Great Britain -- Colonies -- Asia -- Administration; India
Mr. MORLEY: I am afraid I must traverse my hon. friend's description
of Mr. Bright's view, with which, I think, I am pretty well
acquainted. Mr. Bright was, I believe, on the right track at the time,
when in 1858 the Government of India was transferred to the Crown.
He was not in favour of universal suffrage--he was rather
old-fashioned--but Mr. Bright's proposal was perfectly different from
that of my hon. friend. Sir Henry Maine, and others who had been
concerned with Indian affairs, came to the conclusion that Mr.
Bright's idea was right--that to put one man, a Viceroy, assisted as
he might be with an effective Executive Council, in charge of such
an area as India and its 300 millions of population, with all its
different races, creeds, modes of thought, was to put on a Viceroy's
shoulder a load that no man of whatever powers, however gigantic they
might be, could be expected effectively to support. My hon. friend and
others who sometimes favour me with criticisms in the same sense,
seem to suggest that I am a false brother, that I do not know what
Liberalism is. I think I do, and I must even say that I do not think I
have anything to learn of the principles or maxims or the practice of
Liberal doctrines even from my hon. friend. You are bound to look at
the whole mass of the difficulties and perplexing problems connected
with India, from a common-sense plane, and it is not common sense, if
I may say so without discourtesy, to talk of Imperial Dumas. I have
not had a word of thanks from that quarter, in the midst of a shower
of reproach, for what I regard, in all its direct and indirect results
and bearings, as one of the most important moves that have been made
in connection with the relations between Great Britain and India for
a long time--I mean, the admission of two Indian gentlemen to the
Council of the Secretary of State. An hon. friend wants me to appoint
an Indian gentleman to the Viceroy's Executive Council. Well, that
is a different thing; but I am perfectly sure that, if an occasion
offers, neither Lord Minto nor I would fall short of some such
application of democratic principles. In itself it is something that
we have a Viceroy and a Secretary of State thoroughly alive to the
great change in temperature and atmosphere that has been going on in
India for the last five or six years, and I do not think we ought to
be too impatiently judged. We came in at a perturbed time; we did not
find balmy breezes and smooth waters. It is notorious that we came
into enormous difficulties, which we had not created. How they were
created is a long story that has nothing whatever to do with the
present discussion. But what I submit with the utmost confidence
is that the situation to-day is a considerable improvement on the
situation that we found, when we assumed power two years ago. There
have been heavy and black clouds over the Indian horizon during
those two years. By our policy those clouds have been to some extent
dispersed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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