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influence of the Office be brought directly to bear, but by linking together the labour departments of the various countries by ties of personal relations, contact is established over a wide surface, and these relations mutually support the direct influence exerted by the Office. International work requires the continuous cooperation of national administrations, not only with the international centre but directly with one another. This is particularly true where the subject-matter of international relations is definitely specialised, as in the case of the International Labour Organisation, Those concerned with labour conditions, whether as workers, employers, or administrators, have much to learn from and much to teach their fellow-citizens in other countries. And it is they, and they alone, who are competent to devise international agreements relating to labour conditions, and to take afterwards the first steps in their own countries to secure the national application of these agreements. The more numerous these points of contact and the closer the relations established between them, the more fruitful will be the results of the work of the Organisation.

G. A. JOHNSTON.

Art. 7.-THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THE REFORMS.

AMONGST a certain class of Indian politicians it has become the fashion to regard the Indian States as the survival of a worn-out system, as a ruin which though picturesque is useless and for which there is no room in a practical world. This view is the outcome of an intense enthusiasm for democracy, not perhaps as an end in itself but as the only visible means of obtaining self-government and as the only system under which the modern Indian educated upon the Western plan, and representing what in England would be called the upper middle classes, would have any chance of obtaining real power for himself. We must, however, be honest. The Indian either saw for himself, or if he did not was not allowed to forget, that the war was fought between democratic and autocratic nations, and having loyally and whole-heartedly stood by the Empire of which he formed a part, he very naturally assumed that the democratic cause was the cause of light and the other of darkness, and that the first stood for progress and the last for reaction. Nor was the war the only incentive. Ever since British rule was settled firmly upon the country it has been the aim of its administrators to take the natives of India into participation, partly, it must be owned, because they could not help it, but also, to give them their due, because they looked forward to that ideal time when Indians would be able to manage their own affairs, and they could not conceive any system towards which to train them other than that under which they had themselves grown up. Democracy has been continually held up to them as the ideal of all progressive states, and being logical they have concluded that the negation of it, which is autocracy, is out of date and ought to be abolished.

In this, however, they are mistaken. For a long time past England has been moving towards the democratic ideal in India, first by allowing Indians more than a subordinate share in the government, then by establishing self-governing institutions, then by introducing the elective principle, and finally by taking that momentous step which is known as the Government of India Act, 1919. But it was not until this last step was taken that

the inevitable reactions upon the Indian States began to be recognised. Even now, although the existence of the Indian States can never have been wholly absent from the minds of Mr Montagu and Lord Chelmsford, the short chapter which they were able to devote to them by no means exhausts the possibilities of grave consequences to the Indian Princes, and though they could not without impertinence be discussed in the course of a Report which dealt solely with British India, both Parliament and the public are left somewhat in the dark as to the intentions of the authors, and very little guidance is given towards fitting the Indian States into the scheme of responsible self-government for British India. For as the scheme develops into practical politics, doubts are beginning to be heard whether, after all, the virtues of democracy are of such universal application as our fathers supposed, and whether a system which has been slowly built up in England during at least three hundred years ought suddenly to be thrust upon a country which has loyalty to the personal ruler in the blood and has in the mass little or no idea of what democracy means.

The Indian politicians are mistaken not only for the reason just given but also because, in the largest and most important States, the government is good and affairs are conducted in an enlightened and progressive manner. The States, in fact, are far from being either degenerate or moribund. It was not always so. The Indian States are very largely a legacy from the predecessors of the British, the Maratha, and the Moghul Empires. It has been recently remarked by an American writer, Mr Alleyne Ireland, that bad government can be as poor a neighbour as bad health.' Bad government has thus led to annexation in India, but so also have political entanglements and the necessities of the occasion. It is notorious that the East India Company were most reluctant to increase their imperial obligations; wherever possible they avoided annexation, and sought to adopt the attitude of indifferent spectators, trying to delude themselves into the belief that what happened in the States was no concern of theirs. But circumstances were too strong for them. In the earlier days it became absolutely necessary to annex certain territories if the Company was to hold its own

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against its rivals, both French and Indian, and the native Princes, however well disposed they might be, were too weak to discharge the burden of defence. On the other hand, the help of the more powerful States was important and even necessary to the Company in its contest with its more formidable adversaries and notably with Haidar in Mysore, and the alliances thus formed were upon the basis of mutual equality. The theory of the 'bad neighbour' prevailed only when his existence was a menace to the Company. Common decency combined with deliberate policy to dictate abstention from any aggression; the commonly accepted theory of the time was that the rights of the native rulers should be scrupulously respected. The Company, indeed, did not aspire to any superiority; being supreme in the territories which they had acquired, they were content to acknowledge the supremacy of others in those not theirs. In a word the relations were international.

As time went on, however, this attitude became impossible. Clashes were inevitable. A series of wars; the Maratha, the so-called Pindari, and the Sikh, were in effect the outcome of bad neighbourliness. Insults to the flag and outrages to British officers had to be avenged, and the result was the extension of the Company's dominions. Yet even so, States were carved out of the wreck of what had gone before, and set up under native rulers. The four great Maratha chiefs, Sindhia of Gwalior, Holkar of Indore, the Gaikwar of Baroda, and the Bhonslas of Nagpur, received shares, and, after the final collapse of the Maratha Empire, a State was founded, with Satara as the capital for the successor of Sivaji. This last is said to have lapsed owing to the failure of male heirs, though other accounts suggest that the Raja was implicated in conspiracies against the British. Nagpur was similarly annexed after the death of the last Raja without male heirs, but in this case the Raja was himself the creature of the British Government. Of all the older States Mysore is the classic instance of forbearance, for the Hindu dynasty was deliberately restored after it had been crashed in ruin before the onslaught of Haidar, and when the whole State lay at the mercy of the British at the death of Tipu in the breach of Seringapatam.

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The accepted policy was thus non-interference at almost any price, but there came a point when misrule could be no longer tolerated. When this happened annexation seemed to the statesmen of the time to be the only remedy. The person of the ruler was merged in the existence of the State; the bad ruler, if he was bad enough, brought about, not only the ruin of his own dynasty, but also the collapse of State independence. Later on fresh counsels found favour. It was discovered that States could be saved by wise advice to the ruler or, if that did not prevail, by the removal of the individual and the recognition of a successor. That policy has prevailed to the present day, and the recent abdication of the Maharaja of Indore and the immediate succession of his heir is only the latest instance of it.

This rapid sketch which, of course, ignores all the many minor principalities, whether preserved on the principle that what applies to the greater should also apply to the less, or else set up independently of the former suzerains, must suffice to indicate how it came about that the map of India is what it is. Self-preservation forced the earliest administrators into the reluctant expansion of their possession; self-preservation and the need of good government dictated further acquisitions, but perhaps most of all it was the change of policy from time to time which accounts for the maintenance of some States while others were swept away. From the time when annexations ceased and Indian Princes entered into solemn engagements and treaties with the Paramount Power to which was reserved a limited interference in their affairs, the map of India became stabilised. Analogies are not always helpful and are sometimes dangerous; the position of the Princes suggests, however, a comparison with that of Archelaus and Herod during the Roman occupation of Palestine.

Thus it has come about that India, taken as a whole, has been divided into two unequal parts, the one directly ruled by the Government of India and the other controlled by it as Agent for the King-Emperor as suzerain. But that government has always been aristocratic or oligarchical; the Viceroy was either one of the hereditary nobility of England, or was a distinguished commoner ennobled for the purpose of his high office.

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