I have already alluded to the unfortunate effect of the recommendations of the Public Service Commission of 1886-7 on the native side of the Education Service. But if it has become more difficult to attract to it the right type of Indians, it has either become almost as difficult to attract the right type of Europeans, or the influence they are able to exercise has materially diminished. In the first place, their numbers are quite inadequate. Out of about 500 Europeans actually engaged in educational work in India less than half are in the service of the State. Many of them are admittedly very capable men, and not a few possess high University credentials. But so long as the Indian Educational Service is regarded and treated as an inferior branch of the public service, we cannot expect its general tone to be what it should be in view of the supreme importance of the functions it has to discharge. One is often told that the conditions are at least as attractive as those offered by an educational career at home. Even if that be so, it would not affect my contention that, considering how immeasurably more difficult is the task of training the youth of an entirely alien race according to Western standards, and how vital that task is for the future of British rule in India, the conditions should be such as to attract, not average men, but the very best men that we can produce. As it is, the Education Department cannot be said to attract the best men, for these go into the Civil Service, and only those, as a rule, enter the Educational Service who either, having made up their minds early to seek a career in India, have failed to pass the Civil Service examinations, or, having originally intended to take up the teaching profession in England, are subsequently induced to come out to India by disappointments at home or by the often illusory hope of bettering their material prospects. When they arrive they begin work without any knowledge of the character and customs of the people. Some are employed in inspection and others as professors, and the latter especially are apt to lose heart when they realize the thanklessness of their task and their social isolation. In some cases indifference is the worst result, but in others—happily rare—they themselves, I am assured, catch the surrounding contagion of discontent, and their influence tends rather to promote than to counteract the estrangement of the rising generation committed to their charge. Some men, no doubt, rise superior to all these adverse conditions and, in comparing the men of the present day with those of the past, one is apt to remember only the few whose names still live in the educational annals of India and to forget the many who have passed away without making any mark. The fact, however, remains that nowadays the Europeans who have the greatest influence over their Indian pupils are chiefly to be found amongst the missionaries with whom teaching is not so much a profession as a vocation.



CHAPTER XIX.

SOME MEASURES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM.

Though already in 1889, when Lord Lansdowne was Viceroy, an important resolution, drafted by Sir Anthony (now Lord) MacDonnell as Secretary to Government, was issued, drawing attention to some of the most glaring defects of our educational system from the point of view of intellectual training and of discipline, and containing valuable recommendations for remedying them, it seems to have had very little practical effect. A more fruitful attempt to deal with the question was made during Lord Curzon's Viceroyalty. He summoned and presided over an Educational Conference, of which the results were embodied in a Government Resolution issued on March 11, 1904, and in the Universities Act of the same year. They were received at the time with a violent outburst of indignation by Indian politicians, who claim to represent the educated intellect of the country. The least that Lord Curzon was charged with was a deliberate attempt to throttle higher education in India. This factious outcry has now died away, except amongst the irreconcilables, and Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, an authority whom even Hindu partisanship can hardly repudiate, declared in his last Convocation speech that the new regulations which are now being brought into operation, far from bearing out the apprehensions of "alarmist prophets," have been distinctly beneficial to the better and stronger class of students.

To summarize very briefly the work of the Conference, it recognized in the first place the importance of the vernaculars as the proper medium for instruction in the lower stages of education, whilst maintaining the supremacy of English in the higher stages. It sought to give a more practical character to high-school training by promoting the "modern side," hitherto overshadowed by a mainly literary curriculum, and it endeavoured to make the school courses self-sufficing and self-contained instead of merely a stepping-stone to the University courses. To this end secondary schools were encouraged to give more importance to School Final Examinations as a general test of proficiency and not to regard their courses as almost exclusively preparatory to the University Entrance Examination. Great stress was also laid upon the improvement of training colleges for teachers as well as upon the development of special schools for industrial, commercial, and agricultural instruction. Nor were the ethics of education, altogether forgotten in their bearings upon the maintenance of healthy discipline. Government emphasized the great importance of a large extension of the system of hostels or boarding-houses, under proper supervision, in connexion with colleges and secondary schools, as a protection against the moral dangers of life in large towns; and whilst provision was made for the more rigorous inspection of schools to test their qualifications both for Government grants-in-aid and for affiliation to Universities, certain reforms were also introduced into the constitution and management of the Universities themselves.

The results already achieved are not inconsiderable. The provision of hostels, in which Lord Curzon was deeply interested, has made great progress, and one may hope that the conditions of student life described by Dr. Garfield Williams in Calcutta are typical of a state of things already doomed to disappear, though at the present rate of progress it can only disappear very slowly. In Madras there is a fine building for the Presidency College students and also for those of the Madras Christian College. In Bombay Government are giving money for the extension of the boarding accommodation of the three chief colleges. In Allahabad, Agra, Lucknow, Meerut, Bareilly, Lahore, and many other centres old residential buildings are being extended or new ones erected. The new Dacca College, in the capital of Eastern Bengal, is one of the most conspicuous and noteworthy results of the Partition. In Calcutta itself little has been done except in the missionary institutions; and it is certainly very discouraging to note that an excellent and very urgent scheme for removing the Presidency College, the premier college of Bengal, from the slums in which it is at present in every way most injuriously confined, to a healthy suburban site has been shelved by the Bengal Government partly under financial pressure and partly because of the lukewarmness of native opinion. What is no doubt really wanted is the wholesale removal of all the Colleges connected with the Calcutta University altogether from their present surroundings, but to refuse to make a beginning with the Presidency College is merely to prove once more that le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

In regard to the University Entrance Examinations, the latest Madras returns, which were alone sufficiently complete to illustrate the effect of the new regulations, showed that the increased stringency of the tests had resulted in a healthy decrease in the number of matriculations, whilst the standard had been materially raised. In Calcutta the University inspection of schools and colleges and the exercise by the Universities of their discretionary powers in matters of affiliation have grown much more effective. That the powers of the University Senates have not been unduly curtailed is only too clearly shown on the other hand by the effective resistance hitherto offered at Bombay to the scheme of reforms proposed by Sir George Clarke. To the most important features of the scheme, which were the provision of a course of practical science for all first-year students, a systematic bifurcation of courses, the lightening of the number of subjects in order to secure somewhat more thoroughness, and compulsory teaching of Indian history and polity, no serious objection could be raised, but the politicians on the Senate effectively blocked discussion.

A great deal still remains to be done, and can be done, on the lines of the resolution of 1904. The speed at which it can be done must, no doubt, be governed in some directions by financial considerations. The extension of the hostel system, for instance, which is indispensable to the removal of some of the worst moral and physical influences upon education, is largely a matter of money. So is too to some extent the strengthening of the educational staff, European and native, which is also urgently needed. The best Indians cannot be attracted unless they are offered a living wage in some measure consonant with the dignity of so important a profession, and our schools and colleges will continue to be too often nursery grounds of sedition so long as we do not redress the legitimate grievances of teachers on starvation wages. But though improved prospects may attract better men in the future, the actual inefficiency of a huge army of native teachers, far too hastily recruited and imperfectly trained, can at best be but slowly mended. We want more and better training colleges for native teachers, but that is not all. The great Mahomedan College at Aligarh, one of the best educational institutions in India, partly because it is wholly residential, has obtained excellent results by sending some of its students who intend to return as teachers to study Western educational methods in Europe after they have completed their course in India. The same practice might be extended elsewhere.

To raise the standard of the Europeans in the Educational Service something more than a mere improvement of material conditions is required. Additions are being made to both the teaching and the inspecting staff. But what is above all needed is to get men to join who regard teaching not merely as a livelihood, but as a vocation, and to inform them with a better understanding both of the people whose children they have to train and of the character and methods of the Government they have to serve. This can hardly be done except by associating the Educational Service much more closely with what are now regarded as the higher branches of the public service in India. No Englishmen are in closer touch with the realities of Indian life than Indian civilians, and means must be found to break down the wall which now rigidly separates the Educational Service from the Civil Service. Opportunities might usefully be given to young Englishmen when they first join the Educational Service in India to acquire a more intimate knowledge of Indian administrative work, as well as of the character and customs and language of the people amongst whom their lot is to be cast, by serving an apprenticeship with civilians in the mofussil. The appointment of such a very able civilian as Mr. Harcourt Butler to be the first Minister of Education in India may be taken as an indication that Lord Morley realizes the importance of rescuing the Educational Service from the watertight compartment in which it has hitherto been much too closely confined. We can hardly hope to restore English influence over education to the position which it originally occupied. There are 1,200 high schools for boys in India to-day, of which only 220 are under public management, and, even for the latter, it would be difficult to provide an English headmaster apiece. What we can do is to follow up the policy which has been lately resumed of increasing the number of high schools under Government control, until we have at least one in every district, and in every large centre one with an English headmaster which should be the model school for the division.

