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तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय
SANTINIKETAN
VISWA BHARATI
LIBRARY
354.2015
H21

·THE DEAD SEA APPLE
OR
THE ÆTIOLOGY OF THE "SAFEGUARDS**
BEING A VIEW OF THE PROPOSED INDIAN REFORMS
FROM A NEW ANGLE.
BY
A HARIJAN
CALCUTTA
E BOOK COMPANY LTD.
1935

·Published by
GIRINDRA NATH MITRA,
4/3B, College Sg., Calcutta.
**Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as to investigate
systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in
life."-MARCUS AURELIUS.
Re. 1/-
Printer : PRABHAT CHANDRA RAY,
SRI COURANGA PRESS,
71/1, Mirzapur St., Calcutta.

·PREFACE The writer has made an attempt, in the following pages, to follow the pragmatic method in tracing the sources of the "Safeguards" which are an outstanding feature of the proposed constitutional reforms, while he has tried, in his own humble way, to open the eyes of the present generation of his politically-minded countrymen to the impracticable and unreas asonable character of their aims. The task he has undertaken is one of unusual difficulty. A section of Indian politicians has not the slightest doubt that we are a solid, united, full-fledged nation fully qualified to take over immediately the sovereignty of India from British hands and to govern the country as an independent State. But the leaders of this section are living in dream-land. They have utterly failed, in spite of the most strenuous efforts, to secure the adherence of the majority of Moslems. They cannot, therefore, put forward a decent claim to represent all India. Moslems have proved a discordant element in building up an Indian nation. Mr. Gandhi has been baffled by this great difficulty, although as a confirmed optimist he professes to hope against hope. As a matter of cold fact his dream of Purna Swaraj could not be realized even if the Moslem community were to join him in a body, because there would still remain several large and influential bodies of Hindus and followers of other religions who would refuse to follow his lead.

·ii In the circumstances the Congress party in demanding complete independence is only crying for the moon. It is doing positive harm to the country by raising false hopes in the mind of ignorant, half-educated people and by diverting attention from urgent national work of a constructive nature. The unfortunate position of the Hindus was well understood by that fiery patriot, Pundit Motilal Nehru. He wanted a social revolution as a preliminary to a political revolution ; but he fully realized that the former was even more unthinkable than the latter. What is the position of the Hindus ? Time was when they had no Moslem in India to reckon with. Now the Moslems count for more in India than the Hindus themselves. India is as much the home of Islam as it is of Hinduism. Even the most powerful Hindu civic and political organizations have to truckle to Moslems. The influence of Moslems is fully recognized by the British Government. Lord Salisbury stated in the House of Lords in December, 1934, in connection with the Indian reforms: "The real honest truth was that the Government were anxious to conciliate Moslem opinion." It is a matter of common experience that Government has often flouted Hindu opinion but that they are meticulously scrupulous in respecting Moslem opinion. Our rulers are under no delusion as to the relative strength of the two rival communities. "None but the brave deserves the fair." A solemn warning was given to his co-religionists in 1909 by Colonel U. N. Mukerji, I.M.S., who, in a book entitled "A Dying Race" alluded to a representation made to the Secretary of State for India by the All-India Moslem League and to the Secretary of State's reply which was ·to the effect that all the demands of Mahomedans will be met with in full." Colonel Mukerji wrote: are us. We Hindus most ridiculously, most contemptibly ignorant. We have no idea about what is going on around us. ... How do the two communities stand today? The Mahomedans have a future and they believe in it-we Hindus have no conception of it. Time is with them--time is against At the end of the year they count their gains, we calculate our losses. They are growing in number, growing in strength, growing in wealth, growing in solidarity, we are crumbling to pieces. They look forward to a united Mahomedan worldwe are waiting for our extinction. The wages of sin is death. We Hindus have sinned deeply, damnably, against the laws of God and nature, and we are paying the penalty. In our treatment of our co-religionists lies the germ of our self-destruction. This is the history of the Hindus. Since the commencement of British rule another community has come into being the Christian-and has, under the fostering care of that rule, made very rapid progress and now ranks as the third biggest community in India. If the Hindus cannot hold their own against Moslems what hope can they entertain of securing equality of treatment with Christians under a Government whose State religion is Christianity? In the proposed reforms the position of the State Church has been made perfectly secure. Any condominium with a Legislature and Ministry in which the non-Christian element will predominate has been carefully, avoided. Other Christian Churches will participate in the benefit of this excellent arrangement. Some concession from a strong party to a weaker one in the direction of fair and equitable treatment might be expected in the ·iv ordinary course of nature. But this would involve a certain amount of self-denial ; and such self-denial cannot be expected from people whose religious faith places an impassable barrier between themselves and outsiders and produces the conviction that outsiders deserve no better treatment by reason of their obstinate refusal to accept the glad tidings of great joy which is offered to them. This conviction is the result of the doctrine of exclusive salvation which is the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. That doctrine prevents the free development of virtue by enabling man to find a wider range of self-denials and a truer conception of the objects on behalf of which denial should be made. The great English rationalist, Lecky, has observed with perfect truth that religions which hold the dogma of exclusive salvation are logically bound to persecute and are certain to do so when occasion serves. In England many liberal plans of reform have been wrecked, and some are still being thwarted by orthodoxy and conservatism. It is also a well-known fact that the official impact of the Church has been on the side of those in power while the Church is cultivated by the powersthat-be because it is in a position to enforce the social discipline those powers wish to impose. We find this reflected, to some extent, in the administration of India. One of the few Rationalist members of the present Parliament, Lord Snell, stated in the House of Lords in December, 1934, that his own desire was to take the risk of a generous concession and try to win India to the position of a proud and contented member of the Commonwealth of Nations. A similar sentiment no doubt prompted the noble-minded British statesmen to ·make generous promises of real self-government to India after the Great War. But they were very much out in their reckoning. British public opinion was against them and men like Mr. Winston Churchill, who understood the trend of that opinion only too well, duly sounded the warning. An endeavour has been made here to show that it has been found impossible in the past by British statesmen to give effect to the much simpler promises which were made to the people of India in 1858 as they were opposed to British public opinion ; and that it was absolutely hopeless, in the circumstances, for India to obtain anything like the substance of self-government from the British Parliament. Modern intellectual progress in the West which has resulted from research is effecting, however slowly, the disintegration of the old religious notion of separatism. Thus we are told by Dr. Burns in "An Outline of Modern Knowledge" : "The only valid modern theory of the relation of races or groups at different stages of develop- "ment is that they must be assumed to be fundamentally equal in rights and status, although at any moment one race may not have developed "to its full stature. Just as the best teacher stands "aside when the pupil is educated, so modern nations must stand aside when the other races "which they control are able to govern them- "selves. And if they are not so able, after many "years of control by others, that is a condemna- "tion of their controllers. The relation of the 66 ·v TO peoples of Asia, who are by no means primitive, "to the wealthier and powerful European peoples is already that of equals. Modern political "theory assumes that the Chinese, for example, "are not to be taken over as subjects by any "European races. The same is true of India. **Trusteeship is already inapplicable in most of “Asia, where ancient civilisations survive." But the prevailing view in the West is very different. That view rests upon absolute, unquestioning faith in a revealed, supernatural religion which assigns to its adherents a high level of superiority unattainable by followers of other religions except through its own intermediation. One of the main points dealt with in these pages is the reluctance of our rulers to treat us on terms of equality. This is the root-cause of all trouble. Lord Lawrence wrote in a letter to Captain Eastwick published fifty-two years ago in a biography of the great "Saviour of India": *The great difficulties here are between the Englishmen and the natives. It is these which will in the long run damage, if not ruin, our power." More recently, Lord Morley apprehended the same danger from the "Jingo" rule of the Man-on-the- Spot. Lord Lawrence wrote officially to the Secretary of State for India: "Our difficulties and dangers are at home ; not, I mean, at present, but in the future ; in the bad feeling between the two races, English and native. . . . If anything is done or attempted to be done to help the natives a general howl is raised which reverberates in England and finds sympathy and support there. I feel bewildered sometimes what to do." The same difficulty has been described by Lord Curzon in ·vai I. his book on "The British Government in India", from which an extract has been made in Chapter XI. The general attitude of British colonists towards native races was thus delineated by Mr. Gladstone in 1883: "Well, Sir, I have had much to do for a long "period with a series of questions, and I am not aware at this moment of any series of great "reforms which have been brought about by the 'courage and the foresight of the British Legisla- "ture in respect of any portion of this Empire “which has had the favour and support of the "resident English community. I do not remember that the abolition of slavery had the support of "those resident in the West Indian Colonies, whose 'opinions, from their experience and knowledge, "were undoubtedly of considerable weight.' Grant Allen wrote in a letter which is reproduced in the Biography of Alfred Russel Wallace: "I am afraid, the fact cannot be blinked that most Englishmen don't mind oppression, as long as the oppressed people are only blacks. A startling outrage, like the Zulu War, wakes them up for a moment, but chronic and oldstanding sores like India or Barbadoes, do not affect them." Mr. David Freeman has gone somewhat fully into the subject of colour prejudice, which is intimately connected with the matter under inquiry, in an article headed "Colour Prejudice in the British Empire" which appeared in the Contemporary Review for March, 1931. Mr. Freeman mentions the fact that the late Mr. Syed Ameer Ali, who was the first Asiatic to sit on the Judicial 9 ·viii ag a Committee of the Privy Council, was a member of the Reform Club, but could not even cross the threshold of any European Club at Calcutta. He also mentions the fact that the late Lord Sinha, who was the first Asiatic to enter the House of Lords and to be appointed Governor of an Indian Province, could never dine, even guest, at the big English Club at Bombay. Mr. Freeman wrote: "I remember hearing the wife of a well-known Assam tea-planter, a clever and charming woman, describe how Mrs. Besant, and a number of her English and Indian friends, had ignored the usual spirit of Britons in the East on a voyage to Bombay. Why,' she remarked, there was not a man on board who would not have liked to kick those Indians, when they saw them sitting on deck near an English lady. Many voyages, during more than twenty years in the Far East, have convinced me that colour prejudice is spreading in British Possessions." He further wrote: “How can the British Colonial Empire persist if it is permeated through and through by such a spirit? How can the indigenous populations, to whom Mr. Baldwin referred in his fine speech to the students of the Glasgow University, respect us? Only if, in his words, they see truth and loyalty, fair play and self-control that will be their conception of the nation ; and the nation's work in governing, controlling, and advising is to that extent made more easy instead of more difficult. The day that we cease to be worthy of that respect, that day the foundations of the Colonial Empire will crack.'" The late Mr. Montagu said in the House of Commons in the course of the Dyer debate that "an Indian is tolerable so long as he will only obey your orders" and that "if once he imbibes .

·ix the ideas of individual liberty which are dear to the British people, why, then you class him as an educated Indian and an agitator." Interviewed by the Daily Mail on his arrival in England towards the end of April, 1920, General Dyer is reported to have declared that every Englishman in India approved his act and emphasised that if he had not fired his little force would have been swept away. As to the latter statement it may be said that whatever General Dyer might have thought in the plenitude of his martial wisdom it would be an insult to the common sense of the average Englishman in India to suggest that he apprehended any real danger to the squad of well-trained and well-armed troops under a British General from a crowd of political agitators and their hordes of listeners and numerous idle sight-seers none of whom were armed with anything more dangerous than light walking sticks. The fact is that colour prejudice is the greatest obstacle towards the promotion of cordial relations between the rulers and the ruled. Let us turn to the Queen's Proclamation of 1858. Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, as Chancellor of the Calcutta University, said about it in March, 1877: "The Proclamation of the Queen contains solemn pledges spontaneously given, and founded upon the highest justice." In reply to an address of congratulation presented by the Bombay Municipality on the occasion of the Jubilee of 1887, the Queen-Empress herself said : "Allusion is made to the Proclamation issued “on the occasion of my assumption of the direct government of India as the charter of the liberties "of the Princes and Peoples of India. It has "always been and will continue to be my earnest ·X we “desire that the principles of that Proclamation "should be unswervingly maintained.' But the pledges were not redeemed. Regarding one important provision the Duke of Argyll said in the House of Lords on March 11, 1869 : "With regard, however, to the employment of ''natives in the government of their country, in the Covenanted Service, formerly of the Company “and now of the Crown, I must say that have "not fulfilled our duty, the promises and 'engagements which we have made." Writing on the same subject in the Despatch of the Government of India, May 2, 1878, Lord Lytton said: "Since I am writing confidentially, I do not "hesitate to say that both the Governments of "England and of India appear to me, up to the "present moment, unable to answer satisfactorily "the charge of having taken every means in their power of breaking to the heart the words of 'promise they had uttered to the ear. Giving evidence in 1884 before the Education Commission, Professor W. Wordsworth of Elphinstone College, Bombay, said: "The diffusion of education in India is only intelligible and defensible if the foreign rulers are prepared to admit their subjects to a larger and increasing share in the government of the country. To many Englishmen in India this idea is simply intolerable. Their imperial pride is outraged by the mere suggestion of such a policy." The need for Safeguards springs from the spirit of parochialism. Where men regard themselves, through religious conviction, as the elect of God they cannot but ..

