TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW CAPITAL OF INDIA.
THE transfer of the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi is one of the most momentous events in the his- tory of our dominion in India. The first thing to remember in dealing with the event, and in pointing out such conse- quences as are visible, is that the step is irrevocable. For good or ill the die is cast, and nothing but harm would be done by any attempt to suggest that the Government could now go back from its pledged word. Whether the Government were right in introducing this great change without allowing Parliament the opportunity of considering it. we shall not now discuss, though unquestionably there is a good deal that could be said on the point. No doubt it is much easier to take a great step of this kind under conditions which forbid criticism, but whether recourse to the armour of secrecy is wise is quite another matter. The next point to remember about the change is that it is, in one sense, no novelty. The question of moving the capital from Calcutta has been a matter of academic and abstract debate for fifty years and more. That Calcutta is a bad capital cannot be doubted. It is tucked away in the eastern corner of India, instead of holding, as the capital of a continent should, a central position. Its climate is bad ; indeed it might almost be said to possess the worst climate of any great city in India or in the world. The relaxing air of the Ganges delta mekes it unfit for the prolonged residence of Europeans. It is a commonplace of Indian life that, except for some six weeks or two months of winter, the official can get through far less work at Calcutta than he could in a place which enjoys better air. It is for this reason that, though Calcutta has been the capital in name, Simla has of late been the capital in fact. In former days the Governor-General, his Council, and the chief officials who ruled India used to live at Calcutta and pay a short annual visit to the hills. Of late years it is not too much to say that they have lived in the hills and paid a short visit each year to Calcutta. Next, Calcutta must be admitted to be not only geographi- cally but ethnologically an unfortunate site for the capital of British India. Though the point can be exaggerated, it is in a sense true that the inhabitants of a capital tend to exert a certain influence over and give a certain colour to the Government which is situated among them. But it is in many ways exceedingly undesirable that Bengal and the Bengali should have this advantage over all the other provinces of India. The inhabitants of Bengal, though numerous, are not in any sense typical inhabitants of India, nor do their racial peculiarities or historical traditions fit Bengal for the part which it has played as the capital province. It has given the smooth-tongued but effeminate Bengali too great an influence on Indian affairs. The transfer of the capital to Delhi will put the Indian Government in better perspective. Though Bengal must, of course, remain a province of great importance, that importance will not now be unduly emphasized.
If Calcutta must be regarded as, per se, affording a bad site for a capital, Delhi must unquestionably be regarded as affording a good one. In the first place, the climate for the greater part of the year is healthy and bracing. Although the heat in summer is very great it is not enervating. Next, the journey from Delhi to Simla is only fourteen hours, while that from Calcutta is forty- eight. It will be hardly a greater undertaking to travel from Delhi to Simla than it is to travel from Menton° to Paris. The journey from Calcutta to Simla is more com- parable to the journey from Paris to St. Petersburg. Another advantage of Delhi is that it is not the chief town of a huge province, but a city which has always stood by itself, somewhat as Washington has stood by itself in America. The inhabitant of Delhi is a. Delhi man first and last, and in no sense a provincial. The rule of the Moguls, which extended throughout India, separated the capital from the province in which it stood. Its subsequent history as a marble shrine in which the last of the Moguls were, as it were, entombed alive accen- tuated this fact. When Clive entered Delhi to receive the grant of the Dewan from the Mogul—by that time "great" only in name—he entered a city which did not belong to the Mahrattas or the Sikhs, the Rajputs or the Bengalis, but a city which, though it bad been east down from its high estate, retained its claim to be regarded as a separate entity. Finally, Delhi has never lost its traditionary position as the capital of all India. During the Mutiny it was felt throughout the peninsula that the essential point of the great struggle was the fight over Delhi. No one again raised any question as to Delhi being the proper place from which to proclaim the assumption by Queen Victoria of the title of Empress of India. It was at Delhi that Lord Curzon held the Durbar to announce the accession of Edward VII., and to which George V. came in person to assume the Im- perial Crown. In a word, whenever it has been necessary to perform a ceremonial act embracing all India--there were special reasons for choosing Allahabad in l88— Delhi has been the city naturally and inevitably chosen for such a function. To test the matter in another way : plenty of Indian cities might have been found to assert a claim to be the seat of supreme government ; but each city if told to choose some other place than itself as the capital would have chosen Delhi, just as every Athenian general, though he voted for himself first as Commander-in-Chief, put down Themistocles as his "second choice."
There is another advantage in the change of the capital which curiously seems up till now to have passed un- noticed. The change of capital, in our opinion, will prove a signal advantage, since it will advertise to the whole of India and its 300 millions of inhabitants once and for all the hollowness and absurdity of the talk of our abandoning our sovereignty over India and of our willingness, if we are only sufficiently pressed, to retire from India with deprecations and apologies for having ventured to intrude so long. The natives of India will be quick to see that if we were really on the point of pack- ing up our belongings and departing, we should not take the trouble to choose a new capital. The placing of the seat of government at Delhi shows that we are not relax- ing our hold upon India, but making it firmer. It is a. physical proclamation of the fact that we have come to stay and that our rule in India is not temporary but permanent—or at any rate as permanent as any human institutions dare proclaim themselves. For " traders " and " raiders " from oversee a coast town was an appropriate capital. Our choice of a city a thousand miles inland puts a seal upon the growth and development of our Empire. The British rulers of India in future will stand with their backs against the wall of the Himalayas, ready to make good their right of rule against all corners. It is a commonplace that history revels in ironies. It is among the greatest of such ironies that a. political party which is supposed to have doubts as to our moral claim to continue in India should have been the party to make so new and so tremendous an assertion of our Imperial claims. But in truth no party in this country has ever really meant to relax our hold upon India. Though the spokesmen of Radicalism and of Labour may have said foolish things, all sensible men here early recognized that it was only talk. We venture to say that a Labour Ministry at Whitehall would prove in effect quite as determined to retain. our Indian Empire as the most Imperialistic of their political rivals. Those Hindu politicians who imagine that we can be induced to leave India on the plea that our rule has no moral basis will be wise to consider what the transfer of the capital to Delhi symbolizes.
