But that is not all. The case of Russia alone has brought home to all capable of realising an economic truth the fact that the economic collapse of any large mass of population which had in the past entered into the totality of international trade is a condition of proportional impoverishment to all the others concerned. He who sees this as to Russia cannot conceivably miss seeing it as toGermany; even tariffist hallucinations about a “losing trade” under German tariffs cannot shut out the fact that our trade with Russia and the United States was carried on under still higher hostile tariffs. The unalterable fact remains that industrial prosperity rises and falls in the measure of the total mass of goods handled; and men who realise the responsibility of all Governments for the material wellbeing of their populations can come to only one conclusion. Trade must be facilitated all round for our own sake.
Once more we come in sight of the truth that the industrial health of every trading country depends on the industrial health of the rest—a Free Trade truth that is perceptibly of more vital importance now than ever before. It is in the exchange of commodities, and the extension of consumption where that is required on a large scale, that the prosperity of the industrial nations consists. And to say that, is to say that until the trade exchanges of the world in general return to something like the old footing, there cannot be a return of the old degree of industrial wellbeing. Not that industrial wellbeing is to be secured by the sole means of industrial re-expansion: the question of the need of restriction of rate of increase of population is now being more and more widely recognised as vital. But the present argument is limited to the fiscal issue; and it must suffice merely to indicate the other as being of the highest concurrent importance.
Adhering, then, to the fiscal issue, we reach the position that, just as foreign trade has been amain source of British wealth in the past, and particularly in the Free Trade era, the wealth consumed in the war is recoverable only on the same lines. It is not merely that British shipping—at present so lamentably paralysed and denuded of earning power—cannot be restored to prosperity without a large resumption of international exchanges: a large proportion of industrial employment unalterably depends upon that resumption. And it is wholly impossible to return to pre-war levels of employment by any plan of penalising imports.
How then does the persistent Free Trader relate to the special case of the “key industry,” of which we heard so much during the war, and hear so little to-day? I have said that the question of maintaining any given industry on the score that it is essential for the production of war material is a matter of military administration, and not properly a matter of fiscal policy at all. But the plea, we know, has been made the ground of a fiscal proceeding by the present Government, inasmuch as the special measure known as the Dyestuffs (Import Regulation) Act of 1920 forbids for ten years the importation of dyestuffs into this country except under licence of the Board of Trade. Dyestuffs include, by definition, all the coal-tar dyes, colours, and colouring matter, and all organic intermediate products used in the manufacture of these—the last category including a large number of chemicals such as formaldehyde, formic acid, acetic acid, andmethyl alcohol. The argument is, in sum, that all this protective control is necessary to keep on foot, on a large scale, an industry which in time of war has been proved essential for the production of highly important munitions.
What has actually happened under this Act I confess I am unable to tell. Weeks ago I wrote to the President of the Board of Trade asking if, without inconvenience, he could favour me with a general account of what had been done in the matter of issuing licences, and my letter was promised attention, but up to the moment of delivering this address I have had no further reply. I can only, then, discuss the proposed policy on its theoretic merits.[1]The theoretic issues are fairly clear. Either the licensing power of the Board of Trade has been used to exclude competitive imports or it has not. If it has been so used, it is obvious that we have no security whatever for the maintenance of the industry in question in a state of efficiency. In the terms of the case, it is enabled to persist in the use of plant and of methods which may be inferior to those used in the countries whose competition has been excluded. Then the very object posited as the justification for the Act, the securing of a thoroughly efficient key industry necessary to the production of munitions, is not attained by the fiscal device under notice. If, on the other hand, there has been no barring of imports under the licence system, the abstention from use of it is anadmission that it was either unnecessary or injurious or was felt to be useless for its purpose.
And the common-sense verdict on the whole matter is that if continuous and vigilant research and experiment in the chemistry of dye-making is held to be essential to the national safety, the proper course is for the Government to establish and maintain a department or arsenal for such research and experiment, unhampered by commercial exigencies. Such an institution may or may not be well managed. But a dividend-earning company, necessarily concerned first and last with dividend earning, and at the same time protected against foreign competition in the sale of its products, cannot be for the purpose in question well managed, being expressly enabled and encouraged to persist in out-of-date practices.
This being so, the whole argument for protection of key industries goes by the board. It has been abandoned as to agriculture, surely the most typical key industry of all; and it has never even been put forward in regard to shipbuilding, the next in order of importance. For the building of ships of war the Government has its own dockyards: let it have its own chemical works, if that be proved to be necessary. Protection cannot avail. If the Dyestuffs Act is put in operation so as to exclude the competition of foreign chemicals, it not only keeps our chemists in ignorance of the developments of the industry abroad: it raises the prices of dyestuffs against the dye-using industries at home, and thereby handicaps them dangerously in their never-ending competition with the foreignindustries, German and other, which offer the same goods in foreign markets.
The really fatal competition is never that of goods produced at low wages-cost. It is that of superior goods; and if foreign textiles have the aid of better dyes than are available to our manufacturers our industry will be wounded incurably. It appears in fact to be the superior quality of German fabric gloves, and not their cheapness, that has hitherto defeated the competition of the native product. To protect inferior production is simply the road to ruin for a British industry. Delicacy in dyes, in the pre-war days, gave certain French woollen goods an advantage over ours in our own markets; yet we maintained our vast superiority in exports by the free use of all the dyes available. Let protection operate all round, and our foreign markets will be closed to us by our own political folly. Textiles which are neither well-dyed nor cheap will be unsaleable against better goods.
[1]The promised statistics were soon afterwards sent to Mr. Robertson by the Board of Trade. They will be found in theLiberal Magazinefor September, 1922, p. 348.—Ed.
It is of a piece with that prodigy of self-contradiction that, when the Liberal leaders in the House of Commons expose the absurdity of professing to rectify the German exchanges by keeping out German fabric gloves, a tariffist leader replies by arguing that the Paris Resolutions of the first Coalition Government, under Mr. Asquith, conceded the necessity of protecting home industries against unfair competition. Men who are normallygood debaters seem, when they are fighting for a tariff, to lose all sense of the nature of argument. As has been repeatedly and unanswerably shown by my right hon. friend the Chairman, the Paris Resolutions were expressly framed to guard against a state of things which has never supervened—a state of things then conceived as possible after a war without a victory, but wholly excluded by the actual course of the war. And those Resolutions, all the same, expressly provided that each consenting State should remain free to act on them upon the lines of its established fiscal system, Britain being thus left untrammelled as to its Free Trade policy.