·xi regard others as outsiders and they cannot but be vitally concerned in avoiding contamination from those outsiders and in refusing equality to them. This is where the root of the Western superiority complex lies. This superiority complex is a serious danger to the safety and well-being of mankind as a whole. Christians are taught to believe that the world was made for themselves and that non- Christians may exist only on sufferance. They learn this from the Bible which they believe to be Divinely inspired. We have referred in the text to some of these teachings. From the resulting moral blood poison in the body politic there have arisen maladies of various kinds some of which have been briefly mentioned in the following pages. Priests and theologians who teach the doctrine of the Original Sin and the inter-linked doctrine of exclusive salvation promote parochialism and encourage bellicose patriotism and war. Laymen follow in their wake. Oswald Spengler, the modern German writer, openly encourages the wilful aggressiveness of Germany by declaring that man is, and must always be, "a beast of prey". Mussolini openly avows his belief that "perpetual peace deprives and negatives all man's fundamental virtues. Only by bloody effort (according to this great Christian) can man live in the sun". This aspect of Christianity was thus noticed by a cultured pagan Roman when that religion first asserted itself in Europe : "Things were not made for man, any more than they were made for lions, or eagles, or dolphins ; is God angry on account of men, any more than on account of apes Christians are like council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dunghill croaking and squealing 'for our sake was the nor . or Aies. a ·X11 world created' ". Pantheism which teaches the theory that God is identical with All (Ekamevadwiteeam) differs widely from Christianity as the exclusionary idea is repugnant to its spirit. The Stoics, three hundred years before Christ, believed in a form of Pantheism and, as a corollary to that philosophy, they pleaded for universal brotherhood. In our own day it has been left for a small handful of rationalists and for a still smaller body of Christians who are contemptuously called Modernists by the majority of Christians in Europe and America to assert boldly that humanity is one and that war is everywhere and always wicked. The light thrown on these points in these pages will startle many to whose prepossessions they are directly opposed. An eminent English writer has observed that the greater part of the opinions of the greater part of mankind are neither more nor less than prejudgments which is only another name for prejudice. Buckle, the great English historian, has said: "We often find what are called highly educated men, the progress of whose knowledge has actually been retarded by the activity of their education. We find them burdened by prejudices, which their reading, instead of dissipating, has rendered more inveterate. For literar ture, being the depository of the thoughts of mankind, is full not only of wisdom, but also of absurdities. Even in an advanced stage of civilization there is always a tendency to prefer those parts of literature which favour ancient prejudices rather than those which oppose them ; and in cases where this tendency is strong the only effect of great learning will be to supply the materials which may corroborate old errors and confirm old superstitions." H. Bancroft has observed: "The literature of the Middle ·X111 Ages consisted chiefly of musty MSS. emanating from musty minds, devoid of thought and destitute of reason." And it was in the Middle Ages that Christianity had its heyday. We have shown in Chapter III how, since the transfer of the government from the British commercial Company to the Crown, a change has taken place in the official attitude towards religion. We have seen how Provincial Governors are lending their countenance to Missions and how Government gives financial assistance to Missionary medical and educational works which have avowedly an evangelizing purpose. It may not be generally known, but it is a fact, that in Missionary schools aided by Government the guardians of non-Christian students are obliged to sign a declaration to the following effect at the time of admission: "I have no objection to religious teaching being given to my ward on a Christian basis." This makes Christian religious teaching compulsory for non-Christians in Mission schools. In lending pecuniary aid to such schools Government cannot escape the charge of violating the principle of the following clause of the Queen's Proclamation: "Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity, and acknowledging with gratitude the solace of religion, we disclaim alike the right and desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects." Among the good tidings brought to us by the Queen's Proclamation was the assurance that creed and colour would be no bar to the employment of any of Her Majesty's subjects in Government service. We have stated in these pages how this promise of equality of treatment has been kept in practice. Many branches of the public service have been kept as close preserves for ·XIV members of the ruling race and their blood-relations the Eurasians, now known as Anglo-Indians. Thus it has been only in recent years that Indians have been given a place in the Traffic and other departments of State Railways. But a serious grievance has been made of this tardy justice and attempts are being made, in connection with the India Bill now in Parliament, to help the poor whites" in remembrance of their magnificent services in the monopoly days at the expense of the fullblooded natives. Alluding to the Indianisation of the Indian Army the late Sir Valentine Chirol referred in his book on India to the strong racial objections of British officers to being placed in the position of ever having to take orders from Indian officers." Mr. G. R. F. Tottenham, Army Secretary, stated in the Legislative Assembly on February 22, 1935, that according to the accepted policy of the Government the proportion of two to one between the European and Indian element in the I.M.S., had to be maintained. This policy clearly and openly violates both the letter and the spirit of the Queen's Proclamation. On March 6, 1935, at Patna, Mr. Sachchidananda Sinha, the Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Legislative Council, gave out the fact that when he was nominated by Lord Sinha, Governor of Bihar, as Finance Member of his Executive Council the proposal met with strong 1.C.S. opposition. Mr. Sinha, at the same time disclosed the fact that Lord Sinha had great difficulty in countering the plea of the then Secretary of State, Mr. Montagu, on whom very strong pressure was brought by the Service men. While the India Bill is passing through Parliament British I.C.S. men are actively working through the Secretary of State to ·XV our secure and improve their own position. Their interests cannot but be safeguarded. In India Government means the I.C.S. It must be conceded that in the present state of India the British element is indispensable and it deserves special consideration. The only trouble is that in conceding its demands to the full India will be reduced to the lowest depth of bankruptcy. Excessive taxation does not tend to the popularity of any government. Good government is always and everywhere associated with light taxation, with increased provision of the amenities of life, with cheap Railway fares and low Postal charges, and with an inexpensive system of justice through law-courts. During the last fifty years Government has been, in these respects, dancing the back step. To England India is indebted for many kind gifts ; but in some directions the boons have been slow in coming and have been hardly adequate in view of the greatness of England. In the Army excessive caution has been displayed by keeping Indian soldiers out of certain important branches of Military service. The Victoria Cross, a badge of distinction for gallantry on the battle-field, was instituted in 1856, but it was not till 1911 that Indian officers and soldiers were admitted to it. The blessing of English education was not conferred on India with an open heart. In an article contributed to India, the London organ of the Indian National Congress, in 1894, Mr. H. J. Reynolds, I.C.S., a Member of the Bengal Board of Revenue, wrote: “Just sixty years ago, Lord Macaulay entered an indignant protest against the argument that the spread of education in India might endanger our power. 'We will never consent,' he В ·xvi said in the House of Commons, 'to stupify and paralyze a great people whom God has committed to our charge, for the wretched purpose of rendering them more amenable to our control. What is power worth if we can hold it only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed.' The following comparative statistics on State expenditure on education were placed before the Supreme Council by the Hon'ble Mr. G. K. Gokhale in March, 1908 : Country State Expenditure on Education per head. 8. 5 4 d. 4 0 8 ... France Germany Italy Austria Netherlands India 2 4 3 0 192 ever be Sir Jagadis Bose, the great Indian scientist, said in his Allahabad University Convocation speech in 1928 : "The Government in India have still to educate themselves into the conviction that it is only by fostering knowledge and learning that their rule can broad-based upon the people's will." In 1912 a great journal like the Spectator opposed increased education in India on what the more liberal Truth described as precisely the grounds which are habitually used by the Russian techinovic." In the September (1928) number of Light for the Fighting Forces in India, Lt.-Colonel F. D. Frost, C.B.E., M.C., a retired officer of the Indian Army, writing from the religious point of view, observed that ·xvii education was doing great harm not only in India but all over the world. The Man-on-the-Spot no doubt salves his own conscience by the reflection that British statesmen, in framing the Proclamation of 1858, went much too far and that Indians have already received at his hands all that they deserve and even more. In the Middle Ages the principle was evolved in Europe that no faith should be kept with infidels and that the believer has a perennial dispensation from his God to break all vows and oaths made to infidels. We have it from Gibbon (Vol. v., p. 115) that towards the close of the sixth century the Italians were induced to invoke the aid of the Franks against the Lombards, and that the Pope encouraged the Franks "to violate without scruple their oaths and engagements to the unbelievers." A much higher standard of international morality has since been attained ; but as long as the essential distinction between believers and unbelievers is maintained to its full extent any real equality of treatment between the two classes in India cannot be hoped for. We have, in Chapter ix, alluded to the English Public Schools as the fountain-head of the superiority complex. Those schools indeed form excellent training-ground for soldiers, sailors, Colonial administrators and others who have, in the past, helped in effecting the expansion of England and at the present day, maintaining England's far-flung Empire. But England's real probelm at home is to make better men, women and children, letting all choose their own good and not having it chosen for them. Dealing with this great problem in "The Challenge to Democracy' an are, ·xviii an can a (Allen and Unwin) Dr. C. Delisle Burns, D.Litt., does not regard the influence of the Public Schools as at all helpful. He holds that the British democratic government is not democratic enough and he urges that improved educational system is necessary. It hardly be denied, writes Sir Alexander Cardew (late of the Indian Civil Service) in a review of Dr. Burns's book in the Literary Guide, that the English system of socalled "Public Schools" is a hindrance to the growth of the true democratic spirit. Elsewhere, in Europe, the resort to arbitrary forms of government (as in Italy, very religious country) is rightly regarded by Sir Alexander as a discouraging symptom representing a reversion to medieval methods. Resort to force is not, he further observes, compatible with a high stage of civilization. Mr. Stanley Baldwin has declared recently that the real aim of Government was to give to India, as a unit of the British Empire, the right amount of liberty, in the right way, at the right time. That was a right principle, rightly expressed. But the right way of going about it, for our rulers, is not to impose upon us what they think will be good for us, is not by reposing implicit faith on the advice of the Man-on-the-Spot but by carefully ascertaining the real views of Indians as to what the country needs. While due heed should be paid to British public opinion, it should be carefully borne in mind that that opinion is only a reflection of the views of the Man-on-the-Spot so far as Indian affairs are concerned. While certain special privileges should be clearly and explicitly reserved in the interests of the ruling race by virtue of their position as rulers, the views ·xix of the people of India should not be ruthlessly cast on one side. Indian opinion can be best ascertained in India. The exercise of wide powers by the bureaucracy sometimes results in administrative action to the prejudice of the weak ; and in a country where the Man-on-the- Spot cannot be and is not, adequately controlled by superior officers the results are deplorable. This point has been touched upon on p. 64. Buckle has stated in his History of Civilization that there is only one protection against the tyranny of any class : and that is to give that class very little power. Power, he holds, is always abused if much of it is conferred upon men. "The entire history of the world", he writes, "affords no instance to the contrary." The conditions prevailing in India unfortunately necessitate the conferment of extraordinary powers on the lower ranks of district officers. Buckle has instanced the case of the Scotch Kirk which (at the time when it was at the height of its power) was next only to the Spanish Inquisition in the intensity of its tyranny. In every Catholic country but France the clergy had more authority than in Protestant countries. Therefore in Catholic countries they have done more harm. It is not the writer's intention to draw up a list of grievances. His real aim is to draw attention to defects of a pronounced character which blacken the escutcheon of British Raj. As an instance showing how power is sometimes exercised by the bureaucracy allusion may be made to the indifference, amounting to callousness, to the deaths of Indians living in rural areas from wild animals and reptiles. In 1927 wild animals caused 2,285 ·are are a deaths and snakes 19,069 deaths of Indian villagers in British India. The annual toll of life is appalling. A correspondent having drawn attention to the refusal of officers of the Forest Department to issue licences to shoot tigers in certain reserved forests the Statesman wrote in July, 1925: "We think the policy of protecting beasts of prey cannot be defended. Nearly all tigers cattle-lifters and some man-eaters, and to preserve them in the interests of a few officials, including forest officers, is to entirely ignore the interests of villagers and others to whom tigers are constant menace." Villagers are not reckoned amongst the vocal sections of the Indian population, but they are not negligible as British subjects. Does the Man-on-the-Spot bother himself much about their safety and well-being? The policy adopted by the dominant school of administrators is very well indicated by the Editorial utterance made by the Statesman on August 10, 1932: "Governments have no resource in the face of anarchy but to crush the anarchists, and they must do so whatever the inconvenience and hardship to the innocent. An Englishman who is a believer in the same doctrine thus expressed himself to the Rev. C. F. Andrews : **The fact is, the only thing the East understands is force. It is because we have forgotten this that India is slipping out of our hands and Kenya also. If we were only men as we were in Nicholson's time, India would soon 'come to heel' ". (The Modern Review for February, 1924). This doctrine was put to the test by General Dyer at Amritsar in 1919 with the only clear and definite result that his "manly" action has made the administration of India a tougher job than it was ever before. A some·what practical view was expressed by the Daily Telegraph in the following passage which was quoted in the same magazine for July, 1933: “We could hold India by force in the final necessity, but an India governed in that manner would be the gravest threat to the Empire. A rebellious, or even a sullen, India would be a burden such as even our financial resources could not sustain." The words of the great Englishman, Edmund Burke, ought to carry weight: "The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment ; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again ; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered." And also the words of the eminent American, Ralph Waldo Emerson : "We foolish people still rely on force, not yet learning that force can only bring us force, as hate brings hate." Force arises from fear. The words of a great British General, Sir Hubert Gough, will bear repetition: "Fear does not make men either just or generous." In the concluding Chapter reference has been made to the action of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as head of the State Church, in urging his countrymen to raise their voice Heaven-wards for the fulfilment of the pending State measures affecting the administration of India for the good of both England and India. Reference has also been made to the action of an influential party in England anxious to frustrate those measures as being injurious to British interests in certain directions. According to an ex-M.P., who writes in the Literary Guide for April, 1935, a correspondent has suggested that the Times (in which ·Xall the Archbishop has expressed his own views) should be invited to print the following as a retaliatory prayer : Most Reverend Father in God. Cosmo Cantuar: We beseech thee to take benign and gracious note that an increasing number of Hindus, Muslims, and Britishers are openly and rationalistically abandoning thy obsolete and grovelling theology, and are trusting to human common sense and inter. national and inter-racial goodwill to construct a sound political structure of Indian self-government. We pray thee, therefore, mercifully to refrain from inflicting on us, thy long-suffering , fellow countrymen, thy well-meant but futile exhortations. Amen. While the writer has endeavoured to show that the reforms proposed to be granted by our rulers do not constitute much transfer of real self-government to the people and that they are, in some respects, distinctly retrograde, he has no doubt whatever that those Indians who are clamouring for complete independence are only a set of fuddled sentimentalists who are out to upset the existing order, such as it is, without possessing the capacity to build up and maintain anything remotely approaching it in efficiency. Men are apt to expect with certainty an issue of events favourable to themselves, when no certainty is to be had, and they are inclined to build hopes without the shadow of a reason to justify such hopes. Then, when the issue comes and their hopes turn out to be fallacies, they exclaim against the constituted order of things and fill the air with their wailings over the disappointments. The writer has no doubt as to the utter incapacity of the Hindus to assume the sovereignty of India. He has not stated his reasons but he has referred to the views of the leading political leaders amongst the Hindus ·XXi11 in support of his position. He has also, in the concluding chapter, quoted the opinion of an eminent educationist, Sir P. C. Roy, on the subject. It will be sufficient for his purpose to mention, as a clincher, the opinion of Swami Vivekananda who is undoubtedly the spiritual leader of the Hindu section of young India : "The great national sin is the neglect of the masses and that is one of the causes of our downfall. No amount of politics would be of any avail until the masses in India are once more well educated, well fed, and well cared for. They pay for our education, they build our temples, but in return they get kicks. They are practically our slaves. If we want to regenerate India, we must work for them." Vivekananda, who uttered this solemn warning, died nearly thirty-three years ago ; but the Hindus have neglected his warning and meanwhile millions of the "untouchables" (Harijans) have gone over to the camps of the Cross and the Crescent. The task indicated by him has been taken up, as the last of his experiments, by Mr. Gandhi ; but in this matter his numerous followers have not so far shown a fraction of the enthusiasm with which they had greeted his political campaign against the "Satanic Government". A really sensible and practical view has been recently expressed in the Council of State by the Hon'ble Sir Fazl-i-Husain, a Member of the Governor- General's Executive Council, who said that it was not open to Indians, pursuing constitutional methods of agitation to refuse to work the Constitution which was being enacted for them by those who have the authority to do so as long as they possess that authority. Our political leaders will do well to bear in mind the message

·XXIV
given by our gracious Sovereign at the Round Table
Conference on November 12, 1930: "I cannot doubt
that the true foundation of self-government is in the fusion
of such divergent claims into mutual obligations and in
their recognition and fulfilment. It is my hope that the
future Government of India based on this foundation will
give expression to her honourable expectations.
April 28, 1935.

·CONTENTS PAGE .. 4 ... ... ... CHAPTER 1. Broken Pledges : a Retrospect II. A Scrap of Paper III. Retrograde Measures IV. The Fate of India's Great Charter V. The Superiority Complex VI. The Spirit of Separatism VII. Sources of the Superiority Complex VIII. The "Old Adam" in Man IX. Education and the Superiority Complex X. The Moral Aspect of Colour Prejudice XI. Some Results of the Spirit of Separatism XII. Religious Sources of Separatism XIII. The “Jingo" Spirit XIV. Civilians as Judges XV. Executive Justice XVI. Some Evil Fruits XVII. About “Safeguards” XVIII. The Training of Civilians XIX. Civil Administration XX. India Under John Company XXI. Departmental Efficiency XXII. Present Conditions in India XXIII. Stern Rule in India ... XXIV. Conclusion ADDENDA ... 7 10 12 17 21 26 30 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 62 67 71 73 75 80 86 90 99 ... ... ... ... ... ...

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·THE DEAD-SEA APPLE OR THE ÆTIOLOGY OF THE “SAFEGUARDS.” I. BROKEN PLEDGES : A RETROSPECT. In order to understand the situation existing in India now, early in February, 1935, and resulting from the Government's still inchoate scheme of Constitutional Reforms it will be necessary to go back to the eventful year 1857. The Sepoy Mutiny resulted in the termination of the sovereignty of the British East India Company (popularly known as "Kampani Bahadur") and in its transference to the British Crown. Erroneous ideas are current as to the nature of the Mutiny. The general view is that it was caused by a nationality movement among the people-a movement which at last extended to the army. This is untrue. The fact is thus stated by Professor J. R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge: "The mutiny of 1857 was not of this kind. It began in the army and was regarded passively by the people ; it was provoked by definite military grievances, and not by any disaffection caused by the feeling of nationality against our Government as foreign. But now let us ask: In what way was this mutiny, when once it ·2 had broken out, put down? I am afraid that the only opinion that has ever obtained in England has been that it was crushed by the prodigious heroism of the English and their infinite superiority to the Hindus.*** The Professor goes on to say that as a matter of fact the Mutiny was, in a great measure, "put down by turning the races of India against each other." The Duke of Argyll wrote in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1906 : “We were only able to vanquish a sepoy army by the aid of gallant native troops who remained faithful to the salt'". The view of Mr. G. W. Forrest, C.I.E., formerly Director of Records to the Government of India, has been thus expressed: “We can ask ourselves now what must have happened had the Madras and Bombay Presidencies joined in the revolt—had the Sikhs taken the other side or had the Punjab frontier force proved faithless. Take the single significant fact that Allahabad with its arsenals of arms and ammunition had been left solely in charge of sepoys."+ But, unfortunately, the British people are brought up in wrong ideas as to the actual facts concerning India. They are taught that their forefathers by their prowess and under Divine guidance achieved the miracle of a conquest of a country of continental dimensions inhabited by dark races of heathens and infidels, fierce in aspect and diabolical in character. But the truth-which is not * "The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures". (London: Macmillan, 1883), P. 231. + The Saturday Westminster Gazette (1906) in review of Mr. Forrest's "History of the Indian Mutiny, reviewed and illustrated from Original Documents." a ·3 realised even at this day-was thus told by Professor Seeley more than half a century ago : And even if we should admit that the English fought better than the sepoys, and took more than their share in those achievements which both performed in common, it remains entirely incorrect to speak of the English nation as having conquered the nations of India. The nations of India have been conquered by an army of which on the average about a fifth part was English. But we not only exaggerate our own share in the achievement; we at the same time entirely misconceive and misdescribe the achievement itself. For from what race were the other four-fifths of the army drawn? From the natives of India themselves! India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners; she has rather conquered herself. Although the English people were misinformed as to the character of the Mutiny, although they were kept in ignorance of the fact that by far the greater part of the Indian peoples were unconnected with the Mutineers and of the fact that many rendered help to Europeans, the higher British statesmen of the time did not share their ignorance and thought it right, in the circumstances, to inaugurate a policy of sympathy and justice towards India. That spirit of good-will was admirably expressed in our good Queen Victoria's Proclamation of November 1, 1858. The cream of the Proclamation lay in the words : WE HOLD OURSELVES BOUND TO THE NATIVES OF OUR INDIAN TERRITORIES BY THE SAME OBLIGATIONS OF DUTY WHICH BIND US TO ALL OUR OTHER SUBJECTS. But the British residents in India have been stubborn in their unwillingness to act in this spirit of equality. They have treated the solemn document as a mere scrap of paper. Punch (July 13, 1901) had the following skit on ·4 the striking passage : "In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward :" Vox Indiae Clamantis. see near, Prosperity !-when year by year Grim poverty 1 Draw ever nearer and more Devouring all my children's gear Why, what a mockery is here Of Her benign decree ! What strength, O England, shall be thine When such prosperity is mine? Contentment !-what contentment lies In that poor slavish heart, That dumb despair, with sunken eyes, That bears its ills, and rather dies A thousand deaths than dare to rise And play a freeman's part? Ah, what security can be On such contentment based by thee? My gratitude ?-ah, empty name! Thy charitable mites But feed today the feeble frame That starves tomorrow; for the same Old wrong grows on untouched. I claim Not charity, but rights- England, what gratitude have 1? Canst find reward in apathy? II. A SCRAP OF PAPER. Advantage has been taken of a verbal safeguard in the Queen's Proclamation by the British administrators ·5 Own in India to keep Indians, however fit, from higher appointments in the Services. The point was thus mentioned by the late Lord Lytton in a letter dated April 13, 1884, to the Times : "From the date of the Queen's Proclamation, communicated to Her Majesty's Indian subjects by Lord Canning, her first Viceroy of India, down to the commencement of my Viceroyalty, no serious effort had been made by any Indian Government to give systematic and regulated effect to the principles put forth in that Proclamation respecting the employment of the natives of India in the Civil Service of the Crown." Indians are still awaiting equality of opportunity for entering the higher civil, military and other services. In the matter of education the good old Tory argument that education makes people discontented and desirous of rising above their proper station" has been used in India. Taking the Census figures of 1901 only six per centum of the entire Indian population could read and write. According to the figures of 1921 the percentage was 7:1 and according to those of 1931 it was 8. The Soviet Union has now over 90 per centum literates as against 40 per centum in 1920. Speaking at Dacca on March 6, 1925, Lord Lytton, Governor of Bengal, declared that the nationhood of Bengal could not be built up on a foundation of widespread illiteracy. He said that no money would be forthcoming for extension of education until the people agreed to tax themselves. Speaking on Indian education in London in June 1925, Sir Henry Wheeler, Governor of Bihar on leave pointed out that "whereas £11,000,000 had been spent in 1921 upon the education of 4,500,000 in London, ·6 more. : a the total expenditure upon the education of 247,000,000 people of British India was little Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the well-known statesman of South India, said in 1932: “My diagnosis is that education in this country having regard to the enormous population is pitifully meagre." In recent years the provincial Governments have found rather large sums to give to Missionary schools although those schools have sectarian aim and are avowedly maintained for the purpose of evangelization. No non-Christian School having such aim or purpose would be entitled to aid from the public funds. In another direction injustice has been done by steadily increasing the expenditure on the Ecclesiastical Establishment since the date of the Proclamation. Is the maintenance of a costly Ecclesiastical Establishment from mainly contributed by non-Christians compatible with the profession of ruling India for the benefit of the Indians ? The question of the abolition of the Establishment was raised many years ago. It was discussed in the Statesman in 1884. Archdeacon Baly defended the Establishment. The Statesman wrote on February 28, 1884 : We can understand the assertion that the ecclesiastical service, like the medical, is maintained only for the officials. The statement is made because in a polemic sense it is useful. But it is not true. Archdeacon Baly in defending the establishment, with much frankness admitted that it was maintained not for officials, but for all members of the Church of England. It is sometimes said that in India all Christian sects are treated alike, and that the English Church has no monopoly. Seeing that all the Christians taken together form but a small minority, the defence is hardly complete. revenues ·7 The tax-payers, being nearly all Hindoos and Mahomedans, complain that their money is taken to support Christian ministers whom they do not want. It is not a perfect answer to say that the Christians divide the plunder fairly among themselves. Referring to the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment cost of £200,000 the Statesman wrote on January 27, 1897 : Now, if we are sincere in our repeated declaration that we are governing India for the benefit of its people, we cannot justify the expenditure of this large sum annually upon institutions which exist for the benefit of the ruling race and of the ruling race alone. It is doubtful whether the most accomplished dialectician could show by any ingenuity of reasoning that these Ecclesiastical Establishments exist for the benefit of the people. If they do not, the conclusion is plainthey should be abolished, the sooner the better; unless we are prepared to confess that the creed we proclaim of governing India for the Indians is mere lip-service. III. RETROGRADE MEASURES. A notable departure from the previous policy followed in British India has been taken since 1858. That change has been in favour of the State Religion and has been adopted to safeguard British political interests. In taking that important step the authorities have clearly violated the spirit of equality of treatment in religious matters which was promised in the Proclamation and which had been, to a great extent, observed in practice by the Hon'ble John Company. Mr. Arthur Mayhew, C.I.E., late Director of Public Instruction, Central Provinces, has stated in in his "Christianity and the Government of India" that the Government has been gradually led to recognize the ·"inevitable need for the co-operation of missions and the possibility of ensuring this co-operation by financial assistance." At a meeting of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta held in London in 1914 shortly before the outbreak of the Great War the Bishop of Oxford disclosed the interesting fact that "instead of being jealous of religious influence the Government has determined to do its utmost to encourage it." Canon Brown said at a previous meeting which was presided over by Lord Sydenham, ex- Governor of Bombay, that the Mission was going to open a new hostel for students in Calcutta "with the munificent help of Government. On being appointed Lord Bishop of Calcutta in 1898 the Rev. Dr. J. E. C. Welldon addressed a Missionary meeting at Exeter Hall, London, on November 8, before leaving for India, and he disclosed an interesting fact. He said: "When I was asked to go to India as a Bishop, I said to the Secretary of State that unless I was allowed a free hand to encourage and support Christian missions I could not go." He only came out as the concession or liberty that he demanded was allowed to him. Provincial Governors, under the existing policy, freely support Christian missions with funds. At a meeting of the Foreign Bible Society held in Government House, Darjeeling, in 1895, Sir Charles Elliott, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, as president, made the following declaration : "We who are not missionaries, exclusively devoted to the teaching of Christianity, should at least be their auxiliaries and add our weight and impact to theirs.'

