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 and Extremists had not yet been mended, there was much talk of reunion. Some of the Moderates had grown once more faint-hearted. The Extremists who knew their own minds still constituted a very formidable party, and they were finding new allies in an unexpected quarter.

When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and for nearly thirty years afterwards, the Indian Mahomedans kept severely aloof from it, partly because they had kept equally aloof from Western education which had originally brought the leaders of the new political movement together, and partly because most of those leaders were Hindus, and the ancient antagonism between Mahomedans and Hindus led the former to distrust profoundly anything that seemed likely to enhance the influence of the latter. One intellectual giant among the Mahomedans had indeed arisen after the Mutiny, during which his loyalty had never wavered, who laboured hard to convert his co-religionists to Western education. In spite of bitter opposition from a powerful party, rooted in the old fanatical orthodoxy of Islam, who resented his broad-mindedness which went to the length of trying to explain, and even to explain away much of, the Koran, Sir Seyyid Ahmed Khan succeeded in founding at Aligurh in 1880 a Mahomedan College which soon attracted students from the best Mahomedan families all over India. His idea was to create there a centre which should do for young Mahomedans what he himself had watched Oxford and Cambridge doing for young Englishmen. Education was not to be divorced as in most Indian colleges from religion, and he was convinced that a liberal interpretation of the Mahomedan doctrine was no more incompatible with the essence of Islam than with that of Western civilisation, with which British rule had come to bring India into providential contact. Loyalty to British rule was with him synonymous with loyalty to all the high ideals which he himself pursued and set before his students. For a whole generation success appeared to crown this work to which he brought all the fervour of missionary enterprise. He died full of years and honour in 1898, and one of his last efforts was an historical refutation of the Ottoman Sultan's claim to the Khalifate of Islam. He already realised the reactionary tendencies of the Pan-Islamic propaganda which Abdul Hamid was trying to spread into India. So great and enduring was the hold of Sir Seyyid Ahmed's teachings upon the progressive elements in Mahomedan India that the All-India Moslem League was founded in 1905, almost avowedly in opposition to the subversive activities which the Indian National Congress was beginning to develop. It was in this spirit, too, that the influential deputation headed by the Agha Khan, who, though himself the head of a dissenting and thoroughly unorthodox Mahomedan community claiming descent from the Old Man of the Mountain, was then the recognised political leader of the whole Indian Mahomedan community, waited on Lord Minto to press upon the Government of India the Mahomedan view of the political situation created by the Partition of Bengal, lest political concessions should be hastily made to the Hindus which would pave the way for the ascendancy of a Hindu majority equally dangerous to the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute. It was again in the same spirit, and fortified by the promise which Lord Minto had on that occasion given them, that they insisted, and insisted successfully, on the principle of community representation being applied for their benefit in the Indian Councils Act of 1909.

A new generation of young Mahomedans had nevertheless been growing up who knew not Seyyid Ahmed and regarded his teachings as obsolete. The lessons which they had learnt from their Western education were not his. They were much more nearly those that the more ardent spirits amongst the Hindus had imbibed, and they were ready to share with them the new creed of Indian Nationalism in its most extreme form. Other circumstances were tending to weaken the faith of the Mahomedan community in the goodwill, not only of the Government of India, but of the British Government. Even the most conservative Mahomedans were disappointed and irritated by the revision of the Partition of Bengal in 1911 when the predominantly Mahomedan Province of Eastern Bengal, created under Lord Curzon, was merged once more into a largely Hindu Bengal. The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of their own independent nationhood. In that light they saw in the British occupation of Egypt, in the Anglo-French agreement with regard to Morocco and the Anglo-Russian agreement with regard to Persia, and last but not least, in the Italian invasion of Tripoli, the gradual development of a scheme in which all the powers of Christendom were involved for the extinction of the temporal power of Islam and, with it inevitably, according to orthodox doctrine, of its spiritual authority. The Ottoman Empire had been saved for a time by the protection extended to it for her own purposes by Germany who had alone stood between it and the disintegrating machinations of the "European Concert" in Constantinople, bent on undermining the ascendancy of the ruling Mahomedan race by its menacing insistence on reforms for the benefit of the subject Christian races which could result only in the further aggrandisement of the independent Christian states already carved out of the Sultans' former dominions in Europe and in the introduction of similar processes even into their Asiatic dominions. The Balkan wars of 1912-1913 appeared to bear out the theory of a great European conspiracy directed against Turkey as "the sword of Islam," and whilst the sympathies of Indian Mahomedans of all classes and schools of thought were naturally enlisted in favour of their Turkish co-religionists, the leaders of the advanced Mahomedan party themselves went to Constantinople in charge of the Red Crescent funds collected in India and got into close personal touch with the Turkish Nationalists who ruled in the name of the Sultan but derived their authority from the "Committee of Union and Progress." The same party had in the meantime gone a long way towards capturing the All-India Moslem League and bringing it into line with the advanced wing of the Indian National Congress. The fusion between the League and the Congress, which was still very repugnant both to the politically conservative and to the religious orthodox majority of the Indian Mahomedan community, was not completed, nor was the reunion of the Moderate and Extremist parties within the Congress itself, when India was caught up with Great Britain and most of the nations of the world into the whirlpool of the Great War on August 4, 1914.



CHAPTER VIII

THROUGH THE GREAT WAR TO THE GREAT INDIAN REFORM BILL

The genuine outburst of enthusiasm with which India, whether under direct British administration or under the autonomous rule of indigenous dynasties, responded to the call of the Empire at the beginning of the war came almost as a revelation to the British public generally who knew little about India, and the impression deepened when during the critical winter of 1914-1915 Indian troops stood shoulder to shoulder with British troops in the trenches to fill the gap which could not then have been filled from any other quarter. The loyalty displayed by the Indian princes and the great land-owning gentry and the old fighting races who had stood by the British for many generations was no surprise to Englishmen who knew India; but less expected was the immediate rally to the British cause of the new Western-educated classes who, baulked of the political liberties which they regarded as their due, had seemed to be drifting hopelessly into bitter antagonism to British rule—a rally which at first included even those who, like Mr. Tilak, just released from his long detention at Mandalay, had taught hatred and contempt of the British rulers of India with a violence which implied, even when it was not definitely expressed, a fierce desire to sever the British connection altogether. In some cases the homage paid to the righteousness of the British cause may not have been altogether genuine, but with the great majority it sprang from one thought, well expressed by Sir Satyendra Sinha, one of the most gifted and patriotic of India's sons, in his presidential address to the Indian National Congress in 1915, that, at that critical hour in the world's history, it was for India "to prove to the great British nation her gratitude for peace and the blessings of civilisation secured to her under its aegis for the last hundred and fifty years and more." The tales of German frightfulness and the guns of the Emden bombarding Madras, which were an ominous reminder that a far worse fate than British rule might conceivably overtake India, helped to confirm Indians in the conviction that the British Empire and India's connection with it were well worth fighting for. This was one of Germany's many miscalculations, and the loyalty of the Indian people quite as much as the watchfulness of Government defeated the few serious efforts made by the disaffected emissaries and agents in whom she had put her trust to raise the standard of rebellion in India. All they could do was to feed the "Indian Section" of the Berlin Foreign Office with cock-and-bull stories of successful Indian mutinies and risings, which the German public, however gullible, ceased at last to swallow. Amongst the Indian Mahomedans there was a small pro-Turkish group, chiefly of an Extremist complexion, whose appeals to the religious solidarity of Islam might have proved troublesome when Turkey herself came into the war, had not Government deemed it advisable to put a stop to the mischievous activities of the two chief firebrands, the brothers Mahomed Ali and Shaukat Ali, by interning them under the discretionary powers conferred upon it by the Defence of India Act. Indian Mahomedan troops fought with the same gallantry and determination against their Turkish co-religionists in Mesopotamia and Palestine as against the German enemy in France and in Africa, and the Mahomedan Punjab answered even more abundantly than any other province of India every successive call for fresh recruits to replenish and strengthen the forces of the Empire.

