If India must now forgo this tribute from China, it is not at any rate the fault of the Government of India that the whole cost of the awakening of the national conscience in England to the iniquity of the opium traffic is being thrown upon India.
The question is not whether we have done well, but whether we might not have done better, and whether the economic development of India, industrial, commercial, and agricultural, has kept pace with that of the rest of the world. If the answer in this case is more doubtful, we have to bear in mind the idiosyncrasies of the Indian people and especially of the educated classes. Indians have been as a rule disinclined to invest their money in commerce or industry or in scientific forms of agriculture. It is estimated that the hoarded wealth of India amounts, at a conservative calculation, to £300,000,000, and this probably represents gold alone. The annual absorption of gold by India is very great. Lord Rothschild remarked to the Currency Commission that none of the smooth gold bars sent to India ever came back. There is, in addition, an enormous sum hoarded in silver rupees and silver ornaments. It is no uncommon sight, in the cities of Upper India, to see a child wearing only one ragged, dirty garment, but loaded with massive silver ornaments. Indians who have money and do not merely hoard it prefer to lend it out, often at usurious rates of interest, to their needy or thriftless fellow-countrymen. Until quite recently the educated classes have held almost entirely aloof from any but the liberal professions. Science in any form has been rarely taken up by University students, and for every B.Sc. the honours lists have shown probably a hundred B.A.'s. The Indian National Congress itself, as it represented mainly those classes, naturally displayed the same tendencies, and for a long time it devoted its energies to so-called political problems rather than to practical economic questions. Hence the almost complete failure of the Western-educated Indian to achieve any marked success in commercial and industrial undertakings, and nowhere has that failure been more complete than in Bengal, where it would be difficult to quote more than one really brilliant exception. Hence also no doubt some of the political bitterness which those classes display. Within the last few years, however, the politician has realized that, whilst commercial and industrial development was steadily expanding and the demand for it was increasing on all sides, he was left standing on a barren shore. He has done his best, or rather his worst, to convert _Swadeshi_ into a political weapon. His efforts have only been temporarily and partially successful. But we may rest assured that long after this spurious political _Swadeshi_ has disappeared, the legitimate form of _Swadeshi_ will endure--the _Swadeshi_ that does not boycott imported goods merely because they come from England, but is bent on stimulating the production in India of articles of the same or of better quality which can be sold cheaper, and can, therefore, beat the imported goods in the Indian markets.