TW Roberts Pamphlet, circa 1936: “Problems of Public Life in India & Ceylon”

(1)                         THE CEYLON ELECTIONS OF 1936

H. E. the Governor had been misinformed when he says that cast played a big part in the recent election. It played a far smaller part than ever before. In Galle District, over half the Goigama votes went to a Karawa candidate. In Matara nearly half the Karawa vote seems to have come to a Goigama candidate.

But H. E. was plum right when he said that religion and race were the greatest forces deciding contests. The journalist, who purport to dispute this, are like the birds which bury their head in the sand. They do not wish to see.

Would anyone honestly suppose that Mr Susanta Fonseka and Mr Tennekoon beat Mr Tambimuttu and Mr Wille on the merits? Or that the Hatton and Talawakele results were based on personal quality?

Let us admit that, save in exceptional circumstances like those of Mr Freeman and the NCP, a non-Buddhist has no chance in a straight fight against a Buddhist in a Buddhist constituency. Let us admit the same about Tamil constituencies. So, just as accident made the last council Vakilraj, more fixed conditions have made the present position Buddhagamaraj. Those conditions will probably have the same effect in many more elections.

Does this justify the conclusion that Dominion powers must be postponed till Buddhists elect Christians?

I do not think it sound to draw this conclusion from the mere fact that Buddhists vote for Buddhists. Would any Sinhalese be elected chairman of the planters association? Or of any district PA in which British’s have 90% of the vote? Did radicals have any chance of victory in English county boroughs 80 years ago? It is a common knowledge that 75% of the rustic British population then had no opinion counter to the Squire and the Parson. People, who do not think or care deeply about politics, often follow blindly the lead of the most respected and influential man in their parish. The spirit of feudal times is not by any means dead even in modern England. It will not die in Ceylon for hundreds of years.

(2)  Nor was race and religion the only determining factor in Ceylon. It was partly a matter of class. There is a great social golf between the British and Orientals in Ceylon. The estate Coolie’s, who voted against the British planters, voted for one of their own folk as being a person better fitted to understand their wants, in exactly the same spirit in which the Labour Party selects most of its candidates from the labouring classes. They wish to be sure of sympathy in their member. No one thinks it right to disenfranchise labour in England on this ground.

In a word, all the contempt and abuse now being showered on the Ceylon voter was levelled with the same amount of veracity at the masses in England 70 years ago doubtless, it will have the same futility in Ceylon as it had in England.

But this does not conclude the matter. Manhood suffrage has done no harm.. But the elections have revealed a surprising truculence of temper. Buddhist priests have ignored the traditions of their cloth and openly canvassed the country. In one district the winner won, I hear, by presenting 100 shillings to every temple and like institutions. In another, the winner nursed the constituency for years with gifts to all churches, temples, schools and other beggars. In one town, soon after the excitement of the election, when a Muhammad and butchers boy threw a bone and accidentally struck a Buddhist priest, rowdies thrashed all the Islamic traders in that street and looted all the shops. Decent Buddhist of course hate this hooliganism, but they have no control over the hooligans. This hooligan temper is the same temper which inspired the religious riots of 1905 when the Islamites had to hide in fear and hunger for a week or more.

Suppose such rights came again, and suppose that the colony had responsible Government and a Buddhist Minister in charge of Law and order. Would he put it down with a firm hand? Few members of the minorities feel confident about such a situation. I do not myself share that all-round distrust, but I cannot deny that it is natural. Certainly, I cannot imagine any elected Minister putting a riot Damages Act through the present Council, except a statute placing almost all the burden of payment on the unoffending upper classes. Any other form of compensation would lose the Minister his job. So would any firm an early use of the rifle in stopping the riot.

(3)

I grant that men with a double dose of youth in their moral make up, for example Mr J L. Kotalawala or Mr. D S Senanayake might damn the consequences with less procrastination than Sir Robert Chalmers but one can hardly expect such temerity of average prudent men. They would temporize and hope for the Governor to hold the baby. Doubtless he would oblige them, since failure to repress civil commotion would lose him his job. Doubtless too, the police and public service would heartily obey the Governor in spite of the Council, since he alone can give or get them the sack. So far, the problem is simple. But the latest stages are not so clear, if the constitution is responsible government. Money must be voted to pay the bill. Indemnity must be enacted for those who stopped the row. For all this, the Governor needs the power to legislate over the head of the Council.

The minorities therefore wish the Governor’s powers to stand. I am not at all sure that anyone outside the Congress walls wants them to go.

It may be urged in reply to this point, and urged with plausibility, that the decisive consideration should be not what the minorities want but what in all interests they and the rest of Ceylon ought to want. There is solid substance in that reply, but it leads to no positive conclusion. It is not yet clear what they ought to want. It is clear that the minorities are genuinely afraid. In the same way that the fears of Ulster have blocked the road to a united Ireland, because practical politics must give weight to positive mistrust and the danger of civil war, so the fears of the Ceylon minorities will for sometime effectively obstruct the journey on to a dominion constitution.

But let us look further ahead. Solvitur ambulando. I for one have faith in the sin Elise, in their ultimate good sense and judgement of values, particularly in their sense of humour. They will not be permanently fooled by shibboleths and religious pretence. As soon as they awaken to the vote-catching motives behind electioneering campaigns, they will vote for the first honest opposition candidate.

Straws indicate the wind, it is said. I have noticed a few straws in recent events.

For example, many politicians have donned what they call national dress, hoping to persuade the public that they are nationalist at heart. This play acting has cut no ice.                    (4)       Many of these quietly attired mummers have been badly beaten at the polls. Voters will not judge sincerity by sartorial fashion

Again, I regret fully listened to a crowd hooting are less careen guard after a reception to H. E. the Governor. That harmless card is a pleasant relic of the past, but they do not look competent to guard a king. Beside the police and C.L.I. in line they were felt by the crowd to be ridiculous, an they were greeted with the same laughter which hails the dismissal of an opposing batsman for duck.

I have a feeling that if they had heard His Excellency’s apologies for the headman system, this crowd would have greeted that too with Homeric laughter.

There is no real reason permanently to distrust people who laugh with their whole heart. So we may look forward to a growth of amity, when the majority community will make good. The first step to this end will be to abolish the weird committee system, and give the best men a chance really to lead.

There are many colonies which have outgrown Crown Colony Government but are not known to be ripe for a Dominian parliament. Downing St has set up the Donaghmore Constitution in Ceylon as a halfway house, in which there is proceeding are try out of that type of constitution as well as that type of colonial. It is therefore of interest to consider how it has worked.

Its second election has just ended, and has been full of sensation. Its first and most purple patch was an outbreak of post election shooting at Matale, a backward country town, at which an agent of the ousted member shot 8 of the opposing party dead. It is not known whether this shooting was instigated or just a spontaneous spasm of rage. Some critics have pounced on this deplorable event as proof that this colony is unfit for manhood suffrage. This view is not confined to the British settlers in the island, one meets it in many spheres of Ceylonese life. Educated Ceylonese are as definitely oligarch in outlook as the country gentlemen of England were 100 years ago. But one of the persons suspected of an interest in this shooting was for a while suffering from brain storm, and no sound observer will indict our nation for one man’s crime. There was sporadic violence in other places too, but nothing worse than has occurred in many western elections. The guilty person in many of the                         (5)       deeds of violence were people of some substance or education, whom an intelligence test or property franchise would not have disqualified. No general conclusion can truthfully be deduced from the violence encountered at these elections.

The next startling event was the defeat of Mr EW Perera by an unknown competitor. Mr Perera is one of the best an most eminent statesman in the colony. He has done more than any living men to secure a constitution for Ceylon. Some regard his defeat as inexcusable ingratitude. Certainly, it is ingratitude. But it has much excuse. L

In the first place, Mr Perara’s chief platform was further constitutional reform. But the people do not care a tinker’s dam for a new constitution. They want more money. Their daily wage is about 6 pence, and in many weeks they find only four days’ job. Suppose those were the wages paid in England. Would anyone blame English work people full voting socialist under such conditions? The victorious candidate was a socialist.

The result of this election is a clear index to what will happen in India. They will vote socialist and they will ignore all efforts to boycott the Council. In one province of Ceylon a boycott lasted for five years, but with one accord it has now been abandoned as folly.

Another factor in Mr Pereira’s defeat was that he stood aloof from hoi polloi. That is the reason for the defeat by little known candidates of three well-known and respected British planters in the hill district. Voters vote for their own folk because they know them and expect them to feel their wants. To the masses, the British planter is a distant Olympian.

The next blot on the hustings was the prevalence of bribery. It is common talk that many candidates spent twice the legal sum of £2000. That may be exaggerated, but there is truth behind it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that these bribes had little effect. The humble voters, whom I know, voted on one ticket and no other. They were Buddhists and they plumped for Buddhist candidates against all others. Where two candidates were Buddhist, they backed the one who had done most to help Buddhist schools and temples. The bribes went to plausible bosses, who pretended to control votes which they did not control. In one constituency, the defeated candidate paid large sons to his adversaries agents, who purported to have changed sides but played the giver false! Election day is the great                                                   (6) opportunity of the loud demagogues to bring unearned cash from the money bags of the ambitious plutocrat.

In my view, the worst feature of the election is the temper of the Buddhists. It is in fundamental antipathy to the gentle tolerance of the Buddha. If news of it can reach him in Nirvana, his peace can hardly still be peace. His priests resorted to open electioneering in the teeth of the accepted custom of their faith. His followers frequently abuse any Christian clergyman, who travels in the buses of the poor. Some, I hear, spit on clerics, who seek to preach Christianity by the wayside. In one town, when a bone thrown out of his shop by a Mohammedan butcher accidentally struck a Buddhist priest, hundreds of rowdy’s forthwith thrashed all the Mohammedan butchers in the same street and looted all their shops. That is the same spirit which inspired the 1915 riots. Elections may make it worse. The conclusion is clear. For many years, the Governors power to override the council must remain unweakened. In no other way will the minorities of other creeds be safe.

It must not be supposed that the upper and middle classes of Buddhist faith approved these Miss deeds. They are decent folk enough. But they cannot control the masses and at election time they seem ready to make use of all that is bad in popular passions and in the battle of the creeds. Many years must roll before the people of Ceylon grow out of this.

But the same as true in Germany. To abolish the franchise is no remedy in either country. I for one have faith in the people of Ceylon and their ultimate development. They have a clear head and a sense of humour, which will someday expose the stupidity of the present prejudice and intolerance.

The next big blemish revealed in the public life of Ceylon has been the visor of corruption. About 20% of the members of the last council were venal. Some of the grafters have been re-elected by big majorities.

The first lesson to be drawn from this is that honesty is not regarded by Ceylonese as a cardinal virtue in the same way that it is regarded in Europe. A plausible crook is admired even after his twists have been exposed. This attitude is not, as many people believe, I congenital character of the Sinhalese race. It has its origin in social conditions                               (7). and particularly in two facts of history. The public life of Ceylon has for years been adMinistered by the Civil Service through an army of Mudahyars, Vanniahs and minor headman, with whom baksheesh has for thousands of years been a settled custom. If two villages fall out over dividing a crop or building a fence, the local head man must investigate and report. If he is a bad head man, he extracts a big bribe from one man and grants him a false report. If he is a good headman, he grants a true report, but obtains a tip from both disputants. Hence arises a double custom. Villages never rely on themselves and never expect public servants to do anything without specific renumeration.. Venality is part of their daily bread. It is no surprise to them if councillors and Minister are given to graft.

The other cause is that Ceylon takes its legends from Brahman India and the storybook of the Brahmins abound in refinement of the science of deceit as a necessary weapon with which the conquered race may and must out with their conquerors.

The only solution of this problem is (1) to purify the tone of childhood, (2) to mend or in the headman system. Much is being done by schools and playgrounds modelled on England to purify the tone of youth. But the only effort to mend or end the headman system has come from the parliamentarians and the democracy, and has met with no little obstruction from the Civil Service and Colonial Governors. In short, the only hope of improvement depends on a vigorous maintenance of the present democratic constitution. This is a firm point in favour of manhood suffrage. The third place in the Donoughmore Constitution is the committee system. The house divides itself by ballot into seven committees controlling a separate group of administrative departments. Each Committee elects a Minister. The Leader of the House has no control of each Minister. He cannot easily get rid of a grafter unless graft is proved in court. Such proof is rare. Without it, a motion of no confidence is sure to fail. Then his remedy against such a situation is to secure a dissolution. That remedy is too heroic for daily use. So the peccant Minister may snap his fingers at all who would correct him, so long as he retains his committee’s support. Sometimes he can ensure this by sharing the spoils. The Committee System further lends to promote the maximum of friction. The Cabinet becomes a hotch-potch of all shades of policy and opinion.

(8) The main object of this committee system was to secure to the more cultured minorities a chance of office and a place in the sun. The members of the Donoughmore Commission found no real parties in existence and doubted whether parties would ever materialise in the absence of party politics, they felt certain that the minorities would have no chance of office. Therefore, they framed this system as a vehicle of administration rather than statecraft. In the result, the selection of Minister depends on a throw of dice. The principles and standards of the Leader of the House and the best Minister may be good, but will not permeate all the cabinet.

The present election indicates that the apprehensions of the Donoughmore Commission were wrong. Parties have already begun to form themselves.

There is the Congress party, nearly 20 in number recruited first from the upper and middle classes of the Sinhalese interested in self government but now converted into a band of mild wigs with an agricultural outlook, bent on subsidising the rice industry and bent on power.

Next comes the labour members for Colombo, voicing the urban unions wants, and Close behind them the labour members for the estates.

Next stands a little Socialist group, which seemed so far quite sincere.

Next come the members for the Tamil districts, a solid band chiefly interested in securing (1) solid votes for hospitals, tanks and other aids to life in the Tamil districts, (2) jobs for Tamils in the Public Service. The same remarks apply to the Kandyan group.

Last, then are little groups representing the British and Burgher minorities, like the Tamils anxious to get a proportionate share of the spoils.

Already there is a cave of Have-nots. The groups are beginning to combine and work together. The whole raison d’être of the Committee System will soon be gone. There is no utility in the Committee System of choosing Minister.

But the other two safeguards must remain. The chief is the Governor’s veto. The other is the reservation of a few seats to the minorities, to be filled through a nomination by the Governor. To some up, I admit that 25% of the                               (9). members are in solvent, stupid or otherwise undesirable, but when all is said and done, over two third of the elected members are men either of standing or of ability. If one analyses their legislative record, we stumble on one or two big blunders but also on solid good work. They spent Rs.7 million in six months on the malaria epidemic and the famine caused by the 1935 and 1936 drought. No one imagines that a Crown Colony Government would have spent one tenth of that.

The elected Council have made their mark on the fundamental need of the colony when they set up an agricultural bank and projected a general bank to cheapen money. In their programs, there is far more imagination, insight and courage than ever came across the sea from Downing Street.

Since I wrote this article, the Council has met and selected its seven Minister. All are Singhalese. The minorities are clean out of it, and are much enraged. Some are demanding a new Commission. Others are holding public meetings to make complaint to the Secretary of State in London.

Now it is clear that two or three of the elections of Minister were a verdict based on race or religion rather than merit. But in Europe no one blames the Tories for choosing Tory Minister, even when at abled Liberals are available. And in the Ceylon lobby it is admitted, the minorities could have nobbled two ministries of the seven with the greatest ease. They failed to do so for two reasons. (1) The Europeans held aloof from the other minorities, because some of the leading spirits of these minorities called themselves communist. (2) The rest had no team spirit. Each man wanted to be Minister himself. No one wish to serve a leader. For this there is only one remedy. They must learn from experience or stay out of office. A minority cannot fairly expect to rule the majority. They need the discipline of failure and of Parliamentary life. They will get it in working the present constitution.

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(10)                THE OUTLOOK IN INDIA.

* Look, said the Anglo-Indian colonel on his homeward journey after 30 years in Bengal, ‘look at the volunteer battalions in the Calcutta schools and colleges, where the British government teaches Indians to be soldiers. We are training them to murder us.’

As a casual remark on a recent murder, that is fair comment. It is shameful that students who owe almost all that they are and know to British teaching should be ready to join the assassins and imitate the Fenian gangs.

On the other hand it is folly to find the summer in a single swallow. It is folly to forget how many thousands of English men spend their days in the heart of India in absolute safety, a safety greater than most Indians enjoy. It is greater folly to forget how many Indians have fought side by side with British troops not only against aliens but in every rising in India.

Other critics point to the native states where the Princes of India ensure tranquility by ignorance and by force. But would England ever have followed their medievalism? Would a tranquil, servile and ignorant India be worth its price in dishonour to England?.

It is England’s greatest honour in India that she has taught the Indians to rise out of the past and march forward on the road of democratic progress.

Bearing all this in mind, I still find matter for thought in the colonel’s apprehensions, because I have recently stumbled on similarly gloomy expectations in the opposite camp.

According to almost all the Indian students in England, the intention of Indians is to drive the British out of India.

According to Gandhi, soul force, passive resistance and boycotts were to be the instruments of expulsion.

According to information current in the East a few years ago since Gandhi and non-cooperation have failed, the hotheads propose to ginger up the process with                                                  (11). terrorism. This information preceded the recent murder in which a British merchant was killed by a propagandist aiming at a superintendent of police.

It is of interest to consider how deep this antipathy lies and how far it is likely to go. Does it mean civil war as it meant in Ireland? What is it origin? And what is it cure?

To find the sure one must know the cause. Let us begin with analysis of the cause.

The first cause lies in the aloofness and reserve of the British. As a race they stand together and apart from Indians.

In business, they employ Indians only as manual underlings. No Indian is welcome in their houses or their clubs. They make Indians uncomfortable if they meet them in a train. At most receptions, you will see the British throng together on one side of the hall, the Indians on the other, with a sort of Rubicon in between. Now and then, an Englishman will cross the stream but he dare not stay long on the other side. Here and there, you will find an interplay of courtesy, but seldom or never will you find friendship. Courtesy at a distance will not do much good. Indians have for years been made to feel that the British regard them as an inferior race one and all. They resent that, and they will not be mollified by politeness at the end of a pole. They no longer want sympathy, they want equality, they want justice, they want a place in the sun.

