WHAT BRITISH RULE HAS ACCOMPLISHED.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 975, 26 March 1924, Page 4

WHAT BRITISH RULE HAS ACCOMPLISHED.

Sir William Vincent, a member of the India Council, and for many years a member of the Indian Civil Service and Minister of the Interior on the Governor-General’s Executive Council, in the course of a recent address on “British Rule in India,” pointed out that the one great object of Englishmen in India has been to govern the country in the interests of the masses of the people, to prevent oppression, and to do justice. In none of these respects, he said had they failed. Tire benefits of British administration have, he further stated, been repeatedly admitted by Indian leaders of outstanding capacity, and he quoted Mr Gokhale as saying: “The continuance of British rule means the continuance of that peace and order which it can alone maintain in our country, and with which our best interests and among them the growth of a spirit of nationality are bound up.” There is a danger that the names of the great and illustrious men who were the pioneers of our Indian Empire may be forgotten. But they are remembered by the better class Indians, who are acquainted with the history of their country and who know that the foundations of tranquil government were laid by such meu as Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, Job Charnock, Surgeon Hamilton, Sir William Jones, Malcolm Munro, Bishop Heber, and others who helped to make India the country it is to-day. “Indians,” Sir William Vincent said, “are well aware of the value of tile services rendered by these and many others who have helped in the upbuilding of their nation.” Characteristically enough, when the Moplah disturbances necessitated the intervention of the military, a deputation of influential Mohammedans waited upon Sir William, who was then Minister of the Interior, to proffer two requests. They asked first that British troops should alone be employed in suppressing the risings, because they weie more humane, and, secondly, that Christian magistrates should alone be employed to try the offenders because their honesty and justice were above suspicion. Surely more eloquent testimony to the humanity and probity of a Government could not be obtained than that. But we have also the testimony of an American—Professor Van Tyne—who conducted personal investigations into the political conditions obtaining in India last year. B.e said of one of the services that it was “perhaps the best and most incorruptible the world hns over seen” and that “most British administrators have carried out well a laborious and often thankless task, with an unselfish desire to rule for India’s good and to adhere to a high standard of official rectitude.” Under British rule the country lias progressed by leaps and bounds. It has been safeguarded from external aggression. “For 700 years warring races of Central Asia and Afghanistan had poured successive hordes of robbers into India iooting, pillaging, devastating, and carrying into slavery thousands of artisans, and on the east and west coasts a tract of seaboard a thousand square miles in area was recorded in the earliest survey as depopulated by pirates.” India was then the poorest and most wretched of countries and, for three months of the year, three-quarters of the population were on the verge of starvation and had nothing they could call their own. Corruption prevailed everywhere under the Mogul Administration and the laws were absolutely barbarous. That has all been swept away and, under British rule, 3/ ,000 miles of railways, 50,000 miles of motailed and about 145,000 miles of unmetalled roads have been constructed. Co-operative societies exist in all the provinces, and the external trade of the country which in the earliest days of the old East India Company, was only one million, in 1921 amounted in value to five hundred millions. So far from the British exploiting industry, all the cotton mills, numbering 257, are in the hands of the Indians who own them and employ 332,000 people, and the jute mills numbering 77 and employing another 288,000 people, are in their hands also, and the whole trend of British government has been in the direction of benefiting the country and its inhabitants. That the Government has not been free from faults is admitted, but it lias not failed to do its duty by the people of India and has maintained the scales of justice with an even balance.