THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS
A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more grave. When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from agitation against the Part.i.tion of Bengal, procured by the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon"s departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial, and he determined to maintain the Part.i.tion. He was entirely new to Indian affairs, and his _Recollections_ show him to have been often sorely perplexed by the conflict between his own political instincts and the picture of Indian conditions placed before him by his official advisers at home and in India. He felt, however, on the whole fairly confident that he could deal with the situation by producing a moderate measure of reforms which would satisfy India"s political aspirations and by keeping an extremely vigilant eye on Indian methods of administration of which "sympathy" was in future to be the key-note rather than mere efficiency. But when in the course of 1907 the agitation broke out afresh with increased fury and began to produce a crop of political outrages, Mr. Morley found himself in a particularly awkward position.
He was known from his Irish days to be no believer in coercion. But the Government of India was not to be denied when it insisted that a campaign of murder could not be tolerated and that repression was as necessary as reform. The Secretary of State agreed reluctantly to sanction more stringent legislation for dealing with the excesses of the Extremist press in India, but he was only the more resolved that it must be accompanied by a liberal reforms scheme. The Viceroy himself shared this view and lent willing a.s.sistance. But the interchange of opinions between India and Whitehall was as usual terribly lengthy and laborious.
A Royal Proclamation on November 28, 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria"s Proclamation after the Mutiny, foreshadowed reforms in "political satisfaction of the claims of important cla.s.ses representing ideas that have been fostered and encouraged by British rule." But not till the following month, _i.e._ three years after Mr. Morley had taken over the India Office, did the reforms scheme see the light of day.
It bore his impress. He had a ready ear for Indian grievances and much understanding for the Moderate Indian point of view. He was prepared to give Indians a larger consultative voice in the conduct of Indian affairs, and even to introduce individual Indians not only into his own Council at Whitehall but even into the Viceroy"s Executive Council, the citadel of British authority in India. He was determined to enforce far more energetically than most of his predecessors the const.i.tutional right of the Secretary of State to form and lay down the policy for which his responsibility was to the British Parliament alone, while the function of the Government of India was, after making to him whatever representations it might deem desirable, to carry his decisions faithfully and fully into execution. He was prepared to exercise also to the full his right to control the administrative as well as the executive acts of the Government of India and its officers. He was not prepared to devolve upon Indians collectively any part of the const.i.tutional powers vested in the Indian Executive and ultimately through the Secretary of State in the British Parliament. He was not therefore prepared to give India any representative inst.i.tutions that should circ.u.mscribe or share the power of the Indian Executive. The Indian Councils Act of 1909 was drawn up on those lines. It enlarged the membership and the functions of the Indian Legislative Councils, and placed them definitely on an elective basis without doing away altogether with nominations by Government. The only point upon which Mr.
Morley yielded to pressure was in conceding the principle of community representation in favour of the Mahomedans, to whom, at a time when they not only held rigidly aloof from all political agitation but professed great anxiety as to political concessions of which the benefit would, they submitted, accrue mainly to the Hindus, Lord Minto had given a promise that in any future reforms scheme full consideration should be given to the historical importance and actual influence of their community rather than to its mere numerical strength.
The Indian Councils Act, 1909, fell considerably short of the demands put forward even by the founders of the Congress five-and-twenty years before, as the new Councils, greatly enlarged, were still to be merely consultative a.s.semblies. But it did for the first time admit "the living forces of the elective principle," and to that extent it met the demand for representative inst.i.tutions. Indian Moderates could point also to the presence of an Indian member, Sir Satyendra (now Lord) Sinha, in the Viceroy"s Executive Council and of two Indian members in the Secretary of State"s Council at Whitehall as a definite proof that India would have henceforth a hearing before, and not as in the past merely after, the adoption of vital lines of policy. The Act was accepted by the Moderate leaders as a genuine if not a generous instalment of reform, and it restored to some extent their influence as the advocates of const.i.tutional progress by showing that the British Government had not been altogether deaf to their appeals. It did not of course satisfy the Extremists, but their influence had suffered a great set-back from the wrecking of the Surat Congress, their great Deccanee leader was working out a long term of imprisonment at Mandalay, and with the tide of anarchism still spreading and visibly demoralising the student cla.s.s all over India, even to the undermining of parental authority, the first feeling of suppressed and largely inarticulate alarm and resentment developed into a definite reaction in favour of government as by law established.
The great wave of unrest which had swept over India was already subsiding when Lord Minto left India in 1910 amidst genuine demonstrations of returning goodwill, and the appointment of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst as his successor was welcomed in the same spirit, not because Lord Kitchener, who had run him very hard for the Viceroyalty, was personally unpopular in India, but because he owed to reactionary supporters the quite unmerited reputation of being "the man with the big stick."
The visit of the King and Queen to India at the end of 1911 was therefore well timed, and it provoked a still greater outburst of popular enthusiasm than their visit as Prince and Princess of Wales in 1905. For it was the first time that the Sovereign to whom it was given to rule over India from a remote Western island travelled out to receive on Indian soil the homage of his Indian subjects and appeared before them in the full majesty of crown, orb, and sceptre. Apart entirely from the merits of the measure, the dramatic transfer of the capital of his Indian Empire from Calcutta to Delhi appealed to the imagination of Indians as a demonstration of the Royal power no less impressive than the splendours of the great Durbar at which the Royal command went forth. Equally did their Majesties fulfil another of the time-honoured conceptions of royalty by knowing, so to say, when to step down from their throne and mix freely with the people. It has been from times immemorial one of the principles of Indian rulership that the ruler cannot deny to his subjects the privilege of access to his person, and many are those who have gained more popularity by giving ample opportunity to their subjects for stating to them their grievances in the royal presence than by ever actually redressing them. In Calcutta especially when the King and Queen moved cheerfully amongst the delirious crowds that had thronged to the Maidan to worship them, the scene surpa.s.sed all previous experiences. For had not one of the measures announced as the Royal will at the Delhi Durbar been the revision at last of Lord Curzon"s detested Part.i.tion of Bengal? The furious agitation of the first few years had broken in vain against the dead wall of the _chose jugee_ which Mr. Morley had upheld, and it had gradually died down. The wound, however, had been still there, and now the King"s hand had touched and healed it. The old Province of Bengal was not indeed restored within its former limits, but Eastern Bengal, created as the Hindu Bengalees believed, in favour of Mahomedan ascendancy, disappeared, and in its stead Behar and Orissa, where a large part of the population was of a different stock and spoke a different tongue, were detached to the west and south of Bengal proper and formed into a separate province which served equally well to relieve administrative congestion without doing violence to Bengalee sentiment.