·9 Lord Meston, ex-Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, addressing a meeting of the World Evangelical Alliance in London, in April, 1929, declared : "Speaking entirely as an old administrator I honestly believe that, with the conditions as they are in India today, Christianity is the only solution for her great problems." Father Van der Schueren, S.J., the Belgian Jesuit Missionary, gave a lecture, towards the end of 1928, before the East India Association in London. The Statesman (January 9, 1929) in a leading article on the subject of this lecture stated how the pioneer missionary, Father Constantine Lievens, began work in 1885 at Torpa, in the Ranchi district and how by 1914 the mission had a consolidated aboriginal Christian congregation of 170,000. The Statesman wrote: “The lecturer referred with special gratitude to the Government of Bihar, the mercantile firms of Calcutta, and the Calcutta Turf Club. By their lavish assistance-the adjective is Father Van der Schueren's the structure was saved, (when the War threatened disaster] and after 1918 progress was resumed. . . . In short, there is an army of the Belgian Jesuit Missionaries] working for the civilization and uplift of the poor aboriginals of those uplands (of Chota Nagpur). Government has another army, of officials, organized much after the same fashion for much the same purposes. Then why should there not be closer co-operation?" A momentous change involving increased expenditure has been thus quietly carried out in spite of the solemn promises contained in the Proclamation of 1858. Indian political leaders appear to be in the dark about it. They ·10 will now realize the object in view in safeguarding the Ecclesiastical Department from popular interference through the Indianised Legislatures. Here is some kudos for Indian politicians : "To the honour of India it must be said that at no time has any determined opposition been made to expenditure by the British Government on its own religious establishment or in aid of missions' medical or educational work that has avowedly a religious purpose. IV. THE FATE OF INDIA'S GREAT CHARTER. A very different policy has been followed in the matter of conceding equality of treatment to Indians. Writing in the Nineteenth Century for August 1907 a titled Military officer voiced the opinion of the Man-onthe-Spot when he said: "The modern teaching that the native is in every way equal to the European is a dangerous theory to instil into his (the native's) mind.' This matter was earnestly taken up by Lord Reading during his Viceroyalty. The that His Excellency adopted to remove existing inequalities only partially mitigated the evil. Any far-reaching reform in this direction was impossible in the face of opposition from Europeans, both official and non-official. It was stated at the time by Professor Satis Chandra Ray, Calcutta University Professor of Economics, that Lord Reading's Viceregal pronouncement of racial equality in India would not stand the test of experience and would eventually prove impracticable. And so it has proved. measures * "Christianity and the Government of India," by Arthur Mayhew, C.I.E.

·11 The following extract from the editorial article of an Anglo-Indian paper will be read with interest : says rancour The Viceroy's speech at the Chelmsford Club, on Monday, was conceived in proper vein. Its refreshing candour is its greatest recon commendation. There is nothing in it of the meaningless bombast of a Curzon or the diplomatic twist of a Hardinge. It is a man to man talk with the people of India telling them what the Government will do in the future and what they are to do in return. Lord Reading touches the plague spot in the Indian administration when he that it is much pestered by racial inequality. It is this racial inequality which has been the greatest bane of British rule in India and at times it has been so much accentuated that the it caused had greatly clogged the administrative machinery. British "hauteur" is a by-word in India and the Indian feels it everywhere, even in the railway compartments. The Indian is a "native", he must be kept at arm's length. It is this short-sighted policy--this racial pride that has greatly annoyed the Indian and the result has been that even a "bonafide" mistake is resented and the racial question crops up at every step. The educated Indian feels it more than the uneducated and more often than not he pays the Britisher back in his own coin. And this warfare has been going on for some time past to the detriment of both parties. Jallianwallah Bagh which has burnt itself into the very skin of the Indian, is attributed directly to this ban of racial inequality. In fact, the heartless manner in which General Dyer gave evidence before the Hunter Committee has given the Indian the greatest offence, not greater certainly than the shooting itself and the Indian thinks the General could only behave like this because he had to deal with Indians. The truth appears at last to be dawning upon the British Cabinet and Lord Reading, who apparently comes well primed with instructions from that body, takes the earliest opportunity to tell both European and Indian India that racial inequality must go. The Queen's Proclamation laid that down in black and white more than sixty years ·12 ago but the promises therein made to the Indian ear have numberless times been broken to the heart.* as a a V. THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. The reasons which have led a great people like the British so to treat a solemn official declaration of policy mere scrap of paper are worth inquiring into. Briefly stated, the real explanation is to be found in the general view held by Britons that the Proclamation went too far in conceding equality of treatment to people who were very much below themselves not only in general culture but in religion. The real attitude of the British people found expression in a book entitled, "The Light of Asia" written by Mr. Harold Begbie for the Christian Literature Society for India. In this book Hinduism is described as "weltering chaos of terror, darkness and uncertainty." And the writer goes on: It is a religion without the apprehension of a moral evolution, without definite commandments, without a religious sanction in the sphere of morals, without a moral code, without a God, except a Being which is a mixture of Bachhus, Don Juan and Dick Turpin."' Opinions expressed by important Churchmen are equally pronounced. This will appear from Bishop Heber's hymn from which two quoted : What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle, Though ev'ry prospect pleases, And only man is vile; famous verses are * The Indian Daily News, June 2, 1921. + Quoted by Sir John Woodroffe in "Is Ir Jia Civilized ?"

·13 In vain with lavish kindness, The gifts of God are strown, The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone. This is a very popular hymn and we are told by Mr. Arthur Mayhew, C.I.E., formerly Director of Public Instruction, C.P., that it "gained much money and support for the cause. The Rev. R. E. Lee, Minister of the Church of Scotland, stated in a letter to an Indian paper in November, 1933, that the first verse has been omitted in the latest edition of "The Church Hymnary" used by the Church of Scotland and six other Presbyterian Churches. The verse presented presented some practical difficulty in the task of converting the educated heathen. The Rev. Dr. Alexander Duff, the great Missionary, in a speech delivered in Exeter Hall, London, denounced those who wrote sentimentally of India and its Fields of paradise and bowers Entwining amaranthine flowers a and he went on to draw his own picture of heathen India : "Above, the spiritual gloom of a gathering tempest, relieved only by the lightning glance of the Almighty's indignation-around, moral wilderness where light dies and only death lives and underneath, one vast catacomb of immortal souls perishing for lack of knowledge." Pious Christians have no doubt that aboriginal tribes who listen to their teachings and accept their religion more readily than the Hindus occupy a higher moral ·14 to remotest level than the latter. It was stated in the Report of the German Lutheran Mission in Chota Nagpur for 1869 : The Kols, a people gifted by nature, in the possession of many beautiful reminiscences belonging the period of mankind, monotheistic in their religious tendencies, had gradually deteriorated during the last centuries under the rule of their Hindu masters into devil-worshippers, and had sunk entirely under the baneful influence of drink. They could not hold their own against the invading Hindu, and their society as well as religion became more and more tainted by Hinduistic principles, which could not but end in their becoming one of the lowest Hindu castes, although they were once the proud aborigines of the land. Such being the religious conviction of pious Christians it cannot be expected for a moment that they, as men possessing the light of Divine knowledge, should regard vile men living in the gloom of spiritual ignorance as their equals. Herein lies the secret of the fact that physical force is in the ascendant in the dealings of the Christian nations of the West with non-Christian peoples and that moral force is in abeyance. This is a matter which calls for closer examination. We read a good deal of the spread of Christian enlightenment in the countries of Africa. But to have a true account of the dealings of the white man with the black natives of that continent one should refer to a book like the late Mr. E. D. Morel's "The Black Man's Burden" published in 1920 by the National Labour Press of Manchester. In this book Mr. Morel has shown the sufferings which Europe has inflicted upon Africa. Alluding to the superiority claimed by Europeans in subduing immense populations of coloured people and in fighting against heavy odds Mr. Morel observes :

·15 "Conceding every credit to force of character, innate in the white imperial peoples, which has enabled, and enables, a handful of white men to control extensive communities of non-white peoples by moral suasion, is it not mere hypocrisy to conceal from ourselves that we have extended our subjugating march from hemisphere to hemisphere because of our superior armament?" A few extracts from the book may be useful : In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white man has massacred the African in heaps. The African has survived, and it is well for the white settlers that he has. In the process of imposing his political dominion over the African, the white man has carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Africa to the other. The African has resisted and persisted. For three centuries the white man seized and enslaved millions of Africans and transported them, with every circumstance of ferocious cruelty, across the seas. Still the African survived and, in his land of exile, multiplied exceedingly. Attention may be drawn to certain facts recently disclosed in Mr. Ludwig Bauer's "Leopold the Unloved" (London: Cassell) about the doings of a European king- King Leopold II of Belgium-and a great European explorer-H. M. Stanley-in the Congo. While Leopold sought self-aggrandizement Stanley with better intentions and ideals unwittingly helped the King to realize his ambition by cutting his way, under great difficulties, through trackless jungles where he encountered naked savages who regarded him as an unexpected and welcome source of food. Let the Viscountess Dunedin, who has reviewed the book, tell us the rest of the story : Soon the unfortunate Negroes were to learn how much unspeakable suffering would have been spared them if they had only caught and made a meal of the white intruder. For ·16 Stanley, full of religious zeal to baptize the natives, marching down the Congo, naming rivers and mountains after himself, was assuming a right of invasion and possession as much as the unscrupulous and ambitious King of the Belgians was to do "the king who made himself owner of twenty million blacks. When he died there were only ten millions left."** In Australia the natives have been less fortunate. They have been cleared out of the areas bordering on the sea and those that survive live in the remote areas in the centre of the country—areas which are not yet wanted by the white man. The natives of the beautiful island of Tasmania have ceased to exist as the place was wanted by the white man. The Rev. C. E. C. Lefroy, formerly Archdeacon of Perth, in Western Australia, has stated that there was “a vast amount of deliberate cruelty in the process. In 1930 the British settlers in Rhodesia made representations to His Majesty's Government dissenting from the Colonial Office memorandum on native policy in East Africa. The Manchester Guardian Weekly (December 5, 1930) reproduced the following extract from one of these representations : "British colonists hold that the British Empire is primarily concerned with the furtherance of the interests of British subjects of British race, and only thereafter with other British subjects, protected races and the nationals of other countries in that order." Here we have the white Christian mentality in a nutshell. Christianity rejects with contempt the equalitarian view of humanity as being contrary to its fundamental idea, while that view is finding favour with scientific men and rationalists. * John O'London's Weekly, January 12, 1935.

·17 Of the Pilgrim Fathers, who brought the blessings of Western civilization to the New World, it has been aptly said that "they fell first on their knees and then on the aborigines.” Punch (September 4, 1897) put these words into the mouth of the African native : "Maxims of civilization ?" that's your fun. Your only maxim ism-a Maxim gun. And "civilizing', in your cynic mirth. Means-sweeping niggers off the face of the earth. The rule generally followed has been well expressed by an English poet in the following familiar lines : The good old rule Sufficeth them, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can. But after all is said and done the fact remains that India is indebted deeply to her present rulers for the peace and security she enjoys, for having roused her from her pathetic content and for extricating her from the slough of despond. Amongst the nations of the West the English nation is the only one which is always Holding forth a beacon peerless To the oppressed of all the world. VI. THE SPIRIT OF SEPARATISM. An Anglican clergyman of Lamourya Nyeri drew the attention of the Colonial Office to the following injunctions of St. Paul, lest the authorities should, in a moment of forgetfulness, recognize the claims of the Indian settlers in Kenya to equality with the white 2 ·18 O settlers : "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers : for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?" (2 Cor., vi). Archdeacon W. P. Law of Nairobi wrote in April, 1923, to the Times on the Kenya question, then on the tapis: "The granting of the Indian claims in Kenya will mean the spread of Indian civilization, methods of government, religions and all they stand for I doubt if there is a single missionary today in Kenya who does not contemplate with dismay the granting of the Indian claims. For, pressed to its logical conclusion, it will mean that the Government will pass into the hands of a non-Christian people."'* Happily for the Church which the Archdeacon represented the serious catastrophe apprehended by him was averted. The Rev. C. F. Andrews told a representative of the Times of India that 'the Bishop of Uganda had probably done most of all to set the (British] public against the Indians by his presentation of the case." According to Reuter's message dated Nairobi, June 23, 1930, the conference of the Tanganyika and Nairobi white settlers, including the members of the legislatures of both territories had cabled to the Colonial Secretary a resolution which declared that the East African Colonists stand for * General Sir Henry Page-Croft said in November, 1934: "If the White Paper goes through, our rule ceases. And India will pass permanently under the control of Hindus dominated by Brahmanism. Inevitably the precepts of Christianity will have to make way for Hindu ascendancy." ..

·119 the principle that the white race is the only people which has proved its capacity to govern mixed races and that the white settlers cannot accept the right of the Indians to participate on the same basis as Europeans in the Government of East Africa. Mr. Winston Churchill has written about East Africa in his “My African Journey": It was the Sikh soldier who bore an honourable part in the conquest and pacification of these East African countries. It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man could go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than any one else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communication. Is it possible for any Government with a scrap of respect for honest dealing between man and man to embark upon a policy of deliberately squeezing out the native of India from regions he has established himself in under every security of good faith? Most of all, we ask, is such a policy possible to the Government which bears sway over 300 millions of our Indian Empire ? In this connection the reader may be referred to what Sir Norman Angell has said in "The Fruits of Victory" : Some of the worst crimes against justice have been due to the very fierceness of our passion for righteousnessa passion so fierce that it becomes indiscriminating and unseeing. It was the passion for what men believed to be religious truth which gave us the Inquisition and the religious wars; it was the passion for patriotism which made France for so many years, to the astonishment of the world, refuse justice to Dreyfus ; it was the righteous loathing for negro crime which has made lynching possible for half a century in the United States, and which prevents the development of an opinion which will insist on its suppression.

·20 The white settler in South Africa speaks of "human beings and Kaffirs."* The American whites speak of Negro children not as children but as "piccaninnies.' The Dutch in South Africa are known to be good Christians. The Rev. C. F. Andrews, writing about them in the Modern Review for August, 1927, said: "The colour bar goes very deep indeed when really good and kindly people justify it on the ground of their most cherished religious beliefs." The Rev. Dr. J. Du Plessis, professor in the Stellenbosch University, wrote in the International Review of Missions : "Ought we not to regard this racial prejudice, which is so persistent and ineradicable, as fulfilling a distinct function in the Divine order?" The same Reverend gentleman further observed that the Natives within the Union of South Africa "have no reasonable claim to equal rights and equal privileges with the white settlers.' The Rev. Dr. Thomas Arnold, the eminent Headmaster of Rugby, has said : world made up of Christians and non-Christians, the latter should have no rights." Dr. Arnold has also said: "I would thank the Parliament for having done away with distinctions between Christian and Christian ; I "In a a * Mr. W. F. Bailey, F.R.G.S., has stated in the Nineteenth Century for February, 1906, that there are in South Africa many white men who boldly deny that the black man is any more human being than a baboon and that he frequently heard his fellow countrymen there speak of "human beings and Kaffirs." Writing about the Australian aborigines in her "Sketches of Australian Life" Mrs. Campbell Praed states : “They were regarded as little above the level of brutes, and in some cases were destroyed like vermin."

·21 would pray that distinctions be kept up up between Christians and non-Christians. VII. SOURCES OF THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. In India non-Christians derive their notions about Christianity from Christian teachers and from Christian literature. They remain in the dark as to the reality. A few plain facts may be stated for their enlightenment. The doctrine of exclusive salvation constitutes the bedrock of Christianity. It divides humanity into two separate classes—those who, as the elect, will have everlasting life and those who are doomed to eternal torment in hell. Dean Inge has courageously expressed his concurrence with the eminent English historian Lecky in holding that the doctrine of exclusive salvation blots out the fundamental notions of right and wrong ; it teaches men to stifle the inner light as a lying witness. He has added: "Of the atrocious cruelty to which this theory logically leads it is unnecessary to say The spirit of separativeness which is manifested by European Christian nations in their dealings with non-Christians arises from this main source. The Bible tells Christians that the heathen were given over by Jehovah, the Lord God of the Jews, to his favourite man David, the king of that God's "chosen people", the Jews, for his "inheritance". The Lord gave the Jewish king a free . more. * See "Life" by the Rev. R. J. Campbell. It may be noted that this view is not shared by many European Agnostics and Humanists who have broken away from their old moorings. Their idea is well expressed in Colonel R. G. Ingersoll's formula : “AII men are equal and have the right to life, to liberty, and joy."

·22 hand to bruise the heathen with a rod of iron and break them in pieces like a potter's vessel." (Psalm ii, 8, 9). Irenæus the Christian Father who flourished in the second century after Christ laid down the principle : "The Pagans are our debtors ; all that the Pagans have acquired with labour we ought to enjoy without labour." The same principle was enunciated by St. Augustine. Barbeyrac states in his "Traite de Morale des Péres" : "All the wealth of the heathen world belonged to the faithful." Pope Gregory VII claimed the whole earth as the property of the Popes and on the discovery of America and the East Indies (India) the Popes allotted to the Portuguese all lands to the eastward of Cape Nun on the African coast and to the Spaniards all lands to the west, the islands being regarded as the appanage of the Holy See. The King of Portugal assumed the title of "Lord of the conquest, navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India."'* Mr. A. L. Saunders, C.S.I., I.C.S., tells us : "A long start was obtained by the Portuguese, who relied, as lawyers say, on a Donation of the Pope's, in return for which they were pledged to establish Christianity in India."† Pope Nicholas II declared that Jesus had conferred upon Peter the control (jura) of an earthly as well as of a heavenly empire ; and this phrase was embodied in the canon law. Another Pope, at a later date, asserted that James, the brother of Jesus, left to Peter not only the govern- * "Christianity and Civilization" by C.T. Gorham. (London: Watts). + "The Religions of India", a Lecture delivered to the Victoria League on March 9, 1925. (London : Watts). ..

·23 ment of the whole Church but that of the whole world (totum seculum gubernandum). The Churches of Rome and of England have both completely ignored the fact that India is a non-Christian country ; and they have proceeded to slice it up into dioceses and ecclesiastical areas each under its own hierarchy of priests. This may be called peaceful penetration ; but the white races have deliberately made themselves aggressors and used force in dispossessing the heathen natives living in their ancestral homes in America, Africa and Australasia and in setting themselves up as masters of those great continents. They had, of course, the support of their Churches in all that they did to extend the empire of Christ and their religious belief gave them a clear conscience. The result is that we have magniloquent accounts of the conquests effected by the Christian soldier on his onward march under Divine guidance and of the blessings of civilization conferred upon the benighted heathen aborigines, or at any rate on such of them as survive. George Bernard Shaw, who knows what he is talking about, told a Press Association reporter on August 7, 1929: “Of course, a great many Englishmen are under the impression that Egypt belongs to England. Similarly, they are mostly under the impression that the whole earth belongs to this country." Colonel Seton (who has, on retirement from the Army, entered Holy Orders and is now Vicar of Barley in Rutland) has thus commented on the term “heathen" used in the passage in Psalm i mentioned above : "Surely that means the teeming millions of India, Africa, and the South Sea Islands, Burma, etc., to whom we have taken good government ·24 and the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ".* Many pious British Christians believe that the British race is God's Covenant people, i.e., God's chosen people. This was the claim put forward openly at a meeting of the British Israel Congress held at the Central Hall, Westminster, on October 22, 1923, and presided over by Lord Gysborough at which Princess Alice, Countess of Athlor.e, was present. General F. D. Frost, C.B.E., M.C., who hus, on retirement from the Army, undertaken work as a Christian Missionary, holds that the phenomenal, miraculous success of the British in India was possible only because God was on their side and fought for them just as he fought for the Israelites in Egypt and Palestine against Gentiles. The Archbishop of Canterbury and laymen like General Page-Croft are no doubt anxious about the continuance of the precepts of Christianity in the administration of India. It will shock them and surprise others if it is said that the cardinal doctrines of the Bible are really at the root of the European Christian's colour prejudice from which all trouble has arisen. In the Old Testament God has taken the Jews under his special protection as his chosen people. This is the very negation of the idea of God as the father of mankind. The lesson derived by the Jews is well expressed in the synagogue benediction which occurs in their prayer book : "Blessed art thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a heathen, who hast not made me a slave, who hast not made me a woman. or Fallacy?". London: the Covenant * "British-Israel, Fact Publishing Company, 1918.