A much vexed question is whether it is impossible to raise the fees charged for higher education with a view to checking the wastage which results from the introduction into our schools and colleges of so much unsuitable raw material. The fees now charged for the University course are admittedly very low, even for Indian standards. The total cost of maintaining an Indian student throughout his four years' college course ranges from a minimum of L40 to a maximum of L110—i.e., from L10 to L27 10s. per annum. The actual fees for tuition vary from three to twelve rupees (4s. to 16s.) a month in different colleges. Very large contributions, amounting roughly to double the total aggregate of fees, have therefore to be made from public funds towards the cost of collegiate education. Is it fair to throw so heavy a burden on the Indian taxpayer for the benefit of a very small section of the population amongst whom, moreover, many must be able to afford the whole, or at least a larger proportion, of the cost of their children's education? Is it wise by making higher instruction so cheap to tempt parents to educate children often of poor or mediocre abilities out of their own plane of life? Would it not be better at any rate to raise the fees generally and to devote the sums yielded by such increase to exhibitions and scholarships for the benefit of the few amongst the humbler classes who show exceptional promise?

Against this it is urged that it would be entirely at variance with Indian traditions to associate standards of knowledge with standards of wealth, and, in practice, education has, I understand, been found to be worst where the fees bear the greatest proportion to the total expenditure. The same arguments equally apply for and against raising the fees in secondary schools. In regard to the latter, however, the opponents of any general increase of fees make, nevertheless, a suggestion which deserves consideration. In many schools the fees begin at a very low figure—eight annas (8d.) a month in the lowest forms and rise to three, four, and even five rupees (4s. 5s. 4d. and 6s. 8d.) a month in the highest forms. It is this initial cheapness which induces so many thoughtless parents to send their boys to secondary schools without having considered whether they can afford to keep them through the whole course, whilst it fosters the notion that badly paid and badly qualified teachers are good enough for the early, which are often the most important, stages, of a boy's education. To obviate these evils it is suggested that the fees for all forms should be equalized.

I shall have occasion later on to point out the immense importance of giving greater encouragement to scientific and technical education. Government service and the liberal professions are already overstocked, and it is absolutely necessary to check the tendency of young Indians to go in for a merely literary education for which, even if it were more thorough than it can be under existing conditions, there is no longer any sufficient outlet. The demand which is arising all over India for commercial and industrial development should afford an unrivalled opportunity of deflecting education into more useful and practical channels.

Some better machinery than exists at present seems also to be required to bring the Educational Service into touch with parents. Education can nowhere be a question of mere pedagogics, and least of all in India. Yet there is evidently a strong tendency to treat it as such. To take only one instance, the tasks imposed upon schoolboys and students by the exigencies of an elaborate curriculum are often excessive, and there have been cases when the intervention of other authorities has been necessary to bring the education officers to listen to the reasonable grievances of parents. If in these and other matters parents were more freely consulted, they would probably be more disposed to give education officers the support of their parental authority. There are many points upon which native opinion would not be so easily misled by irreconcilable politicians if greater trouble were taken to explain the questions at issue.

What is evidently much wanted is greater elasticity. In a country like India, which is an aggregation of many widely different countries, the needs and the wishes of the people must differ very widely and cannot be met by cast-iron regulations, however admirable in theory. It is earnestly to be hoped that the creation of a separate portfolio in the Government of India will not involve the strengthening of the centralizing tendencies which have been the bane of Indian education since the days of Macaulay, himself one of the greatest theorists that ever lived. We cannot afford to relax the very little control we exercise over education, but education is just one of the matters in which Provincial Governments should be trusted to ascertain, and to give effect to, the local requirements of the people. In another direction, however, the creation of a Ministry for Education should be all to the good. If any real and comprehensive improvements are to be carried out they will cost a great deal of money, and in the ordinary sense of the term it will not be reproductive expenditure, though no expenditure, if wisely applied, can yield more valuable results. As a member of Council—i.e., as a member of the Government of India—Mr. Butler must carry much greater weight in recommending the necessary expenditure than a Director-General of Public Education or than a Provincial Governor, especially as the expenditure will probably have to be defrayed largely out of Imperial and not merely out of Provincial funds. If the educational problem is the most vital and the most urgent one of all at the present hour in India, it stands to reason that no more disastrous blunder could be made than to stint the new department created for its solution.



CHAPTER XX.

THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

There remains one vital aspect of the educational problem which was left untouched by the Educational Resolution of 1904, and has been left untouched ever since we entered three-quarters of a century ago on an educational experiment unparalleled in the world's history—a more arduous experiment even than that of governing the 300 millions of India with a handful of Englishmen. Many nations have conquered remote dependencies inhabited by alien races, imposed their laws upon them, and held them in peaceful subjection, though even this has never been done on the same scale of magnitude as by the British rulers of India. We alone have attempted to educate them in our own literature and science and to make them by education the intellectual partners of the civilization that subdued them. Of the two tasks, that of government and that of education, the latter is not by any means the easier. For good government involves as little interference as possible with the beliefs and customs and traditions of the people, whereas good education means the substitution for them of the intellectual and moral conceptions of what we regard as our higher civilization. Good government represents to that extent a process of conservation; good education must be partially a destructive, almost a revolutionary, process. Yet upon the more difficult and delicate problems of education we have hitherto, it is to be feared, bestowed less thought and less vigilance than upon administrative problems in India. The purpose we have had in view is presumably that which Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee admirably defined in his last address to the University of Calcutta as "the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State." But is it a purpose which those responsible for our Indian system of education have kept steadily before them? Is it a purpose that could possibly be achieved by the laisser faire policy of the State in regard to the moral and religious side of education? If so, how is it that we have had of late such alarming evidence of our frequent failure to achieve it?

The divorce of education from religion is still on its trial in Western countries, which rely upon a highly-developed code of ethics and an inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of religious sanctions. In India, as almost everywhere in the East, religion in some form or another, from the fetish worship of the primitive hill tribes to the Pantheistic philosophy of the most cultured Brahman or the stern Monotheism of the orthodox Moslem, is the dominant force in the life both of every individual and of every separate community to which the individual belongs. Religion is, in fact, the basic element of Indian life, and morality apart from religion is an almost impossible conception for all but an infinitesimal fraction of Western-educated Indians. Hence, even if the attempt had been or were in the future made to instil ethical notions into the minds of the Indian youth independently of all religious teaching, it could only result in failure. For the Hindu, perhaps more than for any other, religion governs life from the hour of his birth to that of his death. His birth and his death are in fact only links in a long chain of existences inexorably governed by religion. His religion may seem to us to consist chiefly of ritual and ceremonial observances which sterilize any higher spiritual life. But even if such an impression is not due mainly to our own want of understanding, the very fact that every common act of his daily life is a religious observance, just as the caste into which he is born has been determined by the degree in which he has fulfilled similar religious observances in a former cycle of lives, shows how completely his religion permeates his existence. The whole world in which he lives and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the sublime.

Yet in a country where religion is the sovereign influence we have, from the beginning, absolutely ignored it in education. It is no doubt quite impossible for the State in a country like India with so many creeds and sects, whose tenets are often repugnant to all our own conceptions not only of religion but of morality, to take any direct part in providing the religious instruction which would be acceptable to Indian parents. But was it necessary altogether to exclude such instruction from our schools and colleges? Has not its exclusion tended to create in the minds of many Indians the belief that our professions of religious neutrality are a pretence, and that, however rigorously the State may abstain from all attempts to use education as a medium for Christian propaganda, it nevertheless uses it to undermine the faith of the rising generations in their own ancestral creeds? Even if they acquit us of any deliberate purpose, are they not at any rate entitled to say that such have been too often the results? Did not the incipient revolt against all the traditions of Hinduism that followed the introduction of Western education help to engender the wholesale reaction against Western influences which, underlies the present unrest?

Few problems illustrate more strikingly the tremendous difficulties that beset a Government such as ours in India. On the one hand, Indian religious conceptions are in many ways so diametrically opposed to all that British rule stands for that the State cannot actively lend itself to maintain or promote them. On the other hand, they provide the ties which hold the whole fabric of Indian society together, and which cannot be hastily loosened without serious injury and even danger to the State. This has been made patent to the most careless observer by the events of the last few years that have revealed, as with a lurid flash of lightning, the extent to which the demoralization of our schools and colleges had proceeded. If any Englishman has doubts as to the connexion in this matter of cause and effect, let him ask respectable Indian parents who hold aloof from politics. They have long complained that the spirit of reverence and the respect for parental authority are being killed by an educational system which may train the intellect and impart useful worldly knowledge, but withdraws their youths from the actual supervision and control of the parents or of the guru, who for spiritual guidance stood in loco parentis under the old Hindu system of education, and estranges them from all the ideas of their own Hindu world[20]. That parents often genuinely resent the banishment of all religious influence from our schools and colleges appears from the fact that many of them prefer to Government institutions those conducted by missionaries in which, though no attempt is made to proselytize, a religious, albeit a Christian, atmosphere is to some extent maintained. It is on similar grounds also that the promoters of the new movement in favour of "National Schools" advocate the maintenance of schools which purchase complete immunity from Government control by renouncing all the advantages of grants-in-aid and of University affiliation. They have been started mainly under the patronage of "advanced" politicians, and have too often turned out to be mere hot-beds of sedition, but their raison d'etre is alleged to be the right of Hindu parents to bring up Hindu children in a Hindu atmosphere.