On the very first anniversary, however, of the day of the great Delhi Durbar an audacious attempt to murder the Viceroy at the moment when he was making his solemn entry into the new capital came as a painful reminder that the fangs of Indian anarchism had not yet been drawn. From one of the balconies of the Chandni Chauk, the chief thoroughfare of the native city, a bomb was thrown at Lord Hardinge who was riding with Lady Hardinge on a State elephant, in accordance with Indian usage, on his way to the Fort where he was to have delivered a message of greeting to the people of India recalling the memorable results of the Royal visit.
The Viceroy was severely wounded and Lady Hardinge, though she escaped without any apparent hurt, suffered a shock which at least hastened her premature death two and a half years later. Lord Hardinge had already earned the widespread confidence of Indians by his undisguised sympathy with all their legitimate aspirations, and the Lady Hardinge"s School of Medicine for Indian women stands now at Delhi as an enduring monument, not only of the keen interest which she took in the cause of Indian womanhood and in everything that could tend to its advancement, but of the affection she had won by a rare charm of manner that was, with her, merely the outward reflection of a gentle and finely tempered nature.
There had been abortive plots against Lord Minto"s life, but it had been deemed politic to minimise their importance. This, however, was an attempt too flagrant and too nearly fatal to be disguised or denied, and a thrill of horror which hushed even the Extremists went through the whole of India, for to the office of the Viceroy as the personal representative of the sovereign there had always. .h.i.therto attached something of the sanct.i.ty with which, according to Indian beliefs, all kingship is invested. All the more grateful was the response elicited by the a.s.surance which Lord Hardinge hastened to convey from his sick-bed that what had happened could and would in no way diminish his affection and devotion to the people of India or modify the policy of goodwill and progress for which he stood. Neither he nor India ever forgot that a.s.surance.
Unfortunately the artificial basis upon which the Morley-Minto reforms had been built revealed itself very soon under the searching test of practical experience. The Councils Act of 1909 had made no attempt to organise on an effective and genuine basis "the living forces of the elective principle." The indirect system of election established under the Act could only produce haphazard and misleading results. An indirect chain of elections afforded no means of appraising the true relationship between the elected members of the Councils and their original electors. The qualifications of candidates, as well as of electors, varied widely from province to province, but shared one common characteristic, that the election was more often a matter of form.
Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Munic.i.p.al and Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or mandate from, the const.i.tuencies by which these bodies had been chosen, partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound by the acts of its const.i.tuted representatives. The so-called electorates were never known to give definite mandates to those who professed to represent them or to p.r.o.nounce upon any course of action which their representatives might pursue. n.o.body knew what was the numerical foundation on which an elected member took his seat. It was almost impossible to trace it back along the chain of indirect elections. Before the British Reform Bill of 1832 much play was made of pocket boroughs of twenty or thirty electors. In India, one const.i.tuency electing a member to the Imperial Legislative Council numbered exactly seven, and there were cases where the representation was pretty well known to have been divided by agreement between two individuals. Nor did the recommendations of a Royal Commission on Decentralisation avail to break down that spirit of over-centralisation which had of late years marked the policy of the Government of India. The Provincial Governments still remained bound hand and foot by the necessity of constant reference to the Central Government, while the latter in its turn was forced to make an ever-increasing number of references to Whitehall, where Mr. Morley enforced, far beyond the practice of any previous Secretary of State, the principle that the Provincial Governments were responsible to the Central Government, and the Central Government to the India Office for every detail of administration.
More galling to Indians was it to have to admit that the expansion of Indian representation in the Councils had not been followed by any visible increase of Indian control over the conduct of public affairs.
Whilst disclaiming warmly any intention of paving the way for the introduction of parliamentary inst.i.tutions into India, Mr. Morley had allowed an illusory semblance of parliamentary inst.i.tutions to be introduced into the enlarged Councils by requiring their sanction for legislative measures brought forward by the Executive. The latter had to go through the same forms of procedure as if its existence depended upon the support of a parliamentary majority to which it was responsible, whereas it continued to be irremovable and responsible only to the Secretary of State. These were in fact mere empty forms, for however unpalatable any measure might be to the Indian members, or however powerful their arguments against it, Government could always vote the Indian opposition down in the Viceroy"s Legislative Council, the most important of all, by mustering the official majority in full force to deliver their votes according to instructions. In the Provincial Councils on the other hand in which an unofficial majority had been conceded, the Indian members were in a position to create a deadlock by refusing to vote for measures indispensable to the proper conduct of Government; but whilst the power they could thus exercise might go far enough to paralyse the Executive, they had no power to turn it out.
These new Councils had been invested with large but mostly negative powers, and with no positive responsibilities.