The British Government and people responded generously to these splendid demonstrations of India's fundamental loyalty to the British cause and the British connection. The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, declared with special emphasis that in future Indian questions must be approached from "a new angle of vision," and Indians, not least the Western-educated classes, construed his utterance into a pledge of the deepest significance. For two years India presented on everything that related to the war a front unbroken by any dissensions. The Imperial Legislative Council passed, almost without a murmur even at its most drastic provisions, repugnant as they were to the more advanced Indian members, a Defence of India Act on the lines of the Defence of the Realm Act at home, when Lord Hardinge gave an assurance that it was essential to the proper performance of her part in the war, and it voted spontaneously and unanimously a contribution of one hundred million pounds by the Indian Exchequer to the war expenditure of the Empire. India had thrilled with pride when, at Lord Hardinge's instance, her troops were first sent, not to act as merely subsidiary forces in subsidiary war-areas, but to share with British troops the very forefront of the battle in France, and she thrilled again when an Indian prince, the Maharajah of Bikanir, and Sir Satyendra Sinha, who was once more playing a conspicuous part in the political arena, and had been one of the oldest and ablest members of the moderate Congress party, were sent to represent India at the first Imperial War Conference in London, and took their seats side by side with British Ministers and with the Ministers of the self-governing Dominions.

There was, however, another side to the picture. If India had displayed in the best sense of the word an Imperial spirit and made sacrifices that entitled her to be treated as a partner in, rather than a mere dependency of, the British Empire, was she still to be denied a large instalment at least of the political liberties which had been long ago conferred on the self-governing Dominions? Were her people to be refused in the self-governing Dominions themselves the equality of treatment which her representatives were allowed to enjoy in the council-chamber of the Empire? Whilst the Morley-Minto reforms had disappointed the political expectations of the Western-educated classes, the measures adopted in several of the self-governing Dominions to exclude Indian immigration, and, especially in South Africa, to place severe social and municipal disabilities on Indians already settled in some of the provinces of the Union, had caused still more widespread resentment, and nothing did more to strengthen Lord Hardinge's hold upon Indian affection than his frank espousal of these Indian grievances, even at the risk of placing himself in apparent opposition to the Imperial Government, who had to reckon with the sentiment of the Dominions as well as with that of India. The war suddenly brought to the front in a new shape the question of the constitutional relationship not only between Great Britain and India but between India and the other component parts of the Empire. It was known in India that, before Lord Hardinge reached the end of his term of office, extended for six months till April 1916, he had been engaged in drafting a scheme of reform to meet Indian political aspirations more fully than Lord Morley had done, and it was known also in India that schemes of Imperial reconstruction after the war were already being discussed throughout the Empire. The Indian politician not unnaturally argued that if, as was generally conceded, the constitutional relations of the Government of India to the Imperial Government were to be substantially modified and India to be advanced to a position approximately similar to that of the self-governing Dominions whose governments were responsible to their own peoples, this could be done only by opening up to her too the road to self-government. The Extremist at once pressed the argument to its utmost consequences. The India for which he spoke was at that time, he declared, still willing to accept the British connection on the same terms as the Dominions, but she must be given Dominion Home Rule at once—not merely as a goal to be slowly reached by carefully graduated stages, but as an immediate concession to Indian sentiment, already more than due to her for her share in the defence of the Empire during the war.

In the Legislative Councils there had been a political truce by common consent after the Government had undertaken to introduce no controversial measures whilst the war was going on. But the war dragged on much longer than had been generally anticipated. India, to whom it brought after the first few months an immense accession of material prosperity by creating a great demand for all her produce at rapidly enhanced prices, was so sheltered from its real horrors, and the number of Indians who had any personal ties with those actually fighting in far off-lands was after all so small in proportion to the vast population, that the keen edge of interest in its progress was gradually blunted, and political speculations as to the position of India after the war were unwittingly encouraged by the failure of Government to keep Indian opinion concentrated on the magnitude of the struggle which still threatened the very existence of the Empire. Circumstances, for which the British lack of imagination as well as the ponderous machinery of Indian administration was in some measure responsible, favoured, it must be admitted, the revival of political agitation. Some three years elapsed after India was promised a "new angle of vision" before there was evidence to the Indian eye that anything was being done to redeem that promise. Lord Hardinge had taken home with him one scheme of reforms, and his successor, Lord Chelmsford, had set to work with his Council on another one as soon as he reached Simla. But time passed and all this travail bore no visible fruits. Outside events also gave rise to suspicion. The rejection by the House of Lords of the proposed creation of an Executive Council for the United Provinces caused widespread irritation amongst even moderate Indians, and the rumours of a scheme to hasten on Imperial federation and to give the self-governing Dominions some share in the control of Indian affairs aroused a very bitter feeling, as Indian opinion still smarted under the treatment of Indians in other parts of the Empire and remained distrustful of the temporary compromise only recently arrived at. The Viceroy was very reserved and reticent, and his reserve and reticence were made the pretext for assuming that, as he had been appointed under the first Coalition Government at home when Mr. Chamberlain succeeded Lord Crewe at the India Office, he was the reactionary nominee of a reactionary Secretary of State. No assumption could have been more unjust. Lord Chelmsford's scheme was completed and sent home towards the end of 1916. But nothing transpired as to its contents, nor as to any action being taken upon it. Indians inferred that it was indefinitely pigeon-holed in Whitehall. The very reasonable plea that the Imperial Government, whose energies had to be devoted to the life-and-death struggle in which the whole Empire was involved, had little time to devote to a serious study of such problems as the introduction of grave constitutional changes in India, was countered by the argument that the same Imperial Government seemed to find no difficulty in sparing time for such measures as Irish Home Rule, votes for women, and a large extension of the franchise in the United Kingdom.

The long delay, whatever its causes, perplexed and alarmed even moderate Indian opinion, which had lost the most popular of the leaders capable of guiding it, and waited in vain for any comforting assurances from responsible official quarters. Moreover, it allowed the Extreme wing to set up a standard of political demands which it became more and more difficult for any Indian to decline altogether to endorse without exposing himself to the reproach that he was unpatriotic and a creature of Government. As soon as it became known that Lord Chelmsford was engaged in elaborating a scheme of post-war reforms, nineteen Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council hurriedly put forward a counter scheme of their own, professedly for the better guidance of British Ministers. Besides pressing for various more or less practical reforms, such as the granting of commissions to Indians, the Nineteen demanded full control for the Provincial Councils over the Executive subject to a limited veto of the Governor of the Province; direct election to those Councils—although nothing definite was said about the franchise; and, in the Imperial Legislative Council, an unofficial majority and control over the Central Government except in certain reserved matters. The scheme was hazy, bore evident marks of haste, and aggravated immensely the dangers with which experience had already shown the Morley-Minto reforms to be fraught. It was an attempt to make the Central and Provincial Governments in India dependent upon the caprice of legislatures, with no mandate from any representative electorate and no training in responsible government, but completely immune to the consequences of their own mistakes. It must have led to a hopeless deadlock and the complete paralysis of Government, but even so it did not satisfy the more fiery members of the Indian National Congress, where, in complete unison with the All-India Moslem League, finally captured by some slight concessions to Mahomedan sentiment, resolutions were passed more crude and unworkable than the scheme of the Nineteen, and virtually amounting to Home Rule in its most impracticable shape.