From the opposite pole in politics, most of the ruling chiefs in their replies to Lord Minto's request for their opinions on the growth of disaffection call attention to this aspect of education, and the Hindu princes especially lay great stress on the neglect of religious and moral instruction. I will quote only the Maharajah of Jaipur, a Hindu ruler universally revered, for his high character and great experience:—

My next point has reference to the neglect there seems to be of religious education, a point to which I drew your Excellency's attention at the State banquet at Jaipur on the 29th October, 1909. I must say I have great faith in a system of education, in which secular and religious instruction are harmoniously combined, as the formation of character entirely depends upon a basework of religion, and the noble ideals which our sacred books put before the younger generation will, I fervently hope, make them loyal and dutiful citizens of the Empire. Such ideals must inevitably have their effect on impressionable young men, and it is perhaps due to such ideals that sedition and anarchy have obtained so small a footing in the Native States as a whole. In the Chiefs' College Conference, held at the Mayo College in 1904, I impressed upon my colleagues the necessity of religious education for the sons of the chiefs and nobles of Rajputana, and it should be one of the principal objects in all schools for the Pandits and the Moulvies to instil in the minds of their pupils correct notions as to the duty they owe to the community they belong to and to their Sovereign.

In this respect the ruling chiefs unquestionably reflect the views which prevail amongst the better-class Indians in British India as well as in the Native States. The Government of India cannot afford to disregard them. The Resolution of 1904, it is true, laid it down again definitely that "in Government institutions, the instruction is and must continue to be exclusively secular." But much has happened since 1904 to reveal the evils which our educational system has engendered and to lend weight to the representations made by responsible exponents of sober Indian opinion in favour of one of the remedies which it is clearly within our power to apply. Nor need we really depart from our time-honoured principle of neutrality in religious matters. All we have to do is to set apart, in the curriculum of our schools and colleges, certain hours during which they will be open, on specified conditions, for religious instruction in the creed in which the parents desire their children to be brought up. There is no call for compulsion. This is just one of the questions in which the greatest latitude should be left to local Governments, who are more closely in touch than the Central Government with the sentiment and wishes of the different communities. I am assured that there would be little difficulty in forming local committees to settle whether there was a sufficiently strong feeling amongst parents in favour of a course of religious instruction and to determine the lines upon which it should be given. Some supervision would have to be exercised by the State, but in the Educational Service there are, it is to be hoped, enough capable and enlightened representatives of the different creeds to exercise the necessary amount of supervision in a spirit both of sympathy for the spiritual needs of their people and of loyalty to the Government they serve. It may be objected that there are so many jarring sects, so many divisions of caste, that it would be impossible ever to secure an agreement as to the form to be imparted to religious instruction. Let us recognize but not overrate the difficulty. In each of the principal religions of India a substantial basis can be found to serve as a common denominator between different groups, as, for instance, in the Koran for all Mahomedans and in the Shastras for the great majority of high-caste Hindus. At any rate, if the effort is made and fails through no fault of ours, but through the inability of Indian parents to reconcile their religious differences, the responsibility to them will no longer lie with us.

Another objection will probably be raised by earnest Christians who would hold themselves bound in conscience to protest against any facilities being given by a Christian State for instruction in religious beliefs which they reprobate. Some of these austere religionists may even go so far as to contend that, rather than tolerate the teaching of "false doctrines," it is better to deprive Indian children of all religious teaching. To censure of this sort, however, the State already lays itself open in India. There are educational institutions—and some of the best, like the Mahomedan College at Aligurh—maintained by denominational communities on purpose to secure religious education. Yet the State withdraws from them neither recognition nor assistance because pupils are taught to be good Mahomedans or good Hindus. Why should it be wrong to make religious instruction permissive in other Indian schools which are not wholly or mainly supported by private endeavour? Is not the "harmonious combination of secular and religious instruction" for which the Maharajah of Jaipur pleads better calculated than our present policy of laisser faire to refine and purify Indian religious conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the present revolt against Western ascendency?

Here is surely a question bound up with all the main-springs of Indian life in which we may be rightly asked "to govern according to Indian ideas." Can we expect that the youth of India will grow up to be law-abiding citizens if we deprive them of what their parents hold to be "the keystone to the formation of character"? Can we close our eyes to what so many responsible Indians regard as one of the chief causes of the demoralization which has crept into our schools and colleges? The State can, doubtless, exact in many ways more loyal co-operation from Indian teachers in safeguarding their pupils from the virus of disaffection. It can, for instance, intimate that it will cease to recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long as we take no steps to refute a charge which, in view of recent evidence, can no longer be dismissed as wholly unfounded, can we expect education to fulfil the purpose rightly assigned to it by Dr. Mookerjee—"the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State?"



CHAPTER XXI.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

It is too late in the day now to discuss whether it was wise to begin our educational policy as we did from the top and to devote so much of our energies and resources to secondary at the expense of primary education. The result has certainly been to widen the gulf which divides the different classes of Indian society and to give to those who have acquired some veneer, however superficial, of Western education the only articulate voice, often quite out of proportion to their importance, as the interpreters of Indian interests and desires. One million is a liberal estimate of the number of Indians who have acquired and retained some knowledge of English; whilst at the last census, out of a total population of 294 millions, less than sixteen millions could read and write in any language—not fifteen millions out of the whole male population and not one million out of the whole female population—and this modest amount of literacy is mainly confined to a few privileged castes.

With the growth of a school of Indian politicians bent upon undermining British rule, the almost inconceivable ignorance in which the masses are still plunged has become a real danger to the State, for it has proved an all too receptive soil for the calumnies and lies of the political agitator, who, too well educated himself to believe what he retails to others, knows exactly the form of calumny and lie most likely to appeal to the credulity of his uninformed fellow-countrymen. I refer especially to such very widespread and widely believed stories as that Government disseminates plague by poisoning the wells and that it introduces into the plague inoculation serum drugs which destroy virility in order to keep down the birth-rate. No one has put this point more strongly than Lord Curzon:—

What is the greatest danger in India? What is the source of suspicion, superstition, outbreaks, crime—-yes, and also of much of the agrarian discontent and suffering amongst the masses? It is ignorance. And what is the only antidote to ignorance? Knowledge.

Curiously enough, it was one of Lord Curzon's bitterest opponents who corroborated him on this point by relating in the course of a recent debate how, when the Chinsurah Bridge was built some years ago over the Hughli, "the people believed that hundreds and thousands of men were being sacrificed and their heads cut off and carried to the river to be put under the piers to give the bridge stability, so that the goddess might appreciate the gift and let the piers remain." And he added:—"I know that ignorant people were afraid to go out at nights, lest they might be seized and their heads cut off and thrown under the piers of the Hughli Bridge."

It was, however, on more general consideration, as is his wont, that Mr. Gokhale moved his resolution in the first Session of the Imperial Council at Calcutta last winter for making elementary education free and compulsory, and for the early appointment of a committee to frame definite proposals.

Three movements [he claimed] have combined to give to mass education the place which it occupies at present amongst the duties of the State—the humanitarian movement which reformed prisons and liberated the slave, the democratic movement which admitted large masses of men to a participation in Government, and the industrial movement which brought home to nations the recognition that the general spread of education in a country, even when it did not proceed beyond the elementary stage, meant the increased efficiency of the worker.

The last of these three considerations is, perhaps, that which just now carries the most weight with moderate men in India, where the general demand for industrial and commercial development is growing loud and insistent, and Mr. Gokhale's resolution met with very general support from his Mahomedan, as well as from his Hindu, colleagues. But, in the minds of disaffected politicians, another consideration is, it must be feared, also present, to which utterance is not openly given. It is the hope that the extension of primary schools may serve, as has that of secondary schools to promote the dissemination of seditious doctrines, especially amongst the "depressed castes" to which the political agitator has so far but rarely secured access.

