Starting a thread on #BritishEmpireinIndia. Will add to it as and when find other relevant things. Preface of Will Durant's book "The Case for India" 1930:
I went to India to help myself visualize a people whose cultural history I had been studying for The Story of Civilization.

I did not expect to be attracted by the Hindus, or that I should be swept into a passionate interest in Indian politics. I merely hoped to add a little to my material, to look with my own eyes upon certain works of art,

and then to return to my historical studies, forgetting this contemporary world. But I saw such things in India as made me feel that study and writing were frivolous things in the presence of a people one-fifth of the human race-suffering poverty and oppression bitterer than any

to be found elsewhere on the earth. I was horrified. I had not thought it possible that any government could allow its subjects to sink to such misery. I came away resolved to study living India as well as the India with the brilliant past; to learn more of this unique Revolution

that fought with suffering accepted but never returned; to read the Gandhi of today as well as the Buddha of long ago. And the more I read the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently
conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England

throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history. And so I ask the reader's permission to abandon for a while my
researches into the past, so that I may stand up and say my word for India.

I know how weak words are in the face of guns and blood; how irrelevant mere truth and decency appear beside the might of empires and gold. But if even one Hindu, fighting for freedom

far off there on the other side of the globe, shall hear this call of mine and be a trifle comforted, then these months of work on this little book will seem sweet to me. For I know of nothing in the world that I would rather do today than to be of help to India.

I've seen a great people starving to death before my
eyes, & I'm convinced this exhaustion & starvation
are due not, as their beneficiaries claim, to over-population
and superstition, but to the most sordid & criminal
exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history.

England has year by year been bleeding India to the point of death, and that self-government of India by the Hindus could not, within any reasonable probability, have worse results than the present form of alien domination.

1803: When the British besieged the Fort at Agra, & their cannon struck near the beautiful Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the Hindus surrendered at once lest one of the most perfect creations of the human hand should be ruined like Rheims. Who then were the civilized?

The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art
and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a
country temporarily disordered and helpless,

bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and "legal" plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy- three years, and goes on at this moment.

It was the wealth of India which attracted the English & French commercial pirates & the East India Company proposed to appropriate. Already in 1686 its Directors declared their intention to "establish a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come."

Robert Clive defeated the Bengal forces at Plassey, and thereupon declared his Company the owner of the richest Indian province. He added further territory by forging & violating treaties, by playing one native prince against another, and by generous bribes given & received.

$4m were sent down the river to Calcutta in one shipment. He accepted "presents" amounting to $1.17m from Hindu rulers dependent upon his favour & his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140K; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament.

"When I think," Robert Clive said, "of the marvellous riches of India, and the comparatively small part which I took away, I am astonished at my own moderation." Such were the morals of the British who proposed to bring civilization to India. #Imperial #History #BritishEmpire

Clive's successors in the Company began a century of unmitigated rape on the resources of India. They profiteered without hindrance: goods which they sold in England for $10m they bought for $2m in India. They engaged, corporately and individually, in inland trade,

and by refusing to pay the tolls exacted of Hindu trades, acquired a lucrative monopoly. The Company paid such fabulous dividends that its stock rose to $32K a share.
Its agents deposed & set up Hindu rulers according to bribes refused or received;

in ten years they took in, through such presents, $30m. They forged documents as circumstances required, and hanged Hindus for forging documents. They taxed the provinces under the Company so exorbitantly that two-thirds of the population fled;

defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates. It was usual to demand 50% of the net produce
of the land.

Bombay Admin report, written by Englishmen: Every effort, lawful & unlawful was made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel & revolting beyond all description, if they wouldn't or couldn't yield what was demanded."

During the five years which followed the departure of Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to such a point as seemed incompatible with the existence of society. The servants of the Company forced Indians to buy dear and to sell cheap.

Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while 30m of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.

By 1858 the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven that the British govt took over the territories as Crown's colony. England paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India, to be redeemed, principal and interest (originally at 10.5%),

out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. All the debts on the Company's books, together with the accrued interest on these debts, were added to the public obligations of India, to be redeemed out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people.

Exploitation was dressed now in all the forms of Law, i.e. the rules laid down by the victors for the vanquished. Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.

