At the same time the effacement of the Viceroy's Executive Council has weakened that collective authority of the Government of India without which its voice must fail to carry full weight in Whitehall. Every experienced Anglo-Indian administrator, for instance, had been quick to realize what were bound to be the consequences of the unbridled licence of the extremist Press and of an openly seditious propaganda. Yet the Government of India under Lord Minto lacked the cohesion necessary to secure the sanction of the Secretary of State to adequate legislative action, repugnant to party traditions at home, until we had already begun to reap the bloody harvest of an exaggerated tolerance, and with the Viceroy himself the views of the ruling chiefs seem to have carried greater weight in urging action on the Secretary of State than the opinions recorded at a much earlier date by men entitled to his confidence and entrusted under his orders with the administration of British India. Even if one could always be certain of having men of transcendent ability at the India Office and at Government House in Calcutta, it is impossible that they should safely dispense with the permanent corrective to their personal judgment and temperament--not to speak of outside pressure--which their respective Councils have been created by law to supply. Let us take first of all the case of the Viceroy. His position as the head of the Government of India may be likened to that of the Prime Minister at home, and the position of the Viceroy's Executive Council to that of the Ministers who, as heads of the principal executive Departments, form the Cabinet over which the Prime Minister presides. But no head of the Executive at home stands so much in need of capable and experienced advisers as the Viceroy, who generally goes out to India without any personal knowledge of the vast sub-continent and the 300 million people whom he is sent out to govern for five years with very far-reaching powers, and often without any administrative experience, though he has to take charge of the most complicated administrative machine in the world. Even when he has gone out to India, his opportunities of getting to know the country and its peoples are actually very scant. He spends more than six months of the year at Simla, an essentially European and ultra-official hill-station perched up in the clouds and entirely out of touch with Indian life, and another four months he spends in Calcutta, which, again, is only partially Indian, or, at any rate, presents but one aspect of the many-sided life of India. It takes a month for the great public departments to transport themselves and their archives from Calcutta to Simla at the beginning of the hot weather, and another month in the autumn for the pilgrimage back from the hills to Calcutta. It is only during these two months that the Viceroy can travel about freely and make himself acquainted with other parts of the vast Dependency