he 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 spe