by John Buchan
II
During the first months of 1907 the discussion of reform was approaching its culmination — the embodiment of the Viceroy’s proposals in an official dispatch. The Arundel committee had reported, and the suggestion as to a native member met with no support from the Viceroy’s Council, with one solitary exception, its chief opponents being Lord Kitchener and Sir Denzil Ibbetson. Minto’s own view on the matter was unshaken (“In accepting an Indian member of Council we should at once admit the immediate right of a native to share in the highest executive administration of the country “), but he was ready to look at the question from every side, to admit the difficulties with the British public, and to put before Mr. Morley the arguments urged against it in India. It was a strong measure to push the proposal in the face of all his colleagues but one, but he was prepared to face it. He told Mr. Morley so on 27th February: —
“The reasons against it as stated in the notes of members of Council are generally very narrow, based almost entirely on the assumption that it is impossible to trust a native in a position of great responsibility, and that the appointment of a native member is merely a concession to Congress agitation. The truth is, that by far the most important factor we have to deal with in the political life of India is not impossible Congress ambitions, but the growing strength of an educated class, which is perfectly loyal and moderate in its views, but which, I think, quite justly considers itself entitled to a greater share in the government of India. I believe that we shall derive the greatest assistance from this class if we recognize its existence, and that, if we do not, we shall drive it into the arms of Congress leaders.”
On 21st March Minto, much encouraged by a deputation from Hindus and Mohammedans, who were anxious to combine in putting an end to the unrest,* sent off the dispatch: “I do not believe that any dispatch fraught with greater difficulties and greater possibilities has ever left India.” The contents were kept a close secret, but some hint of them got abroad, and Minto recognized that sooner or later, whatever happened, the native member proposal would be known, and his own share in it.
* Footnote: He wrote to Mr. Morley: “Of all the wonderful things that have happened since I was in India, this, to my mind, was the most wonderful. . . . The burden of it was that they are most anxious to put an end to unrest and bad feeling, and that they propose to organize associations throughout the country with a view to inducing Mohammedans and Hindus to work together for the control of their respective communities. . . . It was simply marvellous, with the troubles and anxieties of a few months ago still fresh in one’s memory, to see the ‘King of Bengal’ sitting on my sofa with his Mohammedan opponents, asking for my assistance to moderate the evil passions of the Bengali, and inveighing agamst the extravagances of Bepin Chandra Pal. I hope you will forgive me a little feeling of exultation at the confidence expressed to me by these representatives of hostile camps, and their declaration of faith in you and Mr. Hare and myself.”
“I think,” he wrote to Mr. Morley on 17th April, “that Anglo-India would be divided into two camps, agreeing and disagreeing with me, and that I should be violently attacked by the latter both here and at home. If he is appointed, the attacks will, I believe, die down, and gradually disappear; if he is not appointed, we shall have a tremendous revival of agitation, in which moderate natives will join and with which many Anglo-Indians will sympathize. It will be generally known throughout India that the Viceroy (and it will be assumed, I am sure, that your sympathies run in the same direction) and reasonable British opinion as well as native have given way to the clamour of a bureaucracy largely influenced by concern for their own interests. We shall have a row either way, but in the case of the appointment of a native member it would emanate from the official world alone, and would, in my opinion, gradually subside.”
On 5th June Minto wrote that he had never been anxious to escape from criticism, and was “quite ready to stand the shot.”
The Secretary of State, as he admitted in a later letter of 31st October, was less bold. The King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament had hinted at Indian reform, and he clamoured from January till April for the Viceroy’s dispatch. When he got it he was inclined to take alarm at the opposition of the Viceroy’s Council, and the certain repercussion at home. “I have known,” he had written on 24th January, “some slippery places in my ill-spent political days, but I declare I do not recall one when any step, both in reaching a conclusion and in the process of making it known, needs more wary deliberation.” He foresaw that his own Council would be unanimous against the native member; ex-Viceroys like Lord Elgin and Lord Lansdowne were hostile, as was an ex-Indian Secretary, Sir Henry Fowler, who, however, according to Mr. Morley, was “not happily constituted for swimming, or even floating, in deep waters “; there was the whole host of retired Anglo-Indians, and the wary and untiring opposition of Lord Curzon to be reckoned with. Even Lord Ripon was against the scheme on its merits. Mr. Morley was better at dealing with recalcitrants in the ranks of his own party, the rump of Indian sympathizers in the House of Commons whom he despised, than with an opposition of which he knew little and which he vaguely respected. His own views in the abstract were Minto’s, but he was only half-persuaded himself of the wisdom at the moment of the step, and he failed to persuade the Cabinet, who had always at the back of their minds the agitation which followed the notorious Ilbert Bill. In the Budget debate in the first week of June the Secretary of State did not mention the subject, but announced that the time had now come when he might safely nominate one, or even two Indian members to his own Council. These appointments followed in August.
