and, for reasons we have already partly analyzed (§ 6), it has been worse during the last few decades than it was before. There has been a deterioration in the quality of British imperialism in relation to "subject peoples." Whether that is a temporary deterioration or whether it is a fated drift towards disruption is a question of the profoundest moment to an English writer, but it is one that it is impossible to discuss properly within the limits of this Outline. But even at its worst it is open to question whether the British rule in India does not compare favourably with any other domination of one entirely remote and alien civilization by another. What is wrong is not so much that Britain rules India and Egypt, but that any civilized country should be ruled by the legislature of another, and that there should be no impartial court of appeal in the world yet to readjust this arrangement.[1]
- ↑ All intelligent Englishmen or Englishwomen with a vote owe it to the Empire and themselves to read at least one book dealing with India or Egypt from the native point of view. For India, Lajpat Rai's Political Future of India is to be recommended. A compact book running counter to the views in this text, and giving the Church missionary point of view, is the Rev. W. E. S. Holland's Goal of India. William Archer's India and the Future is an interesting display of the temperamental clash of a Nordic writer with things Dravidian. It sustains the argument that even the most high-minded Nordic type cannot be trusted to govern other races sympathetically. (See also in that matter Archer's In Afro-America.) The Aga Khan's India in Transition gives very admirably the views of a liberal Indian gentleman. Sidney Low's A Vision of India is still not yet superseded as a picture of India in 1905-6, when the present stir was only brewing.
