_India in America._ Here in the United States of America the attention paid to Indian affairs by the American press, has elicited long statements by British statesmen in connection with their rule in India. The Secretary of State for India, the Under Secretary of State for India, the Viceroy, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, the Finance Minister have all granted interviews to American correspondents, assuring the latter of the marvellous progress India is making under British rule, of the prosperity and loyalty of India and of the extreme unimportance of the Nationalist party. Judged from these interviews India must be a very paradise on earth--a garden of Eden. Most of the statements are vague and misleading, containing half truths and suppressing important facts. I will pick up one statement for purposes of illustration. The Finance Minister of India is reported to have said: “So far from the people of India groaning under an enormous burden of taxation India is one of the most lightly taxed countries on the face of the earth.... The total Revenue, Imperial and Provincial, for the current year amounted to £86,500,000 and this sum distributed among the 244,000,000 people of British India gave a resultant contribution per capita of only seven shillings.” Now at best this is only a half truth. The Finance Minister should have added that the total income of India is about £600,000,000 a year, bringing the average per capita to £2 a year. Seven shillings out of £2 a year is perhaps the heaviest tax paid by any country on the face of the earth. Equally misleading are other statements about land tax, etc., which I am noticing in my new book dealing with Economic Effects of British Rule in India which is going to the press soon. The writer is also establishing a kind of Bureau in New York, where all kinds of information, political, economic, legal, commercial, etc., relating to India will be supplied to the American public. LAJPAT RAI. New York, 19th January, 1917. P. S. Since the above was written the newspapers have reported that the British Government have decided to raise a war loan of $500,000,000 in India as a “free gift” to Great Britain. Free gift, indeed! Where the donor and the donee are the same--a free gift by a people vast numbers of whom do not get two meals a day and have an average income of ten dollars a year. Imperialism, wonderful are thy feats!!! NOTE: The _Manchester Guardian_, March 13, 1917, comments as follows upon the war loan mentioned in the above P. S., the italics being mine: