by John Buchan
III
The arrival at Bombay was an embarrassing affair, with Lord Curzon waiting on the eve of departure and the officials of the Bombay Government unable to cope with a situation which had no precedent. Minto landed late in the afternoon, too late, it was judged, for a public reception. He had a long talk that evening with Lord Curzon, who left early next morning, when the deferred public reception of the new Viceroy at last took place. Minto was conducted to the Secretariat, where the warrant of appointment was read, and he took his seat as Viceroy, but the whole ceremony was something of a muddle. The subject may be dismissed with the dry note which is to be found in the official report on his administration: “These proceedings were not entirely in accordance with precedent, and Lord Minto has decided that they shall not be taken as a guide for the future.”
On 22nd November the Mintos arrived in Calcutta, where their reception made amends for the informalities of Bombay. The first impression of a Viceroy must be of a ceremonial state almost too heavy to be endured, of a cloth-of-gold ritual which stiffens all the movements of life. A household of seven hundred native servants, whose tasks are infinitely and rigidly differentiated, leaves upon the newcomer a sense of living alone in the heart of vast solitudes, from which it is possible to get only a distant prospect of the normal world. The Viceroy has immediate duties to turn his mind from this weighty magnificence, but his wife must grapple with it and domesticate it. Lady Minto’s first feeling was one of an immense loneliness. “Letters are brought in from A.D.C.’s saying that they await my commands-at present I have none to give them. Apparently in future I shall have to send for any one I may wish to see, as no one intrudes upon the sacred presence uninvited. I am bound to say a deep depression has taken possession of my soul!” Nothing cheered them both so much as to come across traces of the family traditions which linked the quiet home by Teviot with this gorgeous East. The portrait of the first Earl hung conspicuously in the Council Chamber of Government House. Almost the first deputations which Minto received were from the four Maharajas of Patiala, Jind, Nabha, and Behawalpur, states which the first Lord Minto had protected against the encroachments of Ranjit Singh, who was seeking to extend his territory across the Sutlej. It was pleasant to find that India had a long memory.
Christmas was a season of functions — the state visit of the Tashi Lama of Tibet, a young man in a yellow bishop’s mitre, with a tom-tom-beating escort on shaggy ponies, and the Tongsa Penlop of Bhutan, a famous figure in the Lhasa expedition. On 29th December the Royal party arrived in Calcutta, and till their departure on January 9, 1906, the Prince and Princess of Wales and their hosts led crowded lives. At first there had been a threat that the native population would boycott the visit, but Minto took the bold step of sending for Mr. Gokhale, the leader of the Indian progressives, and talking to him with so much effect that all danger from that source was removed. It was a visit in which the future monarchs of Britain won golden opinions from every class, European and native alike, for their graciousness and friendly simplicity, and it was of the first importance, too, in the development of Indian policy. The Prince, in his speech at the Guildhall on his return, declared as the moral he had read from his tour the need of a closer and wider sympathy between government and governed in India, and it fell to Minto to provide means for the realization of this ideal.
By the early months of 1906 the new Viceroy was in the toils of the laborious routine of his office, and attempting in his scanty leisure to bring into focus the multitude of new problems which each day presented. His indefatigable predecessor had drawn all the details of administration to himself, and this centralization, beneficial as were many of its results, involved the emasculation of the local governments, and a dead-weight of detail for the Viceroy. The Members of Council had been stripped of all real responsibility, and from coadjutors had become clerks. In Colonel Dunlop Smith, Minto had a most capable private secretary who laboured to spare him, but the system of bringing the most trivial of matters to the Viceroy for decision, of using, in Burke’s phrase, the “extreme medicine of the constitution as its daily bread,” could not be altered in a day. “Every morning about eight,” Lady Minto writes, “heavily laden servants stagger upstairs with innumerable papers. These colossal files, with their distinctive labels and huge red tickets with ‘Urgent’ printed in aggressive letters, are built in a zareba on the floor round his writing table and almost hide him from view.” It was not easy to wade through morasses of the inessential — to sanction the spending of a thousand rupees on building a bathroom for a remote official or decide whether a man should have leave to visit his dentist — and at the same time to keep the mind clear and fresh for the consideration of the greater matters of policy. From that folie de doute which prevents a man from delegating work and makes him nervous about the most microscopic detail to which he has not given personal attention, Minto was conspicuously free. He thought of government as an exercise in co-operation and not as an anxious dictatorship, and he steadily refused to be buried under a drift of files. From the first he strove to restore the responsibility and initiative of the Executive Council, and he insisted on making leisure for himself to study and meditate upon the larger questions of Indian rule. He was not sent to India to be an under-secretary but a Viceroy.
