a theosophist, very unlikely to be prejudiced in favour of Britain. He
insists "that loss of life in famine time is infinitesimal compared with
what it used to be." "As for impoverishment," he goes on to say, "we
have poured European capital into the country by scores of millions for
public works and the establishment of factories, and we have enriched
India instead of impoverishing it to an extent that makes the Home
Charges--of which such agitators as Digby always exaggerate the
importance--a mere trifle in the balance." Lord Curzon's statement of
three or four years back was that there were eight hundred and
twenty-five crores of rupees (five hundred and fifty millions sterling)
of buried capital in India; and he might have added the easily
ascertainable fact that the sum is yearly being added to. The
anti-British idea was put forward in 1885 by the late Mr. William Digby,
an ardent supporter of the Congress; the Congress adopted it in one of
its resolutions in 1896, and the idea has lamentably caught on. In 1897
a Conference of Indians resident in London did not mince their language.
In their opinion, "of all the evils and terrible misery that India has
been suffering for a century and a half, and of which the latest
developments are the most deplorable famine and plague arising from
ever-increasing poverty,... the main cause is the unrighteous and
un-British system of Government, which produces an unceasing and ever
increasing bleeding of the country," etc. etc.[43] Such language, such
ideas, do not call for refutation, here at least; they are symptoms only
of a state of mind now prevailing, out of which educated India must
surely grow.

Nor need it be forgotten that the rise of the anti-British feeling was
foreseen and political danger apprehended when the question of English
education for natives of India was under discussion. A former
Governor-General, Lord Ellenborough, declared to a committee of the