to a potent instrument for good.

Of the deeper significance which underlay the meeting of this remarkable
assembly it is still perhaps premature to speak. But cautious and
tentative as was the attitude of all parties concerned, and free as,
from beginning to end, the proceedings were from any startling
incidents, no one can have watched them without being conscious of the
presence of new forces of vast potentiality which must tend to modify
very profoundly the relations between the governors and the governed in
India itself, and possibly even between India and the Mother Country.
They are the forces, largely still unknown, which have been brought into
play by Lord Morley's Constitutional reforms, and though they made
themselves naturally more conspicuously felt in the Imperial Council at
Calcutta, they were present in every one of the enlarged Legislative
Councils of the Provincial Governments.

It is no part of my purpose to recount in detail the long, though
generally dispassionate, controversy to which these reforms gave rise.
We may not all be agreed as to the necessity or wisdom of some of the
changes embodied in them, and some may think that we are inclined to
travel too fast and too far on a road which Indians have not up to the
present shown themselves qualified to tread without danger. But there
are few Englishmen either at home or in India who do not recognize the
statesmanlike spirit in which Lord Morley, loyally seconded throughout
by Lord Minto, has approached the very difficult problem of giving to
the people of India a larger consultative voice in administration as
well as in legislation without jeopardizing the stability or impairing
the supremacy of British control. The future alone can show how far
these far-reaching changes will justify the generous expectations of
their author, but taken as a whole they undoubtedly represent a
constructive work which is fully worthy of the fine record of British
rule in India.

How very far-reaching they are the merest indication of their most
salient features will suffice to indicate. For the sake of convenience,
though they form a homogeneous whole, they may be divided roughly into
two categories--those that affect the Executive Councils and those that
have remodelled the Legislative Councils. To the former category
belong:--

(1) The appointment of an Indian member to the Viceroy's Executive
Council. Mr. S.P. Sinha, a Bengalee barrister in large practice, was