The ostracism of race is of course inevitable in some of the strata of Indian life. The habits of the lower and lower middle classes in India are, in point of cleanliness and clothing, such as to make close intercourse between them and Englishmen impossible.

But in fact race ostracism governs the relations between the British and all classes of Indian. It has grown more and more complete as Indians have acquired more and more of the culture of the West.

The aloofness is at its zenith in India, although it is not assumed solely for the discomfiture of the Indians. It is prominent in the first dealings of any Englishman with people of any other race. Australians and Canadians notice and dislike it as much as Frenchman and Dutchman dislike it. But French and Dutch have a great history behind them, Australians and Canadians have behind them a big continent and a big outlook. It does not occur to them that (12). English regard them as inferiors. They learn to regard reserve as being as much natural to the British as stoicism to a Spartan or taciturnity to a Red Indian.

In so far as it represents an effort to ape the ancient aristocracies, they regard it as a jest and look deeper for the kind heart underneath. But in India, as once in Ireland, the English are on top in almost every branch of existence. If any Indian desires to rise out of the ruck in the schools or in commerce, in public or in private office, as a policeman or an engineer, he has to take off his hat to some Englishman.

The antipathy of racial dislike is therefore embittered by jealousy and a sense of political wrong.

Indians observe that Indians rise easily to the front at the law and in medicine, where there is a fair field and little favour. They conclude that in other avocations they lag behind because a British Government and race prejudice block the way.

They are therefore out for self-determination, they demand Home Rule and they mean to be masters in India.

It is difficult for people, who are not Indians, to see how and why Indians feel a sense of wrong.

More than any Empire that went before has the British Empire stood for justice so far as it could see it. They have not introduced conscription like France. They have kept the public services open to Indians and given them in fact the highest judicial preferment.

Why then do Indians feel a sense of wrong?

This good British work appears chiefly in public life and Indians place it to the credit of Whitehall, as they place its opposite to the debit account of the English in India. In the life of individuals, there is little amity. This public impartiality does not penetrate into the hearts of the British and Indians when they meet as race meets race.

The truth is that Indians, except in the judicial service have little chance of rising to the top of the tree. Competitors and their judges are British born.

With every intention to be just, the British believe in the greater capacity of the British, and particularly in regard to the power of command.

(13). In almost all departments, Indians are persuaded that however competent they may be they cannot reach the top.

This is most bitterly felt to be fact when the British element is recruited by individual selection or makeshift examinations of the quality of which nothing is known in India as has sometimes I gather occurred in recruitment for the Police, Excise and technical departments. It is less felt in regard to the Civil Service where an open examination of established quality is the door of entry.

But most of all in the reforms have Indians found ground for disappointment and distrust of the British. I need not discuss the Morley–Minto scheme. I am an old time believer in the political gospel according to John Morley, but I have nothing to say of his Indian reforms except that they were a mockery of Liberalism. The foundation of Liberal doctrine is that one must trust the people. The fundamental fact in the Morley reforms for India is distrust of the Indians.

No country would be content to be ruled by a bureaucracy chosen by an examination. That system too violently ignores the men who have made good in the battle of life. Why should anyone expect India to be content with Civil Service rule? It may be good. It is often good. But the people, even the people of wealth and brains, have no sufficient part in it.

In the Montague reforms however, there is a strong and definite advance towards Home Rule. But this advance is wrapped up and hidden away in the folds of an intricacy into which the common eye has not yet been able to penetrate. What was wanted was a plain and simple constitution, which all could understand, a piece of progress big and bold and clear cut enough to catch the popular fancy. India wants Home Rule. Whatever is given her should be wide enough to be known as Home Rule. Checks and balances at the same time there must be, but they must not be so prominent as to strike Indians as the main spring of the scheme.

Briefly and crudely put, the Montague reforms introduced two changes. The first is the machinery of Legislation. It is here that we have the big advance.  in the Legislatures, the elected representatives of India now have the control of Legislation, subject to the power of the Viceroy to certify                          (14)  particular bills as matter of paramount importance and to pass such bills on the statute book over the heads of the Legislature Councillors.

This power to certify has already been used.

Much fuss has been raised over this exercise of the power to certify. It is curious how ready mankind is to fail to see the wood for the trees, how ready to doubt and misunderstand the rule because of the exception.

The power to certify was never meant to be frequently used. Few Viceroys will be found rash enough to use it often, except to preserve order against anarchy and rebellion.

The Viceroy is not a Sultan. He has to render account to the India office and that in turn is responsible to the House of Commons.

A Viceroy who overrides the will of the Legislative Council-India without plane, grave and indisputable reason, would promptly get the sack. He will use his power to certify only if that is the only way to prevent gross persecution and to secure provision for carrying on the King’s Government. In nine cases out of ten he will follow the lead of the Councils.

I can easily conceive circumstances in which the mechanical safeguard consisting of the Viceroy’s power to override the Councils may prove ineffective. It is eminently possible that emotional majorities in the Councils may make laws in the way of economic preference, religious propaganda or of drink prohibition involving terrible tyranny which the Viceroy may yet be too timid to stop. The only true break for the Indian political car is one that stops the engine by compression from within. It must be organic and it must be Indian. Any bureaucratic safeguard will be resented as alien, and the certainty of that resentment, which it is the object of reforms to root out, will weaken and circumscribe the use of any veto resting in the Viceroy.

The most natural safeguard is to follow the examples of history and set up a second chamber with a veto, preferably elected, but elected on a high property franchise and designed to give to wealth and birth and culture bigger voting power than is a portion to them in the Lower House. On such a franchise it is certain that the British, the domiciled community of Anglo Indians or Eurasians, the Parsee, the                                    (15)  Christians and all the most meritorious of the present minorities will secure members to guard their interests and find a stronger safeguard then now they find in the Viceroy.

Such a safeguard is essential not because the new rule will be ruled by Indians but because it is the rule of a young democracy.

The absence of such a safeguard means that the Montague reforms have given to Indians in the sphere of Legislation not too little power but too much. And that sphere they govern India. If so, what excuse have Indians for professing dissatisfaction with the Montague scheme?

In fact, not one Indian in 100 realises how complete is the control of Legislation given to the Elected Council. Between the deliberate misrepresentations of their extremist press and their own innate habit of suspecting everyone, they apprehend that the Viceroy and the Governors will increasingly apply their powers of overriding the Indian Parliaments. The right way to meet this suspicion is to go steadily ahead.

As they see the reformed constitution at work, it’s true character will more and more make self plain. For the present it is a quaint irony that England has given India legislative prerogatives equal to nearly half of what constitutes Home Rule, but no British statesman has had the gumption to say so in plain terms and no Indian has been found to believe it to be so. They have only to wait and see.

The other half of the Montague reforms appears in their so-called attempt to give Indians part control of administration. Certain departments of Public business are reserved for the Governor and the Civil Service acting under his order, the rest, the transferred departments, have an Indian at their head, who must be a member of the parliament and who will, it is hoped, have the confidence of the parliament. Here however, the safeguards checks and balances out run each other and nullify the scheme. The Indian Minister is chosen by the Governor, paid by the Governor, and removable by the Governor. The men chosen have often been moderates whose following in the elected House was small. Even if it was not small, his appointment as Minister manifestly makes him a government man, and is the quickest way to make his following small and to destroy such confidence as the people previously may have felt in him.

(16). What is equally feeble, when he became Minister say for education, he cannot decide the education policy or get rid of the men who obstruct him inside his own department, unless he persuade the Governor to agree. The Governor will consider each important point in Executive Council and will be much influenced by the views of the Civil Servant, who previously controlled the department and who remains in office as a permanent secretary or expert advisor to guide the new Indian Minister in the way he should go.

That is to say an Indian Minister proposing to replace Tory by Liberal principles in the administration of a transferred department, must often convert his permanent assistant from the Tory to the Liberal faith; or he must cut and chop his plans so as to keep the assistant quiet or to convince the Governor that new paths are right. Suppose that each Labour Minister had to get the approval of a Tory Committee before he issued a new circular, would anyone feel that he had control? Could any surer road to friction and stagnation be conceived? Could any system be more inappropriate to an India pulsating with the hot life of the national consciousness just awakened?

This system places Indians in office but not in power. It selects for such office not the people’s man but the Governors fancy. In short, on the administration side it is not a reality. It is an undisguised sham.

Why have British Statesman put up a bit of a make believe at this point?

The reason given is the importance of protecting the minorities and the depressed castes. It is urged that they stand no chance of getting justice from Indians of the higher castes. In this view there is some little truth but not much. The higher castes regard the lower as untouchable and incompetent.

Here and there, this prejudice would give rise to disabilities and injustice. But to assert that this injustice would be widespread and permanent is to beg the question and to ignore the growth of national feeling. Every Indian is now proud of every distinction won by every other Indian whatever his caste or race. The lower castes have only to assert themselves and prove their fitness. Nothing will harm them more than to let them expect to win eminence and position by dint of British aid, by reliance on a Deus Anglicus ex machina. They must learn to do things for themselves. It is one of the most brilliant achievements of British rule that                                                                                                                    (17)  in some places they have learnt self-reliance. In Madras for instance, a variety of less prominent castes have already done things. They have combined and got a major majority in the Councils of Madras. They have even put through a resolution that every vacant office in the local services is to be filled by a non-Brahman. Since four out of five competent people in Madras are Brahmans, this resolution is ridiculous if taken as a permanent policy but as a temporary reaction from the veracity with which Brahmins have hitherto monopolised office it is a natural bit of self assertion on the part of non-Brahmans and proof of their capacity to protect themselves.

The second reason is more important. British statesman wish to preserve part of the covenanted Civil Service so far mostly recruited of the British-born. This service has a splendid efficiency and a glorious tradition. It is a natural instinct which decides to preserve it. It is a miserable meanness where some Indians try to throw mud on this service.

On the other hand it is wrong and unfair to exaggerate. It’s indispensability or to say that there are no Indians who could take the place of the British. There are not a few Indians recruited in India who have made good. Most of those recruited in England have made good. I do not say that on the average they would be as honest and able as the British Civil Servants, but in all fairness I say that they would be honest and capable enough and they would cost much less. I agree that one could not at once find Indians enough capable of taking the place of the British employed in some departments, especially the technical and the educational departments, but I see no doubt that they can be found within ten years.

Among English folk in India, this would be repudiated as rank heresy. Some of them they are born with a belief that the Creator has given the British monopoly of the capacity to command. Others have acquired in the east a conviction that destiny has cursed the oriental with an incapacity to command. It is high time to cry halt to these fallacies of tribalism. You cannot build an Empire on a lie. Most of all in India there is no need to build on lies. It suffices to stand by the simple truth that British recruitment has produced a wonderfully efficient public service and that solely Indian recruiting would replace it by a less efficient service.

(18)  A third reason for circumscribing the administrative privileges granted to Indians, and I think this was the reason which carried most weight is the feeling of the British in India. They distrust Indians. There are thousands of British settled in India, and there are millions of British money. British people feel that they and their money would hardly be safe with Indians in absolute control. They feel they have conquered India in vain if their folk are to be second in command to Indians. Many, if not most, of the senior Civil Servants have sort leave to retire on proportionate pensions rather than serve under Indians. All the British in commerce evince a vivid preference for dealing with British officials. All this sets up a little Ulster in India.

Here however it is up to British statesman to take a firm stand and make a firm choice. They can stand by the vested British interests in India but to do so they must rule by force, or they can stand by the policy of conciliation which they have purported to adopt these last 60 years. If the policy is conciliation, it must move on to Home Rule and it must give the Indians in office control of these officers. One solid safeguard it is well to preserve, i.e., open recruitment in England of one quarter of the Civil Service and the other departments. This has a plain justification of its own. The British have lived and laboured in India these 200 years. Their work and example has made it grow. Their hands have watered it and made it fertile. Their heads have guarded it from war and civil earthquakes. Their brains have guided its footsteps and built its defences. They have as good a right to India as any Indian, that and no more. They must on this footing share with Indians all the privileges of Indian office. Indian services must be open to the British and the Indian, and those of them who join it must be entitled to such promotions as their abilities deserve. The British will often come to the top by the force of merit. Let that suffice. There is no need to invent doubtful theories about Indian in capacity to command or about British indispensableness.

A fourth argument for reserving special power to the British in India is the theory that apart from the British army the North of India would overrun the plains and exterminate the politicians. For my part I see no good ground for expecting such an invasion, and I see strong ground for thinking that if such invasions did occur, the greater wealth and civilisation of Bengal and Bombay would equip their men with better arms and wipe the red dust of India with the blood of the Hillman. The British need not                                                                                    (19)  rest on brag. They may stand firm on the deeper fact that the standards and principles of Indian Rule, if Indians rule India, will at heart be British.

The practical result of all the above would be Home Rule for each province with Indian Ministers in office by the choice of the people, and permanent Civil Servants, sometimes Indian and sometimes British but mostly recruited in England as their right hand, just as Minister in Great Britain have Civil Servants by their side. Secondly our second chamber about 1/10 of it British, elected on a high franchise and equipped with a power of veto to play the part which the Senate plays in France and America. Thirdly a Viceroy with power to override both, at special need, and with sole control of the Army.

Such a constitution will place Britishers in the Indian Civil Service in an unpleasant position. They will advise Minister but be under their orders. Minister will suck their brains and take the credit if things go right. If they go wrong, they will try to split the blame.

The older Civil Servants have been in their way kings of province or a county, benevolent dispose these last 50 years. During those years, the Indians who will be Minister above them, have played second fiddle, hats off and all the rest of it, to the Civil Servants whom they now proposed to command. For these senior Civil Servants the new system will be an impossible situation. It is wise to face this fact and let them go. It is stupid to keep them in a position likely to disgust both sides. They cannot assimilate themselves to the new national need and the new Indian demand. The right course for them is to retire on a well earned pension.

But for the younger generation of British Civil Servants it is otherwise. They are young enough to adjust themselves to the new system. They may will be the eyes of the new government when it needs to restrain its new Minister.

The additions here suggested will convert the Montague reforms into a mild Home Rule and I believe they would content India. Nothing less will finally content India. Anything less must brand them, whenever they turn their eyes on Canada or South Africa, with a bitter brand of inferiority.

The new Councils Act goes this length but many Indians distrust it still. That being so what is the outlook in India? Of course agitation will continue, but will it grow to civil War, and would the rebels win?

(20)  That is the question which agitates many minds. I confess to a firm optimism on it all.

I see no sign that the rebels would win, or even that they think they would win. When Indians talk glibly of driving the British out of India, it is well to remember that hyperbole is natural to the East. Almost all it’s literature is couched in hyperbole. Nobody expects the East to believe in his sincerity unless his words breathe ardent passion. By driving the British from India I take it they mean no more than destroying the present overwhelming pre-eminence of the British in the Cabinets of India.

Doubtless some of the extremist mean more than this and much of Bengal extremist at heart. Nothing can be more foolish than to believe the servile Indian who pretends to prefer Britishers in Office above Indians; so much of that talk his lip service designed to curry favour or secure a job.

But extremist India is still a shrewd and cautious India. Their aim is India for the Indians but their methods are borrowed from the Passive Resisters with only a little dose of Irish ism. Any bigger dose of violence would disgust most of the extremist. They despise violence as a stupid and brutal thing, and also an ungrateful thing. The British have builded better than they know. There are few Indians who do not owe, and who do not know that they owe, much to England, in education or example or otherwise. In all industry, Englishman have led the way. Most schools have begun with English aid and direction. The roads and railroads were born in Britain. In the towns it is often British money that supports Indian charitable institutions. Look at the countless threats of violence and efforts at violence which have bubbled up and come to nothing, in Bengal and the Punjab in the last 20 years. Consider how many bombs have been laid in the track of British trains, and how regularly these have come to light before they hurt their hair of any British head. The inference is plain. Much of the ardent talk and threatening is simply bluff.

I confess to admiration for the ingenious mixture of enthusiasm and bluff by which Indian politicians have secured for India the big constitutional advance already got with a minimum of bloodshed. That ingenuity has been backed by a power to combine which has astonished all and which leaves on my mind no doubt of their fitness to rule. I know that Indian barriers are second to none in forensic fitness, and I suspect their politicians to be not far behind. It is monstrous to compare them with China.

(21)  There are two things, however that British statesman must avoid. The first is that they must not sound undecided or weak. Indians have seen their agitation thrive on threats. They have seen Ireland get Home Rule by fighting. I have heard Mr. Montague prate of “his friend Mr. Gandhi”. It will be a serious blunder if any soft sawder from British statesman persuade them that their threats will take them further. The diehards have done little of value in India, but they did a big thing when they got rid of Mr Montague. They shewed that theymeant business.

The other and the greater danger is that, if here and there agitation produces a little rising, some Dyer will arise and put it down with brutality calculated to inflame Indian blood. That, I learn from Irishmen, is what happened in Ireland. Every such event converts thousands of theoretical extremists into raging enemies. It is certainly a puzzle that having got so much, the Indian extremists have not had the common sense to make the most and best of it as the quickest road to getting more. When they say that self respect requires them not to touch the half hearted gift, is that a case of Oriental hysterics or of histrionics carried too far? Parnell in the 80s over-reached himself in the same way. I fancy that Indians will not play non-co-operation game too long.

If over 20% of the Indians resolve on a guerrilla warfare against the British in India, there is no force in the empire that could permanently keep India under. But nothing but brutal blundering and persecution could enrage 20 per cent of India to that length.

Let the politicians avoid all this; avoid hypocrisy on the one hand and cruelty on the other. Let them say what they mean and mean what they say.

Even if they bring constitutional progress in India to a premature standstill, they cannot make that permanent and they will not do fatal harm.

Best of all if they have the courage, let them give India something more solid. Give it soon and the gift will be in time as it was in Australia and the Transvaal.

It is false philosophy to wait till Indians prove them themselves fit for democracy before a bar of judges whose judgeship will end if their verdict is for India.

Neither Canada nor Australia, neither England or France, nor any country yet no one would ever have had democracy if they had first to prove themselves fit.

(22)  The forgoing views were jotted down many years ago. It has occurred to me that they are now perhaps worthy to see the light, because my prognostications have come true. Terrorism flamed up for awhile but has yielded to firm treatment. The fire only simmers.

