to the debate with keen, lively, and close interest. I am not one of
those who have usually complained of these grave topics being raised,
when fair opportunity offered in this House. On the whole, looking
back over my Parliamentary lifetime, which is now pretty long, I think
there has been too little Indian discussion. Before I came here there
were powerful minds like Mr. Fawcett and Mr. Bradlaugh and others, who
constantly raised Indian questions in a truly serious and practical
way, though I do not at all commit myself to the various points
of view that were then adopted. But, of course, this is a vote of
confidence. I am not going to ask members to vote for the Government
on that ground. But I must submit that His Majesty's present
Government in the Indian department has the confidence both of the
House and of the country. I believe we have. An important suggestion
was made by my hon. friend now sitting below the gangway, that a
Parliamentary Committee should sit--I presume a joint committee of the
two Houses--and my hon. friend who spoke last, said that the fact of
the existence of that committee would bring Parliament into closer
contact with the mind of India. Well, ever since I have been at the
India Office I have rather inclined in the direction of one of the old
Parliamentary Committees. I will not argue the question now. I can
only assure my hon. friend that the question has been considered
by me, and I see what its advantages might be, yet I also perceive
serious disadvantages. In the old days they were able to command the
services on the Indian committees, of ex-Ministers, of members of this
House and members of another place, who had had much experience
of Indian administration, and I am doubtful, considering the
preoccupations of public men, whether we should now be able to call a
large body of experienced administrators, with the necessary balance
between the two Houses, to sit on one of these committees. And then I
would point out another disadvantage. You would have to call away from
the performance of their duties in India a large body of men whose
duties ought to occupy, and I believe do occupy, all their minds and
all their time. Still it is an idea, and I will only say that I do not
entirely banish it from my own mind. Two interesting speeches, and
significant speeches, have been made this afternoon. One was made by
my hon. friend, the mover, and the other by the hon. Member for East
Leeds. Those two speeches raise a really important issue. My hon.
friend the Member for Leeds said that democracy was entirely opposed
to, and would resist, the doctrine of the settled fact.[1] My hon.
friend tells you democracy will have nothing to do with settled facts,
though he did not quite put it as plainly as that. Now, if that be so,
I am very sorry for democracy. I do not agree with my hon. friend. I
think democracy will be just as reasonable as any other sensible form
of government, and I do not believe democracy will for a moment
think that you are to rip up a settlement of an administrative or
constitutional question, because it jars with some abstract _a priori_
idea. I for one certainly say that I would not remain at the India
Office, or any other powerful and responsible Departmental office, on
condition that I made short work of settled facts, hurried on with my
catalogue of first principles, and arranged on those principles
the whole duties of government. Then my hon. friend the Member for
Brentford quoted an expression of mine used in a speech in the country
about the impatient idealists, and he reproved me for saying that some
of the worst tragedies of history had been wrought by the impatient
idealists. He was kind enough to say that it was I, among other
people, who had made him an idealist, and therefore I ought not to be
ashamed of my spiritual and intellectual progeny. I certainly have no
right whatever to say that I am ashamed of my hon. friend, who made
a speech full of interesting views, full of visions of a millennial
future, and I do not quarrel with him for making his speech. My hon.
friend said that he was for an Imperial Duma. The hon. Gentleman has
had the advantage of a visit to India, which I have never had. I think
he was there for six whole long weeks. He polished off the Indian
population at the heroic rate of sixty millions a week, and this makes
him our especially competent instructor. His Imperial Duma was to be
elected, as I understood, by universal suffrage.
[Footnote 1: The Secretary of State had on an earlier occasion spoken
of the Petition of Bengal as a settled fact.]
Dr. RUTHERFORD: No, not universal suffrage. I said educational
suffrage, and also pecuniary suffrage--taxpayers and ratepayers.
Mr. MORLEY: In the same speech the hon. Gentleman made a great charge
against our system of education in India--that we had not educated
them at all; therefore, he excludes at once an enormous part of the
population. The Imperial Duma, as I understood from my hon. friend was
to be subject to the veto of the Viceroy. That is not democracy. We
are to send out from Great Britain once in five years a Viceroy,
who is to be confronted by an Imperial Duma, just as the Tsar is
confronted by the Duma in Russia. Surely that is not a very ripe idea
of democracy. My hon. friend visited the State of Baroda, and thought
it well governed. Well, there is no Duma of his sort there. I will
state frankly my own opinion even though I have not spent one single
week-end in India. If I had to frame a new system of government for
India, I declare I would multiply the Baroda system of government,
rather than have an Imperial Duma and universal suffrage. The speech
of my hon. friend, with whom I am sorry to find myself, not in
collision but in difference, illustrates what is to my mind one of the
grossest of all the fallacies in practical politics--namely, that you
can cut out, frame, and shape one system of government for communities
with absolutely different sets of social, religious, and economic
conditions--that you can cut them all out by a sort of standardised
pattern, and say that what is good for us here, the point of view, the
line of argument, the method of solution--that all these things are to
be applied right off to a community like India. I must tell my hon.
