conservative.

Not till after Mr. Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe
had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the
demand of the Western-educated classes for a larger share in the
administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable
grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who were still
for the most part penned up in the Provincial Services as established on
the recommendations of the Aitcheson Committee more than twenty-five
years earlier. In 1912 a Royal Commission went out to India with Lord
Islington as Chairman. It was a body on which the British element in the
Indian Public Services was only represented by a small minority, and
amongst the European members Lord Ronaldshay and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald,
both then in the House of Commons, stood for widely different schools of
politics. Of the three Indian members, Mr. Gokhale, who had become one
of the most influential leaders of the Moderate party, carried by far
the greatest weight, and his premature death before the Commission
completed its Report seriously impaired its usefulness. It spent two
successive winters in taking a mass of evidence from Indians and
Europeans all over India, but its sittings held, except in very rare
cases, in public served chiefly at the time to stir up Indian opinion by
bringing into sharp relief the profound divergencies between the Indian
and the Anglo-Indian point of view, and in a form which on the one hand,
unfortunately, was bound to offend Indian susceptibilities, and on the
other hand was apt to produce the impression that Indians were chiefly
concerned to substitute an indigenous for an alien bureaucracy. Anyhow,
while the Western-educated classes were rapidly coming to the conclusion
that the Minto-Morley reforms had given them the shadow rather than the
substance of political power, they saw in the proceedings of the Public
Services Commission little indication of any radical change in the
attitude of the British official classes towards the question of
training up the people of India to a larger share in the administration.

In such circumstances the Extremists saw their opportunity to pour
ridicule on the new Councils and preach once more the futility of
constitutional agitation. The Indian National Congress, overshadowed for
a time by the new Councils, began to recover its popularity, and though
the split which had taken place at Surat between Moderates