I BELIEVE that it is our duty not only to govern India well now for our own sakes and to satisfy our own conscience, but so to arrange its government and so to administer it that we should look forward to the time when India will have to take up her own government, and administer it in her own fashion.*
By doing this, I think we should be endeavouring to make amends for the original crime upon which much of our power in India is founded,* and for the many mistakes which have been made by men whose intentions have been good. If we seek thus to deal with those millions, and men in after ages condemn our fathers for the policy which for the time bound India to England,* they may award praise to us and to those who come after us for that we have striven to give them that good government and that freedom which He who is supreme over all lands and all peoples will in His own good time make the possession of all His children.
abridged
* Bright did not think this could be done straightaway. Although he recognised that his proposal for moving towards six or seven strong and independent states was controversial, “that would be a thousand times better than our being withdrawn from it now when there is no coherence amongst those twenty nations, and when we should find the whole country, in all probability, lapse into chaos and anarchy, and into sanguinary and interminable warfare.”
* Bright had said earlier, “the empire has been built up by means which I am afraid have been instrumental in building up almost all great empires, by ambition, and crime, and conquest.” Bright was of course not so naive as to suppose that rival European Powers in India such as the French, the Dutch or the Portuguese would have done better, or left India alone. “There is nothing in the world more clear than this,” Bright added a little later, “that India is essentially a country at this moment of great and abject poverty, and that the reputation of its wealth has only been founded upon the fact that it is a country which marauders have always found it easy to plunder.”
* One such critic in Bright’s own day was Major Thomas Evans Bell, a former employee of the East India Company. When Bell went on a speaking tour of the USA, Bright wrote to him a strongly-worded letter telling him that if Bell wanted to help India, instead of scolding the British for yesterday’s mistakes he might like to scold the Americans for today’s high tariffs on Indian trade. See The Righting of Wrongs.