by John Buchan
The campaigns were brilliantly conducted, and the inflammable elements on the frontier, which might have blazed into a formidable war, were skilfully damped down. Mr. Morley followed the details with acute interest, and perhaps with a little nervousness, and its conclusion was to his mind a relief, and also a source of pardonable pride. The philosopher for once had been in command of troops, for the war had been fought under his explicit instructions. The generals were his generals. To Sir James Willcocks he wrote: “I must congratulate you on having carried out my orders so efficiently.”
“I follow the military doings with lively interest, and we have people in the office who know the ground. So, by the way, does Winston Churchill, who was there with Bindon Blood. Winston is, next to poor Chamberlain, the most alive politician I have ever come across. . . . They make other folk seem like mere amateurs, flâneurs. . . .”
On 4th March: —
“We Indians are all in good spirits here just now at the end of the Zakka, and at its being a good end; and our gratification is shared to the full by all the rest of the world. I think the policy of His Majesty’s Government has been amply justified in the result; and the military part of the work has evidently been done to perfection. For this I cannot but feel that we owe Lord K. a special debt. I don’t suppose that he had any taste for our policy of prompt and peremptory withdrawal, and yet he manifestly (and as I learn from letters) threw himself into the execution of it with as much care, skill, and energy, as if he had thought it the best policy in the world. That’s the true soldier.”
In reply Minto wrote: “K. is the very essence of caution as regards the frontier. I know no one more anxious to avoid punitive expeditions, possibly no doubt because he knows that with the vastly improved armaments of the tribes a frontier war on a big scale would be a very serious affair.” And he added this picturesque note: —
“By far the most striking characteristic of the expedition has been its political management by Roos-Keppel. . . . His personal friendship with the very men against whom he was fighting is the most attractive part of the story. Though his own Khyber Rifles are full of Zakkas, they insisted on accompanying him to fight their own fathers and sons and blow up their paternal mansions, and I am told the first thing the Zakka jirga said to him when they saw him was, ‘Sahib, did we put up a good fight?’ to which he answered, ‘I wouldn’t have shaken hands with you unless you had!’ He is unhappy about Dadai, who was the most powerful Zakka leader against us, and is supposed to have been mortally wounded. He wrote Roos-Keppel a very nice letter from his death-bed, saying how sorry he was for all that had occurred, and that he fully realized the mistake he had made in relying upon assistance from Kabul. Mooltan, too, the other great Zakka leader . . . is also a great friend of Roos-Keppel’s, and at one time stayed with him as his guest for three months. He was leader of the famous attack on Peshawar the other day, and wrote to Roos-Keppel afterwards saying he hoped he was not annoyed at what he had done!”
This honeymoon atmosphere between the India Office and Calcutta was fortunate, for there were matters pending on which both Minto and Kitchener were directly at variance with the Secretary of State. Mr. Morley considered that the Anglo-Russian Convention should be followed by a decreased military budget for India; both Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief asked, most pertinently, in what respect the Convention strengthened India’s security or enabled her to relax her defensive vigilance. Another point of difference was the policy to be pursued as to southern Persia and the Gulf. Mr. Morley was inclined to criticize Minto’s view of the place as the glacis of the Indian fortress; he questioned the appropriateness of the whole metaphor, and he was disposed to deny India’s right to a view on the larger questions of foreign policy. “China, Persia, Turkey, Russia, France, Germany,” he wrote, “I have never been able to understand, and never shall understand, what advantages the Government of India have for comprehending the play of all these factors in the great game of Empire. On the contrary, the Government of India is by no means the Man on the Spot. That, I say again, is just what the Government of India is not.” To such outbursts, which must seem a little beside the mark, Minto replied by stating patiently in many letters the common sense of the case. It was not a matter for extreme dogmas on either side.
“It is not the appearance of German armies that we have to fear, it is the growth of German influence and its effect on Eastern nationalities. Given paramount German influence in Turkey, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and southern Persia, our position in India would be seriously threatened. . . . I don’t see how Indian interests in Persia and the Gulf can be handed over entirely to home administration, for if this were done, putting aside political matters, any military expenditure in Persia or naval expenditure in the Gulf could not fairly be charged to India. And yet we know that, as a matter of fact, in the case of difficulties arising in Persia it would be upon Indian troops that His Majesty’s Government would be obliged to rely. I don’t think you can separate Indian interests from the commerce of the Gulf, or the strategical position in Persia from the possible necessity of Indian military assistance.”
In April the resignation of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman involved a reconstruction of the Cabinet; Mr. Asquith became Prime Minister and Mr. Morley went to the House of Lords, because, as he told Mr. Asquith, “though my eye is not dim nor my natural force abated, I have had a pretty industrious life, and I shall do my work all the better for the comparative leisure of the other place.” To Minto he wrote on 15th April: —
“My inclination, almost to the last, was to bolt from public life altogether, for I have a decent library of books still unread, and in my brain a page or two still unwritten. Before the present Government comes to an end, the hand of time will in any case have brought the zest for either reading or writing down near to zero, or beyond. I suppose, however, one should do the business that lies to one’s hand.”
