Office, should be more or less placed within the reach and knowledge of the House so far as they are complete.  The principles of the Bill are in the Bill, and will be affirmed, if your Lordships are pleased to read it a second time.  The Committee points, important as they are, can well be dealt with in Committee.  The view of Mr. Gladstone was cheerfully accepted by the House of Commons then, and I hope it will be accepted by your Lordships to-day.

There is one very important chapter in these regulations, which I think now on the Second Reading of the Bill, without waiting for Committee, I ought to say a few words to your Lordships about—­I mean the Mahomedans.  That is a part of the Bill and scheme that has no doubt attracted a great deal of criticism, and excited a great deal of feeling in that important community.  We suggested to the Government of India a certain plan.  We did not prescribe it, we did not order it, but we suggested and recommended this plan for their consideration—­no more than that.  It was the plan of a mixed or composite electoral college, in which Mahomedans and Hindus should pool their votes, so to say.  The wording of the recommendation in my despatch was, as I soon discovered, ambiguous—­a grievous defect, of which I make bold to hope I am not very often in public business guilty.  But, to the best of my belief, under any construction the plan of Hindus and Mahomedans voting together, in a mixed and composite electorate, would have secured to the Mahomedan electors, wherever they were so minded, the chance of returning their own representatives in their due proportion.  The political idea at the bottom of this recommendation, which has found so little favour, was that such composite action would bring the two great communities more closely together, and this hope of promoting harmony was held by men of high Indian authority and experience who were among my advisers at the India Office.  But the Mahomedans protested that the Hindus would elect a pro-Hindu upon it, just as I suppose in a mixed college of say seventy-five Catholics and twenty-five Protestants voting together, the Protestants might suspect that the Catholics voting for the Protestant would choose what is called a Romanising Protestant, and as a little of a Protestant as they could find.  Suppose the other way.  In Ireland there is an expression, a “shoneen” Catholic—­that is to say, a Catholic who, though a Catholic, is too friendly with English Conservatism and other influences which the Nationalists dislike.  And it might be said, if there were seventy-five Protestants against twenty-five Catholics, that the Protestants when giving a vote in the way of Catholic representation, would return “shoneens.”  I am not going to take your Lordships’ time up by arguing this to-day.  With regard to schemes of proportional representation, as Calvin said of another study, “Excessive study of the Apocalypse either finds a man mad, or makes him so.”  At any rate, the Government of India doubted whether our plan would work, and we have abandoned it.  I do not think it was a bad plan, but it is no use, if you are making an earnest attempt in good faith at a general pacification, to let parental fondness for a clause interrupt that good process by sitting obstinately tight.