For a time the sentiment of trust which underlay the granting of the reforms had its effect. Both sides seemed to display a more conciliatory spirit and the relations between the official and unofficial benches in the enlarged Councils a.s.sumed a more friendly character. In many cases the influence of the non-official members was successfully exerted to secure modifications in the legislative measures of Government, though from a mistaken desire to "save its face" Government too often preferred to make concessions at private conferences with the Indian leaders rather than as the outcome of public discussion, and lost thereby a good deal of the credit which it might have secured by a more open display of its desire to meet Indian objections. On some occasions before the war the pressure of Indian opinion even deterred Provincial Governments from introducing legislative measures which they considered essential to public safety because they apprehended defeat at the hands of the unofficial majority in the legislative Councils. But the Indian public remained generally in ignorance of the extent to which the influence of the Indian representatives made itself felt, either for good or for evil, on Government. The bureaucracy, more secretive in India than elsewhere, had never realised the importance of guiding public opinion, or, _a fortiori_, the necessity of keeping it informed if you wish to guide it. The politicians, on the other hand, preferred to make capital out of those questions on which they failed to make any impression upon Government, though the real difficulty very often lay in the rigidity of the statutory control exercised by the Central Government over Provincial Governments, and by Whitehall over the Central Government.
The inevitable consequences soon became clear. The enlarged Indian representation appeared to have less power than it really enjoyed, and, having no responsibility whatever, it was free to make its own bids for popularity with const.i.tuencies equally irresponsible. Resolutions were introduced which, if they could have carried them, the unofficial members would often have been much puzzled to carry into effect, and grievances were voiced which, even when well founded, it was frequently beyond the power of any Government to remedy. On the other hand, the Executive was threatened with the possibility of a complete deadlock, and the concessions by which it could be averted often alarmed not merely the innate conservatism of the official world but many Indian interests scarcely less conservative.
Not till after Mr. Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the demand of the Western-educated cla.s.ses for a larger share in the administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who were still for the most part penned up in the Provincial Services as established on the recommendations of the Aitcheson Committee more than twenty-five years earlier. In 1912 a Royal Commission went out to India with Lord Islington as Chairman. It was a body on which the British element in the Indian Public Services was only represented by a small minority, and amongst the European members Lord Ronaldshay and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, both then in the House of Commons, stood for widely different schools of politics. Of the three Indian members, Mr. Gokhale, who had become one of the most influential leaders of the Moderate party, carried by far the greatest weight, and his premature death before the Commission completed its Report seriously impaired its usefulness. It spent two successive winters in taking a ma.s.s of evidence from Indians and Europeans all over India, but its sittings held, except in very rare cases, in public served chiefly at the time to stir up Indian opinion by bringing into sharp relief the profound divergencies between the Indian and the Anglo-Indian point of view, and in a form which on the one hand, unfortunately, was bound to offend Indian susceptibilities, and on the other hand was apt to produce the impression that Indians were chiefly concerned to subst.i.tute an indigenous for an alien bureaucracy. Anyhow, while the Western-educated cla.s.ses were rapidly coming to the conclusion that the Minto-Morley reforms had given them the shadow rather than the substance of political power, they saw in the proceedings of the Public Services Commission little indication of any radical change in the att.i.tude of the British official cla.s.ses towards the question of training up the people of India to a larger share in the administration.
In such circ.u.mstances the Extremists saw their opportunity to pour ridicule on the new Councils and preach once more the futility of const.i.tutional agitation. The Indian National Congress, overshadowed for a time by the new Councils, began to recover its popularity, and though the split which had taken place at Surat between Moderates and Extremists had not yet been mended, there was much talk of reunion. Some of the Moderates had grown once more faint-hearted. The Extremists who knew their own minds still const.i.tuted a very formidable party, and they were finding new allies in an unexpected quarter.
When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and for nearly thirty years afterwards, the Indian Mahomedans kept severely aloof from it, partly because they had kept equally aloof from Western education which had originally brought the leaders of the new political movement together, and partly because most of those leaders were Hindus, and the ancient antagonism between Mahomedans and Hindus led the former to distrust profoundly anything that seemed likely to enhance the influence of the latter. One intellectual giant among the Mahomedans had indeed arisen after the Mutiny, during which his loyalty had never wavered, who laboured hard to convert his co-religionists to Western education. In spite of bitter opposition from a powerful party, rooted in the old fanatical orthodoxy of Islam, who resented his broad-mindedness which went to the length of trying to explain, and even to explain away much of, the Koran, Sir Seyyid Ahmed Khan succeeded in founding at Aligurh in 1880 a Mahomedan College which soon attracted students from the best Mahomedan families all over India. His idea was to create there a centre which should do for young Mahomedans what he himself had watched Oxford and Cambridge doing for young Englishmen. Education was not to be divorced as in most Indian colleges from religion, and he was convinced that a liberal interpretation of the Mahomedan doctrine was no more incompatible with the essence of Islam than with that of Western civilisation, with which British rule had come to bring India into providential contact. Loyalty to British rule was with him synonymous with loyalty to all the high ideals which he himself pursued and set before his students. For a whole generation success appeared to crown this work to which he brought all the fervour of missionary enterprise.
He died full of years and honour in 1898, and one of his last efforts was an historical refutation of the Ottoman Sultan"s claim to the Khalifate of Islam. He already realised the reactionary tendencies of the Pan-Islamic propaganda which Abdul Hamid was trying to spread into India. So great and enduring was the hold of Sir Seyyid Ahmed"s teachings upon the progressive elements in Mahomedan India that the All-India Moslem League was founded in 1905, almost avowedly in opposition to the subversive activities which the Indian National Congress was beginning to develop. It was in this spirit, too, that the influential deputation headed by the Agha Khan, who, though himself the head of a dissenting and thoroughly unorthodox Mahomedan community claiming descent from the Old Man of the Mountain, was then the recognised political leader of the whole Indian Mahomedan community, waited on Lord Minto to press upon the Government of India the Mahomedan view of the political situation created by the Part.i.tion of Bengal, lest political concessions should be hastily made to the Hindus which would pave the way for the ascendancy of a Hindu majority equally dangerous to the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute. It was again in the same spirit, and fortified by the promise which Lord Minto had on that occasion given them, that they insisted, and insisted successfully, on the principle of community representation being applied for their benefit in the Indian Councils Act of 1909.
A new generation of young Mahomedans had nevertheless been growing up who knew not Seyyid Ahmed and regarded his teachings as obsolete. The lessons which they had learnt from their Western education were not his.
