y 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