by John Buchan
The visit to Lahore in April was a great success. The Viceregal party on elephants entered the narrow streets of the old city, where every house was decorated with embroideries and mottoes, including the remarkable couplet: —
“Eipon, Minto, Morley, England’s greatest three, India sing their praises till eternity.”
“The wonderful part,” Minto wrote to Lord Morley, “was that our route lay through the very heart of the old city, through streets no Viceroy had ever before been allowed to pass. It had not been considered safe. . . . Nothing but friendly enthusiasm the whole way. I confess it was all very encouraging. Yet it is an inflammable population, a much more dangerous population in reality than in Bengal.”
Later in the same month the Mintos went tiger-shooting in the vicinity of Dehra Dun, and while waiting mounted on elephants while the jungle was being beaten out, encountered an appalling thunderstorm. “The air seemed full of electricity,” says Lady Minto’s journal; “the noise was deafening, and besides the forks of flame flashes of light seemed to break out in all directions. . . . We all agreed that, as long as the Viceroy held on to his rifle, the rest of the party were in duty bound to follow suit. Rolly declared that he would have given a thousand pounds to get rid of it, but his izzat forbade his taking such a course.”
That summer Minto and his wife had an encounter with a mad dog, and had to undergo the Pasteur treatment, which has a most depressing effect upon the system. Happily both had equable nerves, but the twenty-one days of suspense were a nightmare to the staff. During the autumn there was an extended tour among the Rajput states, and at Udaipur on 6th November Minto delivered an important speech on the subject of the native states and the ruling princes. The loyalty of the latter had been questioned in irresponsible quarters in Britain, but their behaviour during the outbreak of anarchy in the past two years had given the lie to the calumny. The Viceroy now took occasion to define the policy of Britain — the more necessary now that democratic reform was on the eve of being introduced in British India. At Gwalior in 1899 Lord Curzon had announced that he considered the native chiefs as “his colleagues and partners in the administration.” But such colleagueship might involve an unwelcome and unworkable responsibility, and an attempt to enforce uniformity in administration. It was not possible to turn a ruling class, sensitive about their prerogatives and status, into a picturesque kind of lieutenant-governor or commissioner. Minto accordingly emphasized their internal independence, as far as it was consistent with the interests of India and the British Empire, and the need of elasticity and variety in their relations with the Raj. He had no belief in a world steamrollered out into a uniform flatness to please a certain type of official mind.
“I have made it a rule to avoid as far as possible the issue of general instructions, and have endeavoured to deal with questions as they arose with reference to existing treaties, the merits of each case, local conditions, antecedent circumstances, and the particular stage of development, feudal and constitutional, of individual principalities. . . . I have always been opposed to anything like pressure on Durbars with a view to introducing British methods of administration — I have preferred that reform should emanate from the Durbars themselves, and grow up in harmony with the traditions of the State. It is easy to overestimate the value of administrative efficiency.”
The colleagueship of the Viceroy and the Secretary of State remained during the year close and friendly, though not without occasions of vigorous dispute. There was the old trouble of private correspondence by subordinates without the cognizance of the superior, and in the case of a flagrant breach of etiquette by one member of the Viceroy’s Council the Secretary of State seemed scarcely to appreciate the Viceroy’s indignation. Minto, too, was harassed at times by Lord Morley’s thirst for what he felt to be irrelevant information, and, as we have seen, the matter of the deportees involved much cabled argument. But the mutual regard of the two men is shown in the correspondence by their inclination to discuss with each other matters of moment not strictly pertinent to their offices. Minto laments that in a time of strain and constant watchfulness he has no leisure for private reflection. “It makes me sad to think how little time there has been to read or study the many mysteries of India — it has been a life of every-day action — certainly learning much as one goes along, but realizing all the more how terribly ignorant one is of many things.” He comments on the land clauses of Mr. Lloyd George’s famous Budget, and mentions that at Minto he had, out of a gross rent-roll of £5,600, net receipts of £83, which he hoped would still be available to entertain the Secretary of State when he visited the Borders. Lord Morley replied with his impressions of the German Emperor as “Mars commis-voyageur.” “He is a consummately interesting figure all the same, with just that streak of Crackedness which is perhaps essential to the interesting. As for Bagman, don’t suppose I think it a term of reproach: just the opposite. The soldier is a fine fellow; the diplomatist is indispensable; but the alert and thrifty Bagman, making money, accumulating it, employing it, he’s the foundation of a strong State! I much suspect that this will revolt you!” He draws an amusing picture of Indian humbug in Surendra Nath Banerji. “He nearly made me cascade with gross compliments — their Guru, a Great Man, then (by noble crescendo) the greatest Man since ATthbar! I hope he’ll balance the little account between us two by swearing that you are far greater than Aurungzebe. After this nauseating dose, he went straight off to a meeting presided over by Cotton, and listened with silent composure to an orator denouncing me as no less of an oppressor and tyrant than the Tsar of Russia!”