The new adventure seemed to have raised the spirits of one who never wanted for courage, and who behind a staid exterior preserved a boyish liking for enterprise. A week later he wrote: —
“I have been swamped with correspondence about my grand glorification, winding up with a fuss with a bearish squire in my native Lancashire, who swears I have no right to take the name of his manor as a tag to my own surname. His argument is that his family were there in 1600, ‘when there were no Morleys and no Radicals.’ . . . I daresay I’ll let the bear have his way. . . . As if it mattered to a man with no children who is within a few months of the Psalmist’s allotted span! All I hope is to be alive as long as I live — if you understand that; and at present I don’t feel otherwise than alive!”
The summer of 1908 was marked by a recrudescence of barbarous outrages, of which the attempts to murder Sir Andrew Fraser and the district magistrate of Dacca in the previous year had been a foretaste. On the night of 30th April a bomb, intended for Mr. Kingsford, a former Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta, was thrown into a carriage in which two Englishwomen were returning from the Club at Muzaffarpur, and both ladies died of their injuries. A secret murder society, operating in Calcutta and Midnapur, was revealed, connected with the notorious Maniktolla Gardens, and bomb factories were discovered in various quarters. In July there were ugly disturbances in Bombay consequent upon the prosecution of Tilak for sedition, and riots at Pandharpur and Nagpur. In September an approver was shot dead by two of the Muzaffarpur prisoners in the chief prison in Calcutta. In November there was another attempt to murder Sir Andrew Fraser, and a native inspector of police was shot in a Calcutta street. It soon became clear that there was a wide network of secret anarchist societies, whose members, mostly of the student class, were inflamed by a scurrilous press, and directed in their crimes by subtle and unwearied leaders.
Minto took the alarming development with fortitude and good sense. “I am determined,” he said in the Legislative Council on 8th June, “that no anarchist crimes will for an instant deter me from endeavouring to meet as best I can the politic
al aspirations of honest reformers, and I ask the people of India, and all who have the future welfare of this country at heart, to unite in the support of law and order, and to join in one common effort to eradicate a cowardly conspiracy from our midst.” But if he refused to be panicky, he was resolved not to be supine. He was responsible for the lives of many millions of quiet folk, and for the maintenance of order and law, and he was determined to apply the exact measures needed to meet the situation — no more and no less. He did not ask for a “free hand,” he realized that he must carry the Secretary of State with him in all his new measures; but it was his duty to be frank with the British Government and make them realize the truth, even at the cost of giving offence to minds which loved to wrap ugly facts in soft phrases. The measures which Minto enforced may be briefly set down. The English Explosives Act was passed in June as an Indian statute. The Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act, passed in December, provided a summary procedure for the trial of seditious conspiracies, and gave power to suppress associations formed for unlawful acts. The executive Government was empowered to declare an association unlawful, and there was no appeal against its decision. The Press Act of 1908, dealing with newspapers which published incitements to murder and violence, did not create new offences but provided a more drastic procedure, a better machinery for getting at the real culprit, and severer penalties. The Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act of 1907 already gave the Government power to “proclaim” an area and prohibit public meetings within it. The old Regulation of 1818, which permitted the Government to place persons under detention without trial, was put into use, and nine Bengali agitators were clapped into jail in December with excellent results for the peace of the realm. This was perhaps the most criticized of the measures, but it was on the same plane as the British power of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, and was made necessary because witnesses were being terrorized and dared not go into court.
Such measures were a hard trial for the Secretary of State, and on the whole he faced the facts with courage and reasonableness. The legality of a lawyer is as nothing to the legality of a Whig statesman, and Lord Morley had to strive — not with critics in Parliament, of whom he was habitually contemptuous — but with the prepossessions and traditions of a lifetime. He may have drawn comfort (for he loved to have philosophic authority on his side) from the words of his master Mill, who had written, “A people like the Hindus, who are more disposed to shelter a criminal than to apprehend him . . . who are revolted by an execution but not shocked by an assassination, require that the public authorities should be armed with much sterner powers of repression than elsewhere.” It was Lord Morley himself who suggested the application of the Explosives Act to India, and it was enormously to his credit that he accepted the arrest of the nine ringleaders in December. He was unable to resist Minto’s resolute and moderate good sense, his clemency which was not changed by difficulties, and his firmness which was not clouded by hysteria. But the Secretary of State had to overcome his ingrained distrust of a bureaucracy, which he believed to be always contemptuous of law and clamorous for the violent hand.