Meantime, by the fantastic irony of events, while reforms matured anarchy and disorder raised their heads. The area was the Punjab, always a dangerous neighbourhood because of the virile and warlike qualities of the Sikh people, who formed a substantial part of the Indian army. There was rioting in Lahore in April and at Rawal Pindi in May — serious rioting which had obviously been skilfully organized. Something was due to the anti-British propaganda of Bengali agitators, something to the recent plague and the wild suspicions which always accompany such a visitation, and much to the unwise handling by the local Government of the canal colonies. Undoubtedly the native army was being tampered with, and in India a little flicker may in a day be a prairie fire. As Lord Kitchener said, “My officers tell me it is all right, but they said the same thing in the Mutiny days till they were shot by their own men.” Sir Denzil Ibbetson, as Lieutenant-Governor, asked for special precautions to meet a special danger. There was some difference at first in the Viceroy’s Council, but summary measures were undertaken. Under an old regulation of 1818 the two chief agitators, Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, were arrested and deported without trial. An ordinance was also issued (The Regulation of Meetings Ordinance, 1907) prohibiting the holding of seditious meetings in the provinces of the Punjab and Eastern Bengal. These were strong measures for a Liberal Secretary of State, but Mr. Morley rose gallantly to the occasion, accepted the need for them, and loyally defended the Government of India in Parliament. He had in many letters shown a curious restiveness under the very suggestion of the charge that he might be averse from using the strong hand when the situation demanded it. He felt that to be a suspicion which followed naturally upon his political record, and he was determined to give it the lie. He desired to make concessions to the Indian people, and was the more zealous, therefore, to show that he also stood for law and order. “If we can hatch some plan and policy,” he wrote, “for half a generation, that will be something; and if for a whole generation, that would be better. Only I am bent, as you assuredly are, on doing nothing to loosen the bolts.”
The instancy and vigour of the action of the Government of India had a miraculous effect in allaying the Punjab unrest. But more effective than anything else was Minto’s behaviour in connection with the Chenab colony, suspicion of the Government’s attitude as to which had been a prime cause of the trouble. In the administration of this
colony, peopled by 1,200,000 souls, the Punjab Government had introduced certain measures which the colonists regarded, and with justice, as a departure from the pledges on which the settlement had been formed. The bill, passed by the Punjab Legislative Council, was now up for the Viceroy’s assent; it was admittedly an imperfect measure, it was notoriously unpopular, and to Minto it seemed a clear breach of faith. But he was told, if he disallowed it, that at a critical time he would lessen the prestige of the local government in the eyes of the people. This was never the kind of plea that appealed to Minto’s mind. If it was an unjust bill, he told an inquirer, he would not consider the feelings of fifty Punjab governments. “I hate the argument,” he wrote to Mr. Morley, “that to refuse to sanction what we know to be wrong is a surrender to agitation and an indication of weakness. It is far weaker, to my mind, to persist in a wrong course for fear of being thought weak.” So he disallowed the bill, with the most fortunate consequences. The trouble among the colonies disappeared, and the Viceroy acquired in the eyes of the natives the repute of a just and beneficent divinity. It is needless to say that in his action he had Mr. Morley’s fullest support. Lord Kitchener, too, was in favour of the course followed, and Minto’s only qualm was that it might seem to cast a slight upon Sir Denzil Ibbetson, a most courageous and competent administrator, who was leaving the Punjab fatally stricken with disease.
During these months the relations with the Secretary of State were cordial, though on occasions a little delicate. Mr. Morley’s letters were always full of urbanity and reason, but his telegrams, if there should be any trouble brewing in Parliament, were sometimes petulant and exasperating. His extreme sensitiveness was now apparent to Minto, who laboured to avoid any matter of offence, but sudden storms would blow up, as on the question of Mr. Morley’s private correspondence with Kitchener, where an odd misunderstanding arose when Minto thought that he was interpreting Mr. Morley’s own expressed wishes. Lady Minto was in England at the time, and had some interesting talks at the India Office. “I don’t suppose,” the Secretary of State told her, “that any Viceroy has had such a weight of responsibility on his shoulders since India was taken over by the Crown.” He felt to the full the comedy of a situation in which a Tory Viceroy on a matter of reform was bolder than a Liberal Minister.
“Lady Minto,” he wrote, “told me the other day that I had said that you were a stronger Radical than I am; or else that I was the Whig and you were the Radical, or something of that sort. I daresay I did in good humour talk in that vein, at my own expense, not yours. If I may seem over-cautious to you, ‘tis only because I do not know the Indian ground, and I hate to drive quick in the dark. You are at close quarters and see things with your own eyes, and this gives you, rightly gives you, confidence in the region of political expansion. At least be certain that, in object and temper, I am in entire sympathy with you, even if in detail I may now and then differ. You remember old Carlyle’s saying of himself and another—’We walked away westward, from seeing Mill at the East India House, talking of all manner of things, except in opinion not disagreeing!’ About India I don’t know that you and I disagree even in opinion.”