It is not dead. Many sincere extremist still demand independence, and wait for the next world war to give India her chance of separation. That stand-point has been reiterated in a recent book by one of the greatest Indians. But it is clear, I feel sure, to most educated Indians that India cannot stand alone. Her northern boundaries lie at the mercy of Russia. Her eastern and Western flanks are open to Japan and Italy as soon as she ceases to fly the British flag. Recent history proved that the old spirit of conquest is much alive. India cannot stand alone until she has organised a competent army and navy. These forces cost 1000 million pounds + a £200 million a year. Indians are shrewd realists enough. For India, separation is a dream of the future, and the intelligentsia of India are not blind to things as they are.

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THE INTERNATIONAL OUTLOOK

World politics are always full of mystery. But never was the mystery deeper than in 1936. A few years ago, Mr. Baldwin announced that the Rhine is England’s frontier. He sounded as if at last he knew his own mind.

But within two or three years, the value of that frontier has been reduced by half, since Germany has been allowed to re-arm.

At first, Mr. Baldwin denied that Germany was re-arming, but within two years of that denial we find her re-armament almost complete, and still Mr Baldwin is Prime Minister. To explain all this, for some time we took refuge in a guess, and imagined that the staff had blundered and misled Mr Baldwin.

Now, that refuge too is barred and bolted against us. Lord Londonderry has told the world that Mr Baldwin was duly apprised of the re-armament, and he has blandly admitted it.

If that is so, why has he not resigned for very shame? Men have been hanged for less. Some folk think that there is no one fit to take his place. True, the luck is with him there. Of the statesman near the throne, one, Mr Austin Chamberlain, is able enough in every way, but he is well advanced in years and physically far from strong. The ablest, Mr Winston Churchill, is hated and distrusted by all but his own set. But there is nothing against Mr Neville Chamberlain. He is not loved as Mr. Baldwin is loved. But he does know his own mind.

Therefore, it is not lack of a possible successor that has enabled Mr. Baldwin to survive the great blunder above described. Then, what is the explanation?

Let us analyse the blunder. He announced that Germany was not re-arming. But in fact Germany was re-arming, and he knew it. Why did he distort the truth? I do not know, but I will guess. Let us put ourselves in his place. We may be sure that France was dead against permitting that re-armament. Therefore, France would press England to join in a ultimatum in order to stop re-armament.

(24)  But Mr. Baldwin has an eye on the Ten Commandments. Would it be just war, if we set out to stop re-armament? Of course, Germany was pledged not to re-arm. But equally France and Italy were pledged to disarm. Both had broken their pledge. Why fight Germany to please these treaty-breakers?

Certainly, British opinion with its sporting instinct for fair play, would not have tolerated, war on that ground. Therefore, Mr Baldwin had to say no. A blunt no would have been better, but, like many other timid men, he preferred a pretext and pretended that there was no re-armament in fact. A new diplomacy! A new John Bull! The cabinet was his partner in that pretence. Again later, sir Samuel Hoare laid it down that it lies with the League to see that aggression does not pay, but a month later proposed to handover half of Abyssinia to the aggressor. Public resentment drove him from office. But a few months later, the League on Mr Eden’s motion has raised its sanctions and left Abyssinia under the aggressor’s heel.

Of course, that is cowardice. No one can honestly dispute Mr. Lloyd George’s epithet. Nor will anyone be satisfied with Mr Baldwin’s smug reply that the only alternative to raising sanctions is war and no nation wanted war or was willing to go to war.

Well, why not? It is part of the covenant of the League to apply other sanctions first and then resort to war, if those other sanctions fail.

Why did the League not consider all this and work out a definite policy beforehand? The first solid obstacle was that the fighting power of the League is simply the fighting power of France plus England and their united forces, if they somehow united, were not adequate in 1935 to beat Italy and be still ready to face Germany.

The second obstacle was no less important. There again Lord Londonderry had let the cat out of the bag. He says the problem for England is whether France or Germany is to be her ally! France, so long as she stands by Italy as an indispensable ally, is in effect adverse to the League policy of coercing Italy. France agreed to sanctions with her tongue in her cheek. Therefore, the league policy was partly make believe and partly leaving it to luck and the Abyssinians to lengthen out the struggle till Italy went bankrupt.

(25)  Now, that has failed. Also, Britain finds Hitler’s demands and his long delay in answering the questionnaire thereon intolerable. She has also perceived a reapproachement growing between Italy and Germany, which has now included Austria.

No wonder Paris is stupefied. Her diplomatic castles have vanished in thin air.

Nevertheless, one good thing has emerged from all this night of darkness and indecision. Britain has at least made up her mind. Four things make that clear.

1. Mr. That Cooper has administered a stern rebuke to the pacifists. The pacifists say to his possible foe, “I shall not hit back if you knock me down”. If he persuade the other man that he means that in very truth, he will forthwith be knocked out. That is one of the shortest roads to war.
2. the government has announced that Malta is now nearly impregnable. Malta can only be impregnable if the British fleet and the air forces in the Mediterranean can beat the Italians. If the government has made that nearly sure, we breathe again: and Mussolini hears something he understands.
3. Mr Duff Cooper has again announced that the Rhine is a frontier of England. That was a pretty gallantry when Mr Baldwin said it. Today, it rings out another note; we here again the voice of Cromwell and Drake and Nelson, the only sort of voice which Hitler and Mussolini will appreciate. It gets this new quality by reason of its conjunction with the fourth fact.
4. Britain is rearming. From many quarters of the Empire, the air pilots have gathered together in Europe and are standing by. I take this to be the reason why the tourist traffic is standing still.

Is war, then, the next step? Is that the mind of Hitler?

Now, every dictator, who engages in war of any sort, goes to the battlefield with his crown in his pocket. If he is beaten, his throne is gone. No one knows this better than Hitler. If the Kaiser and Czar had known this, they would have been no war in 1914. Therefore, Hitler’s mind will not make war his program unless victory is sure or war is the only way to save his throne.

(26)  It is hard to see how Hitler can regard victory as sure. Perhaps his Air Force is a bit better than any. Perhaps, his scientists have developed a first rate death ray.

But he cannot know for certain how good his adversaries may be in the battle of the air, know how efficient their bombs and rays of death.

Failing quick and complete victory, he must face the prospect of a war of attrition, with numbers on the opposite side, with the Maginot line to break, with few reserves of capital to finance a long struggle. In these circumstances, he is, one must infer, more afraid of war than France and England.

Some writers conclude that he wants war because he talks big and because Mein Kampf announces ambitions irreconcilable with peace.

But bluff and big talk is the common resort of people in panic, and has always been part of the stock in trade of the German foreign office. Every demagogue aiming at leadership, puts before his audience hill-top aspirations. In all history we find that office and power, when they are attained, teach prudence and restraint and soften asperity. Hitler has realised the first of his ambitions and re-armed Germany. His second is to fortify the Rhineland, and here he is biding his time. His third ambition was the unification of Germany and Austria, but according to our news of his latest packed with Schusnigg and Mussolini, he has already dropped the more perilous half of his aim and converted unification by force into an alliance of equals, under which peaceful penetration is to take the place of force

The next aims are:(1) a rearrangement about Danzig (2) recovery of the German Colonies (3) annexation of some fertile territory at his expense of South Russia or Slovakia.

There is room to hope that he may peacefully obtain part of his aim about Danzig and the colonies. The present position is that a large number of Germans are under the heel of Poles and Slavs on the East of Germany just as the Outlanders under the heel of the Boers, and that no small part of the people inside and outside Germany feel this to be unfair. Public opinion in England would hardly approve a war against Germany to maintain this position. Mr Baldwin has not yet announced that the frontiers of Poland and Yugo-Slavia are the frontiers of England. It is probably a fact that various agreement bind England to uphold these frontiers: but these resemble the agreements of                                 (27)  the League to protect Abyssinia and all other members of the League. These agreements constitute a real danger, which is doubly real so long as the liability is not clearly understood by the British and German public.

It is therefore high time to limit and define that liability in the most expressed terms. But it should also be possible so to alter the selection and powers of the League representative at Danzig and so to adjust the eastern Frontier as to remove part of the German grievance.

Similarly, it may not be possible, or just, to restore what was once German Africa to Germany, but it should be possible to give Germany an equal share with England in a Mandate over these colonies.

It is only the last of Hitler’s ambitions, that of annexing parts of South Russia or Yugo-Slavia, about which no compromises thinkable. Is that essential in Hitler’s mind? If so, there is no escape from war.

There is a cordial hatred between Nazism and Communism, partly the outcome of a contrast of ideal and chiefly arising from mutual fear. To understand Hitler one must put oneself in his place.

In the first place, he is head of the Nazis or National Socialist; his first main object is to rehabilitate Germany and his second to provide jobs and food for the Germans. But he is not a Communist. He is at heart bourgeois. After putting through a tremendous political revolution, Cromwell proclaimed himself fundamentally a Conservative in his famous observation. “A nobleman: a gentleman: a Yeomen. That must remain “. That is Hitler’s standpoint. He has done much to control capital. He has compelled employers to give all the employment they can, to pay wages as good as they can. But he is passionately against the idea of distributing their wealth among the proletariat. Therefore he is against the example of Russia and against the Communist campaign of the International.  It is probable that this campaign was acquiring far more influence in Germany than it got in Great Britain. Until his campaign ends, Hitler is the natural enemy of Russia.

On the other hand, Russia has repudiated her hundreds of millions of debt, and divided up the land and money of her noble and capitalist classes by the simple process of banishing and executing those classes. Russia therefore felt all capitalist countries to be her enemy. The white Russian (28)  armies gave a bitter point to this fear. Russia therefore set out to save herself by converting the rest of Europe to Communism. Only in a Communist Europe could she feel safe.

But today France and England are agreed about preserving the independence of Russia. It is no longer a case of Russia standing alone against the world. Therefore, the international activities of the Communist campaign will naturally come to a standstill. As soon as that occurs, half the cause of the hatred between Hitler and Russia comes to a natural end; and there is one less incentive to war.

A second cause of hatred remains. Hitler has terribly maltreated the Jews. Half the leaders of Russia are partly Jewish. Doubtless, their resentment is deep. I find no justification of Hitler’s dealing with the Jews. It is true that the bankers had destroyed the mark and ruined the middle classes of Germany, who had put all their savings into German government bonds. Doubtless, Jewish bankers inspired that practical repudiation of the German national debt to German stockholders. But Jews were not the only bankers: and wrath against a few bankers cannot justify persecution of millions of humble Jews. It is natural, therefore, that the Jewish element in the Soviet cabinet should hate Hitler.

I suspect that fear of the huge red army, of the communist international and of the Jews at the helm of Russia was the decisive factor which led Hitler to re-arm. His second object was to provide cheap jobs for the out of work. If so his object was defence rather than offence. If so, a war of aggression to annex part of the Ukraine or of Slovakia is not his intention.

One must admit that such a war of annexation against South Russia or Slovakia must have its temptations to Hitler in view of the abundance of population in Germany. These countries stand far off the armies of France. The finer organisation, mobility and staff work of the German troops are likely to make South Russia and Slovakia an easy prey.

Nevertheless, even here there is much to give Hitler pause. The armies of Russia are enormous. Their air fleets are splendid and are not far off Berlin.

If an attack by Germany on South Russia or Slovakia or Poland is sure to produce an attack on Germany by France or England, then the ultimate result would depend on luck.

(29)  It is therefore of prime importance for France and England to have a plane and unambiguous policy about this eastern Frontier. It is genuinely believed that France has such a policy and expects England to support it. But the point should not be left in doubt. Most publicists seem now to be convinced that there would have been no war in 1914, if England had plainly announced that she would fight.

The existence of pacts is not enough. Witness Abyssinia. A live intention to fulfil the pacts is a vital need. Next best is a plain announcement that Britain will not feel bound to defend the frontiers of Poland, Slovakia and Russia. Such an announcement would warn these countries to come to the best terms as possible with Germany or else be ready to defend themselves. Eastern Europe would then know where it is. Till the middle of 1936, the frontiers of Eastern Europe seemed secure by dint of French, British and Italian policy. Today, Italy has moved apart. Here lies the greatest danger. That is why France is stupefied by the Italo-German-Austrian entente. In Eastern Europe, Germany has now a very strong hand. Naturally, in these conditions, Mr Titulescu feels that Romania is being left in the lurch and departs in a huff from the Dardanelles Conference. With Italy detaching herself and England wobbling, France can hardly be expected to stand as sole guarantor of the eastern frontiers.

In spite of all this, there is no good reason for despair. The millions of the Russian army, the brilliance of their airmen and the lack of gold in Germany are solid forces on the side of peace. Hitler will not face a long war, if he can achieve part of his objects in peace. The strategic strength of his hand will have its natural effect and open the eyes of the nations on his Eastern frontier, as well as those of their allies, to the importance of meeting Hitler halfway on the issue of Danzig and a quarter of the way on the need of Germany to expand. Expansions by annexations and violence will be resisted, but there is room to give Germany markets and economic expansion in south-eastern Europe and perhaps in what once was German Africa. These are the problems facing diplomacy today. It is not impossible for the diplomats to find a compromise.

The next and greatest danger of war lies, according to some thinkers, in the impending bankruptcy of Germany. Having spent £1,600,000,000 on a rearmament, she cannot they argue, meet the bills two or three years hence: then, war maybe Hitler’s only alternative to dethronement.

(30)  I do not believe in the bankruptcy of Germany. That belief is founded on the idea that export trade is 3/4 the battle. This same idea persuaded many people that Germany in 1914 would not be able to fight for more than a year or two and that Italy in 1935 could not last out six months war. These ideas ignore the basic fact that 80% of the spent £1,600,000,000 on rearmament has been spent in Germany and paid to Germans. It remains in German hands it is food for men and for taxation.

Neither do I find solid point in the theory that lack of money will inconsistently drive Hitler to make war and waste money. Most wars do not pay: the winners suffer as much as the losers. That is no less clear to Hitler than to you and me.

In short, all nations fear war as war was never before feared. That is the best, and I think an effective, safeguard of peace.

How does all this affect dependencies like India and Ceylon? Some utopians dream of the next world war as India’s chance of independence. No more stupid illusion ever befogged the mind of man. Modern weapons ring the death knell of national independence for all unarmed people. A small Air Force can keep vast territories in complete subjection.  Therefore, defeat of England in a world war must simply transfer India and over to the domination of the conqueror.

Except France, no nation but the British has ever developed a liberal constitution in any dependency. Nor do we find, even in the French colonies, any substantial gift of political privilege such as appears in the political rights of Ceylon, Jamaica and Barbados.

If we compare this with the history of the Dutch and Belgian empires or with the policy of Germany in South West Africa, the issue is plain. For India and Ceylon and all the Eastern and African dependencies, defeat of Great Britain in a world war means a transfer from a generous hegemony to the merest tyranny and exploitation. Therefore, self interest puts all these dependencies on the side of Britain.

In the West Indies, it is not merely a point of interest. With the Monroe doctrine in force, it is perhaps not a point of interest at all. But we have these 300 years worked and played and lived alongside of the British and we stand with them as a matter of instinct.

(31)  In spite of much that hurts and jars, that instinct will grow in the East with the growth of representative government, if only Whitehall will play the game and let them be for 50 years.

When one observes how the services have been allowed to obstruct and whittle away the growth of self-government in India and the Indianization of part of the Indian army, there arises a deep suspicion of the honesty of Whitehall. The communal award and it’s apparent aim of embittering the antagonism between Moslem and Hindu and so of keeping the British on top in the Indian Parliament lends colour to this suspicion.

But let us not forget. England is bigger than Whitehall. For a long period Whitehall withstood the development of a liberal constitution in Australia and other dominions. But in the end the goodwill and good sense of the British people will prevail. It lies with India and Ceylon by steady progress, loyalty, and self restraint to keep alive that good will.

It is likely that before long science will perfect the death ray and make it a complete defence against all arms and types of attack, and it may well be that the experts of India, Ceylon and other dependencies and dominions will share the mastery of the death ray. In the same way that in the Middle Ages the discoveries of the long bow and the rifle put an end to the domination of the mail clad aristocracy over the people, the death rate will make it impossible for any country to conquer or dominate any other country defended by the death ray. That will be the immediate end of all empire. But even in that day, there is no reason why the unity of the British Commonwealth of nations should end. Long association, common interest and goodwill may yet bind them together. That union is the best safeguard of world progress and peace.

But all this lies far off in the future, and political thought must deal with the world of things as they are. In that world, as it is today, talk of independence either for one of the dominions or one of the colonies is nonsense.

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(32)                                 BACK TO THE LAND

A Problem of Eastern Education

In India and the eastern colonies there is in progress a great demand for English education, and there is at the same time a great unrest and a great exodus from the land to the towns. It is commonly assumed that the current system of education is the cause of this exodus, and that system is frequently condemned as fundamentally wrong. People accuse it of inducing Orientals to ape the West, to desert their father’s farm for professions and life as a clerk. There is room for them, people urge, on the farms but no room elsewhere: Present conditions are therefore multiplying unemployment and along with it political discontent. This multiplies the number of bachelors of arts and science to a point at which there is no demand for them. These out of work people then blame the Empire for taking them beyond their depths. Such circumstances are a continual breeding ground of revolutionaries.

So some thinkers demand a new system of education which will keep scholars in the place where they are needed and teach them what will pay.

In this argument, there is a radical confusion both of facts and logic.

It is preposterous and untrue to find the cause of the exodus from Eastern country life in English education of the Oriental. That same exodus is as marked a feature of English life as it is of Indian. It is nearly as common among illiterate Indians as it is among Indians from the universities. All my servants in Ceylon today are persons from far off country villages. Not long ago I met another such in a gaol where I held an examination. He was born of decent family in a village which I know. He agreed that his misfortune arose from bad company in town. But when I suggested that on his discharge he would do well to return to his village, I met with a decided and deliberate negative. He would never go back to the land. In his village he said there are no theatres and pictures. There is not much money and there is  no life. He preferred at all cost to gamble with life in town. He knows no English.

