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 i