IV
Before the close of 1905 Mr. Balfour’s Government had fallen, and the election of January 1906 brought the Liberals into power with a majority almost too big to be comfortable. The new Government entered upon office with a large programme of reform, and, since they had defeated decisively the imperialist policy of Mr. Chamberlain, it was assumed by many that their accession would involve some radical changes in the administration of the Empire. Mr. John Morley, who had his choice of many posts, selected the Secretaryship for India, and, whatever doubts may have been in Minto’s mind as to future unanimity, he welcomed the appointment to the India Office of a man so able, so generally esteemed, and so powerful in the councils of his party, as a proof that India would not be relegated to the position of a forgotten side-show in British policy. He had met Mr. Morley in Canada and had greatly liked him, and the first letter from the new Secretary of State recalled the meeting. “The conversation we had when you so kindly sheltered me at Ottawa last year convinces me that we speak the same political language, even though we may not always say precisely the same things.” Their relations thus began on a note of friendship, a friendship which through frequent differences of opinion was never impaired. The many private letters which passed during this period between Whitehall and Calcutta form a body of correspondence as fascinating in its revelation of temperament and mind, and as politically informative, as any in the archives of the British Empire. Lord Morley has happily given to the world many of his letters, and it is our privilege in these pages to supplement them by certain quotations from Minto’s side. He has also published in his Recollections* a tribute to his correspondent, based upon five years of intimate colleagueship: —
“Lord Minto, the new Viceroy, had all the manly traditions and honourable associations that gather round the best of youth at Eton and Trinity. In stock he was descended from patrician Whigs, and he had his share of the intuitive political perception that belonged to that sect since its rise at the revolutionary settlement. His temperament was theirs. He had seen active service under Roberts in India; he had fought on the side of the Turks against Russia: nor, in truth, did friendly feeling for the Ottoman ever leave him. As Governor-General of Canada he had acquired insight into the working technicalities of public administration in a free parliamentary system. Such habits of mind he joined to the spirit of the soldier. The Indian Viceroy is not bound to know political philosophy or juristic theory or constitutional history; he is first and foremost an administrator, and the working head of a complicated civil and military service. Nature had endowed Lord Minto with an ample supply of constancy and goodhumour. His loyalty, courage, friendliness, straightforwardness, and pressing sense of public duty were a
ll splendid; so was his rooted contempt for those in whom he found such excellences languid. A Viceroy needs to be a judge of men, whether with dark skins or white, and Lord Minto mixed tact and good cornmon sense and the milk of human kindness in the right proportion for discovering with what sort of man he had to deal. He liked people, though he did not always believe them, and he began by a disposition to get on with people as well as they would let him. If he found on trial what he thought good reason for distrusting a man, he did not change. His vision was not subtle, but, what is far better, it was remarkably shrewd. A bare catalogue of qualities, however, is not all; such lists never are, nor can be. It is the summary of them, the man himself, that matters. His ancestor, an idolater of Burke, and Indian Viceroy a hundred years before, once dropped the ingenuous but profound remark, ‘How curious it is to see how exactly people follow their own characters all through life.’ Our Lord Minto was a first-rate case. You were always sure where you would find him; there was no fear of selfishness or pettiness drawing him for a single passing moment from the straight path; his standard of political weights and measures was simple — it was true to the right facts, and it was steadfast.
