flagrant and too nearly fatal to be disguised or denied, and a thrill of horror which hushed even the Extremists went through the whole of India, for to the office of the Viceroy as the personal representative of the sovereign there had always hitherto attached something of the sanctity with which, according to Indian beliefs, all kingship is invested.  All the more grateful was the response elicited by the assurance which Lord Hardinge hastened to convey from his sick-bed that what had happened could and would in no way diminish his affection and devotion to the people of India or modify the policy of goodwill and progress for which he stood.  Neither he nor India ever forgot that assurance.

Unfortunately the artificial basis upon which the Morley-Minto reforms had been built revealed itself very soon under the searching test of practical experience.  The Councils Act of 1909 had made no attempt to organise on an effective and genuine basis “the living forces of the elective principle.”  The indirect system of election established under the Act could only produce haphazard and misleading results.  An indirect chain of elections afforded no means of appraising the true relationship between the elected members of the Councils and their original electors.  The qualifications of candidates, as well as of electors, varied widely from province to province, but shared one common characteristic, that the election was more often a matter of form.  Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Municipal and Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or mandate from, the constituencies by which these bodies had been chosen, partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound by the acts of its constituted representatives.  The so-called electorates were never known to give definite mandates to those who professed to represent them or to pronounce upon any course of action which their representatives might pursue.  Nobody knew what was the numerical foundation on which an elected member took his seat.  It was almost impossible to trace it back along the chain of indirect elections.  Before the British Reform Bill of 1832 much play was made of pocket boroughs of twenty or thirty electors.  In India, one constituency electing a member to the Imperial Legislative Council numbered exactly seven, and there were cases where the representation was pretty well known to have been divided by agreement between two individuals.  Nor did the recommendations of a Royal Commission on Decentralisation avail to break down that spirit of over-centralisation which had of late years marked the policy of the Government of India.  The Provincial Governments still remained bound hand and foot by the necessity of constant reference to the Central Government, while the latter in its turn was forced to make an ever-increasing number of references to Whitehall, where Mr. Morley enforced, far beyond the practice of any previous Secretary of State, the principle that the Provincial Governments were responsible to the Central Government, and the Central Government to the India Office for every detail of administration.