to great political measures which are referred home for approval.”  This seems undoubtedly to be the view of the relations, inherited from the East India Company, between the Secretary of State and the Government of India which has been accepted and acted upon on both sides until recently.  Nor is any other view compatible with the Charter Act of 1833, or with the Government of India Act of 1858, which, in all matters pertinent to this issue, was based upon, and confirmed the principles of the earlier statute.  The Secretary of State exercises general guidance and control, but, as Mill laid it down no less forcibly, “the Executive Government of India is and must be seated in India itself.”  Such relations are clearly very different from those of principal and agent which Mr. Montagu would apparently wish to substitute for them.

Besides the special emphasis he laid on his definition of the relations between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, other reasons have led to the belief that the Under-Secretary, who spoke with a full sense of his responsibility as the representative of the Secretary of State, was giving calculated expression to the views of his chief.  I am not going to anticipate the duties of the historian, whose business it will be to establish the share of initiative and responsibility that belong to Lord Morley and Lord Minto respectively in regard to the Indian policy of the last five years.  Whilst something more than an impression generally prevails both at home and in India that Mr. Montagu’s definition does in fact very largely apply to the relations between the present Viceroy and the Secretary of State, and that every measure carried out in India has originated in Whitehall, it is only fair to bear in mind that Lord Morley has never himself put forward any such claim, nor has Lord Minto ever admitted it.  The Viceroy, on the contrary, has been at pains to emphasize on several occasions his share, and indeed to claim for himself the initiative, of all the principal measures carried out during his tenure of office, and especially of the new scheme of Indian reforms, of which the paternity is ascribed by most people to Lord Morley.

The Secretary of State’s great personality may partly account for the belief that he has entirely overshadowed the Viceroy, all the more in that he has certainly overshadowed the Council of India as never before.  But if Lord Minto has reason to complain, of the prevalence of this belief, he cannot be unaware that he too has helped to build it up by neglecting to associate his own Council with himself as closely as even his most masterful predecessors had hitherto been careful to do.