Could this great pronouncement have been made a year earlier, and with the added authority of a Royal proclamation, it might have been received with such widespread acclamation in India as to drown any but the shrillest notes of dissent from the irreconcilables.  The Moderates hardly dared to admit that it fulfilled—­nay, more than fulfilled—­their hopes, whilst the Extremists in the Indian National Congress, presided over on this occasion by Mrs. Besant herself, banged, bolted, and barred the door against any compromise by reaffirming and stiffening into something akin to an ultimatum the Home Rule resolutions of 1916 just at the moment when Mr. Montagu was landing in India.  But the Secretary of State was not the man to be perturbed by such demonstrations.  He had the British politician’s faith in compromise, and he did not perhaps understand fully that Indian Extremism represents a very different quality of opposition from any that a British Minister has yet had to reckon with in Parliament.  He saw Indians of all classes and creeds and political parties during his tour through India, but on none did he lavish more time and more patient hearing than upon the Extremists whom he hoped against hope to convert.  He had an easier task when he tried to disarm the resentment which his vigorous onslaught on the methods and temper of British administration just before he took office had aroused amongst the European members of the public services.  He conferred with governors and with heads of departments, and with representatives of the European community.  He received endless deputations and masses of addresses, and he remained of course in close consultation with the Viceroy in accordance with the declared object of his mission.  After four strenuous months Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford signed at Simla on April 22, 1918, a joint report which was laid before Parliament in July.

Great as had always been the responsibilities of the Secretary of State and the Viceroy for the government of India “as by law established,” they were on this occasion vastly greater.  For two men of widely different temperaments had to work out together a scheme for shifting the very axis of government.  They rose to the occasion.  The Montagu-Chelmsford Report will rank with the great State papers which are landmarks of constitutional progress in the history of the British Empire.  It falls naturally and logically into two parts, the first setting forth the conditions of the problem, the second the recommendations for its solution; and even if the second had not provided the foundations for the Act of 1919, the first would have deserved to live as a masterly survey of the state of India—­the first authoritative one since the transfer to the Crown just sixty years before.  For the first time since the Mutiny it marked a reversion to the spirit in which the Bentincks and Munros and Elphinstones had almost a century earlier conceived the mission of England in India to lie in