John Morley estimated that during the 19th C England carried on 111 wars in India, using for the most part Indian troops; 28 million Hindus shed their blood that India might be slave. The cost of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last penny out of Indian taxes;

the English congratulated themselves on conquering India without spending a cent. Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a magnanimous, achievement, to steal in 40 yrs a 250K
sq. miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the
expense.

In 1857 Hindus resisted & were met with medieval ferocity; the British blew the rebels to bits from canon mouths. London Spectator: "We took at least 100K Indian lives in the mutiny." They called it the Sepoy Mutiny & the Hindus the War of Independence. There's much in a name.

Let Englishmen describe the result. A report to the House of Commons by one of its investigating committees in 1804 stated: "It must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company the condition of the people of India has been worse than before."

1826, Bishop Heber: "The peasantry in the Company's provinces are, worse off, poorer & more dispirited than the subjects of Indian Princes. Very few men will not, in confidence, own their belief that the people are overtaxed, & that India is in a gradual state of impoverishment."

James Mill: "Under their dependence upon the British Govt
the people of Oudh and Karnataka, were, by misgovernment plunged into a state of wretchedness with which hardly any part of the earth has anything to compare."

Lt. Col. Briggs in 1830: "I conscientiously believe that under no Government whatever, Hindu or Mohammedan, professing to be actuated by law, was any system so suppressive of the prosperity of the people at large as that which has marked our administration."

F. J. Shore, British administrator in Bengal, testimony to the House of Commons, 1857: "The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They've been taxed to..."

"...the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort... "

"...The Indians have been excluded from every honour, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept."

Subject to the British Parliament the Viceroy is omnipotent. He is a political appointee, chosen for his executive ability as manager of a concern demanding high dividends out of poor rolling stock. He is seldom selected for his knowledge of India;

sympathy with India would disqualify him, as it disqualified Lord Ripon. After five years of service the Viceroy acquires some knowledge of the people and the country, and is replaced.

In many cases in the past land tax has amounted to 50% of the gross produce, in some cases to more than the entire gross produce; in general it is 2-3 times as high as under pre-English rule. The British Govt has the exclusive right to manufacture salt ...

... & adds a tax of 1/2 cent/pound. The avg annual income in India is $33. The Indian Witness: "It's safe to assume 100m Indians have annual income of no more than $5.00." It helps understand how much the British share in responsibility for the Hindus's ill-health & emaciation.

An English MP, Catheart Wilson: "The % of taxes in India, as related to the gross produce, is more than that of any other country." Until recently the rate was 2x as high as in England, 3x as high as in Scotland.

Herbert Spencer protested against "the pitiless taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half the product of their soil."

Another Englishman, the late H. M. Hyndman, after detailing the proof that taxation in India was far heavier than in any other country, though its population is poorer, entitled his book The Bankruptcy of India.

Sir William Hunter, former member of the Viceroy's Council, in 1875: "The Govt assessment doesn't leave enough food to the cultivator to support himself & his family throughout the year."

Mr. Thorburn, one-time Financial Commissioner of the Punjab, said that "the whole revenue of the Punjab .... is practically drawn from the producing masses."

Will Durant asked the guide at Trichinopoly how Indians had found, 3-400 yrs ago the money to build the vast temples there & at Madura & Tanjore. He said that rajahs had been able to build these despite the fact that they had taxed the people much less severely than the English.

Against this terrible blood-letting the Hindus have no redress. In the midst of the heart-breaking poverty engendered partly by this taxation, the Govt treats itself, at staggering cost, to gigantic official buildings at Delhi, needlessly alien in style to Indian architecture.

For 7 months each year it moves the Capital, with all its machinery & personnel, to resorts in the mountains, at an expense of millions of dollars; from time to time it holds gorgeous Durbars, to impress the people who provide tens of millions for the ceremony. It pays to be free

The result is that the national debt of India ballooned. Let these figures tell the tale:
1792 - $35m
1805 - $105m
1829 - $150m
1845 - $215m
1850 - $275m
1858 - $350m
1860 - $500m
1901 - $1bn
1913 - $1.535bn
1929 - $3.5bn

The expense of maintaining the British army, whose function is the continual subjection of India by bullets, shells and air-bombs, is borne by the Indian people. In 1926 its cost was $200m—a tax of 3% on the scanty earnings of every man, woman and child in the land.

