Charles Crosthwaite

“ Men like Lord Wellesley, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Canning, could have shown their capacity as rulers of men nowhere so well as in the Government of our great Dependency. It may seem a paradox to say that we are indebted to India for the great Mutiny, which has been well called the 'Epic of the Race.' The Mutiny has proved to us what our countrymen can do in the face of great odds and terrible hardships. ”

“ The frontier of the Empire is now the frontier of Afghanistan, and we might at any time be called to defend it I recognise the admirable spirit of the great feudatory chiefs and their fidelity to the King-Emperor, nor do I doubt the loyalty and peaceful character of the people of India. Nevertheless, I am forced to believe that the foundation of our dominion is the maintenance of an adequate force of British soldiers in India, and the absolute command of the sea. ”

“ On the whole, I think it may fairly be claimed for the Government of India that it has worked hard and successfully, and with a single mind for the good of the people. The old gibe that if the English left India nothing but broken beer-bottles would remain to commemorate their rule has become mere foolishness, if it was ever anything else. If a peaceful and well-administered country, if thousands of miles of railways and of fertilizing canals, can afford a monument of our dominion, we may rest content. ”

“ Decentralize the Government as much as possible, looking forward to the time when each of the great Provinces will be more and more independent—governed and directed, indeed, by the Viceroy, but freed from interference in all matters not of great importance in principle or policy. An India thus constituted will be divided, as it were, into water-tight compartments, and will form in the future one of the strongest links in the great British Empire. ”

“ The possession of India has converted England from a small island Power into a world-wide Empire. In India we have the main links of our commerce with the Far East We have the complement of that great chain of naval and coaling stations which give us a command of the sea which no other nation can boast. Our dominion in India, moreover, makes us much more powerful as a military nation than we should be without it. The 70,000 British troops and 200,000 Indian soldiers do not count for nothing. ”

“ We cannot, without repudiating our responsibility for the good government of the country, put it into the power of a small number of men, who after all is said could not be held to represent the peoples of India, to control our powers of legislation, or dictate to us what laws we should or should not pass. ”

“ Such is the Great British Dominion in India—an object of envy and admiration to foreign nations, viewed with indifference and neglect by our own people. The great majority of the nation, by whose voice Great Britain is ruled and her destinies swayed, know little and care less about their Indian Dependency. As to the means by which this Empire has been won, there may be still some foreign politicians who believe in deep-laid schemes of colonial expansion, worked out by a succession of British Governments for the past three centuries. ”

“ In the second place, to this dust-cloud of people who from time to time have suffered so much from persecution and intolerance we have given religious freedom. Every one is at liberty to follow his own form of religion, no matter what its nature may be, provided always that the great laws of morality and humanity are not outraged. ”

“ As to civil liberty, I believe there is no country in the world, certainly there is none in the East, in which a man can live his own life with greater freedom than in India, unmolested by officials of any sort. ”

“ It is impossible, however, to contemplate a catastrophe of this kind, so long as Great Britain and Ireland have any life left in them.
As to what we can do for India in the future, we must go on, as I said in dealing with the aspirations for political progress, as we have been going, not attempting any great novel or heroic reforms, but watching, mending, improving in every direction. The greatest reproach that can be brought against us by our most hostile critics is the recurrence of famines. ”

“ The employment in the civil administration which India offers to some of our best young men is not without its value to the nation from a pecuniary point of view. But in that respect it is not a matter of much concern. The whole Indian Civil Service consists of about eleven hundred members. If it were closed, the competition in the home professions would be keener, but the class that provides the successful candidates would not be left without careers possibly more remunerative than service in India. In other directions the nation would suffer, although it might not be conscious of its loss. ”

“ If it were announced that a Commission was to be appointed to hear evidence of complaints against any branch of the administration—the land revenue, for instance, or the courts of justice—it is probable that in India, where people are much influenced by private enmities and grudges, and are not particularly accurate in what they say, a similar case might be made out I do not for a moment deny the need of police reform. ”

“ There are men in India of high birth and sober, reflecting statesmanship who would adorn a seat in such an assemblage, and whose advice would be of real value. It may be added that by such means more could be done to tie the people to us, and to make their natural leaders feel that they were regarded as having a rightful voice in affairs of State, than by any measures of so-called self-government and premature representative institutions, which would only spell conflict and disaster. ”

“ If I am asked if there is no measure which can be taken in order to give our Government a deeper hold on the people, I reply that we cannot do better than go on as we have begun. Some may think that the time has come for broadening the foundations of our rule and basing it on a system of representation by election. This is one of the main objects of the Congress, a gathering of persons supposed to represent the different provinces, which has been held yearly for the last twenty years or more. ”

“ At the same time it must be remembered that we are in India a handful of aliens, ruling nearly 800,000,000 of people, most of them willing, indeed, to be ruled, and only asking to be protected in their peaceful pursuits, and to be left in undisturbed exercise of their religious and social customs inseparably connected in their minds. ”

“ Above all, avoid increase of taxation, especially in new forms, even if improvements have to be foregone. The Finance Minister we desire in India is a man thoroughly acquainted with the details of the administration, who can tell where economies can be effected or improvements in existing sources of revenue made. A great financier, full of theoretical notions of the best way of raising the revenue, and bent on putting them into practice if he can, is a man by all means to be avoided. ”

“ In every province of India with which I am acquainted there is scattered about a considerable element of this kind—the vultures waiting for the death of their prey. In British India proper there are few large landowners or chiefs who, in case of any accidental paralysis of the paramount power, could hold in check the forces tending to anarchy even within a fractional area of one of our provinces. Hence, I would lay down the provision of an adequate British army as the first and indispensable condition to the maintenance of the dominion. ”

