There is a twofold danger in any eclipse, even partial, of the Governor-General in Council. One of the remarks I have heard most frequently all over India, and from Indians as well as from Englishmen, is that "there is no longer any Government of India"; and it is a remark which, however exaggerated in form, contains a certain element of truth. To whatever extent the Viceroy, in his relations with Whitehall, detaches himself from his Council, to that extent the centre of executive stability is displaced and the door is opened to that constant interference from home in the details of Indian administration which is all the more to be deprecated if there appear to be any suspicion of party pressure. Lord Morley has so often and so courageously stood up for sound principles of Indian government against the fierce attacks of the extreme wing of his party, and he has shown, on the whole, so much moderation and insight in his larger schemes of constructive statesmanship, whilst Lord Minto has won for himself so much personal regard during a very difficult period, that criticism may appear invidious. But the tone adopted, especially during the first years of Lord Morley's administration, in official replies to insidious Parliamentary questions aimed at Indian administrators, the alacrity with which they were transmitted from the India Office to Calcutta, the acquiescence with which they were received there, and the capital made out of them by political agitators when they were spread broadcast over India contributed largely to undermine the principle of authority upon which, as Lord Morley has himself admitted, Indian government must rest. For the impression was thus created in India that there was no detail of Indian administration upon which an appeal might not be successfully made through Parliament to the Secretary of State over the head of the Government of India. Now if, as Lord Morley has also admitted, Parliamentary government is inconceivable in India, it is equally inconceivable that Indian government can be carried on under a running fire of malevolent or ignorant criticism from a Parliament 6,000 miles away. That is certainly not the sort of Parliamentary control contemplated in the legislative enactments which guarantee the "ultimate responsibility" of the Secretary of State.
At the same time the effacement of the Viceroy's Executive Council has weakened that collective authority of the Government of India without which its voice must fail to carry full weight in Whitehall. Every experienced Anglo-Indian administrator, for instance, had been quick to realize what were bound to be the consequences of the unbridled licence of the extremist Press and of an openly seditious propaganda. Yet the Government of India under Lord Minto lacked the cohesion necessary to secure the sanction of the Secretary of State to adequate legislative action, repugnant to party traditions at home, until we had already begun to reap the bloody harvest of an exaggerated tolerance, and with the Viceroy himself the views of the ruling chiefs seem to have carried greater weight in urging action on the Secretary of State than the opinions recorded at a much earlier date by men entitled to his confidence and entrusted under his orders with the administration of British India.
Even if one could always be certain of having men of transcendent ability at the India Office and at Government House in Calcutta, it is impossible that they should safely dispense with the permanent corrective to their personal judgment and temperament—not to speak of outside pressure—which their respective Councils have been created by law to supply. Let us take first of all the case of the Viceroy. His position as the head of the Government of India may be likened to that of the Prime Minister at home, and the position of the Viceroy's Executive Council to that of the Ministers who, as heads of the principal executive Departments, form the Cabinet over which the Prime Minister presides. But no head of the Executive at home stands so much in need of capable and experienced advisers as the Viceroy, who generally goes out to India without any personal knowledge of the vast sub-continent and the 300 million people whom he is sent out to govern for five years with very far-reaching powers, and often without any administrative experience, though he has to take charge of the most complicated administrative machine in the world. Even when he has gone out to India, his opportunities of getting to know the country and its peoples are actually very scant. He spends more than six months of the year at Simla, an essentially European and ultra-official hill-station perched up in the clouds and entirely out of touch with Indian life, and another four months he spends in Calcutta, which, again, is only partially Indian, or, at any rate, presents but one aspect of the many-sided life of India. It takes a month for the great public departments to transport themselves and their archives from Calcutta to Simla at the beginning of the hot weather, and another month in the autumn for the pilgrimage back from the hills to Calcutta. It is only during these two months that the Viceroy can travel about freely and make himself acquainted with other parts of the vast Dependency committed to his care, and, though railways have shortened distances, rapid journeys in special trains with great ceremonial programmes at every halting point scarcely afford the same opportunities as the more leisurely progress of olden days, when the Governor-General's camp, as it moved from place to place, was open to visitors from the whole surrounding country. Moreover, the machinery of administration grows every year more ponderous and complicated, and the Viceroy, unless he is endowed with an almost superhuman power and quickness of work, is apt to find himself entangled in the meshes of never-ending routine. It is in order to supply the knowledge and experience which a Viceroy in most cases lacks when he first goes out, and in some cases is never able to acquire during his whole tenure of office, that his Executive Council is so constituted, in theory and as far as possible in practice, that it combines with administrative experience in the several Departments over which members respectively preside such a knowledge collectively of the whole of India that the Viceroy can rely upon expert advice and assistance in the transaction of public business and, not least, in applying with due regard for Indian conditions the principles of policy laid down for his guidance by the Home Government. These were the grounds upon which Lord Morley justified the appointment to the Viceroy's Executive Council of an Indian member who, besides being thoroughly qualified to take charge of the special portfolio entrusted to him, would bring into Council a special and intimate knowledge of native opinion and sentiment. These are the grounds upon which, by the way, Lord Morley cannot possibly justify the appointment of Mr. Clark as Member for Commerce and Industry, for a young subordinate official, however brilliant, of an English public Department cannot bring into the Viceroy's Executive Council either special or general knowledge of Indian affairs. Such an appointment must to that extent weaken rather than strengthen the Government of India.
The same arguments which apply in India to the conjunction of the
Governor-General with his Council apply, mutatis mutandis, with
scarcely less force to the importance of the part assigned to the
Council of India as advisers of the Secretary of State at the India
Office.
