BOOKS.

MR. KEIR HARDIE ON INDIA.*

VE have every desire. to be fair to Mr. Keir Hardie, and can 'honestly say that we opened this book prepared to find that the reports that he bad uttered wicked and foolish incitements to the natives during his visit to India last year had been rgrossly exaggerated. That, indeed, we do find—Mr. Keir liardie repudiates the version of one of his speeches which vas published widely in England and shocked all those who 'believed it—but, on the other hand, the book is written in a :spirit in which we can discover hardly a trace of a desire to be lair to his countrymen. His arguments are recklessly and Wilfully perverse. We are astonished that he should have taken so little trouble to make some of them even superficially Plausible. As a narrative the work is very poor, the -descriptions leaving little impression upon the mind, and 'Oinking one reflect on the immense superiority of such work as that of Mr. Sidney Low ; but we should have no corn- Plaint against Mr. Keir Hardie for his artistic defects if only he argued the case for Indian self-government with the 'intellectual honesty of which, we are sure, several earnest Englishmen who agree with his conclusions are capable. We 'cannot believe that this book will do anything but injury to his authority among his followers. They will perceive that .,a mind capable of such false logic, and such hasty conclusions,

might mislead them equally in matters which concern them much more nearly. We must quote first Mr. Keir Hardie's repudiation of the so-called seditious speech attributed to him in India, and than turn to the less pleasant task of proving by quotation that what we have said of his work in other :respects is not unjustified :—

th71TrT. inies, in a leading article on October 2nd, 1007, stated Ihe Bengali newspapers assert that Mr. Keir Hardie has dealt: of red. the condition of Eastern Bengal to be worse than that • Russia, and that the atrocities which officials commit there would cause more horror in this country, were they known, than 'the Turkish outrages in Armenia.' The pressman who had sent

he cable through Reuter's Agency was challenged on the spot •

." rediar iinprestionii and .Suggeetions. By J. liar szdie,. X.P. London 23 Bride lane, E.C. [le. net.] by five of his brother journalists, all Englishmen, and two of them Conservatives, to produce his authority for the statement. He was unable to do so. The statement was a pure concoction. The man who invented it had such a reputation for misleading the public at home concerning affairs in India that seven of his brother journalists in Calcutta, prior to this incident, sent a warning note to the editors of British newspapers to be on their guard against statements emanating from him. One or two of the home newspapers, when they found how they had been taken in, had the decency and the good taste to apologise for having assumed the statement to be true. But despite that, and although every schoolboy who takes an interest in politics is aware that the statement was a fabrication, certain journalists and others still continue to accept the unsupported testimony of this one discredited scandal-monger against the testimony of all the responsible authorities and journalists in Calcutta and other parts of India."

We accept that statement fully, and regret, as all decent persons must, that in this respect Mr. Keir Hardie was so badly used.

On p. xv. of the preface we read :—

"The two main divisions of population are Hindus and Moham- medans. Out of a population of say 800,000,000 the Mohammedans muster about 00,000,000, of whom only some hundreds of thousands are Muglials or Pathaus, who came in as invaders and conquerors. Most of the rest of the Mussulman population are Hindus who have been converted to Mohammedanism, many of them in the olden days at the point of the sword. The Mussulmans pre- dominate in the north, but when the Punjab is left behind it is rarely that a Mughal is seen, though when he is there is Bo mistaking him because of his superior physique and proud, erect bearing. Among the peasantry, Hindu and Mohammedan, belonging as they do to the same race, mingle freely, attend each other's religious festivals and social functions, and when left alone behave as good neighbours should. The policy now being pursued by the Government is to show special favour to the Mohammedans, and it looks with a complacent eye upon, oven if it does nothing to foster, outbursts of fanatical strife between the two sections of religious belief. Groat Britain may one day have to pay a long price for this folly. The Mussulmans are a warlike people come of a conquering race."

It passes our comprehension bow Mr. Keir Hardie can write like this when one of the features of Lord Morley's reforms is notoriously to give preference to the Hindus, who alone are represented on the Viceroy's Council. We think Lord Morley is making a mistake for which the Empire may have to pay, but the talk of "special favour to the Mohammedans" is an exact inversion of the chief fact of the present situation. The insinuation that the Government of India rather encourage outbursts of fanaticism is a disgraceful one, and Mr. Keir Hardie should have been ashamed to make it unless he could produce some proof, which he does not. The fact that the Judiciary is always ready to unmask and condemn the unauthorised acts of inferior policemen is

distinct proof that the charge is unfounded. As an example of his incredible carelessness, the reader may be interested to examine more closely the passage we have just quoted. Having stated that the vast majority of Indian Mohammedans are not descended from the original conquerors, but are "Hindus who have been converted" (a very loose statement in itself, by the way), he goes on to the perfect non sequitur, so far as his argument is superficially concerned, that the Mussulmans "coma of a conquering race," and may as such give the trouble he foresees to be possible. On p.1 Mr. Keir Hardie writes :—

"It is calculated that the British capital invested in India in railways, irrigation schemes, public works, and undertakings of various kinds amounts to 4500,000,000. That, of itself, at 5 per cent. interest, represents a. burden upon India of .825,000,000 sterling a year. By a burden I mean that the interest is paid to bondholders in this country and is not, there- fore, benefiting the people from whom it is taken."

