THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1908. THE INDIAN EXPERIMENT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13938, 21 December 1908, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1908. THE INDIAN EXPERIMENT.

The scheme of the Imperial He minent for Const.' f "tional re Prt ~— in India can only be regarded as an exceedingly dangerous experiment. That its --~ne is to be limited by the restriction of reprospntation upon the various legislative councils to special and privileged classes, and by the permanent maiut.en v >,'ie on these councils of official majorities, can only whet the appetite of the agitators, who will see in these and the minor reforms nothing more than concessions wrung by fear from the British rulers. The purpose of the Government in local affairs is to train the people to manage such matters for themselves ; after this it is difficult to follow Viscount Morley's train of thought when he says that " if he believed that the changes contemplated would lead directly or of necessity to the establishment of a Parliamentary system he would have nothing to do with them. The Indians are to have local autonomy, are to have class-representation upon the highest legislative bodi2s, ; .> to have power through their representatives to make not only legislative but Budget recommendations. • If this does not justify a further agitation for a Parliamentary system through which the British may be driven out of India, wh-fc does'? It is true that we have a vigorous suppression of open sedition inaugurated at the same time as this Constitutional reform, but the Sedition Act iii its

very nature ia a temporary expedient designed to counteract certain intolerable forma of agitation while the Constitutional reforms are permanent, for once inaugurated they cannot be repealed without vast dissatisfaction. The Bengali newspapers anticipate further reforms, although British officials regard them as' already excessive and due to Viscount Morley's insistence. Apparently the only reason why these reforms are being pushed forward at the present juncture is that they are sequential to the long-established policy of British Liberalism, which only a generation ago openly proclaimed its desire to educate British colonics in self-government so that they might be made ready to separate from their Mother Country, and which has never been able to appreciate the fundamental difference between a British colony peopled by Englishmen and a British dependency peopled by subject aliens. In the Imperial proclamation to the Indian people read at the great gathering of Indian princes held to celebrate the jubilee of Crown Government it was stated that: " From the first the principle of representative government began to be introduced, and the time has come when in the* judgment of my Viceroy and Governor-General and others of my counsellors it may prudently be extended." Referring to the disloyal agitation the proclamation said that: "These conspiracies I know to be abhorrent to the loyal and faithful character of the vast hosts of my Indian subjects, and 1 will not suffer them to turn me aside from my task of building up the fabric of security and order." Hero we have an outline of the attitude cf the Imperial Government in India, an attitude which might be more cordially viewed if a note of doubt and pessimism did not pervade the utterances of Ministers in the Imperial Parliament during the discus sion upon the proposed reforms. -For there can be no intelligent gainsaying of the now vhib'c f'i"t that the attempts to liberalise Indian legislative and administrative methods have most wofully failed in conciliating the sympathies of the Indian peoples. For fifty years the Crown officials have been engaged in herculean tasks' have fought famine, have restrained disease, have instituted' vast irrigation works, have maintained peace and upheld justice. It was.no idle boast in the Jubilee proclamation that: "Noman among my subjects has been favoured, molested, or disquieted, ljy reason of his religious belief or worship. All men have enjoyed protection of the -law. The law itself has been administered without disrespect to creed or caste, or to usages and ideas rooted in your civilisation; it has been simplified in form, and its machinery adjusted to the requirements of ancient communities slowly entering a new world." This is so —and that it is so is one of the glories of Imperial rule, will forever shed a glory upon the British occupation of India, even though it passed to-night, in the minds of all who can appreciate Western ideas of truth, integrity, and justice. But what is the effect upon India? n oes any unbiassed man imagine for one moment that there is more loyalty in India than there was fifty years ago, or that British rule would last for a month if naval supremacy were so lost that no reinforcements could possibly reach the British garrison from the British lands? The country is honeycombed by secret societies, aiming at our overthrow, is being ceaselessly indoctrinated with Anglophobist ideas by those to whom British law has given opportunity and protection, is waiting with the unfathomable paticn.. of India for the white man to pass and for India to be left to itself again. We may not like to think of this, but it is the truth, which no Englishman can afford to shirk. To admit a few Indians to office in the Government which British devotion and energy have created among them, to make them magistrates and telegraphists, postmen, and policemen, even members of the Viceroy's Council, or even to elect some of them to the Imperial itself in the strange fashion of the homestaying Englishman—does not alt?.]* things in the slightest, excepting -bo increase their desire to get rid of us and thus pocket for themselves the salaries paid to British officials. For instead of standing firmly upon the immutable truth that the Law and Order of India, the development of its industries, the security of its people and the equality of their creeds, are impossible without a British bureaucracy and British ruleis, we have gone out of our way to persuade the Indians that they can govern themselves—provided only there is an official majority in the various executive councils. It might not be an unmixed evil if we lost India, for thenceforward we might save for good colonial use the tens of thousands of honest, honourable, capable and devoted Englishmen who lay down their lives in that marvellous work by which a comparative handful holds 300,000,000 of natural anarchists in the leash of law. But we are approaching too near the possibility of such a loss to discuss it lightly Every so-called "reform" which brings nearer to the the hands of Eastern multitudes the political weapons of the West, certain to be used not for their own good but against British authority, makes the ultimate loss of India at least more probable.