Yet within less than ten years from that emphatic declaration, the goal which Lord Morley formally repudiated has been formally adopted by his successor. What is the reason for this change? Partly, no doubt, it is a consequence of the failure of Lord Morley to foresee that, whatever his own intentions, the reforms which he initiated were destined to lead us into a blind alley, if they were not to lead to definitely representative institutions. Enthusiastically as they were welcomed at first by the Western-educated classes in India, to whose political influence they were in themselves a direct and open concession, they failed to satisfy their aspirations as soon as it was shown in practice that increased opportunities of consultation involved no effective increase of power in the conduct of public affairs. Indirectly the Indian members have unquestionably been able, during the last ten years, to make their influence substantially felt in the Indian Legislatures, but more often in private and confidential conferences between their leaders and the official representatives of government than in public debates, of which alone the Indian public is cognizant. One of the most unhappy provisions of the Morley-Minto reforms was the resort to a mechanical majority to uphold the final discussions of the Executive in legislatures which were only designed to be consultative. It served merely to foster the illusion that they had something of the character of parliamentary assemblies in which the Executive must rely for its maintenance in office upon a voting majority.

In the Viceroy's Legislative Council the official majority was permanently secured. In the Provincial Councils, in which government depends for its majority on some non-official votes in addition to the safe official votes, it has already in some instances been compelled to abandon even legislation which it considered almost essential less it should lose face by being placed in a minority. As Mr. Lionel Curtis remarks in his 'Letters to the People of India,' to which further reference will be made:

'Is it humanly possible, if this system be long continued, that the Executive will resist the temptation to influence non-official members by means other than pure argument in open debate? Wherever this system has been long continued, government by "influence" has set in, degenerating into government by intrigue, and ending in government by corruption.'

Already, though with no shadow of foundation, Indian elected members have not hesitated to suggest the intrusion of such evils by ignoring and pouring contempt upon their fellow-countrymen who owe their seats not to election but to nomination by government. On the other hand, criticism of government unrestrained by any growing sense of responsibility has increased in bitterness with the larger opportunities it enjoys of making itself heard. The Morley-Minto reforms have thus promoted discord instead of harmony between the two races by the creation of assemblies which are neither in reality merely deliberative, since the Indian members do actually wield sufficient power in them to hamper and obstruct, though not to control, the Executive; nor parliamentary, since the power wielded by the Indian members remains entirely divorced from the real responsibility that can only act as an effective restraint when an opposition has to face the possibility of being called upon to change places with the government and translate its own theories into practice.

But great as was even before the war the disillusionment of Indian politicians, and even of many thoughtful Europeans, over the results of the Morley-Minto reforms, and widespread as was already the agitation for another 'forward step' in the very direction which Lord Morley had excluded from all his calculations, such a complete change of front in British policy as the Pronouncement of August 20th implies would not, it may confidently be asserted, have taken place without the great revolution produced by the war in the whole outlook both of the British and of the Indian peoples. The genuine outburst of enthusiasm with which India responded to the call of the Empire at the beginning of the war came almost as a revelation to the British public generally, who know little about India, and the impression deepened when during the critical winter of 1914-15 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 those Englishmen who did know India; but less expected was the rally to the British cause of even that section of the new Western-educated classes in India which, until then,

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 throw off British rule itself. 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 the one thought, as 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 gratitude for peace and the blessings ' of civilization secured to her under its ægis for the last 'hundred and fifty years and more.' The tale of German frightfulness and the guns of the Emden, 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. Great Britain and the whole British Empire marked their sense of the new imperial spirit of which India had shown herself capable by admitting representatives of India into the innermost counsels of the Imperial War Conference which assembled last year in London. India's representation at the imperial conferences inevitably brought to the forefront a question which had hitherto preoccupied only those who had given time and thought to one of the great problems of the British Commonwealth of Nations-namely, the position of India within an Empire made up of self-governing nations. Could it possibly continue in such company to be a mere dependency, however important, without any definite voice in the control of its own affairs? Could it under such conditions be regarded as an equal partner with nations each of which had full control of its own affairs? Simultaneously, our own war aims came to be more clearly defined, and, with the Russian revolution and the accession of the United States, the world-war shaped itself more and more to the one paramount issue: Freedom versus Slavery; Democracy versus Military Despotism. So the conception of India's ultimate position as another great self-governing nation within the British Empire grew into an

* Maharajah of Bikanir and Sir Satyendra Sinha.

inevitable corollary not only of her own claim to full partnership in the Empire she was fighting for, but of the principles for which the British Empire and its allies had committed themselves to a life-and-death struggle.

