This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ...rates of pay may have to be slightly augmented in some cases, but the abundant supply of indigenous ability which is now available ought to be used to keep down unnecessarily high salaries. An economical Government is one of the necessities of a country like India, where practically the whole of the people five at bare subsistence levels. The traditional glamour of the nabob is rather old now, and at no time did it belong to the eternal fitness of things. Every branch of the public service should have as its standard of pay an Indian and not a foreign level, and the allowances that have to be given to foreign administrators should be liberal, but be regarded as extra, so as not to affect normal scales. The pay we give to our administrators is purely artificial from the point of view of India (whatever it may be 1 Whoever looks only at the salaries paid does a grave injustice to the officers who receive them, and I wish to make it clear that I have some conception of the expenditure which they have to meet. from our own). Thus far we have wrought India much harm, and this is a reform which self-government would do well to make. But the expense of a foreign Government is not only great as regards its salaries, but also great, and far more grievous, as regards its pensions. Upon civil and military pensions alone the Indian tax-payer has to find for claimants living in England something like £3,500,000 to £4,000,000 each year. And these dead charges under a foreign Government are doubly serious, for they are not only drawn from Indian production, but are withdrawn from India itself. The pension paid to a Provincial officer who retires to his native village, or lives in Calcutta or Bombay or Madras, is one thing. The people of India...