If we look at the Morley-Minto régime from another point of view, it is passing strange that the tendency to concentrate the direction of affairs in India in the hands of the Viceroy and to subject the Viceroy in turn to the closer and more immediate control of the Secretary of State, whilst simultaneously diminishing pro tanto the influence of their respective Councils, should have manifested itself just at this time, when it is Lord Morley who presides over the India Office. For no statesman has ever proclaimed a more ardent belief in the virtues of decentralization than Lord Morley, and Lord Morley himself is largely responsible for legislative reforms which will not only strengthen the hands of the provincial Governments in their dealings with the Government of India, but will enable and, indeed, force the Government of India to assume on many vital questions an attitude of increased independence towards the Imperial Government. The more we are determined to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas and with Indian interests, the more we must rely upon a strong, intelligent, and self-reliant Government of India. The peculiar conditions of India exclude the possibility of Indian self-government on colonial lines, but what we may, and probably must, look forward to at no distant date is that, with the larger share in legislation and administration secured to Indians by such measures as the Indian Councils Act, the Government of India will speak with growing authority as the exponent of the best Indian opinion within the limits compatible with the maintenance of British rule, and that its voice will therefore ultimately carry scarcely less weight at home in the determination of Indian policy than the voice of our self-governing Dominions already carries in all questions concerning their internal development.
The future of India lies in the greatest possible decentralization in India subject to the general, but unmeddlesome, control of the Governor-General in Council, and in the greatest possible freedom of the Government of India from all interference from home, except in regard to those broad principles of policy which it must always rest with the Imperial Government, represented by the Secretary of State in Council, to determine. It is only in that way that, to use one of Mr. Montagu's phrases, we can hope successfully to "yoke" to our own "democratic" system "a Government so complex and irresponsible to the peoples which it governs as the Government of India."
CHAPTER XXVII.
CONCLUSIONS.
No Viceroy has for fifty years gone out to India at so critical a moment as that at which Lord Hardinge of Penshurst is about to take up the reins of government. In one respect only is he more favoured than most of his predecessors. The Anglo-Russian agreement, of which he himself helped to lay the foundations when he was Ambassador at St. Petersburg, has removed the greatest of all the dangers that threatened the external security of India and the peace of Central Asia during the greater part of the nineteenth century. It does not, however, follow that the Government of India can look forward with absolute confidence to continued immunity from all external troubles. Save for the Tibetan expedition and one or two small punitive expeditions against Pathan tribes, there have been no military operations on the Indian frontier since the Terai campaign was brought to a close in 1898. But signs are, unfortunately, not wanting of a serious recrudescence of restlessness on the North-West Frontier, where the very necessary measures taken to cut off supplies of arms from the Persian Gulf have contributed to stimulate the chronic turbulence of the unruly tribesmen. There is no definite evidence at present that they are receiving direct encouragement from Cabul, but it is at least doubtful whether the somewhat exaggerated deference shown to the Ameer on the occasion of his visit three years ago to India has permanently improved our relations with him, and though he is no longer able to play off Russia and England against each other, he has not yet brought himself to signify his adhesion to the Convention which defined our understanding with Russia in regard to Afghan affairs. The condition of Persia, and especially of the southern provinces, has created a situation which cannot be indefinitely tolerated, whilst the provocative temper displayed by the Turkish authorities under the new régime at various points on the Persian Gulf is only too well calculated to produce unpleasant complications, however anxious we must be to avoid them, if only in view of the feeling which any estrangement between Mahomedan Powers and Great Britain inevitably produces amongst Indian Moslems. The high-handed action of China in Tibet, and, indeed, all along the north-eastern borderland of our Indian Empire, has introduced a fresh element of potential trouble which the Government of India cannot safely disregard, for we are bound not only to protect our own frontiers, but also to safeguard the interests of Nepal and Bhutan, where, as well as in Sikkim, the fate of Tibet and the flight of the Dalai Lama have caused no slight perturbation. In Nepal especially, which is one of the most valuable recruiting grounds of the Indian Army, Chinese ascendency cannot be allowed to overshadow British influence. Lord Hardinge is by profession a peacemaker, and how efficient a peacemaker he proved himself to be at St. Petersburg during the Russo-Japanese war will only be fully known when the historian has access to the secret records of that critical period of Anglo-Russian relations. But it must not be forgotten that the maintenance of peace along such a vast and still largely unsettled borderland as that of India may at any moment be frustrated by disturbing forces over which the most peacefully disposed Viceroy has little or no control.
Peace and sound finance, which is inseparable from peace, have certainly never been more essential to India than at the present juncture. For without them the difficulty of solving the most absorbing and urgent of the internal problems of India will be immeasurably enhanced. There is a lull in the storm of unrest, but after the repeated disappointments to which official optimism has been subjected within the last few years, he would be a sanguine prophet who would venture to assert that this lull presages a permanent return to more normal conditions. Has the creation of a new political machinery which gives a vastly enlarged scope to the activities of Indian constitutional reformers, definitely rallied the waverers and restored courage and confidence to the representatives of sober and law-abiding opinion, or will they continue to follow the lead of impatient visionaries clamouring, as Lord Morley once put it, for the moon which we cannot give them? Have the forces of aggressive disaffection been actually disarmed by the so-called measures of "repression," or have they merely been compelled for the time being to cover their tracks and modify their tactics, until the relaxation of official vigilance or the play of party politics in England or some great international crisis opens up a fresh opportunity for militant sedition? To these momentous questions the next five years will doubtless go far to furnish a conclusive answer, and it will be determined in no small measure by the statesmanship, patience, and firmness which Lord Hardinge will bring to the discharge of the constitutional functions assigned to him as Viceroy—i.e., as the personal representative of the King Emperor, and as Governor-General in Council—i.e., as the head of the Government of India.