Having regard to the whole history, Free Traders are entitled to say that the attempt of tariffists to cite the Paris Resolutions in support of the pitiful policy of taxing imports of German fabric gloves, or the rest of the ridiculous “litter of mice” that has thus far been yielded by the Safeguarding of Industries Act, is the crowning proof at once of the insincerity and ineptitude of tariffism where it has a free hand, and of the adamantine strength of the Free Trade case. If any further illustration were needed, it is supplied by the other tariffist procedure in regard to the promise made five years ago to Canada that she, with the other Dominions, should have a relative preference in our markets for her products. In so far as that plan involved an advantage to our own Dominions over the Allies who, equally with them, bore with us the heat and burden of the war, it was as impolitic as it was unjust, and as unflattering as it was impolitic, inasmuch as it assumed that the Dominionswanted a “tip” as a reward for their splendid comradeship.
As it turns out, the one concession that Canada really wanted was the removal of the invidious embargo on Canadian store cattle in our ports. And whereas a promise to that effect was actually given by the tariffist Coalition during the war, it is only after five years that the promise is about to be reluctantly fulfilled. It was a promise, be it observed, offree importation, and it is fulfilled only out of very shame. It may be surmised, indeed, that the point of the possible lifting of the Canadian embargo was used during the negotiations with Ireland to bring the Sister State to terms; and that its removal may lead to new trouble in that direction. But that is another story, with which Free Traders are not concerned. Their withers are unwrung.
On the total survey, then, the case for Free Trade is not only unshaken, it is stronger than ever before, were it only because many of the enemy have visibly lost faith in their own cause. The Coalition, in which professed Liberals were prepared to sacrifice something of Free Trade to colleagues who were pledged in the past to destroy it, has quailed before the insuperable practical difficulties which arise the moment the scheme of destruction is sought to be framed.
All that has resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile tinkering with three or four smallindustries—a tinkering that is on the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine of Free Trade isscience, or it is nothing. It is not a passing cry of faction, or a survival of prejudice, but the unshakable inference of a hundred years of economic experience verifying the economic science on which the great experiment was founded.
On the other hand, let me say, the tactic of tinkering with Free Trade under a system of special committees who make decisions that only the House of Commons should ever be able to make, is a “felon blow” at self-government. It puts national affairs under the control of cliques, amenable to the pressures of private interests. Millions of men and women are thus taxable in respect of their living-costs at the caprice of handfuls of men appointed to do for a shifty Government what it is afraid to do for itself. It is a vain thing to have secured by statute that the House of Commons shall be the sole authority in matters of taxation, if the House of Commons basely delegates its powers to unrepresentative men. Here, as so often in the past, the Free Trade issue lies at the heart of sound democratic politics; and if the nation does not save its liberties in the next election it will pay the price in corrupted politics no less than in ruined trade.
Sir Hamilton Grant said:—I have been asked to address you on the subject of India, that vast, heterogeneous continent, with its varied races, its Babel of languages, its contending creeds. There are many directions in which one might approach so immense a topic, presenting, as it does, all manner of problems, historical, ethnological, linguistic, scientific, political, economic, and strategic. I do not propose, however, to attempt to give you any general survey of those questions, or to offer you in tabloid form a resumé of the matters that concern the government of India. I propose to confine my remarks to two main questions which appear to be of paramount importance at the present time, and which, I believe, will be of interest to those here present to-day, namely, the problems of the North-West Frontier, and the question of internal political unrest.
Let me deal first with the North-West Frontier. As very few schoolboys know, we have here a dual boundary—an inner and an outer line. The inner line is the boundary of the settled districts of theNorth-West Frontier Province, the boundary, in fact, of British India proper, and is known as the Administrative border. The outer line is the boundary between the Indian Empire and Afghanistan, and is commonly known as the Durand line, because it was settled by Sir Mortimer Durand and his mission in 1895 with the old Amir Abdur Rahman. These two lines give us three tracts to be dealt with—first, the tract inside the inner line, the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province, inhabited for the most part by sturdy and somewhat turbulent Pathans; second, the tract between the two lines, that welter of mountains where dwell the hardy brigand hillmen: the tribes of the Black Mountain, of Swat and Bajur, the Mohmands, the Afridis, the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, and a host of others, whose names from time to time become familiar according as the outrageousness of their misconduct necessitates military operations; third, the country beyond the outer line, “the God-granted kingdom of Afghanistan and its dependencies.”
Now each of these tracts presents its own peculiar problems, though all are intimately inter-connected and react one on the other. In the settled districts we are confronted with the task of maintaining law and order among a backward but very virile people, prone to violence and impregnated with strange but binding ideas of honour, for the most part at variance with the dictates of the Indian Penal Code. For this reason there exists a special law called the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a most valuable enactment enabling us to deal with casesthrough local Councils of Elders, with the task of providing them with education, medical relief etc., in accordance with their peculiar needs, and above all with the task of affording them protection from the raids and forays of their neighbours from the tribal hills. In the tribal area we are faced with the task of controlling the wild tribesmen. This control varies from practically direct administration as in the Lower Swat and Kurram valleys to the most shadowy political influence, as in the remote highlands of Upper Swat and the Dir Kohistan, where the foot of white man has seldom trod. Our general policy, however, with the tribes is to leave them independent in their internal affairs, so long as they respect British territory and certain sacrosanct tracts beyond the border, such as the Khyber road, the Kurram, and the Tochi. The problem is difficult, because when hardy and well-armed hereditary robbers live in inaccessible mountains which cannot support the inhabitants, overlooking fat plains, the temptation to raid is obviously considerable: and when this inclination to raid is reinforced by fanatical religion, there must be an ever-present likelihood of trouble.
