[To the Editoi• of the SPECTATOR.] Sui,—The last mail which
arrived in India brought Lord Rothermere's latest contributions to the Daily Mail about India. A peculiar streak in Lord Rothermere's latest affec- tation of patriotism is his frantic effort to convince the readers of the Daily Mail that without India's subjection to their will Great Britain would be lost, undone, a thing of rags and bones." We gather that of late he has been juggling with a wonderful profusion of figures in a silly effort to show that should India be given Dominion Status his numerous readers would at once be more or less " penniless," " clotheless," and, what perhaps would be more tragic still, even Daily Mail-less.
I am at a loss to know who supplies Lord Rothermere with figures about India. The actual figures are surely well known. Take the sum value of the United Kingdom's total exports and imports—even excluding the re-export trade—and the figures of India's trade with the United Kingdom, and what do we find ? That in normal times India, with a population, say, twenty per cent. of the whole world's population, gives the United Kingdom only a miserable eight per cent. of its total world trade. This, in my opinion, affords the strongest argument in favour of Dominion Status for India. British traders have been in India for over three centuries (since 1617) and up to now India gives Britain only a small fraction of what that trade ought to be. I have just been turning over some files of the Spectator, and I came across an interesting article : " What does Lord Rothermere know ? " (Spectator, March 7th, 1925).
In that year Lord Rothermere began a campaign to prove the " inefficiency of elementary school education in Britain." We were told that " the boy of to-day learns nothing, he leaves school without a single fact in his head, with a mind quite incapable of taking exercise," and so forth. In'a recent issue his readers were instructed that " H.H. the Aga -Khan was the spiritual head of the seventy million Moslems of India." That is to say, the Moslems of India are all " Khojas." The fact is, of course, that this community numbers only a
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