friend that I regard that as a most fatal and mischievous fallacy, and
I need not say more. I am bound, after what I have said, to add that I
do not think that it is at all involved in Liberalism. I have had the
great good fortune and honour and privilege to have known some of the
great Liberals of my time, and there was not one of those great men,
Gambetta, Bright, Gladstone, Mazzini, who would have accepted for one
single moment the doctrine on which my hon. friend really bases his
visionary proposition for a Duma. Is there any rational man who
holds that, if you can lay down political principles and maxims
of government that apply equally to Scotland or to England, or to
Ireland, or to France, or to Spain, therefore they must be just as
true for the Punjab and the United Provinces and Bengal?
Dr. RUTHERFORD: I quoted Mr. Bright as making the very proposal I have
made, with the exception of the Duma--namely, Provincial Parliaments.
Mr. MORLEY: I am afraid I must traverse my hon. friend's description
of Mr. Bright's view, with which, I think, I am pretty well
acquainted. Mr. Bright was, I believe, on the right track at the time,
when in 1858 the Government of India was transferred to the Crown.
He was not in favour of universal suffrage--he was rather
old-fashioned--but Mr. Bright's proposal was perfectly different from
that of my hon. friend. Sir Henry Maine, and others who had been
concerned with Indian affairs, came to the conclusion that Mr.
Bright's idea was right--that to put one man, a Viceroy, assisted as
he might be with an effective Executive Council, in charge of such
an area as India and its 300 millions of population, with all its
different races, creeds, modes of thought, was to put on a Viceroy's
shoulder a load that no man of whatever powers, however gigantic they
might be, could be expected effectively to support. My hon. friend and
others who sometimes favour me with criticisms in the same sense,
seem to suggest that I am a false brother, that I do not know what
Liberalism is. I think I do, and I must even say that I do not think I
have anything to learn of the principles or maxims or the practice of
Liberal doctrines even from my hon. friend. You are bound to look at
the whole mass of the difficulties and perplexing problems connected
with India, from a common-sense plane, and it is not common sense, if
I may say so without discourtesy, to talk of Imperial Dumas. I have
not had a word of thanks from that quarter, in the midst of a shower
of reproach, for what I regard, in all its direct and indirect results
and bearings, as one of the most important moves that have been made
in connection with the relations between Great Britain and India for
a long time--I mean, the admission of two Indian gentlemen to the
Council of the Secretary of State. An hon. friend wants me to appoint
an Indian gentleman to the Viceroy's Executive Council. Well, that
is a different thing; but I am perfectly sure that, if an occasion
offers, neither Lord Minto nor I would fall short of some such
application of democratic principles. In itself it is something that
we have a Viceroy and a Secretary of State thoroughly alive to the
great change in temperature and atmosphere that has been going on in
India for the last five or six years, and I do not think we ought to
be too impatiently judged. We came in at a perturbed time; we did not
find balmy breezes and smooth waters. It is notorious that we came
into enormous difficulties, which we had not created. How they were
created is a long story that has nothing whatever to do with the
present discussion. But what I submit with the utmost confidence
is that the situation to-day is a considerable improvement on the
situation that we found, when we assumed power two years ago. There
have been heavy and black clouds over the Indian horizon during
those two years. By our policy those clouds have been to some extent
dispersed. I am not so unwise as to say that the clouds will never
come back again; but what has been done by us has been justified, in
my opinion, by the event.
Some fault was found, and I do not in the least complain, with the
deportation of two native gentlemen. I do not quarrel with the man
who finds fault with that proceeding. To take anybody and deport him
without bringing any charge against him, and with no intention of
bringing him to trial, is a step that, I think, the House is perfectly
justified in calling me to account for. I have done my best to account
for it, and to-day, anyone who knows the Punjab, would agree that,
whatever may happen at some remote period, its state is comparatively
quiet and satisfactory. I am not going to repeat my justification of
that strong measure of deportation, but I should like to read to the
House the words of the Viceroy in the Legislative Council in November
last, when he was talking about the circumstances with which we had to
deal. He said, addressing Lord Kitchener--
"I hope that your Excellency will on my behalf as Viceroy and as
representing the King convey to His Majesty's Indian troops
my thanks for the contempt with which they have received the
disgraceful overtures which I know have been made to them. The
seeds of sedition have been unscrupulously scattered throughout
India, even amongst the hills of the frontier tribes. We are
grateful that they have fallen on much barren ground, but we can
no longer allow their dissemination."
