“We are trying an experiment never yet tried in the world—­maintaining a foreign dominion by means of a native army; and teaching that army, through a free Press, that they ought to expel us, and deliver their country.”

He went on to say—­

    “A tremendous revolution may overtake us, originating in a free
    Press.”

I recognise to the full the enormous force of a declaration of that kind.  But let us look at it as practical men, who have got to deal with the government of the country.  Supposing you abolish freedom of the Press or suspend it, that will not end the business.  You will have to shut up schools and colleges, for what would be the use of suppressing newspapers, if you do not shut the schools and colleges?  Nor will that be all.  You will have to stop the printing of unlicensed books.  The possession of a copy of Milton, or Burke, or Macaulay, or of Bright’s speeches, and all that flashing array of writers and orators who are the glory of our grand, our noble English tongue—­the possession of one of these books will, on this peculiar and puerile notion of government, be like the possession of a bomb, and we shall have to direct the passing of an Explosives Books Act.  All this and its various sequels and complements make a policy if you please.  But after such a policy had produced a mute, sullen, muzzled, lifeless India, we could hardly call it, as we do now the brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown.  No English Parliament will ever permit such a thing.

I do not think I need go through all the contents of the dispatch of the Governor-General and my reply, containing the plan of His Majesty’s Government, which will be in your Lordships’ hands very shortly.  I think your Lordships will find in them a well-guarded expansion of principles that were recognised in 1861, and are still more directly and closely connected with us now by the action of Lord Lansdowne in 1892.  I have his words, and they are really as true a key to the papers in our hands as they were to the policy of the noble Marquess at that date.  He said—­

“We hope, however, that we have succeeded in giving to our proposals a form sufficiently definite to secure a satisfactory advance in the representation of the people in our legislative Councils, and to give effect to the principle of selection as far as possible on the advice of such sections of the community as are likely to be capable of assisting us in that manner.”

Then you will find that another Governor-General in Council in India, whom I greatly rejoice to see still among us, my noble friend the Marquess of Ripon, said in 1882—­

    “It is not primarily with a view to the improvement of
    administration, that this measure is put forward, it is chiefly
    desirable as an instrument of political and popular education”

The doctrines announced by the noble Marquess opposite, and by my noble friend, are the standpoint from which we approached the situation and framed our proposals.