The Congress was at last passing under Extremist control. Its first session during the war was held in December 1914 in Bombay, and under the presidency of Mr. Bupendranath Basu, afterwards a member of the Secretary of State's Council, the proceedings reflected the general enthusiasm with which India had rallied to the cause of the Empire. But before the Congress met again a disease common amongst Indians and aggravated by overwork and anxiety had carried away in April 1915, still in the prime of life, the founder of the "Servants of India Society," Mr. Gokhale, himself perhaps the greatest servant of India that has toiled in our time for her social as well as her political advancement. His friends believed that in his case the end was precipitated by an acute controversy with Mr. Tilak, to whom he had made one last appeal to abandon his old attitude of irreconcilable opposition. A few months later, in November, the veteran Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who had fought stoutly ever since Surat against any Congress reunion, in which he clearly foresaw that the Moderates would be the dupes of the Extremists, passed away in his seventy-first year, but not before he had sent a message, worded in his old peremptory style, to Sir Satyendra Sinha, daring him to refuse the chairmanship of the coming session which was to be held in December in Bombay. Sir Satyendra came, and his great personal influence kept the Indian National Congress on the rails, and defeated the projects already on foot once more for delivering it into the hands of Mr. Tilak and his followers. But the death of those two pillars of the Moderate party at such a critical juncture proved to be an irreparable loss. When Mr. Gokhale's political testament was published, it was dismissed by the Extremists as a well-meant but quite obsolete document. The Congress found a new and strange Egeria in Mrs. Besant, who had thrown herself into Indian politics when, owing to circumstances[2] which had nothing to do with politics, the faith that many respectable Hindus had placed in her, on the strength of her theosophical teachings, as a vessel of spiritual election was rudely shaken. But nothing shook the mesmeric influence which she had acquired over young India by preaching with rare eloquence the moral and spiritual superiority of Indian over Western creeds, and condemning the British administration of India, root and branch, as one of the worst manifestations of Western materialism. With her remarkable power of seizing the psychological moment, she had fastened on to the catchword of "Home Rule for India," into which Indians could read whatever measure of reform they happened to favour, whilst it voiced the vague aspiration of India to be mistress in her own house, and to be freed from the reproach of "dependency" in any future scheme of reconstruction. She herself gave it the widest interpretation in New India, a newspaper whose extreme views expressed in the most extreme form drew down upon her not only the action of Government but the censure of the High Court of Madras. At the Congress session held at Lucknow at the end of 1916 she shared the honours of a tremendous ovation with Tilak, whose sufferings—and her own—in the cause of India's freedom her newspaper compared with those of Christ on the Cross. Resolutions were carried not only requesting that the King Emperor might be pleased "to issue a proclamation announcing that it is the aim and intention of British policy to confer self-government on India at an early date," but setting forth in detail a series of preliminary reforms to be introduced forthwith in order to consummate the "bloodless revolution" which, according to the President's closing oration, was already in full blast. The All-India Moslem League sitting at the same time at Lucknow followed the Congress lead.

To those feverish days at Lucknow the session of the Imperial Legislative Council held shortly afterwards at Delhi afforded a striking contrast. The Great War was in its third year, and the end seemed as far off as ever. The Government of India announced the issue of an Indian War Loan for L100,000,000 which was well received and speedily subscribed, and, as an earnest of the revision of the whole fiscal relations of the Empire after the war, an increase of the import duty on cotton fabrics, without the corresponding increase of the excise duty which had always been resented as an unjust protection of the Lancashire industry, abated an Indian grievance of twenty years' standing. A Defence Force Bill opening up opportunities for Indians to volunteer and be trained for active service responded in some measure to the agitation for a national militia which the Congress had encouraged. The Viceroy also announced that the system of indentured emigration to Fiji and the West Indies against which Indian sentiment had begun to rebel was at an end, and that the problem of Indian education would be submitted to a strong Commission appointed, with Sir Thomas Sadler at its head, to inquire in the first place into the position of the Calcutta University, and he warmly invited the co-operation of Indians of all parties with the representative Committee under Sir Thomas Holland, then already engaged in quickening the development of Indian industries which, far too long neglected by successive governments, was at last receiving serious attention under the compelling pressure of a world-war. Government and Legislature met and parted on cordial terms. But Mrs. Besant never abated the vehemence of her Home Rule campaign, for only by Home Rule could India, she declared, "be saved from ruin, from becoming a nation of coolies for the enrichment of others." Access to some of the provinces was denied to her by Provincial Governments, and the Government of Madras decided to "intern" her. The "internment" meant merely that she transferred her residence and most of her activities from Madras to Ootacamund, the summer quarters of the Madras Government, where she hoisted the Home Rule flag on her house and continued to direct the Home Rule movement as vigorously as ever. But in her own flamboyant language she described herself as having been "drafted into the modern equivalent for the Middle Ages oubliette," and even Indians who were not wholly in sympathy with her views were aflame with indignation at her cruel "martyrdom." The Government of India, whilst acquiescing in the action of the Provincial Governments, maintained an attitude of masterly inactivity, and neither in India nor at home was an authoritative word forthcoming as to the birth of the reforms scheme known to be in laborious gestation.

The political tension grew more and more acute. When would Simla or Whitehall break the prolonged silence? The publication of the Mesopotamian Report only added fuel to the flames, as it was easy to read into it a condemnation of Indian administration only less sweeping, if expressed in a more restrained form, than that which Indians had for years past poured forth upon it. There was no restraint at all in the fierce attack delivered upon it during the subsequent debate in the House of Commons by Lord Morley's former Under Secretary of State for India, Mr. Montagu. He had himself visited India and was personally known there, and his speech, cabled out at once in full, produced a tremendous sensation, which was intensified when a few days later he was appointed Secretary of State for India in succession to Mr. Chamberlain. There could be no doubt whatever as to the reality of the "new angle of vision" when on August 20 Mr. Montagu made in the House of Commons and Lord Chelmsford in Simla a simultaneous announcement, as solemn in its form as it was far-reaching in its implications.

The purpose of British policy, it declared, was not only "the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, but also the greatest development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire."

This momentous announcement was accompanied, it is true, by a reservation to the effect "that the British Government and the Government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian people, must be judges of the time and measure of each advance; and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those upon whom new opportunities of service will thus be conferred, and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility." But it was made clear that the declaration of policy was not meant to be a mere enunciation of principles, for it wound up with the statement that His Majesty's Government had "decided that substantial steps in this direction should be taken as soon as possible, and that it is of the highest importance that there should be a free and informal exchange of opinion between those in authority at home and in India." For that purpose Mr. Montagu himself was authorised to proceed to India and confer with the Viceroy, in response to an invitation addressed originally to Mr. Chamberlain and extended after his resignation to his successor at the India Office.

Could this great pronouncement have been made a year earlier, and with the added authority of a Royal proclamation, it might have been received with such widespread acclamation in India as to drown any but the shrillest notes of dissent from the irreconcilables. The Moderates hardly dared to admit that it fulfilled—nay, more than fulfilled—their hopes, whilst the Extremists in the Indian National Congress, presided over on this occasion by Mrs. Besant herself, banged, bolted, and barred the door against any compromise by reaffirming and stiffening into something akin to an ultimatum the Home Rule resolutions of 1916 just at the moment when Mr. Montagu was landing in India. But the Secretary of State was not the man to be perturbed by such demonstrations. He had the British politician's faith in compromise, and he did not perhaps understand fully that Indian Extremism represents a very different quality of opposition from any that a British Minister has yet had to reckon with in Parliament. He saw Indians of all classes and creeds and political parties during his tour through India, but on none did he lavish more time and more patient hearing than upon the Extremists whom he hoped against hope to convert. He had an easier task when he tried to disarm the resentment which his vigorous onslaught on the methods and temper of British administration just before he took office had aroused amongst the European members of the public services. He conferred with governors and with heads of departments, and with representatives of the European community. He received endless deputations and masses of addresses, and he remained of course in close consultation with the Viceroy in accordance with the declared object of his mission. After four strenuous months Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford signed at Simla on April 22, 1918, a joint report which was laid before Parliament in July.

Great as had always been the responsibilities of the Secretary of State and the Viceroy for the government of India "as by law established," they were on this occasion vastly greater. For two men of widely different temperaments had to work out together a scheme for shifting the very axis of government. They rose to the occasion. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report will rank with the great State papers which are landmarks of constitutional progress in the history of the British Empire. It falls naturally and logically into two parts, the first setting forth the conditions of the problem, the second the recommendations for its solution; and even if the second had not provided the foundations for the Act of 1919, the first would have deserved to live as a masterly survey of the state of India—the first authoritative one since the transfer to the Crown just sixty years before. For the first time since the Mutiny it marked a reversion to the spirit in which the Bentincks and Munros and Elphinstones had almost a century earlier conceived the mission of England in India to lie in the training of the Indian people to govern themselves, and for the first time an attempt was made to appraise generously but fairly the position of the Western-educated classes and the part they have come to play in the Indian polity. The passage is worth quoting in full, as the constitutional changes effected on the lines recommended by the Report were to give them the opportunity to prove the stuff they were made of as the political leaders of their country.

