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And now I come back to the agitators. Who are they, and what do they want? I have not to my knowledge an Anarchist among my many Indian friends. But if by agitator' is meant one who is dissatisfied with the present administration and wants to see things improved to his own personal advantage, then I have met them by the score, and they have talked over their grievances with me more candidly, perhaps, than they would have a few years ago when I was a power-a small one-in the land. As to organised Anarchism, I think I may assert it does not exist outside Bengal, though there are individuals elsewhere-mostly lads who have just left school-whose exotic education leads them to approve of violent measures merely to rub into Government the fact that they are discontented. Excluding the extremists as a quantité négligeable, I believe one-half of the younger educated men is a most moderate estimate of those who have an axe to grind, and these are supplemented by about twenty per cent. of the older educated men who are also in the movement. The very old men are not generally troubling themselves about politics. Intellectual numbness comes on in India at a much earlier age than in Europe. Further, the Mohamedans generally are holding aloof from active politics, not believing either in the genuineness of the agitation or in a likelihood of its success. And still more are they sceptical of receiving generous treatment at the hands of the Hindus were the movement to succeed. Moreover, they fully appreciate the absolute fairness with which they have ever been treated by the British Government. If they are backward in the competition for administrative posts, they recognise that this is due to their own failure to educate themselves up to the level of their Hindu compatriots.

The majority of the discontented would probably like to see our backs for the last time could this be accomplished without personal risk; but a few are convinced that this is a hopeless prospect at present. So they adopt the attitude of tolerating our supremacy, and of screwing out of us all they can by making things unpleasant for us. Now no one can blame them for this. After all they are natives and we are foreigners. To expect an intelligent man to glory in a government by foreigners, however benevolent, is to mark him as having no ambitions and no patriotism. He can only submit to physical force, and it is by physical force we keep our check in India over the educated and the uneducated. We are not loved. We are tolerated because there is no present possibility of an independent India, and because we are on the whole less objectionable than would be the Japanese or the Russians. This puts the feeling of India towards England in its bluntest form. There is appreciation of what we have done for the country, but no gratitude, because in all we have done we have considered the benefits, direct or indirect, accruing to ourselves, and the trail of self-interest marks our every step in the progress of the country. So say the reformers. Their aim is to make us realize

VOL. LXV-No. 385

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that their educated men must have a substantial share of the higher appointments hitherto mainly reserved for members of the Civil Service. No one can blame them for this, so long as their methods are constitutional. Their executive committees or working members and newspaper editors are drawn from the young men who have been educated in England, from the class that benefits by our legal system: barristers, pleaders, and their clerks; from the ever-increasing roll of college and university youths who have been disappointed in securing Government service. Be it remembered that the industrial and commercial openings are infinitesimal in India, which is mainly an agricultural country. Every student starts in the hope of securing a small Government office, and, failing in this, he has only the law to fall back upon. But even the law courts are limited in their requirements, and consequently the examinations for pleaderships are far more searching than those required of the legal profession in England. Hence the numbers who flock to England to enter by the more open door. The failures are glad to accept the smallest Government clerkships, usually beginning on a salary of £12 per annum. But even of these there are not sufficient to go round. The incumbents are not happy, and their eyes turn with envy towards the young Civil Servant whose pay begins at £320 per annum on the day he lands in India and culminates in a pension (after twenty-one years' residence) of £1000 a year. This is the pie in which the educated Indians would like to have a finger, without, of course, the formality of a stiff competitive examination in England. I will revert to the subject later on.

In still smaller position financially, and with less hope of substantial advancement, are the teachers in Government primary schools existing in almost every village of importance. They are politicians before everything, and carefully study their anti-English newspaper, interpreting its contents to those who cannot read for themselves. In the towns, where higher education is given almost gratuitously, the mischief made by the masters is still more serious, because the boys are better able to appreciate the difficulties they are about to meet with in securing a livelihood, even on starvation wages.

Such is the prospect for educated men. I mean men who can read and write in their own vernacular and have a fair knowledge of arithmetic and a fair knowledge of English-much better than the average university man at home has of French or German. And is it surprising that they aspire to something better in the only line now available to men of education, namely, Government employment; and can it be wondered at if they curse the Government which (after educating them almost gratuitously) fails to provide them with the means of a decent livelihood? For, mark you, to the Government door every evil is placed, be it plague, or famine, or earthquake, or bad times. And whether Government does or refrains from doing, it is set down in the worst light by the native editor. And can you

blame the native editor? He must live, and to live he must sell his paper. No one will buy it unless it is full of abuse of Government; therefore, the paper is full of abuse. Financially, the vernacular newspapers are a poor investment, their average profits being less than £100 a year.

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Broadly speaking, the political movement is strongest in Bengal, largely incited by the recent administrative splitting of the Province into two portions, a measure recently denounced by Lord MacDonnell as the greatest blunder which has been committed in India since Clive conquered at Plassy.'1 Lord Curzon has the credit, or discredit, of this act; but it is one of the few great questions of his time in which he took no initial share, and only after its accomplishment did he perceive the fatal consequences of relying on the judgment of others without examining the pros and cons for himself. The uproar that ensued awoke him to the fact that a mistake had been made. But Lord MacDonnell errs on the side of hysterics when he counsels the retrograde step of restoring the union of Bengal. Even the placating of the irate Bengali would be too heavy a price to pay, and I doubt if he would be placated. Rather would he ask for more, and our administrators would have no peace.

