Punjab" atrocities "and the Amritsar “ massacre " are still dished up in the press and on the platform as if this fiction had not been exploded.

To return to the other charges in the general indictment. Let us examine a few of the most common. India in historical times has never been a nation. A sub-continent of two million square miles, with great natural resources as compared with the deserts and steppes beyond the Himalayas, attracted nearly every conquering race known to Europe and Asia-the Aryan immigrants of three or four thousand years ago, Darius and Alexander, the Scythians, White Huns, Bactrians in later centuries, and from the eighth to the eighteenth century successive Moslem conquerors— Arabs, Afghans, Persians, Turks, Moghuls, Persians, and Afghans again. All these invaders entered by the vulnerable North-West Frontier. From the fifteenth century the Western PowersPortuguese, Dutch, English, French-came by sea. A fact of vital importance, which the advocates of an independent India might note, is that no invasion of India ever failed! And why? Because, owing to the size of the sub-continent, the mixture of hostile races, the divisions of caste established by the Aryan invaders the real inventors of the Colour Bar-to keep their race free from admixture with the dark-skinned aboriginals, and the further cleavages introduced by the Islamic invaders, there was never a nation in India; never a national resistance to an invader. Every invader, from Alexander down to Ahmad Shah Abduli, could count on finding allies among the contending princes.

That would be the position again to-day, if Great Britain— which, for over a hundred years, has placed a barrier to invasion by land and sea-were to abandon the watch-and-ward. The fiction of India's Golden Age is based on a few centuries B.C. and A.D., when the Maurya and Gupta dynasties established a firm and benevolent despotism over Northern India. But the golden era was short-lived: the seeds of disintegration were always there; once more the invaders poured in through the passes of the north and the sub-continent was split up into scores of contending States.

To the advance of conquering Islam there was no barrier. After seven centuries of foreign, i.e., Moslem dominion, which in its prime never covered more than two-thirds of the country,

India, in the eighteenth century, when the Mogul Empire was tottering to its fall, was a prey to invaders and successful military adventurers, the rising power of the Mahrattas in the centre, the Sikhs and Afghans in the north, while some of the old submerged kingdoms were here and there again emerging.

Nor was there ever any British conquest of India as a definite policy. The attempts of our French rivals, with the help of local rulers, to strangle our trade and annex our settlements, compelled the trading East India Company to defend its interests. From 1750 down to 1815 it was fighting the French and their supporters in India, Haidar Ali and Tippu, the Mahrattas and Sikhs, stiffened by French organization and leadership. The defeat of Napoleon left us the strongest Power in India. With the help of our Indian allies we gradually filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the Mogul Empire. We, too, never met any national resistance, because there was no Indian nation; indeed, our progress was aided by most of the Indian races, always ready to welcome any strong rule that rescued them from anarchy and oppression.

Two notable instances may be cited. Our staunchest allies in the struggle against the Mahrattas were the Rajput Chiefs, representing the old ruling families dispossessed by the Moguls and the Mahrattas. They, whether in the Native States reestablished by us, or in British India, are our most loyal subjects and feudatories to-day. It is not from the Rajputs who have ruled and have a claim to rule, that one hears complaints of lost liberty and alien rule, but from the softer peoples of Bengal and Southern India, who have always been under the rule of stronger races.

Again, our hardest struggles in India were those against the Sikhs of the Punjab, a warlike minority which for eighty years had imposed its rule on the Moslem and Hindu majority. The Sikhs, more than any race in India, have a claim to be regarded as a nation. Their attack on British India collapsed in 1849 when the Punjab was annexed. Eight years later they were our stoutest supporters in the mutiny; ever since they have maintained their reputation as loyal and valiant fighting men, wherever the British flag flies. The Sikhs would not be human if they did not sometimes lament their lost glories. But the vast majority are wise enough to realise that a small minority could not hope long to rule over Punjab races as martial as their own and that they are in a stronger position under British rule than under any other.

Thus the popular theory of India's lost independence is a fiction; the Hindu "Golden Age" is a myth. The few generations of Gupta dominion (the Mauryas were Buddhists and have left few traces in India) on which that myth mainly rests, were associated with the darkest features of Hinduism, suttee, female infanticide, human sacrifice, slavery, many of which customs had been adopted by the Aryans as the price of incorporating the lower aboriginal races.

What the British have done is to bring a sub-continent of 320 millions of people, who had never known a national government or anything approaching economic unity, into a single political and economic system. That in itself is a marvellous achievement. The nearest analogy is to be found in the United States of America. But the population of the States is only one-third that of India, and the divisions of race, culture and religion, are infinitely less. Could one imagine all Europe (outside Soviet Russia) ruled by an efficient, impartial, external authority, e.g., the League of Nations, with no fiscal barriers, no customs duties or passports, no armaments, apart from a small, well-equipped force under the central authority, guaranteeing the status of each State or Province, then one would have some conception of what the people of India owe to British rule. Hostile critics, such as Mr. Rutherford and Mrs. Besant, either ignore these facts, or, if forced to admit them, dwell on the sacrifices to India by which those benefits have been obtained.