Few people here in England reading of raids on the North-West Frontier in India realise the full horror of these outrages. What generally happens is that in the small hours of the morning, a wretched village is suddenly assailed by a gang of perhaps50, perhaps 200, well-armed raiders, who put out sentries, picket the approaches, and conduct the operation on the most skilful lines. The houses of the wealthiest men are attacked and looted; probably several villagers are brutally murdered—and probably one or two unhappy youths or women are carried off to be held up to ransom. Sometimes the raid is on a larger scale, sometimes it is little more than an armed dacoity. But there is nearly always a tale of death and damage. Not infrequently, however, our troops, our militia, our frontier constabulary, our armed police, or the villagechighaor hue-and-cry party are successful in repelling and destroying the raiders. Our officers are untiring in their vigilance, and not infrequently the district officers and the officers of their civil forces are out three or four nights a week after raiding gangs. Statistics in such matters are often misleading and generally dull, but it may be of interest to state that from the 1st April, 1920, to the 31st March, 1921, when the tribal ebullition consequent on the third Afghan war had begun to die down, there were in the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province 391 raids in which 153 British subjects were killed and 157 wounded, in which 310 British subjects were kidnapped and some £20,000 of property looted. These raids are often led by outlaws from British territory; but each tribe is responsible for what emanates from or passes through its limits—and when the bill against a tribe has mounted up beyond the possibility of settlement, there is nothing for it but punitive military operations. Hence the largenumber of military expeditions that have taken place on this border within the last half century.
Now this brings us to the question so often asked by the advocates of what is called the Forward policy: “If the tribes give so much trouble, why not go in and conquer them once and for all and occupy the country up to the Durand line?” It sounds an attractive solution, and it has frequently been urged on paper by expert soldiers. But the truth is that to advance our frontier only means advancing the seat of trouble, and that the occupation of tribal territory by force is a much more formidable undertaking than it sounds. We have at this moment before us a striking proof of the immense difficulty and expense of attempting to tame and occupy even a comparatively small tract of tribal territory in the Waziristan operations. Those operations have been going on for two and a half years. At the start there were ample troops, ample equipment, and no financial stringency. The operations were conducted, if a layman may say so, with skill and determination, and our troops fought gallantly. But what is the upshot? We managed to advance into the heart of the Mahsud country on a single line, subjected and still subject to incessant attacks by the enemy; but we are very little nearer effective occupation than when we started; and now financial stringency has necessitated a material alteration in the whole programme, and we are reverting more or less to the methods whereby we have always controlled the tribes, namely, tribal levies orkhassadarsbelonging to the tribe itself, frontier militia or other armed civil force, backed by troops behind.
And for my own part I believe this is the best solution. We must not expect a millennium on the North-West Frontier. The tribal lion will not lie down beside the district lamb in our time, and we must deal with the problem as best we can in accordance with our means, and to this end my views are briefly as follows:—
(1) We should do everything possible to provide the younger trans-border tribesmen with all honourable employment for which they are suited: service in the army, in the frontier civil forces, and in the Indian police or similar forces overseas, and we should give labour and contracts as far as possible to tribesmen for public works in their vicinity. For the problem is largely economic. Unless the lion gets other food he is bound to cast hungry eyes on the lamb.
(2) We should do all that is possible to establish friendly relations with the tribal elders through selected and sympathetic political officers, to give them, by means of subsidies for service, an interest in controlling the hot-bloods of their tribe, and, where possible, to give them assistance in education and enlightenment. We must remember that we have duties to the tribes as well as rights against them.
(3) We should extend thekhassadaror levy system; that is, we should pay for tribal corps topolice their own borders, arming themselves and providing their own ammunition and equipment. In this way we give honourable employment and secure an effective safeguard against raiders without pouring more arms into tribal territory.
(4) We must have efficient irregular civil forces, militia, frontier constabulary, and police, well paid and contented.
(5) We should revert to the old system of a separate frontier force in the army, specially trained in the work of guarding the marches. Those who remember the magnificent old Punjab frontier force will agree with me in deploring its abolition in pursuance of a scheme of army reorganisation.
(6) We should improve communications, telephones, telegraphs, and lateral M.T. roads.
(7) We should give liberal rewards for the interception and destruction of raiding gangs, and the rounding up of villages from which raids emanate.
(8) We should admit that the Amir of Afghanistani for religious reasons exercises a paramount influence over our tribes, and we should get him to use that influence for the maintenance of peace on our common border. It has been the practise of our statesmen to adopt the attitude that because the Amir was by treaty precluded from interfering with our tribes, therefore he must have nothing to do with them. This is a short-sighted view. We found during the Great War the late Amir’s influence, particularly over the Mahsuds, of the greatest value, when he agreed to use it on our behalf.
(9) Finally, there is a suggestion afoot that thesettled districts of the North-West Frontier Province should be re-amalgamated with the Punjab. I have shown, I think, clearly, how inseparable are the problems of the districts, the tribal area, and of Afghanistan; and any attempt to place the districts under a separate control could only mean friction, inefficiency, and disaster. The proposal is, indeed, little short of administrative lunacy. There is, however, an underlying method in the madness that has formulated it, namely, the self-interest of a clever minority, which I need not now dissect. I trust that if this proposal should go further it will be stoutly resisted.
Let me now turn to Afghanistan. Generally speaking, the story of our dealings with that country has been a record of stupid, arrogant muddle. From the days of the first Afghan war, when an ill-fated army was despatched on its crazy mission to place a puppet king, Shah Shuja, on the throne of Afghanistan, our statesmen have, with some notable exceptions, mishandled the Afghan problem. And yet it is simple enough in itself. For we want very little of Afghanistan, and she does not really want much of us. All we want from the Amir is good-neighbourliness; that he should not allow his country to become the focus of intrigue or aggression against us by Powers hostile to us, and that he should co-operate with us for the maintenance of peace on our common border. All he wants of us is some assistance inmoney and munitions for the internal and external safeguarding of his realm, commercial and other facilities, and honourable recognition, for the Afghan, like the Indian, has a craving for self-respect and the respect of others.
Now, where our statesmen have failed is in regarding Afghanistan as a petty little State to be browbeaten and ordered about at our pleasure, without recognising the very valuable cards that the Amir holds against us. He sees his hand and appraises it at its value. He knows, in the first place, that nothing can be more embarrassing to us than the necessity for another Afghan war, and the despatch of a large force to the highlands of Kabul, to sit there possibly for years as an army of occupation, in a desolate country, incapable of affording supplies for the troops, at enormous cost which could never be recovered, and at the expense of much health and life, with no clear-cut policy beyond. He knows, in the second place, that such a war would be the signal for the rising of practically every tribe along our frontier. The cry ofJehadwould go forth, as in the third Afghan war, and we should be confronted sooner or later with an outburst from the Black Mountain to Baluchistan—a formidable proposition in these days. He knows, in the third place, that with Moslem feeling strained as it is to-day on the subject of Turkey, there would be sympathy for him in India, and among the Moslem troops of the Indian army. Now these are serious considerations, but I do not suggest that they are so serious as to make us tolerate for a moment an offensive or unreasonableattitude on the part of the Amir. If the necessity should be forced on us, which God forbid, we should face the position with promptitude and firmness and hit at once; and apart from an advance into Afghanistan we have a valuable card in the closing of the passes and the blockade of that country.
