WCP1525

[1]

(quote India The Statesman¹

12 Cambridge Road.

Hastings.

Oct. 13. <1880?>²

Dear Mr. Wallace,

I have to thank you very much for your kind letter à propos of my article on India. It adds one more link to the chain of proof which I have long collected, that all evolutionists, and all the higher minds generally, are always on the side of right and justice against wanton oppression. I am very glad indeed to find that we agree so thoroughly on the matter.

As to your remarks about the wrong actually perpetrated by us in India, I know only too much about that question. For three years I was employed [2] by W. W. Hunter,³ Director General of Statistics for India, in collating and working up the District Accounts and other materials in his possession. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Dr. Hunter is the literary white-washer of the Indian Government. In working up the abundant reports and other documents submitted to me, I had plenty of opportunities for realizing what English rule really meant. On the ruin wrought by our land-settlements, especially, I collected a large number of facts and statistics; and I offered John Morley⁴to work them into a paper on "the Indian Cultivator and his Wrongs": but Morley did not care for the subject. The fact is, nobody in England wishes to move in the matter. I sent Knowles⁵ a paper two years ago about the same subject, dealing especially with the [3] Ganges Canal — a vast blunder, bolstered up by cunningly continued balance-sheets, in which deficits are concealed as fresh investments: but he would not take it. I only got this article into the Contemporary by leaving out India, and looking at the question from a purely English point of view. I'm afraid the fact can't be blinked that most Englishmen don't mind oppression, as long as the oppressed people are only blacks. A starling outrage, like the Zulu was, wakes them up for a moment: but chronic and old-standing sores, like India or Barbados, do not affect them.

With renewed thanks for your extremely kind letter, and your suggestion about the Statesman (which I shall certainly look up)

I am, yours very sincerely, | Grant Allen.⁶ [signature]