“In early days at the India Office it was refreshing to hear from him how grateful he was for my proposal that he should pardon three hundred students who had been injudiciously dismissed from their school. ‘For,’ said he, ‘I do believe that in this country one can do any amount of good, and accumulate a very growing influence, if one only gives evidence of some feelings of sympathy.’ This was the result of a sure instinct. It went with a strong and active conscience, not a weak one; with a manful sense both of public responsibility and of practical proportion. The sympathy of which he spoke was much more than humane sentiment; it was a key to sound politics, and I very soon made no doubt that, though he did not belong to my own political party on the Thames at Westminster, we should find all that was wanted of common ground on the banks of the Ganges. Good mutual understanding between Secretary of State and Viceroy makes all the difference, and between us two it never failed. We were most happily alike, if I may use again some old words of my own, in aversion to all quackery and cant, whether it be the quackery of hurried violence dissembling as love of order or the cant of unsound and misapplied sentiment, divorced from knowledge and untouched by cool comprehension of realities.”
* Vol II, pages 121-123. In a presentation copy to Lady Minto the author has written the following tribute: —
“To Lady Minto, with warm respect, in grateful memory of an able, straightforward, steadfast, unselfish, and most considerate comrade in tasks of arduous public duty. MORLEY OF B. April 25, 1919.”
Every item in this wise and generous tribute was, we may be assured, deeply felt by the writer, and every phrase is true. Minto had not the literary skill of his colleague, and he has left us no such exercise in the art of Theophrastus; his estimate of Mr. Morley is to be gathered only from fragments of his letters and conversations. But it is clear that from the very outset he had arrived at an accurate judgment of the Secretary of State. A warm regard soon ripened into affection; he admired the brilliance and diversity of his talents, and was grateful for the treasures of wisdom, drawn from a rich memory of the world’s thought and literature, with which he brightened his correspondence. This, he felt, was a compliment of which any man might well be proud. But he had to meet Mr. Morley not as a private friend, but as a Secretary of State, and as a Secretary of State he had his drawbacks. His clear-cut personality, free from ragged edges and indeterminate colours, was not the one best suited to the task of administration. His life had been that of the scholar and the teacher, and even in Parliament his power lay rather in debate than in the arts of leadership. He was not, like Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a skilled party tactician, but an exponent of principles, and an inspirer, rather than a framer, of policies. His intellectual allegiance was owed to a school of thought which tended always towards rigidity in theory, and rigidity in theory is apt, if the thinker becomes a statesman, to develop into absolutism in practice. He had had no training in affairs such as falls to the lot of the humblest country gentleman, and had never had his corners rubbed off by mingling with the ruck of humanity. The scholar, especially a scholar of Mr. Morley’s type, transferred to the seat of power, is always apt to order things with a high hand, because he has little knowledge of the daily compromises by means of which the business of the world is conducted.
