a province so detached that one sometimes wonders if it should have been incorporated in India at all? In saying all this I am probably exposing my own ignorance; but if so, I want to expose it in order to learn by getting you to correct me and explain why these things are so. In the absence of such explanation I am drifting towards the conclusion that in this vast and diversified country, no real attempt has been made to evolve a distinction between things provincial and things which are national. For despite all this diversity you have only to look at the map to see that in India proper there is national unity underlying the diversity. You cannot eliminate the Government of India as John Bright wished to do. But I suggest that you can and must evolve a list of matters which provincial governments can regulate for themselves, subject only to such a veto by the Governor-General as exists in Canada.

§ 18. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that your so-called provincial governments are scarcely deserving of the name. They are merely the Government of India operating in the provinces. One curious manifestation of this is the peculiar position of the I.C.S. in the Provinces (see Report of the Decentralization Commission, sections 31, 34, 38, 39, and 40). The members of this corps are still expected to supervise all the executive departments of government, although to a lesser degree than formerly. The Commissioner and Collector still supervise and report upon the schools, the police, the forests, the irrigation department, the Public Works Department, and so on. In a great measure the I.C.S. remains the Government of India in the Provinces. This simply will not work under any system of real popular government which operates through a parliament and cabinet. In responsible government the unity which an executive must have is provided, not by the permanent civil service, but by the cabinet. The permanent officers are all grouped under one or other of the ministers, and any matters at issue between various departments are threshed out between ministers in the secrecy of the cabinet. The minister who is overruled must either resign or else be prepared not merely to accept the cabinet's decision, but even to justify to the public a decision which he has contested with his colleagues. The system implies that ministers stand on a footing of virtual equality under the leadership of the Prime Minister. Members of the I.C.S. would have to be answerable to one minister whose position. would be intolerable if his subordinates were constantly

supervising and reporting on the departmental work of all his colleagues.

§ 19. The general result is that in order to popularize the control of provincial governments you must not only draw horizontal lines dividing their functions from those of the national government; but you must also draw vertical lines dividing the functions of provincial departments from each other.

§ 20. In travelling towards responsible government there is another consideration you must hold in mind, which differentiates the case of India from that of America, Canada, and Australia, though in a slighter degree from that of South Africa. The people of the American, Australian, and Canadian colonies were all approximately at the same stage of advancement. In the Provinces of India there is a far greater variety. Am I not right in thinking that in Bombay and Bengal the people sufficiently conversant with public affairs to take a part in them are far more numerous than in the Central and Frontier Provinces? If so, your system should be one which admits of each Province advancing at its own pace. If you apply the same system to all of them you are on the horns of a dilemma. Either the progress of your advanced Provinces must be kept down to the pace of the most backward, or you will have a breakdown in the backward Provinces which will bring your whole forward movement into disrepute. Any definite breakdown will strengthen the case of those who are averse to progress towards responsible government. Disorder is like plague; the infection spreading from one community to its neighbours will greatly complicate the task of ministers in the more advanced communities. Happily the reverse is also true. Unhampered progress in advanced Provinces will influence the backward communities. If you desire your progress towards responsible government to be as rapid as possible you have everything to gain from a system which allows each Province freedom to move as fast as it can without waiting for those behind it. You don't want your march to proceed on the military principle that the pace of the army must be that of the slowest regiment.

§ 21. And whatever steps you take towards responsible government should be real steps. The criticism I should venture to make of the various schemes which have been put forward is that they provide no instalment of real responsible government. The first condition of popular government is that a definite section of the people should

aspire to achieve for themselves a better life not only in things material but in things spiritual. A few leaders must then formulate plans for realizing these vague aspirations in practice. In response to the vague aspiration for improved education, leaders must formulate schemes for training more teachers, building more schools, &c. But in offering to execute those plans they must also insist that the people at large must bear the cost, and bear it before the benefit is reaped and experienced. And when this is. done the plans will often prove disappointing in their results. Other leaders will arise who will argue that many mistakes have been made and that they, in the light of experience, if given the power, can do things in a better way. In the long run the electorate can only test the value of the various leaders and their views by trial, that is to say by dismissing one government and by putting another in office. The trustiest leaders in the long run will prove to be those who can induce the electorate to face the heaviest immediate sacrifice for the sake of a future benefit to be reaped by their successors rather than themselves. In order to realize these conditions your constitution must be one which makes it perfectly clear where responsibility for success or failure lies. In a government half appointed and half elected you could never know this. It is only when governments stand or fall together under the leadership of one man that a people really learn which leaders to trust and which to avoid.

