id="page33" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[pg 33]"/> The point is in fact conceded by all fair-minded English publicists.

The Manchester Guardian, only the other day, discussing the recent increase in the cotton duties, questioned "the wisdom and justice" of this £100,000,000 exaction from India and admitted that "the loss it represents to an extremely poor population like that of India is very much greater than the gain to England." Even the Morning Post, that representative of Jingo Imperialism, recognizes the extreme poverty of the masses of India. I will not quote the Nation as you do not like that journal. The moneyed classes of India, the Rajas and Maharajas, the bankers and mill owners, the industrial corporations that will fill this loan could not find a more profitable investment. They get 100 per cent. stock for 95 and besides get from 5 to 5-1/2 per cent. interest, in some cases free of income tax for thirty years to come. Upon whom will the burden of interest fall? Neither on the lender nor on the borrower, but mainly on the ryot and the laborer. Do you know, sir, that the average price of salt (wholesale) in Lahore, Punjab, had risen from R1-9-7 a maund in 1912-13 to R2-7-3 in 1916-17? But that in retail sale "the average price of salt per maund (82 lbs.) had risen from R1-14-0 to R5-0-0" (Tribune, Lahore, March, 1917). The fresh taxation imposed since the war, which by this loan-cum-gift transaction of 100 million sterling threatens to become permanent, has raised the prices of the necessaries of life to an abnormal extent. The wages remain virtually the same. Your Government which employs large numbers of laboring men in railways, canals, and otherwise have not considered it necessary to raise the wages of the workingmen. Will the private employer do otherwise? I know from personal knowledge how frightfully the poor Indian clerk is sweated in the offices of your Government in India on a mere pittance. Can't you feel for the millions of those little ones whose already scanty, insufficient food is still further reduced by the fresh taxes imposed by your Government to find means to pay the war budget and this permanent addition of £6,000,000 a year to their burden? Don't you know, sir, that in India there are millions of widows (much more than in any other country) who have to support their little ones by their own toil and that every penny of additional taxation hits them hard. The hardships and privations imposed in Europe by the war are nothing as compared with what the Indian masses have been putting up with, for the last fifty years or so. The fiscal policy of your Government has ruined Indian industry. You know it as well as anyone else. Did you notice the letter of Mr. G. W. Forrest in the London Times of March 14, 1917, wherein he admitted that "the tale of England's dealing with Indian industry was one of littleness and injustice," and that "by positive prohibition and heavy duties the Indian textile trade in England was destroyed and our own trade was fostered." You and your colleagues have used grandiloquent rhetoric in your defense of the increase in the cotton duties in India and over your concern for India and Indian industries, but you are mistaken if you think that anyone in India is likely to be taken in by your hypocritical professions. Pardon me, sir, I mean no insult when I say "hypocritical professions." The practice is a part of a modern statesman's job. He has to create a certain atmosphere before he can make his people believe that what he does is the only correct thing to do.

Your cotton duties, sir, afford no relief to the Indian poor. It would not have hurt me much, if you had forced or induced the Rajas and the Maharajas, the bankers and the capitalists to contribute even more than 100 million pounds to the war expenses, as it is they who have grown fat, if anyone in India has, under the British regime, but to force the Indian ryot and the Indian wage earner to do it and to continue to pay for it for years to come out of his scanty daily rations is the climax of cruelty. Then the unkindest cut of all is that it should come from you, whom we had associated with feelings of kindness, and pity, for the poor and the workmen.

Your Government has called it a free and spontaneous gift of the people of India! If the members of your cabinet, if the Secretary of State for India, if the Governor General of India and his ministers of the Executive Council, are the people of India, then truly you are right and we wrong. If they are not the people of India, as they are not, then it is a gift by yourself to yourself, of other peoples' money. Again, the statement that the measure was unanimously approved of by the Indian members of the council is a diplomatic lie. You know that the matter was settled between your Cabinet as represented by the Secretary of State for India and the Viceroy's Executive Council (which includes only one Indian member nominated by you), before it was announced in the Legislative Council. You know also, sir, and if you don't, you ought to, that the Indian Legislative Council has no power under the law to make any changes in the budget. The budget is entirely beyond their purview. The members can only extol it or criticise it. They can propose resolutions disapproving of some of its provisions which can amount to nothing more than pious wishes even if passed. But the official majority in the Council guarantees the defeat of any hostile resolutions by non-official members. Re this loan-cum-gift transaction, the non-official members of the Legislative Council put a seal on their mouths because they thought it was useless to incur the risk of being called disloyal for a matter which was reported to them as a fait accompli and which they could not in any way change or modify; yet two of them did raise a sort of feeble protest.

IT IS NOT A GIFT BY THE PEOPLE OF INDIA

The press comments on it, however subdued and timid and halting, leave no doubt about the real mind of India in the matter. The truth has been pointed out by the Manchester Guardian and the Nation. (Beg your pardon, sir, for mentioning the Nation again). The former, in its issue of March 15, remarked: "It is we, who govern India and not the Indian people. The initiative in all financial proposals necessarily comes from the government we appoint in India, and these cannot reach the light of public discussion in the Legislative Council or elsewhere until they have received the sanction of the Secretary of State for India here. For Mr. Chamberlain to throw off upon Indian people the responsibility for originating and devising the 100 million contribution is as unconvincing a rhetorical exercise as the House of Commons has witnessed for many a long day. The responsibility from the first to the last is his and that of the Indian Government. We have said more than once, and we repeat it that in our opinion a wise statesmanship would both find better uses in India for India's millions and employ India more advantageously for the common cause by using more of her manhood and less of her money," I will not quote the Nation, sir, which is on this point as explicit, if not more, as the Manchester Guardian.

Now, sir, you know that India has been very eager to fight for the Empire. She has supplied you with about 350,000 troops in this war, paying for their services and equipment herself. But 350,000 do not represent even a fraction of her man power, the whole of which she was prepared to throw in this struggle. While Australia and Canada and Ireland have either