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Under the Reforms India enjoys fiscal autonomy, and the alliance between the great landed interests and the industrialists of the towns prevents Government from adopting a more equitable fiscal system. The good-will of the Legislative Assembly has enabled Tata's steel-works, which enjoy a practical monopoly, to obtain in a few years a bonus of £1,500,000 from the taxpayer, besides a protective tariff of 33 per cent., in spite of the injury to the rural consumer who counts for little in politics. One industry after another is receiving high protective duties, and the Swadeshi cry is being exploited ruthlessly to benefit the Indian n anufacturer-a combination of pseudo-patriotism and antiBritish spleen which led the Bombay cotton-spinners to subscribe £300,000 to Mr. Gandhi's boycott fund. Two years ago an alliance between the Swaráj party and the great landlords in the United Provinces rejected a moderate government measure to protect tenants from rack-renting and arbitrary ejectment. When the Governor exercised his emergency powers to push the Bill through, his action was attacked as arbitrary and tyrannical.

The charge of excessive military expenditure is equally fallacious. There is no country in the world defended so cheaply and so efficiently. The annual expenditure on defence comes to £40,000,000, or half-a-crown per head. In Great Britain it averages £2 158. per head; in the pacific United States, £1 10s. ; in Japan, 198. India escapes so lightly because: (1) the small

army of 60,000 British and 160,000 Indian regulars is highly efficient, owing to British organization and leadership; (2) in case of need, India can fall back on Great Britain's military resources; (3) India pays only a nominal sum of £110,000 towards the British Navy. If she had to defend her 5,000 miles of coastline she would probably have to spend some £20,000,000 a year, as Japan does.

The ruin of Indian industries by Great Britain is another article in the indictment. It rests mainly on the fact that, when the customs duty on Lancashire cotton was raised many years ago from 7 to 11 per cent., the free-trade school secured the imposition of a countervailing excise duty of 3 per cent. on Indian cotton goods. That was a legitimate grievance from the Indian standpoint. But the excise duty was abandoned a year ago when financial conditions allowed. The Indian manufacturers refused to guarantee that they would pass on the benefit to the consumer; they are already clamouring for a bonus plus an

increase of the import duty to at least 15 per cent., but have not gained their point so far.

Apart from this, the charge rests on the disappearance of many artistic arts and crafts, such as the Dacca muslins, and of cottage industries generally. That is certainly to be deplored, but it has happened in England itself and in every other country, owing to changes of fashion and the substitution of the power-loom for the hand-loom. The critics also overlook the fact that while British competition may have driven certain industries out of the field, British capital and brains, supplemented by Indian skilled assistance, have created new industries of far greater value, e.g., the tea, jute and cotton industries, employing nearly two million workers, railways, engineering works and mines, each employing

200,000.

The "drain on India" is perhaps the most popular slogan of anti-British extremists. But the boot is on the other foot: the drain is from England to India. As a result of the "Pax Britannica," and the thousand millions of British capital invested in railways, canals and other industries created by Great Britain, India has now become one of the greatest exporting countries in the world. The balance of trade is always in her favour. In 1924-25 she exported goods valued at £300,000,000; her imports were only £185,000,000. The difference is made good partly by her payments to the British investor for interest on loans, and payments for services rendered, such as military training and transport, pensions to retired officials, etc. But an enormous balance still remains which is made good by the import of gold and silver. In the three years 1923-25, India absorbed no less than £151,000,000 in precious metals. Her capacity for the absorption of gold is only second to that of the United States, and is becoming a world problem, for most of the gold and silver goes under ground instead of being used to accelerate the wheels of industry.

Finally we come to the allegation that Indians have not been given a fair share in the administration. This grievance is never put forward by the rural masses, who invariably ask, and ask in vain, for more British officials, in whose integrity and impartiality they have more confidence. It is confined to the hereditary literary classes of the towns. For generations all the Civil Services -I.C.S., Public Works, Medical, Forests, Education, Agriculture, etc.-have been open to free competition by British and

Indian candidates. Several hundreds of Indians have entered by this door, and many have given proofs of ability and integrity, especially in the judicial and other sedentary services. The only services closed to them in the past were the higher posts in the army and police, for which the intelligentsia showed little aptitude or desire. These have been for some years thrown open to them. But, so far, it has been found difficult to find suitable candidates for the fifteen annual vacancies at Sandhurst. The elimination of the British officers (10 or 12 per regiment and battalion) proposed by the Skeen Committee is most unpopular with the Indian Army itself and the fighting races, and if carried out will certainly weaken India's power of defence.