Whatever danger may lie in that direction, it cannot be allowed to affect the policy of Government, who gave to Mr. Gokhale's resolution a sufficiently sympathetic reception to induce him to withdraw it for the present. To the principle of extending primary education the Government of India have indeed long been committed, and increased efforts were recommended, both in the Educational Despatch of 1854 and by the Education Commission of 1883. Stress was equally laid upon it by the Resolution of 1904 under Lord Curzon, who already, in 1902, had caused additional grants, amounting to more than a quarter of a million sterling, to be given to provincial Governments for the purpose. Under Lord Minto's administration Government seemed at one moment to have gone very much further and to have accepted at any rate the principle of free education, for in 1907 the Finance Member conveyed in Council an assurance from the Secretary of State that "notwithstanding the absence of Budget provision, if a suitable scheme should be prepared and sanctioned by him, he will be ready to allow it to be carried into effect in the course of the year, provided that the financial position permits." It was rather unfortunate that hopes should be so prematurely raised, and it would surely have been wiser to consult the local Governments before than after such a pronouncement. For when they were consulted their replies, especially as to the abolition of fees, were mostly unfavourable, and this year also Government, whilst expressing its good will, felt bound to defer any decision until the question had been more fully studied and the financial situation had improved.

The present situation is certainly unsatisfactory. In 1882 there were 85,000 primary schools in India recognized by the Educational Department which gave elementary education to about 2,000,000 pupils. In 1907, according to the last quinquennial report, the total attendance had increased to 3,631,000; but though the increase appears very considerable, the Director-General of Education had to admit that, assuming progress to be maintained at the present rate, "several generations would still elapse before all the boys of school age were in school." And Mr. Gokhale's resolution applies, at least ultimately, to girls as well as to boys! Now in British India—i.e., without counting the Native States—the total number of boys of school-going age on the basis of the four years' course proposed for India would be nearly 12 millions, and there must be about an equal number of girls. The total cost to the State according to the estimates of local Governments would be no less than L15,000,000 per annum, whilst non-recurring expenditure would amount to L18,000,000. The fees at present paid by parents for primary education, which is already free in some parts of India and in certain circumstances, make up only about L210,000 per annum. The whole of the enormous difference would, therefore, be thrown upon the Indian taxpayers, who now have to find for primary education less than L650,000 per annum. Even Mr. Gokhale does not, of course, propose that this educational and financial revolution should be effected by a stroke of the pen, and one of his Hindu colleagues held that, it would be contrary to all Hindu traditions for parents to avail themselves of free education if they could afford to pay a reasonable sum for it.

But even if the state of Indian finances were likely within any appreciable time to warrant an approximate approach to such vast expenditure, or if Government could entertain the suggestions made by Mr. Gokhale for meeting it, partly by raising the import duties from 5 to 7-1/2 per cent, and imposing other taxes, and partly by wholesale retrenchment in other departments, the financial difficulty is not the only one to be overcome. Model schoolhouses could no doubt be built all over India, if the money were forthcoming, instead of the wretched accommodation which exists now, and is so inadequate that in the Bombay Presidency alone there are said to be 100,000 boys for whom parents want, but cannot obtain, primary education. But what of the teachers? These cannot be improvised, however many millions Government may be prepared to spend. There is an even greater deficiency of good teachers than of good schoolhouses, and, in some respects, the value of primary education still more than that of secondary education depends upon good teachers—teachers who are capable of explaining what they teach and not merely of reeling off by rote, and imperfectly, to their pupils lessons which they themselves imperfectly understand. The total number of teachers engaged in primary education exceeds 100,000, but their salaries barely average Rs.8 (10s. 8d.) a month. So miserable a pittance abundantly explains their inefficiency. But there it is, and a new army of teachers—nearly half a million altogether—would have to be trained before primary education, whether free and compulsory, as Mr. Gokhale would have it, or optional and for payment, as others propose, could be usefully placed within the reach of the millions of Indian children of a school-going age.

In this as in all other matters, the Government of India cannot afford to stand still, and will have to take Indian opinion more and more into account. But whilst there is a very general consensus that more should be done by the State for primary education, there is no unanimity as to its being made free and compulsory. Various Indian members of Council have expressed themselves against it on different grounds. Some contend that many parents cannot afford, as bread-winners, to be deprived of the help of their children. According to others, there is already much complaint amongst parents that school-going boys do not make good agriculturists and affect to consider work in the fields as beneath their dignity. Others, again, ask, and with some reason, who is going to care for boys of that age who may have to leave their homes and be removed from parental control in order to attend school. There is, doubtless, something in all these objections. Assuming that Government can do more than it has hitherto done to further primary education, the wisest course would be to improve the quality rather than the quantity, and, most of all, the quality of the teachers. Here, again, uniformity should be avoided rather than ensued. No primary curriculum can be evolved which will meet the needs alike of the rural population and of the townsfolk, or of the different parts of India with their varying conditions of climate and temperament. Even more than with regard to secondary schools, the needs of parents must be consulted, and the greatest latitude given to provincial Governments to vary the system in a practical spirit and in accordance with local requirements. Nor can the opinion, strongly held by many parents, be overlooked that religious instruction cannot be safely excluded from the training of such young children. Some of the objects to be kept specially in view have been well stated by Mr. Orange, the Director-General of Public Education:—

We desire to see, if not in every village, within reach of every village, a school, not an exotic, but a village school, in which the village itself can take pride, and of which the first purpose will be to train up good men and women and good citizens; and the second; to impart useful knowledge, not forgetting while doing so to train the eye and the hand so that the children when they leave school, whether for the field or the workshop, will have begun to learn the value of accurate observation and to feel the joy of intelligent and exact manual work.

This is undoubtedly the goal towards which primary education should be directed, but it can only be reached by steady and continuous effort spread over a long term of years. Otherwise we shall discover, again too late, that, as in the case of secondary education, most haste is worst speed.

I shall not attempt to deal with the question of female education, either primary or secondary, for it is so intimately bound up with the peculiarities of Indian, and especially Hindu, society, that it would be difficult for the State to take any vigorous initiative without running a great risk of alarming and alienating native opinion[21]. Owing to Indian social customs and to the practice of early marriage or at least of early seclusion, for girls, their education presents immense practical difficulties which do not exist in the case of boys. Hence the slow progress it has made. At the last census only eight per thousand women could read and write; and in the whole of India only about half a million girls, or four out of every 100 of a school-going age,—even on the basis of a four years' course, are receiving any kind of education. Of such as do go to school nine out of ten only go to primary schools. Mr. Gokhale himself has abandoned the idea of making primary education compulsory for girls as well as for boys. Female education is just one of the questions upon which Indian opinion must be left to ripen, Government giving, in proportion as it ripens, such assistance as can be legitimately expected. It has long engaged the attention of enlightened Indians, and in some communities, especially amongst the Aryas of the Punjab, some headway is being made. The Parsees, of course, as in all educational and philanthropic developments, have always been in the van. With the growth of Western education the Indian woman of the higher classes cannot indefinitely lag behind, and, if only to make their daughters more eligible for marriage, the most conservative Indian parents will be compelled to educate them, as some have already done, so that they shall not be separated from their male partners by an unfathomable gulf of intellectual inferiority. In Calcutta, in Bombay, in Madras, and indeed in all the principal cities of India, one may already meet native ladies, both Hindu and Mahomedan, of education and refinement, who, however few their numbers, are shining examples of what Indian womanhood can rise to when once it is emancipated from the trammels of antiquated custom.



CHAPTER XXII.

SWADESHI AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS.

Was it not Talleyrand who said that speech had been given to man in order to enable him to disguise his thoughts? Indian politicians are no Talleyrands, but they sometimes seem to have framed their vocabulary on purpose to disguise political conceptions which most of them for various reasons shrink from defining at present with decision. We have already seen how elastic is the word Swaraj, self-government, or rather self-rule. In the mouth of the "moderates" of the Indian National Congress it means, we are assured, only a pious aspiration towards the same position which our self-governing Colonies enjoy within the Empire. For the "advanced" politician Swaraj means a transition stage which he hopes and believes must infallibly lead to a complete severance of the ties that unite India to the Empire. For the "extremists" it means the immediate and violent emancipation of India from British rule, and absolute independence. So it is with the term Swadeshi, which means anything from the perfectly legitimate and commendable encouragement of Indian trade and industry to the complete exclusion of foreign, and especially of British, goods by a "national" and often forcible "boycott" as part of a political campaign against British rule.

