Lord Minto’s position has no doubt been one of very peculiar difficulty, and no one will grudge him the warm tribute paid to him by Mr. Montagu.  Whatever the merits of the great controversy between Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener, the overruling of the Government of India by the Home Government on a question of such magnitude and the circumstances in which Lord Curzon was compelled to resign had dealt a very heavy blow to the authority and prestige of the Viceregal office in India.  Within a few weeks of Lord Minto’s arrival in India the Unionist Government who had appointed him fell, and a Liberal Government came into power who could not be expected to display any special consideration for their predecessors nominee unless he showed himself to be in sympathy with their policy.  Lord Minto’s friends can therefore very reasonably argue that his chief anxiety was, quite legitimately, to avoid any kind of friction with the new Secretary of State which might have led to the supersession of another Viceroy so soon after the unfortunate crisis that had ended in Lord Curzon’s resignation.  If this was the object that Lord Minto had in view, his attitude has certainly been most successful, for Lord Morley has repeatedly testified to the loyalty and cordiality with which the Viceroy has constantly co-operated with him.  That the Secretary of State and the Viceroy have, nevertheless, not always seen eye to eye with regard to the interference of the India Office in the details of Indian administration appears clearly from a telegram read out by Lord Morley himself in the House of Lords on February 23, 1909.  In the course of this telegram, which acknowledged in the most generous terms the strong support of the Secretary of State in all dealings with sedition, the Viceroy made the following curious admission:—­“The question of the control of Indian administration by the Secretary of State, mixed up as it is with the old difficulties of centralization, we may very possibly look at from different points of view.”  The curtain fell upon this restrained attempt to assert what Lord Minto evidently regarded eighteen months ago as his legitimate position, and to the public eye it has not been raised again since then.  But in India certainly the fear is often expressed in responsible quarters that, notwithstanding the courageous support which Lord Morley has given to legislative measures for dealing with the worst forms of seditious agitation, their effect has been occasionally weakened by that interference from home in the details of Indian administration of which Lord Minto’s telegram contains the only admission known to the public.