All I suggest is that in negotiating with Afghanistan, we should remember these things and should not attempt to browbeat a proud and sensitive ruler, who, however inferior in the ordinary equipment for regular war, holds such valuable assets on his side. And my own experience is that the Afghans are not unreasonable. Like every one else, they will “try it on,” but if handled courteously, kindly, with geniality, and, above all, with complete candour, they will generally see reason. And remember one thing. In spite of all that has happened, our mistakes, our bluster, our occasional lapses from complete disingenuousness, the Afghans still like us. Moreover, their hereditary mistrust of Russia still inclines them to lean on us. We have lately concluded a treaty with Afghanistan—not by any means a perfect treaty, but the best certainly that could be secured in the circumstances, and we have sent a Minister to Kabul, Lt.-Colonel Humphrys, who was one of my officers on the frontier. A better man for the post could not, I believe, be found in the Empire. Unless unduly hampered by a hectoring diplomacy from Whitehall, he will succeed in establishing that goodwill and mutual confidence which between Governments is of more value than all the paperengagements ever signed. One word more of the Afghans. There is an idea that they are a treacherous and perfidious people. This, I believe, is wicked slander, so far as the rulers are concerned. In 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, the Amir Dost Muhammed was true to his bond, when he might have been a thorn in our side; and during the Great War the late Amir Halilullah, in the face of appalling difficulties, maintained the neutrality of his country, as he promised, and was eventually murdered, a martyr to his own good faith to us.
Let me now turn to our second question: internal political unrest. In clubs and other places where wise men in arm-chairs lay down the law about affairs of state, one constantly hears expressions of surprise and indignation that there should be any unrest in India at all. “We have,” say the die-hard wiseacres, “governed India jolly well and jolly honestly, and the Indians ought to be jolly grateful instead of kicking up all this fuss. If that meddlesome Montagu had not put these wicked democratic ideas into their heads, and stirred up all this mud, we should have gone on quite comfortable as before.” But if we face the facts squarely, we shall see that the wonder is not that there has been so much, but that there has been so comparatively little unrest, and that India should, on the whole, have waited so patiently for a definite advance towards self-government.
What are the facts? They are these. Partlyby commercial enterprise, partly by adroit diplomacy, partly by accident, largely by the valour of our arms, we have obtained dominion over the great continent of India. We have ruled it for more than a century through the agency of a handful of Englishmen, alien in creed, colour, and custom from the people whom they rule—men who do not even make their permanent homes in the land they administer. Now, however efficient, however honest, however impartial, however disinterested such a rule may be, it cannot obviously be really agreeable to the peoples ruled. This is the fundamental weakness of our position. That our rule on these lines has lasted so long and has been so successful is due not to the fact alone that it has been backed by British bayonets, but rather to the fact that it has been remarkably efficient, honest, just, and disinterested—and, above all, that we have in the past given and secured goodwill.
Superimposed on this underlying irritant, there have been of late years a number of other more direct causes of unrest. Education, which we gave to India and were bound to give, had inevitably bred political aspiration, and anintelligensiahad grown up hungry for political rights and powers. Simultaneously the voracious demands of a centralised bureaucracy for reports and returns had left the district officer little leisure for that close touch with the people which in the past meant confidence and goodwill. Political restlessness had already for some years begun to manifest itself in anarchical conspiracies and crimes of violence,when the Great War began. In India, as elsewhere, the reflex action of the war was a disturbing element. High prices, stifled trade, high taxation, nationalist longings and ideas of self-determination and self-government served to reinforce subterranean agitation.
But throughout the war India not only remained calm and restrained, but her actual contribution to the war, in men and material, was colossal and was ungrudgingly given. She had a right to expect in return generous treatment; but what did she get? She got the Rowlatt Bill. Now, of course, there was a great deal of wicked, lying nonsense talked by agitators about the provisions of the Rowlatt Bill, and the people were grossly misled. But the plain fact remains that when India had emerged from the trying ordeal of the war, not only with honour untarnished, but having placed us under a great obligation, our first practical return was to pass a repressive measure, for fear, forsooth, that if it was not passed then it might be pigeon-holed and forgotten. India asked for bread and we gave her a stone—a stupid, blundering act, openly deprecated at the time by all moderate unofficial opinion in India. What was the result? The Punjab disturbances and the preventive massacre of the Jallianwala Bagh. I do not propose to dwell on this deplorable and sadly mishandled matter, save to say that so far from cowing agitation, it has left a legacy of hate that it will take years to wipe out; and that the subsequent action of a number of ill-informed persons in raising a very large sum of money for the officer responsible forthat massacre has further estranged Indians and emphasised in their eyes the brand of their subjection.
To India, thus seething with bitterness over the Punjab disturbances, there was added the Moslem resentment over the fate of Turkey. I was myself in London and Paris in a humble capacity at the Peace Conference, and I know that our leading statesmen were fully informed of the Moslem attitude and the dangers of unsympathetic and dilatory action in this matter. But an arrogant diplomacy swept all warnings aside and scorned the Moslem menace as a bogey. What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India. Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral,ententebetween the two great rival creeds.
It was in this electric atmosphere that Ghandi, emerging from his ascetic retirement, found himself an unchallenged leader. Short of stature, frail, with large ears, and a gap in his front teeth, he had none of the outward appearance of dominance. His appeal lay in the simplicity of his life and character, for asceticism is still revered in the East. But his intellectual equipment was mediocre, his political ideas nebulous and impracticable to a degree, his programme archaic and visionary; and from the start he was doomed to fail. TheHijratmovement which he advocated brought ruin to thousands of Moslem homes; his attack on Government educational establishments brought disaster to many youthful careers; non-co-operation fizzled out. Government servants would not resign their appointments, lawyers would not cease to practise, and title-holders, with a few insignificant exceptions, would not surrender their titles; the “back to the spinning-wheel” call did not attract, and the continual failure of Ghandi’s predictions of the immediate attainment of completeSwarajor self-government, which he was careful never to define, like hope deferred turned the heart sick.