Wherever the Indian army sheds its (mostly native) blood, in Afghanistan or Burma or Mesopotamia or France (for the government is free to send it anywhere), the expense is met not by the Empire which it enlarges of defends, but by Indian revenues alone.

When England had to send British troops to India in 1857 it charged India with the cost not only of transporting them, maintaining them in India, and bringing them back home, but with their maintenance in Britain for 6 months before they sailed.

In the 19th C India paid $450m for wars fought for England outside India with Indian troops. She contributed $500m to the War Chest of the Allies, $700m in subscriptions to War loans, 800K soldiers & 400K laborers to defend the British Empire outside India during the Great War.

In 1922 64% of Indian revenue was devoted to this army of fratricides : Hindus compelled to kill Hindus in Burma until Burma consented to come under British rule; Hindus compelled to defend on the fields of Flanders the Empire which in every year was starving 10m Hindus to death.

1926: Viceroy announced the Govt intention to build a Royal Indian Navy; the proposal added that this navy should be used wherever in the Empire the British Parliament might care to send it & that the navy's entire cost should be met from Indian revenues. It pays to be free.

In 1858 Queen Victoria officially proclaimed it as her "will that ... our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely & impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, & integrity, duly to discharge."

Nevertheless the actual policy of the British in India has been one of political exclusion & social scorn. Every year the Indian colleges graduate 12K students; hundreds of Hindus graduate from universities in Europe or America,
and return to their native land.

Only the lowest places in the civil service are open to Indians. About 4% of positions (salary $4,000 per year) are held by Hindus; these berths are reserved for the British. Some of the British are capable, ... but most of them are poorly rated by their countrymen.

Lord Asquith declared in 1909 that if high places were given to Hindus half as unfit as the Englishmen who then occupied them in India it would be regarded as a public scandal.
"Decapitation of an entire people," Lajpat Rai called it.

It is the commonest thing to see Indian scholars & officials, of confessedly high ability, of very fine training, & of long experience, serving under young Englishmen who in England wouldn't be thought fit to fill a govt/business position above the 2nd/3rd class.

Ramanandra Chatterjee: Eminent Hindu physicians & surgeons are compelled to spend the best years of their lives in subordinate positions as 'assistant' surgeons, while raw & callow youths lord it over them and draw four to five times their pay.

Lord Lytton, Viceroy, 1878: Since I'm writing confidentially, I don't hesitate to say that the Govt of England & India appear to me unable to answer satisfactorily the charge of having taken every means in their power of breaking to the heart the words of promise they've uttered.

The English act as if their superior position can be best maintained by asserting it at every step, by avoiding participation in the life of the Indians, by setting up against them every aristocratic social distinction, by treating them in every way as an inferior race.

Sunderland reports that the British treat the Hindus as strangers and foreigners in India, in a manner "quite as unsympathetic, harsh and abusive as was ever seen among the Georgia and Louisiana planters in the old days of American slavery".

Savel Zimand corroborates him : "Many of the distinctions drawn against Indians are like those made against the blacks in our south - minus lynching. I could fill a volume with such instances."

Sir Henry Cotton, a high British official in India: the govt in India is as complete a bureaucracy as Russia's under the Czar; as autocratic in its methods, as reactionary in its spirit, as determined as ever the Russian aristocracy was to keep all power & advantage in its hands.

The result is a pitiful crushing of the Hindu spirit, a stifling of its pride & growth, a stunting of genius that once flourished in India. Is the Hindu character degraded, w/o virility & initiative? But what people could've retained such qualities under such ruthless alien rule?

The British charge Hindu with unmanliness but they've driven it out of him by the accident of superior guns & merciless rule. If there's rebellion today let every true Briton be glad; for it means India is not dead, the spirit of liberty lives; the Hindu can be a man after all.

In 1915 Bengal's Statistical Dept. calculated agri-labourer's avg. wage at $3.60/month. House & furnishings of a family of six is worth $10. Almost half his earnings govt takes; if he cannot pay the tax, his holding, which may've been in his family for centuries, is confiscated.

In Bombay, in 1922, despite the factory acts of that year, the avg. wage of the cotton workers was 33 cents. In that same year the profit of the owners of those mills was 125%. This was an "off-year"; in better years, the owners said, the profits were 200%.