Political Swadeshi bases itself upon a Nationalist legend that a "golden age" prevailed in India before we appeared on the scene, and that British rule has deliberately drained India of her wealth. Even if we have to, admit that Indian home industries have suffered heavily from the old commercial policy of the East India Company and from the formidable competition of the organized and scientific processes of British industry, this legend hardly deserves to be treated seriously. The reductio ad absurdum of the argument has certainly been reached when Mr. Keir Hardie alleges that Indian loans raised in England constitute "a regular soaking drain upon India because the interest is paid to bondholders in this country [England], and is not therefore benefiting the people from whom it is taken." I can only commend this sapient contention to our self-governing Colonies, who have all had recourse in turn to British capital for the development of their resources, and paid interest on their loans to British bondholders without being apparently conscious of any "soaking drain." The supposed "drain" is estimated in various ways, but a common method adopted is to lay stress upon the excess of exports over imports[22]. Lord Curzon has rightly pointed out that economically this test is quite fallacious; and that in the richest country in the world, America, the value of the exports exceeds the imports by over L100,000,000 per annum. Home charges represent three-fourths of the "drain," and these may be calculated at about L18,000,000 annually. Of this sum, L6,750,000 is paid in interest on railway capital; but the railways are a source of profit, and the payment comes from the railway passenger. Moreover, in course of time, the Indian railways will become, and are becoming, a property of enormous value to the State. The interest on India's public debt is L3,000,000, but it has to be remembered how much India has benefited by expenditure which has proved reproductive. Sir Bampfylde Fuller has stated that the lowest estimate of the increase in produce obtained through irrigation works alone is estimated at L30,000,000 annually. In the last 50 years the total volume of Indian trade, imports and exports, has increased from L40,000,000 to L200,000,000. The remaining items are roughly, home military charges, L2,000,000; India Office, &c., L250,000; leave allowances, L750,000; pensions, L4,000,000. A considerable part of these pensions represent merely deferred pay. Moreover, unlike some other countries, e.g., the United States, where L32,000,000 are spent on pensions, mostly unearned, India has had good value, brimming over, for her pensions. The private remittances to England, which must be added to these sums, are not treated in any other country as an economic loss. No American economist would so regard the enormous annual sums remitted by immigrants to Ireland, Italy, and other European countries, or the vast annual expenditure of American tourists in Europe. Indian immigrants remit L400,000 annually to India from the Straits Settlements and Malay States alone, and considerable sums must be sent from East and South Africa and Ceylon, as well as smaller sums from Mauritius and the West Indies. Yet these colonies do not apparently complain about a "drain" to India.

What India is entitled to ask is whether Indian loans have been expended for the benefit of the Indian people, and the answer is conclusive. India possesses to-day assets in the shape of railways, irrigation canals, and other public works which, as marketable properties, represent more than her total indebtedness, without even taking into account the enormous value of the "unearned increment" they have produced for the benefit of the people of India. If, therefore, we look at the Government of India for a moment as merely a board of directors conducting a great development business on behalf of the Indian people, they can certainly show an excellent balance-sheet. Let us admit that some of the "home charges" may be open to discussion, and I shall have a word or two or say about them later on. But taken altogether they may fairly be regarded as the not unreasonable cost of administering a concern which, if we wished to liquidate it and to retire from business to-morrow, would leave a handsome surplus to India after paying off the whole debt contracted in her name. The case was stated very fairly by the late Mr. Ranade, whose teachings all but the most "advanced" politicians still profess to reverence, when he delivered the inaugural address at the first Industrial Conference held just 20 years ago at Poona:—

There are some people who think that as long as we have a heavy tribute to pay to England which takes away nearly 20 crores of our surplus exports, we are doomed, and can do nothing to help ourselves. This is, however, hardly a fair or manly position to take up. A portion of the burden represents interest on moneys advanced to, or invested in, our country, and so far from complaining, we have reason to be thankful that we have a creditor who supplies our needs at such a low rate of interest. Another portion represents the value of stores supplied to us, the like of which we cannot produce here. The remainder is alleged to be more or less necessary for the purpose of administration, defence, and payment of pensions, and, though there is good cause for complaint that it is not all necessary, we should not forget the fact that we are enabled by reason of this British connexion to levy an equivalent tribute from China by our opium monopoly.

If India must now forgo this tribute from China, it is not at any rate the fault of the Government of India that the whole cost of the awakening of the national conscience in England to the iniquity of the opium traffic is being thrown upon India.

The question is not whether we have done well, but whether we might not have done better, and whether the economic development of India, industrial, commercial, and agricultural, has kept pace with that of the rest of the world. If the answer in this case is more doubtful, we have to bear in mind the idiosyncrasies of the Indian people and especially of the educated classes. Indians have been as a rule disinclined to invest their money in commerce or industry or in scientific forms of agriculture. It is estimated that the hoarded wealth of India amounts, at a conservative calculation, to L300,000,000, and this probably represents gold alone. The annual absorption of gold by India is very great. Lord Rothschild remarked to the Currency Commission that none of the smooth gold bars sent to India ever came back. There is, in addition, an enormous sum hoarded in silver rupees and silver ornaments. It is no uncommon sight, in the cities of Upper India, to see a child wearing only one ragged, dirty garment, but loaded with massive silver ornaments. Indians who have money and do not merely hoard it prefer to lend it out, often at usurious rates of interest, to their needy or thriftless fellow-countrymen. Until quite recently the educated classes have held almost entirely aloof from any but the liberal professions. Science in any form has been rarely taken up by University students, and for every B.Sc. the honours lists have shown probably a hundred B.A.'s. The Indian National Congress itself, as it represented mainly those classes, naturally displayed the same tendencies, and for a long time it devoted its energies to so-called political problems rather than to practical economic questions. Hence the almost complete failure of the Western-educated Indian to achieve any marked success in commercial and industrial undertakings, and nowhere has that failure been more complete than in Bengal, where it would be difficult to quote more than one really brilliant exception. Hence also no doubt some of the political bitterness which those classes display. Within the last few years, however, the politician has realized that, whilst commercial and industrial development was steadily expanding and the demand for it was increasing on all sides, he was left standing on a barren shore. He has done his best, or rather his worst, to convert Swadeshi into a political weapon. His efforts have only been temporarily and partially successful. But we may rest assured that long after this spurious political Swadeshi has disappeared, the legitimate form of Swadeshi will endure—the Swadeshi that does not boycott imported goods merely because they come from England, but is bent on stimulating the production in India of articles of the same or of better quality which can be sold cheaper, and can, therefore, beat the imported goods in the Indian markets.

To this form of Swadeshi it is undoubtedly the duty and the interest of the Government of India to respond. We are bound as trustees for the people of India to promote Indian trade and industry by all the means in our power, and we are equally bound to help to open up new fields of activity for the young Indians whom our educational system has diverted from the old paths, and who no longer find for their rapidly increasing numbers any sufficient outlet in the public services and liberal professions which originally absorbed them. No reforms in our educational system can be permanently effective unless we check the growth of the intellectual proletariat, which plays so large a part in Indian unrest, by diverting the energies of young India into new and healthier channels. At the same time there can be no better material antidote to the spread of disaffection than the prosperity which would attend the expansion of trade and industry and give to increasing numbers amongst the Western-educated classes a direct interest in the maintenance of law and order. There are amongst those classes too many who, having little or nothing to lose, are naturally prone to fish in the troubled waters of sedition.

In regard to agriculture, which is, and is bound to remain, the greatest of all Indian industries, for it supports 70, and perhaps 80, per cent, of the whole population, the Government of India have no reason to be ashamed of their record. Famines can never be banished from a country where vast tracts are entirely dependent upon an extremely uncertain rainfall, and the population is equally dependent upon the fruits of the soil. But besides the scientific organization of famine relief, the public works policy of Government has been steadily and chiefly directed to the reduction of famine areas. Not only has the construction of a great system of railways facilitated the introduction of foodstuffs into remote famine-stricken districts, but irrigation works, devised on a scale and with a skill which have made India the premier school of irrigation for the rest of the world, have added enormously both to the area of cultivation and to that where cultivation is secured against failure of the rainfall. The arid valley of the Indus has been converted into a perennial granary, and in the Punjab alone irrigation canals have already added 8,000,000 acres of unusual fertility to the land under tillage, and have given to 5,000,000 acres more the protection against drought in years of deficient rainfall which they formerly lacked. Plantations of tea, coffee, cinchona, &c., and the cultivation of jute have added within the last 25 years some L30,000,000 a year to the value of Indian exports. Jute alone covers the whole of the so-called "drain."

