The Chamber of Princes was opened with all the glitter of oriental pomp and magnificence, but it only held a few meetings and the proceedings were veiled in secrecy.  Only enough transpired to show that personal jealousies and clan rivalries were rife even at that early stage.  Its very constitution denies it the assistance for which the Indian Councils and the Indian Ministers have been wise enough to look from the co-operation with them of British elements, whose authority in government and administration is still maintained by statute and so far undisputed.  To the Chamber of Princes the Viceroy alone is in a position to give guidance, and to shape that illustrious assembly to useful purposes is one of the many difficult tasks in front of Lord Reading.

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] At the “stabilised” rate of exchange a crore, or ten million rupees = one million gold pounds sterling.  One hundred lacs make a crore.

CHAPTER XIII

ECONOMIC FACTORS

If the war has wrought great changes in the political life of India, in its status within the Empire and in its constitutional relations with the United Kingdom, it has produced equally important changes in its economic situation and outlook.  The Montagu-Chelmsford Report had not failed to note how largely economic factors entered into the political situation which the Secretary of State and the Viceroy were primarily concerned to study.  India is, and probably must always remain, essentially an agricultural country, and its economics must always suffer from the exceptionally unstable conditions to which, except within the relatively small areas available for irrigation, dependence upon a precarious rainfall condemns even the most industrious agricultural population.  Many circumstances had combined to retard the development of its vast natural resources and the growth of modern manufacturing industries.  Few British administrators during the last half-century had realised their importance as Lord Dalhousie had done before the Mutiny, until Lord Curzon created a special department of commerce and industry in the Government of India.  The politically minded classes, whose education had not trained them to deal with such questions, were apt to lose themselves in such blind alleys as the “doctrine of drain.”  But as they perceived how largely dependent India was on foreign countries for manufactured goods, whilst her own domestic industries had been to a great extent crushed in hopeless competition with the products of the much more highly organised and equipped industries of European countries, they rushed to the conclusion that an industrial revival might be promoted by a crude boycott of foreign imported goods which would at the same time serve as a manifestation of their political discontent.  The Swadeshi movement failed, as it was bound to fail.  But failure intensified