I do not say the Noble Lord admitted that it was due to military operations, but I want him to deny that it was. Perhaps I am not putting my point very clearly. I have never yet heard a Conservative Government tell a Conservative working man that a vote for them meant a payment of 6d. in taxation on every ounce of tobacco that he bought. It is only when he is up against the proposition of denying it that we have any kind of sport at all. Here is an article, written by a candidate for the Nobel peace prize, His Highness the Aga Khan. I do not suppose the Noble Lord would denounce him as a Bolshevist agitator from the backwoods of Madras. He won a race the other day, and is hoping to win another. This gentlemen, one of the greatest ruling princes in India, has contributed to one of your big Sunday papers a four-column article. Here is what he says: I do not write in defence of the Parliamentary Members of India, but I would point out that the core of the Indian case is this. The greater part of the expenditure of the central authority being for military purposes, and the Legislature having no control whatever over this expenditure, it was felt that the whole budgetary provisions should be rejected in the spirit of the man who says, 'you have taken the cream and we do not want the skimmed milk.' He goes on to say: The Indian argument is that excessive defensive insurance is imposed upon her willy nilly in time of peace, and that she is required to make her preparations on a much wider wale proportionate to her resources than is made in Great Britain. It is an article which ought to have been read by every Member of the House who is attempting to understand what are the basic causes behind the unrest in India. I do not want the sneer levelled at me that I have never been in India. It has been levelled at me and at others, and we have lived to see that those who claim to be experts on other countries where people are struggling to be free have had to admit that, in spite of all their martial law, in spite of all the burdens put upon the British taxpayer to keep order by martial law, they have found that on the withdrawal of martial law and with the autonomy of the people, as occurred in Egypt, there has been a cessation of rioting, and there is peace now where you never had it any day or at any moment under the imposition of martial law. Therefore I have not any great faith in a person who says. "I know all about it because I have been there." I want to ask either the representatives of the British Government or those who wish to defend the imposition of the Salt Tax to answer the points that have been put. My hon. Friend has put a series of figures dealing with the standard of living of the Indian miner. I have given a few figures dealing with the standard of living of the textile workers. If it were necessary I could give further figures proving what exactly is the standard of living and what exactly is the rate of profit. I do not want to do that, but there are many reasons that could be adduced as to why the wages are low. One very relevant reason is given in an extract from a financial paper published in Calcutta. Labour troubles have moderated considerably. The Gurkha is an immediate cure for all labour troubles. The desire of evil-doers, even in our own Legislative Council, to get rid of them (the military) is a great tribute to their efficiency. Wherever there is an attempt to raise the standard of living, the Gurkha is brought in. That is the evidence from the financial paper of Calcutta. There are other financial journals which we could quote if there were time and need, and we will recite the quotations if any hon. Member opposite desires to make out that the British capitalist in India is striving against loss, and merely continues his investment in order to provide food and shelter for the Indian workers. The potential investor in India, like the investor in British railways in pre-War days, is always referred to either as a widow or an orphan urgently in need of dividends.

I hope that when a reply is made to the indictment put forward by my hon. Friend who moved the Motion, we shall get down to relevancies. The immediate urgency of the argument is that the British Labour Government are in a position to wipe out the doubling of the salt tax resisted by the whole Indian Parliament, and only imposed upon them by the act of authority expressly provided for by the Coalition Government in the framework of the Government of India Act, 1919. By the doubling of the salt tax there has been put upon the shoulders of the Indian people a burden of indirect taxation out of wages. They are paying Income Tax out of the miserable amount of £,1 13s. 4d. per month, and even out of the miserable wages of the miner of 7d. per day. When they buy their salt they have to pay out of these miserable wages double the amount of tax that they paid before the War. Every manifestation of protest on the part of the people is denounced as a Bolshevik tendency which ought to be put down.

I want to draw attention to the phenemona of latter-day politics. During the War the Indian soldier, the Sikh, the Pathan, and all the men who are now denounced as murderous revolutionaries were taken to France, and for the first time in the history of British rule they were taught to fight as white men and were taught that they were equal to white men. They were taught to suffer and die in France and Flanders like white men, and for the first time in the history of the Indian soldier they were given to understand that they were as good as the white men with whom they were fighting. There are photographs, which can be produced, of Indian soldiers coming back wounded and being taken to Brighton and sent to convalescent homes for Indian soldiers. After being treated on terms of equality with white men, after fighting and dying on terms of equality with white men, you ask these men to leave Western ideas and customs aside, to forget all the glimpses that they had of an advanced status, and to go back to the old conceptions and the old ideas of pre-War days. It cannot be done, and it will not be done. Chains are bursting all over the world, and the people who stand in the way of those chains are likely to be hurt.