They were much more nearly those that the more ardent spirits amongst the Hindus had imbibed, and they were ready to share with them the new creed of Indian Nationalism in its most extreme form. Other circ.u.mstances were tending to weaken the faith of the Mahomedan community in the goodwill, not only of the Government of India, but of the British Government. Even the most conservative Mahomedans were disappointed and irritated by the revision of the Part.i.tion of Bengal in 1911 when the predominantly Mahomedan Province of Eastern Bengal, created under Lord Curzon, was merged once more into a largely Hindu Bengal. The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of their own independent nationhood. In that light they saw in the British occupation of Egypt, in the Anglo-French agreement with regard to Morocco and the Anglo-Russian agreement with regard to Persia, and last but not least, in the Italian invasion of Tripoli, the gradual development of a scheme in which all the powers of Christendom were involved for the extinction of the temporal power of Islam and, with it inevitably, according to orthodox doctrine, of its spiritual authority. The Ottoman Empire had been saved for a time by the protection extended to it for her own purposes by Germany who had alone stood between it and the disintegrating machinations of the "European Concert" in Constantinople, bent on undermining the ascendancy of the ruling Mahomedan race by its menacing insistence on reforms for the benefit of the subject Christian races which could result only in the further aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of the independent Christian states already carved out of the Sultans" former dominions in Europe and in the introduction of similar processes even into their Asiatic dominions. The Balkan wars of 1912-1913 appeared to bear out the theory of a great European conspiracy directed against Turkey as "the sword of Islam," and whilst the sympathies of Indian Mahomedans of all cla.s.ses and schools of thought were naturally enlisted in favour of their Turkish co-religionists, the leaders of the advanced Mahomedan party themselves went to Constantinople in charge of the Red Crescent funds collected in India and got into close personal touch with the Turkish Nationalists who ruled in the name of the Sultan but derived their authority from the "Committee of Union and Progress." The same party had in the meantime gone a long way towards capturing the All-India Moslem League and bringing it into line with the advanced wing of the Indian National Congress. The fusion between the League and the Congress, which was still very repugnant both to the politically conservative and to the religious orthodox majority of the Indian Mahomedan community, was not completed, nor was the reunion of the Moderate and Extremist parties within the Congress itself, when India was caught up with Great Britain and most of the nations of the world into the whirlpool of the Great War on August 4, 1914.
CHAPTER VIII
THROUGH THE GREAT WAR TO THE GREAT INDIAN REFORM BILL
The genuine outburst of enthusiasm with which India, whether under direct British administration or under the autonomous rule of indigenous dynasties, responded to the call of the Empire at the beginning of the war came almost as a revelation to the British public generally who knew little about India, and the impression deepened when during the critical winter of 1914-1915 Indian troops stood shoulder to shoulder with British troops in the trenches to fill the gap which could not then have been filled from any other quarter. The loyalty displayed by the Indian princes and the great land-owning gentry and the old fighting races who had stood by the British for many generations was no surprise to Englishmen who knew India; but less expected was the immediate rally to the British cause of the new Western-educated cla.s.ses who, baulked of the political liberties which they regarded as their due, had seemed to be drifting hopelessly into bitter antagonism to British rule--a rally which at first included even those who, like Mr. Tilak, just released from his long detention at Mandalay, had taught hatred and contempt of the British rulers of India with a violence which implied, even when it was not definitely expressed, a fierce desire to sever the British connection altogether. In some cases the homage paid to the righteousness of the British cause may not have been altogether genuine, but with the great majority it sprang from one thought, well expressed by Sir Satyendra Sinha, one of the most gifted and patriotic of India"s sons, in his presidential address to the Indian National Congress in 1915, that, at that critical hour in the world"s history, it was for India "to prove to the great British nation her grat.i.tude for peace and the blessings of civilisation secured to her under its aegis for the last hundred and fifty years and more." The tales of German frightfulness and the guns of the _Emden_ bombarding Madras, which were an ominous reminder that a far worse fate than British rule might conceivably overtake India, helped to confirm Indians in the conviction that the British Empire and India"s connection with it were well worth fighting for. This was one of Germany"s many miscalculations, and the loyalty of the Indian people quite as much as the watchfulness of Government defeated the few serious efforts made by the disaffected emissaries and agents in whom she had put her trust to raise the standard of rebellion in India. All they could do was to feed the "Indian Section" of the Berlin Foreign Office with c.o.c.k-and-bull stories of successful Indian mutinies and risings, which the German public, however gullible, ceased at last to swallow. Amongst the Indian Mahomedans there was a small pro-Turkish group, chiefly of an Extremist complexion, whose appeals to the religious solidarity of Islam might have proved troublesome when Turkey herself came into the war, had not Government deemed it advisable to put a stop to the mischievous activities of the two chief firebrands, the brothers Mahomed Ali and Shaukat Ali, by interning them under the discretionary powers conferred upon it by the Defence of India Act. Indian Mahomedan troops fought with the same gallantry and determination against their Turkish co-religionists in Mesopotamia and Palestine as against the German enemy in France and in Africa, and the Mahomedan Punjab answered even more abundantly than any other province of India every successive call for fresh recruits to replenish and strengthen the forces of the Empire.
The British Government and people responded generously to these splendid demonstrations of India"s fundamental loyalty to the British cause and the British connection. The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, declared with special emphasis that in future Indian questions must be approached from "a new angle of vision," and Indians, not least the Western-educated cla.s.ses, construed his utterance into a pledge of the deepest significance. For two years India presented on everything that related to the war a front unbroken by any dissensions. The Imperial Legislative Council pa.s.sed, almost without a murmur even at its most drastic provisions, repugnant as they were to the more advanced Indian members, a Defence of India Act on the lines of the Defence of the Realm Act at home, when Lord Hardinge gave an a.s.surance that it was essential to the proper performance of her part in the war, and it voted spontaneously and unanimously a contribution of one hundred million pounds by the Indian Exchequer to the war expenditure of the Empire. India had thrilled with pride when, at Lord Hardinge"s instance, her troops were first sent, not to act as merely subsidiary forces in subsidiary war-areas, but to share with British troops the very forefront of the battle in France, and she thrilled again when an Indian prince, the Maharajah of Bikanir, and Sir Satyendra Sinha, who was once more playing a conspicuous part in the political arena, and had been one of the oldest and ablest members of the moderate Congress party, were sent to represent India at the first Imperial War Conference in London, and took their seats side by side with British Ministers and with the Ministers of the self-governing Dominions.