Will anybody say, that in view of the possible danger pointed to in
that language of the Viceroy two or three months ago, we did wrong in
using the regulation which applied to the case? No one can say what
mischief might have followed, if we had taken any other course than
that which we actually took.
Let me beseech my hon. friends at least to try for some sense of
balanced proportion, instead of allowing their wrath at one particular
incident of policy to blot out from their vision all the wide and
durable operations, to which we have set firm and persistent hands.
After all, this absence of a sense of proportion is what, more than
any other one thing, makes a man a wretched politician.
Now as to the reforms that are mentioned in my hon. friend's
Amendment. It is an extraordinary Amendment. It--
"submits that the present condition of affairs in India demands
the immediate and serious attention of His Majesty's Government."
I could cordially vote for that, only remarking that the hon. member
must think the Secretary of State, and the Viceroy, and other persons
immediately concerned in the Government of India, very curious people
if he supposes that the state of affairs in India does not always
demand their immediate and very serious attention. Then the Amendment
says--
"The present proposals of the Government of India are inadequate
to allay the existing and growing discontent."
I hope it is not presumptuous to say so, but I should have expected a
definition from my hon. friend of what he guesses these proposals are.
I should like to set a little examination paper to my hon. friend. I
have studied them for many months, yet would rather not be examined
for chapter and verse. But my hon. friend after his famous six weeks
of travel knows all about them, and the state of affairs for which our
plans are the inadequate remedy. I do not want to hold him up as a
formidable example: but in his speech to-day he went over--and it
does credit to his industry--every single one of the most burning and
controversial questions of the whole system of Indian Government and
seemed to say, "I will tell you how far this is wrong and exactly what
ought to be done to put what is wrong right." I think I have got from
him twenty _ipse dixits_ on all these topics on which we slow dull
people at the India Office are wearing ourselves to pieces. When it is
said, as I often hear it said, that I, for example, am falling
into the hands of my officials, it should be remembered that those
gentlemen who go to India also get into the hands of other people.
Dr. RUTHERFORD: I was in the hands both of officials and of Indians.
Mr. MORLEY: Then let me assure him, perhaps to his amazement, that he
came out of the hands of both of them still with something to learn.
I wonder whether, when this House is asked to condemn the present
proposals of the Government of India as being inadequate to allay the
existing and growing discontent, it is realised exactly how the case
stands. I will repeat what I said in the debate on the Indian
Budget. The Government of India sent over to the India Office their
proposals--their various schemes for advisory councils and so forth.
We at the India Office subjected them to a careful scrutiny and
laborious examination. As a result of this careful scrutiny and
examination, they were sent back to the Government of India with the
request that they would submit them to discussion in various quarters.
The instruction to the Government of India was that by the end of
March, the India Office was to learn what the general view was at
which the Government of India had themselves arrived upon the plans,
with all their complexities and variations. We wanted to know what
they would tell us. It will be for us to consider how far the report
so arrived at, how far these proposals, ripened by Indian opinion,
carried out the policy which His Majesty's Government had in view.
Surely that is a reasonable and simple way of proceeding? When you
have to deal with complex communities of varied races, and all the
other peculiarities of India, you have to think out how your proposals
will work. Democracies do not always think how things will work.
Sir Henry Cotton made a speech that interested and struck me by its
moderation and reasonableness. He made a number of remarks in perfect
good faith about officials, which I received in a chastened spirit,
for he has been for a very long time a very distinguished official
himself. Therefore, he knows all about it. He went on to talk of
the great problem of the separation of the executive and judicial
functions, which is one of the living problems of India. I can only
assure my hon. friend that that is engaging our attention both in
India and here.
Another of the subjects to which the attention of the Indian
Government has been specifically directed has regard to the mitigation
of flogging, the restriction of civil flogging, and the limitation of
military flogging to specific cases. In this we are making a marked
advance in humanity and common sense,--which is itself a kind of
humanity.