This is, as I read it, the logical genesis of the Pronouncement of August 20th. Seldom in our history has so far-reaching a decision been based so largely on abstract principles of right rather than on the considerations of practical expediency which usually inform our policy. Let us not, therefore, be surprised or discouraged if the difficulties it involves are great, but let us recognize how great they are, and then face them. They are far greater than any we have yet encountered and surmounted during our three centuries connection with India.

We have undertaken to introduce democratic institutions, which in our own country have been the slow product of our national evolution and of our western civilization, into a country with an ancient civilization entirely different from our own, and only recently and still very superficially influenced by ours, a country which in the course of its long history has never known democracy, except in the microscopic shape of the Indian village Panchayat or Council of Five Elders, whose horizon has never extended beyond the village. The system of autocratic governinent under which we have hitherto ruled India has been none of our own making. We took it over from our predecessors, the Mogul Emperors, alien conquerors like ourselves, merely making it more paternal and efficient than ever it was in their days. It is the fashion with Hindus to praise the Emperor Akbar for having, although a Mohammedan, ruled Ir dia largely through the agency of Hindus. But the Hindus he employed merely enforced his rules of government, which, if for his time and creed singularly tolerant and enlightened, were nevertheless despotic; they were what to-day would be called 'bureaucrats,' though of the best type. Under the indigenous Hindu rulers, before India was overwhelmed by successive waves of Mohammedan conquest, despotic forms of government equally prevailed, though the power behind the throne was frequently that of the Brahman oligarchy, sometimes good and sometimes bad, but never in any sense tending towards democracy. The Buddhist Emperor Asoka, whose edicts engraved on stone pillars remain to this

day the most splendid monuments of apostolic kingship, was an absolute autocrat, though a saintly autocrat. The ancient social structure of India is the reverse of democratic. There is nothing in the tenets of Islam fundamentally incompatible with democracy, but even the Mohammedans of India are still largely tinged with Hindu conceptions, and Hinduism is a social even more than a religious system, based upon the iron law of caste. A law which assigns men from their birth to separate pens from which until death they can never emerge is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, and at the present day there are scores of millions of low caste or no caste Hindus whom their fellow-men of the higher castes regard and treat as 'untouchable,' especially in Southern India, where Brahmanical ascendancy has been much less severely shaken than in the north by the impact of Islam. Even in its higher aspects, Hindu philosophy does not tend to develop the sense of social duty of which democracy should be the political expression, for it teaches the individual to seek not the relief of human suffering around him, but his own escape from an endless cycle of suffering existence, which is all mayà or illusion, by complete withdrawal from human intercourse and concentration of all his faculties on the salvation-i.e. the annihilation of self. There is not even a belief in the efficacy of prayers for others to relieve Indian asceticism from the reproach of spiritual selfishness to which the more recluse forms of Christian monasticism are open.

Historical and geographical causes have produced another obstacle to democratic progress in the profoundly unequal level of civilization to which the different parts of India have attained. As Lord Morley said: We have now, as it were, 'before us in that vast congeries of peoples we call India a 'long, slow march in uneven stages through all the centuries 'from the fifth to the twentieth.' Millions of hill and jungle folk are barely removed from primitive savagery. The relations between the great landlords and the peasantry of large parts of India still retain much of their old feudal character. Between the masses of the two greatest communities, Hindus and Mohammedans, the fanatical spirit of our own religious wars still smoulders, and, in spite of the watchfulness of a strong government, leaps up suddenly from time to time into flames. Only last autumn, at the very time