In estimating the politically-minded portion of the people of India we should not go either to census reports on the one hand, or to political literature on the other. It is one of the most difficult portions of our task to see them in their right relation to the rest of the country. Our obligations to them are plain, for they are intellectually our children. They have imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their credit. The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no reproach but rather a tribute to our work. The Raj would have been a mechanical and iron thing if the spirit of India had not responded to it. We must remember, too, that the educated Indian has come to the front by hard work; he has seized the education which we offered him because he first saw its advantages; and it is he who has advocated and worked for political progress. All this stands to his credit. For thirty years he has developed in his Congress, and latterly in the Moslem League, free popular convocations which express his ideals. We owe him sympathy because he has conceived and pursued the idea of managing his own affairs, an aim which no Englishman can fail to respect. He has made a skilful, and on the whole a moderate, use of the opportunities which we have given him in the legislative councils of influencing Government and affecting the course of public business, and of recent years he has by speeches and in the press done much to spread the idea of a united and self-respecting India among thousands who had no such conception in their minds. Helped by the inability of the other classes in India to play a prominent part he has assumed the place of leader; but his authority is by no means universally acknowledged and may in an emergency prove weak.

The prospects of advance very greatly depend upon how far the educated Indian is in sympathy with and capable of fairly representing the illiterate masses. The old assumption that the interests of the ryot must be confided to official hands is strenuously denied by modern educated Indians. They claim that the European official must by his lack of imagination and comparative lack of skill in tongues be gravely handicapped in interpreting the thoughts and desires of an Asiatic people. On the other hand, it is argued that in the limited spread of education, the endurance of caste exclusiveness and of usages sanctioned by caste, and in the records of some local bodies and councils, may be found reasons which suggest that the politically-minded classes stand somewhat apart from and in advance of the ordinary life of the country. Nor would it be surprising if this were the case. Our educational policy in the past aimed at satisfying the few who sought after English education, without sufficient thought of the consequences which might ensue from not taking care to extend instruction to the many. We have in fact created a limited intelligentsia, who desire advance; and we cannot stay their progress entirely until education has been extended to the masses. It has been made a reproach to the educated classes that they have followed too exclusively after one or two pursuits, the law, journalism, or school teaching; and that these are all callings which make men inclined to overrate the importance of words and phrases. But even if there is substance in the count, we must take note also how far the past policy of Government is responsible. We have not succeeded in making education practical. It is only now, when the war has revealed the importance of industry, that we have deliberately set about encouraging Indians to undertake the creation of wealth by industrial enterprise, and have thereby offered the educated classes any tangible inducement to overcome their traditional inclination to look down on practical forms of energy. We must admit that the educated Indian is a creation peculiarly of our own; and if we take the credit that is due to us for his strong points we must admit a similar liability for his weak ones. Let us note also in justice to him that the progressive Indian appears to realise the narrow basis of his position and is beginning to broaden it. In municipal and university work he has taken a useful and creditable share. We find him organising effort not for political ends alone, but for various forms of public and social service. He has come forward and done valuable work in relieving famine and distress by floods, in keeping order at fairs, in helping pilgrims, and in promoting co-operative credit. Although his ventures in the fields of commerce have not been always fortunate, he is beginning to turn his attention more to the improvement of agriculture and industry. Above all, he is active in promoting education and sanitation; and every increase in the number of educated people adds to his influence and authority.

The authors of the Report were at the same time by no means unmindful of England's responsibilities towards the vast masses still quite content to accept the system of government which she had given them, and who looked with undiminished faith to their British administrators for the continuance of the peace and security and even-handed justice which they had seldom if ever enjoyed in the same measure under their indigenous rulers. The problem to be solved was "one of political education which must be practical and also experimental." The politically-minded classes had to be given an opportunity of learning how to govern and administer; and the other classes, which have hitherto accepted unquestioningly the government and administration given to them, had to be taught to exercise the critical rights of intelligent citizenship. A sphere had to be found in which Indians could be given work to do, and be held accountable to their own people for the way they did it. That sphere had to be circumscribed at first so as not to endanger the foundations of Government, and yet capable of steady expansion if and in proportion as the experiment succeeds, until the process of political education should be complete and Indians should have shown themselves qualified for the same measure of self-government as the Dominions already enjoy within the British Empire.

From a careful examination of the existing structure of Government and an exhaustive review of present conditions in India, the Montagu-Chelmsford Report deduced two definite conclusions:

(1) It is on the Central Government, i.e. the Government of India, that the whole structure rests; and the foundations must not be disturbed pending experience of the changes to be introduced into less vital parts. The Government of India must therefore remain wholly responsible to Parliament, and, saving such responsibility, its authority in essential matters must during the initial stages of the experiment remain indisputable.

(2) While popular control can be at once largely extended in the domain of local government, the Provinces provide the sphere in which the earlier steps towards the development of representative institutions and the progressive realisation of responsible government promised in the Declaration of August 20, 1917, can be most usefully and safely taken.

The whole of the second part of the Report was devoted to working out in considerable detail a practical scheme for giving effect to those two conclusions. The powers and responsibilities of the Government of India as the Central Government were left intact, but an All-Indian legislature consisting of two assemblies, the one as popular and democratic as a large elective majority proceeding from the broadest practicable franchise could make it—to be called the Indian Legislative Assembly—and the other a relatively small upper chamber to be known as the Council of State which, composed partly of elected members and partly of members nominated by Government or entitled ex officio to membership, was expected to provide the desired counterpoise of approved experience and enlightened conservatism. The Report expressed the pious hope that "inasmuch as the Council of State will be the supreme legislative authority for India on all crucial questions and the revising authority for all Indian legislation," it would "attract the services of the best men available," and "develop something of the experience and dignity of a body of Elder Statesmen"—an expression presumably borrowed, but not very aptly, from Japan, where the Elder Statesmen have no doubt had immense influence but never any constitutional status. The Report had, moreover, to contemplate the possibility of conflict between the Legislature and the Executive, and in accordance with the first of the two main conclusions at which it had arrived it proposed to arm the Governor-General in Council with power to override the Legislature if it failed to pass measures or grant supplies which he was prepared to "certify" as vital to the peace, safety, and interests of India.

For the great experiment in the provincial sphere, the eight provinces of Bombay, Madras, Bengal, the United Provinces, Behar and Orissa, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, and Assam, were deemed to be already ripe. Burma (which is not really India at all, and whose people belong to another race and to another stage of political development), the North-West Frontier Province, and Baluchistan (which for strategical reasons must remain under the direct control of the Government of India), and a few smaller areas, whose populations are altogether too backward, were not to be touched at present. The essential feature of the scheme was the division of the functions of the Provincial Government into two categories: the one comprising what are now termed "the reserved subjects," i.e. those with which the maintenance of peace and order and good government is immediately bound up; and the other, those which, though less vital, very closely affect the daily life and common interests of the people, and which were to be called "the transferred subjects," because it was proposed to transfer at once the largest possible measure of power and responsibility in regard to them to exclusively Indian shoulders. While all essential power and responsibility in regard to "the reserved subjects" were to remain vested in the Governor-in-Council, i.e. the executive body consisting of the Governor and (under the new scheme) one British and one Indian member of Council, real power and responsibility for dealing with "the transferred subjects" were to be conferred on Indian Ministers accountable to a Legislative Council in which there was to be a large Indian non-official majority, elected also on the broadest possible franchise. The Provincial Government would thus itself be divided into two compartments: in the one the Governor-in-Council, responsible as heretofore to the Government of India and to the Secretary of State, i.e. the British Parliament; in the other the Governor—but not "in Council"—acting with Indian Ministers responsible to an Indian legislature.

