VII

ENGLAND AND INDIA[2]

IT has been my lot for almost eighteen years to spend the greater part of my time in India, and perhaps it is because of that long dwelling in an eastern land, and of a very keen and lively sympathy with eastern thought and eastern ways - it is probably because of that that the Executive of your Society asked me to speak on this occasion on England and India. May I preface what I have to say by venturing to suggest that a good deal - I was going to say nonsense, but perhaps that is hardly polite - a good deal of want of sense is shown in the talk that we so often hear as to the profound difference between the eastern and the western mind, the impossibility of the Indian understanding the Englishman and the equal impossibility of the Englishman understanding the Indian? It is perfectly true that the attitude of the Indian to life and [146] thought differs very largely from the attitude of the Englishman; but that, I think, is more a question of long custom, environment, and conditions of life than of any fundamental difference of intelligence, of thought. It is sometimes said that the East is subtle, while the West is scientific. It is quite true that the average, even uneducated, Indian has a greater aptitude for abstract thought, for spirit­ual response, than the average dweller in the West; but, on the other hand, it is well that the West should understand - for I think that the error lies at the root of a great deal of the misconception between England and India - that, given similar conditions in the East, - the Indian responds to those in very much the same way as the Englishman would do, and that the lack of understanding of that Indian response to western influence lies very much at the root of much of the misunder­standing and of the unrest today. Difference of attitude towards life - yes, that certainly exists; fondness for metaphysical and abstract thinking - that, certainly, you continually find but, on the other hand, that attitude is capable of very rapid modification, when the Indian mind comes into touch with western thought and western ways. And it is very largely that response in India, apparently unexpected, which has given rise to much of the trouble, much of the discomfort, on either side, that we have met during the last few years, much [147] of what is called unrest in India, much of un­necessary anxiety as to the outcome of that unrest in England. And I want, if I can, tonight to try to put to you some of the results of long experience of life in India, living also under conditions of close friendship, of close intimacy, with a very considerable number of the Indian educated class. In order that I may make clear what I mean by saying that the attitude towards life is different when you compare the Englishman and the Indian, but that fundamentally there is not the difference that so many people talk about so largely - in order that I may not be misunderstood in that, let me preface what I have to say by a few words on the conditions of Indian life before the influence of England had spread far and wide, and especially before English education had made any way in the country.

The caste system in India, primarily intelli­gent and useful in orderly social progress, has become split up, as most of you know, during the later centuries into innumerable sub-divisions which are neither justified by nature nor useful in their working. The original division into four great castes you find in one form or another in every civilised country: the class of the thinkers, the teachers, the leaders of religious thought; the class of the law-makers, of the rulers, of the preservers of ordinary civil order; the class of the organisers of industry, the merchants, those who direct agriculture; the [148] bankers, and so on; and then the great mass that over here would be called the proletariat, the tillers of the soil, the artisans, the workers at the various arts and crafts; you have there a system of natural divisions which is only mis­chievous when it becomes too rigid, when it loses the flexibility of the elder days, and when the passage of a man from one into the other is barred not by natural but by artificial conditions. As gradually the rule passed away from Indian chieftains belonging to the Hindu faith, and the Mussulmans conquered large portions of the Indian land, you found side by side with that difference of religion comparatively little of social or civil disability; the Mussulman rulers quite wisely tried to propitiate the vast majority of their subjects of the Hindu faith; and even down to the present day the division between the Mussulman and the Hindu does not exist in Indian States as it exists under the British Government. If you go to the great territories of the Nizam in the Deccan you find there from time to time a Hindu prime minister, masses of Hindus, the majority of the subjects of that Mussulman rule, but socially, civilly, you do not find any very broad dividing lines. The same is the case when you deal with the Mussulman under a Hindu ruling Chief. It is the interest of the Chief to be friendly with the whole of his subjects, and if you go to Kashmir, where the majority of the people are Mussulman and not Hindu, but where the Maharaja is a [149] Hindu, you will find that there Mussulmans and Hindus mingle in the friendliest fashion, and that there is practically no line which divides them which gives rise to evil feeling or to bitter trouble. It is not the same in British India. It is there and there alone in India that you find growing deeper and wider this religious gulf which is splitting the nation into two, and that gulf is growing deeper and wider year after year; so that men today who will tell you that their fathers were closely intimate with Mussulman families, that they took food of certain kinds together, and had much social intercourse - they will tell you that they cannot do as their fathers did, and that the social and the civil cleavage is becoming more and more distinct as years go on. Now, when you remember how long the Mussulmans had been in India, when you remember that they number a fourth of the total population, you will at once see that if an Indian nation is to grow up, Mussulman and Hindu must both learn to be Indians, and to feel that the common Indian nationhood is greater than the religious separa­tion, the religious division. Hence it is most unfortunate - so far as I myself judge in the matter, and I believe that the great bulk of educated opinion in India goes with me - it is most unfortunate that the late scheme of reform, useful and far-reaching and pregnant with self-government in India in the future­ - it is most unfortunate that that was marred by [150] the introduction of Mussulman electorates. I was going to say Mussulman and Hindu elec­torates, but the latter have no privileges and elections like those given to the Mussulmans. So that you have in India today, with the beginnings of self-government, a religious cleav­age, which is as though you went back for a century in England, and divided off your Roman Catholics and your Protestants into two opposite camps, hostile in all political matters.

