MR. NAOROJI'S " POVERTY IN INDIA."
Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. By Dadabhai Naoroji. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co. 102 ad.)—The tone of Mr. Naoroji's somewhat chaotic book is sufficiently indicated by its title, but be has not made it easy for a reviewer to give a fair description of his six hundred pages. Instead of developing his thesis in a connected way, he has merely reprinted such of his essays, speeches. letters, lectures, and statements to Commissions as seems good to him. Mr. Na.oroji's views are fairly well known : he shows great industry in compiling figures, and undoubtedly writes from conviction, but he will -not win many adherents to his theory that India is over-taxed by making public such eccen- tricities as the correspondence with the Admiralty (17 pp.), in which he demands that natives of India be given commissions in the Navy. His main contentions are that while we have given India the advantages of Western education—which perhaps some readers of the book may think a doubtful blessing—free speech, and a free Press, have abolished cruel customs, and maintain law and order (only because, hs thinks, a disorderly Empire would be such a nuisance to us), we have not kept our promises in the allocation of offices, and we systematically drain the country of a tribute it can ill afford. He does not seem to us fully to allow for the fact that a large part of the drain con- sists of interest on British capital invested in such enterprises as railways and tea-gardens while his economic doctrines appear to stand or fall with Mill's "wage-fund" theory. A good deal of the substance of the book is interesting, but most of it can be found better stated in Blue-books. The recent Commission has, of course, decided that India has in the past borne too large a share of what are properly Imperial expenses. But Mr. Naoroji in his abuse of "the Anglo-Indian" forgets that the remedying of this wrong is due, first, to the sober arguments of English- men who have given their lives to the service of the Government of India ; and secondly, to the desire of the Imperial Government to be just when mistakes are proved. We do not think that as regards the alleged excessive exaction of land revenue Mr. Naoroji proves his case ; but, as a recent writer in /Redwood points out, the inelasticity of our revenue system presses hardly at times on the cultivator. As regards the home charges, our main difference with,the Congress school is that we prefer, first of all, efficient administration : they desire to see, first of all, offices in the bands of such natives of India as can pass examine- ti, ms. We fancy a Sikh cultivator would criticise Mr. Naoroji's arguments more forcibly than we have. If he wishes to be taken seriously, he should not say that " the lot of the unhappy Indian natives was somewhat worse than that of the slaves in America" (p. 641), or assert that "famines were far less harmful in the feudatory States than in that part of India which was under direct British rule," without mentioning that our relief camps in pasts of Gujarat were swamped by starving natives from the adjoining States. Nor should he describe (p. 36) the Bengal Presidency as being under permanent settlement.
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