BRITISH RULE IN INDIA.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume XLIX, Issue 12630, 18 October 1905, Page 5

BRITISH RULE IN INDIA.

A somewhat notable article appears <'n the " Nineteenth Century " from the pen of his Highness Aga Khan, G.C'I.E., who apologises quite unnecessarily .for his English composition. What is notable in it is the spontaneous tribute which the writer pays to the efficacy and value of British rule in India. The subject he discusses is the defence of our Empire in Asia, which he has studied for more than eight years, and while so doing has mad© himself acquainted with the state of political affairs in Arabia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, and Chinese Turkestan. " Knowing the political condition of the people of those countries," he says, " I have been irresistibly led to the conclusion that the maintenance of British rule in India is of vital necessity for the welfare of its 300,000,000 of people," and thus in spite of the fact that there never has been and never j can 'ba any fusion of the subject races with their alien conquerors, such as took place in England, for example, between the Normans and Saxons, after the Conquest. Two methods of protecting India against invasion by Russia or China present themselves. The adoption, on the one hiand, of what is known as a "forward policy," which would make the boundaries of British India and of these two empires coterminous, and the interposition on the other of a wide neutral zone —really independent buffer States—between them. Aga Khan avows his strong preference for tih© latter method, and advances arguments 'in its favour which are not only cogent but almost unanswerable. And when putting^ forward theso he makes the gratifying statement that in the opinion of the majority of the subject, peoples —for, as he reminds us, there is no Indian.'nation at present—the British rule, alien although it be, "is the best of all the Governments that the country has ever possessed, and that under its tutelage India has prospered, and its peoples advanced in a manner unapproached during any period of the past. . . .

" I am firmly convinced," he presently goes on to remark, " that the British Empire is the greatest secular institution on earth, and that the happiness of hundreds of millions, not of the British races, is bound up with that Empire."