal first with the question of amount. As the method by which India makes her payments in England is that she exports more than she imports, all calcula- tions as to the amount of payments must necessarily be based on the returns of Indian trade, which show by how much the Indian exports exceed her imports. If the trade returns are examined for 1904, 1905, and 1906, after making due allowance for the capital sent to India in connexion with Government transactions, the average excess of exports over imports, or, in other words, payments by India to England for services rendered, is £23,900,000 per year during the three years that have been mentioned. This payment is made up of, first, £21,200,000, being the average annual amount of the Government remittance during three years, which corresponds to the alleged political drain of £30,000,000; and, secondly, £2,700,000, the average annual amount of private remittances during the same period, which total has been most carefully examined, and corresponds to the alleged commercial drain of £40,000,000. Now let us examine for a moment the nature of these two remittances. The Government remittance is mainly for the payment of home charges,—namely, those charges in England which are normally met from revenue. These charges, in the three years to which I have referred; averaged £18,250,000. made up in the following manner :— Interest on Debt, £9,500,000; payments for stores, ordered, and purchased in this country, which cannot• be manufactured in India, £2,500,000; pensions and furlough pay to civil and military officers, £5,000,000; and miscellaneous, £1,250,000. It will thus be -seen that, after deducting £5,000,000 for pensions and furlough pay, the bulk of the remittance repre- seas interest for railway developments and other matters with which the interests of the peoples of India are inti- mately bound up. Besides the home charges proper, certain sums were remitted to England by the Government to defray capital charges. These bring the Government remittances to the total of £21,200,000 already mentioned. Now let us turn for a moment to the supposed commercial drain of £40,000,000 per year, which, as I have endeavoured to -show, is in reality £2,100000, being the difference during the period referred to between the private remittances from India, representing private profits, savings, &c., sent home to England, and the private remittances to India, representing the transmission of English capital to that country. ' We can therefore say definitely that, whatever India may have sent to England within the three years, she received from England as capital a sum falling short of that amount by £2,700,000 a year; and perhaps I might incidentally remind the House that at the end of 1907 the capital outlay on railways alone in India amounted to £265,000,000 sterling, the bulk of Which is British capital, but by no means represents the full amount of British capital invested in India, which has taken its part in commercially developing its resources and providing employment for the masses of people in that great continent."
We pass to the other charge that the British occupation is responsible for famine and plague, and that these horrors did not occur to an appreciable extent in pro.. British days. We take the accusation in a characteristic form from Mr. Keir Hardie's book :— "I conclude, then, that there is abundant evidence to justify the belief that the condition of the Indian peasant has worsened under British rule. The environment which for centuries had protected him has been shattered, and as a consequence he is less able to protect himsblf and his interests. New and strange con- ditions of life and government, in the control and direction of which he has no longer part or lot, have been forced upon him. He finds his poverty deepening and the burden .of life pressing with increasing weight upon him, and not only is he without means of resistance, but he has no organ through which he din voice his woes. One answer to this is to quote the estimates of people killed by internecine warfare in the days of pre-British rule; but to this the retort has been made that all the wars of the world since the Fall of man have not destroyed so many, lives 'as famine has done in India during the-- past: half-century'
Plague then is, in the main, due to hunger, and that is a con- dition of things for which our system of governing India must be held directly responsible."
Again, Mr. Keir Hardie says :—" The real rat plague, then, in India, is poverty, and the flea which spreads the disease is the Government." We trust that Mr. Keir Hardie was honest with himself, calculated the probable effect of his words, and was convinced, according to his lights, of the necessity of uttering them when he wrote that 'sentence. How do such accusations reappear ? In Dhiugra's statement in the Police Court we find this : I hold the English responsible for the murder of eighty millions of people in the last fifty years." The Master of Elibauk gives the answer:— "The main principles of State relief in seasons of drought are now Bottled beyond discussion, and I can claim for the Indian Government that their methods are the hard-won products of experience and continuous thought ever since India passed under the rule of the Crown. This is a fact too often overlooked by a certain school of over-severe critics of the labours of British administration in India. The British Indian Government inherited no guidance in this respect from the Indian rulers who preceded them. It was not that there were no droughts or famines in pre-British days. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that under Indian rule there were grievous famines and appalling misery, desolation, and waste, -and no settled policy of relief or prevention. There were few roads, no railways ; such irrigation works as existed were antiquated and merely tanks. If the food-supply of a district failed, the people died. There is no record of famine-relief campaigns, because such things were unknown. Sir John Hewitt, the able Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces, draws a very interesting comparison between the drought of 1907 and that of 1900. In their intensity there was little difference between them, but there was great difference in the bearing of the people. The 1900 famine was a labourers' famine. They crowded on to the relief works from the first ; but at the last famine the labouring population did not resort in large numbers to relief works except in the very severely affected districts ; and he draws the deduction that the position of the labouring classes has improved during the last ten years. He also states that wages have risen iu the provinces in much greater proportion than the price of food, and he concludes with these words: "That labour has become dearer and more independent every year, and to a large extent the cultivating classes no longer depend solely on cultivation.' I claim on behalf of the Indian Govern- scent that its many years of devoted and humanitarian work iise now bearing fruit. Railways and canals have deprived the most intense drought of its terrors, and the Government's relief policy on each successive occasion becomes more delicately adjusted and more conspicuously successful in its results. With regard to the plague, its decreasing virulence during the last two years is encouraging. In 1906 it was hoped that the worst had been seen of the disease. In each of the two immediately pre- ceding years the mortality had exceeded one million, but in 1906 it had dropped to 357,000, and keen was the disappointment of the Indian Government when the following year proved to be the worst that had been experienced. A mortality of upwards of 1,500,000 showed that the enemy had lost none of its strength. But in 1908 the death-rate was reduced to one-ninth of that of the preceding year—namely 150.000; and the first six months of this year, in which, owing to climatic reasons, the mortality is always much higher than in the latter part of the year, amounted to 84,000. Let me at once say in fairness to the Indian peoples that they are beginning to understand the principles under which it should be combated, and are showing an increasing disposition to co-operate with the Government in their endeavours to deal with its scientific aspect. The Government of India are fully alive to their responsibilities, and attach so much importance to disseminating knowledge that simple instruction on the subject of the plague and sanitation is now given in the elementary schools of the land."
It is not only in India that inconceivable harm is done by Mr. Keir Hardie and other Members of Parliament. We have before us a copy of the French paper L'Belair, in which the murder of Sir Curzon Wyllie is made the text of an article headed " L'Inde Pressure par l'Angleterre," in which fabulous tortures and tyrannies by the British in India are recounted, and the usual lesson is drawn from an amazing fabrication that Britain has no right to preach to other countries. Thus wild, prejudiced, cruel, and demonstrably false statements—to call them by no worse name—about the British authorities in India made ,by their own countrymen will inevitably be used to weaken all the moral influence we have with Belgium in the Congo, with Russia in her treatment of her own people, and indeed everywhere throughout the world.
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