(2 of 6)
The other British face toward India has been liberal, reformist, seeking to redress imperialism's economic and personal ravages. Steadily through the years India has been championed by such Englishmen as Edmund Burke, who in 1788, speaking of the great Indian empire builder, Warren Hastings, said: "Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a man would dare to mention the practices of all the villains, all the mad usurpers, all the thieves and robbers in Asia, that he should gather them all up, and form the whole mass of abuses into one code and call it the duty of a British Governor?"
In 1833 Lord Macaulay was intoning: "It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government. . . . Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history." It was such men who nurtured India's own liberal ideals and ambitions by inviting Indians into Britain's universities.
A British Case. Today many British liberals favor immediate Dominion status for India. Some favor immediate independence. But today, also, many liberals make perhaps the strongest possible case for extreme caution in Britain's India policy. The fact that the same case is adopted hypocritically by some archimperialists obviously does not impair its merits as a case. It rests on the undeniable major premise that the wrongs of the imperialist past cannot be undone, that present and future are what matter. The text is taken from the inscription on the $10,000,000 palace in which the Viceroy waited last week : "Liberty will not descend to a people ; a people must raise themselves to Liberty." The case goes on to claim that Indian self-government must be extended gradually, that sudden granting of it would result in civil war, ruinous to India and all its relations.
India is not a nation ; it is a subcontinent with many races and languages. It is only under British rule that India has known general unity. The bulk of India's population is made up of 250,000,000 Hindus and 80,000,000 Moslems; their religious and ethical ideals are widely divergent. Moreover, a third of India's space, a fourth of its population are in the 562 Indian States, of many sizes and conditions of government, which have their own rulers under an elastic "paramountcy" of the British Raj. These potentates generally incline toward British rule as safeguarding their own powers.
Since the Amritsar massacre of 1919, the British Government has been moving slowly but steadily toward Indian self-government. By the Act of 1935, provincial self-government became a fact. Eight of the eleven British provinces came under majority Governments of Mohand as Gandhi's and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's Indian National Congress, a great nationalist catchall of rich & poor, Hindu & Moslem, left & right. The Congress is the most powerful political group in India, though it has never had more than 4,500,000 paying members. The other three provinces had coalition governments.