·25 con- The Christian doctrine of eternal punishment for unbelievers is regarded by the followers of Christ as a truth, although a man like Cardinal Newman was strained to describe it as a terrible truth." It is really a negation of Divine love. But this doctrine has a strong hold upon believers in the Christian faith. The partiality for the Jews on the part of Jesus was on a par with that of God in the Old Testament. He wanted to reserve the great blessing of salvation (by which alone eternal damnation can be avoided) to the Jews. He did not seek converts outside Israel. He held that things that are holy are not to be offered to unworthy people. He said: “Salvation is of the Jews." (John iv). He said: "It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." Professor F. C. Burkitt has stated in “Jesus Christ-an Historical Outline" that Jesus tells us quite distinctly that he meant that he had not been sent to outside nations but to the Israelites. Christ's own injunction to the twelve apostles was : "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not : but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." (Matt. x). He made the attainment of salvation very difficult indeed for non-Jews when he told his disciples : "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them." ( Mark iv). His attitude towards the heathen is reflected in his utterance as recorded in Matt. xviii. 17 : "If he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an ..

·26 heathen man and a publican." Jesus says: “Let your prayers be short, do not be like the heathen who think they will be heard for their much speaking." In his Sermon on the Mount delivered to the Jews he teaches them to take no thought for the morrow. He tells them that Gentiles have such thoughts as What shall we eat? What shall we drink? etc. Such thoughts were unworthy of the Jews. In this Sermon Christ addiesed his own people and gave the males amongst the Jews certain rules of life to supplement the taboos of the Ten Commandments. He urged his followers to attain a higher moral standard than that of the scribes and Pharisees. The Ten Commandments delivered by the God of Israel to Moses are likewise addressed to the Jews with whom that God made a covenant. Moses, addressing his people under God's authority, forbade all communion with other nations and he directed the Jews to avoid making any covenant with other nations and to show no mercy to non-Jews. (Deut. vii, 1-3). Religion influences the conduct of nations. It is necessary to bear this simple fact in mind in trying to understand the dealings of Christian nations with non-Christians. VIII. THE "OLD ADAM" IN MAN. Another salient fact which exercises great influence on Christian minds is to be found in the belief that man's nature is essentially bad. The Christian believes in what he regards as the natural vindictiveness of mankind. Carlyle has spoken in "Latter-day Pamphlets" of the "ineradicable tendency" to revenge as a divine feeling in man's mind. The Bible says that God not only curseå his own creature Adam for his infirmity in yielding to ·27 can no as to the the promptings of a woman who had passed under the influence of Satan but also his future (then unborn) progney. The Christian believes that since Adam's fall and in consequence of that catastrophe the sovereignty of the earth has passed on to the Devil. He prays daily for the restoration on Earth of the kingdom of God which at present exists only in Heaven. He hopes for the fulfilment of this prayer when the Second Advent of Christ occurs. Meanwhile there is no certainty as to when that great event will take place, although Christ, in addressing his immediate followers, assured them that it would come in the life-time of some of those men. In the meantime, man continues to be wicked at heart. His moral nature may be rectified through the blessings of Christianity ; but there be doubt hopeless vileness of the heathen. Vengeance is claimed by Jehovah as his own special weapon. Jesus is believed to be the second God of the Trinity and to have been sent down as the Redeemer of mankind ; but while he was on earth he did not seek converts outside Jewry and he displayed a spirit of vengeance on those who did not come for hard and accept his doctrines, by pronouncing on them the curse of eternal hell-fire. This will serve to explain the attitude of white Christians towards coloured non-Christians. We non-Christians cannot for a moment believe that this is a bad world wanting the guidance of God or that human nature is bad. We fully share the view of the Rev. Dr. Charles W. Wendte, a Unitarian, who has expressed his belief in the essential dignity of human nature, and its gradual improvement through natural and orderly process of evolution.

·28 "Step by step, since time began, We see the steady gain of man, *and this gives us the largest faith and hope in his possible future. This faith in man's individual improvement gives birth to our larger hope for the progress and betterment of human society." But this is a view which will be contemptuously rejected by the great majority of Christians of the many Churches, sects and denominations who, while professing to believe in a trinity, i.e., plurality of Gods, refuse to Unitarians, who are real monotheists, the title of Christian. Racial prejudice, the origin of which has been explained above, is the real difficulty which confronts those generous statesmen who intended the Reforms as a gesture of their goodwill towards India. Colonel H. Gidney, I.M.S. (retired), said at Bombay on January 29, 1926, that in his opinion colour prejudice was the main cause of the present unrest and mistrust. He said : “Equality of treatment and recognition of rights of each other should be the fundamental principle in the development of the Empire. Kill colour prejudice and I submit you have killed the unrest." But Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and lord Willingdon who undoubtedly represent the better mind of Britain and who are genuine well-wishers of India as well as of Britain are quite powerless to remove what an influential Christian paper has described as the instinctive racial feeling of the European." Lord Willingdon has long realized the real difficulty. His Excellency said in 1923 when he was Governor of Madras: "After many years' experience in this country as head of the administration I can say with some confidence that if all my fellow-countrymen had realized ·29 me, more COST this in past years and had been less intolerant on the colour question many of the troubles and difficulties which have assailed the administrator would never have arisen at all." Speaking on the subject of colour prejudice in India several years ago Mr. A. J. Fraser-Blair, the well-known journalist, said at a public lecture in Calcutta : The attitude of the younger Anglo-Indian generation is very well summarised in an expression made use of by a gilded youth and recently reported to "I can't stand these natives," he drawled, "I think they are such rank outsiders." There is not a stiffer or less accommodating race than the British. The wonder is that our world-wide responsibilities have not made us osmopolitan. But the fact is that there is scarcely a nation in Europe except the Dutch and the Germans, both nearly allied to our own, which has not a greater power of adapting itself to various peoples and conditions than we have. We have a prejudice against a dark skin. We hate a foreigner in any case, and our dislike of him is intensified if his complexion is swarthier than our own. .... I should like to strongly impress upon every Briton in India the duty of cultivating, whether it be pleasant or not, a amenable spirit towards our Indian fellow-citizens, A waggish Frenchman is said to have facetiously remarked that an Englishman was an island. Mr. C. F. Andrews has had exceptional opportunities of studying the colour question not only in India but in other parts of the world, especially in South and East Africa. Speaking at Montreal in April, 1929, he observed : "Arrogance of the white man in India is breeding revolt among the Indian people." The late Mr. E. S. Montagu has stated in his "Indian Diary" how, in Bombay, he went with the 1 nore ·30 Governor, Lord Willingdon-an old friend whose support cheered him at all times to see the new Sports Club, intended to punish the Yacht Club and the Byculla Club for their refusal to admit Indians." He has stressed the fact that this social problem "has really brought the present political situation upon us. IX. EDUCATION AND THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. In his book, “Must, England Lose India ?" Colonel Arthur Osburn, D.S.O., observes that the besetting sin of England is hard-hearted, overbearing arrogance. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" he asks, and replies, “Yes, the English public schools. India, he adds, serves as a continuation course of education with a practical bias taken out after the grounding in brutality given at the Public schools. The influence of returned Anglo-Indian officials perfected there in the theory and practice of brutality threatens to contaminate all that is wholesome in English life. It is impossible to doubt the influence of schools on young people. We are told by Father ). S. M.'Ward of the Abbey of Christ the Kimg, New Barnet : "It is from the Secondary and Public schools (he means Eton etc.) that the bulk of the leaders of the nation are drawn, alike in State, industry, and the professions. In England education has been always under the control of the Churches. Education there has been of the Church, by the Church and for the Church. Mr. Edmond Holmes, an English authority on Education, stated in the Hibbert Journal for April-1926 : * Quoted in the Literary Guide (London) for January, 1935.

·31 years, The education which the Church has practised for more than a thousand and which Christendom, following the lead of the Church, has accepted as orthodox, is on principle dogmatic, dictatorial and severely disciplinary, the discipline which it enforces being that of quasi-military drill. History occupies a very high place in the curriculum of all universities. The conversion of Emperor Constantine (306-337 A.C.) marked the triumph of Christianity in Europe and that event had a profound effect upon historiography in Europe. About that effect Professor F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Professor of History in the University of London, writes in "An Outline of Modern Knowledge" : The writing of history passed into the hands of priests and monks, and in their hands it remained throughout the mediæval millennium. This meant that historiography was reduced to the rank of the handmaid of theology; that sit was made, as neyer before, pragmatic and didactic; that it lost whatever scientific character it had ever had, and became wholly indifferent both to truth and probability that it became filled with miracles and marvels; that it ceased to regard any values that were not religious ; that it lost sense of perspective, placing the Hebrews in the forefront of the drama of the agene and relegating all the empires of antiquity to the backsound the wings; that, in short, it blotted true history out of existence for a thousand years. Eusebius, a Christian historian of the fourth century, has stated that he has, in his history, omitted whatever, might tend to the dishonour of the Church and has magnified whatever conduces to her glory.* Jean Le Clerc, a Swiss Protestant theologian,' wrote: "An ecclesiastical historian ought to adhere inviolably to this Or . "On the Influence of Religion on Truthfulness", by F. H. Perrycosto. (London: Watts, 1913).

·32 *** maxim-that whatever be found favourable to heretics is false and whatever can be said against them is true. Mr. Hilaire Belloc, the great Catholic writer of our day, has laid down the proposition that "true history is history written in accordance with Catholic philosophy."'t Cardinal Newman has told us : "The Greek Fathers thought that when there was a justa causa an untruth need not be a lie." No wonder Canon Streeter should have declared that "the conscience of Europe is shocked by the failure of the Church to appreciate the supreme moral value of truth." Dean Inge wrote in the Atlantic Monthly : “The educated man, especially if he has a scientific training, finds it very difficult to understand the apparent indifference to truth among the majority of believers, and the general readiness" to believe the most grotesque superstitions." British children have their first lesson about India at school. The Rev. Edward Thompson has stated in “The Other Side of the Medal"-a book which had been long suppressed—that Britain has suppressed half the truth of the Indian Mutiny and that English boys are brought up on the atrocities perpetrated by the mutineers but never hear a word about the atrocious reprisals which equalled and in part excelled some of the worst things done by the mutineers. Writing about this book in the columns of the Manchester Guardian Weekly Mr. H. W. Nevinson said: When I was young all British boys and girls were brought up on tales of "the Mutiny," and taught to regard all Indians Hallam's "Introduction to the Literature of Europe," ii., p. 95. + “The Rationalist Annual, 1933", p. 42.

·33 of men. with passionate abhorrence because of the atrocities committed at Cawnpore. The story of Cawnpore and its well was driven into us until India seemed nothing but the scene of massacre, and Indians nothing but bloodthirsty criminals unfit to live. And when the Manchester Guardian sent me to India eighteen years ago I found much the same ideas still prevailing among my fellow-passengers. On landing at Bombay their first thought was to travel to Cawnpore and Lucknow to view the memorial of the massacre and the relics of the siege; such sights gave them the thrill they required and inspired them with the hatred and contempt appropriate to their treatment of "natives". National vanity characterizes all sorts and conditions Even barbarians are not free from it. There are aboriginal races which reserve the term “man" to their own tribesmen only. There is an English saying that "What's good's all English, all that isn't 'aint. Mr. F. H. Skrine wrote in 1899 : It is, perhaps, a wholesome instinct which leads Englishmen to tell again and again the long bead-roll of their victories by land and sea, and to banish defeat and disaster from their memory. We hear much of Dettingen, very little of Fontenoy; and while we follow the Peninsular campaign in Napier's thrilling narrative we have but a superficial knowledge of the Walcheren expedition or the attack on New Orleans. The spirit of superiority in the West has, without doubt, a religious basis. It is thus explained by the author of "The Churches and Modern Thought" (London: Watts: The Thinker's Library): “We are so accustomed to hear every humane or unselfish deed, and every moral act described as Christian that 'good' and 'Christian' have almost become synonymous terms.' The Christian propaganda in the East adopts various ways and means. One of these ways is to specially edit 3 ·34 and publish Oriental religious books with the avowed object of demonstrating their inferiority to the Bible. The underlying motive is frankly acknowledged in an editorial preface to a book on Jainism by a learned Missionary lady, the book being one of a series on Oriental religions published by the Oxford University Press under the editorial direction of Dr. J. N. Farquhar, D.D. The editorial preface referred to states that the writers of this series "seek to set each form of Indian religion by the side of Christianity in such a way that the relationship may stand out clear. Jesus Christ has become to them the light of all their seeing, and they believe Him destined to be the light of the world." Miss Jane Alden, who was on a visit to India and accepted the hospitality of a European Missionary lady stated in the American magazine, Asia, for June, 1926, that her hostess gave her some books to read, the books containing expositions of Indian religions by Christian writers. Of the character of these books she stated that they always present a subject through the lens of the man who has settled his point of view beforehand. If the beliefs and practices aren't good, they aren't Christian. If they are good, whatever is good in them is borrowed from the Christian religion.' The plots of many English books of fiction, short stories and Bioscope films are designed to show off the high and noble qualities of the white man against the vileness of the coloured heathen. The dark heathen beast is used as a foil to display the brilliance of the white Christian beauty. Adam Smith deplored the imperfection of the information available in England in his day about foreign ·35 countries. He particularly regretted that China had to be judged by the information supplied by "weak and wondering travellers and by stupid and lying missionaries. It is true that in the West, notwithstanding the most vigorous efforts to sustain it, the collapse of the orthodoxy of past generations is happening through the disintegrating effect of secular education. This fact was acknowledged by Mr. Stanley Baldwin as a Christian on May 12, 1931, at the annual Assembly of the Congregational Union of the City Temple where he said: “For over two centuries, we are told on high authority, religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive. But religion in Europe and America is too deep-rooted to be eradicated easily from below. It still dominates a very large section of the higher orders and almost the whole of the lower orders of the population. The Rt. Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel has stated in John o'London's Weekly of February 9, 1935: “In an age when instinct, intuition, and emotion are exalted ; when, in their name, violence, tyranny, and race hatred are propagated ; when the most foolish forms of superstition are often in the fashion—it is impossible to regard the supremacy of reason as a matter of course ; it is neces. sary, from time to time, to come to its defence." This has a direct bearing on the subject of our present inquiry, and it fully accounts for the state of things prevailing in India. * The Literary Guide for July, 1931.

·36 X. THE MORAL ASPECT OF COLOUR PREJUDICE. Let us look at the moral aspects of colour prejudice. Writing on this subject in a British journal Lord Olivier stated in 1930 that colour prejudice was most rampant where white men having to sell their labour for wages, found themselves under-bidden by the Chinese, the Japanese, Indians or Africans who were content or constrained to be satisfied with a lower standard of living. "There is," he wrote, "nothing morally admirable in this antagonism.' He further wrote: "Colour prejudice is immoral because it contrives to give a natural justification for pride and a conviction of superiority ; and that pride and that conviction, in their turn, supply the excuse and justification for oppression and enslavement of the weaker to subserve the purpose of the stronger". A very important aspect of this question has been thus dealt with by Dr. C. Delisle Burns, D.Litt., Stevenson Lecturer in Citizenship in the University of Glasgow, in that magnificent work, "An Outline of Modern Knowledge" (London: Gollancz) : "The 'strenuous conditions of the modern world' as the Covenant of the League of Nations] puts it, means in plain prose, the pressure of European peoples for the obtaining of oil, cotton and rubber. It may be an advantage to subjectpeoples to sell such goods to Europeans. They may receive in return some European organisations of health, some very restricted education and some few commodities. But neither European trade nor European government has so far raised the standard of life of 'backward' more than just enough to secure supplies for Europe. A modern principle of the relation between races ·37 peoples could not allow the continuance of the current practice of colonial government.' It is quite characteristic of the times, writes Mr. H. G. Wells, who is a thorough-going rationalist, in his "Outline of History", that Rudyard Kipling should lead the youth of the middle and upper class public of Christian Britain back to the jungle to "learn the law". Mr. Wells proceeds: "In this we have the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern Imperialism : the idea of a tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence." Some odious features of colour prejudice may be mentioned. The Rev. C. F. Callaway, an S. P. G. Missionary in South Africa, stated in the East and the West for January, 1910, that "there is an absolute and almost bitter refusal on the part of white Christians to mingle in any kind of fellowship with black Christians." He also stated that "the one impulse which apparently has power to conquer the spirit of antipathy is lust." Writing in the Literary Guide for January 1912, Miss Fanny K. Streatfield said that while negroes are put to death in cold blood for offences against white women and children in America white men commit the "selfsame crime in its most heinous form to the tune of some 200 cases yearly." She wrote: "Nearly half the criminal lunatics who commit these offences escape scot-free ; of those that come into court more than one half are suffered to escape, which assuredly would not be the case if the wretches in the dock were negroes instead of Englishmen. Of those actually convicted the majority get off with extraordinarily light sentences. Crime in South ..

