AN IMPERIAL DILEMMA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16493, 7 March 1914, Page 10

AN IMPERIAL DILEMMA.

Neves, perhaps, since the days of Guy Fawkes, has the British Cabinet been sitting above such a powdermagazine as that which threatens it at tho present moment, and it puzzles the plain man completely to know how Ministers sleep at all these nights. Without even crossing St George’s Channel, there is scare-material enough to keep any Parliament on tho tenterhooks of anxiety, with the clamant fiscal, housing, land, electoral, ecclesiastical and industrial questions all menacing tho stability of the Administration. It looks as if Home, Colonial and Imperial policies had reached one and tho same point of electric, tensity. Happily, perhaps, British statesmen are constitutionally of that temperament which, in tho words of Mr Croaker, “ would fry beefsteaks at a volcano,” and thus they are able to bring what at times seems almost a distractingly cool judgment to hear on these burning problems. What a herculean task lies before the Imperial Ministers to-day, with the Home Ride impasse, tho constant muttering of disaffection in India, and the doublestemmed upas-tree which is poisoning South Africa, to say nothing of minor problems, tho outsider at this end of the world can only imagine, but it is obvious to tho most casual reader of tho day’s news that they are confronted with difficulties of the very gravest magnitude. A trenchant article by Mr S. M. Mitra in the “ Nineteenth Century ” brings out a side of the Indo-Afriesvn embroglio, which is calculated not only to find the most sensitive spot in the British tax-payer’s consciousness, but also to strike the student of history with the curious ironies of Imperial power and expansion. Naturally the reader is disposed to be a little critical in viewing such a subject through Indian eyes, but Mr Mitra has previously shown himself able to handle British problems on paper with constraining force, and his present contention is one of rather more than academic interest to the bearers of the Empire’s fiscal burdens. Writing late in December, before the strike and the deportation of its leaders had overshadowed the Indian trouble iu Natal, he directed attention to the firm attitude of the Viceroy, and urged the appointment of an official of the Indian Government, preferably the present Chief Justice at Calcutta, as a representative on tho Commission of Inquiry set up by the South African Government. Ho argued that the British people had a right to demand this concession to India, since tho Empire depended mainly on fiscal and military unity, tho relations between Britain and India in this respect differing from those between Britain and tho colonies. Tho British democracy at large seldom fails to respond to an appeal cf this kind, even when the battery of facts and figures is not worked from such a vantage-point as that attained by Mr Mitra when he contrasts the positions of India and South Africa ; n respect to tho Empire. Mr Mitra points out that South Africa up to tho present has been an extremely expensive luxury to the British taxpayer, who, in addition to all his other benefactions to the young Federation, provides for the permanent British garrison. The Indian army, seven times greater, is paid for, on the other hand,

by India alone. The trade of the Home Country with her self-governing colonies is hampered by restrictions she cannot control; her trade with India bears only such burdens as she cares herself to impose.

Lord Curzon has summed up what this moans to Britain. One-tenth of her whole trade passes through the Indian ports, amounting to more than one-third of tho trade of the Empire outside tho United Kingdom, and more than that with Australia and Canada combined. Moreover, India is now “ the largest producer of food and raw material in the Empire, and tho principal granary of. Great Britain.’ 1 The imports into the United Kingdom of wheat, meal and flour from India exceed those from Canada and are double those from Australia. These facts are worth weighing if indeed Britain has como to tho pass, unbelievable to the average Indian mind, where she cannot influence South Africa to deal justly with the stranger within her gates. Air Mitra briefly indicates tho double consequence of an estrangement between Britain and her groat dependency—tho lengths to which the swadeshi could bo carried were the boycott of native buyers focussed on British goods alone, not on European goods at large, and the danger of disaffection among the native troops. He is careful to point out that tho Hindus who went, not uninvited, to South Africa ask no political rights, merely the measure of justice they were promised both by the Home authorities and the South African in the provisional settlement of 1911. The irony of all this is seen in the fact that South Africa was acquired in the first place in order to keep the trade route to India open, and in the widely spread belief that Britain, after spending millions on subjugating tho Boers is now perforce to spend or lose millions more in maintaining an essentially Boer Government an its anti-Indian and anti-Labour policies.