There are graver moments, too. He transcribes, to comfort Minto in his difficulties with a disloyal colleague, a wise passage from Mr. Gladstone: —
“The imperious nature of the subjects, their weight and form, demanding the entire strength of a man and all his faculties, leave him no residue, at least for the time, to apply to self-regard; no more than there is for a swimmer, swimming for his life. He must, too, in retrospect feel himself to be so very small in comparison with the themes and interests of which he has to think.”
He was beginning, in spite of all his vitality, to feel the burden of his years, and wondered sometimes whether he would ever have a talk with his correspondent face to face. “I am rather jaded, and I have a birthday of terribly high figure next month. I had promised myself a rest as soon as ever I got free of Reforms and Deportees. Unhappily I am not quite my own master for three or four weeks to come. They insist that I denounce the House of Lords to their noble faces — a pastime that would have given me lively satisfaction once, and I should have produced an hour’s oration with the utmost ease. So I shall have to revive my memory of Pym, Hampden, Eliot, and King Charles. Then I’m bidden to Windsor for four days — very agreeable always, only not rest like my library.” The shadow of a general election, too, hung over him, and a possible change of Government. “The men named by the Cabinet-makers for this office are Percy, Midleton, and Milner. If it should be the last, I do believe you will sometimes sigh with a passing breath for the meek individual who now subscribes himself.”
III
The Nasik murder in December 1909 had created throughout all India a sense of insecurity, and on January 24,1910, it was followed by a no less startling crime, when the Mohammedan police officer who had been mainly instrumental in unravelling the Bengal murder plots was shot dead in the very precincts of the Calcutta High Court. It was an ill-omened prologue to the opening of the reformed Legislative Council. Some comfort was to be drawn from the replies of the ruling princes of India, whom Minto had officially consulted on the question of the growth of sedition. Their responses, published on the 21st, were a splendid manifesto of loyalty, and a promise of vigorous co-operation in whatever policy of repression the Government of India proposed.
Lord Minto addressing the First Meeting of the new Legislative Council, Government House, Calcutta, 1910
It was clear that that Government must arm itself with further
powers, for, as Minto wrote on 6th January, “we want above all things to convince the public, both Indian and European, that we are determined to do all in our power to protect the safety of individuals and to uphold the credit of British administration. We can afford no delay in doing so. We may have another assassination at any moment.” That other assassination came on the day preceding the opening of the new Council.
It was a season of tense anxiety, in which only the Viceroy seems to have wholly kept his head. “The worst of it,” he wrote, “is that the meaning of outrages is so enormously exaggerated at home. I wish the British public would understand that the troubles we have to deal with do not mean the possibility of rebellion.” He was very averse to further deportations, for he believed that he had adequate machinery to deal with the crisis — the Criminal Amendment Act and the ordinary processes of law. “Speaking frankly,” he wrote later, “there was at one time a very decided slackness on the part of local governments in respect to prosecutions for sedition. They were much more inclined to advise deportation and throw the responsibility on the Government of India and the Secretary of State, and there was a tendency to complain of the weakness of our legal machinery, the truth being that it was often ample, but that its application was neglected. I have done all I can to insist on every use being made of the ordinary law and to discourage demands for exceptional procedure.” But in January he was doubtful whether the Criminal Amendment Act would be sufficient. “The difficulty is that the European Calcutta population is so unnerved that, if things go wrong, it may be necessary to restore confidence by immediate deportation. I do not like saying this sort of thing at all, but that’s how it is.” There was a proposal for martial law, made by the Commander-in-Chief, which Minto vetoed, and which Lord Morley said made his hair stand on end. The Viceroy decided to ask the support of the new Council for an enlarged Press Act — for one main source of the mischief lay in press incitation — and at the same time to seek the earliest favourable occasion for the release of the nine Bengalis deported in December 1908. Lord Morley had been pressing for their release in a tone which was not far from peevish, and with arguments which, however justifiable by formal logic, were strangely remote from reality. No doubt it seemed an anomaly that men, whose release had been determined upon, should continue in confinement because of fresh murders in which they had no complicity, but such anomalies are of the essence of practical administration. “If this indefinite detention,” the Secretary of State wrote, “until the Day of Judgment (if that be thought necessary) is what you mean by deportation, then I do not expect to find myself able to sanction any more of it, nor the continuance of this.” The argument was purely academic; the facts were that murders had been committed which had spread consternation in India, that reforms were about to be put into practical effect which involved in many eyes a slackening of the reins of British government, and that any day fresh deportations might become inevitable. To release deportees at the moment without any new safeguards would have been a “gesture” wholly contrary to the logic of facts, and a potent stimulus to the prevalent anxiety.
