15 OCTOBER 1864, Page 8

the account. comparably the first in Asia. India makes England

a first- 1. The case of India differs from that of the colonies in class Power on two continents instead of one, without one very material feature. The resources of the dependency, imposing on her the double obligations required to support whether little or great, are absolutely at the disposal of the double rank.

the British Parliament, as absolutely at- its disposal as those 2. As human beings are constituted that position is surely of Scotland or Cornwall, Wales or Ireland. There is no of some value. If power is worth the acquisition, and alliance is elected legislature, no constitutional contract to stand in the worth securing, and trade is worth protecting, empire of that way of action ordered from Westminster, no public opinion kind is surely worth some kind of sacrifice and exertion; but pressed. But even courage and decision appear in an un- to be obeyed or conciliated, and no means of material amiable light when they are always forthcoming to extend resistance to be seriously dreaded. If Parliament choose one's own privileges, and always wanting when there is a to order that all surplus revenue should be spent in question of extending those of other people. England, or that India should maintain all the British For the direction of our foreign policy the House of Com- colonies in Africa and Asia, or should keep up an army a limns is barely responsible. It must accept or condemn million strong, or should create a fleet of iron-clads superior results. It would be useless to attempt to renew now dis- to that of Russia, there is no power short of Providence which cussions which are already exhausted. All Liberals are has either the right or the will to interfere. European *greed as to the wisdom of inactivity with reference to opinion on the spot would, on adequate cause shown, sanction America, most perhaps with reference to Poland and Den- any orders on which Parliament was determined, there is no murk. But so far as the two latter questions are concerned native opinion except in favour of internal order, and the few will maintain that the House of Commons has by sane- only organized body capable of resistance is British and comes boning the policy of the Government elicited any very home every ten years. The force thus absolutely at the dis- enthusiastic response from the nation. The activity of the posal of Parliament is so great as to form not only an appre- Foreign Office in Japan, in China, and Brazil has been equally ciable addition to the strength of Great Britain, but an addi- endorsed by the House, and certainly it is of a kind to attract tion more than equal to a first-class alliance. From Egypt to the sympathies of the improvers of the Game Laws. Japan, whatever the work to be performed, the aid of India For the present, however, it is the cue of the thick-and- is worth more in direct assistance than the aid of France. thin supporters of the Government to write up these " chief The revenue of England is calculated at seventy millions, but results " as something of which we ought to be very proud. in any time of emergency it is a hundred and sixteen, for the 'Unless we are to adopt Mr. Roebuck's paradox and contend 46,000,0001. of Indian revenue is absolutely at British dis- that doing nothing is doing something because you resolve to posal. The army of Britain is estimated at 120,000, but it do nothing, and to make a resolution is to do something, we is really three hundred thousand, for every British soldier and do not see it. The Parliament seems to us to have been Sikh auxiliary is available for action outside India. That essentially respectable. It has had a keen eye for the main army, moreover, can be raised to any numerical strength for chance. It has reformed the extravagance of its youth. It which funds can be procured, to a million thoroughly trained has taken very great care of its own comforts and amuse- troops for example without the faintest difficulty, and within meats. It has been quite willing to do any good to the lower six weeks of the arrival of the order. No man who knows classes by which it could by no possibility be called on to India doubts for an instant that if the British Parliament sacrifice anything which at present appertains to the upper ; decided to conquer China and Egypt and Japan all at once, and it has done its best to keep the country out of scrapes. India could carry out those orders, could garrison those All which is very commendable, but is scarcely a faith for countries, and could hold them for years against any force which men will exert themselves. If the Liberal party is to Asia or Europe is at all likely to employ in resisting such an be warmed into new life something nobler and more generous enterprise. Or to bring the case nearer home. Suppose than this must be devised by its leaders. In political Europe contending for the heritage of the "sick man," India fights, as in all others, men need a war-cry and a could, if stirred to vehement action, pour three armies of a banner, and the bond of a Liberal party must always hundred thousand men each into Asiatic Turkey, move, be in its common pursuit of a higher average of good. fight, and keep them there without assistance from England No doubt after every campaign there must be a halt, for at least two years. All these things may be, in our judg- to rest the troops and secure the country that has been ment would be, acts of wickedness or folly, but the potency won, and apparently in the opinion of the Government the of doing them comprehended in the possession of India com- without objection ; if for advances he makes them in millions,