Now, the political life of India can never grow strong and healthy until an Indian thinks of himself as an Indian, rather than as either a Mussulman or a Hindu; their interests are really the same, although superficially for a moment they may seem to be divided. This most unhappy marring of a great act of justice, full of great possibilities for the future, one may hope will gradually disappear, and that the same evil road will not be further trodden by the English rulers.

Remembering that - the difference between these two communities at present - let us turn to some things that come out strongly of very considerable importance in the future work; and I will put those for a moment before taking up again the gradual change of Indian life which has landed us to some extent in the present difficulties. The fact that the Mussulman in India has exercised rule to a very large extent, that he came as an invader and re­mained as a conqueror, has given to the [151] Mussulman population one great advantage, as regards all the movements which are taking place in India today, and will take place more markedly in the future. The Mussulman has what you may call a political instinct, which the Hindu has not. You can see it coming out very strongly in the present discussion as to the founding of universities in India. The very moment the Mussulman University was proposed, the population, the Mussulman population, practically massed itself together as a unit, without troubling itself as to details, without discussing questions before they were ripe for discussion; they took up the cry of the Mussulman University as one man might take it up. But when you turn on the other hand to the Hindus, you find divided counsels: one man wants one kind and one another, all desiring to carry their own particular fancy, even though it might wreck the scheme as a whole, and long before the subject is fully be­fore the community you find the camp divided into a number of different classes; no man willing to sink his own idiosyncrasies in order that the whole of them by a rational com­promise may carry that at which they aim. And in considering the political future of India that is a very important point. The Hindus tend to divide up into small parties gathering round a particular man; there is no co-opera­tion, no tendency to combination. The lack of political power for so many centuries seems [152] practically to have eradicated that political instinct, strong in Hindus in the past, and showing itself from time to time in individual Hindus today.

Now, before coming back to the point which I shall want to carry further, let me glance at the condition which has made the Hindu mind what it is. I spoke of those four great divisions naturally existing practically every­where; but as those grew more and more rigid, and no passing from one caste to another was possible, you found classes growing up claiming privileges, and entirely forgetting the duties on which those privileges had originally rested. You find a class of learned men, profoundly learned and scholarly, the Pandit class, versed in their own classical language of Samskrit, and knowing practically nothing outside that save their own vernacular, untouched by western thought, uninfluenced by western spirit, becoming more and more a class entirely apart from the life and the movement in the country; the class that by its knowledge ought to be among the leaders of thought, but which by ignorance of modern conditions is entirely cut off from all influence over the thought-currents of the time; and yet a class which by tradi­tion, by custom, has an enormous, almost omni­potent power over the mass of the population; and, while it practically can do nothing with the educated class, it has always that vast mass of the population whom it can sway as it will, and [153] whom it is ever inclined to sway against every­thing along the lines of modern thought, un­knowing as it is of any life or thought outside its own ranks.