·38 Africa and America is one thing; in England it is another." Sir John Harris recently said in an article in the Listener that only now has Australian official opinion arrived at the belated conclusion that whether the remnant of the aborigines are or are not so near the level of the animal kingdom that they might be shot with impunity, they are at least entitled to all the protection a State can give to its subjects. According to Sir John it has been discovered that the aborigine is a very lovable creature and that, contrary to the general belief, he possesses a language and an ethical standard of a high order.* A striking moral aspect of the colour prejudice was thus mentioned by the Statesman in May, 1905 : Since the Russo-Japanese War there has been a distinct reaction in European feeling towards Japan. As long as Japan was a little country filled with objects of artistic interest and with smiling courteous people, all Europeans were enthusiastically pro-Japanese. The moment, however, that the Japanese showed that they were a great nation and were capable of defeating the greatest military power of Europe in a hand-tohand fight, the instinctive racial feeling of the European began assert itself, and faults were rapidly discovered in the Japanese which had been previously ignored. In 1903 Mr. J. A. Hobson, writing in the Nineteenth Century on the Negro question, attributed the prevailing race feeling to the desire of the whites to be masters. He emphasised the fact that the worst negro-phobe sentiment was felt not towards the ignorant low-class blacks .. to The article January 20, 1935. was reproduced in the Sunday Statesman of ·39 ago, but against the educated and progressive negroes who desire to rise in the world. Sir Henry Cotton has stated his experience that in India ''the more Anglicised a native is the more he is disliked by Englishmen. All that is best in the world is claimed for Christianity. Thus, Mr. Stanley Baldwin recently asserted that Christianity was incompatible with the system of slavery. This elicited the following reply from Mr. Ernest Thurtle : Before he committed himself to such a rash generalization Mr. Baldwin should have brushed up his history. He would have discovered that Christianity and slavery had no difficulty in existing side by side for some eighteen hundred years, during which period, as Bradlaugh pointed out many years Christians kept slaves, bought slaves, sold slaves, bred slaves, stole slaves,' Wilberforce found the Christian House of Lords and the great weight of the Episcopal Bench opposed to granting freedom to the slave; and it is notorious that the movement for the abolition of slavery in North America was most steadily and bitterly opposed by the religious bodies in the various States. No, Mr. Baldwin, our memories are as short as that. Only a short time ago Mr. Winston Churchill mentioned in an article in the News of the World the curious fact that at one time "over 6,66,000 slaves were held by ministers of the Gospel of the different Protestant Churches." The Imperialism of the West is founded upon the superiority complex ; and it implies that the white races, as the superior men, must govern the coloured races which are inferior to themselves according to the dictates of their revealed religion. The white man thus commonly assumes that he knows best what is good for non- Europeans under his control. assumes that not He even ·40 backward races are never so happy as they are under the rule of white men. Modern research, carried out on scientific lines, has given the go-by to these comfortable notions. XI. SOME RESULTS OF THE SPIRIT OF SEPARATISM. me Although by common consent justice forms the keystone of British administration our rulers often fail to follow unswervingly the path of strict justice. Sir Charles Napier has said : “The final result of our Indian conquests no one can predict, but if we take the people by the hand we may count on ruling India for ages. Justice-rigid justice, even severe justice-will work miracles. India is safe, if so ruled ; but such deeds are done as make wonder that we hold it a year.' Speaking at the Imperial Durbar held in Delhi on January 1, 1887, Lord Lytton (who has been described by Lord Beaconsfield as the "specially-gifted Viceroy'') said: "One clear case of inability or unwillingness to redress a wrong would be more disastrous to the British Empire than any financial or military catastrophe.' Mr. John Bright said in 1881 : History offers us many examples of great empires which have been built up, and of great empires which have fallen. From the time of Alexander the Great to the time of the Corsican conqueror of our age abundant lessons offered to us that power may be built up, but that wisdom and justice are necessary to sustain it. England has done much by force. Now is the time for the policy of wisdom and of justice. If these great qualities are wanting-and I confess I have not observed them lately in our Indian administrationif these qualities are wanting, I see before me little but own are say, ·41 our rest on a can assure you, calamity and humiliation in connection with Indian Empire. On July 20, 1904, Lord Curzon was presented with the freedom of the city of London. In the course of his speech on the occasion he observed : I have been talking today of the acts and symptoms of British rule in India. What is its basis? It is not military force, it is not civil authority, it is not prestige, though all these are part of it. If our rule is to last in India it must more solid basis. It must depend on the eternal moralities of righteousness and justice. This, I is no phrase of the conventicle. The matter is too serious on the lips of the Governor-General of India for cant. Unless we can persuade the millions of India that we will give to them absolute justice as between man and man, equality before the law, freedom from tyranny and injustice and oppression, then your Empire will not touch their hearts and will fade away.* Lord Curzon made an honest attempt, while in India, to act up to this high ideal, but he found it impossible in the surroundings in which he was placed to give full effect to it. He has himself stated in his “British Government in India" : "Some Viceroys have interfered openly, to protect natives frora violence or outrage at the hands of the white man. Lord Lytton essayed the task ; the writer exposed himself at one time to considerable obloquy from his countrymen for a renewal of the effort, and exaggerated accounts were circulated of his alleged partisanship in notorious cases. Of one of these notorious cases Mr. A. G. Gardiner has ; * Lord Curzon wrote in 1908 to Sir lan Malcolm: "I so loved the people of India that I, on many occasions, braved the obloquy and abuse of my countrymen in order to procure them justice." (The Quarterly Review for July, 1925).

·42 written in his "Prophets, Priests and Kings" : "He made a brave stand for the right of the Indian to equal justice. His action in regard to the 9th Lancers was high and courageous. The evidence pointed to one of them having been guilty of the murder of a native cooka common enough occurrence. They refused to disclose the murderer. He degraded the regiment. When it marched past at the Durbar all official India applauded loudly. It was meant as a rebuke to Lord Curzon, sitting there silent upon his horse." A striking occurrence took place during the Viceroyalty of Lord Ripon. Sir Courtenay Ilbert, who was Legal Member of the Council of the Governor- General of India from 1882, introduced a Bill to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure with the object of removing some disabilities imposed by it on Indian magistrates, as such, in trying European British subjects. The Bill arose because attention had been called to the fact that natives of India, even though they might rise to the highest magisterial or judicial posts, could not exercise jurisdiction in the case of offences committed by European British subjects. After his retirement Sir Courtenay wrote: Personally, I was in favour of the measure on two grounds : first, that it would be giving effect to that clause in the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 which declared that no distinction would be made in India in respect of race or creed, and secondly, that public policy required that if you appointed a man to a public post you ought not afterwards to show distrust of him by crippling his powers. ... I therefore, introduced the Bill to the Legislative Council and eventually it was carried, although a compromise had to be effected by which a European British subject who was tried before a native judge was ·43 a entitled to have a jury. It is astonishing what a fuss was made about so harmless a measure. There is no doubt that those who opposed the Bill really believed that it would have disastrous consequences, but experience has shown that their fears were groundless. As to the character of the fuss that was madefuss in which official Europeans were mixed up with non-officials—Sir Henry Cotton has said in his "Indian and Home Memories": A public meeting of protest by the European community was held at the Town Hall in Calcutta; members of the Bar abandoned the noble traditions of their profession, and speakers and audience, frenzied with excitement, were lost to all sense of moderation and propriety. The Viceroy (Lord Ripon) was personally insulted at the gates of Government House. A gathering of tea planters assembled and hooted him at a railway station as he was returning from Darjeeling, when “Bill" Beresford, then an A.D.C., was with difficulty restrained from leaping from the railway carriage into their midst to avenge the insult to his Chief. The non-official European community almost to a man boycotted the entertainments at Government House. Matters had reached such a pitch that a conspiracy was formed by a number of men in Calcutta, who bound themselves in the event of Government adhering to the proposed legislation, to overpower the sentries at Government House, put the Viceroy on board a steamer at Chandpal Ghat, and deport him to England round the Cape. The Bill could only be passed with safeguards in the interests of the British community. As the Statesman observed in 1924 Lord Ripon bowed to the storm, withdrew the obnoxious clauses of the Ibert Bill and resigned his Viceroyalty. It may seem incredible that British officials should have been en rapport with their non-official countrymen ·46 Amritsar than you could defeat Bolsheviks or save Russia by a massacre at Odessa or Warsaw." But the spirit which guided General Dyer is the spirit which guides the majority of his countrymen. It was displayed in the reservation claimed by the British at the League of All Nations to use aerial bombing in the N. W. Frontier of India. Alluding to the punitive expeditions which are undertaken from time to time in that frontier by way of reprisal, the Englishman wrote in November, 1922 : “Reprisals after the affair afford no satisfaction for the loss of valuable lives. They do not effect the capture of the criminals nor prevent the repetition of outrages." As a matter of fact retaliatory measures often cause injury to innocent persons and they serve to intensify hatred. Collective punishment resorted to by way of repression has the very effect desired by the real enemies of Government by spreading disaffection. When collective fine is imposed on a certain area or a certain community that fine has to be found in the main (as the Statesman wrote on August 24, 1932) by innocent, law-abiding people." The English people are remarkable for their religiousness ; and side by side with their religiousness stands their great devotion for the spirit of war. This love for the warlike spirit differentiates them from the people of India whose ideal is Ahinsa or the spirit of nonresistance. In an editorial article on the late General Gordon, the "Christian Soldier", the Statesman which is the leading Christian paper in India, recently mentioned the fact that the English people love their soldiers to be religious and their religion to be soldierly; and it a ·47 referred, by way of illustration, to the Salvation Army as one of the most characteristically English organizations extant". The Rev. C. F. Andrews went to Santiniketan to preach but he remained to learn. The atmosphere of the place created by the poet Rabindranath and his saintly brother Dwijendranath Tagore (“Bara-dada") led him to the discovery that Wherever religion enters in and accompanies racial prejudice the evil that ensues becomes worst of all. There is no prejudice stronger than that in which difference of race, colour, economic and social status are combined with difference of religion.* Ve may go to the New World, to which Europe has extended the blessings of her civilization, for a striking example of the effects of colour prejudice. A more magnanimous performance than the emancipation of 4,000,000 slaves was not witnessed on this planet in the nineteenth century. The credit of it was due solely to Abraham Lincoln. That great man did not share the religious orthodoxy of the majority of his fellow-countrymen ; but he was not altogether free from the influence of his environment and he desired to be in accord, as far as possible, with the beliefs and wishes of his own people in his difficult fight for the freedom of the Negro slaves. He assured the white slave-owners and their * The Modern Review for August 1929. A London message dated January 22, 1935, which appeared in the Statesman of the following day ran as follows: "The necessity of getting rid of 'our hateful superiority complex, so as to meet the psychology of India rather than impose on India what we in England think' good for her', was emphasised by Mr. C. F. Andrews, broadcasting in the Indian series to-night."

·48 supporters that he was not in favour of Negro citizenship : and he also gave them to understand that he had no purpose to introduce, political and social equality between the white and the black race". He further assured them, as a safeguard, that he did not believe in the possibility of the two races living together upon a footing of perfect equality and that he shared the prevailing view as to the superiority of the white race. His great point was that "there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence--the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Abraham Lincoln held that the Negro was as much entitled to these as the white man. It was over this issue that the great American Civil War was fought. But even Negro is very far from getting the modicum of justice which Abraham Lincoln intended that he should get under the Declaration of Independence from Christian America. now the XIII. THE “JINGO" SPIRIT. It is generally believed that the profound respect in which the higher British tribunals are held by all classes of Indians constitutes a far greater source of security than even the British military power. Educated Indians have much greater respect for the High Courts generally and for the administration of Civil justice in particular than they have for Criminal justice as administered in the districts. The non-official European community appears to share the Indian's regard for the High Courts. In a letter addressed by the European Defence Association ·49 to Government in 1912 it was stated : “There is no feature of the conditions existing in British India upon which Europeans place a higher value than the entire freedom from executive interference which the High Courts have been allowed to possess and which it is generally hoped will be maintained." An eminent Judge of the Calcutta High Court, Dr. C. D. Field, LL.D., in a paper contributed by him to the Asiatic Quarterly Review in 1897, sketched the extraordinary position of influence and importance which the High Court occupied in the estimation and lives of a people where the Government is despotic if benevolent and where the Courts of Justice alone represent fearless impartiality, devoid of personal bias. Dr. Field deplored the policy that had been pursued "to degrade this high tribunal and diminish its importance in the eyes of the people". The Englishman commenting on the speech of Sir Francis Maclean, Chief Justice of Bengal, at the St. Andrews Dinner in Calcutta in 1903 observed : "Rightly or wrongly, the mercantile community of Calcutta suspect the attitude of the Government towards the High Court. They fully recognize that, as Sir Francis Maclean says, it is the one great barrier between themselves and the irresponsible authority under which we live. They fear that the autocracy is seeking to undermine that barrier, and their indignation at the thought is only equalled by their admiration for the man who, standing at the head of the Bengal judiciary, dares to face the Government, and do battle with it for equity and justice." An altogether different view is adopted by the Manon-the-Spot, whose administrative aim was effectively set forth in a letter signed “Anglo-Indian" which appeared 4 ·50 in the Times in July, 1912. The writer observed that **it is an aphorism in Indian polity that, no matter what form of government obtains, the first essential of the country is a strong executive". The dominant school of thought, which has been characterised by Lord Morley as "Jingo", holds that the existing system is an excellent one, that it is the corner-stone of the Indian administration, that it prevents any interference with the Executive and that an arbitrary, uncontrolled Executive is the only salvation of the country under a wave of discontent. A gentleman of the same school who signed himself ** Judge" and who claimed to have spent the best part of a life-time in the Indian courts of every grade wrote a letter to the Times in April, 1912. In this letter he said that the administration of justice was deplorably weak in every district, as "undoubted criminals" were repeatedly acquitted. He suggested that it would be far more effective if cases were decided on police reports and statements. He spoke of the police speaking to him privately about cases. The writer of an article in the Calcutta Review (September, 1897) pointed out that one of the most striking features of the Indian administration of the preceding twenty years was "the supreme contempt for the law shown by almost everyone of the 700 or so enlightened persons, who, by reason of their intellectual attainments in youth, were privileged to administer the country." The writer observed : * Sir Harvey Adamson, formerly Law Member to the Government of India has said: "Can any Government be strong whose administration of justice is not entirely above suspicion ?"

·51 *Contempt for law may be said to be the countersign of Indian polity, and from Lieutenant-Governors down to newly-appointed apprentices the doctrine that the law is an ass is all-pervading. It is in fact the one opinion that may be said to make the whole administration kin. The same writer further pointed out the fact that the High Court of Bengal, from whatever cause, was no longer the power in the land that it once was, and that the Civilian ideal of what is termed a strong judge" still meant a magistrate whose strength consisted in convicting without evidence. Sir Charles Elliott, who was a strong governor, wanted more convictions in criminal cases and issued a circular letter which was known at the time as the "No Conviction, No Promotion Circular". During a period of leave his locum tenens, Sir A. P. Macdonell, who was a statesman of another type, issued circular letter (No. 738-39 J. dated Darjeeling, October 20, 1893) to all Commissioners of Divisions, emphatically enjoining on all inspecting officers "the necessity of shunning any action and avoiding the use of any language which may give colour to the impression that the work of their subordinates is judged by an arithmetical standard and not according to its intrinsic merit." It was believed at the time that differences had arisen between Sir Charles Elliott and Sir Comer Petheram, the Chief Justice of Bengal about the former's Circular. The actual position of subordinate magistrates was thus described in a letter dated March 8, 1905, to the Daily News of London written by another provincial governor, Sir Henry Cotton : a ·52 It is a matter of universal knowledge that subordinate magistrates, whose position and promotion are dependent on the District Officer, are fettered in their judgment and discretion, and too often fail, therefore, to discharge their judicial duties with that degree of independence which ought to characterise a court of justice. Sir Henry Cotton has also referred in "Indian and Home Memories" to the wide powers exercised by young magistrates in India. He has told us that he was, "like all other members of the Civil Service and as they still are up to the present time, vested with magisterial powers beyond comparison greater than those possessed by young men of the same age under any civilized government." At an earlier date Mr. Robert Torrens, a Sessions Judge in Bengal, stated in an official report: "The powers of magistrates in India are, beyond comparison, greater than those possessed by any, similar functionary under any civilized government that I am aware of, and are far too extensive to render it advisable to allow the uncontrolled exercise of them." He went on to say that from the necessity of his position the Magistrate in India was inclined, unconsciously, towards conviction and that the double function of peace-preserver and judge induced in him “a proneness to severity of punishment. XIV. CIVILIANS AS JUDGES. While everyone is agreed as to the great efficiency of the British Civilians as executive officers opinions differ as to their capacity as judges. Mr. H. Batty, a retired Judge of the Bombay High Court, writing about the training of Indian Civilians in 1911 in East and West, said that the present competitive examination is not designed to help selected candidates in the discharge of ·53 their future duties, that law is not made either compulsory or preferential, that the candidates on arrival in India are compelled to pass departmental examinations which qualify them for revenue and executive work, but that the legal attainments required are little more than elementary, and no facilities for legal training, practical or theoretical, are afforded. Sir Henry Prinsep pointed out in the Nineteenth Century in 1912 the imperative necessity to prepare the Civilian for judicial work. He said that the improvement in the capacity of the Bar in India demanded corresponding improvement in the attainments of District Judges, especially in view of the fact that it is from among this body that Civilian Judges of the High Court are drawn. Sir Henry condemned in strong terms the delay in finding a solution of this difficulty. Commenting on this delay the Indian Daily News (September 3, 1912), which was then owned and conducted by a well-known English Barrister, stated that it was "only due to the reluctance of the powers-that-be to offend the susceptibilities of the bureaucracy." The editor further observed that the Civilian District Judge “is pitifully handicapped by his ignorance of what Sir Charles Paul, Advocate- General of Bengal, calls the tremendous complications and the innumerable technicalities of English, Hindu and Mahomedan law." Dr. Field has stated in the Introduction to his Law of Evidence in India that British Civilians "without much previous training and without having practised as Advocates will be required to exercise judicial functions at an early age, when they must be naturally deficient in experience, one of the most valuable qualities in a Judge, as well as experience in a ·54 general sense, as also experience of a new country, a new people, a new language, and social and domestic habits quite different from those of the West." The appointment of the subordinate magistracy through whose agency the bulk of criminal cases are tried, rests entirely with the the Executive authorities. Nomination of honorary magistrates is made by the District Magistrate and all magistrates, whether stipendiary or honorary, are completely under the control of that officer. The District Magistrate's principal colleague is the district Superintendent of Police. The aim of the Executive is to have a magistracy which will work as an auxiliary to the Police. Judicial independence is not a. quality that is counted in his favour when the time comes for the District Magistrate to consider a subordinate magistrate's claims to promotion or to his name being included in the King's Birthday Titles list. In appointing subordinate magistrates the legal knowledge and training of candidates is a matter which counts for less than the consideration whether they may be trusted to dispense **substantial" justice. Mr. F. B. Taylor, I.C.S., who sat on the bench of the Calcutta High Court, has stated in a note written in 1901 : "In Bengal, at least, Magistrates are appointed locally who have had absolutely no previous legal training ; and many of those who ought to know something of law have either neglected their opportunities, or else indulged in a reckless and mutinous disregard of legal rules. Whatever the reason may be the results of judicial work show that an appalling amount of ignorance and carelessness exists." Referring to his own experience Mr. Taylor wrote: "A Second Class Magistrate has been known to examine an accused person ..