The innocent vanity of the scholar, too, may easily acquire that touch of arrogance which brings it near to folie des grandeurs, and is indeed the almost inevitable concomitant of a quick imagination. Mr. Morley was attracted to the India Office by his susceptibility to historic state; he loved to sit in a large room and issue decrees to high officials; it delighted him to feel that he had the control of the fortunes of some hundreds of millions of human souls; there was even satisfaction in the thought that troops might move at his command in just and beneficent wars. It is a curious trait to record in a follower of Comte, but he had no general humanitarian sympathies. Indeed, he had a strong distaste for all coloured races, and little imaginative insight into their moods and views. “The real truth,” he told Lady Minto in a delightful letter, “is that I am an Occidental, not an Oriental; don’t betray this fatal secret or I shall be ruined! I think I like Mohammedans, but I cannot go much further than that in an easterly direction.” He had a prejudice against bureaucracy, but had himself the temperament of the austerest bureaucrat; he professed a distaste for militarism, but he had an odd liking for soldiers, and his affection was vowed in history to figures like Cromwell and Strafford. He called it a “wicked thought,” but it was a self-revealing suggestion of his that “Strafford was an ideal type, both for governor of Ireland in the seventeenth century and governor of India in the twentieth century.” Indeed, if an irreverence may be permitted which its subject would assuredly have forgiven, there was about Mr. Morley at the India Office the air of a colleger who is admitted in his last year at school to the companionship of the captains of the boats and the cricket eleven, and who is intoxicated with his new society and inclined to forget the scholar in the sportsman. He was like Dr. Johnson in his capacity as Mr. Thrale’s executor, striding about the brewery with a great inkhorn and rejoicing in the playing of a novel part.* There are many passages which express his distaste for the doctrinaire, but no man so ready as he was to put his philosophy of life into maxims and aphorisms could escape a touch of doctrinairedom. His school of thought had taught him high-flying doctrines of parliamentary supremacy, and there was a risk that he might incline to views about the government of India which were not the less despotic because the despotism was parliamentary. His rule was in danger of becoming autocratic and inelastic; he would certainly override his own Council, he would probably pay small respect to the Viceroy’s Council, and he might end by ignoring the Viceroy himself.
* Once, when lunching at 10 Downing Street after he had become Lord President of the Council, he was asked by his old friend, Mr. Thomas Hardy, what books he had been reading lately, and replied loftily, “I never read anything” — seeming, said Mr. Hardy gently in telling the tale, “to draw an invisible ermine about him, as though he were a sporting peer who never read anything but the Pink ‘Un.”-Quarterly Review, January 1924.
Minto shrewdly assessed the temperament of the Secretary of State and set himself to counteract its dangers. His aim was by patient argument and adroit suggestion to get Mr. Morley to believe that the policy of the Government of India was initiated by Whitehall; it mattered little who got the credit so long as the work was done. He avoided scrupulously any conflict except on the gravest issues; in lesser matters he was only too willing to humour his colleague. Having no vanity himself, he was not offended by an innocent manifestation of it in another, especially when he had for that other a sincere respect and affection. He recognized, too, that the fates had been kind in giving him, in a new Government of unpredictable tendencies, just such a Secretary of Sta
te. To Mr. Morley he could look with certainty for support in all liberal and sympathetic policies, and, should it become necessary to take strong measures of repression, if he could convince Mr. Morley, he could count with confidence on the support of the Cabinet. A statesman of such an impeccable democratic record would soon silence the ill-informed critics of his own side, for he had about him an aura of earnest morality which would enable him to steal a horse with safety when another man dare not look over the hedge.
The first of Minto’s tasks was to settle the quarrel on military administration which had led to the break between Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener. With the latter he had only a slight previous acquaintance, and looked forward with some trepidation to their first official meeting. To his delight he found a man whom he could work with in perfect confidence and ease, a fellow-soldier who spoke the same tongue as himself, a friend whose humour and loyalty made him an admirable colleague. The new arrangement, which had been sanctioned in principle by Mr. Brodrick in the previous year, was worked out in detail, and, with some modifications, received the assent of His Majesty’s Government, and came into force as from March 19, 1906. The Military Department of the Government of India, which had existed for over one hundred and twenty years, was abolished; the administrative control of the Army of India was distributed between two new departments — the Army Department and the Department of Military Supply; the former was placed under the Commanderin-Chief, who was now directly responsible to the Governor-General in Council for the administration of the Indian forces. The scheme was accepted as a reasonable settlement both in Britain and India; the Cabinet contented itself with altering certain small provisions which the Government of India intentionally inserted that they might be altered. Mr. Morley told Minto that he did not consider the solution particularly brilliant, but that everything depended “upon the C.-in-C. being held by you strictly within the limits we are assigning to him;” the Viceroy, thankful to be quit of the business, told the Secretary of State that “it was refreshing to see ideas conveyed in a kind of English unknown to official language here.” So in an atmosphere of mutual compliments an acrimonious controversy was laid to rest.