Then you have the peculiarity of Indian life that the learned class has always been poor. Money and learning have not gone together in the East. The glory of the learned man lay in his learning, not in his possessions, and so you have a class hereditarily apt to learn and claim­ing by long tradition the right to learn, but a class that, coming face to face with unusual conditions, finds it impossible to meet those conditions, or to gain under English rule the education to which it considers it has this hereditary right.

Now, not only is this class, the ablest, the most brilliant, the most apt to learn, largely shut out from education because of the expense which has come hand-in-hand with English education, but also, most unfortunately, they have a prejudice against almost every form of employment which is not either a learned pro­fession like the law or medicine, or government service. Accustomed for ages past to live by teaching, not being paid for teaching but being supported and teaching freely every student who came to them to learn; supported by the householders of the population, especially by the legislating and even more by the mer­chant class; considering that it was not theirs to earn, no duty of theirs to support themselves; [154] learning was their one wealth, and that they gave freely to whoever desired to ask it. The system of education has been that a boy could go to a Pandit, not only have from him teaching, but clothes, food, shelter, everything that he wanted during the time of education. And so strongly is that feeling still existing in India, that from time to time at our own Central Hindu College - where our conditions are modern, where many of the professors are paid, and where the whole arrangements are largely influenced inevitably by the English spirit - every now and then a boy will come - sometimes have walked even hundreds of miles - because he has heard that schooling is to be had there; and you have a lad coming to you asking to be taught, and if your school is full, if you can’t afford to take any more free scholars, if you have no more room in your boarding-house where you can let him live, giving him board and lodg­ing, you may explain the whole truth to him over and over again, and when you have finished your elaborate statement of the impossibility, he will only turn to you, as he has often done to me, and say: “But, mother, I want to learn!” There you have the old view of teaching in India. Every young person who wants to learn has the right to learn, and he is not supposed to pay for the learning.

Now, when English education came to a nation that - has grown up for ages with these ideas, which fed freely the whole of its [155] teach­ing class, which expected that teaching class in return to give free education, board, lodg­ing, shelter, to everybody who came and asked for it, you will very readily understand that, with such a tradition, English methods and English education were at first unintelligible, and then to a very, very large extent caused widespread discontent. The difficulty there has been that education has become more and more costly as time has gone on; school fees, college fees, have been raised time after time. The class that most wants education finds itself largely shut out because it cannot afford to pay the fees demanded in the school and in the college; and so you have a class which naturally grows discontented, desiring the learn­ing it cannot gain, and unable to turn to any means of livelihood in consequence of the old tradition and the old custom. Those who went into the English education found before them only certain narrow lines of em­ployment: Government service - that was re­garded as honourable, however poorly it was paid; the law - that, by a perversion of the old thought, was also taken up by numbers of the teaching class; and so gradually you have had overcrowded the professions of the law and of medicine and Government service. Then by an economic law which should be familiar to you here, the payment in all those avenues of employment sank lower and lower, and more and more outside were unable even to gain [156] admittance by selling the education that they had obtained at high cost.

You have there one of the causes of a very widespread discontent. The education on the whole was not well planned, well as it was meant. In the first place, it transplanted English education rather than took certain principles of education, and adapted them to the planting in a different land; educating men along lines which made only these special professions open to them, they gradually over­crowded those and yet left a discontented crowd outside.

