the English people became directly responsible for the
Government of India. It cannot, I think, be denied that this
responsibility has been so imperfectly discharged that in many
respects the new system of Government compares unfavourably
with the old.... There was at that time an independent control
of expenditure which now seems to be almost entirely wanting.

Shortly after the Crown assumed the rule of India, Mr. Disraeli asked
the House of Commons to regard India as "a great and solemn trust
committed to it by an all-wise and inscrutable Providence." Mr. George
Yule, in the Fourth Congress, remarked on this: "The 650 odd members had
thrown the trust back upon the hands of Providence, to be looked after
as Providence itself thinks best." Perhaps it is time that India should
remember that Providence helps those who help themselves.

Year after year the Congress continued to remonstrate against the cost
of the army, until in 1902, after all the futile protests of the
intervening years, it condemned an increase of pay to British soldiers
in India which placed an additional burden on the Indian revenues of
L786,000 a year, and pointed out that the British garrison was
unnecessarily numerous, as was shown by the withdrawal of large bodies
of British soldiers for service in South Africa and China. The very next
year Congress protested that the increasing military expenditure was not
to secure India against internal disorder or external attack, but in
order to carry out an Imperial policy; the Colonies contributed little
or nothing to the Imperial Military Expenditure, while India bore the
cost of about one-third of the whole British Army in addition to her own
Indian troops. Surely these facts should be remembered when India's
military services to the Empire are now being weighed.

In 1904 and 1905, the Congress declared that the then military
expenditure was beyond India's power to bear, and in the latter year
prayed that the additional ten millions sterling sanctioned for Lord
Kitchener's reorganisation scheme might be devoted to education and the
reduction of the burden on the raiyats. In 1908, the burdens imposed by
the British War Office since 1859 were condemned, and in the next year
it was pointed out that the military expenditure was nearly a third of
the whole Indian revenue, and was starving Education and Sanitation.

Lord Kitchener's reorganisation scheme kept the Indian Army on a W