The workman's home is like his wage; it consists of one room, shared by the family with animals; Zimand found a room with 30 tenants. Such is the industrial revolution that a British govt has developed under its control, despite the enlightened legislation in America and England.

The people flock to the factories because the overtaxed land cannot support them; & because the domestic industries with which the peasants formerly eked out in winter their gleanings from the summer fields have been destroyed by British control of Indian tariffs & trade.

For of old the handicrafts of India were known throughout the world; it was manufactured—hand-made—goods which European merchants brought from India to sell to the West. In 1680, says the British historian Orme, the manufacture of cotton was almost universal in India ...

... & the spinning wheels enabled women to round out men's earnings. But the English objected to this competition of Indian industry with their mills at home; they resolved to reduce India to a purely agricultural country, force her to become a vast market for British goods.

East India Company directors ordered that the production of raw silk should be encouraged and the manufacture of silk fabrics discouraged; that silk-winders should be compelled to work in the Company's factories, and be prohibited, under severe penalties, from working outside.

Parliament discussed ways and means of replacing Hindu by British industries. A tariff of 70-80% was placed upon Hindu textiles imported into free-trade England, while India was compelled, by foreign control of her govt, to admit English textiles almost duty free...

...Lest Indian industries should still continue to exist, excise tax was placed on Indian manufacture of cotton goods. Were India free, she'd have retaliated, imposed prohibitive duties on British goods, & would thus have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation.

An Englishman wrote: "We have done everything possible to impoverish still further the miserable beings subject to the cruel selfishness of English commerce. Under the pretense of free trade, England has compelled the Hindus to receive the products of the steam-looms..."

"...of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc., at merely nominal duties; while the hand wrought manufactures of Bengal and Behar, beautiful in fabric and durable in wear, have heavy and almost prohibitive duties imposed on their
importation into England."

"The result was that Manchester and Paisley flourished,
and Indian industries declined; a country well on the way to prosperity was forcibly arrested in its development, and
compelled to be only a rural hinterland for industrial England."

India was reduced to such penury that today nothing is left of her people but empty stomachs & fleshless bones. One may think that building of 30K miles of railways gave some prosperity to India. But it was built for England, the British army & trade; not for the Hindus' benefit.

If it feels doubtful observe its operation. Its greatest revenue comes, not as in USA, from freight (the British trader controls the rates), but from the 3rd-class passengers—Hindus—herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for slaughter, 20 or more in a compartment.

The railways lose money year after year, & are helped by the govt out of the revenues of the people; these loans to date total over $100m. The govt guarantees a minimum rate of interest on railway investments; the British companies who built the roads ran no risk whatever...

...No play or encouragement is given to initiative, competition, or private enterprise; the worst evils of a state monopoly are in force. All the losses are borne by the people; all the gains are gathered by the trader. So much for the railways.

British monopolise sea commerce even more than land transport. Hindus aren't permitted merchant ships of their own; all Indian goods must be carried in British bottoms, a further strain on starving nation's purse; ship-building, which once employed 1000s of Hindus, is prohibited.

To the ruining of land with taxation, of industry with tariffs, of commerce with foreign control, add the millions of dollars drained from India each year; to explain India's poverty due to her superstitions is a dastardly deception practised on a world too busy to be informed.

Edmund Burke: "The British in India have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England; nor indeed any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to make a sudden fortune. Animated with all the avarice of age & all the impetuosity of youth...

"they roll in wave after wave, there's nothing for the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey & passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Each rupee of profit Englishman makes is lost forever to India."

1927, House of Commons: Lord Winterton showed there were then 7500 retired officials in Britain drawing annually $17.5m in pensions from the Indian revenue; Ramsay MacDonald put the figure at $20m. England requires of those in India 24yrs of service, reduced by 4yrs of furloughs;

She then retires them on a generous pension paid by Hindus. Even during service these officials send their families/children to England & support them with funds derived from India. Except the more perishable foods, almost everything they buy in India is purchased from abroad.

As early as 1783 Edmund Burke predicted that the annual drain of Indian resources to England without equivalent return would eventually destroy India. From Plassey to Waterloo, 57 yrs, the drain of India's wealth to England is computed by Brooks Adams at 2.5 to 5 billion dollars.