This was the system of partial but progressive devolution that had already come to be known as "Dyarchy," having been propounded in a somewhat different form by an independent inquirer, Mr. Lionel Curtis, whose "Letters to the People of India" on responsible Government, though they at first caused almost as much displeasure in official as in Extremist circles, did a great deal to educate the mind of the "politically-minded" classes, and to prepare the ground for the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. The authors of the Report were themselves fully alive to the demerits as well as to the merits of dyarchy, and they were careful to state it as their intention that "the Government thus composed and with this distribution of functions shall discharge them as one Government, and that as a general rule it shall deliberate as a whole." The Governor-in-Council was to have, on the other hand, within his narrower sphere, powers similar to those retained by the Viceroy for overriding the Provincial Legislature in extreme cases of conflict.

General principles were alone laid down in the Report, and its authors confined themselves to a rough preliminary indication of their views, as to the distribution of "reserved" and "transferred" subjects in the Provinces and as to the constitution of electorates. The latter problem they stated in brief terms: "We must measure the number of persons who can in the different parts of the country be reasonably entrusted with the duties of citizenship. We must ascertain what sort of franchise will be suited to local conditions, and how interests that may be unable to find adequate representation in such constituencies are to be represented." But it was perhaps Mr. Montagu's doctrinaire Radicalism that betrayed itself in the treatment of the question of "communal" representation, i.e. the creation of separate constituencies for various communities, which, however important or however much entitled to make their voices heard, might be submerged in constituencies based solely on territorial representation. "Communal representation" had been conceded to so powerful a minority as the Mahomedans under the Indian Councils Act of 1909; and the Report admitted that it could not be withdrawn from them, and that it might have to be conceded to other communities, such as the Sikhs. At the same time it developed at great length all the theoretical arguments against the principle, viz. that it is opposed to history, that it perpetuates class division, that it stereotypes existing relations based on traditions and prejudices which we should do everything to discourage.

At the risk even of travelling somewhat beyond the expressed terms of their reference, the Secretary of State and the Viceroy could not but recognise that the effects of great constitutional reforms, of which the statutory application would be necessarily confined to that part of India that is under direct British administration, must nevertheless react upon that other smaller but still very considerable part of India which enjoys more or less complete internal autonomy under its own hereditary rulers. A growing number of questions, and especially economic questions, must arise in future, which will affect the interests of the Native States as directly as those of the rest of India; and their rulers may legitimately claim, as the Report plainly admitted, to have constitutional opportunities of expressing their views and wishes and of conferring with one another and with the Government of India. For such purposes the Report included suggestions which were to take shape in the establishment of the Chamber of Princes.

One other recommendation of the Report deserves special notice, as it shows the authors to have realised how seriously Parliament, though more directly responsible than ever for the exercise of due vigilance over Indian affairs after the transfer to the Crown, had lost touch with them, since, with the disappearance of the East India Company after the Mutiny, it ceased to hold the regular and exhaustive inquiries which the renewal of the Charter had until then periodically required. As their own scheme was designed merely to give Parliament a lead in the first of a progressive series of constitutional reforms, they recommended that a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the working of the 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 rejection, but against rejection pure and simple it set its face at once, and it rallied so steadily and surely to acceptance that few of the Moderates attended the Provincial Congress, where they were promptly howled down, and they determined to hold a Conference of their own in opposition to the special Congress session. At this Conference, as well as in the Committee of non-official members of the Indian Legislative Council, there was a good deal of disjointed criticism of various recommendations in the Report, not infrequently due to misunderstanding of their import, but on the whole it was recognised as representing a great triumph for the cause of political progress on constitutional lines and therefore for the educated opinion of India. The breach between the Extremists and the Moderates was clearly defined by Mr. B.L. Mitter, a prominent Moderate of Calcutta and a member of the new Moderate organisation, the "National Liberal League":

The Extremists would have nothing to do with the English in the Government or outside; the Moderates consider co-operation with the English necessary for national development, political, industrial, economic, and otherwise. The Extremists would straightway assume full responsibility of Government; the Moderates think that would lead to chaos, and would proceed by stages. It is the difference between cataclysm and evolution. The Extremists' ideal is destruction of the existing order of things in the hope that something better will take its place, for nothing can be worse than what is; the Moderates' ideal is formation of a new order of things on definite progressive lines. One is chance, the other is design. The primary difference (so far as methods are concerned) is that the Extremists' method is not necessarily constitutional; the Moderates' method always constitutional. Some Extremists use violence, others work secretly and spread discontent and disaffection. Others again, pretending to follow legitimate methods of agitation, take care not to discourage unconstitutional methods or even crimes, nay, they miss no opportunity to applaud criminals as martyrs. There are others, again, who merely idealise and are content with rousing the passions of the people. Intrigue and abuse are the general weapons in the Extremists' armoury. The Moderates always act openly and with dignity, and follow lawful methods of agitation. The Extremists always oppose the Government. The Moderates co-operate with authority, and oppose when necessary in the interests of the country. Lastly, the Extremists appeal only to the passions of the people; the Moderates appeal to their reason.

Later developments in India itself were unfortunately to play once more into the hands of the Extremists, and the leadership was to pass from Mr. Tilak, who was growing old and died in the summer of 1920, and from Mrs. Besant too, who, after being bitterly reviled by her former ally, at last saw the error of her ways and finally went over to the Moderate camp with the diminishing remnants of her influence, into the hands of a new and strange figure in Indian politics, Mr. Gandhi, endowed with very different qualities and greater spiritual influence than either of them.

But before bringing him on to the stage it may be well to follow the progress of Indian reforms at home after the publication of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. It had been laid before Parliament without any imprimatur from the Cabinet, and some months passed before, with the conclusion of the war, His Majesty's Government found leisure to give it their collective consideration. Not till June 1919 was Mr. Montagu in a position to move in the House of Commons the second reading of the great Bill drafted with their authority to give effect in all essentials to the recommendations of the Report. His powerful and lucid exposition of its provisions and of the whole situation with which England was confronted in India made a deep impression on the House, though it by no means disarmed opposition, and the Bill was remitted for consideration to a Joint Select Committee of both Houses which, chosen impartially from all parties, proceeded to take a large mass of evidence from British and Indian witnesses of every political complexion, and delivered a very weighty report in November. The views of the Government of India and of the Provincial Governments, by no means always in accord amongst themselves, had also been before the Committee, as well as those of the members of the Secretary of State's Council. But the alternative proposals submitted were either impracticable or ineffective, and the Bill which, in so far as it was modified in accordance with its recommendations, assumed an even more liberal character. Mr. Montagu's hands were thus strengthened for the final debates in the House of Commons in which the opposition proved sterile in argument and weak in numbers, and the Bill was passed through both Houses of Parliament in time for the constitutional assent of the Crown to be given to it and for the King-Emperor to address a solemn proclamation to the Viceroy, Princes, and people of India on the eminently appropriate date of Christmas Eve 1920. This Royal message of peace and goodwill set forth in simple language both the purposes and the genesis of the Act:

I have watched with understanding and sympathy the growing desire of my Indian people for representative institutions. Starting from small beginnings, this ambition has steadily strengthened its hold upon the intelligence of the country. It has pursued its course along constitutional channels with sincerity and courage. It has survived the discredit which at times and in places lawless men sought to cast upon it by acts of violence committed under the guise of patriotism. It has been stirred to more vigorous life by the ideals for which the British Commonwealth fought in the Great War, and it claims support in the part which India has taken in our common struggles, anxieties, and victories.

In truth, the desire after political responsibility has its source at the root of the British connection with India. It has sprung inevitably from the deeper and wider studies of human thought and history which that connection has opened to the Indian people. Without it the work of the British in India would have been incomplete. It was, therefore, with a wise judgment that the beginnings of representative institutions were laid many years ago. Their scope has been extended stage by stage until there now lies before us a definite step on the road to responsible government.