Now, there is one phrase that is very often used over here, a very offensive one. They talk about Babus, and by that apparently is meant a clerk. It used to mean a prince, and that phrase - which is used by English­men who do not in the least know its meaning, and who repeat it one after another always in the sense of contempt - is applied to huge classes of Indian gentlemen, every one of whom feels insulted and annoyed when he hears himself called by a name like that. Indian names of honour have become names of con­tempt in the English mouth; and then that is widely re-echoed, foolishly repeated, until the natural and rightful sensitiveness of the educated man finds itself continually suffering very, very often from the unintentional insult on the part of the Englishman. You hear phrases like “Babu English”. Now, if the English of the educated [157] Indian is bad, it is the folly of the teachers to begin with, not the fault of the student, who has only learned what his teacher has taught him. You scoff because sometimes the style is inflated, when you insist on teaching your students Addison and the writers of the time of Queen Anne, and discourage their reading the popular works of the day or the ordinary newspaper, which would give them the more conversational style. To mock at them for using the English you yourselves have taught them is not a wise thing to do with a proud and high-spirited people. And may I say that, on the other side, while the Indian does not talk so loudly as the English­man, his contempt for the Englishman’s Hindustani, and Bengali, and Tamil, and Telegu, and all the rest of the vernaculars, is quite as active as any contempt that the Englishman may feel for the Indian’s English. The most ridiculous mistakes are constantly made, the most absurd phrases are continually used, and though the Indian, being polite and courteous in his ways, will not laugh out in the face of the Englishman who murders his language, still at home I have heard many a laugh and many a joke made about the murder of their mother tongues in the mouth of highly placed officials in the English service. As a matter of fact, the educated Indian as a rule - not the half-educated, but the educated Indian gentle­man - talks very much purer and better English than the average Englishman talks. He does [158] not talk slang; he does not pick up all the fashionable clippings which happen to be the mode at the moment; he talks a pure classical, uninflated English; and if you have ever been fortunate enough to hear an Indian orator eloquent in your mother tongue, which is not his, then you will understand something of the ability at which ignorant writers so often scoff; for you will hear your tongue talked with a purity and a beauty that might very well, if transplanted into the English Parliament, make its debates rather less dreary to listen to than they are at the present time.

Now, it is true that there is a very large amount of discontent in India, but it is very largely a righteous and hopeful discontent, and how has it arisen? English people have gone there, and they have practically said to the Indian people: “See what a fine people we are! see how prosperous we are! see how wealthy we are! see how we are very much grander than you! Why don’t you take example by us?” You have taught them history, including the cutting off of the head of Charles I. You have held up your Constitution to them, with all the cant phrases about taxation without representation being robbery, and the rest of it; you have trained the boys in the most plastic time of their life in the idea that English liberty, English constitutionalism, English ways, and English government are the model for the whole civilised world. Well, you have taught [159] them that now for a very large number of years, and they have quite naturally turned round and said to you: “Very well, if it is so good for you, why should it not be also good for us? If these things have made you so magnificent a people, may not we have a few crumbs of the same bread, so that we also in return may grow more magnificent than we are?” They have simply echoed what their teachers have taught them, and when they came and asked for representation, for a small share in the government of their own country, when they asked that the executive posts should be thrown open to them as well as the judicial, when they asked that they should be allowed to take some effective interest in public affairs, and that their voices should be heard, then the Englishman suddenly jumps up and says: “Revolt, rebellion, anarchy”, and all the words that frighten the people at home; and it is not known how exaggerated they are when they have sounded over ocean and land to strike the English ear. Now, there is nobody more moderate really in his demands than the ordinary Indian Nationalist. There are some extremists, granted; but the great mistake that was made over there for a long time was to mass together as one party those who were literally anarchists and those who only demanded some small measure of constitutional reform. It was not until Lord Minto came, until he refused to be frightened by the bomb-throwing [160] into putting off the small measure of justice which was granted, it was not until he made it possible for the nationalist party to separate itself from the anarchical - it was not until then that it was seen how small was the real party of revolt. But the original discontent is one which ought to be understood over here and sympathised with, for it is the desire of a great and intellectual people to realise their own nationality and to feel that they are not strangers on their own soil. Remember that in India it is you who have made an Indian nation possible. There was no nation in India before England went there - only a number of warring States, one at the top today and another at the top tomorrow; there was no Indian nation, there was no common language, there was no common people. But now, gradually and slowly, the sense of Indian nationality is rising, and you cannot stop it; the English language has become a common tongue in India, so that men in the north in the Panjab, who could not talk with men in the south in Mysore, because the vernaculars are utterly different, meet today in congresses and in conferences, and the English tongue is the common language in which they all understand each other. And that fact of a common tongue is doing much towards building a common nationality, for only when men can freely ex­change their thoughts is it possible that they shall build themselves into a united nation. [161]