(33). You cannot write him down on the debit side against English education. He is altogether Oriental. It is essential to remember that Oriental nature is human nature. He’s outlook, as he gave it to me in Sinhalese, is precisely the outlook of thousands of young men in Great Britain.

But the problem in the East is complicated by another fact. Young men prefer the professions not only because they are more pleasant and dignified, but also because they pay in the marriage market. The young doctor or lawyer is sure of a bigger dowry than most others. The young clerk in a public office is likely to find a richer wife than the young man who manages a plantation. The present overstocking of the professions is not the same economic folly in the East as it would be in Europe.

But it has its evil results. The cleverer of boys desert the land, and agriculture remains in the hands of the fool of the family. There are a few things more fatal and pitiful than the management of land by rustic Eastern folk. They are too slack for more than the elements of tillage. They suspect manure as a western devilment calculated perhaps to force a higher output, but bound to cause coconut trees to die earlier than unmanured trees die. Of close, persistent, efficient cultivation, the Eastern men now on the land are for the most part incapable. In the face of strenuous competition from developed scientific production in the Dutch and other colonies, it is matter of first rate importance to attract brains to British Colonial agriculture. I do not mean merely on British owned estates but on all estates. These are the strongest hope of a revival of demand for British manufacturers, and this question is therefore equally important for the tropic countries of the British empire and for Great Britain.

We have then to consider what are the causes which make men shun country life in the Colonies.

The first of these is its monotony. Men hate rustic life because it lacks brightness and social amenity. In England there is a special aversion based on the preponderance and aloofness of the aristocracy. Newcomers do not find an easy footing or cordial society, and they naturally prefer town life, in which a man’s a man for a’ that and a’ that. But the special condition has no great force in the unplanted lands of tropic countries. Newcomers of ability will create their own aristocracy. But difficulties of distance remain.

(34). Homes are far apart. Planters cannot meet each other as frequently as merchants and people in town. Dances and bridge parties cannot be a daily event.

Nevertheless, these difficulties are losing some of their force. Motor transport and wireless mechanisms are doing much to abolish distance and solitude for all those who desire their abolition and can afford to pay for it.

For those who cannot pay, and particularly for peasant proprietors and hired labourers, there is still nothing that can end the monotony of country life. It follows that men will not leave the towns in order to become peasant proprietor or yokels unless they had driven to it by necessity.

Now in the tropics there are multitudes of men bound to the country by stern necessity. Furthermore, there is in some colonies no poor law and in others only a parsimonious poor law: in these circumstances, economic necessity frequently drives many others from town to country life. These conditions are forces at work on their own account. The true object of a deliberate agricultural policy, so far as concerns these classes of persons, should be to give them more knowledge and capital and a better chance of high dividends.

But these classes in the colonies are mostly people of low mental capacity. It is hard for any political or social policy to give them knowledge. They will only assimilate knowledge from object lessons close at hand. They can never have such lessons unless middle class and upper class people of real agricultural capacity plant up land in their midst.

We come then to the second graet obstacle which blocks agricultural development. That is, the crops, which yield quick returns like rice and sugar, do not pay. The others which do sometimes pay like rubber and coconuts do not pay for the first 6 to 10 years. That is a long wait.

Why do rice and sugar not pay? Firstly, there is often lack of cheap land. Secondly, there is always lack of cheap capital. The average rate of interest on loans secured by land in India and Ceylon is 15% and more.

So long as these conditions stand, there is no hope of getting men onto the land.

Some of the politicians of Madras and Ceylon are alive to this fact. They have proposed to establish state mortgage banks ready to supply cheap capital. These proposals have (35)  led to some results in Madras, though not yet too big results. The best hope of a safe future lies wrapped and giving further and full fruition to these proposals.

Nevertheless, the difficulty lies deeper than this. I see around me hundreds of young men of the middle and upper classes in the East, who could easily raise capital for agricultural investment and for improvement of their present estates. But they pursue a placid, inactive life in the towns. They are often professional men, but they do not practice their professions. They do not really work their own estates. They leave their land to incompetent, underpaid managers who know nothing of agriculture.

The truth is that they lack individual vigour and they lack the agricultural mind. In the whole outlook of Eastern society, there is almost no interest in land and country life.

In so far as this inefficiency is born of individual indolence, the present system of education is doing much by its devotion to outdoor games to develop a finer individual quality. It may do yet more by a wider attention to gymnastics and drill. But anyway, the many boys, who shine at cricket and football, will never relapse into that obese indolence which used to distinguish the gentlefolk of the East, here Western education is already doing invaluable work.

But there is room for much more to be done in altering the current intellectual outlook and standpoint in regard to agriculture and choice of calling.

This alteration cannot be created merely by changes in the curricular of education. The press and the government the churches and the temples, the schools and the universities and the men, who lead social and public life, must all cooperate before this end can be achieved. But it is natural and right that this effort should start in the schools.

Public opinion is still mostly led by the lawyers, but the schools of today will make the lawyers of tomorrow.

As it is, boys go from from one end of the school to the other without ever encountering anything which arouses an interest in agriculture. But in fact there is romance in agriculture. There are thousand problems awaiting a scientific solution, and the work of practical planters applying one scientific theory after another and watching the success and failure of such applications is as essential to a solution of the problem as the scientist theories.

Boys, who attend chemistry classes in modern English schools, from their beginnings become familiar with the        (36)  existence of such problems in chemistry. Those of them, whose mental capacity lead that way, are attracted to research or to the medical professions. Others are stimulated by history and geography to seek eminence in politics, commerce and at law.

The schools need classes functioning at least twice a week and designed to create a similar interest in agriculture.

The present classes and books in geography have reached a remarkable perfection of detail, which makes tremendous demands on each pupil’s time. He has to learn all about two countries in and one continent in general.

It would be a simple and useful change to divide the time otherwise. The pupil might study one country in detail and one continent in general, and devote the rest of his present geographic hours to a study of the agriculture of his own land. There comes, too, in every pupil’s life a time at which it is clear that his school days will end in six or 12 months. There is no good reason why for those last six or 12 months one quarter of his day at school should not be spent on some branch of study which will make him proficient in the occupation which he means to follow. But over and above the knowledge of agriculture which such a course of study would give to boys who proposed to follow agricultural vocations, it is important to foster in all the boys an interest in agriculture. For all boys there ought at some part of their school career to be a compulsory class in agriculture as there is such a class in geography, arithmetic and the like. In such agricultural classes, over and above a general acquaintance with the elementary principles of cultivation, the object should be to open their eyes to the fascination of the problems of cultivation.

At present I know of no book simple and bright enough meet this need. But there is a romance in the regeneration of poor stocks of cattle by Mendelian and other methods, in the preservation of soil against erosion and exhaustion. There is romance in the brains and industry which have transformed baron tracks of Flemish sand into first rate wheat and pasture land. There is romance in the foresight which predicted the development of the motor industry and made fortunes in the plantation of rubber.

Offer of a few prizes for brisk, popular handbooks which would interest schoolboys in such matters ought to find a response in the literary world. The governments need only organise school curricular on these lines and the books would blossom in multitude.

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(37)                BILINGUALISM IN THE SCHOOLS

Another Problem in the East

Another great problem in eastern education is that of bilingualism. Many thinkers condemn the use of English as the basic language peoples in secondary schools. Learn everything. They argue that Indian pupils do not properly understand what is so taught, or are given an unnecessarily heavy task in assimilating English besides the numerous subjects like science which are taught in English. They suggest that the whole course should be in Hindustani or some other similar language, and they look to this to revive a genuine nationalism and abolish mimicry of the Western world.

These critics shut their eyes not only to the present lack of textbooks in Eastern languages (which is perhaps not permanently an insurmountable difficulty) but also to the wide variety of races which meet in each secondary school in the East. If each boy is to learn his geography and chemistry in his own language, there must in most or many schools be three to six first forms functioning at once.

And there are even stronger objections to their argument. The colloquial vernacular, which an eastern child learns at home, are not the same as the literary vernaculars which they would have to learn for the study of books on science. Between the colloquial Hindustani vernacular of about 2000 simple words and the literary Hindustani of about 20,000, there is a tremendous gulf. It will take the average boy a long time to cross that gulf. Doubtless, it will take him yet longer to learn English. But not twice as long.

They forget to that the learning of English is a good mental gymnastic and opens to the pupil a rich world of literature, richer than he can find in any Eastern language. Eastern parents in practice know this perfectly well. Schools which failed to teach English, will be mostly empty. English is not merely the high road to knowledge, it is the only road to success in commercial, professional and public life.

(38). Nevertheless, these critics have their finger on a real defect which is more widespread and dangerous today than it was fifty years ago.

Far too many boys are admitted to scientific and classical courses of study before they properly know English. They go through school then, under a heavy handicap which in some produces a distaste for all study and leaves in all such a final deficiency. This is illustrated by the high percentage of Oriental failures in simple examinations like the Cambridge Senior.

But all this means merely that the first grounding in English should be made more thorough. 50 years ago, a larger proportion of the boys came from fairly well educated classes and learnt a good deal in their own houses. Today, they come from all classes, and many have no literary start or helping hand at home.

All that is required is to devote in the junior classes an hour more per day than is now devoted to conversational English and English in general.

In Switzerland schoolboys learn three modern languages. In British schools boys learn French, Latin and Greek. In the same way, Indian pupils can efficiently learn English, Latin and Greek. The difficulty is equalised by omitting French.

What is true is that they cannot efficiently learn these three languages plus science plus mathematics. That is why in my own grammar school the classical students acquaintance with chemistry was absurdly small. One cannot between the ages of 6 and 18 assimilate four languages plus mathematics plus science. The practical solution is for the boys with linguistic aptitude to omit either science or preferably algebra and geometry, and vice versa for the boys with a mathematical bent to omit either one or two languages or science but never both.

There is one more point. All that is said above applies to boys who will spend three years in the top most form, boys who cannot do this will have only a smattering if they study all the subjects. Such boys must omit two of the languages. It is a simple problem of distribution of the available time according to aptitude: and the problem is much the same East and West. It is no education to study any language, even one’s own up to the seventh standard and no further. Either in language or science or mathematics, one must go to the roots and grasp the whole. We cannot do that in all these.

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(39)                   THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IN CEYLON  …. (Written in 1935)

There is underway in Ceylon and effort to reduce the law’s delays, and the idea is prevalent that the best way to do this is to amend the law.

Now, no one will deny that service of summons and processes maybe quickened by altering that law. In India, if a defendant evades summons and cannot be found, the Fiscal may fix the summons or writ to that defendants door and such service is valid. In Ceylon, such service is legal only after the Court orders it: and the Supreme Court considers that it should be ordered only after legal proof of evasion, of the defendant’s presence in Ceylon and of the locality of his house. In consequence, it takes two months longer in Ceylon, and it costs 10 shillings to 50 shillings more in Ceylon than in India to serve process on fugitive debtors.

But that is not a vital thing and the remedy is patent. Simply abolished two sections of the Ceylon Code and substitute two from the Indian Code. There was no need of a costly commission to indicate the cure.

Other such defects there doubtless are in the law, but they are not the heart of the matter.

Nine tenths of the delay is the inefficiency of various lawyers and judges. In my own experience, 33% of the failures of the Fiscal to serve summons was the fault of the lawyer, who delayed issue of the summons up to a date four or five days prior to its returnable date. That is to say, through slackness the proctor gave the Fiscal no adequate time for doing of his job.

But the greatest part of the delay is the length of trials, particularly in the Supreme Court in the Colombo District Court.

One Colombo district judge is famous for what some people call patience and others called deliberation. Others have no name for it. In the Additional District (40)  Court of Colombo one of my friends recently listened to one and a half hours argument about the costs of postponement! No outstation lawyers would commit such a crime. It often means that the judge is a weakling.

I remember asking X why a certain judge had left his work in great arrears, a much esteemed otherwise likeable judge. I was told that every lawyer felt it necessary to repeat each point 7 times: otherwise, that judge would fail to grasp it.

One continually notices how the hearing of this or that appeal drags on for days. Even ordinary D.C. appeals are seldom finished more quickly than two or three a day. There was a time when Wood Renton, Walter Pereira and Hutchinson worked twice as fast as this, and everyone respected their judgements on the civil law.

I suspect this to be the root of the matter. The bar has ceased to respect the judgements of the Appeal Court. Therefore, they put forward specious pleas and outdo each other in verbosity expecting to mislead the weaker minds on the Bench. Many cases drive this conclusion home.

In one such, where a broker A promised a fee to a sub broker B if B found him a buyer at 50,000 shillings and where B found such a buyer but A sold to another buyer at a higher price, two judges held that B could claim no fee from A since his fee was payable by and demandable from the buyer. This verdict conflicts with justice as ordinary humanity understands it. How can I claim my fee from a person with whom I have had no dealings?

In another case, which concerned a will and the question whether a will dates as at the date of its first execution or the date of its Codicil, the Supreme Court heard argument for two days and decided (1) that the English law applies (2) that the Ceylon statute enacts the same (3) that even if it does not, the Roman Dutch law has the same principle and the will dates as at the date of the Codicil. The Privy Council heard argument for two hours and held (1) that the English law applies (2) that apart from the English law and Roman Dutch law the Ceylon statute expressly makes a will date at the date of its Codicil. This is to say, it mattered nothing what the English law and the Roman Dutch law are.

(41)  Therefore, the two days argument in the Supreme Court and it’s long judgement we’re a waste of words. It is hard to understand how any capable lawyer could plead Roman-Dutch law about a matter expressly determined by a Ceylon statute, and how a judge could listen to that plea and discuss it at length. Nevertheless, the lawyers and judges concerned with some of the most eminent and experienced in the Ceylon. Decision of cases pleaded by such persons cannot be anything but slow.

When one has appreciated the depth of their aberrations in that case, and the length of that roundabout journey by which they reached a true conclusion along a false route, one will have no surprise at learning the fate of most Ceylon decisions when they are reviewed in the Privy Council. Out of the last 20 such cases a large proportion have been reversed in England, and not a few of these were on simple issues of fact.

These defeats in the Privy Council are not the only reason why the public has less confidence in the Supreme Court of Ceylon then they used to have. There have been other blunders. The verdict in one case arising from a contested Council Election is generally felt to have been a grave miscarriage of justice. The summoning up of the judge in certain Assize cases has been delivered in the spirit of a dictator rather than that of British justice. Directions to jury in other cases have abounded in elementary blunders.

In short the colony needs better judges and better lawyers. The first step to improve the lawyers is to improve the judges. The next is to improve legal education. Bertram CJ propounded a clear cut plan to do this by permitting admission only through a university course: but no one seems to have the courage to put this through. Compulsory apprenticeship will also be a good thing, but only if the young lawyer is put under a first rate senior. Are there enough of these? Will there ever be enough so long as the judges failed to attain a higher standard of efficiency? Let us therefore consider how better judges can be found.

One shibboleth commonly current urges that the judges are now too old. The writers have the present chief justice Sir A McDonald in view when they say this, but are not frank enough to say it openly. Now, I hold no brief for the chief justice. I do not think that he has or has yet earned             (42)  the reputation of an able judge. But I am sure he is not too old, and I am sure that he is a better judge this year than he was last year. He is learning something about facts and life in Ceylon. He will be still better next year.

Other critics put forward another shibboleth and want all judgeships filled from the practising Bar of Ceylon.

Both these proposals are nonsense, inspired by personal hopes of a job. They are of the same character as the demand that the district judges of Colombo and Kandy shall not be promoted to the Appeal Court Bench. Those same Appeal Court lawyers, whose stupidity and prolixity now cumber and clog the administration of justice, desire to monopolise the Bench!

The vital need is to select the best possible men as judges. One can do little in Ceylon in regard to the men who come from England, but it is still essential to obtain at least half the judges from England. It takes them time to learn local law, but not a great amount of time. Within six months, Hutchinson and Wood Renton acquired a thorough grasp of almost everything. One cannot expect always to find men of their mental calibre. But even the less capable men from England bring to their duties a grasp of criminal law and the law of contract and torts equal to the average of the judges recruited in Ceylon, along with an independence all their own. Concerning their election, Ceylon may still do one thing. It may represent its present dissatisfaction and ask for the exercise of care to select men of higher ability than has been found in most of the selections of the last 15 years.

Concerning selections in Ceylon, it is up to the selectors to obtain the views of a wider circle then they now consult. They should consider the opinions not only of Veyangoda and Bambalapitya but all of Ceylon, not only of the senior but also of the junior bar, not only of the lawyers but also of the suitors. No one can judge the judges better than the people being judged.  They are the toads beneath the harrow. They know best who has judged right and who has judged wrong. True you cannot consult all the suitors, but you can discover what they think by inquiries from 100 sources. You may consult the Merchants and Planters Associations, the Government Agents and the District Judges, the headmen and the surveyors, and many more. Having before them what so many people think, selectors will be better equipped.

(43)  There used to be a Civil Servant inspector of minor Courts. He did useful work which is now left undone. What does the Attorney General know of public opinion on this magistrate and that in their respective districts other than his assistance gather from palavers with the local Crown Proctor? The Inspector of Police Courts could learn more from a three day circuit, from what he sees of the records and hears in the town then the Attorney General will learn in a month. He would be an invaluable advisor not only about magistrates but also about the current opinion of the country on the work of temporary judges in the Appeal Court.

The second path to reform is further specialisation. Judges proficient in the criminal law should stick to sessions work and criminal appeals, and should be given a fair share of the Kandy circuit. It may often be impossible, but so far as it is possible, appeals in cases about contracts and tort should be heard by two judges whose main experience has been in that field, while other judges should deal with cases about land.

The third need is to restrict acting appointments, not only of Magistrates but also of Appeal Court Judges. It is now the custom to offer temporary judgeships on probation. As applied to King’s Council at the top of the ladder, that is an insult. Two or three of the best Kings Counsel have refused such appointments and remained permanently off the Bench. They felt it unbecoming to place themselves at the mercy of the Attorney General and the government in that way. The colony cannot afford to lose the best men. The real policy is to choose the best and trust them.

One further measure to achieve this object is to ask H.E. the Governor to take a personal part in supervising selections of Appeal Court Judges. He has wide knowledge of this island and of humanity. Interest on his part would be the best stimulus to the present selections to disregard everything but Merit.