My hon. friend appeals to me saying that all will be well in India,
if the Secretary of State will make a statement which will show the
Indian people that, in his relations with them, his hopes for them,
and his efforts for them, he is moved by a kindly, sympathetic, and
friendly feeling, showing them that his heart is with them. All I have
got to say is that I have never shown myself anything else. My heart
is with them. What is bureaucracy to me? It is a great machine in
India, yes a splendid machine, for performing the most difficult task
that ever was committed to the charge of any nation. But show me where
it fails--that it is perfect in every respect no sensible man would
contend for a moment--but show me at any point, let any of my hon.
friends show me from day to day as this session passes, where this
bureaucracy, as they call it, has been at fault. Do they suppose it
possible that I will not show my recognition of that failure, and
do all that I can to remedy it? Although the Government of India is
complicated and intricate, they cannot suppose that I shall fail for
one moment in doing all in my power to demonstrate that we are moved
by a kindly, a sympathetic, a friendly, an energetic, and what I
will call a governing spirit, in the highest form and sense of that
sovereign and inspiring word.
IV
INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE
(LONDON. JULY 1908)
GENTLEMEN,--I have first of all to thank you for what I understand is
a rare honour--and an honour it assuredly is--of being invited to
be your guest to-night. The position of a Secretary of State in the
presence of the Indian Civil Service is not an entirely simple one.
You, Gentlemen, who are still in the Service, and the veterans I see
around me who have been in that great Service, naturally and properly
look first of all, and almost altogether, upon India. A Secretary of
State has to look also upon Great Britain and upon Parliament--and
that is not always a perfectly easy situation to adjust. I forget who
it was that said about the rulers of India in India:--"It is no easy
thing for a man to keep his watch in two longitudes at once at the
same time." That is the case of the Secretary of State. It is not
the business of the Secretary of State to look exclusively at India,
though I will confess to you for myself that during the moderately
short time I have held my present office, I have kept my eye upon
India constantly, steadfastly, and with every desire to learn the
whole truth upon every situation as it arose.
But there must be a thorough comprehension in the mind of the
Secretary of State of two things--first of all, of the Indian point of
view; and, secondly, the point of view as it appears to those who are
the masters of me and of you. Do not forget that adjustment has to be
made. It would be impertinent of me to pay compliments to the Civil
Service, to whom I propose this toast--"The Health of the Indian
Civil Service." You might think for a moment, that it was an amateur
proposing prosperity and success to experts. I have had in my days a
good deal to do with experts of one kind and another, and I assure
you that I do not think an expert is at all the worse when he gets a
candid-minded and reasonably well trained amateur.
Now, this year is a memorable anniversary. It is fifty years within a
month or two, since the Crown took over the Government of India from
the old East India Company. Whether that was a good move or a bad
move, it would not become me to discuss. The move was made. (A voice,
"It was a good move.") My veteran friend says that it was a good move.
I hope so. But at the end of fifty years we are at rather a critical
moment. I read in _The Times_ the other day that the present Viceroy
and Secretary of State had to deal with conditions such as the British
in India never before were called upon to face. (A voice, "That is
so.") Now, many of you sitting around me at this table are far better
able to test the weight of that statement, than I can pretend to be.
Is it true that at the end of fifty years since the transfer to the
Crown, we have to deal with conditions such as the British in India
never before were called upon to face? ("Yes.") I cannot undertake to
measure that; but what is clear is that decidedly heavy clouds have
suddenly risen in our horizon, and are darkly sailing over our Indian
skies. That cannot be denied. But, gentlemen, having paid the utmost
attention that a man can in office, with access to all the papers, and
seeing all the observers he is able to see, I do not feel for a moment
that this discovery of a secret society or a secret organisation
involves any question of an earthquake. I prefer to look upon it, to
revert to my own figure, as clouds sailing through the sky. I do not
say you will not have to take pretty strong measures of one sort and
another. Yes, but strong measures in the right direction, and with the
right qualifications. I think any man who lays down a firm proposition
that all is well, or any man who says that all is ill--either of those
two men is probably wrong. Now this room is filled, and genially
filled, with men who have had enormous experience, vast and wide
experience, and, not merely passive experience, but that splendid
active experience which is the real training and education of men
in responsibility. This room is full of gentlemen with these
qualifications. And I will venture to say that the theories and
explanations that could be heard in the palace of truth from all of
you gentlemen here, would be countless in their differences. I hear
explanations of the present state of things all day long. I like to
hear them. You think it may become monotonous. No: not at all; because
there is so much, I will not say of random variety, but there is so
much independent use of mind upon the facts that we have to deal with,
that I listen with endless edification and instruction. But, I think,
and I wish I could think otherwise with all my heart--that to sum up
all these theories and explanations of the state of things with which
we have to deal, you can hardly resist a painful impression that there
is now astir in some quarters a certain estrangement and alienation of
races. ("No no.") Gentlemen, bear with me patiently. It is our share
in the Asiatic question.
A DIFFICULT PROBLEM.