Present Conditions and Future Prospects in India

Mr. President and Gentlemen,-

The subject upon which I am to speak today is an extraordinarily large one, and, as you are well aware, extraordinarily complicated. I have spent in India four and a half years. During that time I was not engaged in any occupation which would directly bring me into touch with political factors or with administration. _ But I think it is extremely probable that those who are not immediately engaged in the government of the country have opportunities of understanding some of the forces that work in the country better, perhaps, than those who are immediately engaged in it. The spirit of the Indian people is such that it is almost impossible for an official to discover what are their real opinions. They will, however, talk freely to others who they think are in sympathy with them and who are not likely to make use of that information in any direct official way.

I will first try to explain what is the general condition of the country in respect of the forces which make either for progress or the opposite, and which, at any rate, exist in the country more or less permanently. It will be necessary to a certain extent to bring out points which, I think, are rarely, if ever, noticed in the ordinary reports of events in India, and particularly to throw emphasis on certain sides of life and character which strongly affect the situation, but are as a rule ignored in journalistic circles and newspaper reports.

In the first place, we hear a great deal about race hatred, and I think there is a strong tendency to suppose that you can roughly divide the country into the British and the rest. We hear of the small handful of British who hold this country without sufficient appreciation of the power which, after all, backs them up. If we had to deal with the question of India from the point of view of ethnology, we should find it an extremely complex subject. If we take it from the political point of view, it is much less complex. A very large majority of the actual living beings in India count absolutely for nothing as political factors; and, roughly speaking, for the purposes of our present analysis, I should say that we could not do better than regard the situation as practically a division of Hindus versus the rest.

Let me explain in what sense I say that. I lived in India during the year 1906, which has been, of the last ten years, undoubtedly the climax of sedition and of unrest. Since then the country has steadily gone back from that extreme. In that year, in April and May, there arose definitely in India the idea that it would be possible to have an "India for the Indians," and this became a popular watchword for a time, eagerly taken up, with no very great understanding of its significance. Before very long, however, a sudden and complete revulsion of feeling came, because it was discovered that, politically, India for the Indians meant India for the Hindus. The Mohammedans, who had thrown their caps in the air at first, immediately began to change their tactics and to be, if anything, rather overanxious to protest their loyalty to the British Empire.

There is a large amount of racial division in India and of what I may call blood-feeling, but this antagonism is just as strong between certain factors among the Indians themselves as it is between the Indians and the British. We have at present nothing like a prospect of uniting the Hindus, especially the old class, with other races which are just as much foreign elements as ourselves. The result is that on the British side we can definitely rank all those who have arrived in India by conquest or by immigration. The Mohammedans cannot be relied upon to back the schemes of the Hindus; neither can the Parsees. If you divide up the really valuable factors in the situation, ignoring all this talk about millions and millions (as if it had any significance), you will find that, so far as interests are concerned in the country, British rule has very much more behind it than the mere number of British people in the country, or even the British forces at its disposal.

The second aspect of this question is that any division of the country according to races is really only partial, and must be supplemented by the division of the country according to interests. And you have many distinct interests in that country, but there is one of paramount importance, namely, the trade interest. The whole tendency of progress in India is undoubtedly towards a development of its own internal resources and trade. In spite of the nationality to which a person may belong, he may have interests based upon trade which overrule his natural propensities in the way of blood and birth. I could illustrate that in many cases by citing examples of the great Swadeshi movement. The word means " one's own country;" it implies the principle that all products sold in the country should also be produced in the country. This trade interest gives us as a British nation a very strong hold over what is already and will be in the future still more, an extremely influential part of the population. It throws upon our side in any particular crisis the conservative element, which naturally wants to avoid anything even analogous to the great events of 1857. So that these two points must be kept in mind: First of all, that the division of the country is not such a simple thing as between the British and non-British; and secondly, all racial distinctions can be obliterated by other interests.

