to Benares, and had hardly any bridges. Three little stretches of railway were thrust inland from Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, but their total length was scarcely 300 miles. Last April there were 30,287 miles of railway open and nearly 2,000 miles under construction, while probably nearly 200,000 miles of roads were being maintained. When the Company was resisting the advent of the Crown in 1858, the Court of Directors boasted that their irrigation works irrigated 11⁄2 million acres; to-day the major and minor irrigation works irrigate nearly 23 million acres. This is exclusive of private irrigation works, which probably irrigate another 261⁄2 million acres. The total irrigated area of British India, including both State and private works, is now close upon 50 million acres even in a dry year. The foreign trade of the country has grown by leaps and bounds. In the last year of the Company the exports of India were valued at 394 millions sterling, and the imports at 144 millions. During the year which ended last March the exports were estimated at 118 millions sterling, and the imports at 91 millions, while the addition of 241⁄2 millions for net imports of treasure brings the aggregate total to the enormous sum of 233 millions sterling. There was only one jute factory in Bengal in 1858, and the Bombay cotton mill industry was still in its infancy. To-day the forests of chimneys, in the island of Bombay and on the banks of the Hugli attest the extraordinary growth of the jute and cotton trades. All over India the process of industrial development is at work, and 700,000 persons are now in regular employment in Indian factories. Much of the capital on which these industries are based is Indian.

It would be easy to pour forth streams of figures in proof of the progress of India under the Crown. Take

Land

for instance, the question of revenue. In the year before the Mutiny broke out the total revenue, at the then rate of exchange, was 334 millions sterling. Last year, allowing for the fall in exchange, the total was 71 millions, and for the current year it is estimated at 73% millions; and these figures do not take into account the large growth in expenditure in local areas. revenue represented half the total receipts in the former period, but now it only constitutes nine twenty-fifths of the total. Take, again, the question of education. In 1858 the expenditure was £394,000, and the number of scholars comparatively small; last year there were 44 million males under instruction and 623,000 females, while the total expenditure was 3% millions sterling. Yet when it is considered that the last census revealed only 152 million literate persons in India, of whom less than a million were females, it must be held that a completely successful educational policy is still far to seek. Only in one respect do the available statistics show a decline since 1858. When the Crown took over the control of India there were 93,000 Eng. lish and 213,000 native troops. Today, in spite of great increases of territory, the strength is 76,000 English and 149,000 native troops, excluding the Volunteers and the Imperial Service forces. If, as is sometimes said, our rule rests upon bayonets, they are neither very numerous nor very visible.

It is not, however, the purpose of this article to deal solely with the moral and material development of India under the Crown. The few facts quoted are merely introduced by way of illustration. They might be indefinitely multiplied did space permit. In every department of the Administration a remarkable advance has been witnessed. The codification of the civil and criminal laws, which has done so much to improve the administra

The

tion of justice, was one of the first great tasks undertaken by the new Executive. The conservation of the forests of India, a matter of the utmost importance to the well-being of large masses of the rural population, was only begun systematically after the Company ceased to exist. wonderful system of famine prevention and relief, which has just successfully undergone a most severe test in the United Provinces, is entirely the creation of Crown control. The general rise in the standard of living and comfort during the last 50 years has been most marked. The evidence on the point is overwhelming, though too detailed and too technical to be reproduced here. Large measures intended to give the people a considerable share in the management of their own affairs have from time to time been passed. In the Imperial and provincial Legislative Councils their representatives can make their voices heard, even although there has been little real delegation of power. An elaborate system of local self-government has been devised, which is perhaps in excess of the requirements of the country. There are now 750 municipalities, with an annual income of about six millions sterling, controlling the local affairs of nearly 17 million people. There are also 1,087 district and local boards, with an annual revenue of over three millions. But the almost entirely rural character of the bulk of the population of India, which necessarily restricts local self-government, is never adequately realized in this country. In all India there are only 31 towns with a population of over 100,000, as against 85 such towns in England and Wales alone. The typical unit of population in India remains, and must always remain, a cluster of dwellings around a well and a tree or two.