The Act, which implemented all the principal recommendations of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, superseded within little more than fifty years the Government of India Act of 1858, under which the Crown first assumed direct responsibility for the government and administration of India. The Royal message certainly did not exaggerate its significance. Its actual provisions are indeed of less moment than its larger implications and the spirit in which it will be interpreted and carried into effect. For the right spirit to crown the new Constitution with success we must look to Indians and British alike, not forgetting that the changes introduced into the structure of Indian government and administration are themselves only ancillary to the still more important changes which must result from the recognition of Indian public opinion as a powerful and ultimately paramount influence in the shaping of policy. Such recognition must follow not only from the creation of Indian representative Assemblies with a large majority of Indian elected members but from the appointment of Indians, three in number already in the Government of India, three in the Secretary of State's Council in Whitehall, and in varying numbers both as Ministers and members of the Executive Councils in Provincial Governments. Side by side with this progressive Indianisation of the Executive of which we are witnessing only the first stage, the Indianisation of the administrative departments and of the public services, and not least of the Indian Civil Service, is bound to proceed with increasing rapidity. Indians can hardly fail to realise that, perhaps for a long time to come, they will require the experience and driving power of Englishmen, but they will inevitably claim increasing control over policy, now formally conceded to them in a large Provincial sphere, until it shall have extended in successive stages to the whole sphere of Provincial Government and ultimately to the Central Government itself. Then, and then only, India will actually emerge into complete Dominion Self-Government. But we shall do well to remember, and Indians will certainly not allow us to forget, that the terms of equality, on which her representatives are now admitted to the innermost counsels of the Empire, have already in many respects outstripped the Act of 1919.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The Evolution of Mrs. Besant, by the Editor of Justice, Madras, Justice Printing Works, 1918.



CHAPTER IX

THE EMERGENCE OF MR. GANDHI

Before this great statute could be brought into operation, and even whilst Parliament was still laboriously evolving it, a strange and incalculable figure was coming to the forefront in India, who, favoured by an extraordinary combination of untoward circumstances, was to rally round him some of the most and many of the least reputable forces which, sometimes under new disguises, the old and passive civilisation of India is instinctively driven to oppose to the disintegrating impact upon it of the active and disturbing energies of Western civilisation. Saint and prophet in the eyes of the multitude of his followers—saint in the eyes even of many who have not accepted him as a prophet—Mr. Gandhi preaches to-day under the uninspiring name of "Non-co-operation," a gospel of revolt none the less formidable because it is so far mainly a gospel of negation and retrogression, of destruction not construction. Mr. Gandhi challenges not only the material but the moral foundations of British rule. He has passed judgment upon both British rule and Western civilisation, and, condemning both as "Satanic," his cry is away with the one and with the other, and "back to the Vedas," the fountain source of ancient Hinduism. That he is a power in the land none can deny, least of all since the new Viceroy, Lord Reading, almost immediately on his arrival in India, spent long hours in close conference with him at Simla. What manner of man is Mr. Gandhi, whom Indians revere as a Mahatma, i.e. an inspired sage upon whom the wisdom of the ancient Rishis has descended? What is the secret of his power?

Born in 1869 in a Gujarat district in the north of the Bombay Presidency, Mohandas Karamchamd Gandhi comes of very respectable Hindu parentage, but does not belong to one of the higher castes. His father, like others of his forebears, was Dewan, or chief administrator, of one of the small native States of Kathiawar. He himself was brought up for the Bar and, after receiving the usual English education in India, completed his studies in England, first as an undergraduate of the London University and then at the Inner Temple. His friend and biographer, Mr. H.S.L. Polak, tells us that his mother, whose religious example and influence made a lasting impression upon his character, held the most orthodox Hindu views, and only agreed to his crossing "the Black Water" to England after exacting from him a three-fold vow, which he faithfully kept, of abstinence from flesh, alcohol, and women. He returned to India as soon as he had been called to the Bar and began to practise as an advocate before the Bombay High Court, but in 1893, as fate would have it, he was to be called to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case in Natal. In South Africa he was brought at once into contact with a bitter conflict of rights between the European population and the Indian settlers who had originally been induced to go out and work there at the instance of the white communities who were in need of cheap labour for the development of the country. The Europeans, professing to fear the effects of a large admixture of Asiatic elements, had begun not only to restrict further Indian immigration, but to place the Indians already in South Africa under many disabilities all the more oppressive because imposed on racial grounds. Natal treated them harshly, but scarcely as harshly as the Transvaal, then still under Boer government. In the Transvaal the Imperial Government took up the cudgels for them, and the treatment of the Indian settlers there was one of the grievances pressed by Lord Milner during the negotiations which preceded the final rupture with the Boer Republics. When the South African war broke out Mr. Gandhi believed that it would lead to a generous recognition of the rights of Indians if they at once identified their cause with that of the British, and he induced Government to accept his offer of an Indian Ambulance Corps which did excellent service in the field. Mr. Gandhi himself served with it, was mentioned in despatches, and received the war medal. His health gave way, and he returned to India in 1901 where he resumed practice in Bombay with no intention of returning to South Africa, as he felt confident that when the war was over the Imperial Government would see to it that the Indians should have the benefit of the principles which it had itself proclaimed before going into the war. He was, however, induced to return in 1903 to help in preparing the Indian memorials to be laid before Mr. Chamberlain whose visit was imminent in connection with the work of reconstruction. On his arrival he found that conditions and European opinion were becoming more instead of less unfavourable for Indians, and though in 1906, when the native rebellion broke out in Natal, he again offered and secured the acceptance of an Indian Stretcher-Bearer Corps with which he again served and received the thanks of the Governor, he gradually found himself driven into an attitude of more and more open opposition and even conflict with Government by a series of measures imposing more and more intolerable restraints upon his countrymen. It was in 1906 that he first took a vow of passive resistance to a law which he regarded as a deliberate attack upon their religion, their national honour, and their racial self-respect. In the following year he was consigned, not for the first time, to jail in Pretoria, but his indomitable attitude helped to bring about a compromise. It was, however, short-lived, as misunderstandings occurred as to its interpretation. The struggle broke out afresh until another provisional settlement promised to lead to a permanent solution, when Mr. Gokhale, after consultation with the India Office during a visit to England, was induced in 1912 to proceed to South Africa and use his good offices in a cause which he had long had at heart. Whether, as Mr. Gokhale himself always contended, as a deliberate breach of the promise made to him by the principal Union Ministers, or as the result of a lamentable misunderstanding, measures were again taken in 1913 which led Mr. Gandhi to renew the struggle, and it assumed at once a far more serious character than ever before. It was then that Mr. Gandhi organised his big strikes of Indian labour and headed the great strikers' march of protest into the Transvaal which led to the arrest and imprisonment of the principal leaders and of hundreds of the rank and file. The furious indignation aroused in India, the public meetings held in all the large centres, and the protest entered by the Viceroy himself, Lord Hardinge, in his speech at Madras, combined with earnest representations from Whitehall, compelled General Smuts to enter once more the path of conciliation and compromise. As the result of a Commission of Inquiry the Indians' Relief Act was passed, and in the correspondence between Mr. Gandhi and General Smuts the latter undertook on behalf of the South African Government to carry through other administrative reforms not actually specified in the new Act. Mr. Gandhi returned to India just after the outbreak of the Great War, and the Government of India marked its appreciation of the great services which he had rendered to his countrymen in South Africa by recommending him for the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, which was conferred upon him amongst the New Year honours of 1915.

The South African stage of Mr. Gandhi's career is of great importance, as it goes far to explain both the views and the methods which he afterwards applied in India. He brought back with him from South Africa a profound distrust of Western civilisation, of which he had unquestionably witnessed there some of the worst aspects, and also a strong belief in the efficacy of passive resistance as the most peaceful means of securing the redress of all Indian grievances in India as well as in South Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable. Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed pamphlet Hind Swaraj. At an early age Mr. Gandhi had fallen under the spell of Tolstoian philosophy, and he has admitted only quite recently that for a time he was so much impressed with the doctrines of Christ that he was inclined to adopt Christianity; but the further study of the spiritual side of Hinduism convinced him that in it alone the key of salvation could be found, and all his teachings since then have been based on his faith in the superiority of the Indian civilisation rooted in Hinduism to Western civilisation, which for him in fact represents in its present stage only a triumph of gross materialism and brute force. Nevertheless, when the Great War broke out, he was prepared to believe that the ordeal of war in the cause of freedom for which Britain had taken up arms might lead to the redemption of Western civilisation from its worst evils, and whilst in London on his way to South Africa he had already offered to form, and to enrol himself and his wife in, an Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps. Yet he was not blind to the flaws of the civilisation for which he stood. He conducted a temperance campaign amongst his countrymen in South Africa, and, brought there into close contact with many Indians of the "untouchable" castes, he revolted against a system which tried to erect such insurmountable barriers between man and man. Perhaps the best clue to the many contradictions in which his activities have continually seemed to involve him was furnished by himself when he said, "Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise; I, however, who wear the guise of a politician am at heart a religious man," and the doctrine which he holds of all others to be the corner-stone of his religion is that of Ahimsa, which, as he has described it, "requires deliberate self-suffering, not the deliberate injuring of the wrongdoer," in the resistance of evil.

