you have in
addition in the Trustees' Savings Banks about 52 million
sterling. Our Postal Savings Bank deposits, with a population
seven times as large as yours, are only about 7 million
sterling, and even of this a little over one-tenth is held by
Europeans. Your total paid-up capital of joint-stock companies
is about 1,900 million sterling. Ours is not quite 26 million
sterling, and the greater part of this again is European.
Four-fifths of our people are dependent upon agriculture, and
agriculture has been for some time steadily deteriorating.
Indian agriculturists are too poor, and are, moreover, too
heavily indebted, to be able to apply any capital to land, and
the result is that over the greater part of India agriculture
is, as Sir James Caird pointed out more than twenty-five years
ago, only a process of exhaustion of the soil. The yield per
acre is steadily diminishing, being now only about 8 to 9
bushels an acre against about 30 bushels here in England.

In all the matters which come under Gokhale's first test, the
Bureaucracy has been and is inefficient.

Give Indians a Chance.

All we say in the matter is: You have not succeeded in bringing
education, health, prosperity, to the masses of the people. Is it not
time to give Indians a chance of doing, for their own country, work
similar to that which Japan and other nations have done for theirs?
Surely the claim is not unreasonable. If the Anglo-Indians say that the
masses are their peculiar care, and that the educated classes care not
for them, but only for place and power, then we point to the Congress,
to the speeches and the resolutions eloquent of their love and their
knowledge. It is not their fault that they gaze on their country's
poverty in helpless despair. Or let Mr. Justice Rahim answer:

As for the representation of the interests of the many scores
of millions in India, if the claim be that they are better
represented by European Officials than by educated Indian
Officials or non-Officials, it is difficult to conceive how
such reckless claim has come to be urged. The inability of
English Officials to master the spoken language of India and
their habits of life and modes of thought so completely divide
them from the general population, that only an extremely
limited few, possessed with extraordinary powers of insight,