standards, established by usage and generally understood and accepted, which it is perhaps easier to describe negatively than positively.  Misrule cannot be tolerated when it amounts to a public scandal or takes the form of criminal acts.  The whole question has always bristled with difficulties, and still does.  The tendency, since Lord Curzon’s time, has been to relax the control of the Supreme Government even in matters of slighter moment on which it had been accustomed to tender advice not always distinguishable from commands.  That some of the Native States, and not the least powerful, are badly governed is of common notoriety.  But if the Supreme Government has been sometimes inclined to turn a blind eye in such cases, and even to forget that it has moral obligations towards the subjects as well as towards the rulers of the Native States, it has been free hitherto to obey considerations of political expediency which may conceivably not weigh so much in the future.  For the same forces that have obtained the surrender of the autocratic principle in British India, may demand with equal insistency its surrender throughout the Native States.  Should the more irresponsible chiefs rely on the solidarity of a Chamber of Princes to secure for them greater immunity than ever from the just consequences of misgovernment, they would merely hasten a conflict which undoubtedly most of their caste have begun to dread between their own archaic methods and the democratic spirit which the Government of India Act of 1919 has quickened in British India.

There are many other thorny points.  Obviously there could be no room for all the seven or eight hundred ruling chiefs, great and small, in any assembly reasonably constituted to represent the Native States.  Nor have they ever enjoyed any uniform status or received any uniform treatment.  Some of them, the most important, have maintained direct relations with the Government of India; the majority only indirect relations through the Provincial Governments within whose sphere their territories are situated.  The creation of the Chamber of Princes has necessitated a new classification of major and minor States, the former entitled to direct, the latter only to indirect representation, which has naturally caused a vast amount of jealousy and heartburning.  Another consequence still under discussion is the substitution in most cases of direct relations with the Government of India for those in which the smaller Native States now stand to provincial governments.  Such transfer must involve innumerable difficulties and complications, especially in a Presidency like Bombay, within whose boundaries there are over 300 Native States inextricably bound up with it by common interests and even by common administrative needs.  Many of them are at first sight inclined to welcome such a transfer as enhancing their prestige; some of them, remembering the old saying that “Delhi is a long way off,” hope that it will lessen the prospect of outside interference in their own administration, however bad it may be or become.  But these are hardly arguments to justify a transfer which can only import a new element of confusion into an already sufficiently confused situation.