AN AMERICAN ON INDIA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 48, 11 October 1911, Page 7

AN AMERICAN ON INDIA.

An American sociologist, Mr Price Collier, is at present examining the results of British rule in India. From his article, in the April number of “Scribner’s Magazine,” we reprint a paragraph which may help the wageearner to realise the debt which India owes to the. British. people • “If you and I had taken over the government, of a distracted country, which for centuries had dated, passing events from the last raid, the last massacre, the last famine, the last deluge, the last plundering’ride of a foreign invader; and if we had laid there 30,000 miles of railway, 100,JOO miles and more of telegraph wire; if we had watered 17,000,000 acres with canals of our own construction; if we had arranged that one in every .seven, acres of,the whole country was irrigated; if we had built schools, nursing homes, dispensaries, hospitals—where 8,000,000 children are vacillated and 25,000,000 people receive relief annually—and post offices and oolice stations; if schoo' attendance ;ad increased from 500,000 to (3,000,000; if the letters carried had increased from none to 700,000 annudly; if we had policed the country rom end to end, administered justice vithont fear or favour; bpr-.A millions .f money and thou san ,b of lives in the country’s , defence ; protected the people from brutal customs, protected the widow and the orphan; secured to every man, woman ,and child his

rights, his property, and his earnings ; if out of nearly 29,000 officers of the Government drawing salaries ranging from £6o—no small income for a native of India—up tc £SOOO, as many as 22,000 were filled by natives, and only 6500 by Euiopcans; if out of a gross revenue of £75,272,000 only £20,816,000 was raiser by taxes so-called, while, in England taxation supplies five-sixths,,,and in, India only about one-fourth, Jof the public income; if we had reduced crime to proportions smaller tlujfi in England itself; if the public ,debt, outtide of debt secured by the ample asset of the railways, canals, and so on, amounted to. only ,£28,000.000, , a sum less than half of what It cost to suppress the Mutiny alone; if the land, which when we took charge of it had hardly any commercial value, was now worth £300,000,000; if the export and import trade ; n less than fifty years had increased liprn £40,000,000 to £200,000,000,. while taxation works out at about 87 cents per head; if innocent religious and social customs had not only not been changed, but protected from interference, in the days, too, alas, when many people mist ike more interference for influence, and in a land of jarring and quarrelsome sects—if you and I had a fraction of these things accomplished, by the English in India to our credit, we should he astonished at censure from'without, or criticism f’om within. Wo might indeed he tempted to resent them.”