§22. To formulate principles with which no one can quarrel is fatally easy when you are writing of government. The only real test of their practical value is first to see whether you can formulate them into a scheme, secondly, to see whether that scheme will draft into legal shape, and thirdly, to see how the law so framed will work in actual practice.

§ 23. I will now go so far as to submit the principles I have suggested to the first test, of seeing whether I can suggest a scheme which looks as if it would enable these principles to be realized in practice. I shall do this in order to elicit your criticism. I will ask you, however, to look at the scheme as a whole before making criticisms on any part of it. § 24. The first step I would suggest is to get rid of the official vote altogether off the Provincial Legislative Council. The reason for having these voters under the direct orders of Government is plain. At present the Provincial Government is responsible to the Government of India; the Government of India is responsible to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State to Parliament. The Secretary

of State cannot, therefore, undertake to be bound by two votes-one in the Provincial Council and the other in Parliament, which may be in conflict. He cannot, therefore, allow the provincial executive to be bound by any vote of their Legislative Council. I am not ignoring the fact that a nonofficial majority has been accorded in these Councils. The Government relies in the last resort on its power of veto. In the last analysis one man cannot serve two masters, and one government cannot obey two authorities. The Provincial Government cannot be responsible to the Secretary of State and also to the Provincial Council. Then why flinch from the fact? Why not say so openly? Why not empower the Provincial Government to declare that it cannot hold itself bound by this or that particular vote? What real good is done by this cumbrous expedient (which deceives no one) of ordering intelligent officials to vote blindly, irrespective of their personal judgement? This practice operates to prostitute the principle of free and conscientious judgement by individuals upon which alone responsible government can rest. It has another evil consequence. The supreme purpose of this world-commonwealth is to achieve the unity of various nations in one free state. It exists to train them to resist their natural tendency to oppose each other, and to learn to act together instead. The stranger who enters the galleries of your Legislative Councils sees the racial division officially recognized and stamped on the benches beneath his eyes.

§ 25. The effect is to create artificial parties--one Indian and one British. The constant pressure of the official vote operates to check the development of real Indian parties, and it is only in so far as you develop such parties that you will achieve self-government. Just at present people in self-governing countries are obsessed by the evils of the party system. People are always obsessed by the defects of the system under which they are living and forget the greater defects of other systems. For no system of government is free from defects. If you are to work popular government at all you must have some organized parties, and the important thing is that those parties should correspond to the sentiments of people in the country itself.

§ 26. I have said, get rid of the official voters.' That you can do without getting rid of the official speakers. If any council is to pronounce an opinion it must have the matter in question explained to it by those in actual charge of the business. Let members of the Government sit in

the Council and speak. Let them be free to summon any other officials they please to take part in the debates. But let voting be confined to members who are not officials. I do not say let it be confined to elected members, because, as I understand, you cannot as yet secure that all sections of your population can get their opinions voiced unless some members are specially appointed.

§ 27. A minor though not unimportant advantage of the change would be that the time of highly-paid officials would no longer be wasted by sitting for weeks on the benches of the Councils, waiting to cast any vote which Government may order them to record.

§ 28. I am assuming that Provincial Governments would be instructed to exercise this power of refusal only where they now use the official whip. They should accept the opinion of the Council, even when it does not coincide with their own, except where they feel that it is such that they cannot be responsible for giving effect to it. Subject to this safeguard the discussions of the Council would range over the whole sphere of provincial government. They would thus remain what they are designed to be, an organ through which public opinion can express itself with regard to any branch of the public administration of law. But I am presently going to suggest that you should make this Council responsible in the true sense of the word for certain branches of administration and also of legislation.

§ 29. Before doing so, however, I would urge that your Councils should be made responsible to a clearly defined electorate, however small that electorate may be. At present this has been done only in the case of the Mohammedan minority. The majority are elected by district boards and municipal councils. With reference to this system there are two questions that I want to put.

(1) Why cannot the voters who elect local authorities be allowed to elect the provincial councillors ?

The answer can only be that many of them are not qualified to record their judgement upon provincial affairs. Accepting that answer for a moment, I have another question to put.

(2) Are the members of local authorities the only people fit to vote for provincial councillors ?

Surely not. There must be many others who did not stand for the local authority who are just as qualified to vote for the Provincial Councils. If so, why not make a list of them and let them vote?