“We cannot carry on upon the old maxims. This is not to say that we are to watch the evildoers with folded arms, waiting to see what the devil will send us. You will tell me what you think is needed. . . . I trust, and fully believe, that you will not judge me to be callous, sitting comfortably in an armchair at Whitehall while bombs are scattering violent death in India.”
On 21st May he wrote: —
“I am much with you, or rather you are much with me, in these pretty anxious days. . . . I daresay, however, that you are of the temperament of Thiers. ‘In public things, take everything seriously, nothing tragically.’ When I began life I was rather the other way, scenting tragedy before there was any need; time and experience have brought me round. Whether I should keep as cool if bombs were flying I don’t know.”
But sometimes his anxieties got the better of his philosophy. He was alarmed at the sentence of twelve months for the Bombay stone-throwers — he seems to have regarded them as only mischievous urchins — and he was quick to take offence at any phrase in Minto’s letters which was capable of being construed into a defence of arbitrary government. There is an illuminating passage in his letter of 17th June: —
“This notion of the ‘free hand’ is really against both letter and spirit of law and constitution. It cannot be; and let me assure you, on my word of honour as a student of our political history, that nobody would have been more opposed to it than that excellent ancestor and official predecessor of yours, Gilbert Elliot, the friend and disciple of Burke and one of the leaders against the greatest of our Governor-Generals. . . . I have amused myself by turning to Burke’s correspondence, and in a letter to Gilbert Elliot I found this: ‘No politician can make a situation. His skill consists in his well-playing the game dealt to him by fortune, and following the indications given him by nature, times, and circumstances’ (including H. of C. and the British Demos). This sage reflection by one of the greatest of men needs not to be quoted to you, for it is exactly in the vein of your own political temper.
“Oh, but I must hold up my hands at your hint of ‘Prerogative’! What a shock to all the Greys, Elliots, Russells, and other grand Whig shades, discussing over and over in the Elysian Fields the foundations of the happy and glorious Constitution of Great Britain! But then you say that on this ‘I feel that I am getting into deep water, and would rather sit upon the bank.’ My temperature had been slowly rising, but at this good-natured doubt it instantly fell to normal, and I thought how, if you and I had been conducting the controversy with face answering to face — you as Tory, I as the good orthodox Whig — we should have pushed our chairs back and gone forth laughing for a saunter in the garden.”
“If reforms do not save the Raj nothing else will,” Lord Morley had written, and Minto had replied with spirit that he utterly disagreed. “The Raj will not disappear in India as long as the British race remains what it is, because we shall fight for the Raj as hard as we have ever fought if it comes to fighting, and we shall win as we have always done. My great object is that it shall not come to that.” Accordingly the Viceroy pressed on with the reform scheme now being incubated at leisure by the local governments. In this work the Secretary of State most loyally and fruitfully co-operated, and, though the proposals came from India and the details were all worked out there, the scheme may fairly be regarded as preeminently the work of these two men. On 1st November there fell the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858, and it was decided to make this the occasion of a message from the King to the people of India, foreshadowing the reform proposals. Minto was resolved that it should also touch on another matter which lay very near his heart — the abolition of the military disabilities of the Indian gentleman. By law an Indian might, if he were a member of the Indian civil service, become lieutenant-governor of a province, he could hold the highest position on the bench, and there was no legal objection to his being Governor of Bombay or Madras, but whatever his value as a soldier he could not rise above a very inferior rank. Minto was well aware that at first few Indians might be found qualified for responsible commands, but, as he argued in reply to Lord Kitchener’s objection, that was not the point. “We want to remove the disability for promotion to such posts which now exists. We can deal with the appointments to them according to the merits of the individuals when the time comes.” In November, too, the Secretary of State at last consented to his proposal for a native member of Council.
On 1st October the Viceroy sent home the fateful dispatch giving the considered scheme of the Government of India. Lord Morley appointed a small expert committee to report on the proposals, and in a dispatch of 27th November sanctioned the scheme, subject to certain slight modifications. Meantime, on 1st November, Minto, in a great durbar at Jodhpur, had delivered the message of the King. Lady Minto’s diary describes the scene in that ancient city set amid the deserts: —
“It was exactly as if we had gone back at least five centuries. The entire route was lined on each side with the Thakurs and their retinues, each band having their distinctive pugrees. On either side of the road there were caparisoned horses with marvellous trappings, long flowing draperies covering their heads, richly embroidered with gold and silver, all wearing the thick gold bracelet above the right knee, pawing the ground and arching their necks as they are taught to do; elephants completely covered with velvet embroideries and massive silver ornaments; camels galore, some carrying antediluvian guns which look as if they could never have done much execution; mounted men covered from head to foot with chain armour, wearing the identical suits of mail used in battle at the time of the early Mogul Emperors.”
