C.D., or E.F., without troubling themselves whether that lettre de cachet is wisely issued or not?  Then it is said of a man who is arrested under this law, “Oh, he ought not to be harshly treated.”  He is not harshly treated.  If he is one of these nine deported men, he is not put into contact with criminal persons.  His family are looked after.  He subsists under conditions which are to an Indian perfectly conformable to his social position, and to the ordinary comforts and conveniences of his life.  The greatest difference is drawn between these nine men and other men against whom charges to be judicially tried are brought.  All these cases come up for reconsideration from time to time.  They will come up shortly, and that consideration will be conducted with justice and with firmness.  There can be no attempt at all to look at this transaction of the nine deported men otherwise than as a disagreeable measure, but one imposed upon us by a sense of public duty and a measure that events justify.  What did Mr. Gokhale, who is a leader of a considerable body of important political opinion in India, say?  Did he move a vote of censure?  He said in the Legislative Council the other day in Calcutta, that Lord Minto and the Secretary of State had saved India from drifting into chaos.  I owe you an apology, Mr. Vice-Chancellor and gentlemen, for pressing upon your attention points suggested by criticisms from politicians of generous but unbalanced impulse.  But they are important, and I am glad you have allowed me to say what I have said upon them.

APPENDIX

A

Extract from the dispatch of the Board of Directors of the East India Company to the Government of India, December 10, 1834, accompanying the Government of India Act, 1833.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Tradition ascribes this piece to the pen of James Mill.  His son, J.S.  Mill, was the author of the protest by the Company against the transfer to the Crown in 1858.]

103.  By clause 87 of the Act it is provided that no person, by reason of his birth, creed, or colour, shall be disqualified from holding any office in our service.

104.  It is fitting that this important enactment should be understood in order that its full spirit and intention may be transfused through our whole system of administration.

105.  You will observe that its object is not to ascertain qualification, but to remove disqualification.  It does not break down or derange the scheme of our government as conducted principally through the instrumentality of our regular servants, civil and military.  To do this would be to abolish or impair the rules which the legislature has established for securing the fitness of the functionaries in whose hands the main duties of Indian administration are to be reposed—­rules to which the present Act makes a material addition in the provisions relating to the college at Haileybury.