and Madras have now Executive Councils, numbering two.  I propose to ask Parliament to double the number of ordinary members.  Seventh.  The Lieutenant-Governors have no Executive Council.  We shall ask Parliament to sanction the creation of such Councils, consisting of not more than two ordinary members, and to define the power of the Lieutenant-Governor to overrule his Council.  I am perfectly sure there may be differences of opinion as to these proposals.  I only want your Lordships to believe that they have been well thought out, and that they are accepted by the Governor-General in Council.

There is one point of extreme importance which, no doubt, though it may not be over diplomatic for me to say so at this stage, will create some controversy.  I mean the matter of the official majority.  The House knows what an official majority is.  It is a device by which the Governor-General, or the Governor of Bombay or Madras, may secure a majority in his Legislative Council by means of officials and nominees.  And the officials, of course, for very good reasons, just like a Cabinet Minister or an Under-Secretary, whatever the man’s private opinion may be, would still vote, for the best of reasons, and I am bound to think with perfect wisdom, with the Government.  But anybody can see how directly, how palpably, how injuriously, an arrangement of this kind tends to weaken, and I think I may say even to deaden, the sense both of trust and responsibility in the non-official members of these councils.  Anybody can see how the system tends to throw the non-official member into an attitude of peevish, sulky, permanent opposition, and, therefore, has an injurious effect on the minds and characters of members of these Legislative Councils.

I know it will be said—­I will not weary the House by arguing it, but I only desire to meet at once the objection that will be taken—­that these councils will, if you take away the safeguard of the official majority, pass any number of wild-cat Bills.  The answer to that is that the head of the Government can veto the wild-cat Bills.  The Governor-General can withhold his assent, and the withholding of the assent of the Governor-General is no defunct power.  Only the other day, since I have been at the India Office, the Governor-General disallowed a Bill passed by a Local Government which I need not name, with the most advantageous effect.  I am quite convinced that if that Local Government had had an unofficial majority the Bill would never have been passed, and the Governor-General would not have had to refuse his assent.  But so he did, and so he would if these gentlemen, whose numbers we propose to increase and whose powers we propose to widen, chose to pass wild-cat Bills.  And it must be remembered that the range of subjects within the sphere of Provincial Legislative Councils is rigorously limited by statutory exclusions.  I will not labour the point now.  Anybody who cares, in a short compass, can grasp the argument, of which we shall hear a great deal, in Paragraphs 17 to 20 of my reply to the Government of India, in the Papers that will speedily be in your Lordships’ hands.