·55 on solemn affirmation, and to sentence a man to rigorous imprisonment when the law only provided for a fine ; and a First Class Magistrate to sentence a man to whipping in a case not provided for by the Whipping Act, and to send a girl to a Reformatory School." In selecting honarary magistrates social rank and communal interests are preferred to efficiency. In August 1901 the Calcutta High Court made the following observations in Emperor versus Sadak Ali and others under Section 302 I. P. C.: "We have had occasion recently to observe that sometimes the subordinate magistrates in the country, in the trid of criminal cases, reversed the right principle of law tha: a person accused of a crime should be presumed to be innocent until he is proved to be guilty." In 1908, Mr. H. W. C. Carnduff, the Sessions Judge, made the following comments on the work of a British I. C. S. Nagistrate in the case of Khudiram Bose, a political ofender at Muzaffarpur : “The prisoner's examination by the committing Magistrate seems to me to have partaten of the nature of an inquisition, and many of the nmerous questions—there were some fifty-five put to hin--would have been appropriate only if he had been a witness under cross-examination." This committing Mgistrate received successively the titles of O.B.E. and C.E. It may be noted that in some provinces certain suordinate magistrates exercising ordinary First Class povers have been vested with power under Section 30 ofthe Code of Criminal Procedure to try all offences not puishable with death and also the powers of an Assistant Sesions Judge to enable them to pass any sentence athorised by law except a sentence of death or of trasportation for a term exceeding seven years or of ·56 never imprisonment exceeding seven years. Magistrates of superior classes have been vested with large powers under laws and ordinances specially enacted and passed to combat terrorism. Writing about the position of subordinate magistrates the Englishman wrote on January 16, 1905 : The rank and file of deputies look to executive authæities as their natural masters and fear little the distant thunders of the High Court. As matters now stand the District Judge is head of his District only in name, and, having rigard to the material from which he is recruited, he can possess the qualifications necessary. . . . In Bengal he is put to his impossible task with less than ten years' experience of the country and without the smallest knowledge of his business. Their body should be reinforced by trained lawyers as suggested many years ago by the Public Service Commissbn. Advancement of all judicial officers should depend solely upon what their High Court thinks of them and the Executive Government should claim no voice in these matters. No improvement has taken place in this direction. On the other hand the White Paper scheme and the safeguards contained in the report of the Joint Selet Committee are calculated to strengthen the position if the Executive. XV. EXECUTIVE JUSTICE. A striking fact illustrating the unwillingness of te bureaucracy to part with power is furnished by the prsistent refusal to separate the executive and judical functions of District Officers. As back as 188 Sir Frederick Halliday, the first Lieutenant-Governor sf Bengal, wrote and said that "the union of the magistrie with revenue collector has been stigmatised as incoapatible but the junction of thief-catcher with judge is ·57 surely anomalous in theory and more mischievous in practice". In the earlier years of its existence the Indian National Congress was undefiled by the taint of disloyalty and it was the practice to submit the proceedings of its annual meeting to the Viceroy. The second Congress, which was held in 1886 in Calcutta, recorded an expression of the universal conviction that a complete separation of executive and judicial functions (so that in no case the two functions should be combined in the same officer) has become an urgent necessity." The question was carefully considered by Sir Richard Garth, formerly Chief Justice of Bengal, in his book entitled "A Few Plain Facts About India." Sir Richard held that "to be tried by a man, who is at once the judge and prosecutor, is too glaring an injustice ; and it is only wonderful that a system so indefensible should have been allowed to prevail thus long under English Government. Independent public opinion has constantly pressed this proposal upon Government and its need has been acknowledged by the authorities, howevet reluctantly. At a meeting of the Viceregal Legislative Council held in Calcutta on March 27, 1908, on March 27, 1908, the Law Member, Sir Harvey Adamson, actually announced the decision of Government on the subject. In doing so, Sir Harvey said : The faults of the system are not to be gauged by instances of gross judicial scandal. They are manifested in the ordinary appellate and revisional work of the higher judicial tribunals. a sentence will be more vindictive than might have been expected if this prosecution had been a private one. In another a conviction has been obtained on evidence that does not seem to be quite conclusive. In short, there is the an In one case ·58 unconscious bias in favour of a conviction entertained by the Magistrate who is responsible for the peace of the district, or by the Magistrate who is subordinate to that Magistrate and sees with his eyes. The exercise of control over the subordinate magistrates by whom the great bulk of criminal cases are tried is the point where the present system is defective. This control indirectly affects the judicial action of the subordinate magistrates. Mr. Bernard Houghton, late of the Indian Civil Service, has stated in "Bureaucratic Government: a Study in Indian Polity": When an officer is responsible in his executive capacity for the preservation of order in the whole or portion of a district, he is likely to punish with peculiar severity offences affecting that order or involving recalcitrance to officials; in cases where the evidence is nicely balanced, he may, from an unconscious bias, decide in favour of that for the prosecution. Even a Chief Judge (a civilian) has been known in Rangoon to give as a reason for his opinion on an important legal point that a contrary decision would cause inconvenience to Government. The validity of these objections has, however, been always vehemently denied by officials, who see in the separation of functions a loss of prestige and a diminution of their own authority. Nevertheless, the Government of India-largely, one suspects, on the initiative of Lord Minto or the Secretary of State-has recently admitted that the separation of judicial and executive functions is advisable. Partly for financial reasons little has yet resulted from this pronouncement, but the admission of the principle, so long and contemptuously denied, will always stand as a landmark in the history of India, Dr. C. D. Field stated in the Asiatic Quarterly Review that the policy steadily followed during the preceding thirty-five years had been to “degrade this high tribunal [the High Court] and diminish its importance in the ·59 eyes of the people." The Englishman wrote on January 30, 1905: “If there is one result against which all kinds of public convictions should unite, it is a Court in which police influence predominates." The Statesman observed on March 24, 1907 : “There has been for some years an evident intention on the part of the Government of India to reduce the power of the High Court. The point was kept well to the fore during the anti-Partition agitation in Bengal, and it is much to be regretted that the non-official European community should have permitted its opposition to the tendency to die down. In such matters as these, a policy of indifference is fatal." The well-known British writer "Max" stated in Capital in 1908 about the Calcutta High Court : "The ermine of the judges in some instances has been besmirched, in other instances there has been nothing to besmirch. The independence of the olden days has gone, the old order has changed and servility has taken its place. It has failed to fulfil its mission. Why encumbereth it the ground?" On March 29, 1932, in the Legislative Assembly an Indian member, holding the title of Rao Bahadur, moved an amendment to clause 4 of the Bengal Detenus Bill which was designed to take away the powers of the High Court in an important respect. In opposing the amendment the Law Member (Sir Brajen Mitter) frankly avowed that the object of the Bill was to substitute “Executive Judgment" for Judicial Judgment. Executive judgment is a contradiction in terms and the Government could only defend the measure on the score of "the compelling necessity of the situation." British Civilians as a class are fully convinced that the opposition of Indians of all classes to the Police is ·60 not only unreasonable but stupid and malicious. They lose no opportunity of backing up the Police. An officiating I. C. S. Judge of the Patna High Court had occasion, in July, 1934, to criticize, in his judgment, an Indian Assistant Sessions Judge who had commented adversely on the conduct of a Sub-Inspector as that conduct appeared to him from the evidence in the case. He said: "The police have to do their work under many difficulties, and are exposed day by day to interested opposition, uninformed criticism and malicious abuse. So the Courts should support the police unless there is good and sufficient reason for concluding that the police are in the wrong.' XVI. SOME EVIL FRUITS. In the proposed Reforms we see nothing about the removal of the long-standing evil of the union of executive and judicial functions ; on the contrary, we find from them that it is designed to strengthen the judicial arm of the Man-on-the-Spot and to place the subordinate magistracy more effectively under Executive control. Some illustrations may be given of the sad results produced by the existing system. Sir Henry Cotton has mentioned some specific examples in his "Indian and Home Memories". Here is an extract from the book : In the Midnapore Conspiracy case arrested as conspirators and bail was refused. Eventually twenty-seven of these were committed for trial before the District Judge. When Mr. Sinha, the then Advocate-General, appeared on the scene, twenty-four of these unfortunates were set at liberty. Three only were convicted at the Sessions, and they were released, on appeal, by the High Court. The Chief Justice recorded a famous judgment, in which he 154 persons were ·61 ventured to say that he hoped what the Court had said about the conduct of the police would receive proper notice from the Government. It will hardly be believed, but yet it is a fact, that these police officers whose conduct was the subject of judicial stigma were not only promoted by the Government, but their names appeared in the King's Birthday Honours List as the recipients of titles. More recently damages and costs have been decreed by Mr. Justice Fletcher of the High Court in a civil suit instituted jointly against these police officers and the district Magistrate for conspiring together against one of the accused in the above case who had been arrested and imprisoned with most improper motives. It is noteworthy that the costs of the defendants in this suit were defrayed by the Government and that the Government is about to pay the cost of an appeal. In the Bengal Legislative Council on August 4, 1931, Mr. Narendra Kumar Basu, an elected member, elicited from Government the fact that in a suit instituted by a man the Subordinate Judge of Mymensingh found that Rs. 940/- had been extorted from him as bribe by the Mahomedan Sub-Inspector of Police, Tangail, and that the judge also made an award of Rs. 60/- to the man as compensation for assault and further what after this the Sub-Inspector was temporarily promoted as Inspector. In the same Council on December 19, 1934, the same member elicited from Government the fact that the Special Tribunal which tried Kamakshya Charan Ghose had made the observation that improper pressure was brought to bear on this accused to make him confess" and that a High Court bench consisting of three British judges before whom the matter came in appeal made the observation that "the treatment which Kamakshya received was in the highest degree reprehensible." ..

·62 XVII. ABOUT "SAFEGUARDS. "Safeguards" have been in the air for some months past, and the explosion of interest in the subject following the publication of the Report of the Joint Select Committee is no matter of surprise to those who note the signs of the times. What, after all, are these "safeguards"? They really represent carefully-devised plans for the maintenance and amplification of existing powers and privileges needed by parties who are strong enough to influence the decisions of the powers that be. Undoubtedly the strongest party in India is the Indian Civil Service. That great service has been very aptly described by Mr. Lloyd George as the “Steel Frame" of the Indian administration. Even in England statesmen are dominated by the bureaucracy. In his own time Lord Macaulay realized that the natives of India, as the weaker party, needed protection from the aggression of the ruling race. He wrote: Unless we to leave the Natives exposed to the tyranny and insolence of every profligate adventurer who may visit the East, we must place the European under the same powers which legislate for the Hindu. No man loves political freedom more than 1. But a privilege enjoyed by a few individuals, in the midst of a vast population, ought not to be called freedom. It is tyranny. India has suffered enough already from the distinction of castes, and from the deeplyrooted prejudices which that distinction has engendered. God forbid that we should inflict on her the curse of a new caste, that we should send her a new breed of Brahmans authorized to treat all the Native population as pariahs. Safeguards come in in the right place if they aim at the protection of the weak against the strong. It was at first actually given out that safeguards would be provided mean ·63 in the interests of the people of India, who are without doubt the weaker party in this country. But when the time of realization approached it turned out to be what some people regarded as a "put-up job". The safeguards are obviously designed to secure and enlarge the special privileges of the ruling class. They really represent greater devolution of actual power than the main provisions of the Report. They constitute the kernel while those provisions form the outer shell.* In considering the position of the British Services in India let us refer to what Sir William Holdsworth, K.C., Vinerian Professor in English Law, University of Oxford, wrote in the Spectator of June 29, 1934 : It is a very disquieting feature because it shows that the statesmen of today are so much in the hands of bureaucrats, who run the departments of which these statesmen nominal heads, that they have contracted that limited vision which is the characteristic of the bureaucrat out to increase the efficiency of his department, and have forgotten the importance of those historic principles of our constitutional law, which, from very early times, have safeguarded the liberties of the subject from tyranny bureaucratic and otherwise. .. The bureaucrat, thinking only of the efficiency of his department, is always heedless of, if he is not actually hostile to, those great constitutional principles which, because they safeguard liberty, restrict his powers. In India the British element in the Civil Service constitutes the “Men-on-the-Spot"'+ on whom the authorities are the * India has since heard by wireless (February 1, 1935) the opinion of Mr. Winston Churchill that "the India Bill is a monstrous monument of shams." + In a letter dated January 8, 1908, to the Viceroy (Lord Minto), Lord Morley wrote: “Notwithstanding all you say about the Man on the Spot, I humbly reply that this is just what the Government ·64 at Home cannot but place implicit reliance. Their position is very much stronger than that of the members of the Home Civil Service. The I. C. S. requires plenary powers for the maintenance of law and order and the authorities at Home are obliged to confer on it whatever special power it may, from time to time, demand. The only Indian Secretary of State who ventured to withstand the repeated demands for more power on the part of the bureaucracy was Lord Morley and he has earned from Sir Henry Craik, the Home Member of the Government of India, the title of a statesman of the doctrinaire school". British statesmen fall under two broad classes. The dominant class believes in the doctrine that force is the only means, national wealth the only end. Men of this class are cocks of the roost. No one doubts the superior intelligence of British Civilians ; but the conditions of English official life in India favour that aloofness from the people of the country which is a serious handicap on their success. It is a striking fact, however, that British officers in India possess unlimited faith in their own perfection. As the Statesman observed the other day, “Unlimited power combined with unhesitating belief in one's wisdom is a terrible thing." But the idea of the higher classes of Indians as to the capacity of British civilians as judicial officers may be fairly gauged from *** of India is not." ("John Viscount Morley" by General J. H. Morgan, p. 183). * The same idea has been thus expressed by Shelley, who was a Humanist : Power, like a devastating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches.

·65 the opinions expressed with marked unanimity by the Bar Associations (which include some European members) of the different provinces in connection with the proposal of the Parliamentary Select Committee to throw open the High Court Chief Justiceship to them. No doubt the British officer in India has a high opinion of himself. About twenty-one years ago a typical Civilian of the first rank, Mr. H. L. Stephenson, (who has been acting Governor of one Province and permanent Governor of two others) put forward two fundamental ideas about the constitution of the Civil Service-first, that the Civil Service represents the only permanent British element in Indian officialdom, and must be recruited with reference to the maintenance of English principles and methods of government ; and secondly, that the higher average of the educated youth in England does possess the qualities which are necessary to this end while the "average" educated youth of India is wanting in those qualities. According to the Man-on-the-Spot the inherent inferiority of educated Indians makes them only fit to be recruited for the Provincial Services. Granting the intellectual and moral superiority of the British officers it must be conceded that the Indian officer has the undoubted advantage of a fuller knowledge of the people amongst whom he has to work. Colonel R. D. Osborn stated in a letter to the Statesman (July 2, 1883): "For myself I have long felt that between the people of India and the English resident among them, the line of division, must grow wider and deeper. The nearer that England is brought to India, the greater the number of Englishmen in India, the less will any Englishman associate with the people of the country, and the greater in consequence will be 5 :

·66 his ignorance about them". These words have proved prophetic. Mr. Philip Nolan, I.C.S., member of the Bengal Board of Revenue, in a circular issued to district officers in November, 1900, observed that there was "a veil between the natives of India and their European superiors which leaves the latter ignorant in an extraordinary degree of the real character of the former." The Statesman wrote on July 19, 1916: "There can be very little dispute that the present-day Indian Civilian has no useful knowledge of the vernaculars. The evidence given before the Decentralization Committee is conclusive on this point." Mr. (now Sir) George Grierson, the well-known linguist, suggested in 1906 before the Indian Section of the Society of Arts that members of the I. C. S. should learn the Indian languages, as a knowledge of those languages is indispensable to them, for it helps them to study the people, their wants and requirements. Mr. C. E. Buckland, I.C.S. (retired), stated in 1906 in a paper read by him before the Society of Arts : “Social intercourse between the Europeans and Indians makes but little progress. ... Mutual understanding has made but little advance. The ignorance of on * The late Lord Randolph Churchill, who was a visit to India in 1885, wrote to his wife in a letter from Jaipur: "The natives are much pleased when one goes to their houses, for the officials out here hold themselves much too high, and never seek any intercourse with the natives out of official lines ; they are very foolish." (The "Reminiscences" of Mrs. Cornwallis West). The bureaucracy has, in recent years, managed to bring the home country nearer to their place of exile by framing new rules to enable British officers and their wives to go home on leave, from time to time, at the cost of the Indian Revenues.

·67 the Indian languages on the part of many Europeans is much to be regretted." This could well have been said in the year of grace 1935. on me XVIII. THE TRAINING OF CIVILIANS. The British officer in India is handicapped by many serious disabilities. One of these has been mentioned by Sir Henry Cotton. It arises from the fact that he is a stranger in a strange land and his own countrymen out here din it into his ears that all Indians are rogues and his Indian subordinates keep him (as they kept his predecessor in office) in complete ignorance of truth by adopting in all their dealings with him the maxim—"If you want to win a Saheb's favour never contradict him.' Sir Henry Cotton writes in his "Indian and Home Memories": When I first arrived in the country, it was duly enjoined as a matter of vital importance that I should insist on all the outward and visible signs of deference and respect which Orientals with a leaning to sycophancy, resulting from generations of subjection and foreign rule, are only too willing to accord. Although I was a very “Chota" (small) Saheb, and posted only to the humble office of Assistant to the Magistrate and Collector of a district, I was early taught that, though I might be but a fly on the wheel of the official hierarchy, I was in the eyes of the people, among whom I lived, a representative of the Government and entitled as such to rights and privileges on no account to be foregone. Such was the atmosphere in which we lived; were directly encouraged to assume an attitude of a patronising and superior character, which was obviously inimical to the best influences which should be exercised in the service of the State. A writer who used the initials “D. P. R." wrote in the Spectator of March 21, 1931: "It is the senior people we ·68 in the Service who as 'experts' infuse the poison of suspicion and hatred into the freshers." As matters stand any frank expression in public of the real opinion held by competent persons regarding the I. C. S. can hardly be expected. In a private letter of the late Lord Lytton published in 1906 the following opinion was expressed : "The general ability of the Indian Civil Service seems to me to be overrated. They look at everything from a small, local and often a purely personal point of view.' In vol. ü of Buckle's "Letters of Queen Victoria" published in 1931 there occurs the following passage : "Our system of sending out . . . people who merely get appointed for passing an examination must be altered, or we shall have some much more serious trouble in India. There is no doubt, from what the Queen hears from many sides, that the natives (though they are very loyal to the Queen-Empress and the Royal Family) have no affection for the English rule, which is one of fear, not of love and this will not answer for a conquered nation." Mr. Nolan, in the official circular to which reference has been made,--a circular which has so far remained a dead letter-told his European subordinates to cultivate kindness and consideration towards their Indian subordinates, adding: **Men may dread, but can never love or regard, those who are continually humiliating them by the parade of superiority." Lord Morley has expressed his conviction that the Civilians preferred power to fame. He referred to them in a letter to Lord Minto as "your law-andorder people, who are responsible for at least as many of the fooleries of history as revolutionists are." He also told Lord Minto: "It is your hard lot to have to carry ·69 . things by the agency of men whose feeling is inclined to be backward." He further told Lord Minto that the soil of India promoted the growth of "hot-headed, highhanded folk, full of alarms and swagger and clamour for more force." Mr. Ramsay MacDonald has said of the Man-on-the-Spot in his book on "The Awakening of India" (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910): “As a matter of fact, he is only a good average Englishman with remarkably little knowledge of the world and of what is going on in it, with an honest bluff sense of justice, and a real desire to do his work well But as it is, he is in India but not of it, of the West but not in it. All he can do, therefore, is to constitute the most clearly-defined of all the castes in India, the ruling caste,* and become a god sitting in an Olympus." Mr. Bernard Houghton, retired Civilian of twenty-five years' experience, has in his "Bureaucratic Government : a Study in Indian Polity" (P.S. King and Son) stated in dealing with the claim of the Civil Service (which he has described as "easily the first service in the world'') to continue its bureaucratic rule as a permanent system of government that that claim is bad in principle because the professional interests of a close foreign monopoly are directly antagonistic to the interests and aspirations of the Indian people, and as it has proved mischievous in practice, because under it the "public servants" have mistaken their vocation and duty setting themselves to a * The formation of a new caste of white bureaucrats was apprehended by Lord Macaulay as we have seen in the last chapter. A well-known Bengali journalist, Sambhu Chunder Mookerjee used to speak of our rulers as the White Brahmans.

·70 be the masters, not the servants of the public. Another retired Civilian, Mr. Robert Carstairs, has stated in his book, “A Plea for the Better Local Government of Bengal": "All over the country, if we like to search, we find, not, as in England, public servants chosen by and doing the will of the people but masters who have sections of the people under their control and obedient to their will." In 1890, in commending the work of the Indian National Congress, which had not yet assumed an attitude of hostility towards Government, the chief Liberal organ, the Daily News, denounced those who raised an outcry against that body as a set of "blustering civilians who imagine that braggadocio about governing India by the sword elevates them to the position of Hastings and Clive." Be that as it may, there is little doubt that administrative blunders sometimes arise from the British official's profound security in his own omniscience. It is a trait which springs from super-abundance of one of his finest qualities-self-confidence a quality which, under normal conditions, makes for his efficiency as a Colonial administrator. The sole reason for this is, as we have seen, his inadequate knowledge of the people. Mr. Arundel Begbie, the author of "The Real India" (Lincoln Williams), is a Britisher who cannot abide Educated India ; but he realises the fact that British officials know little of real India, and the one who knows the least is the Viceroy. An eminent ex-Viceroy, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, frankly confessed, during a debate on India in the House of Lords in July, 1912, that he had spent seven years in India in the vain attempt to ascertain what the opinion of the majority of the people of India was on any subject.