We shall not attempt to enter here upon the vexed question of the repartition of Bengal, except to endorse the very sensible remarks made by the Times in its leading article on Thursday. Nothing would have been more foolish than to reverse the policy we adopted in regard to the division of Bengal, not because that division had proved inconvenient, but because it had been made the subject of agitation. If, however, the matter is looked at closely it will be seen that what is now proposed is not a return to the status quo before the division, but a redivision, in some ways more drastic than that of old. The original Province of Bengal had seventy-eight millions of inhabitants. The new province of Bengal, which is to be a province presided over by a Governor, I ike the Provinces of Bombay and Madras, will have forty-two millions of inhabitants. The othei thirty-six millions are to be divided into a Western Province under a Lieutenant-Governor and an Eastern Province under a Chief Commissioner. The new Province of Bengal will have Calcutta as its first seat of government, but care is to be taken that Dacca shall be treated by the Governor as his second capital, and it will be his residence during part of the year. The essential principle of the partition was that the old province was too huge to be an efficient unit of administration. This truth is emphasized rather than denied by a division of the old. province into three instead of into two. That it might nevertheless have been better to maintain the division so recently made is a matter on which criticism can fairly and properly be made, but, at any rate, it cannot be said that we have been worried into abandoning the principle of partition by the intrigues of insurgent Bengalis.
The change of capital has very naturally awakened dis- cussion as to the nature of our rule in India and as to the lines on which it should develop. The subject is one too vast to be dealt with at the tail-end of a leading article. We must, however, find space to reassert what we have so often asserted in these columns, namely, that there is only one moral base for our domination in India, and that is trusteeship. No matter -what was the origin of our rule in India, and. no matter what the nature of the steps by which we obtained our Empire, we now hold India in trust for its inhabitants. It is the condition of that trust that we should rule the people of India, not for our own good and not in our national interests, but for their good ; that we should govern in the best interests of the governed. We could never have accomplished our work in India or maintained our position if our presence there were not a necessity. We are in India and are ruling India in the last resort because the people of India cannot do without us. Our domination is a necessary condition to the enjoy- ment of law, order, and just government by the 300 million inhabitants of India. Not only is India, as a whole, not a homogeneous country, but practically no considerable part of India is homogeneous in race, religion, or language. In addition to this welter of races and religions, the political solidarity of India is broken across the grain by the caste system. The Hindu acknowledges no duty towards his neighbour or his fellow countrymen, but only towards his caste brother. The notion that if we retired from India its peoples would agree together en some form of government is a delusion. The only result would be, first, anarchy, and then, since no large body of people can endure permanent anarchy, the slow emergence of a conqueror, either from oversea, like our- selves, or more probably a conqueror from beyond the mountain rampart. What may be unscientifically, but none the less truthfully, called the greatest and strongest caste in India is the Mohammedan caste. It is also the caste which has the most recent and most vital tradition of empire. If we went the Mohammedans of India would assuredly fight for dominance, and they would have the singular advantage that they would be able to call to their aid the warlike Mohammedan tribes of the north- west frontier, the Pathans, the Afridis, and the Afghans. Having conquered and pillaged India before, these races have full confidence in their power to pillage and conquer it again. Our restraining hand alone prevents them making the attempt. Possibly some day in the far distant future some miracle may break down the caste system in India, though at present there are signs not of its breaking down but rather of its hardening.
In that case India may conceivably become fit for self- government and the trustee may be called upon to resign his trust. Till then it is our business to think only of the duties of our position. The prime duty of a trustee is to think not what the subjects of the trust want, or say they want, but to think of the true interests of the whole of the population under the trust. To exploit India in British interests would be a crime of the first magnitude, and would be justly rewarded by the downfall of our Empire. To govern India in the interests of the governed is to fulfil a sacred duty, and from that duty we must be deflected by no pressure, internal or external. To yield to the notion that is sometimes pressed upon us of doing things in India, not because they are right or because they will make for good rule, but because the Indian people are supposed to want them, would be as great a dereliction of Imperial obligation as for a trustee with a large family of minors to look after to try to justify a breach of trust by saying that, though he knew it was not in the interests of the minors, it had been very loudly demanded by them. Accord- ingly he felt he ought to yield, even though what they demanded would in the end bring about their ruin. A trustee must think of the true interests of those who are the subjects of his trust and. not yield to importunities, however angry and, persistent. To say in depression or impatience, "Oh, very well ; have it your own way, but you'll repent it," is a breach of trust, a breach of honour, and a, breach of duty.
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