He adds it was stolen wealth from India that supplied England with free capital for the dev. of mechanical inventions, making possible the #IndustrialRevolution. The total wealth drained from India since 1757, were it left in India, would now be, at a low interest rate, $400bn.

Sir Wilfred Seawen Blunt: "The system of constantly enhancing the land values is unaltered. The salt tax robs the poor. There's the same drain of India's food to alien mouths. Though myself a Conservative I own to being shocked at the bondage in which the Indian people are held."

Social Destruction: When the British came, India ran a school system managed by the village communities. East India Company destroyed the village communities & didn't replace the schools; after a century of effort to restore them they stand at only 66% of their number 100yrs ago.

There are now in India 730K villages & 162K primary schools. Only 7% boys & 1.5% girls receive schooling i.e. 4% of total. These govt schools are not free, but exact a tuition fee which, though small to a Western purse, looms large to a family hovering on the edge of starvation.

We have been told that the country schools do not grow more rapidly because women teachers cannot be found for them; and that these teachers refuse to go because they fear that they will be raped. But women are considerably safer in India than in New York.

the country schools lag behind simply because the pay for new teachers is $5.00 a month, for a trained teacher $5.00 to $6.50 a month, for principals $7-10 a month. The govt spends every year on education 8 cents a head; it spends on the army 83 cents a head, more than 10 times.

In 1911 a Hindu representative, Gokhale, introduced a bill for universal compulsory primary education in India; it was defeated by the British and govt-appointed members. In 1916 Patel introduced a similar bill, which was also defeated. The govt could not afford primary schools.

Instead it spent most of 8 cents on secondary schools & universities; the language was English; the history, literature, customs & morals taught were English. Young Hindus found they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process aimed to denationalise & de-Indianise them.

The first charge on a modern state, after public health, is the establishment of education, universal, compulsory and free. But the total expenditure for education in India is less than one-half the educational expenditure in New York State! Hence the 93% illiteracy of India.

Between 1882 and 1907, while public schools were growing all over the world, the appropriation for education in British India increased by $2m; in the same period appropriations for the fratricide army increased by $43m. It pays to be free.

Literacy was more widespread before the British took possession than it is now after 150 yrs of British control; in several of the states ruled by native princes it's higher than in British India. The British responsibility for India's illiteracy seems to be beyond question.

The excuse that caste interferes with education will not hold; caste didn't interfere with the crowding of every Hindu class indiscriminately in railway coaches & factories; it need not have interfered with schools; the best way to conquer caste would have been through schools.

Is it any wonder that a people so stupefied with poverty & lack of education is ignorant to use birth-control, and practises superstitions worse even than those of the West? Instead of encouraging education, the govt encouraged drink. Before the British, India was a sober nation.

"The temperance of the people," said Warren Hastings, "is demonstrated in the simplicity of their food and their total abstinence from spirituous liquors and other substances of
intoxication."

With the first trading posts established by the British, saloons were opened for the sale of rum, and the East India Company made handsome profits from the trade. When the Crown took over India, it depended on the saloons for a large part of its revenue;...

...the license system was so arranged as to stimulate drinking and sales. The govt revenue from such licenses has increased 7-fold in the last forty years ; in 1922 it stood at $60m annually-thrice the appropriation for schools and universities...

...Miss Mayo tells us that Hindu mothers feed opium to their children; and she concludes that India is not fit for Home Rule. What she says is true; what she does not say makes what she says worse than a straight-forward lie...

...She does not tell us (though she must have known) that women drug their children because the mothers must abandon them every day to go to work in the factories. She does not tell us that the opium is grown only and sold exclusively by the govt;...

...that its sale, like the sale of drink through saloons, is carried on despite the protest of the Nationalist Congress, the Industrial and Social Conferences, the Provincial Conferences, the Brahmo-Somaj, the Arya-Somaj, the Mohammedans and the Christians...

...that the Central Legislature in 1921 passed a bill prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, and that the govt refused to act upon it; that 400,000 acres of India's soil, sorely needed for the raising of food, are given over to the growing of opium...

...and that the sale of the drug brings to the govt one-ninth of its total revenue every year. She does not tell us that Burma excluded opium by law until the British came, and is now overrun with it; that the British distributed it free in Burma to create a demand for it;...

