Develop India 127 



great staples, so that not much fiscal intervention by way 

 of bonus or customs duties, or secret parallel concessions, 

 suffices to ruin the exposed individual and to armour-plate 

 his antagonist. The German statesmen had their eyes 

 skinned, where the English statesmen suftered from the 

 cataract of Cobdenite casuistry. We want arrangements 

 with India for the hides and skins and with Burma for 

 the rice. Everything else — tanneries, mills, and all — is 

 ready. 



" British copra, crushed in Germany, the oilcake remain- 

 ing there that ought to feed British cattle, to give our people 

 meat and milk, must come to England, by arrangement 

 with the producers, through tlie respective Governments. 

 I do not mean that Government officials shall interfere 

 with things they know nothing about — tanning, boot- 

 making, rice-milling, metal-refining, cattle-feeding, and 

 all the rest. It is true that with long practice customs 

 officials are extremely efficient, conspicuously so in the 

 United States and Canada, in receiving, checking, valuing, 

 and controlling imports and exports of all kinds. Yet they 

 have nothing to do with procuring, handling, manufacture, 

 or ultimate disposition of the goods. Through the Depart- 

 ment of Trade and Customs in each Oversea state all 

 arrangements can be made." 



Concluding this section of his paper, which I hope 

 everyone will study in the original, Mr. Beale went on to 

 sum up in these words : — 



" The proposal to carry Germany again on our back after 

 the War, plus her Allies, no matter under what guise, or 

 impulse, or form of words that proposal be made, must be 

 rejected. A favourite phrase is, ' There must be no 

 boycott of the enemy.' Lord Lansdowne goes so far as to 

 propose that materials should flow freely in their former 

 channels ! It will not be a question of boycott, but simply 

 whether we shall exclude our suffering friends in order to 

 restore and enrich their cruel foes. In the midst of their 

 rapine, carnage, lust, and perfidy, are British hands to be 

 held out to the Huns with promises of conciliation and 

 level treatment ? " 



It is also as well to remember, as a Japanese writer 

 reminded us as recently as March 24, 1918, in the London 

 Observer, that German agents have been working in India 

 from the very beginning of the War, in order, as is well 

 known, to create sedition. Such a menace, and all these 

 dangers, will be warded off if there were to arise a 

 reconstructed Russia, able to give resistance to German 



