“The Methods that Would Lose India”

The climax of absurdity is reached in an article in which a journal says that “under Mr. Montagu’s system of government, India was on the verge of a second Mutiny, that it was saved by a soldier, that soldier having been relieved of his appointment and censured, that both the Government of India and Mr. Montagu became terrified, that they then tried to hide behind a perfectly unconstitutional Commission and that they decided to sacrifice General Dyer to the susceptibilities of Indian agitators”, and winds up with the amazing observation that “these methods will lose India just as they are losing Ireland.” This familiar trash may pass for wisdom in a strictly limited circle consisting of men who are proof against light and incapable of learning from experience but it will not deceive one single Englishman in whom immediate and gross self-interest has not effaced all traces of sanity. Well, every reader of Irish history knows what really are the methods that have brought Ireland to her present pass, but assuming that it is a policy of conciliation, of making sacrifices to the susceptibilities of agitators, that is losing Ireland, may we enquire what methods it was that lost America to England? If this facile writer of cheap nonsense has not entirely forgotten that page of English history, he must know that it was the very methods that he would have applied both in the case of Ireland and India, the policy of unmitigated force. For our part, we believe as little in the policy of conciliation-cum-repression, which British statesmanship has so far followed in Ireland, as in a policy of unmitigated force, and if we have nevertheless no misgiving as regards our own future in the Empire, it is because we are confident that in our case at least the path of justice to the people is also obviously the path of wisdom for the present predominant power.