From being a demi-god Ghandi gradually became a bore, and when he was at last arrested, tragic to relate, there was hardly a tremor of resentment through the tired political nerves of India. The arrest was indeed a triumph of wise timing that does credit to the sagacity of the Government of India. Had the arrest been effected when the name of Ghandi was at its zenith, there would have been widespread trouble and bloodshed. As it was, people were only too glad to be rid of a gadfly that merely goaded them into infructuous bogs.
I apologise for this long excursus on the somewhat threadbare subject of the causes of unrest in India. But I want those here present to realise what potent forces have been at work and to believe that the Indian generally is not the ungrateful, black-hearted seditionist he is painted by the reactionary press. India is going through an inevitable stage of political transition, and we must not hastily judge her peoples—for the most part so gallant,so kindly, so law-abiding, so lovable—by the passing tantrums of political puberty.
As things stand at present, there is a remarkable lull. It would be futile to predict whether it will last. It is due in part, as I have suggested, to general political weariness, in part to the drastic action taken against the smaller agitating fry, in part to the depletion of the coffers of the extremists, in part to the fact that the extremists are quarrelling amongst themselves as to their future programme. Some are for continuing a boycott of the Councils; others are for capturing all the seats and dominating the legislature; others are for re-beating the dead horse of non-co-operation. Meanwhile, with disunion in the extremist camp, the Councils conduct their business on moderate lines, and, so far as one can judge, with marked temperance and sanity.
The work of the first Councils has indeed been surprisingly good, and augurs well for the future. India has not yet, of course, by any means grasped the full significance of representative government. The party system is still in embryo, although two somewhat vague and nebulous parties calling themselves the “Nationalists” and the “Democrats” do exist. But these parties have no clear-cut programme, and they do not follow the lead of the Ministers, who are regarded, not as representing the elected members of the Council, but as newly-appointed additional members of the officialbureaucracy. There will doubtless in time be gradual sorting of politicians into definite groups, but there are two unbridgeable gulfs in the Indian social system which must always militate against the building up of a solid political party system: first, the gulf between Hindu and Moslem, which still yawns as wide as ever, and second, the gulf between the Brahman and the “untouchables” who, by the way, have found their fears that they would be downtrodden under the new Councils completely baseless.
There are and must be breakers ahead. Some we can see, and there are doubtless others still bigger which we cannot yet glimpse over the welter of troubled waters. What we can see is this: first, there is a danger that unless Government and the Councils together can before the next elections in 1923-24 take definite steps towards the industrial development and the self-defence of India, the extremist party are likely to come in in full force and to create a deadlock in the administration; second, unless the Councils continue to accept a fiscal policy in accordance with the general interests of Great Britain and the Empire, there will be trouble. The fiscal position is obscure, but it is the crux, for the Councils can indirectly stultify any policy distasteful to them, and this too may mean a deadlock; third, there is a danger that the Indianisation of the Services will advance much more rapidly than was ever contemplated, or than is desirable in the interests of India for many years to come, for the simple reason that capable young Englishmen of the right stamp will not,without adequate guarantees for their future, accept employment in India. Those guarantees can be given satisfactorily by one authority alone, and that is by the Indian Legislatures voicing popular opinion. For a complex administration bristling with technical questions, administrative, political, and economic, it is essential that India should have for many years to come the assistance of highly-educated Britons with the tradition of administration in their blood. The Councils will be wise to recognise this and make conditions which will secure for them in the future as in the past the best stamp of adventurous Briton.
Finally, the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme, though a capable and conscientious endeavour to give gradual effect to a wise and generous policy, has of necessity its weak points. The system of diarchy—of allotting certain matters to the bureaucratic authority of the Viceroy and of the Provincial Governors and other matters to the representatives of the people—is obviously a stop-gap, which is already moribund. The attempt to fix definite periods at which further advances towards self-government can be considered is bound to fail: you cannot give political concessions by a stop-watch; the advance will either be much more rapid or much slower than the scheme anticipates. Again, the present basis of election is absurdly small, but any attempt to broaden it must tend towards adult suffrage, which in itself would appear impracticable with a population of over 200 millions.
It is a mistake, however, in politics to look too far ahead. Sufficient unto the day. For the time being we may be certain of one thing, and that is that we cannot break the Indian connection and leave India. Both our interests and our obligations demand that we should remain at the helm of Indian affairs for many years to come. That being so, let us accept our part cheerfully and with goodwill as in the past. Let us try to give India of our best, as we have done heretofore. Let us regive and regain, above all things, goodwill. Let us not resent the loss of past privilege, the changes in our individual status, and let us face the position in a practical and good-humoured spirit. Let us abandon all talk of holding India by the sword, as we won it by the sword—because both propositions are fundamentally false. Let us realise that we have held India by integrity, justice, disinterested efficiency—and, above all, by goodwill—and let us continue to co-operate with India in India for India on these same lines.
Mr. Spender said:—The Egyptian problem resembles the Indian and all other Eastern problems in that there is no simple explanation or solution of it. Among the many disagreeable surprises which awaited us after the war, none was more disagreeable than the discovery in March, 1919, that Egypt was in a state of rebellion. For years previously we had considered Egypt a model of imperial administration. We had pulled her out of bankruptcy and given her prosperity. We had provided her with great public works which had enriched both pasha and fellah. We had scrupulously refrained from exploiting her in our own interests. No man ever worked so disinterestedly for a country not his own as Lord Cromer for Egypt, and if ever a Nationalist movement could have been killed by kindness, it should have been the Egyptian. Nor were the Egyptian people ungrateful. I have talked to Egyptian Nationalists of all shades, and seldom found any who did not handsomely acknowledge what Great Britain had done for Egypt, but they asked for one thing more, which was that she should restore them their independence. “We won it from the Turks,”they said, “and we cannot allow you to take it from us.”