The total personnel in the higher branches (the subordinate personnel is almost exclusively Indian) of all the civil departments is about 4,000, of whom some 3,200 are British-one British official to every 100,000 of the population. This small corps d'élite, essential to maintain the traditions of efficiency, integrity and impartiality, is being steadily reduced to meet the wishes, not of the Indian masses, but of a section of ambitious Indian politicians. Already many of the services on which the development of India depends are being closed to British competition. The results are rapidly becoming apparent in a general deterioration of the standards of administration, growing disregard for the law, an appalling increase in nepotism and corruption-those inevitable features of oriental administration-and frequent sanguinary communal outbreaks. Nothing is more significant than the unanimity with which, when trouble starts, the contending factions clamour for a British magistrate or police officer, whom the so-called representatives of India are doing all they can, with the help of our politicians, to get rid of.

The foregoing remarks throw some light on the final claim that India is a nation entitled to Dominion status, according to the so-called Moderates, or to full independence, as demanded by the extremists. On this point, let us hear what competent Indian opinion has to say.

The Maharaja of Benares, whose authority no one can question, addressing the Viceroy on January 5th, said :

It is a mockery to call ourselves a nation. We cannot do without British protection for centuries. A further reduction of the British element in the services and the courts would be a disaster.

VOL. 246. NO. 501.

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Sir Abdul Rahim, President of the Moslem League, referring to the antagonism of Hindus and Moslems at Aligarh, stated :— The fact that they have lived in the same country for nearly 1,000 years has contributed hardly anything to their fusion into a nation. The English panacea of nationalism has brought not more unity but worse divisions.

These facts are freely admitted by sensible Indians. It would be madness to disregard them. Let us recognise the fact that an Indian nation has never existed and is not likely to come into existence for generations, if ever. We can, then, ask Indians to co-operate with us in the development of self-government in its only practicable form, i.e., provincial autonomy. Even here, progress will be difficult. Take the Punjab, a province perhaps more competent to defend itself and pay its way than any other. Which of the three great communities is to dominate the country-the 11,000,000 Moslems, the 6,000,000 Hindus, or the 3,000,000 Sikhs? Even now the Hindus complain that politically they are suffering under the Moslem majority in the Council; the Moslems assert that they are groaning under the economic tyranny of the Hindus; the Sikhs are afraid of being crushed between the upper and nether mill-stones. Till a sense of common citizenship is established-and the hope of this is steadily receding since the reforms stimulated communal antagonisms-only British control can hold together the jarring elements of even a single province. By steadily weakening that control we are making impossible the object in view-the development of self-governing institutions.

M. F. O'DWYER

BISMARCK AND WILLIAM II.

I. Bismarck. Von Emil Ludwig. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt. 1927.

2. Wilhelm der Zweite. Von Emil Ludwig. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt. 1926. 3. From Bismarck to the World War. By ERICH BRANDENBURG.

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Oxford

4. Bismarck, Andrassy and their Successors. By COUNT JULIUS ANDRÁSSY.

Benn. 1927.

5. The World Policy of Germany, 1890-1912. By OTTO HAMMANN. Allen & Unwin. 1927.

"L'HISTOIRE," wrote Prince Metternich from his exile in

Brussels, est une force très imposante." A modern statesman, finding himself in similar circumstances, might not be disposed to worship so devoutly at Clio's shrine, for, though Clio still has her shrine and her worshippers, her repute, like that of many other once popular deities, has not come unscathed through the refining fires of the World War. Gibbon's mordant style and Macaulay's sonorous periods, which resounded through Europe in the year (1850) in which Metternich wrote his aphorism, still have power to delight the reader; but their confident judgments no longer enjoy the authority that formerly attached to them in the eyes of the public. To-day, when the World War, and still more the Peace of Versailles, have demonstrated the falsity inherent in many tenets, the public rebels against the arbitrary pronouncements of historical writers who, believing themselves wise after the event, seek for that reason to invest their writings with an absolute and final authority foreign to the very nature of history. "History can only justify historical right,” wrote Flint in a trenchant saying that deserves wider recognition than it has hitherto found, " and historical right falls infinitely short of absolute right." Never was this profound truth more ignored in practice by historians than in the years immediately succeeding to the conclusion of the World War-years in which a vast quantity of historical, or pseudo-historical, literature poured forth from the printing presses of Europe and America.

The unlocking of secret archives, the numerous disclosures made by prominent statesmen and politicians, soldiers and monarchs, in memoirs and other autobiographical writings that were too often mere pièces justificatives, placed at the disposal of

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