The next fault, which calls for comment, is the lack of independence in the junior locally recruited magistrates. That is almost a byword. They live in terror of Crown Counsel, of the Police department and of the politicians. Their appointments are on probation, which often lasts for six years. Alongside of this, there is great dissatisfaction with the methods of selection and probation. These depend in part on wirepulling by politicians of influence.

(44)  One direct road lies open out of the present impasse. That is to select by our competitive examinations. Marks may be given not only for legal knowledge but for general fitness. The competition wallahs have made good in the Civil Service. Why not at the bar?

There is a further reform likely to go to the root of the present inefficiency at the Bar. This inefficiency is not merely a matter of prolixity and futility in the higher branch: there is general disgust at the dishonesty practiced by many solicitors in regard to their clients’ money. One High Court Judge recently expressed the view that the Bar had deteriorated in quality in recent years. Many of us are convinced that the old school were just as bad and stole more than the men of today, because clients trusted them with their money more readily than now. The real difference is that formerly competition was less keen and emoluments were higher. Fewer got found out. They repaid in time.

One remembers how the Indian Civil Service 80 years ago had a great name for corruption. Lord Carnarvon’s dispatch if I recollect, lead the Home Government to put it right by doubling and tripling the pay of that great service. That is the right remedy for Ceylon. The fees should be doubled. But in itself that will not be effective since already 75% of the solicitors appear for fees far lower than the statutory rates. It is therefore essential to apply a policy of rationalisation. The number of practising lawyers must be restricted. If more students apply three years hence for matriculation then are required, the proper number should be selected by competitive examination. Restriction has saved rubber and tea from bankruptcy. It may save the legal profession from want and dishonour.

There are two deeper seated faults in the present administration of justice, which are part and parcel of the system and which improvement of the Bar and judiciary alone cannot cure.

The first of these is the habit of truculent and interminable cross-examination and the excessive tendency to reject evidence on the ground of discrepancy. Of course, some discrepancies are vital enough to justify disbelief. This is more particularly true when the witnesses are people of education. But one often hears minute cross-examination on detail, sometimes details of what the witness several months before told the Police and the lower Court concerning this and that jot and tittle of events in issue: and the (45)  witness is crucified for hours on end. Some village folk after two or three hours of such cross-examination are mentally exhausted. They misunderstand half the questions and give stupid replies. In the end they are frequently disbelieved without reason. The result is a universal system of coaching, not only by unofficial parties, but also by the Police. Copies of depositions in the lower Courts are obtained and read over to each witness till he seems word perfect. The victory goes then to the parties whose witnesses have the best memories or have had the best coach. Few people rely on their innocence as adequate safeguard. All regard the opposing lawyer as an enemy and a twister. In consequence of this, of occasional miscarriages of justice and of the cost and delay in legal proceedings, most people have come to regard the Courts and the Bar with hatred, and many suffer wrong and settle things outside. In the villages, this breeds rancour, revenge and crime. Every true case, which the Courts dismiss, produces in the countryside half a dozen offences, many never detected.

Here we are on the horns of a dilemma. We cannot throw overboard the right to cross examine. It is sometimes an indispensable aid to truth. But there is a reason to limit its length. One might provide by law that no complainant shall be examined for more than one hour or cross-examined for more than three hours and no witness for more than half that time unless the Court in its discretion permits otherwise.

The other fault in the present tradition of the Bar, under which a lawyer is his clients’ hireling and is in “honour” and custom bound to fight his clients cause, right or wrong. I know lawyers who refused to go as far as this, but not many. Each lawyer should be free, and it should be his duty, to reveal it to the Court as soon as he finds for sure that his client’s case or evidence is false. One of the most brilliant men, whoever took silk in Ceylon, used to argue with me that he never found it sure that his client’s case was false till the fight was over. I feel that he must wilfully have closed his eyes and ears in many conflict. He would not face the facts or let himself imagine that his client could be a liar. He would not, because he had taken his clients money. I think that no man should hire himself so cheap. Each lawyer for the plaintiff should be retained by the Court to help the Court by pointing out the flaws in the defendants case: each lawyer for the defendant should similarly be freed by the Court to show up the wrong and the lies if any in the plaintiffs case, the fees being deposited from (46)  the start by each party to the order of the Court. Each party would have to be free to select his lawyer, subject to a condition that no lawyer should be retained if he is already over briefed and overworked: this condition has its use because much of the present delay arises from the fact that the popular pleaders take on more cases simultaneously than they can manage.

I do not pretend that all this would at once solve the problem. Some pleaders might accept specially big fees on an arrangement to fight their clients’ case through thick and thin: in that event, the opposite party would be at a disadvantage if his pleader regarded himself as retained by the Court.

But the system here suggested would in time generate a higher tradition, compelling all to consider themselves retained to further neither side but only justice.

There is a torrent of false evidence, which floods the Courts because perjury pays. Nothing but a radical legal reform will end this pestilence.

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(47)   FORMATION OF NATIONAL CHARACTER IN INDIA AND CEYLON.

Cunning and servile, say many observers, are the Hindus as a race. How much truth or falsehood is there in this wide indictment? Bone lazy. Born lazy. The first of these epithets is the verdict on the Sinhalese of almost all the critics who see the Sinhalese in the intervals between sowing and reaping of crops. The second epithet is the theory, to which some of those critics resort for an explanation of this indolence.

If their view is right and the race is by nature servile or indolent, there is no way out of it. They will always be the same. This idea lay at the back of Alexander Ashmore’s famous guest, when he told some anti-crime idealist that the only way to suppress crime in Ceylon was to exterminate the Sinhalese. But people, who remember history and how this race and that have changed their character from age to age, will have no faith in this drill book pessimism. We’re not the Serbs once notorious for lack of courage? We’re not the people of Italy long ago the master workers of this world, and how different from the Italians of the 19th century? What a contrast next appears if we put the Italians of 1915 side-by-side with those of 1936?

According to my own experience, the first epithet ‘bone lazy” over states the facts; and the theory behind the second is a stupid lie. Once and for all, P. S. Mill has uttered the decisive comment on the theorists who put every fact down to original differences of race. “Of all vulgar modes of escaping consideration of the effect of social and moral influences, the most vulgar is that of attributing diversity of conduct to inherit natural differences.”

Admitting that some of the Sinhalese are often indolent, let us consider what social, physical and other conditions, if any, are cause of that indolence, before we put it down to race.

Buckle believed that “the energy and regularity, with which labour is conducted, will be entirely dependent on the influence of climate in two different ways. If the heat                   (48)  is intense, men will be indisposed and in some degree unfitted for that active industry which in a milder climate they might easily have exerted. But climate also influences labour by its affect on regularity of habits. Thus we find that no people living in a very northern latitude have ever possessed that steady and unflinching industry for which inhabitants of temperate regions are remarkable. The reason becomes clear when we remember that the severity of the weather and sometimes the deficiency of light render it impossible for people to continue their usual out of door employment. So the working classes are prone to desultory habits. In Sweden and Norway, labour is interrupted by the severe winter and the shortness of the days. These nations are remarkable for a certain instability and fickleness of character”. He considered that heat produced the same effect on the people of Portugal and Spain.

But surely it is remarkable that identical results should follow from two opposite elements like heat and cold. Nor does the theory as propounded by Buckle explain how so many tropic people have acquired a reputation for industry. No one doubts that some African races have a great capacity for work. Arabs are noted for endurance. It is a compliment if you say that anyone toils like a nigger. Here in Ceylon, the hot plains of the Jaffna district have produced, in the Tamils there resident, a race as robust and energetic as any on God’s earth. We must look elsewhere for the causes which make men tend to work harder than usual among the Tamils of Jaffna. We find it in the compelling necessity of life in Jaffna, where only a limited acreage of the land is available to provide sustenance for a numerous and prolific population. They must work or starve. So in fact they work. And the only crops they can grow and sell are rice and tobacco, both of which demand heavy toil. The toil required for rice is intermittent, though it is heavy. But they cannot live on rice alone. Vegetables and tobacco are an essential half of their livelihood. More than most crops, tobacco demands, unremitting watering and toil. So the habit of toil is native among the people of Jaffna, because the soil gives no response to casual effort.

But in the fertile Sinhalese district, the difficulties are different, and half a dozen facts combine to promote spasmodic intervals and obstacles to work.

The first of these obstacles are the two seasons of drought. In March and February, and again in the second                                    (49)  half of August, the whole of September and part of October, the soil is parched and difficult to dig. It differs vitally from the sandy soil of Jaffna. At those periods, it takes five days to complete cultivation which after the rains one can do in one day. Agriculturalists therefore tend to put it off till the work is easier. When the rains begin, their efforts are first devoted to preparing fields for paddy, and exhausting task, when twice a a year they worked for a fortnight knee deep in mud. Then, the balance of their labour goes into la petite culture. From these conditions there arises a habit of absention from toil till toil is easier. That habit works itself up into indolence in other aspects of life. When once the Sinhalese farmer has ploughed and fenced and sown his fields with paddy and vegetables, he has nothing more to do but wait and pray that no floods will destroy his plantation. He cannot, with the means at his disposal, curb the floods. Since he can do nothing, he does nothing, unless some neighbouring capitalist offers him a job. But such capitalists want a permanent labour force for the whole year round, and so they prefer imported Tamil labourers, who have no fields of their own to attract them away. Therefore it is essential for the superintendent of those estates to learn Tamil and they learn it. Having to spend much of their time on the Tamil language and dealing in Tamil, they are slow to acquire knowledge of Sinhalese, and most of them from sheer custom come to like Tamil labour better. All these circumstances are a positive stimulus to intermittence of industry among the Sinhalese of some districts.

Another and subsidiary factor leading to the same result is the torrential type of monsoon on the West Coast. In the first fortnight is it is often a succession of storms of first rate violence, when no man can work.

A third and vital influence promoting slackness is the joint ownership of property. Each acre of long settled land now belongs to two or three hundred descendants of the first settler. The oldest house on it serves not only as the abode of some of the elders of the family, but as a refuge for those of the juniors who have no job.If some active member of the clan puts his money and labour into the soil and plants up some deserted block of it , half a hundred kinfolk will own and demand a share of the crop which the work of the active one has grown. That is a definite discouragement from industry. 30 to 80 years ago, the enterprising members of each family used to move apart and squat on convenient crown forest and acquire individual (50)  title to the new block by possession for 1/3 of a century. But that avenue has been closed by the Waste Lands Legislation and the determination of the Government to protect the crown jungles from unlegalised appropriation. The only remedy left to active part proprietors of village gardens is to get them partitioned at law, but most are discouraged from this their last chance by the heavy cost and delay of partition proceedings. For the most part, they see an opening in other industries and commerce, but find them over full. One way out would be to alter the law of succession and abolished common ownership, but many years must pass before public opinion is right for such a revolution.

The legislature is seeking to provide two further remedies. In the first place it is offering small blocks of crown land in settled villages to small holders. This is a good project and has roused keen demand. But the quantities of land available in settled villages is so small that it best this project can provide nothing better than a palliative.

The second plan of campaign is to attract settlers to jungles in the hinterland: but the capital cost, the long delay and the terrible obstacles of malaria and bad water supply make it clear that for some generations this plan will produce but a small result.

One is driven back to the root of the difficulty, i.e. the joint ownership of land. It should not be beyond human capacity to subject the system of ownership to a thorough logical analysis, to expose its futility and find a better system. There is a natural reluctance to shirk tackling fundamental customs like that of intestate succession: but, if progress is not to be slow, it must grapple with every obstacle at its roots. It is now a pitiful site when one observes the utter lack of cultivation in 9 out of 10 Sinhalese village gardens, but pity is pointless if it does not penetrate the cause. I find the chief cause not in any racial character but in the system of common ownership, under which the occupants of most gardens lend to be either the dotards or the fools of the family.

There is one school of determinist thinkers convinced that human history and racial character are the result of physical conditions and the state of knowledge. Now, there is no doubt that physical facts and degree of development in science are pivotal causes of many events in history and many types of national character. But these are not the only causes, and they do not work with automatic necessity.   (51)  How far and how soon they will have determining effect depends on half a hundred other factors of individuality in those who lead a country, on the social conditions and ideas which guide mankind, of the creeds and habits which influenced their day.

Let us analyse some of the propositions set out by the determinists. I will quote two principles emphasis by Buckle.

“Of all the great social achievements, the accumulation of wealth must be the first because without it there can be neither taste nor leisure for that acquisition of knowledge on which the progress of civilisation depends. Until wealth comes into play, progress can only depend on the energy and regularity of labour and the returns made to that labour by the bounty of nature soil and climate. There is no instance in history of any country being civilised by its own efforts unless it has possessed one of these conditions in very favourable form. In Asia civilisation has been confined to that vast track where a rich and alluvial soil has secured wealth to man i.e. from east of Southern China to the Western coast of Asia Minor, Phoenicia and Palestine. North of this, there is a long line of barren country invariably peopled by rude nomad tribes, who, while they remained on it, have never emerged from their uncivilised state. So the Arabs in their own country have always been rude and uncultivated. But from the 7th to the ninth centuries, they conquered Persia, Spain and India: and their character underwent a great change. They built cities, endowed schools, and collected libraries. In the same way, the Sahara remains uncivilised, except at its eastern part when the Nile yields abundant returns to toil.”

There would be no room for objection in this description, if it reported merely to state a common tendency: but it is put forward by Buckle as an absolute law. In fact there is no such absolute law. The theory is in conflict with half 100 stubborn facts. It is enough to mention two or three of these facts.

In the first place, at least three of the great religions, which sway civilised mankind and helped to determine the course of human life, had their origin in countries that were particularly poor. Christ and Mohammed had no starting place of wealth or leisure. Buddha was indeed a prince, but he abdicated his throne and renounced his family and       (52)  home. These great teachers found leisure not in the abundance of their positions but in the starvation of long retreats in the wilderness.

In another part of his book Buckle has argued that the great leaders of humanity gathered their visions from the current thought and conditions of their day and did but more perfectly express the half conscious feelings of their fellow men; and from this he considers that such great personalities were the necessary outcome of the times in which they were born.

It seems to me that in this reasoning we find abstraction run wild. It is true that many statesmen have lead mankind along the road, alone which men had already begun to feel their way. Such statesmen were in effect creatures of their time, and did little but give expression to the aspirations of their day.

But others did more than this, even among the statesman; and most particularly we find more than this in the work and life of the great teachers of religion, like Christ and Buddha. Rebellion is the keynote of their lives. They were in revolt against the current thought and morale of their day. They planted a new seed, which their fellow men hated and despised. In the end, they conquered mankind. We fail to understand history if we fail to see that their victory, still incomplete as it is, was in literal truth a miracle.

Buckle’s generalisation about physical laws and their social effects are subject to many modifications.

Another hypothesis has been confidently propounded by Buckle as the main cause of difference of wages and distribution of wealth. In early periods, he says, wealth will be distributed either as wages or as profits. “If the supply of labourers outstrips the demand, wages will fall: if demand exceed supply, wages will rise.” “If two countries differ solely in this, that in one national food is cheap and abundant, and in the other scarce and dear, the population of the former country will increase more rapidly, and the average rate of wages will be lower…….”

“Since people in hot climates consume less food than those in cold climates, the growth of population will be more rapid in hot climates. Further, in cold countries food is dear. The colder is a country, the more carbonised will be the food of its people. Highly carbonised food is more costly, since it is chiefly drawn from the animal world, than (53)  oxidised foods like starch, which are drawn from the vegetable world. These difficulties produce a more adventurous character in the people of cold countries. The conclusion is, there is a strong and constant tendency in hot countries for wages to be low, in cold countries for them to be high. To this law there is one apparent exception in Ireland, the one European country where the people have a cheap national food. The potato is cheaper than any other food equally wholesome. One acre of potatoes will support twice as many people on the same quantity of land in wheat. In such a country population will be ceteris paribus, increase twice as fast and so it has occurred. Population in Ireland, up to the start of pestilence and immigration, increased annually by 3% while in England it grew in the same period only one and a half percent. It is too rapid in England, but the condition of the working classes is one of sumptuous splendour compared with Ireland, where they earn four pence per day.”

“When wages are invariably low, the distribution of political power and social influence will be very unequal. Thus there has a risen in India an unequal distribution of wealth and power. An immense majority of the people, pinched by the most galling poverty, have always remained in a state of stupid debasement, crouching before their superiors in abject submission, fit only to be slaves or led to battle. So we find that in 1810, the interest paid for money in India varied from 36 to 60%. This was the first great consequence of cheap and abundant rice. The next result was inequality of power. So the Sudra casts had no rights as against Brahmins.Their only business has been to labour: they’re only duty to obey. Their annals furnish no instance of a war of classes, no popular insurrections. Like servile conditions have appeared in Egypt for the same reasons.”

There is much truth in this description but there is also much perversion of the truth, when all of the facts are imputed to one course.

It is not true that animal foods are the staple national food in cold countries in general. The peasant of many parts of France and Germany and all parts of Russia live chiefly on bread and potatoes. In the whole history of England one cause lies in the fact that the Norman conquerors were too few to absorb all titles to land or to root out the yeomany of England. Another was the printing press, another was the success of the Reformation and the Puritan revolution, both of these being a vital stimulus (54)  to freedom. Another was the personal influence and example of statesmen like Cromwell, Pitt, Burke and Fox and of bookmen like Newton. Another was the emergence of great inventions like the cotton looms and the steam engine. Another was the plenty and proximity of coal and iron to ports so essential to the ship building and all steel industries.

All such influences depend for the fullness of their civilising effect on the progress of knowledge and on a wise state policy for promoting such knowledge. It has been the policy of the early rulers of India and Russia to restrict and obstruct the progress of knowledge and the education of the people, and they had unlimited power.

Now that Russia has cast off the shackles, she is moving ahead on all sides. So, too, are India and Ceylon advancing, particularly in industry.

But there was no reason in the constitutional position why India should not have progressed in science with real rapidity in the latter half of the 19th century.

