Part 18

Yet it sounded very familiar to me. Indeed, I had listened to much the same story of suppressions, rather worse suppressions, the night before. Then I had been the host of two friends of mine, Mr. Houssain and Mr. Sapre, who have had extensive experiences of suppression in India. They are both here in much the same spirit as the Coreans.

Whenever I talk to Mr. Houssain we always get to a sort of polite quarrel in which he treats me more and more like the Indian Government in its defense, and I become more and more like the British ascendancy. I adopt, almost inadvertently, as much as is adoptable of the manner and tone of the late Lord Cromer and say: “Yes, yes. But are you ripe for self-government?” These gentlemen say frankly that the British rule in India has displayed so much stupidity in such cases as the Amritsar massacre, and the recent suffocation of the Moplah prisoners, and that its complete suppression of any frank public discussion of Indian affairs in India is so intolerable, that it is becoming unendurable.

Everybody is talking of insurrection in India now; nobody talked of it three years ago. These have been three years of stupid “firmness.” Now that that dinner party is past and gone, I can confess that I think Mr. Houssain’s argument that under British rule India has no chance of getting politically educated, because she is prevented from airing her ideas, and that if her discontent is incoherent and disorderly it is because of the complete suppression, completer now than ever before, of discussion, is a very strong argument indeed.

India and Britain cannot talk together about their common future if India remains gagged and without ever a chance of learning to talk. If a break comes in India it is likely to be a bad and hopeless one, because of her lack of worked-out political conceptions, due to her long mental restraint, while all the rest of the world from Corea to Peru has been trying over political self-expression.

But it is interesting and perhaps not quite so pathetically hopeless as it seems at the first glance to find these two men in this city, side by side with the Coreans, trying to get “something done about it” at the Washington assembly. And a day or so ago I had a call from another unofficial delegate, a Syrian Moslem who wanted to talk over the education of his people, also fretting beneath the wide surfaces of the Treaty of Versailles, with the ambition to manage the affairs of Syria for themselves.

And as another case of the stifled voice here are the representatives of the Cantonese Chinese Government, who made a scene the other day when the Peking representatives went into secret session with the Japanese. There was an assembly of hostile Chinese shouting “Traitor!” and things—apparently very disagreeable things—in Chinese. Here again there is a clamor for attention that gets short drift from the official conference.

And, lest these stifled outcries should fill the American reader with self-righteousness, I will note in passing that the entrance to the second plenary conference was besieged by an array of banners reminding us that that evidently most gentle and worthy man, Mr. Debs, is still in prison for saying his honest thought about conscription, and also that I have received, I suppose, over twenty letters about an unfortunate young Englishman, a minor poet named Mr. Charles Ashleigh, who seems to have come into America looking like a person of advanced views, to have done some publicity work for the I. W. W., and to have been caught in a gale of indiscriminate suppression and given a sentence of ten years for nothing at all. The offense of Mr. Debs and the alleged offense of Mr. Ashleigh, I may note further, were a premature craving for universal peace which might have weakened the will for war.

All these suppressions of opinion strike me as black sins against civilization, which can only maintain itself and grow and flourish through the free expression and discussion of ideas. The temptation to ride off from the main business of the conference upon some Quixotic championship of Corea or India or Mr. Ashleigh is therefore very considerable. But when we consider that all these particular injustices are incidents in that general disorder which permits the aggression of nation upon nation and which blinds justice with cruel passion and urgent necessities of war, these cases appear in a different light.

Corea and the suppressed and imprisoned Indian Liberals and Mr. Ashleigh are like people hit casually in a great combat, and the immediate work of the ordinary combatant is surely not to specialize upon these special cases but to go on with the general fight for world peace which will render the atmosphere that created these particular wrongs impossible. Japan is attempting to crush and assimilate Corea because Japan wants to be bigger and stronger, and she wants to be bigger and stronger because of the fear of war and humiliation. Britain holds down India and is reluctant to loose her hold on Ireland for the same cause; if she relax, some one else may seize and use. America also crushes out the anti-conscriptionist because otherwise he may embarrass the conduct of the next war.

In the present conference the liberal forces of the world may be able to establish a precedent that will at once reflect upon the position of both Corea and India, and to open such a prospect of peace as will make the release of Messrs. Debs and Ashleigh inevitable. But that can only be if we stick to the main business of the conference and do not fuss things up at present with too much focusing upon Corea or India or the case of Mr. Debs.

The precedent that may be established through the conference is the liberation of China, when China is militarily impotent and politically disordered, not only from fresh foreign aggression but from existing foreign domination. The establishment of such a precedent is a thing of supreme importance to all men. If the conference does not get so far as that—so far as to establish the principle that an Asiatic people has a right to control its own destinies and to protection while it adjusts these destinies, in spite of the fact that it cannot as an efficient power defend that right—it will have made a very wide step indeed not only toward world peace but toward a general liberation of Asiatic peoples held in tutelage.

It is so important to mankind that that step should be made that I grudge any diversion of energy to minor injustices, however glaring, or any complication of the issue whatever. So far as the conference goes, I am convinced that “Stick to the freedom of China” is the watchword for all liberal thinkers. By the extent to which China is liberated and secured the conference will have to be judged. Even the vast problem of India cannot overshadow that issue.