Could folly go much farther than this outside a lunatic asylum ? When a. business firm raises money to extend its industry, and pays interest to the people who have subscribed the money for that purpose, would Mr.- Hardie say that these payments were a burden unustly

imposed on the firm P The bondholders' money in India is used in public works as much for the good of the people as the money subscribed by shareholders is used by an industrial capitalist for his own good. As to the hire of the money going out of the country to its detriment, Mr. Keir Hardie, who, we presume, pretends to be a Free-trader, uses the typical Protectionist argument. Of a similarly unjust character is his statement that the Indian peasant is taxed to the amount of 75 per cent, of his harvest.

On p. 25 Mr. Keir Hardie professes to explain the meaning • of Swadeshi, as follows :— "I may here explain the meaning of Swadeshi. All over Mast

Bengal, and, in fact, over the greater part of India, there has recently been a great development of this movement. It takes the form' in extreme cases, of boycotting foreign goods, and is intended to support and develop local industries. Lord Roberts, Lord Curzon, and practically everyone who has ever been identified with India, have preached the need for Swadeshi, though not, of course, boycott, and no one can visit the country, even for a brief period, without realising that the poverty- stricken condition of these hundreds of millions of patient, toiling peasants and weavers can never be even temporarily relieved until native industry has been developed. Owing to the feeling excited over the partition of Bengal, the Swadeshi move- ment is particularly strong in that province, where the inhabi- tants have taken a solemn vow not to purchase British goods 'until the partition has been repealed, and to do all they can to induce others to follow their example. They hope by this means so to injure British trade as to force the attention of the authorities at home to their grievances, and thus ensure their redress. The hope may be a vain one, but there it is."

The confusion of this statement is very remarkable. So far as it exculpates the leaders of the Swadeshi movement, it approvingly attributes to them a definite economic campaign in favour of Protection. Again we ask, is not Mr. Keir Hardie a Free-trader P If he is, what is the sense of all this On p. 28 we read :—

" Dacca, our next stopping-place, is the now seat of Government for Eastern Bengal. Here I was informed, as I had been all the way along, that the reason for the special police and the pre- cautionary measures generally was to protect the Mohammedans from being coerced by the Hindus into buying Swadoshi goods, which it was alleged were much higher in price than those which could be imported from abroad. One member of a Mohammedan deputation, who waited upon me at Dacca, repeated this statement, whereupon I sent out to a cloth merchant, who kept both kinds of goods, asking for samples of his goods, foreign and native, with prices. He sent across several bales with the prices marked

m

on, his manager accompanying the to receive the expected order, ho not knowing what my object was. There I found by actual test,. not only that the Swadoshi goods were of bettor quality, but also that for that particular class of goods, dhotis, the price was cheaper at Dacca than was the price of the foreign cloth."

In other words, Mr. Keir Hardie decides on the spot which is the better cloth of the two, and condemns the Moham- medans to be coerced into buying the Hindu cloth whether they like it or not ! We have not often seen this argument equalled in any Protectionist work, however cynical, and it is discouraging to come across it seriously advanced in a book which pretends to be a protest against oppression and tyranny. The fact is that lovers of freedom like Mr. Keir Hardie have no conception of the higher forms of freedom, and the protection of minorities is undreamed of by them.

Perhaps the most discreditable argument in the book is on p. 40, where Mr. Keir Hardie relates bow the judgment of a Magistrate in condemning a native to death was overruled by the High Court of Appeal "in probably the most scathing indictment ever indulged in by a Court of Justice," and then adds: "I give this as typical of the way in which justice is administered by many of the officials in the disturbed districts in Eastern Bengal." Does Mr. Keir Hardie think that "typical" judgments are treated in the Court of Appeal in the manner he describes P On p. 51 he says :—

"At the corner of many houses little crescent-shaped cakes were drying in the sun. These were made of cow-dung, -which, after being dried, is carried into Benares to be sold as fuel."

The italics are Mr. Keir Hardie's. Perhaps he judges the material condition of a people by whether they use coal. Cow-dung is very good fuel, and the misleading italics cannot possibly increase the reader's sadness, as they are apparently intended to do, at the fearful famines of India. Is Mr. Keir Hardie moved to indignation when peat is used instead of coal!' Mr. Keir Hardie knows practically nothing, we judge, of Indian history, and when he heaps contempt on the idea of governing the natives through the propertied or aristocratic class of their own races he is ignorant that he is ridiculing principles supported by the great and good Sir John Lawrence as appealing peculiarly to the native modes of thought. We have not space or patience to analyse more of this harmful and silly little book. Mr. Keir Hardie assures us that there is no sedition in India. So far as we can discover, in his treatment of the Swadeshi movement there is only one casual reference to the met that, violence has been employed and bombs thrown. Of course he has his own opinions as to how bomb-throwing should be stopped, and he has every right to it. But in describing a movement it is none the less a lack of honesty to suppress material and conspicuous facts.