My best wishes go out to the Indian people, not in any attempt to achieve anything by violence, but in a reasonable attempt to get from the British Labour Government an immediate examination of the conditions of those who work for wages, and, as a result of working for wages, what is the amount of their contribution to the upkeep of the military commitments in India. That is the least that the British Labour Government can do. We hope that it will follow out what the Secretary of State for India said in the other House in relation to the Salt Tax. He said: The Government of India decided that it was necessary they should, balance their Budget and that they could not balance their Budget without doubling the Salt Tax. When the Assembly threw out the Resolution doubling the Salt Tax, the Government of India had to certify, as is provided in the case of certain Crown Colonies as well as India, that this was essential in the public interest and that that Resolution must become law. That produced an unfortunate effect in India, as that kind of action always does. In my own experience, whenever it has been had recourse to in the Colonies, it has been held to be a direct slap in the face and stultification of what the elected Members in India and elsewhere consider to be the first principle of democratic government, that you shall not have taxation without representation and that the representatives of the people should decide in matters of taxation. Here is something which the Under-Secretary of State for India might very well answer. We feel very anxious about the continued bearing of these burdens by our comrades in India, for this reason, that we know that whether it be in Germany, in Japan, in India, in France or elsewhere, if the standard of living of the workers in any part of the world is cut down it inevitably leads to the standard being cut down here. I would ask hon. Members opposite, whether they would refute the authority of the Presidential address at the 7th Indian Economic Conference held in Bombay in January, 1924, delivered by the late Sir M. Visvesvaraya. This gentleman, giving an idea of what is happening, said: The monthly income of the Indian people, I have just stated, is rupees 5 per head, or an equivalent of 7s. 6d. per head. This is the average, but the income of the poorest classes is of course much lower than this. The masses of the population are steeped in poverty bordering on destitution, poverty to which there is no parallel in Western countries. You will agree that a people with so low a record of literacy as 6 per cent. and so poor an income as rupees 5 per head per month cannot be said to be equipped for the struggle for existence, and yet our late Governor, Sir George Lloyd, in a speech he made in November last, before a meeting of the Associated Chambers in Bombay, read the situation in a very different light. Said Sir George: 'The more closely the situation is examined, the more amazed does the student become, not at India's poverty, but at her prosperity and wealth!' I should like at this point to read an apt quotation from a speech made at a meeting of the Burmah Oil Company held at Glasgow. The meeting had been convened to discuss the iniquities of the Capital Levy, and Mr. G. L. Moore said: I have come all the way from London to be present at this meeting, and I should feel myself full of ingratitude if I had not come, because I have made a sum of £20,000 within the last few months out of the Burmah Oil Company alone. (Laughter and applause.) And, Mr. Chairman, with the four shares that you give me now for every five shares held by me, I have about 900 shares that have cost me nothing. (Laughter.) I study a thing and work in scientific fashion so that loss is impossible. [An HON. MEMBER: "A system!"] Systematic exploitation. Therefore, I hope the Under-Secretary will deal with all this evidence and give us some indication that the Secretary of State for India or the Government have under consideration the calling of this Royal Commission to inquire into the working of the Act and, if necessary, to make some alteration before 10 years. Mr. Montagu himself laid down that it would be possible within the framework of that Act to take action before 10 years. I submit that the problem of to-day is pressing. You are driving men into the action which is always taken by men in despair. When they have no articulate voice in the counsels of the nation they are driven into all kinds of assemblies which may be regrettable but which none the less are legal. I have no sympathy with the Communist movement in any part of the world. The Communists are striving for my defeat in the Dartford Division of Kent unceasingly, but the Communist party of Great Britain, or Germany, or Russia or India are perfectly legal assemblies. I want the Under-Secretary of State for India to bear in mind the answer which he gave to a question, not orally, on which he could be further questioned, but in a written answer to the Noble Lord the Member for Horsham (Earl Winterton). The Noble Lord asked: What are the actual terms of the charge in the cases now being heard at Cawnpore against certain persons accused of sedition and in what Court is the case being taken? The Under-Secretary of State for India replied: The accused persons are charged of conspiracy to deprive the King of the Sovereignty of British India, an offence punishable under Section 121A of the Indian Penal Code. I would like to make it quite clear that the accused persons are not being prosecuted merely for holding Communist views"— I would ask the Under-Secretary to analyse that sentence. Does he mean that part of the prosecution is because they hold those views, and if not why did he make that statement? or carrying on Communistic propaganda. They are charged with having conspired to secure by violent revolution the complete separation of India from Imperialistic Britain."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 12th May, 1924; col. 944, Vol. 173.] 9.0 P.M.

So far as I and my friends are concerned, they know full well that the man who is despised in India because he is moderate is laughed to scorn in this House as an extremist. The men whose candidature in India was met by the native population with the counter-candidature of goats with things tied to their tails, as symbolising the kind of candidate they thought fit to oppose these men because they were constitutionalists and loyalists and wanted a gradual evolution within the framework of the British Constitution, are, when they come here or speak or write, condemned as irresponsible agitators by people who play into the hands of the extremists by every damping down of national aspiration. We have been turning out for two generations at Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow and Edinburgh young men who have graduated in every kind of science. They go back to India and they find the same thing that we found in Egypt, that always the best jobs are reserved for those eldest sons of certain people, and that always national aspirations are repressed, and always it is said that India or some other country is not ready. You may as well say to a young mother that she must not put her firstborn on the ground, because the baby is bound to fall over. Her reply would be, "If I do not put him on the ground he will never learn to walk."

The Indians, like every other race, are bound to make mistakes in their evolutions towards self-government, but it is our duty to help and not to hinder but to take, such action as will rob them of any incentive to go in for those short cuts which lead nowhere. The kind of propaganda that is going on in India, the alternative to the kind of plea that every representative man is making, can only end in disaster, and ultimately, not only in disaster to India, but in putting tremendous expense on the taxpayers of Great Britain, and in the losing of an enormous number of valuable lives in putting down disorder. It is because I feel, and all my colleagues on this side of the House feel, that this is a subject which should be met promptly and wisely, and, above all, with the entire certainty that it will give the Indian people confidence in the first British Labour Government, that I desire to second this Motion.