INDIAN FINANCIAL SURPRISES. L ORD HARTINGTON evidently, and not unjustly, regards
Indian financial anticipations as a fair approximation to perfect ignorance. Even the seeming verification of the hopes of Indian financiers are but strong delusions in disguise. Thus the Indian anticipation for the year 1878-79 promised the Indian Treasury a surplus of two millions sterling, and the audited accounts for that year appeared to show that the two millions had been realised,—which was not the case. But even in the sense in which the anticipation appeared to have been fulfilled, it was fulfilled only by a double accident,—by the expenditure jumping up to two millions more than had been allowed for, while the revenue had made a corresponding jump ; and even, after calling that a fulfilment which was really a double failure of anticipation, the supposed fulfilment was a mistake. The two millions had been spent, without the Indian Treasury knowing it, in extra war expenses, and there was no surplus at all. But that is a very mild instance, indeed, of the extraordinary series of surprises which Lord Hartington's statement recounted. He after- wards showed that in a war expenditure of £15,000,000, there had been a mistake made of £9,000,000, or just three- fifths of the whole. Further, of this £9,000,000 excess, "£5,500,000 had been already paid, although the Indian Government themselves were not aware of the fact,"—which is the nearest analogy in financial matters to having your leg shot off without knowing it till you found yourself losing your balance in consequence, of which we have ever yet heard. India is certainly the country in which it is easier to lay out a fools' paradise than any other in the civilised world. The facts on which the statesmen feed themselves, furnish a sort of hashish that fills them with illusions. A financier antici- pates a deficit, and a sudden spring of the opium revenue,— the only branch of the revenue which seems to be sometimes as elastic as it is at other times evanescent,—gives him a surplus instead. He anticipates a surplus, and a sudden suspense of rain lands him in a terrible deficit. He makes war, and everything seems to yield before him, the goal is close at hand. He proclaims the end achieved, and suddenly the whole situa- tion is inverted ; nothing has been done, and everything is to do over again. His successes are often his worst failures, and his failures sometimes the best conditions of success. The reckless- ness which makes him expect everything to be easier than it is, is encouraged by the great ease with which the first stages of rash enterprises are conducted ; whereas the resisting medium, pliant at first, gradually exhausts the onset of even the most swift-rushing of projectiles • and British energy itself, when its limits are not understood and its power hus- banded, collapses before the all but invisible resistance of the East. There is no country in which the British ruler appears to fall so easily into sanguine views, as India, and none in which these sanguine views are more dangerous and fatal. It was precisely the same temper which took no ac- count of £9,000,000 out of £15,000,000, that also boasted of the war as so marvellous a success when the Treaty of Ganda- mak had been signed. Three-fifths of the work needful had been left out of account altogether, and therefore the whole was bad, and had to be undone. In India, where estimates are pure guesses, and even audited accounts are but half- seen facts, political anticipations are apt to be mere hopes in disguise, and political retrospects themselves too often little better than poor excuses for broken promises and wrecked schemes.
If we have done so much as we have in India, it has been because statesmanship schooled in a better school than that of Indian optimism, has held back Anglo-Indian dreamers from the wild and sanguine schemes which have been lately in the ascendant ; that the sanguine spirit which feeds itself on Indian uncertainties and on the yielding character of the first resistance opposed to a dreamy ambition, has been strongly controlled by statesmen with cool heads, who measure the politics of the East by a more external and more Western standard of justice and probability, than is natural to all but the keenest and hardest of Anglo-Indians. Take the case of Sir John Strachey, referred to at so much length in Lord Hartington's statement on Tuesday. Can there be a• more instructive instance of the brilliant imbecility of financial statecraft? Here is a man acknowledged to be of the first ability and deeply versed in Indian finance, giving as his excuse for the most extravagant of blunders in dealing even with what was in large measure past ex- penditure, that it was due "not to any misapprehension as to the extent or character of the military operations, but to the - fact that we were ignorant of the actual current cost of the war." That is just as if a man should say that he had spent three times as much as he had supposed, not because he had formed any misapprehension as to the extent or character of the new horses and houses he had bought, but because he was ignorant of the amount of the bills presented. Of course, if a man likes to conceive that he can buy valuable horses and houses for a trifle, he can indulge himself in that fool's paradise till the duns are at the door. But his frienda will say that if he excludes from his view of the "extent and character" of his purchases, what they were to cost, he might just as well have no apprehension of their extent and character at all. Sir John Strachey apparently thought it quite legiti- mate to form a clear apprehension of the military operations needed in Afghanistan, without checking their cost by even so simple a procedure as casting up the monthly outgoings. He maintains that the Government of India had a very clear idea of the extent of the military operations they were paying for,, but no notion at all of the price even of that which they had already achieved. Could recklessness go farther? Is it not perfectly evident that the desire to under-estimate the sacri- fice involved in everything the Indian Government were doing, was at least as vehement as the desire to over- estimate its value ? They were quite aware of all they intended to secure by that great speculation ; they were and even eager to exaggerate the value which it re- presented to them to the highest point ; but the more they wished to paint-up its grandeur, the more they wished to- undervalue its cost. And they succeeded both ways. They persuaded themselves they had bought security, when they had bought nothing but new peril ; and they persuaded them- selves, with still snore wonderful success, that they had paid for the war in Afghanistan only as much as Sir Stafford North- cote asked for precautionary purposes at home, when they had really paid for it, including the railways needed to feed the war, three times as much. What a singular comment on the blindnesa which an inflated and sanguine temper produces is Lord Harting- ton's summing up of these over-estimates :—"If the true war ex- penditure had been known in each year, the year 1878-9, instead of closing with an apparent surplus of two' millions, would have closed with an equilibrium, or a slight deficit ; the year • 1879-80, instead of closing with an apparent small surplus, would have closed with a deficit of nearly three millions ; and the year 1880-1, instead of closing with an apparent small surplus, would have closed with a deficit of about five mil- lions Taking the gross cost of the war during these years roughly at £14,000,000 (after allowing £1,000,000 for increased revenue from the railways and the telegraphs occa- sioned by the war), and adding to it the £4,000,000, the cost of the frontier railway, which is charged in the expenses of the war, we have a total war expenditure of £18,184,426," of which just one-half had never been estimated at all. And how would the case stand, if Lord Hartington had been able to add any appreciation of the false moral expectations of the ends achieved,—massacre in the place of prestige ; two perilous. crises and one great catastrophe, in the place of uniform and brilliant victory; and an inheritance of peril and embarrass- ment, in place of a strong frontier making India so theoretically safe that a great military economy had been promised us ? As- are the figures, so are the moral results. The fumes of a strong illusion took possession of the brains of all the statesmen who conceived, or carried out, or kept the accounts for this Afghan policy. And the best apology to be made for them is that, though many of the statesmen who are answerable for it were in some sense able, and most or all of them may have been in some sense honest, they were all inebriated by the false appear- ance of premature success.
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