...England has refused, at one World Opium Conference after another, to abandon it in India; that though she has agreed to reduce the export of opium by 10% yearly, she has refused to reduce its sale in India;...

...that when Gandhi by a peaceful anti-opium campaign in Assam had reduced the consumption of the drug there by one-half, the Government put a stop to his labours and jailed 44 of his aides...

...She does not tell us that the health, courage & character of the Hindu people have been undermined through this ruthless drugging of a nation by men pretending to be Christians.

On Health, Disease & Death: The emaciation of the Hindus sickens the traveller; closed fingers can be run up around their bare legs from the ankles to the knees. In the cities 34% of them are absent from work, on any day, from illness or injury...

...They are too poor to afford foods rich in mineral salts; they are too poor to buy fresh vegetables, much less to buy meat. The water-supply, which is usually the first obligation of a government, is in primitive condition, after a more than 100 yrs of British rule;...

...dysentery & malaria have been eliminated from Panama & Cuba, but they flourish in British India. Once the Hindu was known to be among the cleanest of the clean; and even today he bathes every morning; but poverty has made social sanitation impossible...

...Until 1918 the total expenditure on public health, of both the central and the provincial governments combined, was only $5m a year, for 240m people—an appropriation of 2 cents per capita...

...Sir William Hunter, once Director-General of Indian Statistics, estimated that 40m of the people of India were
seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger. Weakened with malnutrition, they offer low resistance to infections; epidemics periodically destroy millions of them...

...1901: 272K died of plague introduced from abroad
1902: 5m died of plague
1903: 800K
1904: 1m
1918: 125m cases of influenza, 12.5m recorded deaths
Easy to understand why there are famines in India. It isn't the absence of sufficient food, but people's inability to pay for it...

...Famines have increased in frequency and severity under British rule.
1770 to 1900: 25m Hindus died of starvation. 15m of these died in the last quarter of the century, in the famines of 1877,1889,1897, and 1900.
...

...Railways didn't enable rapid transport of food from
unaffected to affected regions; the worst famines have come since the building of the railways proves the cause
has not been the lack of transportation...

...behind all these as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbalanced exportation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine, that the starving peasant cannot pay for the food...

"There has never been a single year," says Dutt, "when
the food-supply of the country was insufficient for the
people."

Let the late President of Union Theological Seminary, Dr. Charles C. Hall, speak: "The obvious fact stares us in the face that there is at no time, in no year, any shortage of food-stuffs in India...

..."The trouble is that the taxes imposed by the British govt being 50% of the produce, the Indian starves that India's annual revenue may not be diminished by a dollar. 80% of the whole population has been thrown back upon the soil because...

..."England's discriminating duties have ruined practically every branch of native manufacture. We send shiploads of grain to India, but there is plenty of grain in India. The trouble is that the people have been ground down till they are too poor to buy it...

..."Famine is chronic there now, though the same shipments of food-stuffs are made annually to England, the same drainage of millions of dollars goes on every year."

In England the death-rate is 13 per 1000 per year; in the United States it is 12; in India it is 32. Half the children born in Bengal die before reaching the age of eight. Lt. Col. Dunn, of the Indian Medical Service, says the one-half of the death-rate is preventable;...

...if we doubt it we need only see Cuba, which under Spanish rule was ridden with malaria, typhus and cholera, and had one of the world's highest death rates, while now, under freedom, it has become one of the healthiest of countries, and its death-rate is among the lowest known.

Will Durant: And now, having quoted authorities sufficiently to guard against relying on my own too brief experience, I may be permitted, despite that limitation, to express my own judgment and feeling...

...I came to India admiring the British, marvelling at their imperial capacity for establishing order and peace, and thankful for the security which their policing of the world's waters have given to every traveller...

...I left India feeling that its awful poverty is an unanswerable indictment of its alien government, that so far from being an excuse for British rule, it is overwhelming evidence that the British ownership of India has been a calamity and a crime...

...The present plunder has now gone on beyond bearing; year by year it is destroying one of the greatest and gentlest peoples of history...

...The terrible thing is that this poverty is not a beginning, it's an end; it's not growing less, it is growing worse; England is not "preparing India for self-government," she is bleeding it to death...

...Any man who sees this crime, and does not speak out, is a coward. Any Englishman or an American, seeing it and not revolted by it, does not deserve his country or his name.