For many years it has been the fashion among Indian politicians to say

that the promises made in the Queen's Proclamation have not been kept. They declare that the rulers of India have broken "their plighted word." They are very fond of describing the Proclamation as their Magna Charta, but it is very much open to doubt whether many among the modern generation have ever seriously studied it. How many Englishmen know the text of their own Magna Charta? The first three salient promises in the Proclamation related to the princes of India. They were told that all treaties and engagements made with them by the East India Company were accepted by the Crown, and would be "scrupulously maintained." That promise has been faithfully fulfilled, and the most ancient treaties with native States are regarded as being as sacred and as binding as when they were first drafted. The next statement was that. the Crown desired "no extension of our present territorial possessions." That also has been strictly observed. Ever since the Mutiny the so-called "law of lapse"-which was not, as is too often supposed, invented by Lord Dalhousie-has ceased to be exercised. The States of princes dying without heirs are no longer annexed by the Crown. Adoption of an heir is permitted not only during a prince's lifetime, but even after his death. The rendition of the great State of Mysore to native rule in 1881, after it had been administered by the British for 50 years, is the most signal proof that no native State is nowadays a Naboth's vineyard to the paramount Power. The third promise to the princes of India was that the Sovereign would "respect the rights, dignity, and honor of native princes as our own." That promise, too, has been amply maintained, and the princes of India to-day enjoy a security and a consideration which their forbears never knew under the Moguls.

As to the subjects of the Crown, the Proclamation declared the Sovereign bound to them "by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." The phrase is vague, and a little difficult to interpret; but in so far as it implies the duty of maintaining peace and security of life and property, and the provision of strict and impartial justice, it has been unswervingly adhered to. The famous passage which follows, about the maintenance of religious liberty, has been observed almost with an excess of zeal. Every experienced Indian administrator knows how often the pretext of "religious rights and feelings" has been utilized to cover very mundane motives for obstructing some administrative act. So, too, with the promises concerning the heritage of lands and the regard to be paid by the law to "the ancient rights, and customs of India." The voluminous records of the law Courts are an abiding testimony to the faithful fulfilment of these solemn undertakings.

usages

What, then, remains? The whole controversy which has arisen around the Queen's Proclamation really relates to a single sentence, which says:

And it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge.

It is, in short, a question of loaves and fishes. Indian politicians allege that race does, in all but a very few cases, constitute a disqualification for the higher offices in the State. They point out, what is unquestionably a fact, that at present no Indian may hope to reach responsible rank in the Army; and they contend that in civil appointments the present methods of selection lead to the belief that their

exclusion is "intended to be perpetual." The converse arguments were set forth at considerable length by Lord Curzon in his sixth Budget speech at Calcutta in 1904. The then Viceroy frankly maintained that the highest ranks of civil employment in India, though open to such Indians as can pass the necessary tests,

must, nevertheless, as a general rule, be held by Englishmen, for the reason that they possess, partly by heredity, partly by upbringing, and partly by education, the knowledge of the principles of government, the habits of mind, and the vigor of character, which are essential to the task, and that, the rule of India being a Briitsh rule, and any other rule being in the circumstances of the case impossible, the tone and standard should be set by those who have created and are responsible for it.

In advancing this contention, Lord Curzon was simply elaborating the principle laid down so long ago as 1870 by the late Duke of Argyll, who, in his letter on the statute giving additional facilities to Indians to enter the Civil Service, wrote:-"It should never be forgotten, and there should never be any hesitation in laying down the principle, that it is one of our first duties to the people of India to guard the safety of our own dominion." Lord Curzon went on to urge that the general policy of the Government of India was "to restrict rather than to extend European agency," and he proceeded to quote many figures in support of his assertion. Those figures need not now be recapitulated. Their general purport was to show that since 1867-there are no statistics of earlier years-there had been a very great growth in the number of Indians employed in subordinate posts, and a moderate but still very appreciable increase in the number employed in superior posts. The British Empire employs in India in the

civil adminstration fewer than 6,500 of its own countrymen, of whom only 1,263 are in receipt of salaries of £800 a year or more. On the other hand, the other side of the question was rather forcibly, but perhaps a little unfairly, put by an Anglo-Indian correspondent of "The Times," who in a recent letter stated: "It is a fact that by far the greater number of officials are Indian, but there is a constant tendency to exclude them from posts that Englishmen want to hold, and to give them only posts that no Englishman would willingly take." The precise interpretation of this contentious sentence of the Queen's Proclamation will probably always remain a subject of dispute. It may be said, however, that there is an increasing disposition to employ Indians in every grade of the public service; and in a year which has seen two Indians appointed to the Secretary of State's Council, it can no longer be said that they are excluded from the highest posts.