Throughout the war Mr. Gandhi devoted his ceaseless energies chiefly to preaching social reforms and the moral regeneration of his countrymen. He was then an honoured guest at European gatherings, as for instance at the Madras Law dinner in 1915, at various conferences on education, at the Bombay Provincial Co-operative Conference in 1917 when in connection with the admirable Co-operative Credit movement in India he lectured on the moral basis of co-operation, at missionary meetings in which he showed his intimate familiarity with the gospels by reverently quoting Christ's words in support of his own plea for mutual forbearance and tolerance. As late as July 1918 he defined Swaraj as partnership in the Empire, and war service as the easiest and straightest way to win Swaraj, inviting the people of his own Gujarat country whom he was addressing to wipe it free of the reproach of effeminacy by contributing thousands of Sepoys in response to the Viceroy's recent appeal for fresh recruits for the Indian army at one of the most critical moments during the war. His comments about the same time on the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme were by no means unfavourable, and he specifically joined in the tribute of praise bestowed upon the Indian Civil Service for their steadfast devotion to duty and great organising ability. Government itself resorted to his services as the member of a Commission appointed to inquire into agrarian troubles at Camparan, and his collaboration was warmly welcomed by his European colleagues. Nor were there any signs of implacable hostility to British rule in his vigorous protests in the following year against the anti-Asiatic legislation of the South African Union which was again stirring up bad feeling in India.

The circumstances which drove him to declare war against British rule and Western civilisation arose out of the action taken by Government on the report of the "Sedition Committee," which, under the presidency of Mr. Justice Rowlatt, a judge of the High Court of King's Bench, sent out especially to preside over it, had not only carefully explored the origins and growth of political crime during the great wave of unrest after the Partition of Bengal, but recommended that in some directions the hands of the executive and judicial authorities should be strengthened to cope with any fresh outbreaks of a similar character. The Committee pointed out that in spite of the preventive legislation of 1911 it had become apparent before the war broke out that the forces of law and order were still inadequately equipped to cope with the situation in Bengal. For the duration of the war the Defence of India Act had conferred upon Government emergency powers which had enabled the authorities summarily to intern a large number of those who were known to be closely connected with the criminal propaganda, but almost as soon as the war was over their release would follow automatically upon the expiry of the Defence Act, and a dangerous situation would arise again if Government had nothing but the old methods of procedure to fall back upon.

In January 1919 the Government of India announced that legislation in conformity with the recommendations of the Sedition Committee would be required from the Imperial Legislative Council, and two draft bills were published, one of them embodying permanent alterations in the law and the other arming the Executive with emergency powers. The publication of these bills threw the country into a fresh ferment of agitation, and even an Indian judge of undeniably moderate views, Sir Narain Chandavarkar, declared that such measures were no longer required, as with the advent of constitutional reforms revolutionary agitation would, he believed, cease, and, as a warm supporter of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, he felt bound to protest against legislation so entirely at variance with the spirit in which the Report had been conceived and with the expectations which it had aroused. The Extremists read into the bills another proof of the organised hypocrisy characteristic of British rule in general and of the Report in particular, and denounced them as a monstrous engine of tyranny and oppression, against which no Indian would be safe. Government, however, was not to be moved from its determination, and in explaining the necessity for proceeding with the bills the Viceroy pointed out in his opening speech that "the reaction against all authority that had manifested itself in many parts of the civilised world was unlikely to leave India entirely untouched and the powers of evil were still abroad." The Indian non-official members, on the other hand, were solid in opposition, and even those who did not challenge the report of the Sedition Committee intimated that now the war was over they could not acquiesce in such measures until the reforms had come into operation, and unless it was then found that revolutionary forces were still at work and constituted a real public danger. The two amendments, supported by all the Indian non-official members, were voted down by the official bloc. Government did something to allay opposition by agreeing that the Act which was to have been permanent should operate for three years only, and the title of the bill was amended to show clearly that its application would be confined to clearly anarchical and revolutionary crimes. It was further modified in form in the committee stage, but the opposition within the Council remained unmoved, and outside the Council grew more and more fierce. The Extremists who had shrunk from no efforts to misrepresent the purpose of the bills received a great accession of strength when Mr. Gandhi instituted the vow of Satyagraha, or passive resistance, under which, if the bills became law, he and his followers would "severally refuse to obey these laws and such other laws as a committee to be thereafter appointed might see fit," whilst they would "faithfully follow the truth and refrain from violence to life, person, or property." The Moderate leaders at Delhi at once issued a manifesto condemning Satyagraha, but Government stuck to its guns, the bills being finally passed on March 18, after very hot discussion. Mr. Gandhi, having formed his committee, proclaimed a Hartal, i.e. a demonstrative closing of shops and suspension of business for March 30. This Hartal at Delhi started a terrible outbreak which spread with unexpected violence over parts of the Bombay Presidency and the greater part of the Punjab, with sporadic disturbances in the North-West Frontier Province, and even in Calcutta.

The Delhi Hartal brought for the first time into full relief the close alliance into which the Mahomedan Extremists had been brought with the Hindu Extremists, as well as the influence which both had acquired over a considerable section of the lower classes in the two communities. The political leaders had fallen into line in the Indian National Congress and the All-India Moslem League during the 1916 and 1917 sessions, when they united in demanding Home Rule for India, and they had united since then in rejecting as totally inadequate the scheme of reforms foreshadowed in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. But not till towards the conclusion of the war did the Mahomedan Extremists discover a special grievance for their own community in the peace terms likely to be imposed upon a beaten Turkey. That was a grievance far more likely to appeal to their co-religionists than the political grievances which had formed the stock-in-trade of Hindu Extremism, if they could be worked upon to believe that Great Britain and her allies were plotting not merely against the temporal power of the Ottoman Empire, but against the Mahomedan religion all over the world by depriving the Sultan of Turkey of the authority essential to the discharge of his office as Khalif or spiritual head of Islam.

The agitation was at first very artificial, for the bulk of Indian Mahomedans had until recent years known very little about and taken still less interest in Turkey, and their loyalty had never wavered during the war. Some of the leading Indian Mahomedans had indeed openly disputed Sultan Abdul Hamid's claim to the Khalifate of Islam when he first tried at the end of the last century to import his Pan-Islamic propaganda into India. But the long delay on the part of the Allies in formulating their Turkish peace terms allowed time for the movement to grow and to carry with it the more fanatical element amongst Indian Mahomedans. The Government of India tried in vain to allay Mahomedan feeling by receiving deputations from the Khilafat Association founded to prosecute an intensified campaign in favour of Turkey, and professing its own deep anxiety to procure what it called "a just peace with Turkey," for which the Indian delegates to the War and to the Peace Conferences in Europe had been constantly instructed to plead. The greatest success which the Khilafat agitators achieved was when Mr. Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded by them that the movement was a splendid manifestation of religious faith, as he himself described it to me. For, once satisfied that the cause which they had taken up was a religious cause, he was prepared to make it his own without inquiring too closely into its historical or political justification. For him it became a revolt of the Mahomedan religious conscience against the tyranny of the West just as legitimate as the revolt of the Hindu conscience against the same tyranny embodied in the Rowlatt Acts. Whilst Mahomedans proved their emancipation from narrow sectarianism by joining in the Satyagraha movement of passive resistance in spite of the Hindu character impressed upon it by its Sanscrit name, it was, he declared, for Hindus to show that they, too, could rise above ancient prejudice and resentment by throwing themselves heart and soul into the Khilafat movement. Both movements were to be demonstrations of the "soul-force" of India, to be put forth in passive resistance according to his favourite doctrine of Ahimsa, the endurance and not the infliction of suffering.