There was, however, another side to the picture. If India had displayed in the best sense of the word an Imperial spirit and made sacrifices that ent.i.tled her to be treated as a partner in, rather than a mere dependency of, the British Empire, was she still to be denied a large instalment at least of the political liberties which had been long ago conferred on the self-governing Dominions? Were her people to be refused in the self-governing Dominions themselves the equality of treatment which her representatives were allowed to enjoy in the council-chamber of the Empire? Whilst the Morley-Minto reforms had disappointed the political expectations of the Western-educated cla.s.ses, the measures adopted in several of the self-governing Dominions to exclude Indian immigration, and, especially in South Africa, to place severe social and munic.i.p.al disabilities on Indians already settled in some of the provinces of the Union, had caused still more widespread resentment, and nothing did more to strengthen Lord Hardinge"s hold upon Indian affection than his frank espousal of these Indian grievances, even at the risk of placing himself in apparent opposition to the Imperial Government, who had to reckon with the sentiment of the Dominions as well as with that of India. The war suddenly brought to the front in a new shape the question of the const.i.tutional relationship not only between Great Britain and India but between India and the other component parts of the Empire. It was known in India that, before Lord Hardinge reached the end of his term of office, extended for six months till April 1916, he had been engaged in drafting a scheme of reform to meet Indian political aspirations more fully than Lord Morley had done, and it was known also in India that schemes of Imperial reconstruction after the war were already being discussed throughout the Empire. The Indian politician not unnaturally argued that if, as was generally conceded, the const.i.tutional relations of the Government of India to the Imperial Government were to be substantially modified and India to be advanced to a position approximately similar to that of the self-governing Dominions whose governments were responsible to their own peoples, this could be done only by opening up to her too the road to self-government. The Extremist at once pressed the argument to its utmost consequences. The India for which he spoke was at that time, he declared, still willing to accept the British connection on the same terms as the Dominions, but she must be given Dominion Home Rule at once--not merely as a goal to be slowly reached by carefully graduated stages, but as an immediate concession to Indian sentiment, already more than due to her for her share in the defence of the Empire during the war.
In the Legislative Councils there had been a political truce by common consent after the Government had undertaken to introduce no controversial measures whilst the war was going on. But the war dragged on much longer than had been generally antic.i.p.ated. India, to whom it brought after the first few months an immense accession of material prosperity by creating a great demand for all her produce at rapidly enhanced prices, was so sheltered from its real horrors, and the number of Indians who had any personal ties with those actually fighting in far off-lands was after all so small in proportion to the vast population, that the keen edge of interest in its progress was gradually blunted, and political speculations as to the position of India after the war were unwittingly encouraged by the failure of Government to keep Indian opinion concentrated on the magnitude of the struggle which still threatened the very existence of the Empire. Circ.u.mstances, for which the British lack of imagination as well as the ponderous machinery of Indian administration was in some measure responsible, favoured, it must be admitted, the revival of political agitation. Some three years elapsed after India was promised a "new angle of vision" before there was evidence to the Indian eye that anything was being done to redeem that promise. Lord Hardinge had taken home with him one scheme of reforms, and his successor, Lord Chelmsford, had set to work with his Council on another one as soon as he reached Simla. But time pa.s.sed and all this travail bore no visible fruits. Outside events also gave rise to suspicion. The rejection by the House of Lords of the proposed creation of an Executive Council for the United Provinces caused widespread irritation amongst even moderate Indians, and the rumours of a scheme to hasten on Imperial federation and to give the self-governing Dominions some share in the control of Indian affairs aroused a very bitter feeling, as Indian opinion still smarted under the treatment of Indians in other parts of the Empire and remained distrustful of the temporary compromise only recently arrived at. The Viceroy was very reserved and reticent, and his reserve and reticence were made the pretext for a.s.suming that, as he had been appointed under the first Coalition Government at home when Mr. Chamberlain succeeded Lord Crewe at the India Office, he was the reactionary nominee of a reactionary Secretary of State. No a.s.sumption could have been more unjust. Lord Chelmsford"s scheme was completed and sent home towards the end of 1916.
But nothing transpired as to its contents, nor as to any action being taken upon it. Indians inferred that it was indefinitely pigeon-holed in Whitehall. The very reasonable plea that the Imperial Government, whose energies had to be devoted to the life-and-death struggle in which the whole Empire was involved, had little time to devote to a serious study of such problems as the introduction of grave const.i.tutional changes in India, was countered by the argument that the same Imperial Government seemed to find no difficulty in sparing time for such measures as Irish Home Rule, votes for women, and a large extension of the franchise in the United Kingdom.
The long delay, whatever its causes, perplexed and alarmed even moderate Indian opinion, which had lost the most popular of the leaders capable of guiding it, and waited in vain for any comforting a.s.surances from responsible official quarters. Moreover, it allowed the Extreme wing to set up a standard of political demands which it became more and more difficult for any Indian to decline altogether to endorse without exposing himself to the reproach that he was unpatriotic and a creature of Government. As soon as it became known that Lord Chelmsford was engaged in elaborating a scheme of post-war reforms, nineteen Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council hurriedly put forward a counter scheme of their own, professedly for the better guidance of British Ministers. Besides pressing for various more or less practical reforms, such as the granting of commissions to Indians, the Nineteen demanded full control for the Provincial Councils over the Executive subject to a limited veto of the Governor of the Province; direct election to those Councils--although nothing definite was said about the franchise; and, in the Imperial Legislative Council, an unofficial majority and control over the Central Government except in certain reserved matters. The scheme was hazy, bore evident marks of haste, and aggravated immensely the dangers with which experience had already shown the Morley-Minto reforms to be fraught. It was an attempt to make the Central and Provincial Governments in India dependent upon the caprice of legislatures, with no mandate from any representative electorate and no training in responsible government, but completely immune to the consequences of their own mistakes. It must have led to a hopeless deadlock and the complete paralysis of Government, but even so it did not satisfy the more fiery members of the Indian National Congress, where, in complete unison with the All-India Moslem League, finally captured by some slight concessions to Mahomedan sentiment, resolutions were pa.s.sed more crude and unworkable than the scheme of the Nineteen, and virtually amounting to Home Rule in its most impracticable shape.
