days, to win and to keep personal influence, and that we are in danger of creating a pure bureaucracy.  Honourable, faithful, and industrious the servants of the State in India are and will be, but if the present system is persisted in, there is a risk of its becoming rather mechanical, perhaps I might even say rather soulless; and attention to this is urgently demanded.  Perfectly efficient administration, I need not tell the House, has a tendency to lead to over-centralisation.  It is inevitable.  The tendency in India is to override local authority, and to force administration to run in official grooves.  For my own part I would spare no pains to improve our relations with native Governments, and more and more these relations may become of potential value to the Government of India.  I would use my best endeavours to make these States independent in matters of administration.  Yet all evidence tends to show we are rather making administration less personal, though evidence also tends to show that the Indian people are peculiarly responsive to sympathy and personal influence.  Do not let us waste ourselves in controversy, here or elsewhere, or in mere anger; let us try to draw to our side the men who now influence the people.  We have every good reason to believe that most of the people of India are on our side.  I do not say for a moment that they like us.  It does not come easy, in west or east, to like foreign rule.  But in their hearts they know that their solid interest is bound up with the law and order that we preserve.

There is a Motion on the Paper for an inquiry by means of a Parliamentary Committee or Royal Commission into the causes at the root of the dissatisfaction.  Now, I have often thought, while at the India Office, whether it would be a good thing to have the old-fashioned parliamentary inquiry by committee or commission.  I have considered this, I have discussed it with others; and I have come to the conclusion that such inquiry would not produce any of the advantages such as were gained in the old days of old committees, and certainly would be attended by many drawbacks.  But I have determined, after consulting with the Viceroy, that considerable advantage might be gained by a Royal Commission to examine, with the experience we have gained over many years, into this great mischief—­for all the people in India who have any responsibility know that it is a great mischief—­of over-centralisation.  It seemed a great mischief to so acute a man as Sir Henry Maine, who, after many years’ experience, wrote expressing agreement with what Mr. Bright said just before or just after the Mutiny, that the centralised government of India was too much power for any one man to work.  Now, when two men, singularly unlike in temperament and training, agreed as to the evil of centralisation on this large scale, it compels reflection.  I will not undertake at the present time to refer to the Commission the large questions that were spoken of by Maine and Bright, but I think that much might be gained by an inquiry on the spot into the working of centralisation of government in India, and how in the opinions of trained men here and in India, the mischief might be alleviated.  That, however, is not a question before us now.