Wages have been as low in Russia as in Ireland and India. The fundamental difference is not between hot and cold. It lies rather in the relative abundance of population and avenues of employment, and this depends on a thousand other facts besides climate. Cheap food is one fact. The need of coal and costlier houses in cold climates is another fact. The possession of available fertile land or fertile colonies is another fact. The growth of industries other than agricultural is another fact. Some of these depend on nature, some on success in war or conquest, some on the birth of men of inventive genius, some on the availability of good markets for produce, some on the vigour of intellectual life in the schools and the Universities.

In short climate is not the only nor the biggest pebble on the beach where national character grows. We find the same abundant growth of population, the same inequalities of wealth, the same mental subservience and futility in the peasants of some cold lands like Russia as we find in India.

If we ask why wealth, independence and knowledge have been more and more widely distributed in England, we must look for the cause. Even today there appears in India and Ceylon, little real interest in science and research work. In both these countries there are people of great natural gifts but they have made no real scientific discovery. I think the reason is that research and the universities, and especially (55)  the science branches of the universities of India and Ceylon, have not attracted the best brains in the country. The ablest men study literature or mathematics. 75% of the clever men study it in Europe. Then they return to their homes to seek a rich living in the professions. Others find a big dowry, clutch after social or political distinction and seek to make a show. Many of them have paid for their education in Europe with borrowed money, and come back with their person’s mortgage for five years: it is natural for them to avoid scientific research in which there are no pecuniary plums, and devote themselves to more lucrative callings like matrimony and the bar.

Colleges in India have no fat endowments such as enable Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and other places to recruit and reward with big emoluments the men whom they need as lecturers and professors. In India and Ceylon, a series of rich prizes for original research are a great need.

But beyond this there is a deeper defect. It is a surprisingly small percentage of the doctors in practice in these two countries who devote any of their spare time to real research. The only two names of men, who have left their Mark on Ceylon medical history, Charmers and Castellani who, who left the island 25 years ago, and neither of these were Ceylonese. I suspect that this paucity of output is partly due to lack of devotion to science as science, or in other words to want of passion for work for the sake of the work. Sometimes, this is the result of necessary pre-occupation with patients and finance. But sometimes it is lack of backbone.

In politics, too, there is a common outcry against the want of independence and sincerity among the men at the helm. Some Ceylonese critics have gone so far as to describe this so-called national defect as a slave mentality which cripples not only the politicians but the Electorates. This criticism is a gross exaggeration and would be promptly revealed as such if the world heard what the masses of electors in their homes think and say of some of the politicians. But behind the exaggeration is an element of truth. There is a lack of courage. Men do not fearlessly enough oppose and publicly condemn the hypocrites and grafters, though they hate and despise them deeply enough.

The upshot of our argument is that certain defects appear in the lives and character of some of the people of Ceylon and India, which have retarded the full civilisation of these countries, and that these defects have risen from prior and (56)  present conditions under which they have lived. It is a barren argument which discusses only the present in the past. If we have rightly diagnosed the cause, we should be able to predict something of the future and point out ways and means to make it brighter.

The essence of history is that certain conditions and qualities have always produced certain results and are likely to do so again. I am here considering the lack of passion for work, of independence and of courage which we find in not a few of the population of India and Ceylon, and whether a government of good intentions and people of goodwill can so manipulate the conditions as to generate the missing qualities. Apart from such definite activity, those missing qualities may slowly take birth and grow by dint of spreading education or by a fortuitous equalisation in the distribution of wealth, but such a growth must be a matter of centuries. Today, mankind desires applied science which will work more rapidly than natural selection.

Let us take a few examples of peoples which emerged from much obscurity and displayed a remarkable degree of courage and enthusiasm yielding them unexpected glory and eminence.

Two typical countries of this kind are found in Spain and Arabia. The Spanish soldier was the most dreaded fighting man in Europe for two centuries down to the days of Cromwell and thereafter, till the Dutch and English Protestants and Louise XIV broke their reputation. The Saracens and Moors conquered half of southern Europe. Both these peoples had no background of wealth or physical advantage to explain their triumph.

The first cause of their success was their passionate faith in God and their church.

The second was the discipline of warfare which proceeded their triumph. It took the Spaniards two centuries of stern bloodshed to reconquer Spain from the Moors. Similarly, warfare was part of the common round in Arabian life before they swept over southern Europe. Each was fighting for his faith.

Is there in India and Ceylon today the necessary vitality of faith to give backbone to the national character? It seems to me that there is not. There is a sincerity of belief among most of the people, but it’s keynote is serenity rather than power.

(57)  Few are ready to fight against the odds and die for their faith. It may be that there is no need to die for it since there is no intolerable persecution to call for such sacrifice. But their creeds do not govern their daily life and thought, or stir that passionate devotion which I have in mind as the faith of the Saracens and Spaniards. As it is, I see no effective movement at work to revitalise the religions of the east and I cannot imagine that they will be able to lead the people up the hills of self sacrifice until they have re-organised their hierarchy and purged their ranks of the faineants and humbugs who compose at least 10% of their number.

Are there any secular influences at work, or which men may set at work, capable of producing the courage and backbone required!

In Italy and Germany, the personalities of Hitler and Mussolini have, it seems, produced big results. Some folk would make gods of them. But one cannot be sure how much of this adoration is lip worship, nor whether it will last after they are dead, nor even whether it will last through their lifetime.

In Russia, it looks as if they have reached firmer ground. They worship Lennon. They worship the Cause. That is now the religion of Russia.

Is there any sign in the east of the rise of such a worship of the Cause? In Ceylon there is no sign. Nationalism is much alive but some few of the Nationalist leaders have so bespattered their flag with hypocrisy and self-seeking as to dim no small part of the popular enthusiasm and faith. In India, there has been more vital sacrifice for the Cause and it is still led by men, some at least of whom are believed worthy to lead. It lies in their hands. They may make good with a positive advance along the road of social amelioration as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Kemal Pasha. If they do this soon on some simple straightforward plank of sufficient width and imagination, that may vitalise faith in the Cause.

The other great stimulus to courage in a nation has been discipline in warfare. No one desires to apply that stimulus to any country for the mere sake of improving character. But there are conflicts of peace, which may serve as a training ground. Both the German and Italian governments have rightly put physical fitness in the forefront of their educational program.

(58)  In the spirit of British public school life eminence in games earns as much veneration as book knowledge or more. No boy can be best at gym or a game unless he puts his back into it. No platoon can be first rate at drill unless it puts its heart into it. It is a vital importance for every school in the East to have its playground, it’s gymnasium and it’s cadet corps. It is vital to the future for every scholar to acquire the habit of putting his heart and soul into his job. If he does that persistently at gym or games of a hardy type like cricket and football, tennis or hockey, and if he has gathered from his school masters or school atmosphere some sense of values, he will usually put his heart into his job or his country’s job.

To ensure all this it is essential to select teachers of fine quality, men of mind. To-day already, and I think it will be more so tomorrow, the schoolmaster is the greatest clergyman. The first step to attract the best men into the teachers’ profession is to set up decent rates of pay. That is a point which the Governments often ignore. The second step is to make the Universities and Training Schools first rate. They will not readily be first rate until all the undergraduates live in college. Humanity most easily gets its idea of the good and the beautiful from living in a good and beautiful environment. The simple, earnest, Spartan tone and atmosphere of a keen college is the quickest road to the high quality, which all countries need in its teachers. I hope they will soon make it their object to give such a training to as many teachers in upper and elementary schools as national funds permit.

Let us next consider the other accusations against Eastern national character, in which there is some substance. That is the tendency of some classes of people to idle or work intermittently. So far as this tendency is real, it is partly a result of circumstance and habit, partly a result of being underfed. The only way to end underfeeding is to pay higher wages. But wages cannot be higher than the trade will stand, and trade dependant on underfed labour cannot stand much. The governments are doing good in many ways such as efforts to provide cheaper money and land, irrigation works, fostering of new industries, more schools and so on. The democratic parties may soon help the poor along with a minimum wage, and I hope with some profit sharing plan. But all this can only be very gradual. The most effective reform, which could be quickly applied, would be to restrict childbirth.

(59)  Buckle was perfectly right in saying that, other things being equal rapid growth of population must lower wages. It has perpetually in history kept wages low in India and Ceylon. Quite the most foolish utterances heard in the East, in this the 20th century was a recent exhortation by a Minister of the Ceylon Council, in which he advised his countrymen to be fruitful and multiply. In every street and every village there are large families living on three shillings a week. They hardly get one square meal a day. This misery is the necessary result, in present conditions, of fecundity.

There are methods of contraception, which do not break the law. It is open to the Government to organise a course of instruction in these methods in the senior forms of schools. Failing that, it remains for social reformers to hold a regular series of lectures and demonstrations to married women. There is no other quick way up the economic hill.

In conclusion, let us remember this. All these factors help to form character, individual and national. But neither food nor climate, wealth nor poverty, drill nor games play so vital a part as having the right ideal and worshipping the right heroes, which indeed are two sides of one thing. A hero is an ideal in the flesh, and inspires mankind more deeply than any abstract idea. Sometimes, abstractions and moral theories, however right in themselves, are overdone and produce aversion. That has been a feature of the history of the Puritan ideal. It has been pushed beyond its true limit, till mankind or much of it has learnt to hate it. In the reaction from the killjoy policy of parliament after the death of Charles I, England quickly reverted to hedonism. All the swagger of the Cavaliers continued to mark the life and manners of the upper classes in England right onto the middle of the 19th century in spite of all the preaching. I have no space to discuss the other causes, which have produced a different tone, a greater simplicity and good taste. But among these causes some of the chief were the example (1) of the leaders of literature and politics in the 19th century, (2) of the Royal Household under Queen Victoria. I have in mind men like Huxley and Kingsley and Gladstone, and the influence of novels like David Copperfield, Pendennis, The Newcomer,, Shirley, and the Heir of Redcliffe. The last named is now forgotten but in its day had a wonderful vogue. The heroes of these books were simple (60)  earnest–minded gentlemen of quiet ways and perfect taste. Having come to admire this type, the people of England developed a similar type of manner and outlook in their own life.

It rests with the parents and teachers of boys in the East to make the young generation find their heroes, not in the monarchs whose main metier was to be showman, nor in the conquerors, whose program was plunder, but in men worthy to be worshipped, in men and women who have done the world’s work from Pericles to Cromwell, from Caesar to Nelson, from Saint Francis to Lord Shaftesbury, from Martin Luther to Florence Nightingale.

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(61)                                               THE POLICY OF RUBBER RESTRICTION

The first scheme of rubber restriction was conceived and executed in haste. It had fundamental defects, in which lay the seeds of its certain dissolution.

In the first place, it was rapacious. It put up world prices of raw rubber to greedily, and forced manufacturers to an intense program of reclaiming used rubber, which violently diminished the use of new rubber.

Secondly, it did not include Java or Sumatra. Therefore, it could not last, and it’s farmers knew it could not last.

But the present scheme is meant to last. It’s inventors hope that the countries still outside it will come in two or three years hence. They have perceived the folly of raising prices to over a rupee per pound. Probably, they will keep price prices under half a rupee per pound, and they have roped into the restriction platform the producers of over 3/4 of the world’s output of rubber.

All this is good so far as it goes, but it goes only half the distance. It is a practical business man’s scheme: as it stands, it may serve its purpose very well for a few years. But it cannot do more. If it is really to last (1) it must dig itself in under fortifications more impregnable against external attacks than the Hindenburg line (2) it must protect itself against decay from within.

Let us first consider the enemy outside our walls. From whom is an attack likely to come? And what are their resources?

The possible attackers are the countries and manufacturers who use rubber and want it cheap. Their resources are (1) the possibilities of synthetic rubber (2) the possibilities of establishing large and economic rubber plantations in countries outside restriction.

Synthetic rubber has become a reality. Minister of the German Reich have announced the incorporation of a company with big capital to produce such rubber. That is to say, they are confident of making it good enough for daily use. But it is not yet clear that they can make it                              (62)  cheap enough to compete in peace with raw rubber. In war, Germany may be cut off access to raw rubber: it is therefore material for Germany to have internal supplies of a substitute rubber. At present, synthetic rubber is not yet a real rival in the world market. All that restrictions can do about this is to be ready against the day when synthetic rubber is as cheap as plantation rubber. On that day the restriction policy must end. The only remedy then will be to cut the costs of producing plantation rubber, and the only way to be ready for this is so to organise restriction as to make producers keep up a perpetual effort to reduce costs. I see in the present organisation of restriction no trace of an effort to stimulate invention and economy, but rather a stimulus to inefficiency in the form of sheltered high prices. I noticed around me half a hundred estates which had reduced supervising staff just before restriction, but have raised it as soon as restriction raised prices. To most of us living in rubber districts, who know how estate superintendents live, it is an axiom that one man can superintend 2000 to 3000 acres. But the average acreage now supervised by each superintendent is 1000 or less. It is a fundamental floor in restriction if it keeps up this average.

The next possible competitor is wild rubber: but supplies of wild rubber are so scarce and distant that there can be no real danger from this source.

The third danger is a development of rubber plantations in countries outside restriction. Mr Ford is exploiting parts of South America. Mr. Firestone is doing the same in Liberia. But these plantations are far from the coast or the roads and have no cheap and capable labour supply. In those conditions, they’re output cannot, so far as now appears, be cheap enough.

Recently, however, there are more disturbing news. It is contemplated, I read, to plant rubber in Puerto Rico. I believe good land to be available there, near to the coast. Plantations in such land would not have to face the costly transport, which obstruct success in Liberia and elsewhere. And there is abundant cheap labour in Barbados and other West Indian islands, labour which did much to solve the difficulties of building the Panama Canal. I conceive the American project of planting rubber in the Caribbean islands to be a real danger. It is up to the restrictions to remove or somehow forestall this danger. Against it, there                                       (63). is only one line of defence. They must release a large quota of rubber and keep world prices cheap enough to deter the American capitalist from growing more rubber plantations.

It is not enough to talk vaguely about keeping prices low. It is not enough to chop a little and change a little as stocks rise or fall. It is essential to calculate precisely how low the price must be to dissuade capitalists outside restriction from planting more rubber. When that price is a certain, rubber prices must be fixed at the level or near it, and must be permanently kept at that level for a definite period of 3 to 5 years by an unalterable international agreement which all the world must know.

Given such an agreement it will not be worthwhile for American capitalist to sink present capital in planting rubber estates for the sake of a low return to come 10 years hence.

What, then, is that maximum price? Can we find it? And will it suffice to pay present rubber Estates a fair dividend on their capital?

The answer does not seem difficult. The true maximum price must be identical with the natural cost of planting new rubber estates. In eastern experience, it used to cost about 450 rupee an acre, i.e. £30 for unbudded rubber.

That is the figure at which early rubber companies used to be capitalised 20 years ago. But the rupee is now worth over 16% more relative to the pound, and costs of land in places like pure Puerto Rico may be higher than in the east, if rumours speak truth concerning the bribes required to oil all development in those lands. I will accordingly assume £40; and it must wait 7 to 10 years before trees field a fair return full: every capitalist will add interest for the years of waiting to his estimate of capital cost. This addition will raise true cost too, say, £50 per acre. In view of the long wait and the risks still to be faced after the wait, capitalists will expect 8% on their outlay. 8% on £50 is 4 pounds or 80 shillings per acre. The average yield per acre is £400 of rubber from the unbudded trees. Each pound must then need 2 1/2 pence return to capital before the invest besides this, the trading cost of producing a pound of rubber from unbudded trees is about 2p F.O.B.; so long as crop is unrestricted. To this, we should add a penny a pound for costs of transport, brokerage, insurance etc. Therefore, 5 1/2 pence is the natural cost of rubber per pound.

(64)  Therefore, a sound restriction policy should explicitly make this its maximum, if that will yield a living wage to the capital now invented.

In fact almost all rubber estates over 15 years old have more than repaid their original capital cost in bloated dividends in the good years.

The earlier companies were floated at a capital value of about £30 per acre , the later companies in boom period at about £60 . in the share market of today , they stand roughly at £40 to £50 per acre .

The present restriction policy permits them on the average a standard quota of about 450 lbs. per acre. And issues them coupons authorising in Ceylon sale of 60% of the standard quota i.e. about 270 lbs. an acre. The average cost of production of this restricted quantity is between three pence and 3 1/2 pence per pound. Therefore the average gross profit, if 5 1/2 pence is the price, will be two pence per pound, per annum, i.e. 540 pence or £ 2 1/2  per acre. That is an adequate return to the cost of £50. Therefore 5 1/2 pence is an adequate price for restriction to fix.

In fact today, it has fixed the price at six pence a pound. In itself, that will be sound if it goes no higher. Since this was written, prices have gone still higher.

But there is no certainty that it will go no higher. My own information is that the Mandarins of the international restriction board project to raise it higher as soon as rising demand has reduced stocks. Some of my acquaintances are waiting expectantly for a further rise in 1936. When it comes, they are ready to unload shares in the market. They propose to make small fortune soon, and leave the buyers to suffer in the next slump three years hence. They have no confidence in the distant future of rubber.

Now if restriction is going to raise prices higher, these anticipations are right: there is no sound distant future for rubber. That rise of price will multiply plantation outside the restricting countries and kill both the geese.

But, if restriction will use foreright, and firmly and irrevocably peg prices down to 5 1/2 pence a pound, there is no ground to lose faith, since that price will abolish the raison d’être of fresh plantation.

It will further abolish much international discord. No one knows how great or how small a part diplomatic activity from the USA played in hastening the end of the first restriction venture.

(65). I will next consider the internal flaws in the present policy, which may tend to bring about its dissolution from within.

The present policy ignores the rights of consumers, and circumscribes the rights of efficient producers in favour of the inefficient. Some unbudded estates produce £300 per acre, others £600 or more. Budded rubber by all accounts produces 1000-2000 pounds per acre.

But the present policy fixes the quota of output allowed to each estate by its output in the last few years. The estate which produces £300 an acre last year and year before last, has been granted coupons for an output of 60% of £300 for this year. There, it must stand. This set a premium or mediocrity. Few owners will go to the expense of budding, manuring or other improvements that are not sure to yield a profit and raise the quota.

The yield of budded rubber is estimated at 1000 to 2000 pounds per acre. The more sagacious proprietors have spent and are spending large sums on budding, and can produce rubber at a trading cost of one pence a pound i.e. exclusive of interest on capital outlay.

