The Birmingham age-herald., 1921-01-28

MI (Speciai CofreSponoehce.)-Lol
 e rop Stoddard, who has made special study of the various elements of today's worldwide unrest, calls atten- tion in an article entitled, ''The Problem os India" in the February Century Mag azine, to the fact that the question of India is nearly as immediate and desper- ate as that of Ireland, and is not re- mote in it's importance to America. we have but small group of friends of freedom for India" in this country com pared to the numbers of the Irish who are not only among us, but of us, as East Indians have never been. Yet, he reminds us, ''the spark of Serajevo proved once for all how small and close knit is the modern world"
 The course of India in the next few wears will be of immense. if not deter mining, importance to such questions as the already threatened dominance of the white races, and the spread of sovietism.
 India, too, though far, is vast and pro- ductive, an element well able to upset the trembling economies and finances or the world.
 "The outlook" says MT Stoddard, 'Ss confessedly not overbright" It is at the present time lone of the greatest prob
 lems now pressing for solution" And it mot, he reminds us, a new one.
 '"The problem of India rose before the war A full decade before 1914 it had
 drawn worldwide scrutiny, but the war ! has intensified an already acute situa- tion." There is no longer. any question
 whether there will be change, he de- clares; it is simply whether those
 changes will be effected by process of orderly evolution or by one of violent revolution And he then proceeds to point out the complicated nature of the question.
 'Tn the first place. we should remember one thing: India is not a country or a people in the ordinary sense of the term. India is nothing short of minia- ture world Sundered from the rest of
 Asia by the stupendous barrier or the lHimalayas and washed on it's other two
 fronts by the ocean, this huge triangular sub-continent, as large as all Europe ex-
 
 and conditions of men. Its teeming lpopulation of more than ,313,00o000 souls (more than one-sixth of all the human beings on earth) is made up of several distinct races, speaking a multitude of different lanuages. holding to many faiths and occupying widely different |stages of civilization. The traditional
 motivator of Indian life is Brahmanism. more than two-thirds of the whole popu- lation protesting the Hindu faith, a1beit
 sundered among themselves by the rigid lwalls of caste. Nevertheless, Islam has
 been powerfully modifying Indian life
 for more than 1000 years by conquest and ,conversion, so that today there are more than 66,0oo,Ooo Mohammedans, or one lsixth of the population This HinduMo- lhammedaean division runs like eseat !chasm athwart India. Only in recent Iyears has Indian ,'nationalism' succeeded in bridging the gulf. and the strength
 of these bridges still remains to be seen. | "It is more than 15O years Mir. Stod- dard recalls. "since the English made
 themselves masters of Inda,I and ne gives fair recognition to the fact Ia mliar to niost of us. that the British government of India has been, if tyran- inical. still on the whole, benehccnt. klp- Hing has given us the tradition in his jpictures of the Englishman in India as '.rrotector of the poor, and it is not Isurprising to find that there are elensents lin India itsels resoluteiy opposed to the irem1val of the British yoke pnce> (which they find themselves con'para- ltiveiy free from the opporessions of re- iilsious fanatacism and of caste.
 "Extremely interesting Mr. Stoddard !says, were the protests of the antl-
 nationalist groups. particularly the Mo-
 hammedans and the low-caste Hlndus. For it is a fact significant of the com plexion of the Indian problem that many
 millions of Indians fear the nationalist
 movement and look upon the present IBritish autocracy as shield against ma
 tionalist oppression and discrimination
 Tine Mohammedans of India. who. as al ready stated, form one-sixth of fthe tota| population, are sharply divided amons
 themselves, some clsaving to the na' |ticnalist cause. while others believe thal
 Indian nstionallsm. being prodominantla