'India seems to me just as ill-governed as the rest of Asia.
There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign
officials, and waste of money that one sees in Turkey. The
result is the same; and I don't see much difference between
making the starving Hindoo pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and
taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus. Want cuts up
all these great empires in their centralised governments.'
'The "natives" as they call them,' he writes farther on, 'are a
race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. I own
to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are
held, and my faith in British institutions has received a
severe blow.... I never could see the moral obligations
Governments acknowledge of taxing people for debts which the
Governments, and not the people, have incurred. All public
debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less
dishonest, but in a despotism like India they are a swindle.'
'It is my distinct impression,' he states in another portion of
his too brief work, 'from all that I have seen and heard, that
the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there
and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by
a more generous treatment, will in a few years make the
continued connection between England and India altogether
impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will
ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable
misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of
violence such as nothing in the past history of either will
have equalled. The people are beginning to awake and to resent
the stupidity of those who, representing England in India,
wantonly affront them, and unless the English public at home,
with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes
awake, too, to the danger of its own indifference, the
irreparable result of a general race hatred will follow. Only
it should be remembered that India is a vast continent peopled
by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and then the
convulsion, when it comes, will be on a scale altogether out of
proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. Let
India once be united in a common sentiment of hatred for all
that is English and our rule there will _ipso facto_ cease. Let
it once finally despair of English justice, and English force
will be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal,
India's symbol, is a docile beast and may be ridden by a child.
He is sensible, docile and easily attached. But ill-treatment
he will not bear forever, and when he is angered in earnest his
vast bulk alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the
strength of the strongest to guide him.'
All who are interested in the future of England and India should read
this volume, which, although written as far back as Lord Ripon's
viceroyalty, applies in all its lessons and all its warnings with ten
times greater force to the India of to-day, which, with the three-fold
curse upon it of famine, of drought, and of plague, finds the British
Government too engrossed in its aggressive and criminal war in South
Africa to come to the relief of its Indian Empire, where tens of
thousands of human lives, and millions of animals, are wasting in death
and in despair.