In so far as they completed it in time and got this high output before the present restriction began, they are reaping an advantage, since their books prove their output and the assessors give them a higher assessment and quota.

But the return to present and future efficiency and budding is not so clear. Such proprietors must convince the assessor at the next assessment that the new budded rubber will be equally fertile: but restriction prevents that from being tapped, and so the books will not provide proof of super fertility. In the absence of such proof such as an estate maybe put on the flat rate and lose the reward of efficiency.

Even if that does not happen, even in cases where budded rubber has been given a high quotain keeping with its fertility, it will often happen that still its profits are less than it deserves. Consider in this way. Suppose A has today 1000 acres of budded rubber, capable of yielding 2000 pounds per acre. He will probably stand assessed at a quota of 1100 pounds. If this output were 2000 pounds, he’s trading costs would be one pence per pound: but on an output of 1100, his trading costs are probably 2 1/2 pence a pound or 2700 pence per acre i.e. £11. Budding is very costly, and the capital cost of                                                                                                                     (66)  budded rubber is probably twice or thrice that of unbounded, say one hundred pounds per acre. Then at 5% , each acre should yield him £5 per acre over and above trading costs.

He is now selling 1100 pounds of rubber at six pence a pound. I.e. 550 shillings i.e. £28. Then, his present profit is £12 per acre. But suppose he were free to expand output and eliminate his rivals, and whose interest price stands now at six pence, and suppose rubber then fell to 4 pence per pound. Then he would sell 2000 pounds at four pence and receive 666 shillings per acre. That is better than he is now getting. That is his due, according to all previous industrial history and economic order.

But since overproduction threatened him with a short period of very low prices and at the same time threatened his rivals with ruin, they have all agreed to restriction. For the efficient producer, now that slump prices are passed, that is plain loss. When the question arises two or three years hence whether restriction shall be renewed will the efficient producers agree to renew? I cannot tell, but this I say. The best way to secure his consent is to give him his due or more of his due.

In giving him his due, we shall also give consumers their due. It is accepted by all decent industry that consumers should have fair value. It is not fair value to charge them six pence a pound for rubber, and organise restrictions which prevent or discourage the expansion of competition and improvements like budding, which can produce profitable rubber at 2 1/2 pence a pound.

This is no argument against restriction in itself. Restriction is a necessary antidote to the anarchy of production. But what is wanted is a reason to restriction (1) which will give free scope to improve processes (2) which will preserve competition and eliminate the permanently unfit. It should give the inefficient estates a breathing space to make themselves fit. For unbudded rubber, such a period of seven years or perhaps 10 years is essential, but they cannot forever and ever cumber the ground.

Very tentatively, I suggest that the next restriction policy should take place on the following lines.

Suppose a quote of 80,000 tons is allocated to Ceylon. Then no estate will have any indefeasible claim to supply a part, but all will be required to submit tenders, but will be guaranteed a higher price on a sliding scale if world prices rise. The cheapest tenders will be accepted for three                   (67)  years. Delivery will be made to a central Ceylon board, which should be the sole exporter. That board will guarantee compensation to all states, whose tender fails to find acceptance, at a fixed amount per pound. That amount must be fixed after careful reckoning, and is meant to give them time to improve their plantations. Since many proprietors have closed down production and are now selling their coupons at 10 to 18 cents a pound, it is likely that 10 cents a pound will suffice as compensation. Rubber will then be sold by the board at the price given in the tender plus 10 cents a pound plus transport, insurance, etc.

The same proceeding will apply to other rubber countries and will be repeated at the end of three years. At the end of the second or perhaps the third period of three years, compensation will cease, and the incompetent must paddle their own canoe.

During these two or three periods of three years, rubber will probably stand at 5p or 6p a pound. But the scheme will compel all producers to bud their rubber. In 10 years, rubber will be on the market at 2 1/2 or three pence a pound, so soon as that is the stable price, the rise in consumption will abolish all need for restriction.

That is surely a better outlook than the present situation, under which many estates are refusing to bud or manure their plantations and others have resorted to primitive systems of tapping. The biggest plantation in the province, where I live, is obstinately sticking to the Sunderland scheme of tapping, which all present day planters of my acquaintance agreed to be the worst sort of tapping known in the world.

Some of this is due to causes other than restriction, particularly to the lack of brains in control. Buy some coincidence, in rubber as in public life in France and in many other spheres of action, the duds are in command. Dunces are at the top of the class.

But apart from restriction the inefficient could not remain at the top for long. Under competition they would go to the wall. Therefore, their restriction policy must revive and preserve competition in some form or another.

There is another matter in which restriction has done unintended harm. Many of the more indigent producers have sold their coupons to pay their debts with speed, and temporarily cease to work their estates. Their workmen have lost their jobs or found employment as unskilled labour          (68)  at half their former pay. This was inevitable because the biggest states, which bought these coupons, are often 100 miles distant from those which sold, so that the labour of the latter could not migrate. The biggest estates filled the blank in their labour force by imported labour. As a whole, labour lost nothing but clumps of labour lost nearly everything. It will be hard to prevent such dislocation of employment but some plan is better than none. One might fix a quota for each District and make coupons saleable only to estates in the same District.

All these defects point to one fundamental need in the personnel of restriction. Control of restriction must not be left entirely to the planters, ex-merchants and capitalists who direct it. They need the advice of a few first rate economists. Their business is to modify and temper the effects of economic law and natural selection. There are limits up to which they can do this with success. But to go beyond those limits will be suicide.

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(69)                           THE THREAT OF FOOD TAXES AND SUBSIDIES

There is much loose thinking on the subject of tariffs. Some people fail to distinguish reciprocity and preferential tariffs from protection pure and simple. I have in mind for the present protection pure and simple, in which a tariff is imposed to protect home producers from competition abroad.

Even the most stalwart free traders have supported protection of this sort as a temporary safeguard for nascent industries. But some of our Minister of state have gone one better in regard to ginger and paddy. They have put a tax on imported ginger to safeguard a Ceylonese ginger industry, which is not yet born. That gallant whole hogger, D S. Senanayake, assured the house that given the encouragement of such a tariff Ceylon would surely and easily grow its own ginger. His assurance has so far broken down. In the year succeeding the tax Ceylon imported as much ginger as before, at a higher cost than before. No one seems to be growing any ginger. The whole up shot is that all of us are paying an unnecessary, useless and iniquitous tax whenever we buy ginger. That was not the object of the Minister. He had a loadable intention of promoting employment. But more is required of statesman than good intentions. They must know enough to realise their objects.

The next step along the high road to protection has been to shut Jaffna off from access to Indian paddy and confine them to Batticaloa supplies. I love Batticaloa but I cannot see why Jaffna should be robbed to subsidise Batticaloa.

The third plank has not yet taken shape, but something further is under contemplation to help paddy growers in Ceylon. That is clear from the questionnaire recently issued to householders re their reasons for buying Indian rice in preference to the rise of Ceylon. We have not been given full information about the replies, but so far as appears many of those replies have clouded the issue by putting subsidiary reasons forward as if they had equal influence with the real reason. The secondary causes are                               (70)  irregularity of supply, fluctuations in price, higher price in someplace and so on. But the vital factor is that nine people out of 10 like muthasamba and other Indian rice better than the rice of Ceylon. Our local rice is heavy and ugly to look at. It has to my mind a Sandy flavour. Nothing will induce me to eat it daily. I am more likely to give up Scotch and drink Irish whiskey. Tariffs cannot alter along settled taste and preferences of this kind.

Any attempt to force us by duties and higher prices to give up the rice we like for the sake of local rice growers will be a great tyranny; we must be ready to defeated by Downing or its supporters at the next election.

The danger is real. The rice growers have thousands of votes. The distribution of seats is on their side. But against them there will naturally stand the people of the towns, the tea, coconut and rubber estates. These people are already over taxed to pay for the cost and upkeep of great irrigation works, once expected to water vast areas of field. But most or many of these broad acres are still a wild waste where no man ploughs or sows. In spite of this, we find the politicians preparing grandiose schemes to rebuild old tanks and make new tanks. No one will oppose reasonable expenditure on village tanks and channels near to populated areas but big schemes to open up the wilderness are a snare and a delusion. How many acres still stand waste around Unnichi, Kilinochi , Vakmen and half a hundred other tanks? There are no men to exploit those acres. For many years they have stood unnoticed and unremembered. With one voice, they bid the colony halt before it builds more at a cost never to be repaid.

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(71)                          CRUEL TAXES IN CEYLON

We taxpayers are grateful to Ministers for the manifold mercies of their excellent budget, but we ask for two other things more.

One of these things they can do at once, if they will. Death duties were a burden, but the other costs of adMinistering an estate are just as heavy a burden. And administrator has to make half a hundred journeys to his lawyer and to court, and each journey costs money. He has to issue the published notices at further high cost, and he has to pay his lawyers fees. These fees are seldom less than 100/-. That is to say, these other costs are more than death duties are on all but big or fairly big estates. Let them save us from this too by abolishing that chapter of the code, which makes administration compulsory. Let them enact that no administration shall be necessary.

Critics will ask how disputes about wills and heritages will then be decided. They will then be decided by ordinary actions to declare a right or to declare title. For every contested will or inheritance, there are 999 uncontested estates. Why should all go through the cumbrous process of administration?

Other critics will ask how the debts due by and to an estate are to be paid and collected. It is easy for the heirs to get together and pay or sue. If they cannot agree to act together, it is easy for one to give all notice and have one appointed legal representative to sue or be sued. In short, there is no real difficulty in ridding the colony of the unnecessary burden on land. We are cursed by a plethora of statutes. Let us reduce the number. We wait with hope for Mr Freeman to set this ball rolling.

The next boon we need is reduced taxation on our food and our pleasures. It may be treading on powerful toes if we attack the duty on rice. But what about flour, cheese, bacon and butter and jam? These are the foods which contain proteins. These are the foods which can invigorate the people to defeat malaria. To make them duty-free is the first commandment in the anti-malaria Decalogue.

(72)  Then think of our amusements. If I go to the pictures, I pay tax. If I back a winner, I pay a tax. When I smoke a pipe or a cigarette, half the price goes to the treasury. When I buy a bottle of brandy or whiskey for 6/-, 4/- and more are a tax.

There are a number of killjoys, who neither smoke nor booze nor bet. Doubtless, they are delighted at our having to pay such taxes, which they escape, our payments then reduce their taxation bill. We have either to pay or let Mr W. A. Silva direct us what we may eat and drink and do. But I cannot suppose that this sort of class legislation pleases a good sportsman like D. S. Senanayake. He used to like his horses and his beer. It is not likely that association with the Unco Guid has reformed the red blood out of his personality. This or the next budget, is his chance to end or soften our bondage in this matter. Let the duties on our drink and similar pleasures be brought down nearer to the rate of duty on other things.

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(73)                                 THE MYSTERY OF MALARIA

The 1935 Ceylon epidemic came in a year of drought. Many other epidemics in Ceylon and India came in years of heavy rain. From the recent epidemic their emerges another startling fact. Malaria hit the western and central and north western provinces with unprecedented severity, but the north Central, eastern and northern provinces had an unusually mild visitation. In most years, the latter two provinces were the hardest hit. There had been no clear explanation of these divergencies. I suspect that discovery of the cause of this variation may reveal the specific prophylaxis.

I have lived for many years on the coast, and during all those years I found my house free of mosquitoes in the south-west monsoon, but fairly full in the north east. The nearest swamp lives south west of my house. Either the south-west winds used to blow them inland or they migrate inland before its approach. I used to think that they did not travel far. But I live now 4 miles inland, and that here too they have fled before the monsoon. That is to say, they travel far. Some may be found in the Kottawa and Udugama forests. Others may have reached the Haycock and beyond. Mr. Ormiston used to tell us how he found one type of anopheles dwelling in a particular kind of bush in Kottawa forest, and found them their thrice, though he never met that type elsewhere in Ceylon.

Let us put all this alongside another uncommon fact in the events of 1933 and 1934. That is, the monsoon blew not from the south but from the west.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the canal from Negombo to Puttalam is the main breeding ground of that particular specie culicifacies, which does most damage. Perhaps the canal fosters some special sort of sedge or plant dear to the heart of that species of mosquito.

Then, whenever the monsoon is a true south-West wind, it will drive the mosquitoes before it due north-east. Some will stop in the hills of Rambukkana and Polgahawela, others in the hills from Kurunegala and Galgamuwa to Matale. But the main guard will sweep on to Anuradhapura and the north.

(74). But when the monsoon comes up from the west, the main guard will flee due east and lodge in Kegalle, Kandy and the N.W.P, while few will travel to the N.C.P.

This is just a guess. But discovery begins with a guess. Botanical investigation may test this theory by directing special attention to the canal. It may be that they are now oiling the wrong place. To find the source is the root of every difficulty.

We have been told that human precautions rooted out malaria at Ismailia, at the Panama Canal and in parts of Malaya. But Ismailia is a small town. The Panama Canal is a narrow strip of land. Malaya conditions differ in 100 ways from those of Ceylon.sss It does not follow that you can root out malaria in Ceylon because you did it elsewhere.

Colonel Gill has now added his authority to these doubts. He is not satisfied that we know enough about the causation of malaria. He doubts whether our present knowledge is enough to ensure the suppression of malaria in Ceylon.

The lesson is clear. Before millions are spent either on drainage, medicine or oiling, let there be a complete investigation. Let there be certainty that we drain the essential swamp and oil the pools which matter. In the light of the report, the vulgar criticism of the Ceylon government for failing to prevent the 1935 epidemic was vox et praeterea nihil.

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(75)                                            BLACK AND WHITE

The problem of black and white is not merely a problem of politics and nationalism. The political problem is indeed real, but it is not the great problem. The difficulty lies deeper in the present social antagonism between black and white. There is no such antagonism in backward countries under good government such as they receive from England and France. In such countries there is no conceivable substitute for foreign rule. From foreign rule they get a helping hand which they know that they cannot give themselves. Therefore, they are for the present content.

But in those tropical countries, where education and civilisation are growing fast, there is a deep antagonism.

Part of this has its origin in political dissatisfaction, and that part expresses itself in a demand for Home Rule or independence.

But the ginger and fire in this antagonism springs from another cause, that is the social antagonism between black and white. The facts of this aversion are plain. It pervades all their individual relations. When Europeans form a joint-stock company in the tropics, they keep most of the shares and all the appointments and control for men of Europe. When Indians form a company, they do the same. In India and Ceylon, almost every cricket and football club is a club for members of some particular community. Social clubs of the British in all the tropics exclude people of colour from membership, by an almost absolutely rigid custom. Oriental clubs have sometimes replied by making it a rigid rule that no European may be a member. It is true that black and white meet at gubernatorial functions and at occasional private receptions. But these meetings are hardly frequent and their note is not in the key of genuine friendship. Black and white only touch each other at the end of a long pole. Some regard this as a natural and desirable state of things. They contend that the various races prefer to be apart, that each has most in common with people of his own race and that most are uncomfortable in proximity. I grant that most Orientals would rather meet in a purely                                                     (76). oriental club. They are more at their ease. But this preference arises most of all from a feeling that they are unwelcome in British company. They resent that aversion as deeply as professional men of the middle classes resent the snobbery of the county families in England. It is beneath their dignity to express this resentment with that vigour with which they feel it. They can be and they are perfectly happy outside the society of people who think them an inferior type of animal, but they do not like such people.

In England this dislike between the nobility and the middle and humble classes has no great importance because the middle classes rule life in the parliament and in the towns. They stand at the top of the political and the industrial tree. Social ostracism of the men on top is in the last resort a great joke.

But in the tropics the ostracised communities are the under dog. Their resentment is vivid and deep. While it lasts, there will be no concord of the heart. There can only be a ceaseless struggle to defeat the upper dog whenever he can be defeated and to oust him whenever he can be ousted. I for my part have as many black friends as white, straight men and staunch friends one and all. I cannot say that one set is any better than the other. With this personal experience, I feel that all this aversion and antagonism is both unnatural and inhuman. I watch the children around me and find in them no evidence of instinctive aversion any more than I find white animals scorning black.

But it is useless to shut one’s eyes to the fact. The aversion is not only a fact. Some thinkers, especially in USA and Africa, have made it an article of faith, a principle of political philosophy. They preach segregation and exclusion as the only safe policy.

Some of the supporters of this theory believe that there is between race and race a fundamental difference so deeply rooted as to make social intercourse impossible. Mutual hatred is by this theory regarded as part of the common lot of mankind the wheel of Almighty God. But in this way their argument is not worth many words.

There are some people who put down every difficult social fact to original difference of race. They are, as John Stuart Mill long ago observed on the Irish question, too lazy or too stupid to investigate history and the causation of present conditions. It is easy to explain everything by recourse to a deus exmachina, who framed all men and                                                             (77)  things as they are from the Garden of Eden. These people are the descendants in a direct line of that school of thought which pronounced it to be dangerous and absurd to give the franchise to the masses or give Home Rule to the USA, to Canada, to Australia, to South Africa and to Ireland. They imagined all that is weak, unstable and strange in Irish life, public and private, to be due to original sin and the special idiosyncrasies of Hibernian race.

They shut their eyes to the inevitable effect which the union of Ireland and England and Irish land tenure had on Irish character and life. They still think of the French as frog-eaters and they still try to persuade themselves that one Englishman is worth three Frenchman.

So far as I have seen, there is not more than one man in 10 who feels a general hatred of black men because they are black or white men because they are white. Nor is the attitude of this 10th man a heritage of birth. It is born of one little judgement after another, in which after meeting a number of unworthy black men or white men in succession one draws a hasty inference that all are bad — Ex uno disce omnes.

But this is not all. There are men of mind who believe in this doctrine of segregation. Many of these men know well that there is no indictment on which one can justly convict the whole race. They have passed their verdict on a wider analysis of the facts and it behoves us to weigh the facts on their side.

This much is fact. Hundred years ago four black men in five were such that no one of good breeding could live with comfort in close association with them. They did not speak the speech of gentleman. They did not observe the accepted standards of cleanliness, good taste and good conduct. To attempt close friendship with such people is absurd. They offend. The offendship are a daily repeated pain. The friction is insufferable. Real friendship is in these conditions a physical impossibility.

