The long debate on the Indian Budget on Thursday night
was really a debate on the propriety of making a Famine grant to India out of the British Exchequer. Sir H. Fowler and those who advocated this course did so avowedly in order that Indians might think Great Britain benevolent, which seems but a weak reason when the objections are so strong. These objections were stated both by Lord George Hamilton and Mr. Balfour, and amount in brief to this. If the Indian Government in any emergency can appeal to the British Treasury it will make no provision of its own, but will spend all that it receives. Every Anglo-Indian knows that this statement is unanswerably tree, and it seems to us, as it teemed to the House, final. If, indeed, India were unable to help herself England must assist, but although famine has in two years cost £13,000,000, the Treasury is not in straits, the surplus, apart from famine, being 23,000,000, and the "net Debt" being only £30,000,000 it can borrow almost as cheaply as the British Government. There is masculine sense in the refusal to do work which Indians are bound to do for themselves, but we do not doubt that on the Continent we shall be denounced as hard-hearted. We regret deeply to see that the monsoon has " missed " Guzerat, Rajpootana, and Kattiawar, and that the mortality in the first-named State, whose Sovereign is in London, will be un- precedentedly large.
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