new Indian
institutions and the general progress of the people of India should at
stated intervals determine the further stages of advance towards the
final goal of self-government. Such a Commission, armed with power to
examine witnesses, would not only enlighten British public opinion, but
also probe Indian opinion in a much more searching way than can be done
by impassioned and irresponsible arguments and counter-arguments in the
press and on platforms. It would, above all, assist Parliament to master
from time to time the many-sided problem whose progressive solution it
would have constantly to watch and periodically to determine.

The Report was a document of such magnitude and complexity, and went so
boldly to the roots of Indian government and administration, that even
amongst the absorbing preoccupations of the war, which was only just
emerging for the Allies from the terrible crisis of March-April 1918,
its publication at once provoked a considerable stream of criticism. On
the whole, British public opinion was favourable, though there was a
small but not uninfluential group of British reactionaries who at once
took up, and have ever since maintained, the position that the Report
meant, not the mending, for which they saw, moreover, very little need,
but the ending of British rule in India. Equal divergencies occurred in
Indian public opinion. An Extremist gathering in Madras declared roundly
that "the scheme is so radically wrong in principle and in detail that
in our opinion it is impossible to modify or improve it." In vain had
Mrs. Besant been released from her modern _oubliette_ before Mr. Montagu
started for India. "The scheme," she wrote in her haste, on the very day
of its publication, "is unworthy to be offered by England or to be
accepted by India." In vain had Mr. Montagu allowed himself to be
garlanded by Mr. Tilak, who was not far behind Mrs. Besant in
pronouncing the scheme to be "entirely unacceptable." The Calcutta
Provincial Conference of the Congress party held a few days later
abounded in the same sense, and a special session of the whole Congress
convoked in August in Bombay was only in form somewhat less bitterly
uncompromising, and only because it began to realise that the secession
of the more moderate elements was likely to reduce "the Parliament of
India" to a mere rump. Moderate opinion had not committed itself to
acceptance of the scheme as precipitately as the Extremists to its
reje