There were a number of liberationists in the USA who attempted the impossible. After the emancipation of the slaves, they were given political equality. White men tried to give them a literary education and expected this to be followed by an immediate uplift and to be accompanied by a profound gratitude inducing the black men to give the white men of their own spontaneous goodwill, the same respect and obedience which slavery had forced them to give.

(78). These efforts failed as all efforts will fail which seek to make two and two equal to ten or to any number but four. The inference from this failure was that black and white must keep apart.

These are countries in which those same conditions prevail, and in all such countries this verdict is right. In their conditions it is not a problem of black-and-white. It is a problem of good breeding versus the lack of it.

Where the small farmer and the yokel are at heart and in mental outlook nothing better than a yokel, there it is impractical for the squire to admit them too close intimacy. Familiarity will breed abomination.

But in many tropical countries like India, this is not the problem. From the first just verdict that in point of culture 100 years ago most Indians were unfit to be friends of Englishman, some of the British have moved onto a verdict that today Indians are socially impossible because they are black and politically incapable because they are Eastern. Social segregation is the gospel of such people. In South Africa, they wish to intensify this into local segregation. In the pages of Lord Ronaldshay and Sir Hugh Clifford, there is a tendency to expand it into a cultural segregation. They dream of especially oriental culture which will suit the Oriental mind.

If you ask them to be definite and to describe in detail what they mean by especially oriental or tropical culture, they have little to tell you. They will say that oriental literature is better suited to eastern students than the classics. But with people who have a knowledge of language this false antithesis carries no weight. Such people know that Greek and Latin are of one family with Sanskrit and Pali, and that between study of the one pair and the other there is no difference of suitability. A difference there is, but that is a difference of depth and wealth. The Greeks and the Romans have added far more to the richness of human life and thought than any eastern literature. For people who have no gift for literature or no adequate time for a thorough study of language, as smattering is of little value whether in Sanskrit or Greek. The real objection, which the supporters of orientalism in education have in view, is an objection not to the classics but to a surface study of any language.

When we turn to the question of science, the impalpable character of a special oriental culture becomes more clear. There are at present no text books of science in say                              (79)  any Indian language. They suggest translations. I am not sure that the vocabulary of eastern languages would fitly convey the meaning of the textbooks of Europe, but I will assume that they could. Even so when you study chemistry or physics in an oriental language, what you study is a product of the west. You cannot ignore Newton and Pasteur. What you seek is to know the best, and the best in science has been born in Europe. Your culture is not in that case something eastern. You still have to assimilate the West.

It is the same in philosophy and art. No man can pretend to have a grasp of mental science if he has not understood Plato and Kant. There is no sculpture which does not find its pattern in the Parthenon. There is no musician who closes his ears to Mendelsohn.

In religion, if someone propose to found a new cult on a purely western foundation without regard to the teaching of Christ and Gautama, mankind could write him down a fool.

In the same way the doctrine of cultural segregation and a pure orientalism in education is a great inanity. This has been obvious enough to the leaders of educational life both in the east and west. They have gone placidly on their way teaching Western science and literature to eastern pupils on the ancient plan of Western education. They still teach the eastern religions of India and Palestine to all. They have paid no heat to Ronald Shea, Hugh Clifford and co-. We need not waste words on this aspect of our subject.

But in political and social life segregation still stands firm in the foreground. I do not alude merely to the anti-Asiatic immigration laws enacted in Australia, Canada and South Africa. At bottom those laws are based not on an anti-black but anti-black leg policy. At heart this is an economic policy, the natural avarice of Trades Unionism. Those colonies would enact similar legislation against white races if thousands of Poles, Slovaks or Italians began to pour into their country and to compete with local labour at wages 50% below the current rates.

It is true that some statesmen have described this legislation as the policy of keeping Australia white. But these gentlemen are young thinkers in a new country. Young countries tend to be blatant. They pitch their gospel in the highest possible key. They talk big. They convert their                           

(80)     little parochialism into world politics. There is at heart a kindlier feeling for people of colour in Canada and Australia than in most countries of Europe.

The worst examples of the policy of segregation are the anti-Kaffir laws of South Africa and the general social ostracism of coloured people in India, almost all tropical countries and in the USA.

In the Cape, in Natal and in the Transvaal, they are straining every muscle to keep the Kaffir as far apart as they can be kept. The blacks are being deprived of the franchise. They are not to own land except in certain reserves representing a small fraction of the total area of the union, and this is a land where the black people tremendously outnumbered the white. As far as the labour needs of the white people permit, black people are not to live in the same quarter of any town as the white people. All this seems inhuman. But I for one will not pass verdict, because I do not know the facts at first hand. I remember how years ago my blood boiled at the old regulation of the Indian railways which forbade Indians to travel in the same compartment as white men. I remember too how a few years later I came to find reason for that regulation when I discovered not so long ago that sundry Indians were want to mistake the floor of an ordinary compartment for a urinal.

It may be that there is a backwardness and lack of breeding in the natives of South Africa so great as too demand firm, discipline and long ostracism. Some kind of segregation maybe an essential part of such discipline.

But what no one can palliate or justify in the policy of South Africa is the proposal to make the natives eligible to own only a small part of the available land of the union. In an agricultural country that is the royal road to keep them poor and backward, to perpetuate their present inferiority. That is a satanic scheme. Mankind will never for long put up with such a denial of the right to live and grow. The upshot in the end will be civil war. Today successful civil war is an impossibility for unarmed uneducated natives. But nothing can keep them permanently uneducated. And tomorrow, per chance, mankind may discover some new form of destruction available to all, before which repression of any infuriated proletariat may become a hopeless task. If they have any understanding, the politicians will put aside this crude plan of repression. But the problem takes a more complicated form in the civilised lands of the tropic zone. In many of these lands, the upper                                                                                             (81)  classes of the native races have acquired a wide culture. They have pursued their studies in Europe. Their standard of taste and conduct are, or nearly are, those of the gentle folk of Europe. They stand at the top of all the professions. They are finding a place of honour in the schools, the universities, the churches and the legislative Councils of these colonies. But they have no welcome in the homes and clubs of the European born. There is little real friendship. They become more and more unwelcome as they grow in culture and fitness. They feel this aloofness to be altogether due to prejudice and jealousy. They are condemned not because they are unworthy or inferior but because they are black. They are victims of a verdict unworthy of humanity. They are often bitter in their resentment at that verdict. Many of them avoid white men as they avoid a wild beast, and nurse hopes of a day when the British will have left India. That dream may sometimes grow into ambition and a plan of campaign. Doubtless, such visions of revolution are the exception. There is in truth no justification for this extremism. But the longer political reform is delayed and obstructed by the Civil Services and Whitehall, the greater is the provocation for extremism.

As soon as England has made good her promises of Home Rule, the extremists will die a natural death. There will still remain the aloofness, which is a half hostile neutrality of the heart, a giving back for disdain for disdain, of distrust for distrust. This conditions of affairs will satisfy no reasonable people. All these shades of complexion and varieties of race have to live side-by-side. Nothing can be a good substitute for good will.

Here and there I’m sure that good will and mental respect are growing apace. I see it thriving on many a playground. I see it sometimes in business, sometimes in literary and political association and sometimes in joint social work.

I make no doubt that of the men I know one white man in four and two black men in six regard people of opposite complexion with a cordial goodwill.

But I see, too, many solid obstacles. Such men of goodwill are afraid to break the ice which encrusts the outward attitude of black and white. They feel they must stand with their own folk.

With the other three men in four, the obstacles are still too strong to be mounted.

(82)  I attach a little weight to inherent race antipathy as a permanent obstacle: I believe such antipathy to be exceptional.

A more solid obstacle is the force of habit, described above, born of the poor quality of the black men whom people of Europe met 50 or 100 years ago. That has created in the older men and expectation that black men of today will be of similar poor quality. They pass this creed onto the younger men from Europe, and persuade them to keep aloof, to mix only with people from Europe. They hand them lists of houses at which they ought to call, and no black people’s houses appear in those lists.

I imagine that this stumbling block is slowly crumbling away. As education multiplies quality and worth and good taste in the tropical born, this unfavourable verdict will gradually give way, in the minds of all persons sufficiently cultured and logical to revise their own mistake. In short, give a good education to the tropical peoples and particularly to their women folk, and improve their personal and social worth. Then the old verdict of habit will veer around and correspond to value. There is a second and a greater stumbling block in the memory and influence of conquest. The British have acquired empire by conquest. That inspires a conviction of superiority. Even when their own policy has regenerated the conquered races and eliminated their actual inferiority, it goes against the grain of many of the conquerors to admit equality.

There is in England today the same reluctance among the county families to forget the Norman conquest. Many are surprised that the persistence of this feeling, which they write down as mere snobbery. In many places it is an absurd snobbery, but it could never have lasted 1000 years if it had no deeper foundation. In fact, to the middle of the 19th century this snobbery was a verdict which corresponded to values. For the most part the butchers son was a coarser person than the Squires son, and the Squire’s son was more often a gentleman than the butchers lad.

The educational advance of the 19th century has done much to alter that for the men. For the woman folk, that advance has only lately began to be real and wide. It is, more than anything else, the women folk on either side who keep it alive. So long as the Norman families of the nobility had most of the wealth, the culture and the land, so long was their pre-eminence and exclusiveness inevitable. In the life of the industrial centres of the United Kingdom,                               (83)  that pre-eminence is almost dead and that exclusiveness is a joke. In places like Manchester and Glasgow, they are not only dead but buried deep. In country life, their vitality remains, because it is backed by what is almost a monopoly of the land.

No preaching or argument can root out these influences. They are matter of instinct and feeling. They will give away only to new accomplished facts and feelings fostered by such facts.

When in any colony the tropical people stand above the British in wealth and culture and in ownership of land, the instinct of aloofness based on memories of ancient conquest and empire will quietly die a natural death.

But a third obstacle remains which is stronger than any so far discussed. That is the aversion to intermarriage. There are colonies or parts of some colonies in which black men lead public and professional life, own most of the land and own much of the wealth. But the aloofness remains. There is a bar against mixed marriages.

This standpoint has a typical illustration in Sir Clifford’s little novel Sally and it’s sequel Saleh. Sally is a young Malay educated in England from childhood. Till he grew up, he met nothing but kindness. Then he fell in love with an English woman, was rejected and made to feel that in British eyes marriage with a black man is unthinkable. Another English girl, one of his closest friends with a friendship in which there was no touch of sex, stumbled on him in his grief and tried to soothe him with a kiss of sexless pity. That drove it more bitterly home. He felt that she could never have kissed an Englishman in that way. He felt that he was regarded as a different kind of animal. He returned to Malaya with a hatred in his heart. He reverted to savagery. He formented a futile rebellion and died an early death. And the author’s comment is a condemnation of that British education which Westernised the Eastern on the surface and in vain. “Alas for our good intentions and their sorry result!”

Some of the books of this author contained faithful delineations of dissolute and heartless women, but apart from this he has no understanding of humanity. He has failed to see life as it is. Nothing can be more false to life than the picture of Sally brought up British who yet reverts to barbarism in the twinkling of an eye. I have lived nearly thirty (84)  years in the East but have met with no such reversions. What I meet is the opposite failing. I mean the tendency to overdo and exaggerate Westernism.

In the other part, too, of Clifford’s picture there is much which is far from life like.

Intermarriage used to be rare but was never unthinkable or unknown. Today in the tropics you find mixed marriages in every other street.

Out of a dozen Eastern students recently back from Europe, who am I met in 1929, a good six have English wives.

What was a solecism and a sin 100 years ago, is now a mild eccentricity. When you meet solecists daily, they cease to seem solecists.

In fact, so far as concerns marriage between white women and black men, nature has proved too strong for convention. It may no doubt be urged that these intermarriages are a pis aller. Certainly some of them are. There are not a few women, to who when they have failed to secure a desirable husband, any husband is better than none. But that does not apply to most of these mixed marriages. Affection is their sole basis.

But in the matter of marriages between black women and white men, convention is still the master.

While that stands, black people will be welcome in European homes and white men in Black homes only with a definite reserve and they cannot be full and free friendship. At present both will stand apart.

What then are the objections which obstruct an intermarriage? And how far are they sound? Most people would sum them as follows:

1. Such marriages are likely to be unhappy. Black peoples civilisation is a veneer. At bottom they are treacherous and mean. That was the stock argument of the novelists like Hugh Clifford. It has lost much of its force in the light of fact. There are, and all impartial observers know it well, thousands of black people of whom that description is a libel. There have been hundreds of not unhappy marriages between black and white. Of course they may involve discomfort and friction between the white woman married to a black man and her own people. But these couples appear to survive that cheerfully enough.

(85)          2.       The second idea was that the offspring of black and white tend to have the worst failings of each parent and few of the good points. This nonsense has no basis in biology. I imagine that Mendalism knocks the bottom out of it. But it has a slight foundation in sociological fact. The children of such marriages were often educated in the tropics, surrounded by mean and mendacious servants. In that environment they often grow up mendacious and shifty. But so do the children of purely British parents in the same environment. This is matter of obvious reality and common knowledge in India. The mean white is a by word all over the tropics. He is a natural product of poverty and poor upbringing. This has nothing to do with colour and race.

3. The third objection is that the offspring of intermarriage tends to lose the fine physique and quality of European stock. Pure line strains are likely to be best.

And certainly, this is partly true. If Englishman marry a tropical woman of lower physical and mental quality than the average English woman, it is natural that deterioration will follow. But, given a prudent selection, there is no scientific ground for an apprehension of deterioration.

4. Some of the children of such intermarriages will be black or brown. White men prefer to have white children. Some hate the idea of having a black child. Also, such black children may find it hard to secure a husband or a wife in Europe. I do not know why it should be regarded as so horrible to have a black child. But to some the horror of having a black child is real. Such people should not intermarry.

There is in part of the campaign against intermarriage of black and white a tremendous hypocrisy, but in other parts there is much that is genuine. It is important to separate the real from the make believe. What is real is this. Many white people instinctively prefer their children to be white and their closest friends to be white. Many black people similarly prefer their friends and their offspring to be black. We may feel such persons to be small, but we have no right to hate them. So long as they feel like that, they will, so long as they are sincere, be against intermarriage. These preferences are with many people a natural instinct. A true culture, which judges mankind by moral and mental values, may one day breed in them a different outlook. But today, that culture is not yet theirs. Let no one blame them over much.

(86)  But it is quite another thing with many of this school of thought. There was a recent example in an oration delivered by an Englishman. He argued that the objection to intermarriage is universal among his acquaintances, black and white. He suggested that this objection is the chief obstacle to social intercourse. He complained that many black people regard the common social aloofness as a cause for racial antipathy and bitterness.

This is either wilful blindness or pretence. In the first place there is no such general antagonism against intermarriage. A dozen English women who are wives of black men, live within one mile of this man’s house. He sees them every week in his church, in the streets, in the playgrounds. Antagonism to enter marriage may be general among the nobility and even among the public school men of England. But England is bigger than it’s aristocracy, bigger even than it’s public schools. There is no such general and rooted aversion to intermarriage among the work people and middle classes. That is why so many intermarriages occur.

In the second place, there are many men’s clubs in the East which no women enter during 360 days of the year, clubs where women appear only on special occasions like their annual dance or Christmas tree. It is fiction to pretend that black men are barred from these clubs as a safeguard against intermarriage. Let us have done with such fiction. In the third place, such ostracism is in effect a policy of kicks, daily repeated. It is absurd to expect the people who receive the kicks to like the people who adMinister them. Those who practice these exclusions, dislike the black or white people whom they exclude, or at least they do not like them enough to be willing to meet them often. Inevitably, the ostracised will repay this dislike with dislike or this lack of liking with an equal lack.

Any statesmen who shut their eyes to these inevitabilities, are like sentinels who bury their heads in the sand. Ostracism is a rebuff. Rebuffs are a soil on which liking cannot grow. English people, while they follow their present social policy, must not expect to be liked.

But this social attitude does not exhaust the life, the work and achievement of the British in the tropics. It is absurd for black people to judge the British by that one aspect of their outlook and life. Every road and every railroad in the tropics, every bridge and every harbour, every school and Christian church, every court of justice and every playground, every bank and insurance office, every step in agricultural and other science all these are sign posts                                                                        (87)  of British and French activity and standard of value. For all this the tropic peoples owe to the white man a great gratitude and a great respect which they cannot justly withhold and which I do not believe that they will ever withhold.

That gratitude and that respect are alive today. Their growth is being thwarted by the delay in granting to India and other colonies their long promised political freedom. That delay blocks their path into the political limelight. The present supremacy of a mostly British born Civil Service and Government is another ostracism, which retards goodwill. Mild Home Rule is the first step out of the darkness and discord.

But while no full solution appears even on the far horizon today, there is no reason to lose faith in reason, no reason to doubt that there is a remedy somewhere in the womb of nature. Let us do nothing to thwart the curative processes of Nature, nothing to add fire to the present discord.

True, there are some things which are an insult, which no one ought justly and frankly resent. One common example is the duplicity of some English people who in small provincial places in the East make close friends of Indians but avoid those very persons at all gatherings in big towns where a large English colony is found. Such people are bounders at heart. They should be made to feel that they are despicable and despised. But there are many of the white people in whom aloofness is at heart no insult, but a reasoned apprehension that the times are not yet right for intimacy and intermarriage. That is their opinion. They hold it in good faith. It should not likely or rudely be written down as a callous prejudice. Let the tropic people pursue their own way let them grow further in stature and good sense as they have grown these 50 years just gone. That growth may be the end of the riddle, and the end of the ill will. The present estrangements are the result of a lack of quality in the black people of 50 years ago. These estrangements can only be ended by a revolution of fact and outlook. I think I see this revolution growing a pace with the spread of good schooling in the tropics. The present generation of black men are straighter, better men and more truly gentlemen than their fathers. Jealousy and prestige are keeping British people wilfully blind to this change in the facts. This blindness cannot last forever. These higher individual values will by slow degrees do as much to bring black and white together as the lack of them has done to drive black and white apart. Public opinion does not veer around in a night, but it cannot stand still. It must in the end recognise the facts.