TOPICS OF THE DAY
•
THE KING IN INDIA. NOW that the King is back in England it is possible to take a comprehensive view of the -work he accomplished in India and of the retro-active effect of that work upon England. So far as India is concerned there can be no question that the King's visit has been a magnificent success. It is an open secret that the visit was undertaken in spite of the reluctance of the King's Ministers and of many members of his family. It would never have been carried through but for his own deter- mination to show himself to his Indian subjects upon his accession te the throne. That the visit was attended with risks everybody knew, and the King not less than any one else. Throughout India the police authorities felt it their duty to take the most elaborate precautions to prevent the possibility of a hideous catastrophe. No one of course imagined that the bulk of the Indian population was disaffected or would countenance an attack upon the Sovereign, but assassination is the work of an individual, usually of a maniac, and in any crowd there is always the possibility that some maniac may be concealed. Not only did those precautions prove to be superfluous, but looking back now on all that happened they seem almost ridiculous. The King, who Was so elaborately guarded in Bombay and on his way to Delhi, was able in Calcutta to move freely almost without attendants among vast crowds only eager to see him and to do him reverence. It might be imagined that this attitude of the Indian crowds was only due to the respect which Orientals traditionally feel for an here- ditary monarch, but that is not the whole truth. Those who were present throughout the King's visit to India noticed how great was the contrast between the earlier days of the visit and. the weeks that succeeded. During the first few days even at Delhi the reception of the King appeared to fall flat. It was gorgeous from a spectacular point of view, but it was official rather than popular. Suddenly a change seems to have occurred. The people appear to have wakened up to the fact that the King had a personality of his own, that he was not merely a symbol of a distant Power, but that' be was a real man with human sympathies and with a deep personal interest in the welfare of his Indian subjects. From that moment the whole aspect of the King's visit changed, and what might have been merely a series of military processions became one prolonged popular triumph. For this triumph England and India have to thank the King and Queen themselves. It was they who by their unfailing courtesy of manner and by their constant thought for the convenience of others won the hearts of all with whom they came in contact and spread throughout India the conviction that the King and Queen of England had a true affection for the people of India.
Some people may be inclined to ask how Orientals were able to reconcile this view of the King as a genial human being with their own conception of a monarch as a semi- divine person. The answer is that the pagan conception of divinity is essentially human. A pagan whether of Greek, or Roman, or of Indian birth, leas upon his god, not as a divine abstraction, but as something very near to himself, possessing human attributes and enjoying human life. When this essential difference is grasped it is not surprising to find that as the King's personal popularity increased throughout India so did the reverence with which he was regarded also grow. As King he was always a divinity, but by his personal qualities he made that divinity popular. Many descriptions have been published in the press of the way in which the divine and the human point of view were blended together in the minds of the people—how the crowd would rush forward to touch reverentially the dust on which the semi-divinity bad trodden and how the same crowd would cheer the King as a, popular hero. That Kinn.b George should have succeeded in fulfilling so well this double role is a personal triumph of the highest order. It is due in the main no doubt to a naturally genial disposition, but it is further due to an instinctive sense of what his Indian sub- jects expected of him. He realized that it is possible for a man in high position to maintain his authority 'without asserting it by haughtiness of manner. It is a great mistake to imagine that the people of India lose respect for a superior who unbends to them. They know that the man who can afford to be simple and natural in his manner is confident of his own position. The net result has been that the King and Queen by their visit to India have established a, feeling of friendli- ness between England and India which did not exist to the same extent before. The political value of this new feeling it is impossible to exaggerate. Ever since we have been rulers in India the criticism made by the a,cutest observers of our rule, generation after generation, has been that it has suffered for lack of sympathy. We have been so anxious to make our government efficient that we have too often forgotten to make it sympathetic. The King had the tact to see that the Indian peoples, as indeed other peoples throughout the world, want sympathy as well as efficiency, and perhaps even more than efficiency. His visit has therefore sown a seed which is likely to bear full fruit as the years go by. For there will be action and reaction. The Indian official, we may hope, will be a little more inclined to unbend than he was before the King set him so magnificent an example, and reciprocally the Indian has learnt to feel more kindly towards the English- man because he knows that the Englishman's King is his friend.
But the work accomplished by the King does not end in India. He has revealed himself not only to his Indian but also to his English subjects. He has shown to a. wider world what only a few intimates before suspected, that he is a strong man as well as an hereditary sovereign. He has shown that he has a clear grasp of the problems of his Empire, and that he has the courage to carry out what he believes to be the right policy in spite of personal risks and in spite of the anxieties of his political advisers. In saying this we do not for a moment sug- gest that the King has departed by a hair's breadth from the constitutional vile marked out for an English sovereign. All he has done is to use his personal in- fluence in much the same way as Queen Victoria and King Edward used theirs. Queen Victoria never claimed the right to disregard the advice of her Ministers when they persisted in a particular course, but she constantly gave them advice which they not infrequently were only too glad to receive and to follow. In the same way King Edward during his briefer reign was able to in- fluence the policy of his Ministers by the advice which he was able to give out of his wide experience. We now know that King George V. is fully capable of carrying on the work of his two great prede- cessors. He has a wider knowledge of his far-scattered Dominions than any other living Englishman. He made it his business even before he came to the throne to converse with persons of every party and every shade of thought. He knows his own country through and through, and, what is even more important, he is able to look at every problem, whether domestic or Imperial, from the point of view of the permanent welfare of the Empire. None of his Ministers can take this broad view. Whichever party is in power, the members of the Cabinet, from the Prime Minister downwards, are compelled to consider not only national and Imperial interests, but also—and in many cases first—the interests of the party to which they belong. They must do so because their tenure of office depends upon their maintaining a Parliamentary majority. Whether such a forum of government is permanently necessary we need not now consider. The point is that its defects are very obvious and very serious, and it is an immense advantage to the, nation to possess a Sovereign who by his experience, by Ins courage, and by his instinc- tive tact is able to bring influences to bear which greatly modify the evils of our present form of government.
Previous page
