I

INTRODUCTORY

Now we are faced with the greatest and the grimmest struggle of all. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, not amongst men, but amongst nations - great and small, powerful and weak, exalted and humble, -equality, fraternity, amongst peoples as well as amongst men that is the challenge which has been thrown to us. . . . My appeal to the people of this country, and, if my appeal can reach beyond it, is this, that we should continue to fight for the great goal of international right and international justice, so that never again shall brute force sit on the throne of justice, nor barbaric strength wield the sceptre of right.

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE

"Causes and Aims of the War." Speech delivered at Glasgow, on being presented with the freedom of that city, June 29, 1917

WE are told that the world is going to be reconstructed on entirely new lines; that all nations, big or small, shall be allowed the right of self-determination; that the weaker and backward peoples will no longer be permitted to be exploited and dominated by the stronger and the more advanced nations of the earth; and that justice will be done to all. "What we seek," says President Wilson, "is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.”

The Indian people also form a part of the world that needs reconstructing. They constitute one-fifth of the human race, and inhabit about two million square miles of very fertile and productive territory. They have been a civilized people for thousands of years, though their civilization is a bit different from that of the West. We advisedly say "a bit different," because in fundamentals that civilization has the same basic origin as that of Greece and Rome, the three peoples having originally sprung from the same stock and their languages, also, being of common descent. For the last 150 years, or (even) more, India has been ruled by Great Britain. Her people have been denied any determining voice in the management of their own affairs. For over thirty years or more they have carried on an organized agitation for an autonomous form of Government within the British Empire. This movement received almost no response from the responsible statesmen of the Empire until late in the In the meantime some of the leaders grew sullen and downhearted, and, under the influence of bitter disappointment and almost of despair, took to revolutionary forms. The bulk of the people, however, have kept their balance and have never faltered in their faith in peaceful methods. When the war broke out the people of India at once realized the world significance of this titanic struggle and in no uncertain voice declared their allegiance to the cause of the Allies. Our masters, however, while gratefully accepting our economic contributions and utilizing the standing Indian army, spurned our offers for further military contributions. In the military development of the Indians they saw a menace to their supremacy in India.

war.

The Russian Revolution first, and then the entry of the United States into the War, brought about a change in the point of view of the British statesmen. For the first time they realized that they could not win the war without the fullest coöperation of the people of India, both in the military and the economic sense and that the fullest coöperation of the United States also required as a condition precedent, quite a radical revision of their war aims. President Wilson's political idealism, his short, pithy and epigrammatic formulas compelled similar declarations by Allied statesmen. The British statesmen, at the helm of affairs, found it necessary to affirm their faith in President Wilson's principles and formulas if they would not let the morale of their own people at home suffer in comparison. In the meantime the situation in India was becoming uncomfortable. The Nationalists and the Home Rulers insisted on a clear and unequivocal declaration of policy on the lines of President Wilson's principles. The British statesmen in charge of Indian affairs, at Whitehall, were still temporizing when the report of the Royal Commission on the causes of the Mesopotamia disaster burst out on the halfdazed British mind like a bombshell. To the awakening caused by the report and its disclosures a material contribution was made by the outspoken, candid and clear-cut speech of a younger statesman, whose knowledge of the working of the Indian Government could not be questioned. When the Parliament, press and platform were all ablaze with indignation and shame at the supposed incompetence of the Indian Government, to whose inefficiency and culpable neglect of duty were ascribed the series of disasters

that ended with the surrender of a British force at Kut-el-amara, Mr. Edwin Samuel Montagu, who had been an Under Secretary for India under Lord Morley and was at the time of the Mesopotamia disaster Minister of Munitions, came out with a strong and emphatic condemnation of the system and the form of Government under which the "myriads" of India lived and had their affairs managed. Mr. Montagu's opinion of the machinery of the Indian Government was expressed as follows:

"The machinery of Government in this country with its unwritten constitution, and the machinery of Government in our Dominions has proved itself sufficiently elastic, sufficiently capable of modification, to turn a peace-pursuing instrument into a war-making instrument. It is the Government of India alone which does not seem capable of transformation, and I regard that as based upon the fact that the machinery is statute-ridden machinery. The Government of India is too wooden, too iron, too inelastic, too antediluvian, to be any use for the modern purposes we have in view. I do not believe that anybody could ever support the Government of India from the point of view of modern requirements. But it would do. Nothing serious had happened since the Indian mutiny, the public was not interested in Indian affairs, and it required a crisis to direct attention to the fact that the Indian Government is an indefensible system of Government."

Regarding the Indian Budget Debates in Parliament, he said:

"Does anybody remember the Indian Budget Debates before the War? Upon that day the House was always empty. India did not matter, and the Debates were left to people on the one side whom their enemies sometimes called "bureaucrats," and