And then, in addition to that, the very fact that you imposed peace upon a number of warring States made the arising of the feeling of nationality gradually certain. When people are very busy fighting the one against the other, they think of their enmities, not of common objects. Among the many rulers of India there was none, save perhaps the great Akbar, who realised the possibility of a united India, and tried to lay the foundations of it. Such an India might have been builded if his successors had been as great as he was himself, but the feeling of provincialism in India is very strong. We have found it in our own Central Hindu College, where boys come from every Indian province. For a very considerable time there was much antagonism between the Bengali boys, the Up-­Country boys, and the Panjabi boys, and the rest. For years we have laboured to make the boys feel that they are Indians rather than dwellers in a particular province; and gradually the feeling of nationality is growing, gradually the antagonisms are dying away, and, while I will not say they have absolutely disappeared, they are fast disappearing, so that we are getting Indian, not Panjabi, or Up-Country, or Bengali, or Madrasi, as the feeling at the heart of the students.

Then there came, as another cause of the unrest, the cause that lies at the root of most of the bitterness in it, the evil element - the way in which the Englishman constantly treats the

[162] Indian. You know that when the Indians come over here to England they are astonished to find what decent people the English are. When they once come amongst you and see you in your own ways, your own homes, your own country, they realise that what they have known as Englishman is something very different from what we know as thy Englishman in England. The Indians are a stately and courteous people. One Indian would not contradict another rudely; he would only make a suggestion that perhaps it might be looked at from a different point of view. The younger man will never speak roughly to the elder; he will be silent if he disagrees with what the elder has said. The whole type of the nation is aristocratic right through, not democratic. And when sometimes you send over to India, as the results of your competitive examinations, young men who have never given a single order in their lives, even to a servant, so as to learn the common courtesies of language that we use in English homes; when a young man like that - rough in his manners, and rude in his speech - is put over a large number of Indian gentlemen, stately, courteous, accustomed to respect, there is a very lively source of discontent that arises in outraged feeling and injured dignity.

Now this, of course, is not true of all. There are many civil servants there who are sympa­thetic, kindly, well-mannered, English gentle­men; but one man who is a ruffian undoes the [163] work of a thousand men who are courteous and gentle in their ways. And then there is another thing that makes a difference. An English­man will speak to an Englishman quickly and promptly; if he speaks to an Indian like that, the Indian thinks he is bullying him - misunder­standing there on the Indian’s side. One of you in a hurry will speak quite roughly to another, perhaps, as the Indian judges roughness; speak like that to the Indian, and he will think you intend to insult him, and you are doing it because you are proud of yourself. I am not a particularly rough speaker myself, but I can assure you that in India I have very, very often softened my voice more than I should do in talk­ing with English people, spoken more slowly more gently, with more circumlocution, in order to do away with the instinctive feeling of the Indian that the English person who speaks to him wants to rule and to dominate.

And there is worse than that - there is roughness, not only of speech but of blow. You have no idea over here how much of persona violence there is in India from English people to Indians. The other day a leading American professor, coming to see me, spoke of the horror he felt at the things that he had seen during fifteen minutes in Calcutta as he was standing at a hotel window looking down simply into the street. A policeman several times hit a boy with a cane, because the boy was in a block he could not get through. Two [164] men were beaten for blocking the way. A passenger pulled a cabman off his box and kicked him. What passed before, one cannot tell: the cabman may have been rude; but no Englishman would do that to an English cab­man if the English cabman were rude; but he will do it to an Indian, and there lies the difficulty. Indian servants are often struck, Indians in inferior positions are often kicked. The other day in Madras there was a case where an Englishman on a bicycle ran over and knocked down an old man, and then struck the old man for getting in his way. You do not hear much of those things over here. I met not long ago an Indian gentleman, a wealthy landowner, who, in walking past a young officer riding, had not made any salutation - why should he, as he did not know the Englishman? The Englishman got off his horse and thrashed him with a riding­-whip. These are the things that may explain to you something of the violent feeling that you occasionally hear about. What else can you expect?