The Congress was at last pa.s.sing under Extremist control. Its first session during the war was held in December 1914 in Bombay, and under the presidency of Mr. Bupendranath Basu, afterwards a member of the Secretary of State"s Council, the proceedings reflected the general enthusiasm with which India had rallied to the cause of the Empire. But before the Congress met again a disease common amongst Indians and aggravated by overwork and anxiety had carried away in April 1915, still in the prime of life, the founder of the "Servants of India Society,"
Mr. Gokhale, himself perhaps the greatest servant of India that has toiled in our time for her social as well as her political advancement.
His friends believed that in his case the end was precipitated by an acute controversy with Mr. Tilak, to whom he had made one last appeal to abandon his old att.i.tude of irreconcilable opposition. A few months later, in November, the veteran Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who had fought stoutly ever since Surat against any Congress reunion, in which he clearly foresaw that the Moderates would be the dupes of the Extremists, pa.s.sed away in his seventy-first year, but not before he had sent a message, worded in his old peremptory style, to Sir Satyendra Sinha, daring him to refuse the chairmanship of the coming session which was to be held in December in Bombay. Sir Satyendra came, and his great personal influence kept the Indian National Congress on the rails, and defeated the projects already on foot once more for delivering it into the hands of Mr. Tilak and his followers. But the death of those two pillars of the Moderate party at such a critical juncture proved to be an irreparable loss. When Mr. Gokhale"s political testament was published, it was dismissed by the Extremists as a well-meant but quite obsolete doc.u.ment. The Congress found a new and strange Egeria in Mrs.
Besant, who had thrown herself into Indian politics when, owing to circ.u.mstances[2] which had nothing to do with politics, the faith that many respectable Hindus had placed in her, on the strength of her theosophical teachings, as a vessel of spiritual election was rudely shaken. But nothing shook the mesmeric influence which she had acquired over young India by preaching with rare eloquence the moral and spiritual superiority of Indian over Western creeds, and condemning the British administration of India, root and branch, as one of the worst manifestations of Western materialism. With her remarkable power of seizing the psychological moment, she had fastened on to the catchword of "Home Rule for India," into which Indians could read whatever measure of reform they happened to favour, whilst it voiced the vague aspiration of India to be mistress in her own house, and to be freed from the reproach of "dependency" in any future scheme of reconstruction. She herself gave it the widest interpretation in _New India_, a newspaper whose extreme views expressed in the most extreme form drew down upon her not only the action of Government but the censure of the High Court of Madras. At the Congress session held at Lucknow at the end of 1916 she shared the honours of a tremendous ovation with Tilak, whose sufferings--and her own--in the cause of India"s freedom her newspaper compared with those of Christ on the Cross. Resolutions were carried not only requesting that the King Emperor might be pleased "to issue a proclamation announcing that it is the aim and intention of British policy to confer self-government on India at an early date," but setting forth in detail a series of preliminary reforms to be introduced forthwith in order to consummate the "bloodless revolution" which, according to the President"s closing oration, was already in full blast.
The All-India Moslem League sitting at the same time at Lucknow followed the Congress lead.
To those feverish days at Lucknow the session of the Imperial Legislative Council held shortly afterwards at Delhi afforded a striking contrast. The Great War was in its third year, and the end seemed as far off as ever. The Government of India announced the issue of an Indian War Loan for 100,000,000 which was well received and speedily subscribed, and, as an earnest of the revision of the whole fiscal relations of the Empire after the war, an increase of the import duty on cotton fabrics, without the corresponding increase of the excise duty which had always been resented as an unjust protection of the Lancashire industry, abated an Indian grievance of twenty years" standing. A Defence Force Bill opening up opportunities for Indians to volunteer and be trained for active service responded in some measure to the agitation for a national militia which the Congress had encouraged. The Viceroy also announced that the system of indentured emigration to Fiji and the West Indies against which Indian sentiment had begun to rebel was at an end, and that the problem of Indian education would be submitted to a strong Commission appointed, with Sir Thomas Sadler at its head, to inquire in the first place into the position of the Calcutta University, and he warmly invited the co-operation of Indians of all parties with the representative Committee under Sir Thomas Holland, then already engaged in quickening the development of Indian industries which, far too long neglected by successive governments, was at last receiving serious attention under the compelling pressure of a world-war.
Government and Legislature met and parted on cordial terms. But Mrs.
Besant never abated the vehemence of her Home Rule campaign, for only by Home Rule could India, she declared, "be saved from ruin, from becoming a nation of coolies for the enrichment of others." Access to some of the provinces was denied to her by Provincial Governments, and the Government of Madras decided to "intern" her. The "internment" meant merely that she transferred her residence and most of her activities from Madras to Ootacamund, the summer quarters of the Madras Government, where she hoisted the Home Rule flag on her house and continued to direct the Home Rule movement as vigorously as ever. But in her own flamboyant language she described herself as having been "drafted into the modern equivalent for the Middle Ages _oubliette_," and even Indians who were not wholly in sympathy with her views were aflame with indignation at her cruel "martyrdom." The Government of India, whilst acquiescing in the action of the Provincial Governments, maintained an att.i.tude of masterly inactivity, and neither in India nor at home was an authoritative word forthcoming as to the birth of the reforms scheme known to be in laborious gestation.