·71 XIX. CIVIL ADMINISTRATION. It will appear from what has been stated that opinions differ as to the value of the Man-on-the-Spot. There exists a great volume of evidence in support of the perfection of the "heaven-born Service"; but there is, nevertheless, a fairly respectable minority holding a different view. Under the conditions of his life in India the British officer suffers from certain serious disadvantages which none of his high qualities as member of a superior race can make amends for. As he cannot have much direct personal relations with the people he is obliged to depend to an inordinate extent upon particular Indian subordinates who have made a favourable impression on him and whose anxiety to continue in his good books leads them sometimes to misrepresent facts to him just to please him. The judgment of Mr. A. P. Pennell, I.C.S., the District Judge of Noakhali, in the notorious "Noakhali Case" cannot be regarded as a model judicial document. But it contains a statement of fact which agrees with common experience. Mr. Pennell wrote: The people who have the real power in the mofussil are not (save in exceptional cases) the European officials but the European officials' pet natives. It is the pet Deputy to whom a native goes when he wants to get something out of the Collector-Magistrate-the pet native policeman, sometimes Inspector, sometimes Sub-Inspector, sometimes Head Clerk, who leads the District Superintendent of Police by the nose, and the District Judge's Sarishtadar is often-in everything but the actual disposal of cases-a far greater personage than the District Judge. And this is due to two causes. One, the the enervating nature of the climate and the inertia it produces, and which leads the European officer to leave more and more ·72 to the subordinate who saves him so much trouble; the second, the fact that between us and the native there is a great gulf fixed. The causes of this separation between the rulers and the ruled are manifold and need not be referred to here. Suffice it to say that the fact of that separation is notorious and that the natural result of it is that we very often know very little of what is going on around us.* Magnificent as has been the achievement of the British officer in India the fact is overlooked that that work has been greatly facilitated by the conditions prevailing at the time when it was begun. The work lay not in a wild tract of savage, intractable people but in a country in which, contrary to the apprehensions of the early European adventurers, there were living both in urban and rural areas many peoples in an advanced stage of civilization, engaged in peaceful occupations--agriculture, arts and crafts and possessed of a peaceful disposition, accustomed to a settled life and responsive to sympathy. The work of the British pioneers was also greatly simplified by the fact that they found the term Indian to stand for a collective name applied for the sake of convenience to a mass of men holding discrepant beliefs, principles and precepts which could not be welded together. Those pioneers were welcomed by the Indians as an impartial third party willing and able to hold the scales evenly between the different communities. Professor J. R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, has observed in his "Lectures on the Expansion of England," published by Macmillan in 1883: "The fundamental fact then is that Judgment dated February 15, 1901 in Emperor versus Sadak Ali and two others under Sec. 302 I.P.C.

·73 India had no jealousy of the foreigner because India had no sense whatever of national unity, because there was no India and therefore, properly speaking, no foreigner". XX. INDIA UNDER JOHN COMPANY. Notwithstanding the belief firmly implanted in their minds by a religion which draws a firm line of distinction between the elect and the non-elect and in spite of the general belief of Christians that non-Christians are "passing in a terrible procession, minute by minute, to an eternal woe", ', many broad-minded British residents of the earlier days have recorded their appreciation of the Indian character. Thus, Sir John Teignmouth Shore, Governor- General of India (1793-1798) wrote: Drunkenness, and the use of intoxicating drugs have increased in an extraordinary degree under English rule. I have heard many men declare that thirty or forty years ago, even in Calcutta, a drunken native was a perfect rarity. Now they may be seen in every town in the interior, and not unfrequently in the villages also. Mountstuart Elphinstone, who was . Governor of Bombay in 1819, has stated : The villagers are everywhere inoffensive, amiable people, affectionate to their families, kind to their neighbours and towards all but the Government honest and sincere. The townspeople are of a more mixed character, but they are just and orderly, seldom disturbing the public peace by tumults or their own by private broils. On the whole, if we except those connected with the Government, they will bear a fair comparison with the people of towns in England. Their advantages in religion and government give them a clear superiority to our middle class and even among the labouring classes there are many to whom no parallel could be found in rank or order; but on the other hand, there is no an any ·74 set of people among the Hindus so depraved as the dregs of our great towns; and the swarms of persons who live by fraud-sharpers, impostors and adventurers, of all descriptions, from those who mix with the higher orders down to those , who prey on the common people-are almost unknown in India. The pious Bishop Heber, who cannot be suspected of any undue bias in favour of the heathen, has thus put on record the results of his actual observation regarding the people of India : They are men of high and gallant courage, courteous, intelligent, and most eager after knowledge and improvement with a remarkable aptitude for the abstract sciences, geometry, astronomy, etc., and for the imitative arts, painting and sculpture. They are sober, industrious, dutiful to their parents, and affectionate to their children; of tempers almost uniformly gentle and patient, and more easily affected by kindness and attention to their wants and feelings than almost any men whom I have met with. In later times we find a keen observer like Lord Roberts contrasting the later generation of British officers with their predecessors much to the disadvantage of the former. He writes in his "Forty-one Years in India": They lack the more perfect knowledge of human nature and the deeper insight into and greater sympathy with, the feelings and prejudices of Asiatics which those possessed in a remarkable degree who proved by their success that they had mastered the problem of the best form of Government for India. I allude to men like Thomas Munro, Mountstuart Elphinstone, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe, George Clerk, Henry and John Lawrence, William Sleemen, James Outram, Herbert Edwardes, John Nicholson, and many others. Unhappily a steady retrogression has occured in this respect. Dr. W. H. Russell, the famous war correspondent who represented the Times in India during the ·75 .. Mutiny, said in a letter written in 1883 to Mr. Sambhu Chandra Mookerji, a well-known Calcutta Journalist : "I am sorry to say our general knowledge of the greatest empire ever given to an alien race to rule for good has not been warmed by the breath of sympathy, without which the finest administrative talents are as hollow brass and tinkling cymbals. As I wrote in 1858-59, 'If England loses India it will be from want of sympathy with its people.' The Statesman wrote on January 16, 1897 : One of the most melancholy features of our administration of India in the past half century is the steady deterioration in the morale of our rule since Sir Charles Metcalfe's pure and noble spirit was reflected in the course of the Indian Government, and St. George Tucker's influence was paramount at the Council Board in Leadenhall Street, A striking point of contrast between the old and the new has been thus touched upon by Mr. H. G. Wells in his "Outline of History": In the early days of British rule in India, British officials went out modestly as to a wonderful country to learn and live; now they went out absurdly, as samples of a wonderful people, as lights to a great darkness, to profit and prevail. XXI. DEPARTMENTAL EFFICIENCY. As Sir William Holdsworth has truly observed, the bureaucrat who thinks only of departmental efficiency is heedless of those great constitutional principles which, because they safeguard liberty, restrict his powers. The position in India is worse than that of Britain, of which Sir William has spoken. It is worse because the British officer entertains no respect for Indian public opinion which does not possess the force and solidarity of B. P. O. The agitation against the Bengal Partition of ·76 1905 was worked up by some educated journalists and public speakers ; it was based more or less on sentimental grounds ; it was not a spontaneous outbreak of.. popular opinion. But many educated men strongly resented the contempt for their wishes shown by Lord Curzon's Government. The present political situation in India generally, and in Bengal in particular is the immediate result of the disregard of the opinion of the educated classes who are the natural leaders of the people. Where measures are adopted which prejudicially affect the vital interests of large sections of the public the consequences cannot but be serious. Laws and rules are framed with the object of facilitating executive work, sometimes without due attention to the claims of justice. Take as an instance sections 108, 109 and 110 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which are known as the Security Sections. They are foreign to the spirit of British justice. In the early days of John Company it was no doubt necessary for our rulers to arm themselves with extraordinary powers for the maintenance of order. Section 10 of Regulation XXII of 1793 authorised a Magistrate to keep in custody, until he found security for good behaviour, any person of notoriously bad character against whom there was not sufficient evidence of any specific charge. But this procedure offended against the British sense of justice. Mr. Edward Watson wrote in a letter dated April 22, 1815, addressed to the Nizamat Adawlut: The Vagrant Rules contained in Section 10, Regulation XXII, 1793, have been gradually stretched till they have become an evil too intolerable to be longer borne. They have not only abridged, but utterly suspended and suppressed the ·77 one regular administration of criminal justice by the established Courts; and personal liberty is unknown. The laws, or the execution of them, are suspended or dispensed with at the will of the Magistrate, and under commitments palpably illegal. men are imprisoned during pleasure, or for life, without hearing and without trial. Men, would suppose in every country of the world, had at least the power of locomotion without imprisonment or restraint unless by due course of Law.. Here, 1 maintain, they have not. The law has been altered in favour of the subject. For one thing, men bound down to be of good behaviour failing to furnish security are not employed on the public roads or other public works as they were formerly. But. Sections 109 and 110 are survivals of the old law. Under them the fact that the accused person is a habitual offender may be proved by evidence of general repute or otherwise"; no charge need be framed ; and no charge of any specific offence need be proved; and rigorous imprisonment may be, and generally is, awarded. The law provides a safeguard for European British subjects by placing them beyond its reach. In 1898 the scope of this law was widened and a special clause was added for binding down desperate and dangerous men (against whom the Police were unable to make out a definite charge) to be of good behaviour. That was no compliment to Police efficiency. It was supposed that the usual principle governing Section 110 would apply to the new clause (f) and city goondas could be bound down on evidence of general repute. Unfortunately for the Executive, the Calcutta High Court ruled* that such evidence p. 779; Calcutta * Indian Law Reports, Calcutta Series, Vol. 29, Weekly Notes, Vol. 4, p. 97; etc.

·78 was not sufficient for a finding against a man under clause (f) and that the finding must be based on a finding of facts. In the same year Section 108 was added to the Code for binding down men accused of disseminating seditious matter. The High Courts have not always co-operated with the Executive in their Criminal Legislation. In cases where persons were bound down under these Sections Magistrates accepted or rejected the securities offered on the advice of the Police. In doing so they had to act on a Bengal Police Circular issued on September 7, 1902. But in a case reported in 10 C.W.N. 1027 the Calcutta High Court observed : **The implicit acceptance of opinions expressed in Police reports, without considering the facts upon which such opinions are based, would place all persons entirely at the mercy of the police. In another case reported in 19 C.W.N. 220 the same High Court held that sureties offered should not be refused except after judicial inquiry under Section 122 of the Code by the Magistrate who has made the order under Sec. 110. In I.L.R. 43 Cal. 1024 the High Court held that the Magistrate must personally hold a separate inquiry as to the fitness of sureties and that he cannot delegate to a Police officer or other person the function entrusted by law to him alone. The same view was taken by the Allahabad High Court in I.L.R. 25 All. 272 and also in I.L.R. 27 All. 292. Had any real improvement taken place in the detection of crimes these provisions of Executive Justice could have been dispensed with and the distinction between Europeans and Indians embodied in Section 111 of the Code could have been eliminated.

·79 At the present day the District Magistrate exercises full control over all other Magistrates in the district ; and subordinate Magistrates are dependent entirely upon his goodwill. The District Magistrate sometimes issues Córders or directions for the guidance of his subordinates in the performance of their judicial duties. The Calcutta High Court at one time promulgated the following order (which was embodied in High Court's General Rules and Circular Orders, Vol. I, Chap. xii, Rule 4): "District Magistrates are prohibited from issuing general orders in the form of Circulars on judicial matters to the Magistrates subordinate to them." This has not prevented District Magistrates from instructing Magistrates trying cases under the Excise Acts as to the scale of punishment to be followed by them. On August 14, 1886, the Government of Bengal issued an order declaring that it was the right and duty of the Inspector-General of Police to examine Magisterial records of Police cases during his Police inspection of a district. But Rule 51, Part III, Chap. III, Vol. I of the High Court's General Rules and Circular Orders adopted a different view. That Rule ran as follows: The records of decided cases shall be retained in the record-rooms of the Courts to which they pertain, or to the superior Court of the district, and shall not be allowed to pass out of the custody of the Officers of such Courts, except when called for by superior judicial authority, or required for purposes of Sec. 137 Civil Pro. Code by a Civil Court. It is improper and inconvenient that records of Courts of Justice should be sent to other public offices or functionaries. If a reference to their contents is required, the proper procedure is ordinarily to obtain copies of the requisite papers. Turning our attention to Revenue laws, we notice the ·80 the same tendency on the part of the Executive to strengthen the hands of its officers. Laws for the realization of Government Revenue and other dues are framed with the object of facilitating the work of the officers, public convenience being a secondary consideration." The position of Government Estates in which Govern. ment officers collect rent from the cultivating tenants is much the same as that of private landlords. The high prestige of Government only makes the task of rentcollection easier for Government. But in Government Estates and in Estates managed for private proprietors by Government in the department of the Court of Wards special laws have been framed for quick realization of rent by certification while ordinary landlords have to realize their dues through a tedious and expensive procedure. In the existing state of affairs this is inevitable. XXII. PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDIA. The mental attitude of the better class of nonofficial Europeans in India does not differ from that of officials. Both, belong to the same social status. As a very worthy representative of the non-official British community, Sir Robert Watson Smyth, the President of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, openly stated at the annual general meeting of the Chamber on February 28, 1922, that Britishers in India did not believe in social equality. He added: “It is not only we Britishers in India that have this idea of racial inequality. I suppose it is stronger in America than anywhere else. The English settlers in Kenya who have never had anything to do with India, but only with Indians, are on the brink .

·81 of mutiny on account of it." Sir Robert also mentioned the cases of South Africa and Australia in point. Official statistics of crime published in 1914 showed that among the Provinces of India, Burma headed the list in crime showing 87 criminals per 10,000 of the population, followed by the N. W. Frontier Province with 82, then followed Bombay and Madras with 81 and 69, while Bengal was a bad sixth with 50. The proportion of offences affecting life was also extremely low in Bengal which was last but one on the list. Commenting on these statistics the Indian Daily News observed on July 7, 1914 that they were gratifying to the Government and people of Bengal "who have been budnamed (maligned) by the C. I. D. and their organs in the press without intermission. During recent years so much hubbub has been raised about crime and criminals in Bengal that all sense of proportion has been lost. Political crime notwithstanding Bengal occupies a very low place in the criminal calendar. Let us hope that the campaign of calumny which has been carried on in the English press which has made capital shy of Indian investment will now The recent deplorable murders at Chittagong and Dacca have doubtless placed the Bengal Government in an awkward position and rumours of punitive legislation have been in the air for some time. We hope the rumour is groundless for no extraordinary measure is required in the Province except the proper and judicious application of ordinary laws. Whether a crime is political or ordinary makes no difference so far as the law-abiding citizens are concerned and the Government will be well advised in relying on the normal administration of the law, rather 6 cease.

·82 measures than upon the reactionary legislation initiated by the late Minto regime." The Bengalis are known to be a mild, peace-loving race, not at all disposed to be fanatical or violent. Sir Richard Temple who knew them at close quarters in the seventies of last century, wrote of them in "Men and Events of my Time in India': "At heart and in the truest sense the Bengalis are thoroughly loyal. In this respect there are not in British India better subjects of the Crown." It reflects no credit on the Man-on-the- Spot that he should have allowed such a people to become his hobgoblin and that he should have induced Government to adopt involving collective punishment and imprisonment without trial-measures which are repugnant to the best notions of civilized Governments. As a matter of fact although a section of Bengalis has been led into the paths of disgraceful and cowardly political crime there is no reason to suppose that the character of the Bengalis as a race has undergone deterioration so as to justify Executive action in particular parts of Bengal aimed at restricting the liberties of Bengali Hindus generally. Such incompatible with human justice and have the inevitable effect of spreading discontent. Even now, considering the extent of the country and the vastness of the population, crimes in Bengal are much fewer than in many so-called civilized countries of Europe and America. The fact is notorious that the detective ability of the police force is very poor and that crime would have been less prevalent if the standard in this respect had been higher. Mr. R. Hughes-Buller, I. C. S., stated in his Police Administration Report for the Province of Eastern measures are ·83 Bengal and Assam published in 1912 that "practically all superintendents are agreed that, with few exceptions, the investigating staff possess little detective ability." This happens although the police exercise very wide powers. Mr. R. Carstairs, I. C. S., has said in his “Plea for a Better Local Government in Bengal" that the police have to be vested with immense powers of annoyancean arrest for a few hours only being a calamity which many men will pay great sums to avert." Sir Reginald Clarke, formerly Commissioner of Police in Calcutta, said in 1931: "In the police unlike the army, complete authority has to be delegated right down to the lowest ranks and those ranks in India have not yet got the education and the training which would prevent them from, at times, abusing their powers." It is indeed unfortunate, as observed by Sir Richard Garth in "A Few Plain Truths about India", that the police upon whom the Magistrate is obliged to depend very much for his facts and information are neither honest nor reliable." It is also very unfortunate that it should have become necessary for the Executive Government not only to increase immensely the powers of the police but to have to constantly stand up in defence of the policeman against Indian public opinion. Alluding to this aspect of the administration the Englishman wrote in July 1907 : "A policy which deliberately shuts off the public from all concern in matters of importance, and which refuses to it that confidence which ought to exist is a pernicious British officers of the Imperial Services are apt to keep their own counsel. In this instance they have formed erroneous and a pernicious generalization regarding the Bengali Hindus and that idea has been readily one. an ·84 accepted by the British public. Mr. J. N. Gupta, C.I.E., I.C.S., addressed a letter to a member of the Indian Delegation to the Joint Select Committee in which reference was made to an English member of the I. C. S:, who wrote in the Morning Post about the Bengalis as a race of "dishonest, dishonourable, servile and arrogant bullies." The same ill-judged and ill-conceived generalisation is boldly made in official documents. Thus, it was asserted in India in 1932-33", a blue-book issued by the Bureau of Public Information, Government of India, for presentation to Parliament that there is a "widespread persistency of belief amongst Bengali bhadralog Hindus in the efficacy of murder as a political weapon." This is an entirely baseless assertion as applied to Bengali bhadralog Hindus generally. A very large proportion of these bhadralogs consists of orthodox men of the old school to whom politics is a sealed book and all violence is anathema. The methods of agitation and of revolutionary action adopted by a section of the educated men are entirely foreign to the Bengali Hindu temperament. Some educated men have, under Western influence, acquired them from Europe and America and have been putting them in practice. It is very much to be regretted that our Government should have been led by ill-informed Men-on-the-Spot to adopt measures which imply suspicion of a whole nation, which interfere with the liberties of innocent people, and which conflict with the fundamental principles of justice. The conditions of service in India generally are by means difficult. The Times wrote on August 31, 1897: "The record of the country as regards crime will no ·85 compare favourably with that of most European countries." Speaking Speaking a short time after this Sir Francis Maclean, Chief Justice of Bengal, said : "As the head of that great and important body, so powerful for good, so powerless, I ever trust, for evil-I mean the judiciary of India-I cannot but express my admiration of the conduct of the peasantry in the trying days of 1897,* conduct which, amongst much privation and much temptation, proved that they were a patient, an orderly and a law-abiding people." The Pioneer (June 16, 1901) in a leading article on "Criminal Administration in India", estimated the number of persons who actually committed criminal offences in India to be about a quarter of a million. "This (wrote the Editor) would give one actual criminal to every thousand persons. As crime is cases a hereditary profession in India and as every large city contains a number of 'habit and repute criminals, the smallness of this figure speaks eloquently for the general character of the Indian peasant." Mr. C. J. O'Donnell, a retired member of the Indian Civil Service, stated on the floor of the House of Commons in 1906 that it was more difficult to administer one million English people than 70 or 80 millions of Bengalis. Another officer of the same service, Mr. F. H. B. Skrine, wrote in April, 1897, in Capital, the Calcutta organ of the British commercial community: "With many opportunities of studying the Indian character on its seamiest side, I retain a lively sense of its virtues, nor have I hesitated to stand forth alone as a champion for a race in some * A famine of considerable severity prevailed in 1897 in Bihar which formed part of the province of Bengal.

