ak 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, a