In April Minto went into camp at Dehra Dun and elsewhere, and early in May was settled again at Simla. Those summer months, when the Punjab danger was gone, were a time of constant busyness but of comparative peace. Minto had exerted himself to encourage independence among officials, so that they should write what they believed to be true and not what they assumed that the Viceroy wished to hear. His work was bearing fruit in a widespread sense of confidence throughout the hierarchy, and the candour which confidence inspires. Small annoyances were not absent. A section of the English press had constituted itself the passionate apologist of Lord Curzon — which was well enough; but this came to involve a subtle disparagement of his successor, which was merely foolish. Servants of the Crown are not rival beauties, so that the praise of one involves the discrediting of the other. Few people had less vanity than Minto, but any honest man must chafe under misrepresentation. There were difficulties, too, about some of Lord Curzon’s enterprises — the Delhi memorial, for instance, which was to commemorate the famous Durbar, and which had got into dire confusion, and the proposed memorial to Clive, with which Minto fully sympathized, but which he saw danger in connecting with the field of Plassey in the then state of feeling in Bengal. He had little leisure for amusement, but at the Horse Show in June he rode his horse “Waitress” and had a toss over a wall — a thing which can never have happened to a Viceroy before. Lady Minto returned from England in July, and Sir Pertab Singh came on a visit in August to reassure Minto about the condition of India. “People know Viceroy,” he said; “he soldier, he two-hand man, he make people happy; everyone trust two-hand man. Civilian, he only one-hand man.” Under the heaviest press of duties Minto never lost his humour or even his boyishness of temper. He could always see the ridiculous in pompous occasions, and enter into the escapades of his staff, and gossip of sport past, present, or to come, and laugh at the preposterous letter bag of a Viceroy — proposals from unknown Bengalis for the hand of one of his daughters, and requests for gifts to be repaid by the blessing of God, “Whom your Excellency greatly resembles.”
During the summer the negotiations for an Anglo-Russian Convention came to a head. The pourparlers between Sir Arthur Nicolson and M. Isvolsky had begun early in 1906, and the first draft of the Convention was telegraphed to India in May 1907. Within these dates there had been a lengthy correspondence between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, in which the former emphasized especially two points — the absolute necessity of safeguarding the status quo in the Persian Gulf, and the desirability of carrying the ruler of Afghanistan with them. “It is most important,” he wrote in June 1906, “to remember that the present position has been agreed between the Amir and ourselves, and that we are not entitled to cancel it without his consent.” Minto had little confidence in the decencies of Russian diplomacy and the assurances of St. Petersburg, and he foresaw that the agreement would leave northern Persia a happy hunting-ground for Russian intrigue. More, too, than Mr. Morley, he felt distaste for the whole tradition of the Tsarist government. But it was not his business to criticize the foreign policy of His Majesty’s advisers, though he would have assented to many of the criticisms which Lord Curzon made on the Convention in the House of Lords, and, the Gulf position being secured, he was only concerned with the Afghanistan problem.
The possibility of an agreement as to Central Asia between Russia and Japan, which was apparent early in 1907, hastened the steps of the British negotiators, and during the summer there was a continuous and somewhat hectic correspondence between Simla and Whitehall. Minto had to work strenuously to prevent the British Cabinet from ruining utterly the future relations of India and Afghanistan. One instance may be selected. The Cabinet had accepted the following provision: “Should any change occur in the political status of Afghanistan, the two Governments will enter into a friendly interchange of views on the subject.” The clause, away from the context of Article II., of which it was to form a part, looked innocent enough, but Minto saw that it might be a fruitful parent of mischief. In order to secure from Russia no more than a repetition of her pledge that Afghanistan was outside the sphere of her influence, we were to bind ourselves to do what we had never dreamed of before — to consult her whenever a change in the political status occurred. Such a change might mean anything. If the Amir sent a batch of officials to India to be trained in revenue work, or asked for a Royal Engineer officer to advise on the fortifying of Kabul, these requests might be reasonably construed as a change in the political status. Moreover, even without any action on the Amir’s part, Russia could herself at any time force an alteration in the political status, and so bring the whole question of Britain’s relations with Afghanistan into the melting-pot. Minto’s protest had its effect, and the objectionable clause was dropped.
The Viceroy failed, however, to induce the Government to co
nsult the Amir before concluding the negotiations. Mr. Morley felt the difficulty, but his colleagues were obdurate; candour with the Amir would prevent the speedy execution of a diplomatic coup on which they had set their hearts. On 2nd August he wrote: “It came to this at last-a choice between accepting the drawbacks and losing the Convention, Of course any one can see that the relations between us and the Amir were never so good as they are at this moment. Nothing can mend them. On the other hand, it is inevitable that the Convention between us and Russia should make him suspicious and uneasy. The notion of his two neighbours ‘exchanging views’ about annexing and occupying him will naturally have a very ugly look of Partition in his eyes. . . . If the Convention goes on — as in spite of all its drawbacks I am bound to hope that it will — I would ask you to encourage yourself in the delicate diplomacy that we shall in that case impose on you with the Amir. . . . Certainly, if you do not succeed in managing your Kabul friend, the results of the whole proceeding will be disastrous.” On 31st August the Secretary of State telegraphed that the Convention had been signed, and on 10th September the part relating to Afghanistan was communicated to the Amir. Minto wrote that he was pleased with the arrangement, and hoped that the Amir would assent, but repeated that he did not believe that it would enable India to reduce her military budget. Months of weary procrastination and obstruction on the part of Kabul were to prove the soundness of his forebodings.