·86 which has laboured for half a century under the imputation of being false, cowardly and ungrateful." The Bengalis, as a race, have now, thanks to the efficiency of the Imperial Service, acquired an unsavoury reputation as revolutionaries and anarchists. No stronger proof of the failure of the recent measures of stern administration can be found than the excellent judgment delivered by the Hon'ble Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir Harold Derbyshire, in the Lebong terrorist outrage The campaign of terrorism naturally shocked his Lordship and he was constrained to observe that it had necessitated such an extreme as "the curtailment of liberty by the passing of special penal laws." case. XXIII. STERN RULE IN INDIA. As a matter of fact the civil administration in India has been, and will be, as Lord Morley described it, virtually Jingo. It is presided over by men the light of whose faith in the cult of force burns furiously, and whose rule is not built upon the living foundations of sympathy and justice. A typical Man-on-the-Spot, Captain O'Donovan, late of the Indian Police, seriously broached the following suggestion in a letter to the Statesman (October 18, 1933): propose sure method to circumvent terrorism, viz., that in the event of another British official losing his life by assassination, two (or more) of the pampered gentry now resident in Midnapore gaol be taken outside, placed against a wall, and publicly shot. Method and punctuality are amongst the finer qualities which adorn the British element in the Civil the one ·87 to Service. In carrying out reforms suggested by previous Commissions and Committees formed from time to time, the usual practice has been to execute with commendable promptness the changes needed in the interest of economy so far as they affect the lower services, and to whittle down or shelve such as are unfavourable to the Imperial Service. It is only to be expected that the men in power should place their own interests above those of others. This point was gently hinted at in 1934 by Lord Meston who said : “It has always been a reproach that, in the matter of political progress our gifts to India have come too late." He illustrated this by referring to the fact that our rulers have been too late in recognising the spirit typified by the Indian National Congress and in waiting for the Great War start the advance embodied by the Act of 1919. The general belief amongst Englishmen is that the system built up in India through their agency cannot be improved upon, and that the Indians have already got from Britain enough and to spare. It is no good living in blinkers. The reality was thus expressed by the Sunday Times in an article on "'Plain Words about India": "Let us clear our mind of all cant about India. Let us be frank and recognise that the British are not in India for their health but because it pays them to remain in India. As a representative of the most influential party in Britain and as a good Churchman, Sir William Joynson Hicks (**Jix"' as his countrymen endearingly called him) -afterwards, Lord Brentfordsaid quite frankly in 1925: "We did not conguer India for the benefit of the Indians. ... We conquered India as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain." Another ·88 on honest, plain-spoken Englishman, Mr. Winston Churchill, said at a Conservative meeting at the residence of Lord Carson, at Minster, Thanet, in August 1930, that the result of the Round Table Conference will be to make confusion worse confounded. The language then used was prophetic. Mr. Churchill said on the same occasion : ***It is very wrong to encourage false hopes in the minds of the Indian political classes. A European writing August 6, 1932, from Narayanganj, Dacca, to the Statesman (August 17, 1932) suggested the passing of a law providing for the summary trial and execution of any person found in possession of unlicensed firearms. In February, 1934, an official Bill was before the Bengal Legislative Council providing the penalty of death for possession of arms or explosives in circumstances indicating that the offenders intended to use them for the commission or aberment of murder or knew it to be likely that the arms would be so used. The plan of giving more power to the executive officer's elbow is being given a trial. So far it has not been found quite effective in eliminating the spirit which underlies revolutionary activities, while it has produced much annoyance and trouble to people who are wholly unconcerned with those activities. More effective detection and prevention would be better calculated to check actual crime though they may not suffice to root out its cause. But the Indian police is much below the mark in this respect, whatever our rulers may say. Writing in 1909 Mr. T. S. A. Slocock, I.C.S., Inspector-General of Police, Central Provinces, said: "In quite a number of cases the stupidity and even dishonesty of the investigating officer has been the prime ·89 so far? cause of the failure in detection." He quoted the observation of the Superintendent of Police, Akola, who stated that in spite of repeated failures, the Police still .pin their faith on confessions. This is true at the present day of all parts of India. What have been the results of stern rule in Bengal, In view of the claim to success made by the bureaucracy attention may be invited to the fact that at the opening of the Bengal Legislative Council in February, 1935, His Excellency the Governor of Bengal stated that the anarchists in that province were still recruiting and plotting actively. In introducing the Budget for 1935-36 in the Bengal Council on February 21, 1935, the Finance Member, Sir John Woodhead, I.C.S., stated that the heavy additional expenditure thrown on the revenues of the province by the terrorist movement "unfortunately continues to be a very heavy burden on our resources. The Budget for 1935-36 provides for 6274 lakhs of rupees on this head. From 1931-32 down to the close of 1935-36 the promoters of anarchy (observed the Finance Member) will have involved Bengal in expenditure amounting to 26272 lakhs. The Military forces employed in Bengal to co-operate with the Police cost the Central Revenues Rs. 20,88,000 in 1932-33. In addition, a sum of Rs. 75,000 towards the cost of the Chittagong Garrison up to December 15, 1932, has been met by the Bengal Government. A lamentable consequence of all this is the need for imposing further taxation upon a poor population of whom an infinitesimally small fraction has any concern with the revolutionary movement. The steady increase in Postal charges constitutes, in itself, a striking symptom of administrative failure. This failure was foreseen and ·90 foretold by Lord Morley as Secretary of State for India. But he stood almost alone in advocating a policy of sympathy and justice. XXIV. CONCLUSION. Where does our inquiry lead us to? It makes one thing fairly clear--that there is no power on earth, not even the Mother of Parliaments, that can induce the Man-on-the-Spot to yield by one jot or one tittle the special privileges which his position in India has given him. Indian politicians in demanding things like complete independence, Purna Swaraj and Dominion Status are seeking after impossibilities. Hindus, at any rate, have no legitimate claim to such boons ; they are, to them, a nightmare obsession. The claims of the Hindus have been discounted by their acknowledged leader, Mr. Gandhi. He thus expressed himself in Young India in 1921 : I have told them (the people of Southern India) in all their huge meetings in no uncertain terms, that there can be no Swaraj without the removal of the curse (of untouchability] from our midst. I have told them that our being treated as social lepers in practically the whole world is due to having treated a fifth part of our own race as such. Another Hindu leader of great eminence, the late Pandit Motilal Nehru, said in his Presidential speech at the Congress of 1928 : Whatever the higher conception of religion may be, it has in our day-to-day life come to signify bigotry and fanaticism, intolerance and narrow-mindedness, selfishness and the negation of many of the qualities which go to build a healthy society. . . . Unfortunately, the conservative instinct in us is 80 deep-rooted, that the work of a previous generation is lost our ·91 to the next. . . . There should, therefore, be a social revolution which must go hand in hand with political revolution. We do not believe in the progressive realization of freedom. In social matters also gradualism should have no place. No one in India is held in greater respect for character and worth than Sir Prafulla C. Roy. Speaking at Madras on March 18, 1935, he expressed his conviction that unless caste feeling and mentality are changed there would be no salvation for India. Now, this is precisely the direction in which the great majority of Hindus exhibit the least disposition to make a move. The last experiment which Mr. Gandhi has taken in hand is the elevation of the Harijan populations so as to build up national solidarity amongst the Hindus. It is an experiment which is foredoomed to failure. Harijans have as little, if as much, hope of equal treatment from the orthodox castes as Indians generally have from their foreign masters. Their worst fear from the proposed reform is that they will be crushed down by further taxation. The Reforms granted a few years ago have not resulted in any administrative improvement in the direction of substantial self-government, but they have been attended with burdensome administrative cost, the brunt of which has fallen on the shoulders of the Harijans and the agricultural and labouring classes. In giving some share of the loaves and fishes of State to the higher class Indians it has been found necessary by our rulers to compromise with their conscience by providing for fancy salaries for Indians, while they have also been compelled to add materially to the princely emoluments of British officers. The result has proved disastrous to the administration. The British element is, in existing ·92 circumstances, indispensable to India and there is good reason for providing for higher pay and allowances for British officers. But the existing scales are excessive beyond measure and the whole administration has become extremely top-heavy. The only reform really worth while in order to secure a good and popular Government is to overhaul the salaries list so that more money may be found for the nation-building and lifesaving branches of the administration and for lightening the crushing burden of taxation. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury is fully satisfied as to the safety of his own flock from the Indianized Legislatures wherein the heathen-cum-infidel element will prevail ; he is satisfied also that the safety of the other Christian Churches has been secured by the "safeguards"; and he is further satisfied that the continuance of Government co-operation with evangelical work has been assured. He has accordingly blessed the White Paper and the Report of the Joint Select Committee on it. His Grace has called for prayers from his followers "that the course of events may be ruled over by God's providence for the lasting good of the peoples of India." The eminent Archbishop has good reason to believe that under the improved conditions that will result from the Reforms the course of events will lead, by grace of God, to the benefit of heathen Indians by inducing them to adopt Christianity. But there is a large and influential party in Great Britain which is sending up prayers to the same Deity for the annihilation of the entire scheme of Reform. Whatever may be the result of these prayers and counterprayers the outlook is sad for the Hindus. Should the ·93 wishes of the Primate of all England be realized their conversion to Christanity will proceed apace and their extinction as Hindus will be accelerated. An Indianized Legislature maintained at a heavy cost and having no power over the purse and unable to do any national work in opposition to the will of the Provincial Governors and of the Governor-General, with a very costly bureaucracy standing alongside entirely independent of the Legislature and amenable only to the Executive authorities whose main duty will be to exercise rigid surveillance over that Legislature will be no blessing. It will spell India's financial ruin. As the supreme head of the State Church the Archbishop of Canterbury fully believes that the long association of Great Britain and India indicates a purpose of Godthat purpose being the reclamation of the heathen and infidel populations of India from the darkness of ignorance to the light of the Church of England. Writing recently to the Times the Archbishop declared his complete faith in a Divine ordering of the world and he inferred with complete confidence God's purpose as a corollary thereof. If the Hindus and Muslims could only be brought over to that branch of the Church of Christ of which the Archbishop is the head the Indian problem would be straightway solved. British statesmen would welcome such a consummation. But evidently they are wanting in the faith of which the Anglican Divine is so full and they cannot await the fulfilment of God's purpose in His own good time. We find them adopting secular methods for dealing with the political situation which has arisen during British rule and under British administrators. While the great Archbishop relies upon prayer for the fulfilment of ·94 God's purpose our rulers, both in India and in England, are cudgelling their brains to find out some practical means of rescuing the bureaucracy from the cul de sac it has got into since Clive won the country for them. So far no indication can be seen of God's purpose as conjectured by the English Archbishop although hundreds of Anglican missionaries are at work under his guidance and there is no lack of co-operation on the part of the secular rulers. Only the other day His Excellency the Governor of Bengal made a donation of Rs. 500 to the Australian Mission at Birisi in Mymensingh from his discretionary grant fund which is drawn from the general revenues. In spite of all this the Muslims and the educated sections of the Hindus, who have never been drawn to the Cross, are getting more and more shy of it. This is hardly to be wondered at seeing that even in the West many of the brightest intellects are giving up their paternal faith and a spirit of indifferentism is abroad. This is an old theme, as the Rev. Dr. W. B. Selbie pointed out a short time ago when he wrote: “From the first Christianity appealed to the poor and ignorant and addressed them in their own language. The disciples were put down as unlearned and ignorant men, and St. Paul admitted that not many wise men were attracted to his gospel, and the cross was foolishness to cultured Greeks."** Evangelists everywhere at the present day are repeating St. Paul's experience. They are finding their best recruiting ground in jungle tracts and most of their converts amongst the ignorant and illiterate sections of the Indian population. This is an * The Spectator, June 8, 1934.

·95 sit as undoubted fact which hardly bears out the Archbishop's reading of God's purpose. One sure and certain means of enhancing immensely the popularity of Government lies through improvement in the character of the lower ranks of officials who now an incubus on the people. This can only be effected by raising the status of those ranks by giving them substantial increase in wages and by providing for them better prospects. It will be impossible to carry out this much-needed reform without greatly reducing the heavy expediture at present incurred in keeping up the Imperial and Superior Services. An altogether wrong course has been hitherto followed by a Government which is dominated by the Man-on-the-Spot. Persistence in this course cannot but end in disaster. What India really needs is not a form of government modelled on the Western Parliamentary system. India wants justice-justice based on equality of treatment which was promised her seventy-seven years ago. The Times in a leading article told Englishmen on December 17, 1894, what Indians wanted: "They trust us to keep faith with them, and to do what our promised regard for their interest involves. This trust is our surest bulwark, and armed or unarmed we should be left weak and defenceless if this were shaken or destroyed." truth has been just repeated in the following terms by Sir John Thompson: "We believe that in the long run we will hold or lose India not by votes of Parliament, not by force of arms, but by the good or ill will of the people of India." The goodwill of the people may be won by justice, not by a selfish Jingo rule or by severity. Some of the plague-spots in the administration have been The same ·96 or indicated in the foregoing pages. If those defects are not removed and if the cult of force continues to guide our rulers any hope of winning the goodwill of Indians of securing their complete submission will be unachievable. Saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments will not answer, as Mr. Winston Churchill told his countrymen from his seat in the House of Commons in November, 1933. Speaking at a Conservative meeting at Thanet, Kent, in August, 1930, Mr. Churchill said that the Indian political classes were "entitled to be treated with good faith and sincerity." He made it perfectly clear on that occasion that the hopes raised in the mind of those classes were such as could never be fulfilled in the existing state of public opinion in Great Britain. When the Great War came to an end towards the close of 1918, it was fully realised by the British that the war would have ended very differently if the Indian troops had not stemmed the first torrential onrush of the German armies on the Franco-Belgian front. In the first flush of victory Britain ,was in a very generous mood and the Government of India Act of 1919 was passed in a fit of generosity, without adequate deliberation. His Majesty the King-Emperor blessed the measure in a Proclamation on December 23, 1919, 'a definite step on the road to responsible government. In inaugurating the Council of State and the Legislative Assembly on February 9, 1921, H. R. H. the Duke of Connaught said: "For the first time the principle of autocracy which had been wholly discarded in all earlier reforms was definitely abandoned ; the conception of the British Government as a benevolent despotism was finally renounced." 66 as ·97 But as a matter of fact the essential character of the government as an autocracy remained unchanged ; it was in fact perpetuated by a well-designed form of Diarchy. With the downright bluntness of a soldier and without mincing matters Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-chief in India, wrote and told a friend at Home in 1921 : The fact is that the Home Government, having introduced the Reform Schemes are now afraid they are going too fast. They are trying to put on the brake, and the machinery is inclined to run away from them. We must either trust the Indian or not trust him. The schemes have got to be carried out honestly in their entirety, with a view to eventual Dominion Self-government, or else we must return to the old method of ruling India with the sword. There is no half-way house. It is fairly clear that the new India Bill is not seriously designed to take the country forward to any great length in the direction of real self-government. It may be doubted if our rulers themselves really think much of the gift which they are preparing for presentation to India. The presence in the Bill of important safeguards which are framed in the interest of parties not being the children of the soil and the open exclusion of certain speciallyfavoured tracts from the operation of the Reforms are clear indications of the extent to which our rulers can go under existing conditions. Very little can be hoped for as long as the common right of humanity--the right expressly promised in the Royal Proclamation of 1858_of equality of political status with other British subjects, is denied to Indians. The real trouble lies in the fact that British public opinion is adverse to the fulfilment of that promise. That opinion 7 ·98 makes it so very difficult for superior British statesmen to treat Indians with good faith. Of the foundations on which it is based something has been said in these pages. We have indicated in outline the right course for securing the welfare of both India and Great Britain, ·Addenda. breed THE POLICY OF REPRISALS : It may not be generally known that our late Queen-Empress Victoria always set her face against the policy of force as opposed to that of love in the administration of her Eastern Empire. Some of the finest traits in her character were described by a writer in the Quarterly Review for April, 1926. The writer mentioned the Queen's reluctance to bully Japan and her readiness to stand up to Prussia and Russia as facts which compared favourably with the rival system too often followed by her Whig Ministers of bullying weak countries like Greece, China and Japan, and retreating before powers who could defend themselves. “And her temper (observed the writer) was not merely pacific but humane, and hated war even where it brought no dangers. Hearing of a suggestion that a Burmese village should be burned in retaliation for a massacre of a ship's crew, she desired her Ministers to set themselves utterly against the practice ‘of imitating the barbarities of a half-savage people rather than of setting them the example of a policy founded on Christian principles'. She rebuked the insolence of Englishmen towards the natives of India." We learn from the "Letters of Queen Victoria" edited by Mr. George Earle Buckle (London : John Murray) that in 1891 when a punitive expedition sent to Manipur in Assam against that petty hill State was surprised by an attack and the Chief Commissioner (Mr. J. W. Quinton, C.S.I., I.C.S.), the British Resident in Manipur and the commander of the British force were killed, the crime was punished with great severity. We learn further from the same source that in replying to a telegram from the Viceroy (Lord Lansdowne) saying that due punishment would be inflicted the great Queen (inspired by memories of the Mutiny) thus showed her anxiety about the measure of punishment : “While wish murderers if possible to be caught and duly punished, would earnestly deprecate any wholesale punishment for ·100 the incident or any incitement to bloody revenge. This, only too easily encouraged, would not redound to our honour or add to our power for the future." II BETWEEN MAN AND DISCRIMINATION MAN : A few additional instances of the racial discrimination based on religious teaching may be stated. Writing of the European diseases introduced into North America by the early European Colonists, Professor William Christie Macleod states in "The American Indian Frontier" : "An attitude peculiar to the English Colonists of North America, but taken most seriously by the Puritans, was that God had sent such disease in advance of Christian colonization in order to wipe out the pagan population and thereby make room for his own people. The Puritan Johnson, for example, writes in his account of Puritan settlement a chapter on the plague of 1616-20, entitled 'The Wonderful Preparation the Lord Christ by His Providence Wrought for His People's Abode in this Western World'. He describes the plague : “There befell a great mortality among them; the greatest that ever the memory of father or son took notice of; desolating chiefly those places where the English afterwards planted; sweeping away whole families, but chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase..... Their wigwams lie full of dead corpses'. "By this means, Christ', he adds, 'whose great and glorious works throughout the earth are all for the benefit of his churches and chosen, not only made room for his people to plant, but also tamed the hearts of these barbarous Indians'." Here is a further quotation from Mr. Macleod's book : "A variant opinion held by Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Maine, and by the Quaker Governor of California, maintained that God did all this spreading of disease to relieve the English of the necessity of killing off Indians by fire and sword in order to colonize the country. And indeed,' says the Quaker Governor, 'Providence seemed wholly to design this bloody work for the Spanish nation, and not the English, who in their natures are not so cruel as the other." A very good Christian, Professor B. J. Wilden Hart, wrote to the Church Times in September 1923 that the anxiety of those who ·1101 : had friends in Japan would be lessened by the consideration that "by the merciful dispensation of Providence this terrible visitation of earthquake and fire has taken place at a season of the year when most of the white people would have left such towns as Tokyo and 'Yokohama". The following extract from a letter from a German Catholic Bishop at Lahore published in the Christian World was reproduced in India (London) for December 26, 1902: “How marvellous are the Lord's ways! One might almost say that the Divine intention has been to make the parents disappear in order that their children might be led to the Mission and there find the Christian salvation. The last two periods of famine have brought to the Catholic missions thousands of orphans who are all today pious Catholics." All these will serve as illustrations of what Sir Norman Angell has described as "the very fierceness of our passion for righteousness" (Vide p. 19). They will also explain the great difficulty on the part of our rulers to treat Indians on terms of equality with the ruling race. Happy, indeed, is India in having as her Sovereign a worthy grandson of Victoria the Good. Our King-Emperor on his return from a visit to India as the Prince of Wales in 1906 said in London : "I cannot help thinking from all I have heard and seen that the task of governing India will be made easier if we, on our part, infuse into it a wider element of sympathy. I will venture to lict that to such sympathy there will be an ever abundant and genuine response." JII .. EXECUTIVE JUSTICE : Fully half a century after the assumption by the Crown of the direct government of India the Viceroy, Lord Minto, who had previously served in the British Army, found it necessary to adopt exceptional methods for the maintenance of law and order in certain important parts of the country. In November, 1908, Lord Minto wrote to the Secretary of State for India (Lord Morley) urging the need for a special judicial Tribunal for the trial of political cases as the existing law, as administered by ordinary magistrates and judges, had been found to be ineffective. It should be borne in mind that at the worst of times crime is far less prevalent ·102 in India (notwithstanding the presence of bands of professional criminals) than in Britain and that the ordinary criminal laws in India give much wider powers to judges, magistrates and the police than do those of Britain. Lord Minto intended to tell Lord Morley that he, as Viceroy, would ask the Chief Justice of the High Court to "choose strong men for the proposed Tribunal." Later on after some correspondence, Lord Minto wrote to the Secretary of State : "Everyone admits the necessity for the appointment of a Special Tribunal, but there has been a great deal of difference of opinion to how the members should be nominated. ... The Legal Professional opinion would be in favour of nomination by the Chief Justice, but I am very strongly of the belief that the Viceroy should appoint, my reason being that it is all-important at the present moment that the Executive should show its strength." This throws a flood of light not only on the administration of justice generally but on the position of the Judiciary in particular in this country. as

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