The last session of the Congress at Lahore, in December last, is generally admitted to have aroused very little enthusiasm, and there are many who believe that, weakened as it has been by recent dissensions, it will scarcely survive the creation of the new enlarged Councils. These Councils have been so constituted that they will be able to discharge usefully the functions which the Congress arrogated to itself without any title or authority. Perhaps it was the consciousness that the Congress would at any rate be henceforth overshadowed by the new Councils that led Pandit Malavya to inveigh so bitterly in his presidential address at Lahore against the shape ultimately given to the reforms. What one may hope above all is that the Councils will help to give the Indian "moderates" a little more self-reliance than they have hitherto shown. The Indian National Congress has at all times contained many men of high character and ability, devoted to what they conceived to be the best interests of their country, and at first, at any rate, quite ready to acknowledge the benefits of British rule and to testify to their conviction that the maintenance of British rule is essential to the welfare and safety of India. Many of them must have seen that the constant denunciation of Government by men who claimed to represent the intelligence of the country must tend to stimulate a spirit of disaffection and revolt amongst their more ignorant and inexperienced fellow-countrymen. Yet not one of them had the courage to face the risk of temporary unpopularity by pointing out the danger of the inclined plane down which they were sliding, until they actually saw themselves being swept hopelessly off their feet at Surat. It was then too late to avert the consequences of pusillanimity or to shake off their share of responsibility for the evils which the tolerance they had too long extended to the methods of their more violent colleagues had helped to produce. One of the main purposes of the Indian National Congress has avowedly been to set up a claim for the introduction of representative government in India. Yet it has itself seldom escaped the control of a handful of masterful leaders who have ruled it in the most irresponsible and despotic fashion. The Congress has, in fact, displayed exactly the same feature which has been so markedly manifested in the case of municipalities, namely, the tendency of "representative" institutions in India to resolve themselves into machines operated by, and for the benefit of, an extremely limited and domineering oligarchy. CHAPTER XIII. CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS.