Scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about Afghanistan [‎67r] (137/312)

T ulIL )\xii
THE BILL FOR THE AFGHAN WAR.
The Government apparently does not think the question where
and by whom the frontier line of the empire shall be drawn
important enough to justify the summoning of a Cabinet Council.
But the methods of communication with one another provided by
the Postmaster-General are as open to them as to the rest of the
Queen's subjects; and a judicious use of them would enable
them to at once lay to rest the impression, which their silence
is allowing to gain ground, that the cost of the Afghan
war is to be borne by India. It is hard to believe that
this is or has been even for a moment the intention of the
Cabinet; but the persistence with which the ministerial journals 1
avoid all reference to the financial side of the question in its
relation to Englishmen is suspicious. If we are wrong in sup
posing that the Government have ever seriously thought of making
India pay the bill, we tender them an apology beforehand ; but, as
they seem in no hurry to disclaim the notion, it would be
unwise to refrain from saying plainly what such a decision would
mean.
To throw the burden of the Afghan war upon India would be
the meanest policy conceivable, if it were not also the maddest.
It is almost saved from being disreputable by the gravity of the
danger incurred in following it. England is a very wealthy country;
India is a very poor country. England is very lightly taxed; India
is very heavily taxed. England, as Mr. Fawcett pointed out
yesterday, can raise ;£ 12,000,000 yearly by a 6d. income tax
and hardly feel the burden ; India by the same expedient
could only raise .£1,200,000, and it would be raised at the risk
of an insurrection. England is steadily paying off her debt;
and the only reason why she does not pay it off more quickly
is that her people prefer to spend their money in other ways;
India has of late been steadily adding to her debt, and seems ;
likely to go on adding to it, merely to meet what may be called
her daily expenses. England commands so vast an area of food
supply that the price of the necessaries of life scarcely vary from
year to year ; India is so frequently visited by famine, and even
now has such an imperfect system of carriage from province to
province, that only an effort on the part of the Government—
extraordinary in the demand it makes on their resources, but
ordinary in the frequency of its recurrence—can prevent
millions of her people from dying of starvation. These are the t
pictures which the two countries severally present; and yet it is
rumoured that, having looked at each, the Government propose
to treat the Afghan war as a matter of purely Indian con
cern. The meanness of such a course lies in this—that it
would be a distinct evasion by the richer country of a liability
which is in the strictest sense her own. This is not a ques- |
tion of helping or not helping India to bear her own burdens ; ■
it is a question of forcing her by dint of superior strength to
undertake a burden which is not hers. No one pretends that if the
Afghan question only concerned Afghanistan, if the only danger
to be apprehended were the hostility of a barbarous ruler or the
raids of a frontier tribe half-brigands and half-soldiers, it would
be necessary to insist upon sending a mission or to provoke such
a refusal as that which has now to be dealt with. If there were no
Russia standing behind the Ameer, he might have been left to
sulk until such time as it pleased him to invite the mission which
the Indian Government would then have had no special desire to
send. The Afghan war has been brought upon India by Imperial
policy; it will be waged in pursuance of Imperial requirements
and to ward off an Imperial danger; and by every consideration
of justice it ought to be paid for out of the Imperial treasury.
In the days when an invasion of England from France was
expected, the Government did not leave it to the counties of Kent
or Sussex to bear the cost of the fortifications constructed to
defend the coast. Yet any reason which can be assigned for
making India bear the cost of invading Afghanistan would have
been equally valid for this purpose. It was in Kent or Sussex
that the landing of the enemy would be attempted ; therefore, as
Kent or Sussex would be the gainers by the security the forts
afforded, let Kent and Sussex pay for building them.^
The madness of applying this principle to India is perhaps
more wonderful than its meanness. After all, it does not need
verv much couraee to do a shabby thine, but it does show courage
of a certain sort to do a fool-hardy one. Whatever India borrows
has to be paid for first or last by the taxation of the people
of India; and about the people of India one thing is per
fectly well known, and another shrewdly suspected. What is
known is that they are very poor ; what is suspected is^ that
they are not inalienably contented under our rule. Why is the
insult which the Ameer has offered to the Government of
India a matter that must be dealt with thus summarily ? Why
do men who " know the country" declare it to be a quarrel that
must be taken up at once? For this _reason—that we cannot
afford to let our Indian subjects think us weak.^ If they
once get to hold this opinion of us, no Indian expert