I am a peace-loving person in my elder days, but I have very often said in India that part of the training in every Indian school ought to be to train the boys physically so that they shall know how to defend themselves if they are insulted or injured, because no law can change this; there is no public opinion over there strong enough to change it; the only [165] way it will stop is when the Indian learns to strike back when he is struck, and for the ordinary citizen that is quite good morality - not for the saint; but your ordinary citizen cannot be a saint, is not at the stage of evolu­tion where sainthood is possible; and it is necessary in India that the Indian should show that he will not submit to the outrages to which he is very constantly exposed. It is worse in the south than in the north, because southern people are very much gentler. A Pan­jabi would not be struck in that way, because it is known he would strike back.

When you hear all this talk about unrest and violence, you want to know, before you judge, what are the conditions under which these people live. No hearts are easier to win than the Indian heart; gratitude is given for services that do not deserve it. Any official in India who behaves with decent humanity is loved and honoured by all the people amongst whom he lives. That there are many such officials makes possible the English rule in India. There is no real difficulty in India except the difficulty there that we make for ourselves; and if England should ever lose India - and that they may be together for centuries is my hope, for I do not believe that the one can do without the other in the days to come - if England should ever lose India, it will be England’s own fault, because she does not know how to win the Indian heart. [166]

Take Lord Minto. You do not appreciate that man over here at his real value. He did more to undo the evil results of Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty than one would have imagined possible to be done in the brief space of his rule. Genial, sympathetic, kindly to all who came, not making distinction in manners between his way to an Englishman and his way to an Indian. And there are some men like that in India, high in position, though none so truly great as he; it is with the lower officials that the real difficulties arise, and not as a rule with the higher; and if you could devise same way over here of putting your younger men through a school of manners before they go out to India, you would do very much to get rid of the hatred that is often aroused by lack of thought and lack of courtesy. For as a rule they are just, they are fair, except where their own countrymen are concerned. And in the higher courts even that would be an unfair exception. In the lower magistrates’ court the complaint of an Indian against an Englishman is got rid of, as a rule; in the higher courts that is not so. The judges of the High Courts are absolutely fair even where race is concerned, and it is the English justice that is the buttress of rule in India.

One difficulty that has to be faced there is the winning of the people themselves to take part in the work which is not of the highest kind along governing lines. The municipalities, [167] for instance, are very unsatisfactory. There is there the right of popular election. The municipal councils are elected. The Collector, who is an Englishman, is the chairman of the Municipal Board, and you have the difficulty that over and over again the Indian will say ditto to the Englishman, not because he agrees with him, but because he does not like to oppose him. Oh, you say, then he is cowardly! It is a hard word to use under the conditions. In a sense, yes; but to be brave under the present conditions means to be a hero. For if you oppose the man immediately over you, all sorts of difficulties come into your daily life, in your comfort, in your ordinary goings-out and com­ings-in. To have a black mark against you in the books of an official is a very, very serious thing in India. It means very often false witness among the police; it means very often cases trumped up which ruin the man. It is very easy to call a man a coward, but you want to know the conditions amid which the man lives before you have a right to judge him from that stand­point; and while, speaking to Indians, I con­stantly say: “You must learn to state your own opinion, to hold your own ground; why should twenty men give way to one?” when I am speaking over here to the English and not to the Indians, I say that it is the English duty to see that frank speech does not mean social and commercial ruin, and that until danger of that is cleared away you must not blame the [168] silence of the Indian where it is his duty to speak.