The fact, nevertheless, cannot be denied, though it is an unpleasant admission, that a large proportion of the immense agricultural population of India have remained miserably poor. Indian, politicians ascribe this poverty to the crushing burden of the land revenue collected by Government—a burden which has been shown to work out only to about 1s. 8d. per acre of crop and is being steadily reduced in relation to the gross revenue of the country—but they say nothing about the exactions of the native landlord, who has, for instance in Bengal, monopolized at the expense of the peasantry almost the whole benefit of the Permanent Settlement. Some very significant facts with regard to rayatwari landlords were brought out in a debate this year in the Legislative Council of Madras, when Mr. Atkinson, in reply to one of his Hindu colleagues who had been denouncing the Government assessments in certain villages, produced an overwhelming array of figures to show that in those very villages the rents exacted by native landlords varied between eight and eleven times the amount which they paid to Government. Nor do Indian politicians say much about the native moneylender, who is far more responsible than the tax-gatherer for the poverty of the peasant. Still less do they say about the extravagance of native customs, partly religious and partly social, which makes the peasant an easy prey to the moneylender, to whom he is too often driven when he has a child to marry or a parent to bury or a Brahman to entertain. Indebtedness is the great curse of Indian agriculture, and the peasant's chief necessity is cheap credit obtained on a system that will not cause him to sink deeper into the mire. Here again it is not Indian politicians, but the British rulers of India who have found a solution, and it is of such importance and promise that it deserves more than mere passing mention.

It has been found in the adaptation to Indian requirements of the well-known Raffeisen system. Sir William Wedderburn was, I believe, actually the earliest advocate of this movement, but the first practical experiments were made in Madras as a result of exhaustive investigation by Sir Frederick Nicholson and in the United Provinces when Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell was Lieutenant-Governor, and one of the many measures passed by Lord Curzon for the benefit of the humbler classes in India, with little or no support from the politicians and often in despite of their vehement opposition, whilst Nationalist newspapers jeered at "a scheme for extracting money from wealthy natives in order that Government might make a show of benevolence at other people's expense," was an Act giving legal sanction to the operations of a system of co-operative banks and credit societies. It found a healthy basis ready made in the Indian village system, and though it would never have succeeded without the informing energy and integrity of "sun-dried bureaucrats" and the countenance given to it by Government, it has had the cordial support of many capable native gentlemen. It is now only eight years old, but it has begun to spread with amazing rapidity. The report of the Calcutta Conference of Registrars last winter showed that the number of societies of all kinds had risen from 1,357 in the preceding year to 2,008, and their aggregate working capital from 44 lakhs to nearly 81 (one lakh or Rs.100,000=L6,666). The new movement is, of course, still only in its infancy, but it is full of promise. The moneylender, who was at first bitterly hostile, is beginning to realize that by providing capital for the co-operative banks he can get, on the whole, an adequate return with much better security for his money than in the old days of great gains and, also, great losses. One of the healthiest features is that, notwithstanding the great expansion of the system, during the last twelve months, the additional working capital required was mainly provided by private individuals and only a very small amount by Government. Another hopeful feature is that the money saved to the peasant by the lower interest he has to pay on his debts pending repayment is now going into modern machinery and improved methods of agriculture. The new system appeals most strongly to poor and heavily indebted villages, and in the Punjab, where the results are really remarkable, especially in some of the backward Mahomedan districts, it is hoped, that within a few years nearly half the peasant indebtedness, estimated at 25 to 30 millions sterling, will have been wiped off.

Practical education is, however, as urgently needed for Indian agriculture as for any other form of Indian industry. The selection of land and of seeds, the use of suitable manures, an intelligent rotation of crops, the adoption of better methods and less antiquated implements can only be brought about by practical education, and the demand for it is one that Government will hear put forward with growing insistency by the new Councils on which Indian landowners have been wisely granted the special representation that the agricultural interests of India so abundantly deserve.

It was the "sun-dried bureaucrat" again who in regard to Indian industries as well as to Indian agriculture preached and practised sound Swadeshi before the word had ever been brought into vogue by the Indian politician. The veteran Sir George Birdwood, Sir George Watt, Sir Edward Buck, and many others have stood forth for years as the champions of Indian art and Indian home industries. As far back as 1883, a Resolution was passed by Government expressing its desire "to give the utmost encouragement to every effort to substitute for articles now obtained from Europe articles of bona fide local manufacture or indigenous origin." In 1886, a special Economic Department was created to keep up the elaborate survey of the economic products of India which Sir George Watt had just completed under State direction. But the most important administrative measure was the creation under Lord Curzon of a separate portfolio of Commerce and Industry in the Government of India, to which a civilian, Sir John Hewett, was appointed with very conspicuous success. It was also under Lord Curzon that the most vigorous impulse was given to technical education of which the claims had already been advocated by many distinguished Anglo-Indian officials, such as Sir Antony MacDonnell and Sir Auckland Colvin. The results of an exhaustive inquiry conducted throughout India by a Committee of carefully selected officers were embodied in the Educational Resolution of 1904. Particular stress was laid upon the importance of industrial, commercial, and art and craft schools as the preparatory stages of technical education, for which, in its higher forms, provision had already been made in such institutions as the engineering colleges at Sibpur, Rurki, Jubbulpore, and Madras, the College of Science at Poona, and the Technical Institute of Bombay. Until then the record of technical schools had too often resembled the description which Mr. Butler, the new Minister of Education, tersely gave of that of the Lucknow Industrial School—"a record of inconstant purpose with breaks of unconcern." Not only did the question of technical education receive more systematic treatment, but a special assignment of Rs.244,000 a year was made in 1905 by the Government of India in aid of the provincial revenues for its improvement and extension. It was not, however, until the liberality of the late Mr. J.N. Tata and his sons, one of the best known Parsee families of Bombay, recently placed a considerable income for the purpose at the disposal of Government that steps have been taken to establish an "Indian Institute of Science" worthy of the name, to which the Mysore Government, who have given a site for it in Bangalore, as well as the Government of India, have promised handsome financial assistance.

Whilst the encouragement given to Indian technical education has until quite lately proceeded far more from the British rulers of India than from any native quarter, it has been also until quite lately British capital and British enterprise that have contributed mostly to the development of Indian industry and commerce. The amount of British capital invested in India for its commercial and industrial development has been estimated at L350,000,000, and this capital incidentally furnishes employment for large numbers of Indians. Half a million are employed, on the railways alone. Another half million work on the tea estates. The Bombay and Ahmedabad cotton mills represent at the present day the only important and successful application of Indian capital and Indian enterprise to industrial development. The woollen, cotton, and leather industries of Cawnpore, which has become one of the chief manufacturing centres of India, and the great jute industry of Bengal were promoted almost exclusively by British, and not by indigenous effort. Real Swadeshi, stimulated by British teaching and by British enterprise, was thus already in full swing when the Indian politician took up the cry and too often perverted it to criminal purposes, and, though he may have helped to rouse his sluggish fellow countrymen to healthy as well as to mischievous activity, it may be doubted whether any good he has done has not been more than counterbalanced by the injurious effect upon capital of a violent and often openly seditious agitation. Mr. Gokhale himself seems to have awakened to this danger, when in an eloquent speech delivered by him at Lucknow, in support of Swadeshi in 1907, he protested, rather late in the day, against the "narrow, exclusive, and intolerant spirit" in which some advocates of the cause were seeking to promote it, and laid stress upon the importance of capital as well as of enterprise and skill as an indispensable factor of success. British investments are large, but not so large as they might and should be, and the reluctance to invest in India grows with the uneasiness caused by political unrest.

That an immense field lies open in India for industrial development need scarcely be argued. It has been explored with great knowledge and ability in a very instructive article contributed last January to the Asiatic Quarterly Review by Mr. A.C. Chatterjee, an Indian member of the Civil Service. Amongst the many instances he gives of industries clamouring for the benefits of applied science, I will quote only the treatment of oil seeds, the manufacture of paper from wood pulp and wood meal, the development of leather factories and tanneries, as well as of both vegetable and chemical dyes, the sugar industry, and metal work—all of which, if properly instructed and directed, would enable India to convert her own raw materials with profit into finished products either for home consumption or for exportation abroad. It is at least equally important for India to save her home industries, and especially her hand-weaving industry, the wholesale destruction of which under the pressure of the Lancashire power loom has thrown so many poor people on to the already over-crowded land. Here, as Mr. Chatterjee wisely remarks, combination and organization are badly needed, for "the hand industry has the greatest chances of survival when it adopts the methods of the power industry without actual resort to power machinery." The articles on the Indian industrial problem in Science Progress for April and July, by Mr. Alfred Chatterton, Director of Industries, Madras, are also worth careful attention. He remarks quite truly that her inexhaustible supplies of cheap labour are "India's greatest asset"; but he too wisely holds that the factory system of the West should only be guardedly extended and under careful precautions. The Government of India have at present under consideration important legislative measures for preventing the undue exploitation of both child and adult labour—measures which are already being denounced by the native Press as "restrictive" legislation devised by the "English cotton kings" in order to "stifle the indigenous industries of India in their infancy"!

