[Sidenote: Illustrations of the bias: Famines.]
An outstanding illustration of the anti-British spirit is the frequently expressed opinion that the Indian famines are a result of British rule, or at all events have been aggravated thereby. The reasoning is that India is being financially drained to the amount of between thirty and forty millions sterling a year, and that the people of India have thus no staying fund to keep them going when famine comes. Having said this, we ought perhaps to quote the opinion (1903), on the other side, of Mr. A.P. Sinnett, ex-editor of one of the leading Indian newspapers, and, as 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.