The feilding Star. Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5, 1907. India.

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 283, 5 June 1907, Page 2

The f eilding Star. Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5, 1907. India.

The recent spasmodic trouble in India will only tend to call to remembrance the beneficence of the British rule in that vast territory. The "unrest," as it has been termed, was in the shape of a cry from a noisy minority for absolute control of their own affairs, and the expulsion of the British power and authority ; and we have been told by those who know India best, and whose opinions are worth having, that the trouble has been caused mainly by those men, who, having had a university course, are not fitted up at once with Government billets. If this be so, it only proves that the average Hindoo has the average share of human nature, and that when the British took their civilisation to India, it was accompanied by that idea which urges too many men to aim at a fat Government job, with little to do and plenty to get. However, the rule of the British has been an incalculable benefit to India, as it has been in every place in the world-^except perhaps, Ireland — where the Union Jack proclaims the allegiance of the people to the Empire. Doubtless the secret of the success of British colonisation and government is the love of truth and justice which permeates the minds of the leading statesmen of the the country. England gave India a just and equitable form of government which was as strange to that country as it was beneficial, and though a petty chief here and there might wish to go back to the old style of rule, the vast majority of the inhabitants would never give their consent to a proposal to throw off the protection of the Englishman. A speech delivered by the late Viceroy, Lord Curzon, at Bombay, on 16th November, 1905, two days before he left India, gives us an idea of the stamp of man whom the British have been able, and are still able, to send to watch over that part of the King's dominions. In concluding a stirring address, Lord Curzon said: — "A hundred times in India I have said to myself, oh that to every Englishman in this country, as he ends his work, might be truthfully applied the phrase, 'Thou has loved righteousness and hated iniquity.' No man has, I believe, ever served India faithfully of whom that could not be said. All other triumphs are tinsel and sham. Perhaps there are fow of us who make anything but a poor approximation to that ideal. But let it be our ideal all the same. To fight for the right, to abhor the imperfect, the unjust, or the mean, to swerve neither to the right hand nor to the left, to care nothing for flattery or applause or odium or abuse — it is so easy to have any of them in India — never to let your enthusiasm be soured or your courage grow dim, but to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of His ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a striving of duty, where it did not before exist— that is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in India. It is good enough for his watchword while he is here, for his epitaph when he is gone. I have worked for no other aim. Let India be my judge."