What Government can do for the pioneering of new industries is shown by the success of the State dairies in Northern India and of Mr. Chatterton's experiments in the manufacturing of aluminium in Madras. There is an urgent demand at present for industrial research laboratories and experimental work all over India, and above all for better and more practical education. But it would seem that, in this direction, the impetus given by Lord Curzon has somewhat slackened under Lord Minto's administration, owing, doubtless, to the absorbing claims of the political situation and of political reforms.

In speaking in the Calcutta Council on a resolution for the establishment of a great Polytechnic College, the Home Member was able to point to a fairly long list of measures taken at no small cost by the State to promote technical education in all parts of India, and he rightly urged that there would be little use in creating a sort of technical University until a larger proportion of students had qualified for it by taking advantage of the more elementary courses already provided for them. His answer would, however, have been more convincing could he have shown that existing institutions are always adequately equipped and that considered schemes which have the support of the best Indian as well as of the best official opinion are not subjected to merely dilatory objections at headquarters. Three years ago, after the Naini Tal Industrial Conference, the most representative ever perhaps held in India, Sir John Hewett, who had been made Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces after having been the first to hold the new portfolio of Commerce and Industry, developed a scheme for the creation of a Technological College at Cawnpore, which met with unanimous approval. Nothing has yet been done to give effect to it, and it was not only the Indian but many of the European members, official as well as unofficial, of the Viceroy's Legislative Council who sympathized with Mr. Mudholkar's protest when he asked with some bitterness what must be the impression produced in India by the shelving of a scheme that was supported by men of local experiences by the head of the Provincial Government, and by the Government of India, because people living 6,000 miles away did not consider it to be absolutely flawless.

In one direction at any rate, India can rightly demand that Government should be left an entirely free hand—namely, in regard to the very large orders which have to be placed every year by the great spending departments. It has now been laid down by the Secretary of State that Indian industry should supply the needs of Government in respect of all articles that are, in whole or in part, locally manufactured. But Indian industry would be able to supply much more if the Government of India were in a position to give it more assured support. The case of the Bengal Iron and Steel Company has been quoted to me, which was compelled to close down its steel works and to reduce the number of its iron furnaces in blast from four to two because the promises of support received from Government when the company took over the works proved to be largely and quite inexcusably illusory. For works of this kind cannot be run at present in India unless they can depend upon the hearty support of Government, which, through the Railways and Public Works Department, is the main, and, indeed, the only, consumer on a large scale.

At the present moment, Messrs. Tata are making a truly gigantic endeavour to acclimatize the iron and steel industry in India by the erection of immense works at Sakti in Bengal, where they have within easy reach a practically unlimited supply of the four necessary raw materials iron ore, coking coal, flux, and manganese ore. To utilize these, plant is being set up of a yearly capacity of 120,000 tons of foundry iron, rails, shapes, and merchant bars, and plans have been drawn out for an industrial city of 20,000 inhabitants. The enterprise is entirely in Indian hands with an initial share capital of L1,545,000 administered by an Indian board of directors, who have engaged American experts to organize the works. Government has granted various railway facilities to the company and has placed with them an order for 200,000 tons of rails for periodical delivery. Upon the future of these works will probably depend for many years to come the success of the metallurgical and other kindred industries of India, and it is to be hoped that Government will be allowed to give them all reasonable assistance without interference from home. Another purely Indian enterprise—also under the auspices of Messrs. Tata—is a great scheme for catching the rainfall of the Western Ghats and creating a hydro-electric supply of power which will, amongst other uses, drive most of the Bombay mills.

In regard to minor Indian industries, hints have, I am assured, too frequently been sent out from England that the claims of British industry to Government support must not be forgotten. Even now no change has been made in the regulations which compel the Government of India to purchase all articles not wholly or partly manufactured in India through the Stores Department of the India Office. The delay thus caused in itself represents a serious loss, for it appears to take an average of nine months for any order through that Department to be carried out, and further delays arise whenever some modification in the original indent is required. Nowadays merchants in India keep for ordinary purposes of trade such large collections of samples that in nine cases out of ten Government Departments could settle at once upon what they want and their orders would be carried out both more quickly and more cheaply. The maintenance of these antiquated regulations, which are very injurious to Indian trade, is attributed by Indians mainly to the influence of powerful vested interests in England.

The time would also seem to, have arrived when, with the development of Indian trade and industry, private contracts might with advantage be substituted for the more expensive and slower activities of the Public Works Department. Work done by that Department is bound to be more expensive, for its enormous establishment has to be maintained on the same footing whether financial conditions allow or do not allow Government to embark on large public works expenditure, and when they do not, the proportion of establishment charges to the actual cost of works is ruinous. When the Calcutta Port Trust and other institutions of the same character put out to contract immense works running every year into millions, why, it is asked, should not Government do the same? Some works like irrigation works may properly be reserved for the Public Works Department, but to mobilize the Department whenever a bungalow has to be built or a road made by Government, is surely ridiculous.

Indian opinion is at present just in the mood when reasonable concessions of this kind would make an excellent impression; and, if they are not made spontaneously, the enlarged Indian Councils will soon exert pressure to obtain them.



CHAPTER XXIII.

THE FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND GREAT BRITAIN.

When Lord Morley introduced his Indian reforms scheme, a section at least of the party to which he belongs supported it not only on general grounds, but more especially in the belief that it would strengthen the hands of the Imperial Government in dealing with the hide-bound officialism of which the Government of India is in the eyes of some British Radicals the visible embodiment. None of them, probably, anticipated that the boot would be on the other leg. If the Government of India have sometimes sacrificed Indian interests to British interests, it has been almost exclusively in connexion with the financial and fiscal relations between the two countries, and often against the better judgment and sense of justice of Anglo-Indian officials. In this respect the enlarged Indian Councils will lend far greater weight than in the past to any representations which the Government of India may make at Whitehall.

Even in the course of its first session at Calcutta the Imperial Council has given abundant indications of its attitude. In the Budget debate, Sir Vithaldas Thackersey, one of the Indian elected members from Bombay, remarked very pointedly that "there is an impression abroad that, in deciding most important questions of economic and financial policy, the Government are obliged to be guided by political exigencies." Official secrets have a way of leaking out in India, and Sir Vithaldas knew what he was talking about when he added with regard to the Budget under discussion—"It is generally believed that, if the Government of India had had a freer hand, they would have preferred the raising of the general tariff or a duty on sugar, which would have been less objectionable than the levying of the proposed enhanced duties in the teeth of the practically unanimous opposition of the non-official members of this Council and of the public generally".

It is certainly unfortunate that on the first occasion on which the Government of India had to lay a financial statement before the enlarged Council, Indian members should have come to the conclusion that the unpopular Budget submitted to them was not the one originally proposed by the Indian Finance Department, but that it had been imposed upon that Department by the Secretary of State in deference to the exigencies of British party politics. Equally unfortunate is it that the financial difficulties which this Budget had to meet were mainly due to the loss of revenue on opium in consequence of the arrangements made by Great Britain with China, in which Indian interests had received very scant consideration. Not only had Sir Edward Baker, when he was Finance Minister three years ago, given an assurance that the new opium policy would be carried out without any resort to extra taxation, but there is a strong feeling in India that the praiseworthy motives which have induced the Imperial Government to come to terms with China on the subject of the opium trade would be still more creditable to the British people had not the Indian taxpayer been left, with his fellow-sufferers in Hong-Kong and Singapore, to bear the whole cost of British moral rectitude. The Imperial Council did not confine itself, either, to criticism of what had happened. Sir Vithaldas Thackersey had probably every Indian and many official members with him when he made the following very clear intimation as to the future:—"We are prepared to bear our burdens, and all that we ask is that the country should be allowed greater freedom in choosing the methods of raising revenue. I am unable to see how it will be injurious to the interests of Government if this Council is allowed a more real share as regards what articles shall be taxed and what duties shall be paid."

It is upon such questions as these that the voice of the enlarged Councils will in future cause much more frequent embarrassment to the Imperial Government than to the Government of India, and I shall be much surprised if they have not to listen to it in regard to various "home charges" with which the Government of India have from time to time very reluctantly agreed to burden Indian finance at the bidding of Whitehall. The Indian Nationalist Press has not been alone in describing the recent imposition on the Indian taxpayer of a capitation allowance amounting to L300,000 a year to meet the increased cost of the British soldier as "the renewed attempt of a rapacious War Office to raid the helpless Indian Treasury," and even the increase in the pay of the native soldier, which Lord Kitchener obtained for him, does not prevent him and his friends from drawing their own comparison between the squalor of the quarters in which he is still housed and the relatively luxurious barracks built for Tommy Atkins under Lord Kitchener's administration at the expense of the Indian taxpayer. It is no secret that the Government of India have also frequently remonstrated in vain when India has been charged full measure and overflowing in respect of military operations in which the part borne by her has been governed less by her own direct interests than by the necessity of making up with the help of Indian contingents the deficiencies of our military organization at home. It was no Indian politician but the Government of India who expressed the opinion that:—

The Imperial Government keeps in India and quarters upon the revenues of that country as large a portion of its army as it thinks can possibly be required to maintain its dominion there; that it habitually treats that army as a reserve force available for Imperial purposes; that it has uniformly detached European regiments from the garrison of India to take part in Imperial wars whenever it has been found necessary or convenient to do so; and, more than this, that it has drawn not less freely upon the native army of India, towards the maintenance of which it contributes nothing, to aid in contests outside of India with which the Indian Government has had little or no concern.