But there is another difficulty on the Indians’ side. It is that they have not the habit of freedom. They have not been trained up as you have been for centuries and centuries, growing a little more free perhaps with the passing of every century; they are suddenly plunged into it, and they do not yet distinguish and under­stand that if a man is to be a citizen he must be willing to go through drudgery and to do the public work which means self-sacrifice, which means time and labour and thought given to subjects that do not in any way bring gain to himself. We want to persuade our Indian young men to take up the drudgery of municipal life, to understand municipal questions, and so train themselves for the higher paths of political life. They want to leap suddenly into full-fledged citizenship, and they have not yet learned its duties, although they are clamouring for its rights. But the wiser, the more thoughtful, the more educated - they are ready and eager to learn the ways and the methods of benefiting their country. You have over there a number of men of splendid intelligence, of wide sympathies, of statesmanlike ability, and if only England would take them into her counsels and treat them as friends and equals, not as inferiors, you would find their discontent very rapidly disappear; for they know that they still need England, that they are better with her than apart from her. [169]

Apart from that, the great economical question is of enormous importance in India. Very slowly and very gradually the children of the higher classes understand that there is nothing degrading in going into manufacturing and industrial life. Slowly and gradually they are realising that it is not necessary to be a lawyer or a doctor; that a man may be a manufacturer, that a man may labour with his hands, without losing cultivation, without falling in social regard. There has been a great prejudice against using one’s hands in India. It has been thought only to belong to the lower class of the population. That is beginning to die out, and if it be possible - as it is becoming possible - slowly and gradually to turn the bright brains of India along economic lines, so that they may understand, not your political economy as applied to England, but true principles of production and distribution suitable for India - if that can spread, and the movement for manufacture within their own borders could be divorced from politics and made purely eco­nomic, as it ought to be, it would do more in bringing about Indian prosperity perhaps than any one other single thing. The opposition to “Svadeshi” - which only means one’s own country, which means manufacturing what they can manufacture on their own soil - grows out of its use as a political weapon by unscrupulous anarchists. The commercial improvement of India is warmly desired by English officials in [170] India, and it is frankly admitted that in this there is very much to make India discontented. India grows cotton, exports it over to England, gets it back as cloth. If she were fairly treated economically, if she were not sacrificed to Manchester and Lancashire as she is sacrificed today, from the standpoint of manufacture, there again you would strike at one of the roots of Indian discontent which grows out of Indian poverty. Education, political freedom, economic freedom - these are the things which are wanted in India today. England can give them, and only England can give them at present, and by that win Indian hearts for many a century to come.

One point that it would be well to remember, though perhaps you will be inclined to laugh at me for that, is that in India personal attraction plays a very, very great part in the life and the thought of the people. Once before, speaking in England many, many years ago, I ventured to say that the present plan of appointing a Viceroy, changing him in five years, taking anyone whom a political party wants to reward, and sending him over to India, was not one of our ways that appealed to Indian loyalty. The Indian normally is loyal to a person, and that has been unhappily forgotten over here; a con­stantly changing Viceroy to him is very largely a chief clerk, who is just part of the government machine, and comes and goes each five years. If you sent over one of our Royal Family, you would [171] find that that would do a great deal in drawing Indian hearts toward yourself. You do not realise the power of Kingship in India, and the love of the personal Ruler. India is not yet sufficiently Anglicised, although a few of her children may be, to have lost her old belief in the divine right of Kings; and if, instead of doctrinaires, you were statesmen, you would utilise that, you would send over a Prince who would draw around him the Indian Princes, and would make the people feel that they had a Government in which their own ancient rulers were taking a part. Those Princes will not bow to a Viceroy save outwardly; in their hearts they resent the putting over them, who count generations back for thousands of years, of some Englishman of whom perhaps they never heard before. One of the things that gave most offence at the Delhi Durbar was that the Duke of Connaught had to play second fiddle to Lord Curzon. From the English standpoint, it was quite right; Lord Curzon was the representative of the Imperial Crown. From the Indian standpoint, it was all wrong; for the royal blood flowed in the Duke of Connaught’s veins, and Lord Curzon was only a nobleman. And so some of the proudest Indian Chiefs were taken very ill when the time came for the Delhi Durbar; one whom I know of, who was dragged there practically by force, had a bad fever on the day when he ought to have gone to do homage to Lord Curzon. Men who look [172] back beyond historical records to an unbroken line of Kingship have a feeling which makes it impossible for them to bow to some official of the English Government, who comes to them today and goes away a few years afterwards. You lack imagination and you lack sympathy as a nation. You think that what suits you suits anybody else. It is not so. You think that what you like other people like; and that is not true either. If you would feel India, then you could easily rule India; but you have not yet to any very great extent succeeded in doing it. There again Lord Minto did well. He asked advice of Indian Princes; he took their counsel on questions affecting themselves and their people; he made them feel that their voice had weight in the Government. And their power is greater than you know. A statesman should utilise all the peculiarities, if you will, of the people, remembering at the same time that they are changing very rapidly; but that if you do not try to Anglicise too much, if you give what you have to give, but do not impose your manners and your customs, which are not al­ways admirable, then you can make a stronger England and a stronger India, for India has very much to teach as well as very much to learn.