“ There was no nation to conquer. Nor did we, as some appear to think, uproot ancient dynasties, and ruthlessly destroy old historical monarchies. Passing over the time when the various East India Companies were occupied in rending each other or in the occasional peaceful rivalry of trade to the period when the English Company had come out victorious and began to expand, there was not a power or principality of any sort in the whole peninsula which had been fifty years in existence. ”

“ It is a gain, I think, to the whole country to have a number of capable men sent yearly to India, where they are not only trained in the best administrative school in the world, but have their minds opened by contact with wider conditions, with greater problems, and with a variety of races and religions. Although when they retire on their pensions some of them may be bores, and a few may be little better than Jos Sedleys, yet the greater number are men improved by discipline, by responsibility of a character hardly understood in England, and by long experience in the work of ruling men. ”

“ Then there is a land frontier of some 6,000 miles on the west and north, marching with Persia and Russia, for we have made ourselves responsible for the Afghanistan frontier; on the east with China, with France, and with Siam. A seaboard of close on 4,000 miles has to be guarded by the navy of Great Britain—a seaboard boasting many great ports, of which Calcutta, Bombay, Rangoon, Madras, and Karachi alone are worth a nation's ransom, and represent many millions, not only of British, but of European capital. ”

“ They know well that British rifles are required to defend the country and keep the peace while they practise their statesmanship upon it. They know also that if they were left to their own resources they would be speedily hunted out of their legislative palace, wherever they might have established it. It is impossible to take such a Congress seriously. The unsoundness of their proposals will be apparent to anyone who has realized the diverse and multitudinous elements to which British dominion alone has given any sort of unity. ”

“ Space does not permit me to enlarge on what has been done in the way of legislation to protect the peasant from eviction and exactions when he holds from an intermediary landlord, and not directly from the Government. Suffice it to say that from 1859 to the present time there has been a succession of measures for the protection of the cultivator. Security of tenure and a fair rent have been recognised as no less important for the prevention of famine than irrigation, Hardly a Viceroy has left India without an addition to the Statute-Book in this direction. ”

“ In considering how our policy should be framed in order to maintain our dominion, it is well to bear this in mind. We have not to fear or to conciliate a spirit of racial hostility to the British Government on the part of the peoples of India, and such a spirit could only be created by such acts of folly on our part as would unite against us the heterogeneous races, castes, and religions of the peninsula. ”

“ The British dominion in India was the result, then, of great movements in the tides of human affairs in the West as well as in the East. It is noteworthy that both the Government and the men in power on the spot, so far from taking advantage of the favourable currents, set themselves to resist them. ”

“ Dependency though she is, she is a great country—a country whose greatness is growing. Although necessarily subordinate to the Home authority, the Governor-General in Council, which is the legal description of the Government of India, will, I am convinced, become yearly more independent as Indian interests are more clearly defined and public opinion, not only of the educated Indians, but of the resident Europeans and of the great English services, gains strength. ”

“ More than 90 per cent. of the total population is rural. If a man could sail in a balloon from Cape Comorin to Peshawar he would see, broken by tracts of forest and hills, a vast cultivated plain, dotted over with villages a mile or two, seldom as much as three or four, apart. The towns would hardly attract his eye. There are reckoned to be 2,035 towns in all India, of which 1,401 do not contain as many as 10,000 inhabitants. Over the whole area of 1,560,160 square miles, in which much waste and forest land is included, there are 184 persons to the square mile. ”

“ If we were to include the land revenue, it would be less than double that amount, but this would be no more reasonable than, in a similar calculation for our own country, to reckon as taxation a large proportion of the rent paid to private landholders.' The land revenue for 1905-1906 is estimated at £19,468,700. This represents the share of the produce of the land which belongs of ancient right to the Government The land of India is a national asset the possession of which saves the people from taxation. ”

“ It is true that they are for the most part tied to India and set apart for her service, but in case of emergency they can be drawn upon with effect. Witness the 10,000 British troops sent by India to Natal in the Boer War, and the 20,000 Indians despatched to Pekin during the Boxer riots, at a time when England could hardly have found a man for this service. Everyone knows what an incomparable field India has afforded for the training of our army. Without this field our officers and men would have lacked much war experience. ”

“ When we are sickened by the pictures of the women of England drawn by the modern novelist—especially the female novelist—it is good to be able to turn to the scenes of fifty years ago within the battered defences of the Lucknow Residency, and to know that our wives and daughters are of the same blood, and that the women of Shakespeare and Walter Scott still live amongst us. ”

“ I believe that if we turned aside from the path we have followed so long and consistently; if we adopted methods of religious propaganda or outraged caste prejudices—for example, if we enforced the reading of the Bible in the schools or let loose upon the country a body of enthusiastic sanitary experts from Europe—all the rifles that England could maintain would not suffice to keep the people down. ”

“ So far, at least, as the interest on the railway capital is concerned, no argument should be needed to show that it is merely payment for value received, and is only a small fraction of the profits accruing to the country from the cheapening of carriage and the opening up of markets, and the hundred ways in which railways, directly or indirectly, contribute to comfort and wealth.
Next to the railways may be ranked the great irrigation works which have done so much to enrich the country, more especially the northern provinces and the Madras Presidency. ”

“ Pitt said in eulogizing Clive, 'has been fertile in heroes.' If we were to wipe out from the scroll of English history the men who have made great names as soldiers or administrators in our Indian service, the list of our heroes would be meagre indeed. ”