Their next charge is that under British rule India is impoverished and over-taxed. One obvious answer to this is that one-third of India is still under Indian rule, and there generally the taxation is much higher, and the poverty much greater than in British India. India is a poor country, judged by Western (though not by Eastern) standards: for 70 per cent. of its dense population are directly dependent on agriculture, and agriculture is dependent on a precarious rainfall. Hence the frequency in the past of famines, which are now becoming rarer and less widespread. The improvement is due to British capital and enterprise. Over five hundred million pounds of British capital, lent at 5 per cent., or less, have been used in constructing 40,000 miles of railways, thus ensuring the development of agriculture and the movement of population and foodstuffs in times of scarcity. Nearly another hundred millions have been spent on establishing the greatest

irrigation system in the world, one that already secures thirty million acres of crops-valued at £150,000,000 annually-against the vagaries of the weather; that area in the next ten years will be raised to forty million acres, or more than the area of England and Wales.

To take a concrete example. Six of the great rivers fed from the Himalayan snows run down to the sea through the arid Punjab. No native ruler had ever thought of utilizing these rivers for irrigation. We began the work seventy years ago. When the present writer went to the Punjab forty years ago, two million acres, formerly waste or yielding an occasional and precarious crop, had been converted into the most productive agriculture in Asia. When he left the Punjab in 1920, the canal-irrigated area had risen to twelve million acres (nearly half the total arable land and twice as large as the famous Nile irrigation system). When the projects now under construction are completed, the area will be sixteen million acres, producing rich crops of wheat, sugarcane, cotton, maize.

When we annexed the Punjab the selling value of land was five shillings per acre, or only double the heavy Sikh land-tax. Last year, as a result of light assessment, security, railways and irrigation canals, the average sale-price was over three hundred times the British land-tax, and stood at £33 per acre! Again, forty years ago, the 150 miles between Lahore and Mooltan was a barren, rainless waste. Most of the land was perforce recorded as State property, because no one would accept responsibility for what had no value. The writer knew of cases where it sold for under two shillings an acre. Only thirty years later, before he left the Punjab, the canals and railways had converted that tract into one of the richest in the world; the land is now selling at over £50 per acre. Can any country in the world show such progress? And this progress is due entirely to British initiative and capital.

This is the country which Mrs. Besant and her disciples say we are bleeding white by ruthless taxation. There never was a grosser calumny. In all oriental countries, land bears an undue share of the public burdens-the peasant has few friends at courtand India in the past was no exception. The liberal-minded Akbar was conferring on Indian agriculture a great boon when he reduced the State demand to one-third of the produce, or its

cash value. But the old rack-renting reappeared under his successors. As the British took the place of the Moguls they carried on the Mogul system. But they have steadily reduced the standard, and now for British India as a whole it represents less than one-eighth. That leniency, coupled with security of title, irrigation facilities and access to markets explains the great rise in land-values in British India. The Indian States have adhered more closely to the oriental tradition. Their land-tax is generally at least double that in adjoining British areas, the security is much less, and consequently the selling price is infinitely lower. Hence the Indian villager—90 per cent. of the population stoutly resists any proposal for transfer to Indian rule. For him Swaraj has few attractions.

Both absolutely and relatively to income, British India is the most lightly taxed country in the world. In Great Britain the national income is calculated at £3,500 millions per annum, or £80 per head. The Government revenue is above 800 millionsover £18 per head,—of which £700 millions (£16 per head) is raised by taxation; income and super-tax absorb about £320 millions, or nearly one-tenth of the national income. In British India, independent and moderate estimates place the total annual income at £2,000,000,000, or £8 per head; the Government (central and local) revenue is £160,000,000-less than one-twelfth ; the revenue from taxation and including the land-tax, is about £115,000,000-nine shillings per head-one-eighteenth of the average income. Most significant of all, the proceeds of income and super-tax are only £12,000,000-one shilling per head-much less than one per cent. of the annual income. In Japan, taxation averages £2 1os. per head, more than five times that of British India.

But the Indian taxation is very uneven; an undue proportion falls on the peasant and the poorer classes generally. That follows from the tradition that the higher castes, the intelligentsia and the traders of the towns, have a right to escape taxation, while remaining free to exploit the rural masses whose functions are to bear the burdens of taxation and defence. The incometax figures show that in practice this is still largely the case. Great landlords with rent-rolls running into six figures, do not pay a penny as income-tax, because they already pay a land-tax, fixed in many cases 140 years ago. There are no estate or succession or legacy duties in India.