It is upon such questions as these that the voice of the enlarged Councils will in future cause much more frequent embarrassment to the Imperial Government than to the Government of India, and I shall be much surprised if they have not to listen to it in regard to various “home charges” with which the Government of India have from time to time very reluctantly agreed to burden Indian finance at the bidding of Whitehall.  The Indian Nationalist Press has not been alone in describing the recent imposition on the Indian taxpayer of a capitation allowance amounting to L300,000 a year to meet the increased cost of the British soldier as “the renewed attempt of a rapacious War Office to raid the helpless Indian Treasury,” and even the increase in the pay of the native soldier, which Lord Kitchener obtained for him, does not prevent him and his friends from drawing their own comparison between the squalor of the quarters in which he is still housed and the relatively luxurious barracks built for Tommy Atkins under Lord Kitchener’s administration at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.  It is no secret that the Government of India have also frequently remonstrated in vain when India has been charged full measure and overflowing in respect of military operations in which the part borne by her has been governed less by her own direct interests than by the necessity of making up with the help of Indian contingents the deficiencies of our military organization at home.  It was no Indian politician but the Government of India who expressed the opinion that:—­

The Imperial Government keeps in India and quarters upon the revenues of that country as large a portion of its army as it thinks can possibly be required to maintain its dominion there; that it habitually treats that army as a reserve force available for Imperial purposes; that it has uniformly detached European regiments from the garrison of India to take part in Imperial wars whenever it has been found necessary or convenient to do so; and, more than this, that it has drawn not less freely upon the native army of India, towards the maintenance of which it contributes nothing, to aid in contests outside of India with which the Indian Government has had little or no concern.

All these are, however, but secondary issues to the much larger one which the creation of the new Councils must tend to bring to the front with all the force of the increased weight given to them by the recent reforms.  For that issue will raise the whole principle of our fiscal relations with India, if it results in a demand for the protection of Indian industries against the competition of imported manufactures by an autonomous tariff.  It must be remembered that the desire for Protection is no new thing in India.  Whether we like it or not, whether we be Free Traders or Tariff Reformers, we have to reckon with the fact that almost every Indian is a Protectionist at heart, whatever he may be in theory.  The Indian National