The political tension grew more and more acute. When would Simla or Whitehall break the prolonged silence? The publication of the Mesopotamian Report only added fuel to the flames, as it was easy to read into it a condemnation of Indian administration only less sweeping, if expressed in a more restrained form, than that which Indians had for years past poured forth upon it. There was no restraint at all in the fierce attack delivered upon it during the subsequent debate in the House of Commons by Lord Morley"s former Under Secretary of State for India, Mr. Montagu. He had himself visited India and was personally known there, and his speech, cabled out at once in full, produced a tremendous sensation, which was intensified when a few days later he was appointed Secretary of State for India in succession to Mr. Chamberlain.
There could be no doubt whatever as to the reality of the "new angle of vision" when on August 20 Mr. Montagu made in the House of Commons and Lord Chelmsford in Simla a simultaneous announcement, as solemn in its form as it was far-reaching in its implications.
The purpose of British policy, it declared, was not only "the increasing a.s.sociation of Indians in every branch of the administration, but also the greatest development of self-governing inst.i.tutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire."
This momentous announcement was accompanied, it is true, by a reservation to the effect "that the British Government and the Government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian people, must be judges of the time and measure of each advance; and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those upon whom new opportunities of service will thus be conferred, and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility." But it was made clear that the declaration of policy was not meant to be a mere enunciation of principles, for it wound up with the statement that His Majesty"s Government had "decided that substantial steps in this direction should be taken as soon as possible, and that it is of the highest importance that there should be a free and informal exchange of opinion between those in authority at home and in India." For that purpose Mr. Montagu himself was authorised to proceed to India and confer with the Viceroy, in response to an invitation addressed originally to Mr. Chamberlain and extended after his resignation to his successor at the India Office.
Could this great p.r.o.nouncement have been made a year earlier, and with the added authority of a Royal proclamation, it might have been received with such widespread acclamation in India as to drown any but the shrillest notes of dissent from the irreconcilables. The Moderates hardly dared to admit that it fulfilled--nay, more than fulfilled--their hopes, whilst the Extremists in the Indian National Congress, presided over on this occasion by Mrs. Besant herself, banged, bolted, and barred the door against any compromise by reaffirming and stiffening into something akin to an ultimatum the Home Rule resolutions of 1916 just at the moment when Mr. Montagu was landing in India. But the Secretary of State was not the man to be perturbed by such demonstrations. He had the British politician"s faith in compromise, and he did not perhaps understand fully that Indian Extremism represents a very different quality of opposition from any that a British Minister has yet had to reckon with in Parliament. He saw Indians of all cla.s.ses and creeds and political parties during his tour through India, but on none did he lavish more time and more patient hearing than upon the Extremists whom he hoped against hope to convert. He had an easier task when he tried to disarm the resentment which his vigorous onslaught on the methods and temper of British administration just before he took office had aroused amongst the European members of the public services. He conferred with governors and with heads of departments, and with representatives of the European community. He received endless deputations and ma.s.ses of addresses, and he remained of course in close consultation with the Viceroy in accordance with the declared object of his mission. After four strenuous months Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford signed at Simla on April 22, 1918, a joint report which was laid before Parliament in July.
Great as had always been the responsibilities of the Secretary of State and the Viceroy for the government of India "as by law established,"
they were on this occasion vastly greater. For two men of widely different temperaments had to work out together a scheme for shifting the very axis of government. They rose to the occasion. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report will rank with the great State papers which are landmarks of const.i.tutional progress in the history of the British Empire. It falls naturally and logically into two parts, the first setting forth the conditions of the problem, the second the recommendations for its solution; and even if the second had not provided the foundations for the Act of 1919, the first would have deserved to live as a masterly survey of the state of India--the first authoritative one since the transfer to the Crown just sixty years before. For the first time since the Mutiny it marked a reversion to the spirit in which the Bentincks and Munros and Elphinstones had almost a century earlier conceived the mission of England in India to lie in the training of the Indian people to govern themselves, and for the first time an attempt was made to appraise generously but fairly the position of the Western-educated cla.s.ses and the part they have come to play in the Indian polity. The pa.s.sage is worth quoting in full, as the const.i.tutional changes effected on the lines recommended by the Report were to give them the opportunity to prove the stuff they were made of as the political leaders of their country.
In estimating the politically-minded portion of the people of India we should not go either to census reports on the one hand, or to political literature on the other. It is one of the most difficult portions of our task to see them in their right relation to the rest of the country. Our obligations to them are plain, for they are intellectually our children. They have imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their credit. The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no reproach but rather a tribute to our work. The _Raj_ would have been a mechanical and iron thing if the spirit of India had not responded to it. We must remember, too, that the educated Indian has come to the front by hard work; he has seized the education which we offered him because he first saw its advantages; and it is he who has advocated and worked for political progress. All this stands to his credit. For thirty years he has developed in his Congress, and latterly in the Moslem League, free popular convocations which express his ideals. We owe him sympathy because he has conceived and pursued the idea of managing his own affairs, an aim which no Englishman can fail to respect. He has made a skilful, and on the whole a moderate, use of the opportunities which we have given him in the legislative councils of influencing Government and affecting the course of public business, and of recent years he has by speeches and in the press done much to spread the idea of a united and self-respecting India among thousands who had no such conception in their minds. Helped by the inability of the other cla.s.ses in India to play a prominent part he has a.s.sumed the place of leader; but his authority is by no means universally acknowledged and may in an emergency prove weak.
