GREAT BRITAIN: America and India

For six cents the copy, $3.65 a hundred, or $29.15 a thousand, the London Times, most august of journals, offered U. S. citizens a small compact pamphlet last week entitled America and India, by a Dr. Edward John Thompson, to call ”attention to the widely circulated misrepre-sentations which are being offered to the American public as ‘facts’ about India by certain ‘authorities’.”

Ever since 1914, the British Government and British Business have been acutely conscious of the value of U. S. goodwill. Scarcely was the War declared than the elderly Canadian-born British novelist Sir Gilbert (The Seats of the Mighty) Parker arrived in the U. S. and began the backbreaking work of British propaganda in the U. S. which in 1917-18 was to develop into the most tremendous propaganda organization in the world under the late Lord Northcliffe and the master propagandist and secret service organizer, Sir William Wiseman.

British officials have become alarmed in recent months over the persistently impartial tone of press and public opinion in the U. S. as India’s Nationalist troubles continue. Greatly they grieved for “gross inaccuracies, obvious misinterpretations” in U. S. news stories.* Dr. Thompson’s little pamphlet, issued last week was one of Britain’s first overt efforts to arouse sympathy for England’s cause in India.

Edward John Thompson is no name to place beside those of the great War propagandists. He is a poet, novelist, War veteran (Military Cross, mentioned in despatches), lecturer in Bengali at Oxford. He has written a history of India. He has served as an “educational missionary” at Bankura College, Bengal. He has written many a page expressing sympathy with the aspirations of Indian “Moderates.” Doubtless well qualified to write about India, his character as a propagandist is, however, scarcely up to the standard of the great London Times. Last week’s pamphlet exhibits an ignorance of the U. S. press, or a wilful inaccuracy, unworthy of the Times’s amiable editor Geoffrey Dawson, who has visited in the U. S. and who maintains in Washington a correspondent, Wilmot Lewis, whose father-in-law is none other than Col. Frank Brett Noyes, president of the great Associated Press.

In last week’s pamphlet, which was a reprint of three articles appearing last month in the pages of the Times, Dr. Thompson’s attack on the inaccuracy of U. S. Indian information is directed at two books, three magazines and a pamphlet issued by the India Independence League of America. The books, which he describes as having “more than any others influenced American thought about India,” are Eminent Asians by Josef Washington (“Upton Close”) Hall, and India in Bondage by Dr. Jabez Sunderland.* The magazines: The New Republic, Fleet’s Review (described as “a ‘tabloid’ monthly read by most American business men”†), and TIME.

Dr. Sunderland’s India in Bondage has been suppressed by the Indian Government. Pamphleteer Thompson records that fact but does not see fit to mention that the real dynamite in the Sunderland book was its quotations from Prime Minister MacDonald in the days when as an independent Laborite he could say what he chose: “A thousand and one reasons are given for a little more tutelage [for India]. . . . Now plain, practical common sense should come to our rescue. Nobody can imagine that any harm will come from independence. Let independence be granted.”

Accuracy-loving Poet Thompson’s reference to TIME is as follows:

“Time, a popular monthly, has told the American public that ‘the iniquitous salt tax’ amounts to two thousand times the cost of production.”

TIME has never used the phrase “iniquitous salt tax.” TIME has never reported the tax to be 2,000 times the salt’s production cost. What TIME did say (March 24): “The monopolized salt is sold to Indians at prices sometimes 2,000% of production costs.”

*The British censorship on news despatches out of India has been doubled in rigor since mid-May.

*Approximate sales: Eminent Asians, 5000 copies; India in Bondage, 18,000copies: Mother India (pro-British), r40,000 copies.

† Fleet’s Review, unrecorded in N. W. Ayer’s Newspaper Annual is published in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. Circulation: 14,500 (subscription & newsstand).