But Mr. Gandhi, with all his visionary idealism, was letting loose dangerous forces which recked naught of Ahimsa. Hindus and Mahomedans "fraternised" at the Delhi Hartal in attempts to compel its observance by violence which obliged the authorities to use forcible methods of repression, and of the five rioters who were killed two were Mahomedans. These deaths were skilfully exploited by the Extremists of both denominations, and a day of general mourning for the Delhi "martyrs" was appointed. The spark had been laid to the train, and Hindus and Mahomedans continued to "fraternise" in lawlessness, arson, and murder wherever the mob ran riot. Systematic attempts to destroy railways and telegraphs at the same moment in widely separated areas pointed to the existence of a carefully elaborated organisation. Public buildings as well as European houses were burnt down in half a dozen places, and Europeans were often savagely attacked and done to death, nowhere more savagely than at Amritsar, where five Europeans, two of them Bank managers, were killed with the most fiendish brutality, and a missionary lady, known for her good works, barely escaped with her life. The authorities were not slow to take stern measures. Troops were rapidly moved to the centres of disturbance, flying columns were sent through the country, and armoured cars and trains and aeroplanes were used to disperse the rioters. A Resolution issued by the Government of India on April 14 asserted its determination to use all the powers vested in it to put down "open rebellion" even by the most drastic means. By the end of the month the Viceroy was able to announce that order had been generally restored, though in some places there was still considerable effervescence.

Had the measures taken, however stern, been confined to the repression of actual violence and to the punishment of the guilty, the reaction produced amongst the great majority of Indians by the atrocities which Indian mobs had committed, and the appalling spirit of lawlessness which inspired them, would probably have been at least as great as the impression which they at first made upon Mr. Gandhi himself, who suddenly recognised and admitted that he had underrated the "forces of evil" and advised his disciples to co-operate, as he himself had done at Ahmedabad, with Government in the restoration of order. The Satyagraha Committee, of which he was President, resolved to suspend temporarily "civil disobedience" to the laws, and the fraternisation between Mahomedans and Hindus cooled down, when important Mahomedan associations began to protest against the desecration of mosques by the admission of Hindu "idolaters" to deliver fiery orations to mixed congregations within the sacred precincts. But before the reaction could take real effect, it was arrested by rumours of terrible happenings in the course of the repression in the Punjab which turned the tide of Indian feeling into an opposite direction, and for those rumours there ultimately proved to have been no slight foundation.

The methods adopted in the Punjab had been very different from those adopted in the Bombay Presidency, where there had been scarcely less menacing outbursts in some of the northern districts, besides serious rioting in Bombay itself. In Ahmedabad, the second city of the Presidency, mob law reigned for two days. There were arson and pillage, and murder of Europeans and Government officers. Troops had to be hurried up to quell the disturbances, and for a short time the military authorities had to take charge. The repression was stern; 28 of the rioters were killed and 123 wounded in Ahmedabad alone. There were many arrests and prosecutions. But those stormy days left no bitterness behind them. The use of military force was not resented, because it was directed only against the crowds actually engaged in violent rioting. Martial law was never proclaimed, nor did the military authorities prolong the exercise of their punitive powers beyond the short period of active disorder, nor strain it beyond the measures essential to the suppression of disorder. They never interfered in administrative matters. The Bombay Government kept their heads, and there was nowhere any wholesale surrender of the civil authority into military hands. Mr. Gandhi, who had been turned back by the Punjab Government when he tried to enter the Punjab, was left free by the Bombay Government, and the value of his assistance in restoring order in Allahabad, whilst he was in his first fit of penitence, was acknowledged by the authorities.

Very different was the intensive enforcement of martial law in the Punjab. Even when all allowance is made for the more dangerous situation created by a more martial population and the proximity of an always turbulent North-Western Frontier with the added menace at that time of an Afghan invasion, nothing can justify what was done at Amritsar where the deliberate bloodshed at Jallianwala has marked out April 13, 1919, as a black day in the annals of British India. One cannot possibly realise the frightfulness of it until one has actually looked down on the Jallianwala Bagh—once a garden, but in modern times a waste space frequently used for fairs and public meetings, about the size perhaps of Trafalgar Square, and closed in almost entirely by walls above which rise the backs of native houses facing into the congested streets of the city. I entered by the same narrow lane by which General Dyer—having heard that a large crowd had assembled there, many doubtless in defiance, but many also in ignorance of his proclamation forbidding all public gatherings—entered with about fifty rifles. I stood on the same rising ground on which he stood when, without a word of warning, he opened fire at about 100 yards' range upon a dense crowd, collected mainly in the lower and more distant part of the enclosure around a platform from which speeches were being delivered. The crowd was estimated by him at 6000, by others at 10,000 and more, but practically unarmed, and all quite defenceless. The panic-stricken multitude broke at once, but for ten consecutive minutes he kept up a merciless fusillade—in all 1650 rounds—on that seething mass of humanity, caught like rats in a trap, vainly rushing for the few narrow exits or lying flat on the ground to escape the rain of bullets, which he personally directed to the points where the crowd was thickest. The "targets," to use his own word, were good, and when at the end of those ten minutes, having almost exhausted his ammunition, he marched his men off by the way they came, he had killed, according to the official figures only wrung out of Government months later, 379, and he left about 1200 wounded on the ground, for whom, again to use his own word, he did not consider it his "job" to take the slightest thought.

In going to Jallianwala I had passed through the streets where, on April 10, when the disorders suddenly broke out in Amritsar, the worst excesses were committed by the Indian rioters. But for General Dyer's own statements before the Hunter Commission, one might have pleaded that, left to his own unbalanced judgment by the precipitate abdication of the civil authority, he simply "saw red," though the outbreak of the 10th had been quelled before he arrived in Amritsar, and the city had been free from actual violence for the best part of three days. But, on his own showing, he deliberately made up his mind whilst marching his men to Jallianwala, and would not have flinched from still greater slaughter if the narrowness of the approaches had not compelled him regretfully to leave his machine-guns behind. His purpose, he declared, was to "strike terror into the whole of the Punjab." He may have achieved it for the time, though the evidence on this point is conflicting, but what he achieved far more permanently and effectively was to create in the Jallianwala Bagh, purchased since then as a "Martyrs' Memorial" by the Indian National Congress, a place of perpetual pilgrimage for racial hatred.

Then, two days after—not before—Jallianwala came the formal proclamation of martial law in the Punjab, and though there were no more Jallianwalas, what but racial hatred could result from a constant stream of petty and vindictive measures enforced even after the danger of rebellion, however real it may at first have seemed, had passed away? Sir Michael O'Dwyer protested, it is true, against General Dyer's monstrous "crawling order," and it was promptly disallowed. But what of many other "orders" which were not disallowed? What of the promiscuous floggings and whippings, the indiscriminate arrests and confiscations, the so-called "fancy punishments" designed not so much to punish individual "rebels" as to terrorise and humiliate? What of the whole judicial or quasi-judicial administration of martial law? The essential facts are on record now in the Report of the Hunter Committee and in the evidence taken before it, though its findings were not entirely unanimous and the majority report of the European members, five in number including the president Lord Hunter, formerly Solicitor-General for Scotland, was accompanied by a minority report signed by the three Indian members, two of them now Ministers in the Government of Bombay and of the United Provinces respectively, who on several points attached graver importance to the circumstances which they themselves had chiefly helped to elicit from witnesses under examination. Upon the Report the Government of India and His Majesty's Government expressed in turn their views in despatches which are also public property. The responsibility of the Government of India was so deeply involved, and in a lesser degree that of the Secretary of State, that in neither case was judgment likely to err on the side of severity. The Government of India certainly did not so err, and one must turn to the despatch embodying the views of the British Government for a considered judgment which at least set forth in weighty terms the principles of British policy that had been violated in the Punjab, however short some may consider it to have fallen of the full requirements of justice in appraising the gravity of the departure from those principles in specific cases.