The prospects of advance very greatly depend upon how far the educated Indian is in sympathy with and capable of fairly representing the illiterate ma.s.ses. The old a.s.sumption that the interests of the ryot must be confided to official hands is strenuously denied by modern educated Indians. They claim that the European official must by his lack of imagination and comparative lack of skill in tongues be gravely handicapped in interpreting the thoughts and desires of an Asiatic people. On the other hand, it is argued that in the limited spread of education, the endurance of caste exclusiveness and of usages sanctioned by caste, and in the records of some local bodies and councils, may be found reasons which suggest that the politically-minded cla.s.ses stand somewhat apart from and in advance of the ordinary life of the country. Nor would it be surprising if this were the case. Our educational policy in the past aimed at satisfying the few who sought after English education, without sufficient thought of the consequences which might ensue from not taking care to extend instruction to the many. We have in fact created a limited _intelligentsia_, who desire advance; and we cannot stay their progress entirely until education has been extended to the ma.s.ses. It has been made a reproach to the educated cla.s.ses that they have followed too exclusively after one or two pursuits, the law, journalism, or school teaching; and that these are all callings which make men inclined to overrate the importance of words and phrases. But even if there is substance in the count, we must take note also how far the past policy of Government is responsible. We have not succeeded in making education practical. It is only now, when the war has revealed the importance of industry, that we have deliberately set about encouraging Indians to undertake the creation of wealth by industrial enterprise, and have thereby offered the educated cla.s.ses any tangible inducement to overcome their traditional inclination to look down on practical forms of energy. We must admit that the educated Indian is a creation peculiarly of our own; and if we take the credit that is due to us for his strong points we must admit a similar liability for his weak ones. Let us note also in justice to him that the progressive Indian appears to realise the narrow basis of his position and is beginning to broaden it. In munic.i.p.al and university work he has taken a useful and creditable share. We find him organising effort not for political ends alone, but for various forms of public and social service. He has come forward and done valuable work in relieving famine and distress by floods, in keeping order at fairs, in helping pilgrims, and in promoting co-operative credit. Although his ventures in the fields of commerce have not been always fortunate, he is beginning to turn his attention more to the improvement of agriculture and industry. Above all, he is active in promoting education and sanitation; and every increase in the number of educated people adds to his influence and authority.
The authors of the Report were at the same time by no means unmindful of England"s responsibilities towards the vast ma.s.ses still quite content to accept the system of government which she had given them, and who looked with undiminished faith to their British administrators for the continuance of the peace and security and even-handed justice which they had seldom if ever enjoyed in the same measure under their indigenous rulers. The problem to be solved was "one of political education which must be practical and also experimental." The politically-minded cla.s.ses had to be given an opportunity of learning how to govern and administer; and the other cla.s.ses, which have hitherto accepted unquestioningly the government and administration given to them, had to be taught to exercise the critical rights of intelligent citizenship. A sphere had to be found in which Indians could be given work to do, and be held accountable to their own people for the way they did it. That sphere had to be circ.u.mscribed at first so as not to endanger the foundations of Government, and yet capable of steady expansion if and in proportion as the experiment succeeds, until the process of political education should be complete and Indians should have shown themselves qualified for the same measure of self-government as the Dominions already enjoy within the British Empire.
From a careful examination of the existing structure of Government and an exhaustive review of present conditions in India, the Montagu-Chelmsford Report deduced two definite conclusions:
(1) It is on the Central Government, _i.e._ the Government of India, that the whole structure rests; and the foundations must not be disturbed pending experience of the changes to be introduced into less vital parts. The Government of India must therefore remain wholly responsible to Parliament, and, saving such responsibility, its authority in essential matters must during the initial stages of the experiment remain indisputable.
(2) While popular control can be at once largely extended in the domain of local government, the Provinces provide the sphere in which the earlier steps towards the development of representative inst.i.tutions and the progressive realisation of responsible government promised in the Declaration of August 20, 1917, can be most usefully and safely taken.
The whole of the second part of the Report was devoted to working out in considerable detail a practical scheme for giving effect to those two conclusions. The powers and responsibilities of the Government of India as the Central Government were left intact, but an All-Indian legislature consisting of two a.s.semblies, the one as popular and democratic as a large elective majority proceeding from the broadest practicable franchise could make it--to be called the Indian Legislative a.s.sembly--and the other a relatively small upper chamber to be known as the Council of State which, composed partly of elected members and partly of members nominated by Government or ent.i.tled _ex officio_ to membership, was expected to provide the desired counterpoise of approved experience and enlightened conservatism. The Report expressed the pious hope that "inasmuch as the Council of State will be the supreme legislative authority for India on all crucial questions and the revising authority for all Indian legislation," it would "attract the services of the best men available," and "develop something of the experience and dignity of a body of Elder Statesmen"--an expression presumably borrowed, but not very aptly, from j.a.pan, where the Elder Statesmen have no doubt had immense influence but never any const.i.tutional status. The Report had, moreover, to contemplate the possibility of conflict between the Legislature and the Executive, and in accordance with the first of the two main conclusions at which it had arrived it proposed to arm the Governor-General in Council with power to override the Legislature if it failed to pa.s.s measures or grant supplies which he was prepared to "certify" as vital to the peace, safety, and interests of India.
For the great experiment in the provincial sphere, the eight provinces of Bombay, Madras, Bengal, the United Provinces, Behar and Orissa, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, and a.s.sam, were deemed to be already ripe. Burma (which is not really India at all, and whose people belong to another race and to another stage of political development), the North-West Frontier Province, and Baluchistan (which for strategical reasons must remain under the direct control of the Government of India), and a few smaller areas, whose populations are altogether too backward, were not to be touched at present. The essential feature of the scheme was the division of the functions of the Provincial Government into two categories: the one comprising what are now termed "the reserved subjects," _i.e._ those with which the maintenance of peace and order and good government is immediately bound up; and the other, those which, though less vital, very closely affect the daily life and common interests of the people, and which were to be called "the transferred subjects," because it was proposed to transfer at once the largest possible measure of power and responsibility in regard to them to exclusively Indian shoulders. While all essential power and responsibility in regard to "the reserved subjects" were to remain vested in the Governor-in-Council, _i.e._ the executive body consisting of the Governor and (under the new scheme) one British and one Indian member of Council, real power and responsibility for dealing with "the transferred subjects" were to be conferred on Indian Ministers accountable to a Legislative Council in which there was to be a large Indi