reticence were made the pretext for assuming that, as he had been appointed under the first Coalition Government at home when Mr. Chamberlain succeeded Lord Crewe at the India Office, he was the reactionary nominee of a reactionary Secretary of State.  No assumption could have been more unjust.  Lord Chelmsford’s scheme was completed and sent home towards the end of 1916.  But nothing transpired as to its contents, nor as to any action being taken upon it.  Indians inferred that it was indefinitely pigeon-holed in Whitehall.  The very reasonable plea that the Imperial Government, whose energies had to be devoted to the life-and-death struggle in which the whole Empire was involved, had little time to devote to a serious study of such problems as the introduction of grave constitutional changes in India, was countered by the argument that the same Imperial Government seemed to find no difficulty in sparing time for such measures as Irish Home Rule, votes for women, and a large extension of the franchise in the United Kingdom.

The long delay, whatever its causes, perplexed and alarmed even moderate Indian opinion, which had lost the most popular of the leaders capable of guiding it, and waited in vain for any comforting assurances from responsible official quarters.  Moreover, it allowed the Extreme wing to set up a standard of political demands which it became more and more difficult for any Indian to decline altogether to endorse without exposing himself to the reproach that he was unpatriotic and a creature of Government.  As soon as it became known that Lord Chelmsford was engaged in elaborating a scheme of post-war reforms, nineteen Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council hurriedly put forward a counter scheme of their own, professedly for the better guidance of British Ministers.  Besides pressing for various more or less practical reforms, such as the granting of commissions to Indians, the Nineteen demanded full control for the Provincial Councils over the Executive subject to a limited veto of the Governor of the Province; direct election to those Councils—­although nothing definite was said about the franchise; and, in the Imperial Legislative Council, an unofficial majority and control over the Central Government except in certain reserved matters.  The scheme was hazy, bore evident marks of haste, and aggravated immensely the dangers with which experience had already shown the Morley-Minto reforms to be fraught.  It was an attempt to make the Central and Provincial Governments in India dependent upon the caprice of legislatures, with no mandate from any representative electorate and no training in responsible government, but completely immune to the consequences of their own mistakes.  It must have led to a hopeless deadlock and the complete paralysis of Government, but even so it did not satisfy the more fiery members of the Indian National Congress, where, in complete unison with the All-India Moslem League, finally captured by some slight concessions to Mahomedan sentiment, resolutions were passed more crude and unworkable than the scheme of the Nineteen, and virtually amounting to Home Rule in its most impracticable shape.