This demand was no new thing, but it was brought to a climax by events during and after the war. When the war broke out, our representative in Egypt was still only “Agent and Consul-General,” and was theoretically and legally on the same footing with the representative of all other Powers; when it ended, he was “High Commissioner,” governing by martial law under a system which we called a “protectorate.” This to the Egyptians seemed a definite and disastrous change for the worse. Throughout the forty years of our occupation we have most carefully preserved the theory of Egyptian independence. We have occupied and administered the country, but we have never annexed it or claimed it to be part of the British Empire. We intervened in 1882 for the purpose of restoring order, and five years later we offered to withdraw, and were only prevented from carrying out our intention because the Sultan of Turkey declined, at the instigation of another Power, to sign the Firman which gave us the right of re-occupying the country if order should again be disturbed. In the subsequent years we gave repeated assurances to Egyptians and to foreign Powers that we had no intention of altering the status of the country as defined in its theoretical government by Khedive, Egyptian Ministers, and Egyptian Council or Assembly. And though it was true that in virtue of the army of occupation we were in fact supreme, by leaving the forms of their government untouched and refraining from all steps to legalise our positionwe reassured the Egyptians as to our ultimate objects.
In the eyes of the Egyptians the proclamation of the Protectorate and the conversion of the “Agent and Consul-General” into a “High Commissioner” armed with the weapons of martial law seriously prejudiced this situation, and though they acquiesced for the period of the war, they were determined to have a settlement with us immediately it was over, and took us very seriously at our word when we promised to review the whole situation when that time came. The truth about the “Protectorate” was that we adopted it as a way out of the legal entanglement which would otherwise have converted the Egyptians into enemy aliens when their suzerain, the Sultan of Turkey, entered the war against us, and we did it deliberately as the preferable alternative to annexing the country. But we have neither explained to the Egyptians nor made clear to ourselves what exactly we meant by it, and in the absence of explanations it was interpreted in Egypt as a first step to the extinction of Egyptian nationality.
Had we acted wisely and expeditiously at the end of the war we might even then have avoided the trouble that followed. But when Egyptian ministers asked leave to come to London in December, 1918, we answered that the time was not opportune for these discussions, and when the Nationalist leaders proposed to send a delegation,we said that no good purpose could be served by their coming to Europe. This heightened the alarm, and the Nationalists retorted by raising their claims from “complete autonomy” to “complete independence,” and started a violent agitation. The Government retaliated by deporting Zaghlul to Malta, whereupon the country broke into rebellion. Lord Allenby now came upon the scene, and, while suppressing the rebellion, released Zaghlul and gave him and his delegation the permission to go to Europe which had been refused in January. It was now decided to send out the Milner Mission, but there was a further delay of seven months before it started, and during all that time agitation continued.
When the Mission arrived it quickly discovered that there was no possible “Constitution under the Protectorate” which would satisfy the Egyptians, and that the sole alternatives were further suppression or the discovery of some means of settlement which dispensed with the Protectorate. The Mission unanimously came to the conclusion that though the first was mechanically possible if the cost and discredit were faced, the second was not only feasible but far preferable, and that the right method was a treaty of Alliance between Great Britain and Egypt, recognising Egypt as a sovereign State, but affording all necessary guarantees for imperial interests. Working on those lines the Mission gradually broke down the boycott proclaimed against them, convinced the Egyptians of their goodwill, induced all parties of Egyptian Nationalists to come to London, and there negotiatedthe basis of the Treaty which was described in the Report. The main points were that there must be a British force in the country—not an army of occupation, but a force to guard Imperial communications—that there must be British liaison officers for law and order and finance, that the control of foreign policy must remain in the hands of Great Britain, and that the Soudan settlement of 1898 must remain untouched, but that with these exceptions the Government of Egypt should be in fact what it had always been in theory: a Government of Egyptians by Egyptians.
Had the Government accepted this in December, 1920 (instead of in March, 1922), and instructed Lord Milner to go forward and draft a treaty on this basis, it is extremely probable that a settlement would have been reached in a few weeks; but Ministers, unhappily, were unable to make up their minds, and there was a further delay of three months before the Egyptian Prime Minister, Adli Pasha, was invited to negotiate with the Foreign Office. By this time the Nationalist parties which the Mission had succeeded in uniting on a common platform had fallen apart, and the extremists once more started a violent agitation and upbraided the moderates for tamely waiting on the British Government, which had evidently meant to deceive them. The situation had, therefore, changed again for the worse when Adli came to London in April, 1921, and it was made worse still by what followed. The negotiations dragged over six months, and finally broke down for reasons that have never been explained, but the probability is that Egypthad now got entangled in Coalition domestic politics, and that the “Die-Hards” claimed to have their way in Egypt in return for their consent to the Irish settlement. The door was now banged in the face of all schools of Egyptian Nationalists, and Lord Allenby was instructed to send to the Sultan the unhappy letter in which Egypt was peremptorily reminded that she was a “part of the communications of the British Empire,” and many other things said which were specially calculated to wound Egyptian susceptibilities.
The Egyptian Prime Minister resigned, and for the next five months Lord Allenby endeavoured to govern the country by martial law without an Egyptian Ministry. Then he came to London with the unanimous support of British officials in Egypt to tell the Government that the situation was impossible and a settlement imperative. The Government gave way and British policy was again reversed, but three opportunities had now been thrown away, and at the fourth time of asking the difficulties were greatly increased. The Nationalists were now divided and the Moderates in danger of being violently attacked if they accepted a moderate solution. It was found necessary to deport Zaghlul Pasha and to put several of his chief adherents on trial. Suspicions had been aroused by the delays and vacillations of the British Government. A settlement by treaty was now impossible, and Lord Allenby had to give unconditionally the recognition of sovereignty which the Mission intended to be part of the treaty, putting the Egyptians under an honourable pledgeto respect British rights and interests. In the circumstances there was nothing else to do, but it is greatly to be desired that when the constitution has been completed and the new Assembly convened, an effort should be made to revert to the method of the treaty which particularly suited the Egyptian character and would be regarded as a binding obligation by Egyptians.
