Abolition of cotton excise

AT last, one might say at long last, His Excellency the Viceroy has done the right thing with regard to what is undoubtedly the most iniquitous and indefensible tax that has ever existed even in bureaucratically governed India. The salt tax is even more obnoxious and unpopular than the cotton excise, but the former has at least this to be said for it that it is a purely revenue measure and has no ulterior object. In the case of the cotton excise, revenue considerations have never been anything else than an insignificant and almost negligible factor whether in the first imposition or in the subsequent maintenance of that hated duty. It is not meant, of course, that a revenue of Rs 2 crore is no consideration to a not over-rich government like the Government of India. But it is certain that even for twice or thrice this revenue, the Government of India could never have thought of imposing this supremely objectionable duty on Indian manufacture if it had not been for the pressure brought to bear upon it by the British Government at the instance of Lancashire. It was on this precise ground quite as much as in the interests of what next to agriculture was her most important industry that India herself made the abolition of the excise a national problem, and for many years carried on an earnest and determined agitation to have this grave national wrong righted. The agitation certainly told upon the Government of India which would long ago have abolished this duty if the British Government had not stood in the way. Its difficulty was that it was, in the words of the late Sir Edward Baker, subsequently endorsed by a much higher authority, “a subordinate Government.”