XXIII INDIA, THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS

Washington, Dec. 7.

It is difficult to think of any subject more completely out of the agenda of the Washington Conference than the future of India. But none demands our attention more urgently, if we are to build up anything like a working conception of an Association of Nations.

Some days ago Senator Johnson declared he had received assurances from President Harding that no further steps toward a definite organization of an Association of Nations were to be taken for the present; but these assurances will not hinder the drift of thoughts and events toward such a developing system of understandings as must at last, in fact if not in name, constitute a World Association. Indeed, the less we try to fix such a thing at present, and the more we think it out, the more probable and safe is its coming.

Let the President go on, therefore, taking no steps directly toward his Association but proceeding, as he must do very soon, with some sort of international conference upon the economic disorders of the world, and also with the creation of some arrangement, permanent understanding or whatever other name may be given to that commission which is inevitable if the peace of the Pacific is to be made secure. Let us who are dealers in the flimsier preparatory stuff of ideas and public opinion get on with our discussion of the wider stabilizing understanding that looms behind.

I have already said that from every country world peace and universal prosperity will demand a price. The price America will need to pay if she is to impose her conception of a universal peace upon the world is a great intellectual effort—an effort of sympathy, an abandonment of some venerated traditions. And in addition she must nerve herself to what may seem at first very great financial generosities. France must pay by laying aside an ancient and cherished quarrel, her glorious and tragic militarism and the last vestige of her imperial ambition. The thought of predominance and the thought of revenge must be the German sacrifice. And Britain also must pay in an altered attitude to those wide “possessions” of hers inhabited by alien peoples that have hitherto constituted the bulk of her empire.

The destiny of all the English speaking democracies that have risen now from being British colonies to semi-independent states seems fairly clear. They will go on to nationhood; their links to Great Britain, continually less formal and legal and more and more strongly sympathetic, will be supplemented by their attraction toward America, due to affinity and a common character. All the mischief makers in the world cannot, I think, prevent the Dutch-English of South Africa, the English-French of Canada, the English-French of Australia, the English-Scotch of New Zealand, the Americans, this new emancipated Ireland and Britain, being drawn together at last by all their common habits of thought and speech, and even by the mellowed memories of their past conflicts, into a conscious brotherhood of independent but co-operative nations.

The day has come for the Irish to recognize that the future is of more value than the past. Even without any other states, this girdle of English speaking states about the globe could be of a great predominant association. Within this English speaking circle of peoples a whole series of experiments in separation, independent action, readjustment, co-operation and federation have been made in the last century and a half, and are still going on, of the utmost significance in the problem of human association.

No other series of communities have had such experiences. No other communities have so much to give mankind in these matters. The German coalescences have been marred by old methods of force, methods which have usually failed in the English cases. Spain and Latin America are at least half a century behind the English speaking world in the arts and experience of political co-operation.

But when we turn to India we turn to something absolutely outside the English speaking world girdle.

One of the many manifest faults of that most premature project the League of Nations was the fiction that brought in India as a self-governing nation, as if she were the same sort of thing as these self-governing Western states. It was indeed a most amazing assumption. India is not a nation, or anything like a nation. India is a confused variety of states, languages and races, and so far from being self-governing, her peoples are under an amount of political repression which is now perhaps greater there than anywhere else in the world.

Politically she is a profound mystery. We do not know what the political thoughts of these peoples are, nor indeed whether they have in the mass any political concepts at all parallel to those of the Western civilizations. The Indian representative at the Washington Conference, Mr. Srinivastra Sastri, is obviously a British nominee; he is not so much a representative as a specimen Indian gentleman. We do not know what national forces there are behind him, or indeed if there is any collective will behind him at all. But it would be hard to substitute for him anything very much more representative.

What constituency is there, what Electoral College, to send any one? India is not in fact so constituted as to send a real representative to a conference or an Association of Nations at the present time. She is a thing of a different kind, a different sort of human accumulation. She belongs to a different order of creature from the English speaking and European states and from Japan. She is as little fitted to deal on equal terms with them as a jungle deer, let us say, is to join a conference of the larger Cetacea in the North Polar seas.

India is far less able to play an effective and genuine part as a member of an Association of Nations even than China. She has no real democratic institutions and she may never develop them in forms familiar to European and American minds. We American and English are too apt to suppose that our own democratic methods, our voting and elections and debates and press campaigns and parliamentary methods, which have grown up through long ages to suit our peculiar idiosyncracies, are necessarily adaptable to all the world. In India they may prove altogether misfitting.

India, were she given freedom of self-government, under the stimulus of modern appliances and modern thought, would probably induce an entirely different series of institutions from those of Europe, institutions perhaps equally conducive to freedom and development but different in kind. And China also, with untrammelled initiatives, may invent methods of freedom and co-operation at once dissimilar and parallel to Western institutions.

But the mention of China brings us back to the possibility of applying the precedent of China to India. The discussions and perplexities of the last two or three years which have culminated in the Washington Conference have slowly worked out and made clear the possibility of a new method in Asia. This is the method of concerted abstinence and withdrawal, the idea of a binding agreement of all the nations interested in China and tempted to make aggressions upon China to come out of and to keep out of that country while it consolidated itself and develops upon its own lines.