On 25th January, in the old-world Council Room at Calcutta, with the portraits of Warren Hastings, Wellesley, Cornwallis, and the first Lord Minto looking down upon him, the Viceroy opened the new Legislative Council. “He began his speech,” Lady Minto wrote, “amid profound silence; you might have heard a pin drop. He spoke gradually with more and more emphasis, and when he announced that whether for good or ill he alone was responsible for the reforms, his strength and determination quite carried his audience with him, and at last they broke out into an enthusiastic burst of applause, a thing hitherto unheard of in the Council Chamber.” He traced the reasons for the reforms, and the various steps in their progress, which showed that they had sprung from the initiative of the Government of India. “It is important that my colleagues and the Indian public should know the history, the early history, of the reforms which have now been sanctioned by Parliament. They had their genesis in a note of my own addressed to my colleagues in August 1906 — nearly three and a half years ago. It was based entirely on the views I had myself formed of the position of affairs in India. It was due to no suggestions from home: whether it was good or bad, I am entirely responsible for it.” Then he turned to the assassinations. “I had hoped to open this new Council under an unclouded political sky. No man has longed more earnestly than I have to allow bygones to be bygones, and to commence a new administrative era with a clean slate. The course of recent events has cancelled the realization of those hopes, and I can but assert that the first duty of every Government is to maintain the observance of the law — to provide for the present, and as far as it can for the future, welfare of the populations committed to its charge — to rule, and, if need be, to rule with a strong hand.” These were almost the words of his great-grandfather: “No man of honour at the head of a Government will ever compromise with revolt.” He concluded on a more hopeful note: —
“I do not for an instant admit that the necessity of ruthlessly eradicating a great evil from our midst should throw more than a passing shadow over the general political situation in India. I believe that situation to be better than it was five years ago. We must not allow immediate dangers to blind us to the evidence of future promise. I believe that the broadening of political representation has saved India from far greater troubles than those we have now to face. I am convinced that the enlargement of our administrative machinery has enormously strengthened the hands of the Viceroy and the Government of India, and has brought factors to our aid which would otherwise have had no sympathy with us. I believe above all that the fellow-services of British and Indian administrators under a supreme British Government is the key to the future political happiness of this country.”
The behaviour of the new Council was such as to justify the hopes of the reformers. On 9th February the new Press Act was passed, which compelled the publisher or printer of a newspaper to give security for good behaviour, and laid down that, in the event of the paper publishing prohibited matter, the security might be forfeited, and, on the second offence, the plant itself. An editor was free to publish what he pleased, as in England, but he did it at his own risk; in England that risk took the form of liability to damages or imprisonment, in India of the forfeiture of property. Mr. Gokhale, though he criticized certain details, accepted the measure, only two members differed from the main principle, and the bill passed the Council without a division.
That same day the Viceroy issued orders for the release of the Bengal deportees. The loyal co-operation of the new Council gave him the cue which he had long sought. In a note which he sent to a colleague who criticized his decision occur these sentences: “That advice (to his Council on the subject of release) was given without any reference whatever, either by letter or telegram, to the Secretary of State. I did not even forewarn him of the possibility of release. I acted entirely on my own responsibility, and I was especially anxious to do so in order to avoid any appearance of any documental suggestion that the Government of India had acted under pressure. As far as I am concerned, the advice I gave my Council was based entirely on what I considered best for India, independently of any influence in England.” But he went on to point out that at any moment there might arise an agitation in Parliament for release, to which the British Government might be compelled to bow, and that it would be disastrous for the strength of future Governments of India if they were dictated to from home on a matter of internal administration owing to the exigencies of party politics.
There was much criticism of the action in India, and more in Britain, by those who accused Minto of being, in the phrase of Tacitus, “suarum legum auctor ac subversor,” of passing a repressive measure with one hand and giving a licence to notorious agitators with the other. The defence is obvious: it was manifestly unjust to keep men in captivity indefinitely because of new crimes which they had not committed, and the loyal action of the Legislative Council made their release both d
esirable and safe. But Minto’s note which has just been quoted did not please the Secretary of State, who read him a grave homily for imagining that he or any member of the Cabinet had ever urged the release of the deportees from any other motive than strict justice. Minto gently replied that they seemed to be at cross-purposes, and that he had been answering a specific accusation, which, if believed, would have done mischief, and not criticizing the Secretary of State. He might have added that for four years Lord Morley had been emphasizing the fact that the House of Commons governed India, and that that House must consequently be humoured. But indeed the question of deportations and prosecutions was becoming an obsession with Lord Morley, and he ceased to judge things with his wonted acumen. During the early summer he discovered a tenderness for Arabindo Ghose, perhaps the most dangerous man in India, and hoped that the Bengal Government would not secure a conviction against him, and he appeared to hanker after some spectacular exercise of the “clemency of the Crown” in the shape of an amnesty in the ancient Oriental fashion. In June Minto was compelled to speak with great frankness: —
“I can only say that under existing conditions it is an impossibility. The old Oriental monarchs exercised their clemency in different circumstances to those of the present day. Their jurisdiction was summary — they had no House of Commons to answer to-they took life freely as it suited them, they released as they liked, and imprisoned as they liked without any question. No one is a greater believer than I am in the elements of sentiment and imagination, but their influence cuts both ways. It may bring grateful tears to the eyes of the effeminate Bengali, or it may shock the spirited traditions and the warlike imagination of more manly races. The great factor, as far as I have been able to judge, in the success of Indian rulers has been strong personality represented by sympathy and power, but sympathy and power must work together hand in hand.”