Next to Bengal comes the Bombay Presidency, where the movement is engineered by the Mahrata Brahmins, having their headquarters at Poona. They are probably more bitter in their hatred of the existing Government than the Bengalis, but they are less demonstrative. Their work is mainly underground, and they are credited with having something in the nature of a big surprise for us when the psychical moment arrives. Madras and the Central Provinces are less formidable for the moment than Bengal and Bombay, though the Poona Brahmins are actively pushing their operations in these directions. Sind and the United Provinces are comparatively inactive. The movement has not caught on ' in Burma and the North-West Frontier Province, nor in the southern Punjab.

Prospects lately were particularly gloomy from a Government point of view in the central and northern Punjab, where a serious attempt was made to influence the landowners and the sepoys. It was stopped by the vigorous action of the Executive. Two selfconstituted leaders were deported. They have since been pardoned, and are now absolutely discredited by their fellow-agitators. They are not likely again to come into prominence. It is rumoured that they agreed to renounce the Devil as a condition of their release. This is the view taken by their countrymen, who regard them as having been bought over by Government. Enough to damn any patriot! An unfortunate Bill was passed by the local legislature withdrawing certain rights in land which had hitherto been freely exercised by a vigorous group of occupiers on a large tract watered

'House of Lords, December 17, 1908.

by a great Punjab river. These occupiers-known as colonists-are men carefully selected by Government as the pick of the basket from the best agricultural districts in northern India. They include many pensioned officers and sepoys and many of our most devoted subjects, distinguished by this substantial reward for services rendered, and they are thriving and prosperous. But to the astonishment of those who framed the Bill, the cultivators rose en masse against the harshness of the proposals, and were even prepared to go into open rebellion had not the Supreme Government fortunately stepped in and at the last moment vetoed the measure. Meanwhile the alarm had spread all over the province. The intentions of Government were freely criticised by the sepoys in all the cantonments of upper India. The vernacular Press saw its opportunity, and pointed out in venomous language that no landowner was safe if even the old soldier and the loyalist were to be thrown over. The affair has left an unpleasant feeling behind it and is by no means forgotten. Nor the moral: that agitation pays. There was at the same time a serious upheaval at Rawal Pindi in the north of the Punjab. The land revenue of the district had just been enhanced after a period of rest, under the ordinary settlement operations. The incidence of the tax was most severely felt in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, where the lands are largely owned by Hindus of the non-agricultural classes. The opportunity was seized upon by the political malcontents, who in violent speeches advocated non-payment of the Government demand. Five of the local leaders were asked to show cause why they should not be prosecuted for inciting the people to resistance. They were accompanied to the magistrate's court by an enormous mob of sympathisers. A riot ensued, in which some houses of Europeans and of persons known to be loyal to the British were wrecked, also a mission church and a post-office. The judicial proceedings which followed were dragged out for several months, and in the end the persons accused of being ringleaders were discharged by the sessions judge. But the magistrate's prompt and vigorous action had the effect of nipping the movement in the bud, and Rawal Pindi has been lamblike in behaviour ever since. At the same moment there were disturbances of a quasi-political character at Lahore, and the agitators were reported to be dangerously busy at Multan. But the executive action at Rawal Pindi caused the leaders everywhere to pause, and nothing serious has since happened.

It was an anxious summer for civilians and soldiers and for Indians who were known to be on our side. Loyalists and sepoys were suspected on most improbable grounds-or on no grounds-on the mere report of paid spies of the lowest type. Cipher telegrams coursed freely over the wires. Were we on the eve of another 'Fiftyseven'? Many thought so, for the simple reason that no one knew, from the Governor-General down to the common policeman, what the

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extent of the agitation was and what hold it had got on the agriculturists. I think it is now generally admitted that there was no organised conspiracy; only the letting go of gas from soda water; that the conspirators' had no common plans; that they intended no immediate physical harm; and that they were more astonished than the Government at the successful result of their ebullitions. They have doubtless taken careful note of the ease with which a panic may be created and put it away for future guidance. Doubtless, also, when opening the next soda-water bottle they will have organised a more efficient backing through the agency of village school teachers and disaffected units.

For the moment things are perfectly quiet on the surface all over India with the exception of the Bengal provinces. They will remain so if the recent special repressive Acts are promptly extended to any tract in which disloyalty shows itself active. The mischief in Bengal had a good start of two years while Lords Morley and Minto were discussing the most humane methods of its crushing. In fact, had not the anarchists forced the pace by adopting assassination the House of Commons would not to this day have sanctioned vigorous dealing with a possible grave danger in the future, and the extremists would have continued to rejoice in a fair field and no favour.'

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I have not yet touched upon the attitude of the feudatory States ; and yet their position is one of the most interesting problems in modern Indian history. Their rulers, one and all, may be counted on at this moment as absolutely loyal to the King-Emperor, and entirely untouched by the lever-movement for reform which presses around them. The majority of these States are governed by men of common sense, either by their rulers in person or by experienced officials acting under the rulers' instructions. And they have in most cases a British officer on the spot whose advice is usually sought and generally followed on questions of importance. I cannot say too much in praise of the Agents of the Political Department and of their devotion to the simple old-world communities among whom they spend their term of official life. These feudatory States are a quaint mixture of the ancient and the modern. Their customs and observances date back to times whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; and the visible signs are the elephants, the retainers and the soldiers in curious garb, the multitude of councillors, the astrologers, the physicians wedded to the bedi and ûnáni systems, the 'lucky' moments for work or play, the dancing girls, the musicians, doles to the Brahmins, and a hundred other old-fashioned happenings, as if the British had never approached nearer than the British Channel. And alongside these, but never ousting them, a system of courts of justice, gaols, dispensaries, schools-such as often exceed in magnificence, but seldom in efficiency, the hard-and-fast institutions of neighbouring British territory. These native States, form a very important factor

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