-70_The Viceroy’s Speech.htm

The Viceroy’s Speech

THE speech of Lord Minto on the occasion of the first meeting of the Viceroy’s Council under the new regime is a very important pronouncement; and the most momentous of the passages in the pronouncement are two, the one in which he disposes finally of any lingering hopes in the minds of the Moderates, the other in which he threatens to dispose finally of any lingering hopes in the minds of the Nationalists. It has been a Moderate legend which still labours to survive, that the intention of Lords Morley and Minto in the Reforms was to lay the foundations of representative self-government in India. This legend was perseveringly reiterated in direct contradiction of the Secretary of State’s famous pronouncement that, so far as his vision could pierce into the future, the personal and absolute element in Indian administration must for ever remain. Lord Minto has. now stamped his foot on the Moderate legend and crushed it into atoms. We quote the important passages in which he accomplishes this ruthless destruction.

"We have distinctly maintained that representative Government in its Western sense is totally inapplicable to the Indian Empire and would be uncongenial to the traditions of Eastern populations — that Indian conditions do not admit of popular representation — that the safety and welfare of the country must depend on the supremacy of British administration — and that that supremacy can, in no circumstances, be delegated to any kind of representative assembly …. We have aimed at the reform and enlargement of our Councils but not at the creation of Parliaments. I emphasise what I have just said in view of the opinions to which advanced Indian politicians appear not infrequently to commit themselves."

In the face of speech so plain and uncompromising it will be difficult indeed to keep up the fiction that it is only the regulations which are objectionable and, if only the regulations are changed, we can with a clear conscience accept and participate in the Reforms. The Act and the Regulations are not different in

aim or parentage; they have one origin, one object, one policy. Lord Minto has emphatically stated that the initiative in the Reforms was from beginning to end his own, and the facts bear out the truth of his statement. His inaugural speech has put a seal of finality on the death-doom of Moderatism of which the publication of the Councils’ rules was the pronouncement. The objective of Moderatism is colonial self-government, the means, the grace and goodwill of the British rulers, and the two British rulers whom they have hailed as apostles and fathers of Reform have declared explicitly that in no future age, however distant, and in no circumstances, however changed, can the official supremacy be delegated to any kind of representative assembly however safely constituted. Not even, therefore, a Russian Duma, that simulacrum of a Parliament, is to be granted to India even in remote and millennial futurity.

The other passage is the reference to the licence of a revolutionary Press as a means of combating Terrorism. The revolutionary Press has long since disappeared and, therefore, we can only suppose that Lord Minto means the Nationalist Press and that this pronouncement heralds fresh coercive legislation. The platform has been silenced, the Press must follow. Then Thought alone will remain free from the prohibitions of the law and even that may be coerced by the deportation and exile of anyone whom the Police may suspect of entertaining liberal opinions. Just as the first-quoted passage ensures the extinction of all Moderate activity, so this menace portends the extinction of all Nationalist activity. We do not know that we shall be altogether sorry. If the Englishman is tired of assassinations, we also are tired of the thankless and apparently unsuccessful task of regulating popular discontent and pointing out legitimate paths to national aspiration on the one hand and attempting to save the officials from themselves on the other. We have only persevered in it from a strong sense of our duty to the country. But we are beginning to feel that Fate is more powerful than the strongest human effort. We feel the menace in the air from above and below and foresee the clash of iron and inexorable forces in whose collision all hope of a peaceful Nationalism will disappear, if not for ever, yet for a long, a disastrously long season.