Our chairman spoke of the soul of India, and through that you might easily reach her people. To ignore religion in India is a blunder. There is a small party of non-religious [173] educated men there, but they are a grain of sand among the countless millions of the Indian people. To penetrate the whole of India with religious sympathy would do much towards drawing India nearer to yourselves. Not to Christianise - you will never do it; the dream of the missionary of making India Christian is a dream from which men are slowly awakening; but the great points of con­tact between the religions might be emphasised, and might be made part of the education of college and of school. I know that over here there is much feeling in favour of secular educa­tion - because you have never had it and know not its results. New Zealand has it, and her youth is a problem she has to solve - racing, gambling, lack of all control and subordination. If democracy is to live, it must be built out of citizens who know how to control themselves, and till men have learned that lesson they are not fit to be free. It is a lesson England has to learn as well as the English colonies. They are great and strong, but their youth is their least satisfactory part.

Australia has given a vote to every man or boy of twenty-one, to every woman of twenty-­one, as far as the Federal Parliament is con­cerned; but they care more about football on the one side and bonnets on the other than they care about the problems of economics and politics, on which good government must depend. Until youth has learned responsibility, youth [174] is not fit to rule. In India the idea of the train­ing of youth before it takes power is begin­ning to disappear, and it will only come back by way of religion and of scientific morality.

India has much to give you along religious lines. She can give you a scientific religion, which as yet you have hardly dreamed of. Religion over here is often blind belief or emo­tional ecstasy. Religion in India is intellectual and scientific. Indian psychology is part of Indian religion. India understands the mind and the Spirit, and knows how they can be unfolded and trained. Because East and West in that are different; because the West is concrete in her science, with a science restricted to the physical world, and India is scientific in her religion and carries her science into the realms of psychology - not much yet into the realm of physics - because of that England and India might be two halves of a single whole; each might give to each what the other lacks. India can make religion here a power to which intellect shall bow; England can teach India the science which will give material prosperity, material welfare. Either of those divorced from the other is like a man who has lost one hand. A one-armed people will never rise to the greatness of the destiny which I believe to lie before England and India united, friendly and sympathetic. You need India as much as India needs you; you can learn from India as much as India can learn from you. But the [175] first thing to realise is that you are not con­querors and conquered, but citizens of a common Empire, belonging to one imperial people. And when England recognises that in India, and India feels that she is friend and not only subject, then you will have a bulwark in the Indian people, while without that it will ever be a danger. In the time of your peril India will be your dearest friend, if you will give her sympathy, if you will let her grow into liberty today. But if you hold her back too long, if you will not listen to her reasoning, and cast scorn upon her longing to be free, then in the hour of your danger she will be your greatest enemy; and the nation that, rightly treated, would have been the bulwark of your future, will become a mine full of gunpowder under the foundations of your Empire. And the choice is yours far more than India’s. For in your hands is the power, and therefore the responsibility. [176]

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