“And how do you like our great brown Mother India?” “She does not feed her children.” “That is true. Mother India must come back to the table of the world and learn how things are served by the younger peoples--the sharper-eyed, quicker-handed peoples. You have heard the story, no doubt, that India had once great and profitable industries. Her commercial systems were founded upon mutual service, not upon competition. Then the East India company and England came. ‘Mother India, you are quite absurd,’ said England, and she took away all the mutual benefit industries, and reorganized them again in the true English way. ‘We shall show you how, Mother India,’ she said. India must have been inept, because England never gave them back.” Both men were smiling. “Then you think India famines are the result of British rule?” the man from Syracuse observed. “If I told you that, it would be right for me to explain why I think so. That would take some time, and the night is very hot.” “I came to Rydamphur to learn the truth. Somehow, I believe I shall succeed--if you will tell me what you can, sir.” The stranger’s eyes brightened. “Discussing the matter seriously, it is well to begin with Macaulay’s sentence. ‘The heaviest of all yokes is the yoke of a stranger.’” “You are not an Englishman?” Mr. Jasper asked. “No, but does that signify? Many English have spoken the truth. Edmund Burke said, ‘The Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our protection which destroys India.’ The English historian, Montgomery Martin, wrote that so constant a drain as England’s upon India would impoverish England herself if she were subjected to it. And here reflect that the wage of the laborer, when he gets work, averages but twopence a day. J. I. Sunderland observes, ‘The British have _given_ India railways, jute-mills, tea plantations, and many things else.... The profits go to the British.’ Mr. Sunderland, no doubt, remarks elsewhere about the opium industry. Herbert Spencer declares that it was an arrogant assumption upon the part of the British to accept as a fact that India exists for England. He also characterizes England’s relations to India as a ‘cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection.’” “But we in America,” said Mr. Jasper--“I refer to those who have not looked deeply into the question--even our president, Mr. Roosevelt--have regarded English rule in India as a vast and beneficent system.”