In regard to the future, there is only one thing to do and that is to work honestly to its logical conclusion the theory now adopted, that Egypt is a self-governing independent State. Egyptians must be encouraged to shoulder the full responsibilities of a self-governing community. It would be folly to maintain a dual system which enabled an Egyptian Government to shunt the difficult or disagreeable part of its task on to a British High Commissioner. Whatever the system of Government, there is no escape for either party from the most intimate mutual relations. Geography and circumstances decree them, but there is no necessary clash between the imperial interests which require us to guard the highway to the East that runs through Egyptian territory, and the full exercise of their national rights by Egyptians. Egyptians must remember that for many years to come the world will hold us responsible for law and order and solvency in Egypt, and we on our part must remember that Egyptians have the same pride in their country as other peoples, and that they willnever consent to regard it as merely and primarily “a communication of the British Empire.” In any wise solution of the question any sudden breach with the past will be avoided, and Egyptians will of their own free will enlist the aid of British officials who have proved their devotion to the country by loyal and skilful service. The hope of the future lies in substituting a free partnership for a domination of one race by the other, and with a genial and good-humoured people, such as the Egyptians essentially are, there should be no difficulty in restoring friendship and burying past animosities. But there must be a real determination on both sides to make Egyptian independence a success and no disposition on either to give merely a reluctant consent to the conditions agreed upon by them and then to throw the onus of failure on the others.
I deeply regret the schism between the different schools of Nationalists in Egypt. As we have seen in Ireland, Nationalism is threatened from within as well as from without, and it is a great misfortune that in settling the Egyptian problem we missed the moment in 1920 when the different Nationalist parties were all but united on a common platform. Extremist leaders have the power of compelling even their friends to deport them and treat them as enemies, and I assume that Zaghlul put Lord Allenby under this compulsion, when he decided that his deportation was necessary. But Zaghlul was one of the few Nationalist leaders who were of peasant origin, and his followers stand for something that needs to be strongly representedin the Government if it is not to take its complexion merely from the towns and the wealthy interests. The fellah is a very different man from what he was in the days of Ismail, and it is improbable that he will again submit to oppression as his forefathers did but it is eminently desirable that there should be in the Government men whom he would accept as leaders and whom he could trust to speak for him.
Above all, it is to be hoped that, having conceded the independence of Egypt, we shall not slip back into governing the country by martial law with the aid of one party among the Egyptians. That would be merely an evasion of the difficulty and a postponement of troubles. There are a good many difficulties yet to be overcome, and the progress of events will need careful watching by Liberals in and out of the House of Commons, but if at length we steer a straight course and bring political good sense to the details of the problem, there is no reason why we should not satisfy the Egyptians and put Anglo-Egyptian relations on a good and enduring basis. In dealing with Egypt as with all Eastern countries, it should constantly be borne in mind that manners, character, and personality are a chief part of good politics. To a very large extent the estrangement has been caused by a failure to understand and respect the feelings of the Egyptian people, and here, as in India, it is important to understand that the demand of the Eastern man is not only for self-government, but also for a new status which will enable him to maintain his self-respect in his dealings with the West.
Mr. Ramsay Muir said:—One of the most marked, and one of the most ominous, features of the political situation to-day is that there is an almost universal decline of belief in and respect for our system of government. This undermining of the confidence that a healthy community ought to feel in its institutions is a perturbing fact which it is the plain duty of all good Liberals to consider seriously. We need not be deterred by the old gibe that Liberalism has always cared more about political machinery than about social reorganisation. The gibe was never true. But, in any case, no projects of social reorganisation have much chance of success unless the political machinery by means of which they have to be carried into effect is working efficiently. Moreover, since most of the projects of social reform which are being urged upon our attention involve an enlargement of the activities of the State, it is obvious that we shall be running the risk of a breakdown unless we make sure that the machinery of the State is capable of meeting the demands which are made upon it. We must be satisfied that our engine has sufficient powerbefore we require it to draw a double load. In truth, one reason why the engine of government is not working well is that it has been required to do a great deal more work than it was designed for. The time has come to consider carefully the character and capacity of our machinery of government in view of the increased demands which are certain to be made upon it in the future.
Our national political system may be divided into two parts. On the one hand, there is the working machine, which goes on, year in, year out, whether Parliament is sitting or not, and which would still go on quite well for a time if Parliament never met again. We call it the Government, and we habitually and rightly hold it responsible for every aspect of national policy and action, for legislation and finance as well as for foreign policy and internal administration. On the other hand, there is what Burke used to call “the control on behalf of the nation,” mainly exercised through Parliament, whose chief function is to criticise and control the action of Government, and to make the responsibility of Government to the nation a real and a felt responsibility. The discontents of to-day apply to both parts of the system, and I propose to deal with them in turn, first inquiring what is wrong with the working machine of government and how it can be amended, and then turning to consider how far the control on behalf of the nation is working badly, and how it can be made more efficient.
In what I have called the “working machine” of government there are two distinct elements.First, there is the large, permanent, professional staff, the Civil Service; secondly, there is the policy-directing body, the Cabinet. Both of these are the objects of a great deal of contemporary criticism. On the one hand, we are told that we are suffering from “bureaucracy,” which means that the permanent officials have too much independent and uncontrolled, or imperfectly controlled, authority. On the other hand, we are told that we are suffering from Cabinet dictatorship, or, alternatively, that the Cabinet system is breaking down and being replaced by the autocracy of the Prime Minister. There is a good deal ofprima faciejustification for all these complaints.
First, as to bureaucracy. It is manifest that there has been an immense increase in the number, the functions, and the power of public officials. This is not merely due to the war. It has been going on for a long time—ever since, in fact, we began the deliberate process of national reconstruction in the years following 1832. In itself this increase has not been a bad thing; on the contrary, it has been the only possible means of carrying into effect the great series of reforms which marked the nineteenth century. And may I here underline the fact that we Liberals, in particular, have no right to criticise the process, since we have been mainly responsible for it, at any rate in all its early stages. When our predecessors set up the first Factory Inspectors in1833, and so rendered possible the creation of a whole code of factory laws; when they created the first rudimentary Education Office in 1839, and so set to work the men who have really moulded our national system of education; when they set up a bureaucratic Poor Law Board in 1841, which shaped our Poor Law Policy, and a Public Health Board in 1848, which gradually worked out our system of Public Health—when they did these things, they were beginning a process which has been carried further with every decade. If you like, they were laying the foundations of bureaucracy; but they were also creating the only machinery by which vast, beneficial and desperately needed measures of social reform could be carried into effect.