All these are, however, but secondary issues to the much larger one which the creation of the new Councils must tend to bring to the front with all the force of the increased weight given to them by the recent reforms. For that issue will raise the whole principle of our fiscal relations with India, if it results in a demand for the protection of Indian industries against the competition of imported manufactures by an autonomous tariff. It must be remembered that the desire for Protection is no new thing in India. Whether we like it or not, whether we be Free Traders or Tariff Reformers, we have to reckon with the fact that almost every Indian is a Protectionist at heart, whatever he may be in theory. The Indian National Congress has hitherto fought shy of making Protection a prominent plank of its platform, lest it should offend its political friends in England. Yet as far back as 1902 a politician as careful as Mr. Surendranath Banerjee to avoid in his public utterances anything that might alienate British Radicalism, declared in his inaugural address at the 18th session of the Congress that "if we had a potential voice in the government of our own country there would be no question as to what policy we should follow. We would unhesitatingly adopt a policy of Protection." This note has been accentuated since the political campaign in favour of militant Swadeshism, and when English Radicals sympathize with the Swadeshi boycott as a protest against the Partition of Bengal, they would do well to recollect that, before Indian audiences, the most violent forms of Swadeshi are constantly defended on the ground that British industrial greed, of which Free Trade is alleged to be the highest expression, has left no other weapons to India for the defence of her material interests. Mr. Lala Lajpat Rai, who has the merit of often speaking with great frankness, addressed himself once in the following terms to "those estimable gentlemen in India who believe in the righteousness of the British nation as represented by the electors of Great Britain and Ireland, and who are afraid of offending them by the boycott of English-made goods":

If there are any two classes into which the British nation can roughly be divided they are either manufacturers or the working men. Both are interested in keeping the Indian market open for the sale and consumption of their manufactures. They are said to be the only friends to whom we can appeal against the injustice of the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy. Offend them, we are told, and you are undone. You lose the good will of the only classes who can help you and who are prepared to listen to your grievances. But, boycott or no boycott, any movement calculated to increase the manufacturing power of India is likely to incur the displeasure of the British elector. He is a very well-educated animal, a keen man of business, who can at once see through things likely to affect his pocket, however cleverly they may be put or arranged by those who hold an interest which is really adverse to his. He is not likely to be hoodwinked by the cry of Swadeshi minus the boycott, because, really speaking, if effectively worked and organized, both are one and the same thing.

That Swadeshi as understood by educated Indians of all classes and of all political complexions means in some form or other Protection was made clear even in the Imperial Council. The Finance Member, Sir Fleetwood Wilson, was himself fain to pay homage to it, but his sympathy did not disarm Mr. Chitnavis, an Indian member whose speech deserves to be recorded, as it embodied the opinions entertained by 99 out of every 1,000 Indians who are interested in economic questions and by a very large number of Anglo-Indians, both official and non-official:—

The country must be grateful to him [the Finance Member] for his sympathetic attitude towards Indian industries. "I think Swadeshi is good, and if the outcome of the changes I have laid before the Council result in some encouragement of Indian industries, I for one shall not regret it." For a Finance Minister to say even so much is not a small thing in the present state of India's dependence upon the most pronounced and determined Free Trade country in the world.... At the same time we regret the absence of fiscal autonomy for India and the limitations under which this Government has to frame its industrial policy. We regret that Government cannot give the country a protective tariff forthwith. However excellent Free Trade may be for a country in an advanced stage of industrial development, it must be conceded that Protection is necessary for the success and development of infant industries. Even pronounced protagonists of Free Trade do not view this idea with disfavour. That Indian manufacturing industry is in its infancy does not admit of controversy. Why should not India, then, claim special protection for her undeveloped industry? Even countries remarkable for their industrial enterprise and excellence protect their industries. The United States and Germany are decidedly Protectionist. The British Colonies have protective tariffs... protective in purpose, scope, and effect. They are not like the Indian import duties, levied for revenue purposes. The Indian appeal for Protection cannot in the circumstances be unreasonable. The development of the industries is a matter of great moment to the Empire, and the popular leanings towards Protectionism ought to engage the sympathy of Government. The imposition of import duties for revenue purposes is sanctioned by precedent and principle alike. ... And yet for a small import duty of 3-1/2 per cent, upon cotton goods a countervailing Excise duty upon home manufactures is imposed in disregard of Indian public opinion, and the latest pronouncement of the Secretary of State has dispelled all expectations of the righting of this wrong.

No measure has done greater injury to the cause of Free Trade in India or more permanent discredit to British rule than this Excise duty on Indian manufactured cotton, for none has done more to undermine Indian faith in the principles of justice upon which British rule claims, and, on the whole, most legitimately claims, to be based. In obedience to British Free Trade principles, all import duties were finally abolished in India at the beginning of the eighties, except on liquors and on salt, which were subject to an internal Excise duty. In 1894, however, the Government of India were compelled by financial stress to revive the greater part of the old 5 per cent tariff on imports, excluding cottons, until the end of the year when cottons were included and under pressure from England. Lord Elgin's Government had to agree to levy a countervailing Excise duty of 5 per cent on cotton fabrics manufactured in Indian power mills. After a good deal of heated correspondence the Government of India were induced in February, 1896, to reduce the duty on cotton manufactured goods imported from abroad to 3-1/2 per cent., with the same reduction of the Indian Excise duty, whilst cotton yarns were altogether freed from duty. This arrangement is still in force.

Rightly or wrongly, every Indian believes that the Excise duty was imposed upon India for the selfish benefit of the British cotton manufacturer and under the pressure of British party politics. He believes, as was once sarcastically remarked by an Indian member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council, that, so long as Lancashire sends 60 members to Westminster, the British Government will always have 60 reasons for maintaining the Excise duty. To the English argument that the duty is "only a small one" the Indian reply is that, according to the results of an elaborate statistical inquiry conducted at the instance of the late Mr. Jamsetjee N. Tata, a 3-1/2 per cent Excise duty on cotton cloth is equivalent to a 7 per cent duty on capital invested in weaving under Indian conditions. The profits are very fluctuating and the depreciation of plant is considerable. Equally fallacious is another argument that the duty is in reality paid by Englishmen. The capital engaged in the Indian cotton industry is, it is contended, not British, but almost exclusively Indian, and a large proportion is held by not over-affluent Indian shareholders.

There is nothing to choose between the records of the two great political parties at home in their treatment of England's financial and fiscal relations with India, and English Tariff Reformers have as a rule shown little more disposition than English Free Traders to study Indian interests. In fact, until Mr. M. de P. Webb, a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, published under the title of "India and the Empire" an able exposition of the Tariff problem in relation to India, very few Tariff Reformers seemed even to take India into account in their schemes of Imperial preference. I hope, therefore, to be absolved from all suspicion of party bias in drawing attention to a question which is, I believe, destined to play in the near future a most important—perhaps even a determining—part in the relations of India to the British Empire.

One of the first things that struck me on my return to India this year—and struck me most forcibly—was the universality and vehemence of the demand for a new economic policy directed with energy and system to the expansion of Indian trade and industry. It is a demand with which the great majority of Anglo-Indian officials are in full sympathy, and it is in fact largely the outcome of their own efforts to stimulate Indian interest in the question. There is very little doubt that the Government of India would be disposed to respond to it speedily and heartily on the lines I have already briefly indicated. Will the Imperial Government and the British democracy lend them a helping hand or even leave a free hand to them? If not, we shall assuredly find ourselves confronted with an equally universal and vehement demand for Protection pure and simple by the erection of an Indian Tariff wall against the competition of imported manufactures. I need hardly point out how the rejection of such a demand would be exploited by the political agitator or how it would rally to the side of active disaffection some of the most conservative and influential classes in India. For if, as those Englishmen who claim a monopoly of sympathy with the people of India are continually preaching, we must be prepared to sacrifice administrative efficiency to sympathy, how could we shelter ourselves on an economic issue behind theories of the greater economic efficiency of Free Trade? If we are to try "to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas"—a principle with which I humbly but fully agree—how could we justify the refusal to India, of the fiscal autonomy for which there is a far more widespread and genuine demand than for political autonomy?