that is only half the case. Every other international position is purchased by enormous suffering, by heavy internal taxation, by burdensome concessions, by liabilities for the future which alarm all thinking statesmen. We hold the Cape at the cost of a. war once in ten years, Gibraltar at the price of the per- manent hostility of Spain, the Canadas at the risk of a most dangerous maritime struggle. The possession of India yields to Great Britain besides status and power other advantages more easily expressed in figures, more readily made intelligible to the mercantile mind. The British sway over those vast re- gions secures to Englishmen permanent free trade with two hun- dred millions of people who cultivate tropical productions. The trade of India, which two years of independence and anarchy would destroy, is already a hundred millions, and supposing that only ton per cent. sticks to the fingers of its managers—an absurdly low estimate—still the profit is equal to one-fifth the annual savings of Great Britain as calculated by Mr. Gladstone. Add to this sum six millions sent home to pay for Company's stock, pensions, depots, salaries and stores, a million and a half more in family remittances, the fortunes yearly remitted made in the internal trades and pro- fessions, and we have a sum of little less than twenty millions added directly to England from her great dependency—twenty millions of profit as direct as if the money wore levied by taxation and distributed among the people of the ruling country. Of the outlet afforded to poor ambition we say nothing, for England is incompressible, and the policy of abandoning possessions will only end in a new era of con- quests, while as mere drains for population countries not under our dominion are almost as good as India. Nor will we repeat the popular theory that India is a training ground for armies, for it costs us more by prejudicing recruits than we gain by the experience those recruits acquire. Neither Marlborough's armies nor the recruits who won Waterloo had been hardened or demoralized by years of tropical service. But we maintain that even as it is, without reckoning any strength not reducible to bayonets or to cash, India raises us in Asia to the rack we possess in Europe, doubles our power for world-wide action, and adds one clear third to the surplus national capital,—that is, to the great reserve fund through which we encounter and survive misfortunes like the Lanca- shire cotton famine. Suppose that misfortune as great as it was predicted it would be, that we lost utterly the whole profit of the cotton trade, that frightful calamity would be expressed by a less sum in cash than the loss of India would involve.

For, and this is the second distinction between the case of India and the Colonies, the loss of the empire would not be a mere change of Government, but the annihilation for trading purposes of the Peninsula. Canada as a colony and Canada as a state remains all the same a customer. But India to be a good customer requires not only order but free-trade, and there is a moral certainty that without European guidance she would not enjoy either for six months. Even if by a miracle all the sepoys throughout the country submitted to the same Emperor, instead of as of old setting up seventy separate lines of internal customs, and that Emperor had the brains and the means to keep up the railroads, he certainly would not keep up free-trade. Public opinion would compel him in twelve months to prohibit the export of food, the manufacture of rum, and the cultivation of indigo, to protect the native manufacture of muslins, and to prevent the import of the infidel's salt. Europeans never remain under a native dynasty, and the lac trade, and the tea plantations, the refin- ing of sugar, and the growth of opium would all alike decline. One-half the export trade, and all the import trade except in hardware and luxuries, would disappear at once, and with it the limitless possibilities which those trades contain. The Indian commerce which begins to look so large is in fact only in its infancy. Granted thirty years of peace and road- making and there is nothing to prevent its rising to the Ceylonese level of two pounds a head, or four times the present total, greater than our whole trade with the Euro- pean continent,—a trade, too, as.absolutely in our own hands as the internal commerce between England and North Britain. In return for all this, for the faithful alliance, and the great trade, for doubted power in Asia, and limitless possibilities of future commerce, we pay by a certain tribute of life estimated at the outside:at 5,000 men a year, a tribute payable only till the railroads and the sanitary arrangements are complete. It is a great payment no doubt, it will when reduced to its lowest figures remain an embarrassing tribute, but as a mere matter of trade calculation we submit that our loss in the transaction is not yet quite proved, that to pay for the pos- session of India less in the way of life than we pay for getting coats a little cheaper than they ought to be is not an extrava- gant proceeding. We say, as more matter of profit and loss, to meet the current argument, though to our minds the value of India is not expressible in money. More than all our colonies, more than all our trade, the possession of India strengthens the English character, defends the English mind from yielding to its instinctive parochialism, and helps to turn a nation of selfish, if successful, industrials into a race of_ governing men.