The Indian temperament is unstable, much more so than you can imagine. They are sensitive to a degree which it is almost impossible for you to appreciate and impossible for the average Englishman to estimate when he first goes out there. There was a young professor in one College, who, becoming extremely annoyed with one of the classes, denounced its members as geese. To call a man a goose here would be looked upon as very mild abuse, but it was not taken in that sense. The -whole class seceded and left the College; the matter was taken up in the local papers, and it was proclaimed abroad as one of the greatest insults the British Empire had put upon the Indian nation. It is difficult to get an understanding of the degree to which an Indian is sensitive, because he can conceal his feelings entirely. I remember one British official talking to a native whom he had greatly offended; he thought he was mollifying him; when, in reality, the native was, internally if not externally, white with passion. Such expressions of feeling they can entirely conceal, so that it is difficult to estimate the effect of your words upon them. The Indian is politeness carried to an extreme, and this characteristic is not to be regarded as unimportant by any means. You know that however good a plan may be, very often a large percentage of .the success which it attains is due to the tact with which it is managed. If that is the case here, where you can give a man credit for being honest, even if he appears rude and bluff, it is so to a much greater degree in India, where they value smoothness and urbanity of manner quite as much as good results.

The average individual who is projected into India to man at country is a young civilian out of one of our universities: I think we strike there the truly important point, and one which has not been sufficiently attended to, namely, the question whether we supply the right material for the administration of that country. We choose men along the line of intellectual achievement rather than men who have tact and some rudimentary ideas of governing the provinces of which they are to have charge. We have absolutely no guarantee that the man we send out is fit for the position. It is one of the standing paradoxes of India that the method has produced so many great administrators, considering the way in which the strictness of the official system practically prevents any one man from being passed over, no matter what his capacities may be. Promotion is regulated strictly according to seniority.

On the British side you have the Civil Service, the Military Service, and the rest-the rest including traders, planters and stray individuals who may turn up from time to time. The military, as a rule, have very little touch with the natives. The remainder are certainly in many cases not our best representatives. They have a thorough dislike for the people among whom they live; they are taken very often as representatives of British methods, 'which are also largely exemplified by the individual known as "Tommy Atkins," and they certainly tend to produce very great irritation. A civil servant is representative of another factor in British treatment of India which is also far from receiving proper attention. He represents the British ideal, and the British ideal of efficiency is not only opposed to that of the Indian, but is one which he is incapable of properly estimating. The civil servant sets himself to work out a plan. He is assured that he is attaining the good of the country, certain of the honesty and righteousness of his own methods, but he does not consider the extent to which the individual with whom he is working values merely sympathy and attention to the trifles and details of politeness. Even in working out his own policy the civil servant is apt to become to the native obviously self-righteous; and, not only that, he is apt to override, in attaining what are merely material gains, those which the Indian would rank as spiritual. This may seem to you rather trifling, but the point of view which one gets from living in India is such as to make one appreciate those elements.

An intelligent Hindu came to me one day and said he was a student of English politics. He said he was sorry to know that England was in such a state of unrest and revolt. He had been reading about the suffragette movement. Very often a casual newspaper report gives you just about as much sense of the proportion of things in India as that youth derived from his reading of the English papers. Departing from these points, there is an entirely different aspect of this question, and one which you will doubtless consider the most important-the question of sedition. That, again, is very often looked upon--I am sorry to say it is certainly looked upon by the officials in India itself-as a matter of education. But that is not so. The sedition is not necessarily in any sense territorial. It is not an expansion of anything. But, on the other hand, it is an intention. It is measured by the extent to which the individuals, who in India have always historically counted for nothing, are beginning to be valued for themselves, and that increases the forces of the nation and even its numerical value. This sedition is based undoubtedly upon education, but it is not by any means a thing which we can put down as the fault of education. We cannot say if there were no education there would be no sedition. Although we are responsible for the education which has begun in that country, it-was begun with a definite political policy and the knowledge that it meant greater value to Britain itself in that country. It rapidly got entirely out of hand so far as the British Government was concerned; and you have only to study the history of education in India to find that the country very soon got hold of its own education; that it realized that it must give it a Western turn, and then held out, in spite of the action of the Government to the contrary. When the Government tried to stop entirely the great progress being made in the learning of English, the only result was that the students left the colleges and went to private institutions; and if we again tried to divert the channel of education it would be immediately restored by going to Japanese colleges and institutions instead of those of the West. We are incapable of controlling that, and I doubt if we really want to. Education is itself one of the greatest factors in quelling sedition.

