[Footnote 1:  The Secretary of State had on an earlier occasion spoken of the Petition of Bengal as a settled fact.]

Dr. Rutherford:  No, not universal suffrage.  I said educational suffrage, and also pecuniary suffrage—­taxpayers and ratepayers.

Mr. Morley:  In the same speech the hon.  Gentleman made a great charge against our system of education in India—­that we had not educated them at all; therefore, he excludes at once an enormous part of the population.  The Imperial Duma, as I understood from my hon. friend was to be subject to the veto of the Viceroy.  That is not democracy.  We are to send out from Great Britain once in five years a Viceroy, who is to be confronted by an Imperial Duma, just as the Tsar is confronted by the Duma in Russia.  Surely that is not a very ripe idea of democracy.  My hon. friend visited the State of Baroda, and thought it well governed.  Well, there is no Duma of his sort there.  I will state frankly my own opinion even though I have not spent one single week-end in India.  If I had to frame a new system of government for India, I declare I would multiply the Baroda system of government, rather than have an Imperial Duma and universal suffrage.  The speech of my hon. friend, with whom I am sorry to find myself, not in collision but in difference, illustrates what is to my mind one of the grossest of all the fallacies in practical politics—­namely, that you can cut out, frame, and shape one system of government for communities with absolutely different sets of social, religious, and economic conditions—­that you can cut them all out by a sort of standardised pattern, and say that what is good for us here, the point of view, the line of argument, the method of solution—­that all these things are to be applied right off to a community like India.  I must tell my hon. friend that I regard that as a most fatal and mischievous fallacy, and I need not say more.  I am bound, after what I have said, to add that I do not think that it is at all involved in Liberalism.  I have had the great good fortune and honour and privilege to have known some of the great Liberals of my time, and there was not one of those great men, Gambetta, Bright, Gladstone, Mazzini, who would have accepted for one single moment the doctrine on which my hon. friend really bases his visionary proposition for a Duma.  Is there any rational man who holds that, if you can lay down political principles and maxims of government that apply equally to Scotland or to England, or to Ireland, or to France, or to Spain, therefore they must be just as true for the Punjab and the United Provinces and Bengal?

Dr. Rutherford:  I quoted Mr. Bright as making the very proposal I have made, with the exception of the Duma—­namely, Provincial Parliaments.