Of the deeper significance which underlay the meeting of this remarkable assembly it is still perhaps premature to speak.  But cautious and tentative as was the attitude of all parties concerned, and free as, from beginning to end, the proceedings were from any startling incidents, no one can have watched them without being conscious of the presence of new forces of vast potentiality which must tend to modify very profoundly the relations between the governors and the governed in India itself, and possibly even between India and the Mother Country.  They are the forces, largely still unknown, which have been brought into play by Lord Morley’s Constitutional reforms, and though they made themselves naturally more conspicuously felt in the Imperial Council at Calcutta, they were present in every one of the enlarged Legislative Councils of the Provincial Governments.

It is no part of my purpose to recount in detail the long, though generally dispassionate, controversy to which these reforms gave rise.  We may not all be agreed as to the necessity or wisdom of some of the changes embodied in them, and some may think that we are inclined to travel too fast and too far on a road which Indians have not up to the present shown themselves qualified to tread without danger.  But there are few Englishmen either at home or in India who do not recognize the statesmanlike spirit in which Lord Morley, loyally seconded throughout by Lord Minto, has approached the very difficult problem of giving to the people of India a larger consultative voice in administration as well as in legislation without jeopardizing the stability or impairing the supremacy of British control.  The future alone can show how far these far-reaching changes will justify the generous expectations of their author, but taken as a whole they undoubtedly represent a constructive work which is fully worthy of the fine record of British rule in India.

How very far-reaching they are the merest indication of their most salient features will suffice to indicate.  For the sake of convenience, though they form a homogeneous whole, they may be divided roughly into two categories—­those that affect the Executive Councils and those that have remodelled the Legislative Councils.  To the former category belong:—­

(1) The appointment of an Indian member to the Viceroy’s Executive Council.  Mr. S.P.  Sinha, a Bengalee barrister in large practice, was appointed to be legal member, and the ability and distinction with which he discharged the duties of his high office have gone far to remove the misgivings of many of those who were at first opposed to this new departure.  It is the more to be regretted that his services will be lost to the new Viceroy, as he has announced his intention of retiring, for personal reasons, at the end of Lord Minto’s Viceroyalty[15].

(2) The appointment of one Indian member to the Executive Councils of the Governors of Madras and Bombay.  The Rajah of Bobbili has been appointed in Madras and Mr. M.B.  Chaubal in Bombay.  An Indian will also be appointed to the Executive Council of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal as soon as that body has been finally constituted[16], and similar appointments will be made to the Executive Councils of the chief Indian provinces when the powers taken to create those bodies shall be put into operation.