The greatest change that has come over India during the 50 years of Crown control is in no sense material. It cannot be expressed in statistics, and it finds no record in current official reports. All the striking facts about the growth of trade and public works, of railways and of revenue, are of less importance at the present juncture, from the point of view of the ruling Power, than the unquestionable growth of insistent political aspirations. The common assumption is that the appearance of these aspirations, in a somewhat militant form, was a consequence of the sudden advent of Japan into the front rank of world Powers. That is by no means the case. To a limited degree they had been silently and almost imperceptibly gathering strength for many years, and the victories of Japan only gave them form and energy. It must be remembered that it was Great Britain, and not Japan, who

first aroused Asia from the slumber of

centuries. The new and pulsating life of India was brought into being by our own efforts, and it is the reflex influence of the British Empire in India that has stirred all Asia into activity. Half a century of ceaseless and unselfish toil has brought about the inevitable consequences, which at first were largely unforeseen. When the Queen's Proclamation was read in India the country was still to a great extent isolated, as it had been for hundreds of years. The sea and the eternal mountains shut it off from the world without. The people of England were only vaguely conscious of its realities, and were not deeply interested in its welfare. Comparatively few Indians had visited England, or had learned to look beyond their own frontiers. Paradoxical though it may seem, the dominant feeling in India, even in the midst of the Mutiny, was that of acquiescence in foreign control. Education had made but little headway, and men had not begun to think. We have changed all that. We have broken down the barriers by which India was hedged, and havé brought the peninsula into the arena of international politics. We have taught Indians to gaze outwards, we have preached to them of liberty of speech and thought, we have urged them to join in the task of working out their own salvation. If they have responded by eventually formulating demands which we cannot possibly grant, the result need occasion no surprise. It is, however, time to recognize and to admit that their plea for a larger share in the management of their own local affairs is not wholly sectional or limited. Between the dastardly conspirators who fling bombs, on the one hand, and the tens of millions of peasants who know nothing of Western politics, on the other hand, there exists a large and growing body of public opinion in

India which asks steadily and increasingly for a more responsible share of local control. As India is not really one country, but is rather a collection of countries inhabited by widely differing races, such public opinion as is manifested cannot be called in any sense homogeneous; but still the desire is displayed in varying forms, and it has to be reckoned with. That is the great factor with which we are confronted at the end of an eventful halfcentury; and it will tax the brains of our ablest statesmen to find a suitable solution of the problem.

It is well known that the second 50 years of Crown control are to be inaugurated by certain important developments in the Indian administrative system, designed to satisfy to some extent the cravings of the moderate and reasonable men among the people of India for more power and influence. What form those developments will take has not yet been disclosed. The secret has been well kept, and possibly we shall know very little about it until almost the end of the year. All that has been announced is that the original programme of reforms, issued last year, has undergone material revision and modification, that some of the original proposals have been abandoned, and that others have been substituted. It may be hoped and believed that, whatever is done, the essential safeguards of British sovereignty will not be impaired. It is more imperative than ever that no reform should be introduced which might weaken the firmness of British control, for that is as essential to the welfare of India as it is to our own Imperial existence. One important reflection which must be noted upon this interesting anniversary is that, however restive India may have become under British methods of administration, loyalty to the Crown is deeper and more abiding than it was 50 years ago.

Such a

thought, well founded as it is, must be counted worth many grave misgivings. India may clamor for selfgovernment, her people may dislike constituted authority, they may be indifferent to the solid material advantages British rule has conferred upon them, but they have never wavered in their belief in that justice and generosity and exalted benevolence of which, to them, the Monarch is the chief visible embodiment. The people of India see no inconsistency in this curious attitude. Veneration for hereditary rule

is their natural instinct. They may have no affection for the Government of India, which is to them a nebulous thing; but the King-Emperor stands apart, to him they yield undiminished homage, and he is the real link that binds India to the British Empire. The most reassuring consideration revealed by an examination of the last 50 years of British rule in India is that of the deepening sense of loyalty to the Crown. It co-exists even with revolutionary aspirations in a way almost unimaginable in the West; it is the best augury of the future stability of British authority; and few acts of statesmanship in India have been wiser and more far-seeing than that which substituted the control of the Crown for that of the Company. The subsequent assumption of the Imperial title was a step which is now recognized, even by those in England who once opposed the innovation, to have been judicious and desirable.

The greatest danger that lies before the British in India is that their rule may grow stereotyped and perfunctory; that their representatives may grow weary of a task which becomes more difficult and more exacting every year; that in seeking to admit the people to a larger share in the administration they may in the end yield up that strong domination which for many a decade to come must be essential to