And there is yet another thing for which Liberalism must assume the responsibility. When Gladstone instituted the Civil Service Commission in 1853, and the system of appointment by competitive examination in 1870, he freed the Civil Service from the reputation for corruption and inefficiency which had clung to it; and he ensured that it should attract, as it has ever since done, much of the best intellect of the nation. But this very fact inevitably increased the influence of the Civil Service, and encouraged the expansion of its functions. If you put a body of very able men in charge of a department of public service, it is certain that they will magnify their office, take a disproportionate view of its claims, and incessantly strive to increase its functions and its staff. This is not only natural, it is healthy—so long as theprocess is subjected to efficient criticism and control.
But the plain fact is that the control is inadequate. The vast machine of government has outgrown the power of the controlling mechanism.
We trust for the control of the immense bureaucratic machine, almost entirely to the presence, at the head of each department, of a political minister directly responsible to Parliament. We hold the minister responsible for everything that happens in his office, and we regard this ministerial responsibility as one of the keystones of our system. But when we reflect that the minister is distracted by a multitude of other calls upon his time, and that he has to deal with officials who are generally his equals in ability, and always his superiors in special knowledge; when we realise how impossible it is that a tithe of the multifarious business of a great department should come before him, and that the business which does come before him comes with the recommendations for action of men who know ten times more about it than he does, it must be obvious that the responsibility of the minister must be quite unreal, in regard to the normal working of the office. One thing alone he can do, and it is an important thing, quite big enough to occupy his attention. He can make sure that the broad policy of the office, and its big new departures, are in accord with the ideas of the majority in Parliament, and are co-ordinated, through the Cabinet, with the policy of the other departments. That, indeed, is the true function of a minister; and if he tries to make hisresponsibility real beyond that, he may easily neglect his main work. Beyondthis consideration of broad policy, I do not hesitate to say that the theory of ministerial responsibility is not a check upon the growth of bureaucracy, but is rather the cover under which bureaucracy has grown up. For the position of the minister enables him, and almost compels him, to use his influence in Parliament for the purpose of diverting or minimising parliamentary criticism.
How can this growth of inadequately controlled official power be checked? Is it not apparent that this can only be done if a clear distinction is drawn between the sphere of broad policy, in which the minister both can be and ought to be responsible, and the sphere of ordinary administrative work for which the minister cannot be genuinely responsible? If that distinction is accepted, it ought not to be impossible for Parliament without undermining ministerial or cabinet responsibility, to devise a means of making its control over the ordinary working of the departments effective, through a system of committees or in other ways.
The current complaints of bureaucracy, however, are not directed mainly against the ineffectiveness of the machinery of control, but against the way in which public work is conducted by government officials—the formalism and red-tape by which it is hampered, the absence of elasticity and enterprise; and the methods of government departments are often compared, to their disadvantage, with those of business firms. But thecomparison disregards a vital fact. The primary function of a government department is not creative or productive, but regulative. It has to see that laws are exactly carried out, and that public funds are used for the precise purposes for which they were voted; and for this kind of work a good deal of red-tape is necessary. Moreover, it is essential that those who are charged with such functions should be above all suspicion of being influenced by fear or favour or the desire to make profit; and for this purpose fixed salaries and security of tenure are essential.
In short, the fundamental principles upon which government departments are organised are right for the regulative functions which they primarily exist to perform. But they are altogether wrong for creative and productive work, which demands the utmost elasticity, adaptability, and freedom for experiment. And it is just because the ordinary machinery of government has been used on a large scale for this kind of work that the outcry against bureaucracy has recently been so vehement. It is not possible to imagine a worse method of conducting a great productive enterprise than to put it under the control of an evanescent minister selected on political grounds, and supported by a body of men whose work is carried on in accordance with the traditions of the Civil Service.
If we are to avoid a breakdown of our whole system, we must abstain from placing productive enterprises under the control of the ordinary machinery of government—Parliament, responsible political ministers, and civil service staffs. But itdoes not follow that no productive concern ought ever to be brought under public ownership and withdrawn from the sphere of private enterprise. As we shall later note, such concerns can, if it be necessary, be organised in a way which would avoid these dangers.
We turn next to the other element in the working machine of government, the Cabinet, or policy-directing body, which is the very pivot of our whole system. Two main functions fall to the Cabinet. In the first place, it has to ensure an effective co-ordination between the various departments of government; in the second place, it is responsible for the initiation and guidance of national policy in every sphere, subject to the watchful but friendly control of Parliament.
Long experience has shown that there are several conditions which must be fulfilled if a Cabinet is to perform these functions satisfactorily. In the first place, its members must, among them, be able to speak for every department of government; failing this, the function of co-ordination cannot be effectively performed. This principle was discarded in the later stages of the war, when a small War Cabinet was instituted, from which most of the ministers were excluded. The result was confusion and overlapping, and the attempt to remedy these evils by the creation of a staff ofliaisonofficers under the control of the Prime Minister had very imperfect success, and in somerespects only added to the confusion. In the second place, the Cabinet must be coherent and homogeneous, and its members must share the same ideals of national policy. National business cannot be efficiently transacted if the members of the Cabinet are under the necessity of constantly arguing about, and making compromises upon, first principles. That is the justification for drawing the members of a Cabinet from the leaders of a single party, who think alike and understand one another’s minds. Whenever this condition has been absent, confusion, vacillation and contradiction have always marked the conduct of public affairs, and disastrous results have followed.
In the third place, the procedure of the Cabinet must be intimate, informal, elastic, and confidential; every member must be able to feel that he has played his part in all the main decisions of policy, whether they directly concern his department or not, and that he is personally responsible for these decisions. Constitutional usage has always prescribed that it is the duty of a Cabinet Minister to resign if he differs from his colleagues on any vital matter, whether relating to his department or not, and this usage is, in truth, the main safeguard for the preservation of genuine conjoint responsibility, and the main barrier against irresponsible action by a Prime Minister or a clique. When the practice of resignation in the sense of giving up office is replaced by the other kind of resignation—shrugging one’s shoulders and letting things slide—the mainvirtue of Cabinetgovernment has been lost. In the fourth place, in order that every minister may fully share in every important discussion and decision, it is essential that the Cabinet should be small. Sir Robert Peel, in whose ministry of 1841-6 the system probably reached perfection, laid it down that nine was the maximum number for efficiency, because not more than about nine men can sit round a table in full view of one another, all taking a real share in every discussion. When the membership of a Cabinet largely exceeds this figure, it is inevitable that the sense of joint and several responsibility for every decision should be greatly weakened.