etails. But no doubt it is desirable that the main
heads of the regulations, rules, and proclamations to be made by the
Government of India under sanction of the India Office, should be more
or less placed within the reach and knowledge of the House so far as
they are complete. The principles of the Bill are in the Bill, and
will be affirmed, if your Lordships are pleased to read it a second
time. The Committee points, important as they are, can well be dealt
with in Committee. The view of Mr. Gladstone was cheerfully accepted
by the House of Commons then, and I hope it will be accepted by your
Lordships to-day.

There is one very important chapter in these regulations, which I
think now on the Second Reading of the Bill, without waiting for
Committee, I ought to say a few words to your Lordships about--I mean
the Mahomedans. That is a part of the Bill and scheme that has no
doubt attracted a great deal of criticism, and excited a great deal of
feeling in that important community. We suggested to the Government of
India a certain plan. We did not prescribe it, we did not order it,
but we suggested and recommended this plan for their consideration--no
more than that. It was the plan of a mixed or composite electoral
college, in which Mahomedans and Hindus should pool their votes, so to
say. The wording of the recommendation in my despatch was, as I soon
discovered, ambiguous--a grievous defect, of which I make bold to hope
I am not very often in public business guilty. But, to the best of
my belief, under any construction the plan of Hindus and Mahomedans
voting together, in a mixed and composite electorate, would have
secured to the Mahomedan electors, wherever they were so minded, the
chance of returning their own representatives in their due proportion.
The political idea at the bottom of this recommendation, which has
found so little favour, was that such composite action would bring
the two great communities more closely together, and this hope of
promoting harmony was held by men of high Indian authority and
experience who were among my advisers at the India Office. But the
Mahomedans protested that the Hindus would elect a pro-Hindu upon it,
just as I suppose in a mixed college of say seventy-five Catholics and
twenty-five Protestants voting together, the Protestants might suspect
that the Catholics voting for the Protestant would choose what is
called a Romanising Protestant, and as a little of a Protestant
as t