At the risk even of travelling somewhat beyond the expressed terms of their reference, the Secretary of State and the Viceroy could not but recognise that the effects of great constitutional reforms, of which the statutory application would be necessarily confined to that part of India that is under direct British administration, must nevertheless react upon that other smaller but still very considerable part of India which enjoys more or less complete internal autonomy under its own hereditary rulers.  A growing number of questions, and especially economic questions, must arise in future, which will affect the interests of the Native States as directly as those of the rest of India; and their rulers may legitimately claim, as the Report plainly admitted, to have constitutional opportunities of expressing their views and wishes and of conferring with one another and with the Government of India.  For such purposes the Report included suggestions which were to take shape in the establishment of the Chamber of Princes.

One other recommendation of the Report deserves special notice, as it shows the authors to have realised how seriously Parliament, though more directly responsible than ever for the exercise of due vigilance over Indian affairs after the transfer to the Crown, had lost touch with them, since, with the disappearance of the East India Company after the Mutiny, it ceased to hold the regular and exhaustive inquiries which the renewal of the Charter had until then periodically required.  As their own scheme was designed merely to give Parliament a lead in the first of a progressive series of constitutional reforms, they recommended that a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the working of the new Indian institutions and the general progress of the people of India should at stated intervals determine the further stages of advance towards the final goal of self-government.  Such a Commission, armed with power to examine witnesses, would not only enlighten British public opinion, but also probe Indian opinion in a much more searching way than can be done by impassioned and irresponsible arguments and counter-arguments in the press and on platforms.  It would, above all, assist Parliament to master from time to time the many-sided problem whose progressive solution it would have constantly to watch and periodically to determine.

The Report was a document of such magnitude and complexity, and went so boldly to the roots of Indian government and administration, that even amongst the absorbing preoccupations of the war, which was only just emerging for the Allies from the terrible crisis of March-April 1918, its publication at once provoked a considerable stream of criticism.  On the whole, British public opinion was favourable, though there was a small but not uninfluential group of British reactionaries who at once took up, and have ever since maintained, the position that the Report meant, not the mending, for