We want to know exactly what it is that produces these appearances of sedition in India, because you must remember that what we hear of that away from India is not by any means the most important element, but the noisiest. I have spoken of the trading interest; and there is another-the native official interest. The native officials feel that they might rise higher in the way of the administration or judicial offices if they had not the British in their way, They have the money and they have the brains, and they have, also, to an extent which is not possible in any other class, a lack of scruple in their methods. Their stake in the country is a matter of stipends, and they feel that the British are in their way. That class, consisting chiefly of the legal element, are interested in sedition, and they find their readiest instrument in the masses of the people who are ignorant. Much of the active sedition in the north of India was aroused by the secret emissaries sent round to explain to the people that the plague from which they were dying was due really to the poisoning of the wells by the British. And that fired the whole of North India as nothing else could have done. It is that sort of thing which education will steadily tend to eliminate. As the mass of the people acquire their education, become better able to judge, they will be able to judge not only the British Government, but also those in their own country who are at present capable of thus exploiting them for their own means.

While I would defend the character of the average Indian in many cases, you have to admit that he has not been trained or raised to the height at which he can comprehend the value of abstract principles. He looks at things from his own point of view, and he considers that the end justifies the means. Education will tend steadily to strengthen the moderate party, and this does not mean retrogression in any sense, but that it will enable us to avoid the catastrophe which might be taken to threaten us at present. It is certain that every day that we can keep away from any actual explosion of an extensive sort is a day that makes it less and less possible for that explosion ever to take place. On the other hand, of course, education is furnishing new problems. Education is enlarging the country in the sense of making its separate individuals more and more valuable, intensively increasing the value of the country; and it is doing that by raising up every day more and more individuals who are capable of holding the highest and most important offices, in the country. As those numbers increase it is only natural that the cry should arise, " Let us have all posts for ourselves, and let us occupy them." And I do not think that anybody whose opinions are not warped would wish to deny that the claim is perfectly just. Neither can we deny that it is a perfectly just claim for India to want to hold more of her own property and her own trading. While there are individuals who seem to think we should use violent means to stop this progress, those who look at the matter from the standpoint of the statesman must see that it is a perfectly just claim. The crisis comes in judging the extent to which it is possible to satisfy that claim. We shall be able to satisfy it in one direction and not in another.

It is impossible for the British Government at the present time to give up its administrative superiority simply for the sake of the Indian. Take the Civil Service. It is open to a native who can qualify, yet he cannot occupy a civil post as an Englishman can occupy it. He must be on one side or the other, and if he is on neither he is looked upon as a hypocrite by both parties. It is impossible for such administrative power to be vested in Indians born and bred. On the other hand, there is a large sphere of development possible in local and municipal administration which would afford positions for many natives. I think for the present the outlet of that claim for administrative power will come in the direction of widening the bases, so to speak, rather than trying to take separate individuals up into the higher ranks.

The further question remains as to what we can do with the higher ranks, and there, again, the whole trend of the country points to an enlargement of that body which rules the country. That is rather a different thing from the Indians' clamour for either an Indian parliament or representation. The representation might come very easily if we knew what to represent them in. It would be a great mistake at present to attempt to create an Indian parliament On the other hand, I do think it is possible for them to be more dependent on themselves and less dependent on Britain, not merely in the way of reducing our superiority in numbers in the administrative section, but rather in decentralizing the work from London to Calcutta. We could then elect into the Government a larger number of Indian representatives than is possible in a Viceroy's Council at present. That process of establishing the Government of India, not in the sense of breaking away from Britain, but 'rather of localizing power and giving the people a part in the solution of its problems, would be an advantage.

There is one great factor in this question, and one which I would like to mention, and that is that throughout India I am quite certain there is a tone which is not the tone which precedes great catastrophes. There is nobody in India who flatters himself that if he could once get at the British Government he would discover anything behind it which the British Government desires to hide. There is no system recognized by the Indians as more upright and straightforward than the British Government. They do not feel that it is a case of breaking down some secret opposition. They feel if they could arise and break the British Government they would have done nothing but break themselves and destroy their own Government. The best people in India, are doing all they can to hold together the country so that it will be possible for the British Government to make reform its own purpose, go about it in an orderly way and ultimately achieve a self-government for the people, which will have to come slowly if it is to be permanent.